Shakedown

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  Granted, the guy had been a piece of shit.

  He’d raped three women. He’d beat up his own mother. And he’d all but maimed a two-year-old with his careless actions.

  But that wasn’t my reasoning for killing the piece of shit.

  Hell, I hadn’t even known about all of that other stuff.

  I’d known that the motherfucker had tried to kill me because of some suspected slight, and I’d had no other choice but to shoot him and suffer the consequences. That was it. Me or him.

  I’d chosen me.

  And then I’d spent the next eighteen months behind bars until the parole board had learned of all the other shit that the man had done in his life. Then they’d been all, ‘Oh, no. We need heroes like you on the outside.’ Which was a bunch of shit.

  I was no hero.

  “Are you even listening to me?” Six snapped.

  “You know he’s not listening to you.” Catori, one of my brothers’ wives, chuckled.

  “Where is your cut?” another woman asked. “You can’t take a picture like that. You have to have your cut on.”

  I looked over to find Swayze, Trick’s wife, staring at me with her phone in her hand.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because leather and bikers go hand in hand,” she said. “If you don’t have your cut on, nobody will know that you’re in a club. And being in a club automatically ratchets up the hotness factor.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It got dirty. Had to have it dry-cleaned.”

  In all honesty, it got blood on it, and I’d had to douse it down with the water hose before taking it to the dry cleaners to see if they could salvage it.

  If not, I might or might not need to find a new one.

  I was hoping that it came out, though.

  Or, at least, when I wore it, it didn’t look like I’d tie-dyed it in blood.

  “Well that’s just stupid,” Swayze grumbled as she put her phone down.

  “I have one from last week,” Blaise called out, pumping her fist into the air as if she’d hit the jackpot. “And he looks good in it. He’s not even scowling!”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Oh, that one’s perfect. Send it to me.” Six was still typing away at the computer. “What do you think of this biography for a profile? Hobby pig farmer by day, Souls Chapel Revenant MC by night. Thirty-two-year-old man looking for a woman that isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Anybody that can’t manage that need not reply.”

  “I think we should add this…” Wyett suggested as she rattled off her idea of edits.

  I sighed and sipped my beer, wondering idly how long it would take to get dinner figured out.

  I was ready to go home.

  Today had been long, and my fucking knuckles were aching.

  Even worse, I think my back was acting up again.

  I’d have to make another appointment at the chiropractor. The one that was scared of me.

  Yay.

  “Ohhh.” One of the ladies laughed, catching my attention.

  “Oh, here’s one for you.” Six dissolved into laughter, turning the computer screen my way.

  Wanted: Man to feed me Doritos so my fingers don’t get orange. No weirdos.

  My ideal match: No animals, no kids, no annoying voices, doesn’t like beaches, can deal with me not talking, and doesn’t mind when I talk down to you or that I’m smarter than you. Also, it’d be ideal if you don’t like to cuddle, because my body temperature runs hot, and I don’t generally like people touching me skin to skin. Is blunt and doesn’t try to use sarcasm. Won’t try to get me to go out to places where there is a large group setting.

  Again, no weirdos.

  “This chick sounds like she’s perfect for you.” Six clicked on the photo, but she didn’t need to.

  I’d seen the photo.

  The woman was gorgeous.

  Though I couldn’t see her height, I could make out other things.

  She was curled up in a chair that looked like a cocoon of sorts. One with really tall sides, big, poofy cushions, and it was all hanging from a contraption from the ceiling.

  She had her knees crisscrossed in front of her, and she was wearing a baggy white t-shirt, black horn-rimmed glasses, and had a book partially in front of her face.

  That book happened to be one of my favorites.

  Captain’s Fury by Jim Butcher.

  In all honesty, that was the very first thing to catch my eye.

  Her hair, which was so fuckin’ curly that I knew if I tried to run my fingers through it, they’d get caught at least a dozen times.

  “She’s perfect,” Crockett declared. “Message her. But don’t make it weird. Make it… sweet.”

  “Bruno’s not sweet,” one of the boys, likely Sin, called out. “Don’t make him come off as sweet. The chick will definitely know that it wasn’t him that wrote it.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Messaged her. Let’s see what she says.” Six squealed, clapping her hands.

  I sighed.

  “Oh, she already messaged back. Oh my God. She said, ‘Hell no.’”

  My brows lifted at that.

  “Oh, she’s perfect. I just know it.” Six snickered.

  “Oh my God. I knew she looked familiar! That’s Belle Pena! One of my good friends! Sorry, Bruno. But there’s no way in hell that she’s going to agree to date you. She has a type,” Beckham said as she settled her son, Hiro, more firmly on her shoulder.

  She looked like she was lagging, though.

  I bent forward and caught the kid before Beckham, who really was interested in this whole mess, dropped her own kid.

  Beckham didn’t even notice that she was giving him away to me before she was insinuating herself into the bullshit.

