Page 122 of Duty and Desire

Mo felt his lips thin.

“There!” Smithie jerked his finger at Mo, not missing Mo’s slight movement. “You’re one of those guys! Christ!” He threw up both hands. “I thought I was done with those guys. Jack didn’t mind his woman stripping.”

Mo had no clue who “Jack” was. He didn’t remember Lottie telling him about one of the women who had a man named Jack.

He still said nothing.

“And what about you?” Smithie asked Hawk. “Not real professional, one of your boys tags the woman he’s guarding.”

“It’s been platonic,” Hawk ground out.

“Right,” Smithie said.

Mo was done.

With a number of things.

What they were discussing right then the least of them.

“I’ve touched her, that way, once. Tonight. When I needed her to focus and I put my hands on her face.Once,” Mo growled. “Lottie wanted a new bodyguard so we could start things up, but no one could be on her, but me. We held off. Now we need to make a decision about this guy because it’s done and that means my job is done which means I can claim my woman, so I’m done with this chat.” He turned to Hawk. “What do you want to do?”

“What doyouwant to do?” Hawk asked calmly.

“I want him dead.”

Hawk didn’t even blink.

“But I’m pissed as fuck and I’m tweaked as hell right now which means I can’t fully get behind that,” Mo continued. “So I want you to call Lawson and Lucas and get his ass in jail. We really got no choice but to let justice take its course, not that I can’t live with the other option, or Smithie can’t, or you can’t, but because I’ll probably have to explain it to Lottie and she won’t be able to.”

“Shit, fuck, you just had to bring Mac into it,” Smithie muttered irritably.

“She’s not being brought into it,” Mo shot back. “It’s all about her and has always been all about her. If I had my say, any victim would be able to choose what punishment their offender would get. That would be random and chaotic, but I don’t give a fuck. It’d be fair, and it’d give closure and power to the people who were stripped of it. I don’t get to decide the way our criminal justice system works. But from the second those journals were found, I was unofficially off the job, and the path was cleared I could officially claim Lottie as mine. So now Idoget to decide how she’s protected inall ways. And I’m not gonna ask her to live with the fact that she knows some guy had his tongue cut out, even if I, personally, would like the opportunity to pull it through a gaping hole in his throat.”

“I think I like you,” Smithie announced.

“I don’t care,” Mo replied and looked again at his boss. “Are we done?”

“You might have to give false testimony, Mo,” Hawk reminded him.

“I don’t care about that either,” Mo replied. “Are we done?”

“You were on her, so no one has to know you were in the house,” Hawk muttered. Then said, “We’re done.”

Mo turned on his boot and walked toward the door.

“You got two days leave, Mo,” Hawk called to his back. “Starting today.”

Mo said nothing as he walked out of that house.

Though he did that thinking, not for the first time, his boss was the shit.

The sun was coming up in the sky.

The dawn of a new day.

Mo was looking forward to it.

He just hoped like fuck he didn’t run anybody over getting his ass back to Lottie.