Redemption (10 page)

“No. Go. Walter’s probably looking for you already.”

But I’d rather stay here.
The determination in Bo’s eyes said “
Leave! Now!”
Lucky pecked his cheek and did as told for one of the few times in his life.

Muthafucking car fired on the first try. But if it hadn’t Bo would hand Lucky the truck keys and still shove him out the door.

He stopped by Starbucks on his way to the office. “Plain decaf… no thanks, I brought my own stevia. And a decaf green tea…” Fuck. “Just the coffee.”

Get the tea. It’ll give you a reason to go back to the house!
But no, Bo had said “Go”.

Lucky shuffled out to the car and sat in the parking lot for a few moments before following the line of cars around the building to the road. Turn left and go home. Turn right and go to work. He turned on his left blinker.

Maybe he needs his space?
Lucky turned right.

Was there always so much traffic in the morning? “Hey, asshole! Move that rusted out piece of shit into the slow lane if it won’t go but forty!” Sheesh. Some people. Lucky saluted with his middle finger.

He took a sip of coffee and swerved to keep from getting hit by an ignorant son of a bitch trying to cut him off. “My car is paid for and pretty much totaled as it is. I’ve nothing to lose. So come on over here, you bastard. I’ll merge with you!”

Laying down on the horn made good stress relief. A mile from work he reined in his baser instincts. He’d flipped off a man in a red Corvette once and wound up face to face with the asshole an hour later during a meeting in Walter’s office. Flipping off Walter’s boss hadn’t been one of his finer moments.

“Mr. Smith wants to see you,” the receptionist told him the moment he stepped off the elevator.

How had Bo known?

Lucky strode into his boss’ office and sank into his usual chair. “Mawnin’.” Nothing good about it yet.

Walter’s office door flung open.

Wham!

“What the fuck is this shit?” Bo didn’t even glance Lucky’s way as he stalked across to floor to face off with Walter Smith. He threw a crumpled sheet of paper on the desk.

Bo was mad enough for three, so either he’d taken the carpool lane, teleported, or Lucky’d farted around longer than he thought.

As calm as you please, Walter smoothed out the scrap, never even batting an eye at his most mild-mannered agent storming into this office, cussing up a blue streak. “I believe it’s a job offer from the Southeastern Narcotics Bureau to one William Patrick Schollenberger III. Your probationary period ended earlier this month.”

“What do you mean, auditing? Surveillance? I didn’t spend the last year of my life up to my ass in alligators to come back to a damned desk job!” Whirlwinds didn’t stir up as much dust as Bo’s sprint around the office. “I’m good at what I do!” He spotted Lucky. “Tell him, Lucky! I’m good! I should be out there”—he waved his hand toward the window—“not sitting behind a desk telling a white collar asshole he needs to update his state license!” Spit flew from Bo’s mouth. “I’d understand if I’d screwed up, but I didn’t.”

Every fiber of Lucky being screamed at him to get up, take Bo in his arms, tell him everything would be okay. No, he couldn’t cross the line and prove the point about on-the- job relationships. But if Walter dared to offend the man…

“You’re not being punished, Bo.” Walter’s calm got on Lucky’s nerves. A man’s career hung in the balance, his future. Lucky’s future. “It’s standard procedure to limit undercover assignments to a year for seasoned agents. You’d scarcely finished training. You stayed too deep, too long. If you’d
screwed up,
as you say, we wouldn’t be offering you a permanent position.”

Bo’s voice took on a note of pleading. “But I can do it, Walter. I can go back out. Stephan Mangiardi—”

“Will soon face Lady Justice.” Walter kept his voice steady, which irritated the fuck out of Lucky. “You’ve done tremendous work for the bureau, and we’re grateful, but the case is out of our hands now.”

Bo ran his fingers through hair he’d never let get so messed up two years ago. “I want him stopped.”

“As do we all. And he will be, I can assure you.”

So quietly Lucky strained to hear, Bo muttered, “I wanted to be the one to stop him.” He locked eyes with Lucky for a moment before shifting his gaze away, tagging Lucky to step into the ring in his defense.

“I’m with Walter on this, Bo. If it makes you feel better, they’ve clipped my wings too, except for small local stings.” Lucky thrived on action, was out of his element in an office. For Bo, who’d tied up so much of himself in his undercover persona, this must be like withdrawals.

