****
Kendra’s drive home from the party went by in a blur. Sam kept his word and sent one of the few crew members who wasn’t dead drunk to follow behind her and make sure she got home. He waited until she unlocked the front door and waved back at him before he took off.
Kendra felt like crying when she finally made it inside her own house where nobody could see her. But she wasn’t the crying type, so she didn’t. Crying never solved a damn thing and it wouldn’t make her feel any less hurt at the moment, either.
She couldn’t imagine ever being more shocked or surprised. Watching Jesse be arrested for the murder of the woman who had tried to help them was bad enough, but when Flint had stepped up and announced he was Jesse’s attorney, she felt like she’d been hit with a brick.
Flint was a lawyer? How was that even possible? He would’ve had to spend several years in college and then law school. She thought he’d been gone from Bardsville for a couple of years, not a decade. Even crazier was the thought that the Steel Infidels had allowed a lawyer to be a member of the MC. Wouldn’t there be tons of conflict of interests there to consider? The ethical boundaries Flint was crossing must be incredible.
It hurt her to think that in the time they’d spent together, Flint had never felt it important enough to mention he was a practicing attorney. In fact, he’d clearly led her to believe he was a tattoo artist who worked with Sam. He’d lied to her and now she felt betrayed and sick inside.
She never should have trusted him so quickly. After all, what did she really know about Flint Mason except what he’d told her? Which if today’s incident was any indication was all a pack of lies.
She rubbed her temples. Crap! Wouldn’t you know it? A damn migraine was coming on. Like she didn’t have enough problems at the moment. She reached for her prescription migraine medication and took one with a sip of water. The headaches always hit when she least needed them and when she most needed to think clearly.
All of their conversations kept circling around and around in her head. Had he ever said outright he was a tattoo artist, or had she jumped to that conclusion? The more she thought about it, the more she realized he had never actually come right out and said what he did for a living or mentioned how he made money. All he had said was that he could do a mean tattoo and then offered to do a hummingbird tattoo for her.
She hadn’t asked too many personal questions because she figured he was a private person and couldn’t talk about the MC’s business anyway. The few times she had started to ask about the tattoo parlor, he had changed the subject and asked about one of the coyote pups that had just come into the clinic or a Blue Jay with a broken wing. If she had been paying closer attention, she would have realized he was uncomfortable talking about his job. Probably because he knew he was covering up a lie. But why? It didn’t make any sense.
In her heart, Kendra knew there must have been a good reason for him not to tell her he was a lawyer. It certainly wasn’t anything to be ashamed of and in fact, he should’ve been proud of his accomplishments. Unless he’d been disbarred, which he obviously wasn’t if he was able to represent Jesse.
Kendra spotted her laptop sitting on the table. She’d been so busy lately that it hadn’t been turned on in weeks. Any quick emails to her clients were usually done on her cell phone while rushing between animal checkups. She wasn’t much of a computer person and felt like it was a useless time drain most of the time.
Except for the very first night at the safe house, she hadn’t sincerely considered Googling Flint’s name to see what she could find. And then once they were solidly together as a couple, she had felt too guilty to be spying on him like that. Almost as if it would be a huge invasion of his privacy to dig into his online background. After all, she wouldn’t want him poking around in hers. Though her life was so boring there wouldn’t be anything to find, except maybe a few old photos of her with braces and glasses she’d rather nobody see.
Taking a deep breath, she walked over and flipped open the laptop. As the computer booted up, she realized the main reason she hadn’t done this before was because she was afraid of what she might find. Oh sure, she could pretend like she was protecting his privacy and all that bullshit, when the honest truth was she didn’t want to find out anything that would make her care for him less.
When the screen finally popped up, she entered his name.
Flint Mason.
Now or never. She hit the search button and held her breath.
An hour later, she sat back and rubbed the back of her neck where the migraine had spread. She’d found out plenty about Flint Mason and had all she needed to know. Instead of the arrest records or other bad things she halfway expected to find, she instead found pages and pages of court cases where he’d represented innocent people as a public defender.
From clearing a grandmother about to be evicted from the only home she’d ever known because her grandson was selling crack in the parking lot of the apartment building to defending a young mother accused of child endangerment because she’d left her kids alone while she ran to the grocery store. The Internet was full of his cases where he’d defended poor innocent people who couldn’t afford a big time lawyer on their own.
From the timeline she’d mentally put together, it appeared Flint had spent the last several years working his way up in a public defender’s office in Atlanta. She knew enough to know the hours were probably long and the pay pretty low for the qualifications he had and the time he put in. She wondered what made him go into the field in the first place. And more importantly, what made him leave a job that he was obviously good at to come back home and hang out with a motorcycle club?
There were so many unanswered questions about Flint. So much she wanted and needed to know.
She felt like such a bitch. Flint had asked her to trust him and she’d turned away from him in a huff. He deserved better than to be treated in such a way. She wiped away the tears she couldn’t hold back any longer and grabbed her purse. It wasn’t too late to set things right.