by Hart, Lane
“Henry, hi. It’s Peyton. I’m not sure what happened, or why you left so suddenly, but you grabbed my briefcase by accident. Maybe we can have coffee in the morning to switch? Please call me back tonight at 404-555-5899. Thanks.”
Her voice is pleasant, with a hint of self-consciousness and an edge of panic that increases on the next message.
“Henry, it’s Peyton again. There’s a very important, government-issued laptop in my bag that I need back ASAP. The files on it are extremely confidential and about ongoing investigations. If you’ll call me back and let me know, I’ll come to your place tonight to pick it up and give you yours. Thanks. I’m waiting for your call.”
The third message loses all hints of pleasantness and is downright rude.
“Henry, if that’s even your real name, it’s Peyton again. Did I mention that I’m an ATF agent? Right, well, funny thing, I did a search with the state bar and your name is not listed as being a licensed attorney. You don’t come up when I do an internet search either, unless you’re the retired, sixty-year-old Henry Aycock in Alabama. Stop being Ay-dick. Call me back so I can get my briefcase tonight!”
And the fourth and final message is straight-up hostile.
“Listen, asshole. I will find you and when I do, you’re gonna be sorry!”
There’s a hint of desperation on the last one. Her voice trembles like she’s tearing up, even though she’s trying her best to sound threatening.
I’m still thinking about her words when I walk into the Savage Asylum.
A manicured hand with bright red fingertips reaches for my arm, stopping me in my tracks as I start toward the basement door.
“Hey, handsome. You look mighty good in a suit,” Alicia, one of the club regulars, says when I turn to face her.
“Thanks,” I reply.
“But I know you look even better out of it,” she replies with a wink. “Want me to come help you take it off?”
Even after the long drive, my dick is still looking for some relief, wanting me to finish what I started with Peyton. But I’m not ready to get rid of the agent’s taste on my lips, or her sweet, peachy scent that’s lingering on my clothes just yet.
“I think I’m just gonna crash tonight,” I tell Alicia, blowing her off and heading down the stairs to my apartment with Peyton’s briefcase.
Hell, maybe I’m coming down with something, turning down two women in one night. My skin underneath the suit and tie does feel like it’s overheating. Nah, that’s probably just the leftover effects from getting so worked up in the parking garage and having to walk away.
That’s when it hits me that the feverish sickness that’s come over me isn’t from the hot make-out session. Instead, I’m pretty sure that it’s…guilt. Guilt for kissing and touching a woman under false pretenses, knowing I was going to screw her over.
The culpability is a new sensation for me since my goal in life for the past eight years has been to never let myself feel anything again for a woman.
* * *
Peyton
“That son of a bitch!” I exclaim as I stomp around Quincey’s apartment bright and early the next morning, with still no response from the jerk. She’s in her green flannel pajamas, curly brown hair an enormous crow’s nest, with squinty eyes, since I knocked on the door and got her out of bed before sunrise.
“I still can’t believe he went down on you in what you claim was the best oral sex ever and then stole from you,” she says between yawns from her seat on the sofa. “It was probably an honest mistake and he’ll realize it when he opens up the briefcase.”
“See, that’s what I thought at first too,” I respond as I continue pacing back and forth in her living room. “But my bag was so much heavier than his. He had to have known!”
“Okay, but why would an attorney rob you for a laptop?” she asks with her brow creased in confusion.
“He’s not an attorney!” I shout, making her flinch. “He lied about that, about everything! And I’m gonna have his ass thrown in jail! Just as soon as I figure out who the hell he is…”
God, it’s so embarrassing to even think about how stupid I was to believe a man I met on a dating app was who he said he was. Then, to not only let him kiss me, but more. What the hell was I thinking?
I’m pretty damn smart most of the time. I have a master’s degree in criminal justice for chrissake. But being divorced and single for so long has apparently made me stupid when it comes to my personal life. Now a single moment of idiocy is going to royally screw me over in my career that I had to work my butt off to obtain.
“How are you going to arrest him if you don’t know who he really is?” Quincey voices my own concern.
“I don’t know yet. That’s what I’ve been working on for the last eight hours rather than sleeping. But I will figure it out!” I declare because I’m a damn good agent when my brain isn’t all foggy with need and longing for a sexy man I knew was too good to be true. “He’s a damn good thief, so he probably has a criminal record.”
“Great, so you just have to look through thousands of local mugshots,” Quincey responds. “At least his face should jump right out at you since he’s so freaking gorgeous.”
“A criminal stole my laptop that is full of confidential government files because I was blinded by his good looks. How messed up is that?” I ask her. “I’m supposed to catch criminals, not get duped by them!”
“Have you tried contacting him again on the app?” she questions.
“His profile is long gone,” I huff, since I tried that about half an hour after he left and didn’t return my calls. I’m pretty sure he took his profile down before he even walked into the bar.
“Well, in a few hours, you can call the local pawnshops to see if he sold it,” Quincey suggests.