  I tipped back the beer and settled the kid more solidly on my shoulder.

  He snuggled in deep, buried his face in my neck, and promptly sneezed all down my neck.

  Gross.

  CHAPTER 3

  Vaginas are expected to be bald, super soft, no stubble and taste like a mango. Yet there are so many hairy, discolored, sweaty and salty ball sacks demanding to be in a mouth. How is that fair?

  -Belle on double standards

  BELLE

  Eight weeks later

  “Somebody should tell him,” I heard one of the men at the table next to mine say.

  “I’m not telling him shit,” another replied. “Do you know how pissed he’d be if he heard that his new girlfriend was cheating on him? There’s a reason that they have the term ‘don’t shoot the messenger.’”

  I slowly turned my head so that I could see the table next to me.

  The table was filled with bikers.

  Bikers that declared themselves part of the Souls Chapel Revenants MC.

  There were five of them in total.

  One, whose nametag I could read, was named ‘Sin.’ He was by far the prettiest that they had.

  Then there was the blond with the glasses. I could just make out the very edges of his nametag. Something that ended with an ‘nt.’

  The only word that my analytical brain could come up with at that point in time was ‘Cunt.’

  But I was sure that he didn’t go by that.

  At least, I hoped he didn’t.

  And, before I could stop myself, I started in on the spiel that my brain couldn’t help but output.

  “During war, kings and warlords needed a way to communicate,” I found myself saying. “They called a truce with certain individuals under a white flag. It was formal and respected.” I frowned. “It’s also said that Shakespeare is responsible. In Henry IV, part two, Cleopatra threatens to treat the messenger’s eyes as balls when told Antony was marrying another.” I tilted my head slightly. “Then there was just the mention of town criers who spread news. If you hurt the messenger, it was considered treason. Therefore, people didn’t do it, and made mention of ‘not shooting the messenger.’”

  The table of men turned their attention to m
e.

  “What I’m getting at is that you should tell him,” I finished, repositioning my feet on the barstool next to me.

  I was at a bar-height table, the only chairs in the entire place that had backs, and I had my feet up with a book in my hand.

  There was a cold beer on the tabletop in front of me, and I was a quarter of the way through a book that I’d never intended to start.

  Why didn’t I intend to start it?

  Because I was supposed to be meeting a date here an hour and a half ago, yet my date had either no-showed me, or he’d been called in to do something at his work and hadn’t had time to call.

  Both of which were very possible.

  My date, Benji, was a successful CEO of a multimillion dollar company. He was also a doctor in town and apparently very popular with the ladies.

  His company was into bionics or something, and he was a ‘very busy man.’

  Well, I was a very busy woman, and you didn’t see me standing up my date.

  “Did you order hot wings?”

  I looked up to find the waitress, the one who’d been giving me ‘sad eyes’ all night, holding out the hot wings that I’d literally ordered from her not even twenty minutes ago.

  I looked at the hot wings and nodded.

  “I did,” I confirmed. “Did you remember the ranch?”

  Normally, I wouldn’t do ranch because it was so messy, but I’d wanted to try the ‘burn yo damn mouth’ ones the restaurant boasted as their ‘hottest flavor’ and thought I’d better prepare for them to actually be too hot.

  It didn’t happen often—me finding a flavor that was actually too hot—but the waitress had already been extremely slow so I wasn’t putting her not coming back and me needing ranch to chance.

  “I’m going for it now. I should have it out in a jiffy,” she said as she all but sprinted away.

  “She totally forgot,” one of the men muttered.

  I looked over at the table of bikers, but they were all staring at something across the way.

  I turned my eyes in that direction, too, finding a very pretty brunette with long, flowing brown hair sucked up to some man’s side.

  Just then, the door to the bar swung open and a very large, intimidating man filled the frame.

  He was tall, way taller than my five-foot-seven and a half inches—that half was very important, so I never forgot it. He had very dark hair. So dark, in fact, that in the somewhat favorable bar light I couldn’t tell what color his hair was—brown or black. He had dark greenish-colored eyes and his skin was the color of light brown sugar.

  He obviously had some Latino roots in his family tree, because that skin was born, not sun-bronzed.

  “Oh, fuck,” I heard one of the men say.

  But I didn’t have time to turn and look at them. My eyes were enraptured by the man that’d just filled the door.

  He was… intimidating, to say the least.

  He was also a man that I’d turned down for a date a few weeks ago when I’d first started my dating profile.

  Why had I turned him down? Because he owned a pig farm.

  Not that pig farming was a bad thing, but from the moment that I’d seen the man’s photo—even in profile—I’d gotten this weird feeling in my chest that I couldn’t explain.

  So I’d done the smart, sensible thing—I’d told him no on his date. And I’d blamed it on his pig farm, because why the hell else would I feel this… irrational… over him?

  And now I was kind of regretting that gut reaction.

  Because just seeing him standing there, taking in the entire bar like a silent wraith, had things inside of me taking flight.

