by Megan Crane
“You get used to it,” Grady said. “Or so they’ve been telling me since the day I moved here.” His grin showed off appealing dents in his jaw. “Are we still on for Friday?”
And really, he was the most attractive sheriff she’d seen outside of television. The one in the town she’d grown up in, her uncle’s crony, had been as fat as he was ugly, like a red-faced bulldog. Grady was definitely not a bulldog. Or red-faced, for that matter.
“Absolutely,” Lara said, trying to sound as if she’d thought of nothing else but that date since the moment he’d asked her. Because she wanted so desperately to be that kind of woman. The kind who would be beside herself at a chance to go out with a man like him. It would prove she really was recovering from her past. That she wasn’t a biker bitch at heart, the way she sometimes feared she was. “I can’t wait.”
“I’m looking forward to it,” Grady said. Then his smile faded. “Be careful walking around out here at night, Lara. Lagrange is pretty safe, but there’s no need to attract the attention of some of the rougher elements we have around here.”
A bike roared then, sounding about half a block away. It split the soft evening apart, then growled off into the distance.
“You must mean the alligators,” Lara said when it was quiet again. “I hear sometimes they attack.”
Grady’s gaze was warm as it met hers, but frank.
“That’s the thing about prehistoric animals,” he said. “You never can tell what they’ll do. Best to be on your guard.”
Lara’s smile felt frozen on her face then. But she kept aiming it right at him, like that would make it friendly. Or erase the shame she was sure he could see all over her, like Chaser’s dirty fingerprints.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.
And when she murmured a goodbye and walked down the alley to her apartment, Grady sat there in his police car and watched her, because that was the sort of good, kind man he was. Clean-cut and handsome. Gorgeous, even, in his crisp uniform and the way he wore it so easily, stretched over a lean, rangy body. As if he was the very embodiment of law and order. Really and truly a goddamned Captain America.
There was no reason at all her teeth should be clenched together like that, or her neck should feel as stiff as her stomach was knotted.
She waved as she unlocked her door, then closed it carefully and slowly behind her, lest anyone think she was slamming it shut in any kind of indecent haste. Then she kicked off her shoes and bolted up the stairs, not resting until she was inside her apartment at last. She locked all three locks she’d insisted her landlord put on the door, three separate dead bolts to keep out bayou ghosts and hungry alligators and no-good bikers alike. And only then, finally, did she give in to gravity and her wobbly knees. She sank down on the floor right there with her back to the overly locked door.
Lara thought she would burst into tears, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She didn’t deserve tears.
Because any way she looked at it, she was way past that. And straight on into epically fucked.
Chapter 4
Chaser was in a seriously shitty mood.
He didn’t much like watching his prissy little wet dream of a teacher smile all over that Boy Scout sheriff some ten minutes after he’d been inside her. Chaser wanted to see where she lived and what her situation was because he really didn’t like either coincidences or surprises, and especially not when they came in a package he wanted his hands all over. What he did not want to see was Lara making eyes at the new prick in town, the recently elected Sheriff Archer, who’d slid into office on a “clean up St. Germain Parish” kick.
Chaser didn’t like that he gave a shit either way, but he really didn’t like watching her smile and laugh and talk to the fucker in his police car without any of the aggression or condescension or snotty teacher armor she’d thrown Chaser’s way earlier. It made his gut knot up a little too tight for his peace of mind.
Or anyone’s health.
The fact that she’d been aiming all that sweetness and light that Chaser would have said she didn’t have in her at an outspoken enemy of the Devil’s Keepers didn’t help. He had to get out of there before he forgot that doing something to satisfy the urge toward violence that itched in him was straight-up stupid, because everybody knew the sheriff was looking for reasons to mess with the club.
Chaser was not about to give the douchebag a reason.
But he wasn’t happy about any of it.