Fuck, it wasn’t
like
withdrawals, it
was
withdrawals. Bo had grown dependent on the poison Stephan fed him, but his true addiction was Cyrus Cooper. Cyrus Fucking Cooper had an answer for everything, didn’t let shit eat him up inside like Bo did. Time to tell Bo about the house and give him another focus—if Lucky got the chance.

“What if I don’t sign on?”

Lucky’s lungs stopped working.

“That’s your prerogative, but I hope you’ll stay with us. We need you. You’ll have a solid career with the SNB.”

“Just no more undercover.” The guy had never sounded so dejected.

“I never said that, Bo. In six months you’ll be reevaluated as to your readiness to return to the field.”

“It’s only six months,” Lucky assured him. “Christ, are you that eager to put your ass on the line again?” Had he said that out loud?

Bo’s un-Bo-like glower shut Lucky up. More quietly, but not by much, Bo said, “Six months. They’ll have caught Stephan by then.”

“One can hope.” Damn but Lucky wanted to be the one to haul in the bastard.

“What do you think I should do?” Bo turned his full attention to Lucky.

Let me wrap you in cotton and keep you hidden in the house?

For a moment Lucky recoiled. Old habits died hard. They had no secrets from Walter though Bo didn’t know it yet. “I stayed, didn’t I?” But if Bo stayed, he risked getting shot, or worse.

Bo’s slumped against the bookcase, gazing down at the floor. “I told you why I don’t want to go back to the pharmacy.”

Walter better not ask.
He didn’t.

Danger on the one hand, Bo leaving Lucky behind on the other. The noble thing to do would be to tell Bo to leave, go find a nice, safe life somewhere. Away from the SNB, away from drug lords, but also, away from Lucky. God, let that not happen. “I think you should stay.”
I want you to stay. Fucking need you to stay.

Or Lucky could say, “Screw the house, screw the job
,
” and go with Bo. If Bo asked.

“You don’t have to decide today,” Walter chimed in.

“I’d like to think about it, please.” Traces of the old Bo shone through the anger.

“Take all the time you need.”

Bo nodded once to Walter and again at Lucky. He left the room and closed the door behind him with a little more force than necessary.

A grueling wait loomed ahead.

***

Lucky lay on the ugly gold couch, staring at the clock on the wall. He’d need to cut out of here in ten minutes if he planned to be waiting in his car for the end of Bo’s appointment, like he’d never left. “My partner is thinking of quitting the SNB.”

Dr. Libby jabbed a finger at her iPad. “And how does that make you feel?”

Lost? Helpless? “Like warmed over shit.” Fucking useless.

“Mr. Harrison, can I ask you something?”

“I reckon.” Whether or not he’d answer was the real question.

“You’ve been coming here for weeks. While I’m impressed by your concern for your partner and your willingness to help him, when are we going to talk about your issues?”

***

Lucky made it back to the car a few seconds before Bo stormed out of the brick building he’d gone into an hour earlier, got in the car, and slammed the door.

“That bad?” Lucky listened for falling car parts.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Funny, Lucky said those same words to Dr. Libby. “Then let’s go home.” He turned the key in the ignition.
Click, click, click.

Bo rolled his eyes and gave Lucky a “fuck this shit” glower. “Haven’t you gotten this old rust bucket looked at yet?”

“Hey!”

“Fuck it. Leave it here, we’ll call a cab. Tomorrow you can take my truck and I’ll call a mechanic. Look, since we’ve decided not to get a house, please consider getting a better car.”

We? We decided?
News to Lucky. And there wasn’t a thing wrong with the Camaro that a little elbow grease and a few parts couldn’t fix. Lucky opened his mouth, but snapped it shut. Bo had made a decision. He’d thought something out and had spoken up, instead of cruising on autopilot and saying, “Whatever.”

A few minutes under the hood could make the car run, but prove Bo wrong. Lucky called a cab.

***

“Lucky?”

“Yeah?”

“Are you awake?”

“No.” Lucky hid a yawn. “What time is it?”

“Three a.m. I need to ask you something.”

“What?” Waking up for sex? Oh, yeah. Questions requiring functioning brain cells? Not before coffee. “You didn’t have another bad dream, did you?” Lucky rolled over and held out an arm.

Bo crawled closer and took the offered shoulder. “Remember when we were in the tunnel and talked about reconnecting with our families?”

