And after that the pokey.

I needed to focus on something, which I decided, for once, would be my driving.

I would find Mag drove a lot faster for he left his position and he was on my tail the last five miles of the drive.

I swung into my covered spot.

He swung into a guest spot.

When I met him with the bag, he took it from me, and we both jogged up the steps to my second-floor pad.

I let us in.

He closed and locked the door behind us.

He then put the bag on my coffee table, and I stood beside him as he pulled out a wad of plastic sheeting that was stuffed in the top. Sheeting that would remain on this earth long after I was gone, and in its lifetime probably suffocate a number of dolphins.

But, for once, I had no mind to that.

What I heard bouncing around in that bag Mag reached in and pulled out.

A prescription pill bottle.

“Oxy,” he growled.

Oh no.

No, no, no, no, no.

He was peering into the bag as he declared, “There’s gotta be twenty, thirty bottles in there.”

He reached back in and pulled out a little baggie filled with milk-colored crystals.

“Ice,” Mag bit off. “Meth,” he said when I did nothing but stare at him.

“Oh no,” I whispered. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“There’s maybe a hundred of these in there,” he shared.

Oh God.

“And this,” he stated, reaching in and pulling out a brick of white covered in plastic wrap and crisscrossed with duct tape.

I’d seen those before.

In movies.

“Coke,” he grunted unhappily. “Two of these in there.”

I closed my eyes.

I opened them and quipped, “Man, you can get a lot of drugs in a Trader Joe’s bag.”

“This is not funny, Evan,” he clipped.

I pressed my lips together.

He was right.

So right.

Something else.

My brother was totally down with putting me in a dangerous situation.

I had never done drugs.

Considering my father, I’d never even smoked pot.

Except for my father’s (and brother’s and sometimes stepdad’s) pot, I’d never even seen any illegal drugs.

I had no earthly clue how much all that was worth and how badly a variety of unsavory characters would want to get their hands on it.

I just knew it was probably worth a lot.

And it was sitting on my coffee table.

I also had no clue why the dude in the long car, since he knew the combination to the lock and where the drugs were, couldn’t just grab them himself.

Nothing about this was right.

Nothing made sense.

I’d never had a good feeling about it.

Though now, that feeling was way worse.

But right then, the worst part was, I had a Trader Joe’s bag filled with illegal narcotics on my coffee table after having a short, but scary conversation with a shady man in the middle of the night at a storage facility.

And my brother put me right here.

Mick put me right here.

I didn’t know what I was feeling, or I couldn’t quite process all I was feeling.

“It’s still your call, but now, I’m gonna strongly advise you to let me call Hawk, who will in turn call Slim and Mitch, covering your ass while he does it, and this means you hand this over to the cops without any blowback on you,” Mag declared.

“Thank you, I really appreciate your help, but now I think we need to call it a night,” I told the Trader Joe’s bag.

I felt Mag focus his attention on me.

I did because his attention not only had a feel, but a temperature.

And that was set at sweltering.

“Evie—”

Woodenly, I turned, looked up at him and cut him off.

“This is a family affair.”

He stared at me like I’d grown a second head before his face softened.

His tone had softened too.

“Evie, baby, honey, I get where you’re coming from, but do not let him drag you under.”

He did not get where I was coming from.

His parents were still together, he spoke of them fondly, and he probably didn’t like his sister’s fiancé simply because he was an older brother and he’d never like his sister’s fiancé.

Now my older brother…

Well.

To wit, he had no fucking idea where I was coming from.

“I really…I mean…I know this was a hassle for you and you didn’t want to do it, so I thank you, a lot, for taking my back. But I’ll take it from here.”

“Babe—”

“I’m not a babe. I’m a grown woman,” I suddenly snapped.

And I knew why.

There he was, literally tall, dark, handsome, but also…nice.

Thoughtful.

Willing to go that extra mile for someone he barely knew.

And the extra mile he went for me included one-way radios and extra ammo.

I couldn’t even imagine the state I’d have been in that night if he hadn’t been there, looking out for me.

And there it was.

A grocery bag filled with illicit drugs that his kind and protective nature helped me procure because my brother gave someone my phone number and told that someone I’d take care of things.

I needed to get Mag gone.

Now.

For his own good.

“I see you’re freaked,” he began.

“Oh, you do?” I asked sarcastically.

He moved closer but didn’t touch me.

However, he did bend down to me from his spectacular height in much the way he’d probably have to bend to me in order to do something awesome, something he was probably very good at, something I’d probably enjoy immensely—kiss me.

But he wasn’t going to do that.

He was going to talk to me about the situation surrounding the drugs on my coffee table.

“Don’t let him make you this person,” he advised.

“You have no idea what kind of person I am.”

“You know I had a woman and I had her a long time,” he stated. “This is why I know about Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie and the fact those shoes on your feet are made of repurposed water bottles. That,” he jabbed a finger at the Trader Joe’s bag, “outside its carrier, has nothin’ to do with the kind of person you are.”

“What I know is, I might have told Lottie a little bit about me, but you were wrong about why she set us up. It isn’t about you sorting me out. It’s about me stopping you laying waste to the female population of Denver with your toxic charm,” I retorted.

He swung back, his face freezing stone cold.

“I know men like you like to think your shit doesn’t stink,” I kept at him. “And this is such a firm belief you have, it won’t matter what I say. But as you can see,” I flipped a hand toward the bag, “I have bigger things to concern myself with. I don’t have the time to rehabilitate a manwhore.”

“A manwhore?” he whispered.

“Do you deny you’ve fucked half of Denver?”

“Yeah, I deny that,” he bit out. “Lottie called me a manwhore?”

“And how would you refer to a woman who engaged abundantly in the activities you engage in abundantly, then scrape off the poor souls to make way for your next victim?”