“Oo, that guy’s cute. Is he spoken for?” asked Sally.
Oh, that’s right. I should say with the addition of Pippa’s dog and her sister, now known as Sally Decker. You heard right. Randy Blankenship and I had developed such a great rapport that I liked to believe it was me and me alone who had convinced him to rattle some cages and get Sally transferred here. I let him know in oblique ways that the Jones matter was taken care of, sewn up, concluded. They would hassle us no more. And he went to bat for Pippa.
“Oh, gross,” said Pippa. “That’s Russ Gollywow. He rarely takes a shower. I don’t think he’s spoken for, if that’s your style.”
“That guy’s cute, too.”
“Oh, even grosser. That’s Maddie and June’s brother Speed.”
I listened to the rest of Lytton’s speech. “I want to stress that first and foremost we’re a club in the most intense sense of the word. We are truly brothers in arms. And when we created this idyllic oasis on the shores of Mormon Lake, we created a new sort of club. A brotherhood of people who have a deep, abiding appreciation for the splendors of the glorious weed. Huzzah!”
Lytton lifted up a bong, and the crowd went wild. Pippa’s first customers were there, too, to partake in the grand opening. She’d listed her inn in a web database of bud and breakfasts, and already she was booked three months in advance. It was truly a booming business, although Gunhammer had pulled out once and for all after Abel Ochoa and twelve of his workers had gone missing. No thanks, Gunhammer had told the remaining Ochoas. It might be legal, but it’s still too risky for me. And it’s still illegal in the eyes of the feds.
Lytton introduced the mayor of P and E, who started yammering about the greater good of all and the camaraderie of a close-knit community. I couldn’t ask Pippa to step away from her own grand opening, but I was itching to bang her. I held her closer to my side, my left hand draped over her shoulder straying down over her chest. In turn, her hand at my waist traveled over my ass. She put her little hand in my back jeans pocket and squeezed. Maybe she was bored with the mayor’s speech too.
I bent down. “Do you want to—”
“Yes!” she answered instantly. “The Eminence Front Room!”
Each unit had been named for a strain of Lytton’s pot. We practically jogged out of the patio area, shoving our way past Ford and Maddie, who gave us annoyed, and then knowing looks. The same happened with Faux Pas and Sapphire as well as Duji and Monique.
“Go get ’em, Prospect,” Duji growled in his gravelly, Al Pacino voice.
I had wondered how Pippa would react to being seen as a belonging to a man. She seemed hyper-independent, but then, so did most of these club old ladies. So when I’d offered her a PROPERTY OF patch, I was pretty sure she wouldn’t take it. She’d been property of Lieutenant Commander Heston for so long, then she’d been a slave to the Joneses in that warehouse. Of course she was going to balk at being labeled my property.
But to my surprise, she’d taken the patch. She’d even personally sewn it onto the back of her jean jacket. “I know I’m not literally your property, Fox,” she’d said. “But it gives me a sense of security knowing I’m tied to you emotionally. I can’t just leave. You can’t just leave. We’re bound to each other in ways that a ring or a patch can’t achieve.”
That had bothered me. It had stuck in my craw, her mentioning a ring. I felt too inadequate to give her a ring. The bud and breakfast looked to be booming, but no one made a bundle at a nonprofit bird place, not even the assistant director. I’d been living off my sicario savings, which was formidable, but I felt guilty as hell not having asked her to marry me.
I wanted it. Hell, after what I’d been through, I liked security as much as Pippa did. Who said men didn’t like having a nice house with decent furniture? A food processor, lawn chairs, a view of red rocks? We had all that now and I wanted to think it was enough for her, but I often wondered.
I slammed and locked the door to the Eminence Front Room, pressing Pippa between my body and the door. My cock was up like a hammer against her belly, and she squirmed and purred with delight. She rocked her head back and forth against the door, her silken hair now dyed nearly the same fiery shade of red as mine. That always got to me, her ultra-feminine ways. Some men might call them wiles even, but since they didn’t bother me in the least, they were just sexy, seductive ways.
I took a big bite from the pit of her throat. “How those balls feeling?”
She rolled her hips like a belly dancer and ruffled my hair with her hand. “The balls are turning me on, sir.” No one had asked her to call me “sir.” Because she did it on her own, I never protested. And who didn’t like being called “sir”? “It was all I could think of listening to Lytton’s speech.”