“Yeah.” Not that it’d be easy for Lucky, with everyone but his sister thinking him dead. Nor for Bo if he kept ignoring all calls from Arkansas.

“Thanksgiving’s coming up, and well, my aunt invited us to spend the holiday at her house. My brother will be there with his girlfriend, and my aunt’s boyfriend will be there with his three kids. What do you say?”

So, after the nightmare Bo broke down and talked to his aunt. Yeah, ‘bout time he took Lucky home to meet the family. Meeting family meant Bo planned to keep him around—for a while at least.

But would the rest of the Schollenbergers think him good enough for Bo? Probably not. But it wasn’t their decision to make, was it? “If you want to go, sure, why not?” Plenty of time between now and then to regret his words. If a family visit got Bo out of the house and reconnected with his loved ones, it’d be worth every minute.

Bo found Lucky’s cheek in the dark for a quick kiss. “Thanks.” He squirmed into Lucky’s side.

Tune in next time, folks, when Lucky meets the family!

Ah, hell.

Chapter Eight

“How’s it going with your fella?” Johnson hefted a box of records onto one hip and tagged along behind Lucky out to her Jeep, a cup of vending machine coffee in her other hand. She’d been playing chauffeur too much, but the Camaro was unreliable and Lucky hadn’t found time to climb under the hood after getting it back to the house.

Taking the truck and leaving Bo at home with no transportation wasn’t happening.

But how were things going with Bo? “He has good days and bad days.”

Bad days mostly, not cleaning or showering. He moped around, watched TV, keeping sex a distant dream—complete with condoms on the few occasions it’d happened.

Lucky once used latex as a barrier to more than possible infection. Bo did the same, keeping distance between them.

“But you’re getting along? Therapy’s helping?” Damn the woman for prying.

“Whose therapy?”

“His and yours. You’re still going, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Helping?”

“I’m not sure. I’m not waking up screaming as much, but with Bo there—” Oh, hell no. He was not sharing his love life, or lack thereof, with this woman. If he struggled to tell the doctor the SNB paid by the hour, he wasn’t giving away his secrets for free. Of course, in all his time with Dr. Drake, he’d yet to talk about anything other than Bo’s problems.

“Why don’t you do something different? Take him out someplace special. Last week Phillip took me to a great restaurant. Here, hold this.” She placed her coffee on the carton Lucky held, opened the back of her Jeep, and shoved her box of log books and shipping records inside. The next few weeks of someone’s life would be spent scrutinizing those documents.

She reclaimed her coffee, took Lucky’s from his hand, and nodded toward the Jeep. Lucky shoved more records into her already full vehicle. This drug distributor would be out of commission for a while. “Almost made up for his mama forbidding him to bring me to Thanksgiving dinner.”

“He’s going without you?” Why Johnson put up with Phillip’s family’s crap boggled the mind. She deserved better.

“Yeah. He sorta has to. He’d catch hell otherwise. Why do people insist on running their kids’ lives? I wanna keep my baby safe, but if he finds someone one day who rocks his world, I’d be happy for him, no matter what color they were or where they came from.”

Okay. So far she’d not made any homophobic remarks about Bo and Lucky, not that it’d be wise to do so to her supervisor. Time to test the waters. She might set different standards for her own family. “What if he brought home a man?”

Johnson didn’t even bat an eye. “Then he better be good to my boy, or I’ll kick his ass.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Hell, yeah. Love is love, baby, and sometimes we love who other folks think we shouldn’t.”

Phillip’s parents were idiots. “Johnson, if I were into women, I’d so take you home to Mama.”

She paused a minute, stared into Lucky’s eyes, handed him his coffee, and patted his cheek. “Thank you, sweetie. And don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul how nice you are. Now, get in. It’s colder’n a well digger’s butt out here.”

Home to Mama. Soon, Lucky would meet the closest woman Bo had to a mother. And fuck if he didn’t want to measure up. Casual fucks-and-forgets were a lot less complicated.

Lucky crawled into the passenger side of Johnson’s Jeep. She buckled in and pulled out into the street.

“What your man needs is a purpose in life.” The font of wisdom named Loretta Johnson kept one hand on the steering wheel and gestured with the other, coffee cup and all. “A way to feel useful. Right now he thinks he’s not good at anything and is a burden. Make him feel like you can’t live without him.”