“I don’t know, but he said he didn’t think that about the other old ladies because they all came with jobs. He thinks because she was homeless, she’s not as good as them. The woman has an education and has worked different jobs. Hell, she did HR and was asking what we did with all our employees at the different businesses. When I mentioned her experience, she said she wasn’t angling for a job. She was curious. She’s been working shit beneath her experience. She just can’t find anything she can do where she could have Hope with her. She has no one to leave her with when she works. She’s fucking completely alone. Her adopted parents are dead, and she didn’t mention having any other family.”
“What do you need us to do? Whatever it is, we’ll do it,” Bull told me.
“I wanna get her around everyone, so she can see you don’t think less of her or that she’s a user. I wanna do everything I can to convince her not to leave at the end of the week. I’m already invested, guys. She’s it for me. This is my chance at happiness and a family. I’m not going to let her walk out the door. Hell, she’s already my old lady in all but a cut. I need my brothers to help me convince her. And I want Outlaw to do some digging into Todd Hamilton in Philadelphia. He’s her old boss. It was a marketing company she worked for. I know you do background checks. Here’s Ilara’s information so you can check into her. I only wanna know if there’s something in there I should know. The rest I’ll learn from her. Outlaw, this is strictly between us. No one else needs to know her background. We didn’t announce the other old ladies’ and I won’t have Ilara’s talked about,” I warned him. I knew I owed it to the club to do this, even if I didn’t want to. We had to know the kind of people we were bringing into the club.
“What about Tate? What’re we going to do with him?” Maverick asked.
“I don’t know. He shouldn’t have done it the way he did. If he had real concerns, he should have approached it a different way. Somewhere that she couldn’t have overheard him,” I snapped.
“Do you think he did it on purpose, hoping she’d hear him?” Ace asked.
“Why would he? He doesn’t know her. He has no reason to do that. I’m too close to this to be reasonable right now, about what we do with him. Let me cool off then we can talk. I do want to know why he did it the way he did,” I told them. After that, we quickly tied things up. All of them promised they’d be sure to make her feel welcome. I went back to the house with hope and dread in my heart. The next seven days could decide my life.