Layne suspected that Vera just pulled out the big guns. Pork chops, au gratin potatoes and Milky Way cake were his favorite and Rocky knew it because she was the one who’d made him his first Milky Way cake on the first birthday he’d celebrated with her, and Vera had been there. Milky Way cake wasn’t Vera’s, it was Rocky’s. Except the fact that Vera had a variety of occasions in the last eighteen years to make it for him and Rocky had not. Layne wasn’t hip on chick war tactics, but he suspected his mother just escalated hostilities.
Cookies and Cakes
“What was that about?” I repeated.
He turned square to me but didn’t touch me.
“You’ve been branded.”
I blinked.
That didn’t sound good.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“Told Willie, called Lee and Darius. Word goes out tonight that you belong to me. Anyone fucks with you, they fuck with me, the DPD, all the boys at Nightingale Investigations and Darius Tucker. I’m callin’ in all my markers. I’m not takin’ any more chances with this shit. Now you got an army of protection, whether you want it or not.”
I kept staring at him as that strange sensation took hold of my belly in a vice-like grip.
“But…” I whispered. “Why?”
It was then he walked to me, put his hands to my neck and gently pulled me toward him until our bodies were touching. He looked down at me and his eyes changed. The warm, tender look was there but so was something else. Something I couldn’t read.
“Because you make a fucking great chocolate sheet cake.”