Rock Chick Reborn (Page 1)

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“CHICKEN AND WAFFLES.”

“Dude, are you crazy? No chick is gonna want you making her chicken and waffles.”

“I’m makin’ her chicken and waffles. Everyone likes chicken and waffles.”

“Yeah, and your bitch probably likes ’em too. The thing is, she’ll never want you to know she likes ’em or that she likes any food at all.”

At that, I stopped us all on a skid.

“If you call a woman a bitch one more time, Sniff, I’m gonna clock you back to the seventeenth century,” I warned.

Me and my boys were standing in the floral section of King Soopers.

This was because Sniff and I had been warned the day before that we had to skedaddle from the house for the night because Roam was bringing over one of his bitches (and I was an adult, I could think that and say it) to make her dinner.

So we were shopping for said dinner and for everything else it took to raise two teenage boys, this last necessitating me being at the damned grocery store at least three times a week.

Case in point, I’d seen Roam eat an entire pack of Oreos in one sitting, open a second and hoover through a whole row.

Not an ounce of fat on the boy though.

As an aside, why was the world so unfair? A woman did that her ass would follow her into a room three weeks after she entered it.

And by the by, I mentally asked about the world being unfair a lot.

I never got an answer.

Though I shouldn’t ask, because I knew the answer.

It was partly about people doing stupid shit their own damned selves, me included.

It was also that the world was just unfair.

Needless to say, raising two teenage boys meant most of the store would be in my Navigator in about an hour.

It should be noted that they weren’t exactly my boys, in the sense I didn’t birth either of them, and that was only obvious with one—the white one.

I was their foster mother.

They were still my boys.

Sniff, as usual, acted like he hadn’t heard my warning.

He said, “Shirleen, tell him. No girl is gonna want him to make chicken and waffles for dinner, because she’ll want him to make chicken and waffles for dinner and it’ll be torture pretending she doesn’t want to snarf down chicken and waffles at dinner.”

I studied Sniff, eighteen and long-since having grown out of his skinny, acne-ridden early teens.

Now the boy was six foot of lean muscle, not skin and bones, and although he had a couple of acne scars, which only made his face look interesting, the excellent insurance plan I was enrolled in at work and a good dermatologist had taken care of the rest.

In other words, now he was hot.

It made me throw up a little in my mouth to think that about my boy, but the evidence was standing right in front of me wearing jeans that every mother in the country would declare illegal and a cream, short-sleeved thermal that molded to various features of his developed chest, narrowing ribs, and flat stomach.

The power that package had over teenage-girl pussy I blamed on the Hot Bunch. It was them that took the boys under their wing, this including physical training, but also the inescapable soaking up of general badassness. So it was them that had honed the bods my boys now had, including Roam’s, who was a lot bulkier, taller, and a different brand of hot.

Chocolate hot.

Effective chocolate hot.

As evidenced by his serial dating.

Leading to chicken and waffles.

Sniff didn’t serial date.

He serial banged.

Due to an uncomfortable conversation Hank and I had some time ago—one that put me in my bed with the vapors for two days, and one that made Hank look like he might expire from trying not to bust a gut laughing after I’d talked him into having “the talk” with the boys—Hank kept them in condoms.

They could buy their own, of course. They not only got an allowance from me for keeping their rooms clean, taking out the trash and looking after the house, they were paid interns for Nightingale Investigations.

They didn’t do any of the dangerous stuff. They did stuff in the control room and stuff on the computers.

Or at least they didn’t tell me if they did the dangerous stuff. On that I just had to trust Liam Nightingale and his band of merry badasses would do the right thing with my boys.

I was all about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” With two teenage boys in my crib, who I loved beyond reason but who were Hot Bunch in the making, this was my new life motto and my only hold on sane.

But Hank made sure they were supplied so I didn’t have to take up residence in Babies ’R’ Us or factor child support into their allowances.

Thus Hank had taken me aside not two weeks ago to share that Sniff, particularly, might want to get a second job to keep him at the necessary level of prophylactics, and that I might want to buy stock in Trojan.

It was a warning.

I requested Hank engage in another conversation with both boys, roping in Roam just to make sure.

Then I took to my bed with the vapors.

“If he wants to make his girl chicken and waffles, he’s gonna make his girl chicken and waffles,” I decreed.

I did this even though Sniff was right, no girl was going to show she loved chicken and waffles in front of a boy.

It was ludicrous, at that age or any age. I had long since learned the only way to live in order not to do your own head in was to let it all hang out.

It was also the way of the world.

Until you learned.

Although I tried to teach my boys other practical knowledge the Hot Bunch would never be able to transfer on them—like the importance of keeping a house, laundering your clothes and being able to cook—Roam was hopeless in the kitchen.

The kid could grill a mean burger.

But other than that, frying some chicken and manning a waffle maker were the only culinary skills he’d mastered.

Sniff, on the other hand, was a savant in the kitchen. All he had to do was watch some show on Food Network, look up the recipe online, go out and get the stuff, and boom! There it was on a plate in front of his brother-from-another-mother and me.

He had the touch.

Good kid.

In a lot of ways.

If he’d quit trying to make up for being scrawny and pimple-faced when he was younger by tagging every piece of ass who glanced his way and would not have glanced his way two years ago.

“It’s gonna be a bust,” Sniff muttered.

“It’s gonna be awesome,” Roam returned.

“It’s gonna . . .” I trailed off when something that felt like a finger traced lightly down the back of my neck.

For some reason, maybe instinct after being around the Hot Bunch for so long, this made me turn my attention to the rose section.

And there stood a man with an empty cart, not moving, his eyes locked on me.

And oh sweet Lord, he was beautiful.

Tall as Roam, had to be, at least six-two. Close cropped hair, close cropped beard that was thicker around his mouth, scanter but not sparse on his cheeks. Both were sprinkled very minimally with a little white.

He had wide set, big, deep-brown eyes and a beautiful brother’s nose, thick and strong. Making that better, at the bridge there were a couple of creases. There were some creases in his forehead that were interesting as well, and with the white in his beard, they were the only things on his burly, wide-shouldered frame that told tale of his age.

He was just . . . perfect.

Even the shape of his skull sitting on the column of his neck was divine.

As I stared at him, his gaze unlocked on me to drop to my hands on the cart then it went to the boys, and a slash of white formed between his beautiful full lips, exposing strong, white teeth.