And as I’d previously noted, Dorian was an action man.

“Totally,” I agreed.

“I’m glad I’m not the last one standing, that would suck,” she went on.

It seriously would.

“Totally,” I repeated.

I mean, it was bad enough seeing how happy Lottie, Evie and Ryn were when my guy was within reach and I wasn’t reaching.

It’d be so much worse if it wasn’t just being scared to take the risk but feeling like I couldn’t reach.

“Maybe we should tone down the domestic bliss,” I suggested.

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

I looked to her. “Why don’t you know?”

She turned fully to me. “I was in the offices when Gwen brought all her and Hawk’s kids in. And all three of them, like a shot, the two boys and his little girl, went right to Aug.”

“Oh man,” I said.

“Yeah, he loves kids. Like, a lot. And they love him back.”

And thus, one reason Lottie picked him for Pepper.

“My mom said something to me, when shit got real with my brother,” Ryn continued. “About how happy she was that I finally had someone in my corner. Pepper’s got it going on, but she also takes a lot of shit from a lot of directions. It’d be good to see her have someone in her corner. And not just us.”

Pepper did take a lot of shit.

So it so would.

And this got me to thinking, maybe I was wrong.

Mag stepped in, and the stuff with Evie’s family had been extreme. They put her in some serious shit. Mag got shot in the middle of it.

And now they were getting married.

Ryn’s sitch hadn’t been that dramatic, but she definitely had some baggage, including, I’d recently discovered, a past partner breaking trust with her in a fundamental and fundamentally terrifying way, and she and Boone were completely solid.

Shit had been real from the beginning with Axl and me, and except for us not very successfully navigating the situation with his sadly departed friend, that had been brief, and other than that, between him and me, it was all smooth sailing.

Lottie hadn’t just wanted to see her girls and her guys happy.

She’d been very deliberate about all this.

And she was not unaware of Pepper’s past, and the important aspect of Juno being in that mix.

I’d been so deep in all the things I was dealing with, it hadn’t occurred to me to look more closely at what Pepper’s day-to-day life would be like.

And my friend really needed someone in her corner.

And not just her girls.

So, to communicate I agreed, I repeated myself again.

This time with feeling.

“Totally.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

She Was Mine Before

Hattie

Having left the club, on the way to my studio, I called Axl.