He headed out to the clubhouse the way he did at the end of any club-related trip, to check in with Digger and let his president know what had gone down. A modified version, anyway, because there were always a few things Chaser kept to himself, especially when brothers in other charters shot off their mouths to him over a few drinks. It was always better to filter that crap before passing it on, and Chaser was particularly good at inter-charter diplomacy or he never would have survived his many years of wandering around between DKMC charters all over the country and reporting back to Luther. No one liked a snitch, after all. But a brother who was all about the club and brought concerns back to those who needed to hear them without pointing any fingers or stirring up any shit? There was a reason Luther didn’t want to replace him. Chaser was damn good at his job. All of his jobs.
He thought he was a decent father, too, for that matter. Certainly better than his own. And he didn’t like that some random woman with too many question marks over her had made him wonder about that.
But when he got to the clubhouse—way out on that lonely bayou road that gleamed beneath the summer moon, long and flat and thick with the noisy green swamp on both sides and the sprawling old club warehouse waiting at the end like the perfect homecoming after days on the road—Digger still wasn’t there. He wasn’t there and he hadn’t been there in the time Chaser had been away.
Which was not good.
“Shit is tense, brother,” T’Roscoe told him, straight-up. “Every day Digger stays away, we get a little deeper into a hole and I’m not sure there’s any way out.”
Roscoe was the VP of the Devil’s Keepers Lagrange charter. He didn’t use that Cajun T that meant “little” much these days, because he wasn’t little and no one really thought it was funny any longer the way they had before his daddy, the much shorter Big Roscoe, got too riddled with arthritis to ride with the club any longer. And Chaser knew Roscoe liked to keep up that easygoing act of his. He liked to wander around with his shaggy brown hair that made him look less threatening, his blue eyes that made the ladies think he was sweet, and that casual grin that took grown-ass thugs off their guard. The truth was the brother was tough and mean as hell. Brutal beneath all that misdirection. And these days Roscoe was using all his considerable talents to gather some strength behind him in case he needed to challenge Digger’s position in the club—no matter that Roscoe might claim that was a last resort and something he didn’t want to do. Necessarily. He was still making sure that if he had to do it, he had enough critical support in the club to get it done.
And the longer Digger stayed gone, the more necessarily started to look inevitable. Because no club did well with a hole in the power structure. That was just the way of things. Leave the president’s slot empty for too long with no explanation and it started to look like weakness. Weakness invited shows of strength, and that shit led straight to blood. Always.
Chaser hated this. He hated that there was a schism in his club, tearing everything apart beneath the surface no matter how everyone tried to pretend otherwise. He hated like hell that he’d agreed that it was necessary to add to the lies. That he still agreed.
Digger needed to explain himself, and until he did—if he could—there was no point talking about what had really happened to Whale. Chaser knew that. But the longer this situation drew out, the less he liked it.
“The Black Dogs tried to start some shit on a run last week,” Greeley, the club’s sergeant at arms, told Chaser.
The four of them, who made up the center of this
grudging revolution in the Lagrange charter, were sitting in one of the more isolated seating areas in the vast main room of the clubhouse, keeping their voices pitched low beneath the fucked-up foreign porn Tick liked to keep blaring on one of the flat screens and the sounds of other brothers getting their dicks wet in a variety of ways with a bunch of drunk chicks and some groupies. It was the same old Wednesday night in the bayou.
Home sweet home, Chaser thought, his eyes on a groupie giving one of the brothers head while another rammed into her from behind.
Greeley shook his head, a hand on his black beard and his dark eyes hard. “It seems a little convenient they’d know it was a good time to hit us, with things up in the air down here and less oversight. They normally know better than to come at us in the middle of serious cartel shit. They know we ride strapped.”
“It all seems convenient,” Uptown said, kicked back with a beer and a grin on his face, like they were talking about light and easy crap. Pussy and gator hunting and all the other things that made life worth living here in the Louisiana bayou. Uptown was good at wearing masks, too, which encouraged people to imagine his pretty face made him a good guy instead of the stone-cold killer he really was. Chaser, meanwhile, had never been anything but grim, inside and out. People knew exactly what he was when they saw him.
