Page 44 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

In a breathless, giddy, thrilled way, tempered only by her worry that Shep might not feel the same.

They’d been playing house for almost two months now, and Raven knowing about it had only heightened the pleasure of sharing a home, a bed, a daily routine, a life with Shep.

It was all so easy, and maybe she should have mistrusted that, should have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but she loved the current shape of her days.

Even the little things: washing dishes, and taking the elevator down to do laundry in the basement, and running out of hot water when they showered together and got too carried away.

Forget going back to the dorms; she didn’t want to go back to living without him, period.

How much different could marriage be?

She turned to him, and found his gaze frozen in the middle distance, face slack and unreadable. His throat jerked as he swallowed. “Get married?” he asked, and his voice was strained.

Oh no. Oh, please don’t let him be rethinking it all.

“Yes. That would be the point of a wedding, Shep,” Raven said.

He blinked, and then turned toward Cass…

And grinned.

~*~

“I’ll handle things,” Raven said, already pulling out her phone when they hit the sidewalk.

“Do we not get any say?” Cass asked. “It’s our wedding.”

“You can have a say,” Raven said, absent and insincere, as she climbed in the back of the Rover. She waved before she shut the door. “I’ll come by in the morning. Ta, darling.”

The driver closed the door, sealing her behind bulletproof steel and smoked glass.

Cass took Shep’s hand as they watched the Range Rover pull out into traffic and disappear in a sea of cars.

“Are you okay?” she asked, softly. Because he’d smiled at her in that rare, boyish way he only ever did at home when it was just the two of them, but then he’d fallen quiet and been introspective, brow furrowed.

He squeezed her hand and then lifted it up and kissed the back of it. “Yeah, baby, I’m good.” He towed her down the sidewalk. “You’re gonna be late to class if we don’t hurry.”

“Wait, wait.” She dug in her heels, and he swung back around, still holding her hand. “Are you sure?”

His cheeks were flushed, and his eyes bright. He looked hectic. High, maybe. “What?”

“Are you sure you’re okay? You seem…”

His gaze darted out toward the street, and then back toward the building. “Yeah, I’m good.” He gave her hand a light tug. “It’s Friday. Isn’t that when that one bitch-ass professor takes attendance?”

“Yes. But. Frank .”

“I’m good.” He lifted his free hand. “Marriage, wedding, rape trial. We got lots to do. Come on.”

She went, but not without misgivings.

~*~

Shep waited until Cass was safe (or relatively so) behind the doors of her classroom building, then started his bike, rode to the nearest jewelry store, and had a minor breakdown in the parking lot.

He paced circles around his bike, glancing occasionally at the sun flares on the window of the store, scrubbing his hair into disarray and wishing things had gone differently. Fuck that attorney, honestly.

“Son, are you okay?” an elderly man walking toward the store stopped to ask him, wrinkled face full of concern.

“Yeah. Fine, thanks,” Shep said, gruffly, and waved the guy off.

The thing is, he wanted to get married to Cassandra, but he wanted to do it right .

His parents were the sort of couple who seemed to hate one another, and who stayed together for financial reasons or just plain stubbornness.

His mother was shrill, his father stoic and henpecked.

He hadn’t been home in at least ten years, and his last impression of them was his dad burying his face in a car magazine while his mother shrieked at Shep’s departing back: “I feel sorry for whatever poor woman you marry!” She hadn’t taken well to his Lean Dogs cut, and so he’d walked out while she was still wrist-deep in the chicken she’d been preparing for another horrible family dinner.

That was his measuring stick for marriage, flavored unfavorably with what he’d seen on TV, and in movies.

The women he’d slept with and casually dated had furthered his idea that marriage was nothing but conflict, every day a minefield, and that at some point the clashing would outweigh the sex.

He’d spent his twenties, thirties, and even early forties convinced he was allergic to marriage.

But then there was Cass, who, at seventeen, sized him up with a bold, bored look and said, “Neither of us is happy about this arrangement, but we might as well make the most of it. Do you like terrible horror movies?” They’d been forced together, but she’d immediately, disarmingly roped him into her corner, so that it had been the two of them versus Raven and the other “adults” who’d thought she’d needed a minder.

She was neither intimidated by him, nor in awe of his raw sexual magnetism (he embellished a little in his own mind, sue him), and against all his expectations, he’d come to care for her as a friend.

In hindsight, it was no wonder he’d fallen in love with her.

He’d never enjoyed a woman’s company so much, and boy, did he enjoy the hell out of hers.

Cohabitating the last few weeks was so easy .

And it was so good . The sex blew his mind, yes, but mostly he loved hearing her humming in the other room, and sitting on the couch together, and waking with her head tucked under his chin.

He never wanted her to leave.

And he’d been thinking, for days now, that there was one surefire way to keep her around for the long haul.

A way that involved carefully selecting the right ring, even if he had to take a loan out for it, and choosing the right moment to get down on one knee and offer it, and himself, to her. For the rest of his miserable life.

Instead, Melissa Dixon and Raven Blake had suggested he do it in broad fucking daylight right in front of Cass.

Cass was going to say yes, her face had been all aglow with her yes, but it wasn’t supposed to go that way . He was supposed to surprise her. It was supposed to be romantic , for fuck’s sake.

Bristling with anger, he charged across the parking lot and into the store—“Welcome, sir, I’ll be right with you!”—and promptly deflated when he caught a glimpse of all the bright, shiny shit under glass.

A tiny slip of a saleswoman came over, perky and chirpy, and didn’t bat an eye at his stammered, “Uh…engagement rings. And—and wedding rings, too, I guess.”

“Engagement rings are right over here. Do you have an idea of what you’re looking for?”

He did not.

He wound up back in the parking lot, pacing more circles around his bike.

