Zach turned on Jay the look his brother knew full well meantYou’ll pay later, asshole.
“We’re just talking,” he said to Eight. “It’s nothing.”
Eight’s eyes narrowed. “Be careful how you treat that man’s daughter, son. He’ll be your brother soon enough. And I have had my fill of brothers fighting over daughters in this club. You hear me?”
He was talking about Dex and Mav. They were fine now, but when Dex first got with Kelsey, Maverick had lost his mind.
At Eight’s comment, Dex stopped chewing, but he didn’t speak up.
Zach answered his president. “I hear you. I’ll be careful.”
Eight nodded. “Good.” He turned his attention to the whole table. “Finish your food. It’s time to saddle up and ride.”
Before Zach went back to his McMuffin, he let Lyra know they were heading out. He didn’t want to leave her on read.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Lyra!” Pop boomed.
In her room, sitting at her desk, the door closed, Lyra knew precisely where he was: at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the newel post. Pop wasn’t a habitual yeller, but he didn’t like to text if he didn’t have to, and he didn’t see a point climbing the stairs if he could make his voice carry through the whole house—which he absolutely could.
Lyra’s voice didn’t carry like his. She’d have to scream from her diaphragm for him to hear her reply. Instead, she stood, paused the music playing on her phone, crossed her room and opened the door. “Yeah, Pop?”
“Come on down, baby bear,” he said in a more normal voice. “Family meeting.”
“Two minutes!” She went to her desk and capped her watercolor pens. Since the Bulls had been in Laughlin, she’d been expecting a family meeting at some point. Both Pop and Reed had been a little weird since that night they’d sat around the fire pit with the boys from Tulsa. Like they had a secret. Lyra had figured a family meeting was on the horizon.
Family meetings had been her mother’s idea, but Pop had kept them going. The Haddon version were, Lyra assumed, pretty much like most families’ version: sitting around the dining room table to discuss some big thing happening, good or bad or just newsworthy, that affected them all. But without Mom’s sunnier influence, sometimes their family’s meetings had a slight flavor of tribunals.
Also, in their house, they sat at the kitchen table. Mom had taken the dining room set in the split; now the dining room was set up as the office for the family business.
When Lyra got to the table for this one, Pop was in his seat at the head, and Reed in his to Pop’s right. Lyra took her seat at his left. “What’s up?”
“Reed and I’ve got something to tell you, then I’ve got something to say.”
Her internal antennae twitching, Lyra frowned at father and brother in turn. There was a hint in there somewhere that she was in trouble in some way, but she hadn’t done anything. She’d rarely been in serious trouble because she’d never been what could be called a rebel. How would one rebel against a biker father and a hippie mother? Join the Young Republicans?
Actually, Pop was a Republican, insofar as he was anything political. When the man he called ‘that gold-toilet-shitting motherfucker’ rose to prominence, Pop abjured all politics in disgust. At any rate, he’d never cared that she and Reed were on a different side of the political spectrum, so there was no rebellion to be had there.
She’d have to become a cop or something to rebel against her parents. No chance of that.
“Okay ...” she replied.
“This can’t leave the house yet,” Reed added. “It’s not public knowledge, and not our call when it will be. Can’t even talk to Michelle about it, Ly. Or Mom. Just me and Dad.”