Truth in fucking advertising, he thought now, the way he always did.
His dirty little teacher hadn’t seemed to mind. She’d known who and what he was at a glance, and she’d come three times despite it. Or, hell, maybe because of it.
Chaser was pretty freaking appalled that he was talking serious club business and thinking about pussy. Pussy he’d already tapped, for that matter. What the hell was wrong with him? He needed to sleep this off and get his head right.
“I don’t like coincidences,” he said, his dark tone as much for the bullshit going on inside him as with his club. “Especially with Digger in the wind, doing god knows what with who knows who.”
“Exactly,” Roscoe muttered. “We have no idea what he’s cooking up out there or how it’s going to play out.”
Uptown grunted his agreement. “And I still want to know why Benny Chambless thinks Digger was making time with Fat Irish. I want to know how that shit is even possible.”
They all had to bite back more robust responses to that. Benny Chambless was Lagrange’s former, disgraced mayor—and the father of Uptown’s woman. Benny had been under the mistaken impression that his long, productive relationship with the club meant he could take money from the Devils and double-cross them with no consequences. He’d been wrong about that, but while he’d been flailing around, coming to grips with his fate, he’d given the brothers some interesting facts to chew over.
Like the apparent friendship between Digger and Fat Irish, the one-eyed president of the Black Dogs up in Little Rock. Something that shouldn’t be possible, given the clubs had been in a blood feud for years. And especially not since Sugar, a DKMC brother currently finishing up a brutal stretch of time in Angola, was the one who’d taken the fat bastard’s eye in the first place.
Not to mention the shit that Whale had said before he’d taken a richly deserved bullet. That the club wasn’t theirs anymore, whether they knew it or not.
There were too many questions left up in the air. And with Digger still AWOL, no way to ask them, much less get them answered.
“North Dakota is getting antsy,” Chaser told them, not bothering to grin or try to look relaxed like Uptown and Roscoe. That would have pretty much the opposite effect on any brothers who might be clocking them. Chaser grinning like a fool would probably terrify the entire club. “You can never tell what Luther knows or what he wants to figure out if you know, but I don’t think Digger’s been checking in with him, which is bad. If Digger doesn’t get back on the radar soon, Luther might get it in his head to come on down to Louisiana and check shit out for himself. He’s not used to charter presidents and old friends avoiding his calls. He doesn’t like it.”
They didn’t have to discuss all the reasons that having Luther down in Lagrange would be a bad idea. The club was the club, sure, and they all had a bond and national pride in the organization. But every charter was different. And they all had to bend a knee and kiss some ass when their national president—who was also one of the founders of the club and the kind of man who liked that shit remembered and respected—showed up. Add to that the fact Luther was a conniving son of a bitch who liked to shoot first and worry about it pretty much never, and he was about the worst person alive to come wading into all the tensions bubbling around in the Louisiana swamp.
“Great,” Greeley muttered. “More crap to look forward to.”
Chaser took off not long after that, because while he usually blew off steam in the clubhouse after irritating conversations, the better to clear his mind, the bullshit he had to deal with tonight still wasn’t done. And sometimes he thought that dealing with all the drama a biker club generated was easier than handling one sixteen-year-old girl.
He’d bought a conventional little house in one of Lagrange’s suburban neighborhoods when he’d finally found Kaylee and brought her back home from Kansas. Because he couldn’t raise a kid—especially not a girl—in the raucous DKMC clubhouse where he’d been living. And also because he’d grown up in a normal-looking house, back in Georgia. It might have been a hellhole inside thanks to his father’s temper, but Chaser had taken a little comfort in the fact that it looked like everybody else’s presumably happier home from the outside. “Normal” had meant something to him when he was a kid, and he hadn’t cared if it was a lie.
