Page 25 of Venom's Sting
I shrug, feeling certain she will jump at the chance. “She always wanted to give me a brother. When I joined the Savage Legion, I told her that I had over thirty brothers. She said it wasn’t the same. I think she wanted me to have someone like you, someone who always had my back and such.”
“I hope that turns out to be true, I really like you and your mom.”
I wipe my palm on my jeans and scoop up my controller while I’m down there. “You’re family.”
Rage tosses the wad of croissant into his mouth and picks up his controller as well. “Well, let’s find these fuckers. Then we can get a coffee.”
I glance over at Amy to find that she’s sniffing. I rush over to her. “What’s up, sweetheart?” I don’t see anything wrong, but sometimes you can’t tell by looking.
She steps out and wraps her arms around me. Okay, she’s hugging me. That’s cool and all but the part I don’t is why. If I knew that, I would be able to get more hugs later. I wrap my arms around her and hold her tight. “Whatever happened, we can fix it,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “It’s just that the two of you are just such good human beings. The way you stepped up for each other was really beautiful. I never thought guys had such deep and profound feelings.”
Suddenly, Rage was standing right beside us. “Of course we fucking do. Men have deep feelings. We just don’t cry and shit like that every damn time we get emotional.”
I whisper, “Too much. Back off, brother.”
“Oh, sorry about that,” he whispers back. “I’ll give the two of you some space, I’m gonna park up around the other side of the farm and get eyes on the woods.”
I can feel Amy trembling in my arms. At first, I think it’s from still being emotional. When she pushes her face back from my chest, I realize she’s laughing. “You two are just too perfect. Whatever woman ends up with you is going so damn lucky.”
Something about the tone of her voice rings true. No one has ever said anything like that to me before. And standing there, staring down into her eyes, I want that woman to be her so much it hurts. I don’t say that because I don’t want to scare her off or make her think I’m trying to get possessive. Unfortunately, I am getting possessive of her.
I hear Rage’s motorcycle engine fire to life and then the sound gets further away as I stand there looking down at Amy’s smiling face, her eyes are still glistening with emotion. Tucking my controller under one arm, I cup her lovely chin in my hands.
“Sorry if all the mushy stuff got to you.”
“Do you really think your mom is going to be okay with getting a surrogate son out of the blue?”
I smile at her. “Yeah, she’ll love it. I’ve seen how she is with Rage whenever we’ve dropped by the restaurant.”
“I’m glad about that.” She hesitates for a few seconds before asking, “So, what got you so interested in snakes?”
Pleased that this woman is so curious about me and my life, I half-jokingly suggest, “How about we trade kisses for secrets.”
Before we can even talk about it, she jumps onto her tiptoes and pulls me down for a kiss, and then another and then another. I’m taken aback as I didn’t expect her to do it—don’t get me wrong, her kisses are amazing, better even than I thought they would be and it’s something that I have been thinking aboutquite a lot since she came into my life. But something is tugging at the back of my mind. I’m lost in the kisses until it occurs to me that she’s paying in advance. I pull back, astounded that she lured me into disclosing my secrets so easily.
No wait, it was in fact my idea. She’s just using my own ideas against me. My maman is right, women are resourceful.
I press my forehead against hers for a brief second before pulling all the way back. “We should probably keep monitoring your grandfather’s farm. You can ask your questions while we work. How does that sound?”
Her pretty face lights up and I don’t think I have ever seen a more beautiful sight.
We sit on the edge of the ridgeline with our feet hanging over and activate our drones again.
“Your drone looks different from mine. Does it do anything special?”
I nod and tell her all about it, probably in more detail than necessary. “Yes, this is my newest drone, I lost my best one a while back. I switched out the motor for a more powerful one, so it doesn’t get blown around by the wind and it can accelerate and decelerate faster. It has a maximum flight distance of twenty miles, that means we can sit here, and the drone can fly way out of Las Salinas.”
“Wow!” she says, her voice full of admiration.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty cool feature. I’ve got one that can fly for sixty miles, but for today’s surveillance we don’t need that. This drone has an infrared feature to pick up heat signatures.”
“How do you manage to do things like that? Did you study mechanical engineering or something like that?”
“No, I’ve always liked tinkering with mechanical things. I might have been a fully-fledged worm and snake enthusiast as a kid, but I also liked to take things apart and put them back together again. My mother used to buy me old clocks, radios, and small appliances to tinker with, by taking them apart I could figure out how they worked.”
“I wish more than anything that we could pick up my mom’s heat signature,” she replies wistfully.