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“You’re blue, son. Practically glowing it, like some Mayan sacrifice, waiting to get your heart ripped out. What has you down so low?”
    Caleb leaned against the long glass counter and gave Nick a snide grin. “Your Mayan analogy is amazingly astute, Bubba. He broke up with his girl.”
    Bubba tsked. “Ah now, that’s a dang shame. I really liked Kody. She was cold-blooded decent.”
    Out of the corner of his eye, Nick saw Mark approaching him from the back room. With shaggy brown hair, he was about two inches shorter than Bubba, and was only slightly less muscled. Thinking Bubba’s partner-in-crime was going to console him, he didn’t react until Mark zapped him in the butt with a cattle prod.
    “Hey!” Nick yelped as pain shot through him. “What are you doing?”
    Mark, who had not cleaned up his usual rumpled clothing couture because Bubba’s mama was in town, held the cattle prod like he might use it again. “Shocking some sense into you. Boy, are you out of your mind? You don’t let a girl like Kody go without a fight … at least not until she sets fire to everything you own. Then you kick her out. But not before then.” He moved to shock Nick again.
    Nick jumped behind Caleb for protection. “Would you stop that?”
    “No. I can’t beat sense into you without going to jail for it.” Mark closed the distance between them. “Ain’t no laws against shocking a minor.”
    Nick continued to dance around Caleb, who was being derelict in his duty to keep the loon off him. “Isn’t that tortfeasory or something? I’m sure there’s a law against it.”
    Bubba let out a heavy sigh. “Unfortunately, Mark, he’s right. It goes under the offensive touching laws.”
    “Offensive touching laws?” Mark drew up short to narrow his eyes at Bubba. “How you know that?”
    “Don’t want to go there.… Not one of my finer moments. Suffice it to say, I don’t want to pay any more lawyer fees for a while. I’m about tapped out on them.”
    “Dear Lord, do I even want to know what y’all are getting into now?” Bubba’s mama asked as she came through the black curtains that separated the back area from the front. Arms akimbo, she passed a menacing glare to Mark. “Do I need to call your daddy for more bail money, son?”
    Mark straightened up instantly before the much smaller lady. Dressed in a no-nonsense black Armani business suit and low heels, she seemed substantially taller than her tiny five-foot-one stature … Mostly because you knew she wouldn’t hesitate to take a stick to your backside if you needed it, no matter how big you thought you were in comparison to her.
    A world-famed pediatric surgeon, Bobbi Jean Burdette took nothing from anyone, and that included lip from her only son and the best friend he’d grown up with.
    And the instant Nick saw her, he grinned a warm welcome. In his head, he heard her favorite saying about Bubba and her hair, which she currently had put up in a sophisticated bun— God gave me black, then Michael turned it gray, and L’Oreal made me a redhead .
    But the best part about Bubba’s mama? She’d twice saved his life.
    “Hi, Dr. Burdette,” Nick said in greeting, then he gestured at Mark. “For the record, he was shocking me for no reason whatsoever.”
    Storms brewed in her hazel eyes as she turned her gaze back to Mark. “Markus Jethro Fingerman, you put that thing down. Right now! Good Lord, I barely got the boy patched up and now you threatening to undo all my hard work on him. Don’t do something else to harm him or I’m going to turn his mama loose on you.”
    Mark immediately tossed the cattle prod so that it landed by Caleb’s feet. He held his hands up as real fear entered his eyes. “Anything but Cherise. I swear I’d rather be naked in the swamp, surrounded by Madaug’s super zombies and hungry gators, than be covered in Kevlar, fully armed with a live grenade in my teeth and flamethrower in my hands and face Cherise Gautier when