“No. He wouldn’t have pawned it. This whole scheme wasn’t about money. He wore a nice, new suit and took the time to set up a fake dating profile and have business cards printed. He’s more than a petty thief who stole for money. He’s smart and patient.” When it finally hits me, I exclaim, “Whoever he is, he must be after what’s on the laptop!” The big picture starts to make more sense when I think about it from that angle. “Oh, god! What if he hacks into it and shares the files? Or reveals the names of confidential informants? I could lose my job if my superiors in Atlanta or…or the U.S. Attorney here finds out that I’m single-handedly responsible for blowing the lids off all of their investigations!”
“Then you need to figure out who he is, find him, and get the laptop back before anyone knows what happened!” she urges.
“I know!” I grumble. “First, I should probably go through the cases I’ve been working on and look at photos of all the suspects,” I say as I think aloud. “Ugh! But it’s kind of hard to do that when he has my damn laptop!”
“Calm down. You can use mine,” she tells me, getting to her feet and retrieving it off the computer desk in the corner. “Did you save your work to our server?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then you should be able to find everything,” she says as she hands the laptop over.
Two hours and a giant pot of coffee later, we’ve been through all the files, along with hundreds of mugshots, yet we still have nothing.
“So, maybe you’re wrong and he’s not a suspect on a potential case,” Quincey says with a sigh from her end of the sofa, where she’s curled up with a blanket and pillow. Both of us called in sick today, since finding this asshole is worth missing a day of work.
“No, I don’t think I’m wrong about that,” I huff as I stretch my arms over my head, working out the stiffness. “If I had to guess, he’s probably in one of the gangs, or associated with them, and they sent him to steal it because he doesn’t have a record.”
“That would be the smart criminal thing to do,” Quincey agrees. “Who has the smartest gang?”
“Probably the one we don’t have a shred of evidence on, even though they’ve been the number one suspects on shootouts,
murders, and arsons in just the last year,” I say, when it suddenly hits me. “Oh! And the same one that is located on the coast, which would fit with his stupid profile’s claim that he likes, ‘long walks on the beach.’”
“Great! Who is that?” she asks.
“The Savage fucking Kings!” I shout.
It looks like I’m going be taking a trip out to the North Carolina coast to see about a handsome thief in a motorcycle gang.
Chapter Three
Dalton
Heading to the chapel with my score, I walk in early with a few minutes to spare before our meeting starts. Most of the guys are already seated, each of them wearing the same identical Savage King MC leather cut as mine since the cuts are required for all meetings. The only time we take them off is when absolutely necessary, like going on a fake date with an ATF agent.
Last night, after I got back to my apartment, feeling a little off-balance and nauseous, I searched through Peyton’s bag before I finally took off the fancy suit and fell asleep. There’s a password of course on her computer, so I couldn’t get in. But some of Peyton’s notes were scribbled on a legal pad, along with her day planner and change purse that held twenty dollars and a few coins. If she had left any credit cards in there, I would’ve found a way to at least return those to her.
And for some reason, I spent more time than I should have reading every fucking thing I could find written in her neat, girly handwriting. She alternates going to yoga and spin class twice each week, which explains why she looks good enough to eat, literally. She recently got a haircut, and she’s planning to go home for Thanksgiving, wherever her “home” is located. My guess is Atlanta.
“Here you go,” I say to Reece when I place the leather briefcase down on the table and slide it to him. Then, remembering our stupid bet, I pull out a hundred-dollar bill from my wallet and toss it down. Sure, I could’ve snapped a photo of Peyton’s panties around her ankles, but I didn’t. I’d rather take the loss than have conned her out of anything else.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” Reece says, reaching for the cash to slip it in the inside zipper of his cut. He’s grinning like a kid on Christmas morning when he removes the laptop from the bag.
“You got it?” Chase asks as he watches Reece typing away on the keypad. “How the hell did you pull that off?”
“Carefully,” I reply with a smirk.
“Okay, I’m in,” Reece says a moment later when he somehow breaches Peyton’s password in a matter of seconds. “Give me a few minutes?” he asks Torin, our president sitting like usual at the head of the table.
“Sure, brother,” Torin answers, so Reece picks up the computer and heads down the hall to his apartment with it for some peace and quiet.
Turning his concerned gaze on me, Torin asks, “Do we have any blowback to worry about?”
“Nope.”
“You’re absolutely sure?” he asks me with one of his sandy-blond eyebrows raised suspiciously. “You just stole a laptop from the federal government. If you get caught, that shit is serious.”
“Oh, I know,” I say, my grin widening as I recall the incredibly erotic details of my heist. “Nothing to worry about. She won’t report it.”
“You better hope not,” Abe huffs from across the table. “You’re too pretty for federal prison. Wouldn’t last a damn day.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” I wink at him. “How long did your ugly mug last in prison? Years, right?” I ask, and the big man flips me off.
For about half an hour, we shoot the shit and discuss the MC’s legitimate businesses and illegal side gigs that supplement our income. Since math is one of the few things I’m good at besides fighting and fucking, my job as the club’s treasurer is to not only collect membership dues, but to sort out the best ways to funnel our dirty money into the legit enterprises before we send anything to our straight-as-an-arrow accountant. Keeping two sets of books isn’t easy but someone has to do it, and Torin has enough shit on his plate trying to run the businesses.
