Without Restraint by Angela Knight

Author:Angela Knight [Knight, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berkley
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Alex and Frank drove to her house and picked up the patrol car without incident, though her shoulder blades were itching as hard as the sergeant’s by the time they headed back.

No sooner had she braked at a stoplight than Paul McCartney began crooning “Let it Be” from her pants pocket. She sighed and dug the iPhone out under Frank’s amused gaze. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, baby. How are you this fine morning?”

I just got shot at by a cop killer. And you? Nope, not the kind of thing to say to a mother who’d never liked her choice of career to begin with. “Doing great, Mom. How are you?”

“Well, your father decided he wanted to have y’all over for a hamburger cookout at five. Can you make it?”

Alex frowned and accelerated as the light turned green. She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. It was, after all, Wednesday. “Aren’t you going to prayer meeting tonight?”

Her mother paused a beat too long. “Not tonight, dear. We haven’t seen you kids in what it seems like forever . . .”

Oh, she definitely didn’t like this. “We were all at the last home game a couple of weeks ago.”

“Yes, dear, but your dad has something he wants to say to you.”

“‘You’ as in all of us, or ‘you’ as in me?”

Another long, worrying pause. “You as in you.” As if sensing Alex’s reaction, she added hastily, “Your brothers are coming, too. It’ll be just the six of us, like it was before all my chicks grew up and left the nest.”

Shit. “Oh.”

“So can you make it? I’m fixin’ your favorite peach pie.”

Oh, hell, Mom’s Southern accent was thickening. Whenever the magnolia quotient increased in Mary Rogers’s voice, she was setting somebody up. Thing was, ducking the invitation would just piss her off and make the inevitable explosion worse. “Yeah, I’ll be there.”

“Great! I’ll see you then.” She hung up.

“Fuck.” Alex tossed the iPhone into the center console in disgust. “I am in so much trouble.”

“What’s the problem?” Frank asked.

“Mom asked me over to a cookout tonight.”

He grinned. “Is she that bad a cook?”

“No, she’s a great cook. The trouble is, it’s Wednesday. Mom always goes to prayer meeting on Wednesdays unless there’s a dire emergency.”

“Could she have heard about the sniper taking a shot at us?”

Alex frowned. “I don’t think so. She was way too calm, and anyway, she’d have asked about something like that first thing. No, I think this is an intervention, because my brothers aren’t bringing their wives. We haven’t had one of those since Harry was dating that stripper.”

“Should I be worried?”

“Not unless you’ve been moonlighting as a stripper. No, I’ve got a feeling this is about Ted and that damned YouTube video of him whipping Cal.”

“Which is an issue why?”

“Because I brought Ted to dinner at the house damn near every time I went myself. And I never warned them about his sexuality.”

“And they think it was their business why?”

“My brother Andy’s got a four-year-old son.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.