Mav’s words from several weeks ago returned to him, his calm, confident assurance that he ought to call Mercy Lécuyer down in Knoxville for advice.

Shep wasn’t in the business of asking for advice from anyone, but he’d never met anyone who talked so adoringly about his wife before, and he was about to have one of those, wasn’t he? And he for sure adored her.

He whipped out his phone and dialed before he could think better of it.

Mercy picked up on the second ring, the background ringing with garage noise. “Hey, Shep!” He sounded genuinely glad to hear from him. Shep tried to remember when that had ever happened…and then realized he’d been greeted by name.

“How’d you know it was me?”

The background noise receded, and he thought Mercy was moving somewhere quieter. His tone was fond, and faintly amused when he said, “I programmed your number into my phone, same with all the New York boys. How’d you get hold of me?” he returned, a smile in his voice.

Shep scrubbed a hand across his eyes, and though he hadn’t seen the man in person in years, it was easy to envision him: his massive frame, and his long black hair, and that easy, sunny way he smiled, like all was right with the world, even when, perhaps especially when, he was extracting answers from someone.

He still recalled the stink of the shed where Mercy had tortured Mikhail Morozov until the once-proud bratva strongman had been a whimpering, bleeding, sniveling mess.

Mercy had whistled to himself while he did it, pleased and unbothered.

His tone now was fatherly; or, at least, Shep’s fantasy ideal of fatherly.

“Also,” Mercy continued, “Mav reached out a few weeks ago and said I should expect your call.”

“He what? That asshole,” Shep said, more stressed than pissed. “Did he tell you what about?”

“No. He just said he’d told you to call me.”

Shep blew out a harsh breath and made another lap around the bike. He caught a glimpse of a face in the storefront window, an employee watching him with a frown. He put his back to the building, attempted to massage the tension from his left temple, and decided not to be coy about this.

“How did you propose to your wife?”

Mercy made a soft, surprised sound. Shep expected to be told to go to hell, or that he was weird, and he deserved to hear both. But after a beat of thought, Mercy said, “It was in the courthouse parking lot, the day we had to flee Knoxville.”

The story of Mercy and his old lady, Ava, had passed into MC legend.

Everyone knew that she’d been a teenager, once, the first time they’d come together, and then fresh out of college the second.

Everyone knew that Ghost had tried to keep them apart, ultimately failed, and that the man now saw his son-in-law as an indispensable part of the club, an unswerving and wholly trusted ally.

The way the story had passed from mouth to mouth, Shep had always thought it must have been this grand and sweeping tale, their marriage.

He said, “What?”

Mercy chuckled. “I got Ratchet to accelerate the license process, and I pulled over at the courthouse on our way out of town, and I said, ‘What do you say, baby?’ And we went in and got married on the spot, so I could take my wife to New Orleans, instead of my girlfriend.”

“That’s…kinda lame.”

Mercy chuckled again. “It is, isn’t it? But she was happy. That’s all that mattered.”

Shep swallowed, with difficulty, his throat dry. “Yeah.”

In a very kind voice, Mercy said, “Why’d you want to talk to me, Shep?”

His lungs tightened. It felt like swimming, holding his breath, when he said, “I’m getting married.

” And…oh. It was stupid, but saying it released some internal pressure valve.

He was getting married. And it wasn’t scary, and it wasn’t shackling, but he still, so desperately it left him dizzy, wanted to do it in a way that pleased Cass.

“And you don’t want to?” Mercy guessed.

“No! No, man, I really want to. Like, really .”

“But you’re nervous.”

“I didn’t even get to ask!” he burst out, frustration bubbling over. “I was gonna, I was working on it, thinking about it, and then the A.D.A., and the cops, and fucking Raven are all like, ‘you gotta get married to she can’t testify against you,’ and I didn’t get the chance to ask her myself!”

“Ah.”

“It’s Cassandra, by the way.” He rubbed at his eyes again; it felt like there was a piece of grit lodged in the right one. “Cassandra Green.”

“Uh-huh. Okay.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“That’s ‘cause I’m not. I’ve been where you are.” He laughed again, low and easy. “Thankfully Ava only had one brother, and he liked me. But. She had a dad.”

“Yeah.” Privately, Shep was thinking that Ava’s dad was an asshole, but he’d likely never dropped through an elevator’s trapdoor to assassinate a foreign dignitary.

“Not that it’s any of my business,” Mercy said, tone going conspiratorial, “but the lovely Mrs. Walsh saw us burying a dead body before she was Walsh’s old lady, and he took her down to the courthouse to fix that.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah, real romantic. And when Aidan got married, he already had a baby with another woman, and Samantha became an instant mom. She’s great at it, everything worked out. But you see where I’m going with this, right?”

Shep felt stupid in the sort of sudden, drop-kicked way that made a man’s knees weak. He perched back on the seat of his bike and said, grimly, “Yeah.”

“You’ll be fine,” Mercy said. “I’ve got two pieces of advice, if you want ‘em.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“One: don’t buy a ring so expensive you can’t afford to eat for a month. She won’t care.”

“You don’t know that. You met her once, three years ago.”

“Yeah.” The smile was back in his voice, “But I know her brothers pretty damn well. And her old man. She’s not superficial.” When Shep didn’t say anything, he said, “What, am I wrong?”

“Nah.”

“Thought so. Okay, so that’s one: shop within your means, bro. Number two, and this is the important one: if Tenny offers to shake your hand, don’t . You’re gonna need both hands free.”

“Jesus.”

Someone in the background called Mercy, so Shep thanked him and ended the call.

“You’ll be fine,” Mercy assured, in parting, and maybe he would.

Shep slipped his phone away, squared his shoulders, and went back into the store.