Wild Like the Wind (Page 13)

That last was a lie, and with anyone Hound spoke to he’d not give a shit he lied.

With Jean, it made his stomach feel sick.

“Perhaps—” she started.

“She’s just a friend, darlin’,” he cut her off quietly.

“You’re not getting any younger. You need to think about settling down. Finding a woman. Making a family,” she shared.

“I got a family.”

“Your own, motek,” she added.

He grinned. “I got my own family, Jean bug. I’m good. It’s all good.”

All of a sudden, those faded blue eyes on him were piercing. “You are the kindest, most gentle soul I’ve ever had touch mine. If you do not give that to a child, Shepherd, that will be lost to this world and that would be such a crying shame, it’d be hard to reconcile it.”

With her words, it shoved right into his head that Keely was forty-three.

Close to past it, but probably not quite yet.

She also had a twenty-one-year-old son, a nineteen-year-old one, and would likely not want to start that shit up again at her age.

Tack and his woman, Tyra, had not thought twice about starting up again after Tyra got in there with Tack, years after he’d rid himself of the bitch who’d been his first wife, Naomi. His girl with Naomi just gave Tack his first grandchild, a boy, and his two youngest with Tyra were barely older than their nephew.

It worked for that family.

The thought of telling Dutch and Jagger he’d knocked their mother up made him want to puke.

The thought that he was even having these thoughts made him want to kick his own ass.

“She was loud then I didn’t hear anything for a long time including your door open and close, Shepherd,” she said sharply. “Though I did hear it later, very late. It woke me up. Did you go out to a late-night movie? With her?”

This was no one’s business.

Except maybe Jean’s.

“Took some time to settle her down,” he hedged.

“It sure did,” she replied, gaze intent on his, lifting her coffee cup to her lips without breaking her regard.

“What happened shouldn’t have happened. She’s the widow of a dead buddy of mine,” he told her.

“I’ll tell you what, Shepherd Ironside, in some cultures it’s the responsibility of the brother who lives to wed the wife left behind in order to make certain she’s cared for.”

“That’s not our culture,” he reminded her, and it definitely wasn’t Chaos culture.

“Perhaps it should be. Perhaps there would be very lonely women who struggle, some of them with children, who wouldn’t have to struggle so hard, and their children would have a steady man in their lives who provided for them and gave them the understanding their mother was worth taking care of, because that’s the truth.”

Suddenly, Hound wondered what was behind that emotion.

“Who we talkin’ ’bout here, Jean bug?” he asked softly. “We talkin’ about Keely or we talkin’ about someone else?”

“My Haim didn’t have a brother, just a younger sister and she was a spoiled rotten brat.”

Hound relaxed and grinned at her.

“I’m old but I’m not stupid and I’ll tell you this, I’m sure it wasn’t gentlemanly behavior you used to settle her down,” she stated.

It was absolutely not that.

She kept at him.

“However, even so, it’s the way of the world today and today’s brand of gentleman would not have her out the door in the middle of the night. Did she need to get back to her children?”

Dutch had his own place. Most the time Jag crashed with him because he was his brother, not his mother, but also because his pad was closer to where Jag was taking classes to become a mechanic.

So it wasn’t just their ages that meant Keely did not need to get back to them.

“Her kids now are grown,” he told her.

“So it was you having to take care of me that made you send her on her way,” she declared.

“Jean, she left because she wanted to leave. It didn’t have anything to do with you.”

He felt the coffee he threw back after he gave her that stick in his throat when she said, “You support me and yourself, Shepherd. You seem not to have very many needs, single men often don’t unless they have expensive hobbies, which you don’t. But it’s obvious you have money. Why are you still in these terrible apartments?”

Well, it was now clear she paid closer attention to her accounts than he thought she did.

“Jean—”

“It’s because of me,” she spoke for him.

It was.

“Jean bug—”

“I’m here because I’ve lived here for fifty-three years, and it wasn’t like this when I moved in and I just don’t have it in me to move out. But more, I don’t have the money to do it. You’re here, in these apartments, in a bad part of town, right where you’re sitting now after making me breakfast, because of me. You’ll come back to make sure I have lunch. You’ll come back and help me get to bed. Boy your age doesn’t need a woman mine hanging like an albatross around his neck. You need a woman to love and children to raise, but more, you need a woman who loves you. I think it’s time we again discuss someone coming in to help, and it’s definitely time we discuss how much money you’re pouring into looking after me.”

“I don’t mind,” he said quietly.

“Well I do,” she retorted firmly.

All right.

He was done.

So done, he found himself maneuvered into sitting on the other side of a discussion they’d quit having two years ago.

“If I don’t, how can you?” he asked tersely. “Has it occurred to you that wakin’ up knowin’ I’d get a dose of you and havin’ something important to do in my day, that also bein’ lookin’ after you as well as stepping up for Keely and her boys, is the only thing feels right about me except my brothers’ givin’ me their love. But that last, I earned. The rest, those are gifts and you want me to give that up? Move out. Leave you to what, Jean? Some soulless company that offers care and you’re just a name on their daily list to tick off and they don’t give a shit about you?”

“Language, Shepherd,” she murmured.

Hound clamped his mouth shut.

“I despair every other morning when it’s time for you to help me shower,” she whispered.

“I don’t. I don’t give a sh . . . oot.”

She shook her head. “The beauty you have in you, motek, I don’t understand why you don’t offer that to a woman.”

“You don’t understand because the only woman I’d let have that is Keely, and her man’s been dead for seventeen years and she still loves him like the first day she laid eyes on him.”

Christ, why was he giving her this?

Maybe because he needed to say it out loud to remember it.

Her voice was filled with misery when she said, “Shepherd.”

“Don’t worry, Jean. I’ve lived with it so long it just is what it is because that’s all it can be.”

“And this visit of hers the other night?”

“She said somethin’ uncool to me and felt bad. She knows I’m hers and she lost one of the three most important things in her life, and the kind of woman she is, that important is important. I’m not that but she wasn’t feelin’ like losing me. So she made sure that won’t happen.”