Finally, Reece comes back with the report on his findings from the government’s files.
“Good news,” he says to the room as he stands in the doorway with Peyton’s silver laptop still in his hands. “They don’t have shit for evidence. The CI we ran off wouldn’t tell them a damn thing other than our names, and it looks like they’re just trying to connect the dots between us, the Aces, and the Cartel. The articles from the arson, bar shooting, and Cruz’s death are all in there, but I didn’t see anything that would tie that shit to us directly.”
“Thank fuck,” Torin mutters and we all heave a sigh of relief. “Now maybe we can get back to business as usual around here.”
“Sounds good, boss,” Reece says, along with the rest of our relieved words of agreements.
Although, I already know that forgetting the hot as fuck agent I screwed over is gonna be harder than I expected, especially since I can’t seem to stop thinking about her, no matter how hard I try.
…
Peyton
“I’m here,” I say into my cell phone after I circle the block and then park a few hundred feet away from the Savage Asylum parking lot that’s known as the clubhouse for the Savage Kings MC.
“Are you sure this is a good idea? You should have let me come with you!” Quincey says into my ear. “These guys are dangerous, right?”
“I’m not stupid. I won’t go running in with guns blazing,” I tell her, with a roll of my eyes she can’t see. “I’m just going to wait here and try to catch Mr. Aycock leaving alone.” God, I should’ve known when he told me his last name was Aycock that he was a fraud. So childish.
“Keep me on the line until then,” she says.
“Okay,” I agree, since what I’m doing out here alone, staking out an MC gang, is not very smart. But desperate times call for desperate measures. I have to get that laptop back, preferably before they’re able to crack my password.
How the asshole was able to so easily distract me, I’m not sure. Even when I was going through a messy divorce, I didn’t make even a single minor error. Now this…
The worst part is that I was finally starting to regain enough confidence to start dating again, and after last night, I’m certain that it will be nearly impossible to believe anything that comes out of a man’s mouth anytime in the near future.
It’s one thing for a guy to use an old or misleading photo on his profile, but to pretend to be someone else entirely in order to steal from me? That level of betrayal blows my already apprehensive mind.
And makes me look like a complete fool.
Conducting background checks on potential suitors seemed a little extreme. Guess I was too naïve for my own good, and now that mistake is going to bite me in the ass. From here on out, I won’t even meet another guy until I’ve learned and verified their full name and date of birth.
“So, what’s the plan if you do see him?” Quincey asks in my ear.
“I’m just going to follow him and when I get him alone, I’ll politely pull him over and ask him to give my computer back to me to avoid criminal charges,” I say, like it’s that simple.
“And if he refuses?”
“Let’s hope that he doesn’t,” I mutter. Because if that happens, I’m fucked.
Before I left Raleigh on this insane mission, I put in a call to the CI who was trying to prospect for the MC before they figured out what he was up to a few weeks ago. The guy was evasive and shady, making it clear he wasn’t thrilled about answering any of my questions. But I was finally able to get names for the two blond members. Once I added in the smirk and the fact that he could also make a living modeling underwear, he was able to narrow it down to just one name—Dalton Brady.
Based on the CI’s intel during his few weeks prospecting, Mr. Brady is also an officer, the club’s treasurer, probably involved with laundering all of the dirty money through the club’s legit businesses, like the bar and strip club.
Surprisingly enough, Mr. Br
ady doesn’t have a criminal record. In fact, other than his driver’s license, there’s nothing else on file for him, not even a single speeding ticket.
How is it that this guy can be a member of a motorcycle club that’s caught up in so much violence it’s scary and be so squeaky clean?
In addition to his good looks, he must be pretty damn smart.
That doesn’t make me feel any better about how easily he was able to screw me over.
And don’t even get me started on the hit to my self-esteem.
The whole time we were talking and then…later, when we were doing more, I thought he was actually attracted to me.
How could I have been so stupid?
Guys like him don’t want women like me. They want beautiful, stick-thin, bikini models, not boring, plus-size federal agents with an overabundance of junk in the trunk.
So, not only am I pissed that he stole my laptop, but I’m also angry at the asshole for making me feel like an idiot.
Hopefully my threat of arresting him will be enough to get him to return my laptop. If he doesn’t, I could lose my job. And that is just not something I’m willing to give up because of one jackass biker.
Chapter Four
Dalton
I spot the familiar black SUV sitting about five hundred feet down the street from the clubhouse’s parking lot when I start to leave. So, it’s no big surprise when I pull out and then look down in my mirror to see the vehicle following me.
Fuck.
So, I guess Peyton’s already figured out who I am, and came to collect. The agent is really damn smart, I’ll give her that. Did she come by herself or does she have a partner with her? If she’s alone, then she’s either insane or incredibly brave to confront me on her own.
Since I don’t want any witnesses for this encounter, especially my MC brothers, who may get all worried and shit for no reason about an agent on my ass, I make a right turn off Highway 58 onto Canal Drive, a private wooded side road. Just as I expected, the blue light in her front dashboard comes on as soon as we’re out of sight from the main highway.
