I clenched my teeth and my eyes flew to Ren.
He was looking at me and he looked even less happy than me. But he jerked his head in a negative shake once and looked to Kevin.
I did too and saw that The Kevster was fidgeting, his eyes darting from me to Lee to different men in the room then to Lee again and he said, “I, uh… dude, I—”
Lee leaned into him and roared, “Tell me how you knew there was a bomb planted in my sister’s apartment!”
I pushed away from the desk. “Lee,” I started cautiously. “He’s freaked. Give him a minute.”
Lee turned blazing brown eyes to me. “Your best bet right now, Ally, is to keep your mouth shut. I’ll get to you.”
He’d get to me?
I felt my eyes get big. “Excuse me?”
Lee turned fully to me and planted his hands on his hips. “One day, my sister gets up in the business of every dirty power broker in a hundred mile radius of Aspen. The next day her apartment explodes. You puttin’ these pieces together or do I gotta do it for you?”
Oh I did not think so!
I leaned into him and started to snap, “Don’t you—”
“It was Rosie.”
That was said by The Kevster, and both Lee and my eyes shot to him.
“Say again?” Lee demanded.
“Rosie’s back,” The Kevster told Lee, and then looked at me. “I mean, dudette, he didn’t plant the bomb. But he may have, um… dropped your name, to some, uh… people and, uh… well, that didn’t go too good.”
What the hell?
“Rosie’s back?” I asked.
“Yeah. He’s back and he might have, uh… brought some trouble with him.”
Lee dropped his head and looked at his boots.
I stared at The Kevster.
I saw movement and turned to see it was Ren who was the one moving.
Taking one look at his face, belatedly I felt the weight of the air and I knew he was not just angrier than me. He was livid.
I moved quickly, got in front of him, put a hand on his chest and caught his eyes. “Let me, Ren. Please,” I asked quietly.
“You got two minutes, babe. Then it’s me,” he replied.
I stared into his eyes.
Yep. Livid.
Hmm. Better get a move on.
I nodded, turned my back to him and looked down at The Kevster.
Kevin was looking up at us, so he saw it when Ren’s arm curled around my upper chest.
Seeing that, his eyes lighted and he cried, “Dudette! You two finally comin’ out?”
Jeez. Even The Kevster knew about me and Ren.
“Maybe we can discuss my love life over Cheetos and beer later. Right now, and fast, Kevin, you need to tell us about Rosie, what he’s up to and how this concerns me.”
“And how you knew there was a bomb in Ally’s apartment,” Hank butted in.
Kevin looked to Hank when he spoke and got visibly more uncomfortable (then again, Hank had had him arrested during the Premier Rock Chick Drama, which would be Indy’s). When Hank was done speaking, Kevin’s eyes came to me.
“Right. Well. You know he grows. Yeah?” he asked.
I nodded. “I know he grows.”
“And you know things got hot here when he was growin’ in Denver,” The Kevster went on.
I nodded again, lifting a hand and rolling it because I knew that too. Intimately. I was the one who found his ass, and I’d also been there when Hank had The Kevster arrested for trying to save Rosie’s unattended pot farm—a pot farm unattended because Rosie was in hiding.
“And I think I told you he’s the maestro of pot,” Kevin continued.
“Skip to the parts we don’t know,” Luke ordered, and Kevin fidgeted again in his seat as he looked to Luke then back to me.
“He kind of recently moved to New Mexico,” The Kevster said.
Finally, something I didn’t know.
“And?” I prompted.
“Well, he started growing,” Kevin stated and I closed my eyes.
Rosie.
All that trouble he had the last time, and, I might add, brought down on Indy, and he was growing again?
What a f**king idiot.
I opened my eyes again when The Kevster kept at it. “He established a fanbase, like, real quick. So some dudes wanted in on the action. As you know, that’s history repeating.”
Oh, I knew this, too.
“Rosie was having flashbacks, not the good kind, and he’d heard word you were establishing yourself as the Badass Queen of Denver,” Kevin stated.
At this, Ren’s arm got tight and I sighed.
The Kevster kept going. “And so, you know, for protection, he dropped your name.”
Ren made a noise that sounded like a growl and I was pretty certain I heard others, primarily from Lee and Hank. But fortunately The Kevster had finally found his mojo and was on a roll.
“The dudes down there tryin’ to horn in on his action don’t know you’re a badass with badass backup. They apparently were unimpressed.”
Great.
Kevin went on.
“So they stopped tryin’ to horn in and just did it. Rosie got pissed. Told them he was comin’ to get you to take care of business and he hightailed it up here. They followed him. He came to me because I knew where to find you. I didn’t get a good feeling about things, because, you know, he was totally tweaked. And Rosie’s usually mellow. When he’s tweaked, dudette, that means bad things.”
It so did.
Kevin carried on.
“I talked to him and got him to bare all. This included the fact that one of those New Mexican dudes blows stuff up in the New Mexico boonies all the time. So that Rosie didn’t, like, lead them to you, I came to tell you this was all going down, and saw some dude who I knew was not your style comin’ out of your apartment. I figured they found you without Rosie. He didn’t see me, so I followed him and he was just sittin’ in his car in your parking lot. But he had this little box in his hand.”
“Fuck me,” Ren murmured.
Kevin talked over Ren. “I figured he was waiting for you to get there so he could, you know…”
He trailed off. The room became stifling, so I urged him to go on, saying, “I know.”
Kevin nodded. “So he wouldn’t see me, I went in and kept an eye out. But you were takin’ a long time to come home, so I went to the stairwell I thought you’d use and had myself a doobie to smooth out the rough edges and pass the time.” His eyes went to Hank and he stated quickly, “It’s legal now, you know.”