Chaser wanted Kaylee to have as much normal as possible after what her junkie mother had put her through. She wasn’t going to get a civilian father, but he figured he could balance that out a bit. So he had a nice little house on a tidy little street that he knew his DKMC brothers found a little horrifying, and he got the added pleasure of terrifying all his neighbors when he felt like it. And he’d imported his sister Liz to add that female touch, or what passed for it coming from her, because he was often busy with club shit.
At least this time there was no questionable car pulled up outside his house when he got there. He’d made it pretty clear that he wasn’t about to tolerate his sister’s crappy taste in boyfriends cluttering up his goddamned house, but he knew Liz. She was a Frey, after all. If there was a way to fuck up her life, she’d dive into it, headfirst.
He let himself in the side door, keeping quiet as he went because he didn’t trust anybody. Certainly not his sister. Not even his own kid, because Kaylee was a teenager and god knew, teenagers did some pretty crazy shit and only sometimes on purpose. Chaser never, ever let down his guard. Not even in his own house.
The television was blaring from the den like always, but that could mean a variety of things. That Liz was passed out in front of it, the way she was sometimes when she over-served herself from his liquor cabinet. That Liz and a friend were getting busy, which he’d also forbidden, but that hadn’t stopped her in the past and, yeah, he had that shit burned into his head forever. It could even be Kaylee in there, though he could hear that it was some reality-show crap and he knew his daughter hated those with the great passion of a sixteen-year-old’s disdain. And Chaser never discounted the possibility that all that noise—any noise—could be a cover for an ambush on one of the DKMC’s most notorious enforcers.
Worrying about every possibility, no matter how slim, was why he was still alive.
He moved through the kitchen, noting it was in its usual indifferently cared-for state, with dishes piled high in the sink and a whole lot of empty beer cans to one side. Typical. He was headed toward the den to check out the situation when his sister appeared in the kitchen doorway instead, a lit cigarette in one hand and her mouth pinched tight. As security systems went, he supposed she’d do. Liz was tall and strong like everyone in their family, with wide shoulders and matching hips she liked to feature in skintight crap like the jeans
she’d sprayed on now and a tank top that showed off most of her bra. And yet despite the skankwear she looked so much like their eternally disappointed mother that it always tripped Chaser out a little, even though Liz slapped on too much eye makeup and scraped all her long, dark hair back into a high ponytail instead of cutting it short and ugly and relentlessly suburban like Mom had.
“I didn’t hear your bike,” his sister said, making it sound like an accusation. Her specialty.
Chaser eyed her. “I didn’t want you to hear it.”
Liz clearly knew what he meant by that and glared at him as she took a drag, then let it out in a big-ass cloud, because apparently they were both pretending he hadn’t told her to stop smoking in his house. “I’m not seeing Joey anymore anyway, not that you care.”
“You’re right. I don’t. Joey was a fucking loser.”
“And it’s great to see you after two weeks, by the way. Welcome home, asshole.”
“Do you know where I went when I got back into town tonight?” Chaser asked her, not working too hard to keep his voice calm. He went over to the fridge and snagged himself a beer—the one thing he knew his sister would keep stocked while spending the money he left her when he went on trips. He twisted off the top and tossed it in the piled-high sink. He took a swig of the light shit Liz liked, then leaned back against the counter. His sister was still standing in the doorway, watching him warily.
Good, he thought. She should be wary.
“The clubhouse?” she ventured.
He shook his head. “The high school. Why the fuck is Kaylee going to school drunk?”
Liz jerked as if she’d been slapped. “How the hell would I know?”
“Because I pay you to know. Because you live in this town, on my dime, in your own fucking place when I’m not out doing shit, for exactly one purpose.”
“I have my own life, Ryan,” she snapped at him, and he knew the use of his civilian name was no accident. Not from his sister when she was rushing to her own defense. “I can’t believe you’re still this conceited. The world doesn’t actually revolve around you.”
