2. Utah

CHAPTER TWO

utah

“ Y ou’re trying too hard, hoss.”

I didn’t even bother to shift my gaze from watching Memphis walk away to gift my Judge with my full attention after that comment.

“Trying too hard? By letting her walk away? Never actually talking to her? Being busy away from the house just about every day?” I asked.

He didn’t appreciate my attitude any more than I did his.

“I don’t think she likes it when you touch her.”

“I don’t touch—” I stopped myself mid-thought. “Teaching her to shoot is not touching her.”

“Your hands were on her body,” he said and laughed. “I can’t stand here and recite the definition of touching for you, but that probably falls under the umbrella.”

“How am I supposed to show her what to?—”

“I’m telling you, man, don’t touch her tomorrow and she’ll stay out here longer.”

Indy wanted to learn to use a firearm. He’d been asking for this lesson for years. He’d also been telling me for years that the only reason he was a Judge rather than an Executioner was because he didn’t have any experience with weapons. He was never interested in hearing that it also seemed to require a very specific level of heartlessness and the ability to simply flip a switch to turn off your humanity. There was definitely more of a gray area in the kinds of jobs that were assigned to Indy and me than there was in the kind of work that New Jersey had done for our organization, but not by much.

Memphis and New Jersey seemed to hold down the top spot for finding people and things, taking them, and delivering them to whoever wanted them. His part specified that he wasn’t supposed to be in the business of murder, while the side of the job where Indy and I played stated very clearly that the occasional loss or taking of a life was just part of it. As long as it was done quietly, effectively, and without any chance of the action being linked back to the organization, I was free to do anything that was necessary to complete my tasks. New Jersey was a well-paid bounty hunter who had the privilege of being as reckless as he wanted. I was a one-man extraction team who had to be able to function like a ghost.

Indy was much too good of a person to be on the Executioner side of what our jobs entailed, but I had no interest in leaving him without a way to defend himself while I would be gone for several days next week. And he was way easier to teach than Memphis.

That girl had frustrating effects on me.

On my ability to function like a grown-ass man, mostly.

She took my brain and its power to form coherent thoughts and tossed it right into a blender.

When that was done, she dropped whatever was left into a food processor just for good measure.

Women didn’t usually make me nervous, if that was what this feeling was. I didn’t usually have to try this hard to understand them, either. I was normally the quiet one. The one who did most of the listening. The one who put the effort into seeing underneath. Except Memphis was encased in concrete. She didn’t speak in riddles or distractions. She just didn’t fucking speak unless it was about work or something snarky.

She hadn’t asked me to stop touching her. She hadn’t turned around and smacked me for putting my hands on her. But she did leave.

She was a confusing soul. She’d had no issue at all standing up to Jersey more than once just in the time that I’d been able to watch them together. She even tended to say whatever was on her mind when it came to Indy and Trista.

She also spent way more time around Indy than she did with me.

“You guys talk about me?” I asked Indy while he stepped up to aim toward the target in the distance.

“No. We just take secret pictures of you all day long and send them to the group chat that we’re in with Triss.”

“I meant did she tell you that I touch her too much?” I paused for a second. “Please tell me you aren’t actually sending pictures of me to those girls?”

“I keep the good ones for myself,” he said and shrugged his shoulders before he went back to preparing to fire.

The thing about Indy was that every word of that statement could’ve been the absolute truth, or every word could’ve been entirely fabricated from nothing. Maybe even something in the middle, where only parts of it were true, but he’d added something extra just to fuck with me. And I would probably never find out for sure which scenario it was.

I stayed out there with Indy to answer his questions and offer anything I knew about guns until he decided that he was done for the day. It was nearly dark outside by the time we were headed back toward the house. New Jersey’s groundskeeper, Kyle, was already out setting up his evening campfire routine with his dog, and Indy was chattering away about what kind of pizza he was going to go pick up for everyone. All while my mind lingered on Memphis.

She was uncomfortable with me compared to the way she acted with the others. I very much wanted to change that.

I waited until Indy left to retrieve his pizza before I went to knock on the door of her room.

“It’s open, Indy,” Memphis called quietly from the other side, because that’s how infrequent my trips were to her corner of the house. I pushed it open and waited in the doorway while covering my mouth with my hand to try to keep from laughing. She’d completely deconstructed the 3566 and had its pieces scattered across her desk while a video of someone talking about firing pins played on her laptop.

“Sorry,” she said without bothering to turn around. “I saw your text, but I was—” She stopped talking when I cleared my throat.

“Did he really send you a picture of me? From today ?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“What?” Memphis asked and laughed. “No. Why would he do that?”

I stared at her until she rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. She glanced back to her desk quickly and made sure to flip her phone upside down before she looked back to me.

“That fucking guy,” I said and shook my head.

“How long have you known about that?” she asked.

“How long have you guys been doing that ?”

“I don’t want to answer that ,” she laughed.

There she went again.

An adorable laugh was all it took to shut down the logical part of my brain and kick the animal side into high gear.

The side that wanted to take her smiles and her laughs just to turn them straight into gasps and moans.

No wonder she was uncomfortable around me.

“What are you doing, angel?” I asked and walked the rest of the way into her room to take the slide from her fingers.

“Learning.”

“Where’d you get the tools?” I asked, taking note of the equipment she’d managed to gather to actually sit here and fucking clean the internal pieces of a firearm without ever having learned to shoot one.

“I asked Kyle.”

“You could’ve asked me.”

This girl pinned me right in place with those perfectly green eyes when she looked up at me. She very clearly put a lot of effort into what she did with her makeup most days, and the whole goal of it was always to make her eyes look even bigger and even brighter than they were. It worked phenomenally in her favor because I couldn’t breathe any better than I could move in that moment.

“I learn better when I just teach myself.”

“Just because you’re used to needing to do it yourself doesn’t mean you learn better that way. The video you’re watching isn’t a Smith & Wesson.”

“Most guns are made of the same inner components. The concepts needed to take them apart to clean them and put them back together are transferable across manufacturers as long as you’re paying attention while you take them apart.”

Yikes.

“Why do you need to take it apart to learn to shoot it, Memphis?”

“Why do you need to go to New Jersey for a crime committed years ago against someone you say you dislike?”

“I don’t think I ever said I dislike him.”

I shifted to sit on the edge of her bed and just stared at her for a moment. Memphis was crazy about New Jersey. I wasn’t about to sit here and talk myself into a hole just because I wanted to hit him in the mouth every single time he opened it.

But even a man who deserved to get hit in the mouth every time he opened it didn’t deserve what had been done to his family. To his child. I could consider him the King of Pricks and still do something to settle that score the way it should’ve been done from the beginning.

She was still staring at me, waiting for an answer about the New Jersey trip.

“You can come with me,” I said, in the least well-thought-out sentence to ever leave my mouth.

“I can what?” she asked and laughed.

“Why not?” I asked, because I couldn’t fucking control my thoughts in her presence. “Get out of here for a while. Go somewhere else. Do something else.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

Why couldn’t I stop talking?

Indy was right. I was trying too hard.

But she hesitated. She didn’t have a good answer for why she couldn’t go with me.

“It’s alright, angel. Think about it. You’ve got time. I’m not leaving until next week. If you’re really that worried about what I’ll do, come keep an eye on me.” I got up to hand the slide back to her and turned for the door. “Let me know if you want help with any of this,” I offered and motioned to the strewn-about weapon pieces.