  Like when I got to that really, really good part in the romance books that I loved so much. The pivotal parts where the hero and the heroine FINALLY admit their love for the other. Or when something really bad happens, and the man realizes that all this time he’s been denying what was right in front of his face.

  Those parts of the books were my absolute favorites.

  The man, Bruno from what I’d remembered, stepped over the threshold, his eyes on something by the bar. The brunette that the people at the table next to me were talking about earlier.

  He saw her, registered who she was, and rolled his eyes.

  Instead of stopping and confronting the woman like I thought he would, he walked right up to the bar just a few spots down from where she was cuddled up to the man she was talking to, and held up a finger.

  The man, obviously knowing Bruno, nodded his head and got to work on a beer.

  It was a local brew. Dark. Something on the label had a skull and crossbones on it.

  I looked at my own beer.

  It was the same exact one.

  I loved skulls and crossbones. Dark beer, though? Not so much.

  But I loved the label enough that I could overlook the bitter taste.

  In fact, I’d had the bartender wash the beer bottle out for me so that I could bring it home. It was currently in my bag, wrapped up in the cardigan that I’d brought with me to the bar.

  Absently, I reached out and picked up a chicken wing and started to nibble on it, feeling the instant heat in my lips as the fiery taste hit me.

  I licked my lips clean and basked in the burn as the big guy finally got his beer and made his way toward the table of men that were watching him with various shades of remorse on their faces.

  “Y’all order yet?” Bruno asked the moment he sat down.

  I took another bite of my wings, then tossed the empty bone onto the tabletop where a napkin was.

  I reached for another one, a drumstick this time, and started in on that one when the waitress finally arrived with the smallest cup of ranch I’d ever seen.

  I would’ve commented on it had I needed it. But since they weren’t as hot as they claimed, I would be okay.

  In the meantime, I flipped the page on my book with my clean hand, listened with half an ear to Bruno and the table’s discussion, and waited for whatever shoe to drop.

  That shoe dropped in the form of one of the men saying, “Oh, hey. I think she finally noticed that you’re here.”

  Bruno grunted as he reached for a handful of peanuts that were in the middle of the table.

  The ones that sat there all day long as person after person put their fingers into the metal canisters.

  “Those are severely unsanitary,” I found myself saying as I turned back to my book. “Do you know how many people reach into that bucket for peanuts each day? I saw at least four people do it before y’all took the table, and just sayin’, but studies show that at least one in four people don’t wash their hands after they go to the bathroom. So saying that, statistically, forty-nine point three percent of the world’s population are women, that means that, logically, at least one in eight people have had their dick in their hands when they reached in that bucket for peanuts.”

  There was a long, silent pause before Bruno himself looked at me.

  But I’d already gone back to my book and was now on my fifth chicken wing.

  “Oh, shit,” I heard said. “Bruno?”

  The sound of a woman’s voice had me looking up in time to see the brunette from earlier come walking over with a sheepish looking male blond. The male blond that was supposed to be my date.

  That’s when I started to get annoyed.

  “You know, Dr. Benji Knight,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. “If you were going to stand me up, the least you could do was tell me that you were rearranging your plans so that I didn’t have to be in a bar waiting for you to get here when I didn’t have to be.”

  Benji looked at me, his eyes widened, and he sputtered out, “I’m so sorry.”

  I rolled my eyes. “If you were sorry, which you aren’t, you would not be holding that woman right now. You’d be here, at this table, eating chicken wings with me. But, since the hero in my book likely has better manners than you, I think I’ll just continue to stick with him. Thanks for nothing.”

&
nbsp; Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bruno’s mouth twitch.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” I heard the brunette say.

  “It’s exactly what it looks like.” I licked one finger clean so that I could reach for my beer. After taking a hefty swallow, I said, “You practically were mauling that man with your mouth when I walked in. I just wish I’d have known that man was my date, and I would’ve turned around. These chicken wings are shit.”

  A man at the table started to laugh, and I didn’t spare him a glance as I turned the page.

  “I can get a manager,” I heard said.

  I glanced up to see the waitress there looking a bit miffed.

  “Just my check.” I shrugged. “Thanks anyway.”

  I didn’t need to speak with the manager.

  I knew the ‘manager’ was sitting at the table with the men.

  “What’s wrong with the chicken wings?” the big man with the nametag that read ‘Trick’ asked.

  “They’re okay… I guess.” I shrugged again. “You just boast that these are ‘super-duper hot’ when in reality they taste like I picked a flavor off of the kid’s menu. My lips are sufficiently tingly, but I can still function. If they were actually ‘hot’ as you put it on your menu, I wouldn’t be able to be sitting here holding an intelligent conversation with you.”

  The man, Trick, who happened to also be the owner, laughed.

  “Not many chicks can roll up in here and eat those,” he said. “But I’ve heard the same from a few of them.” He jerked his head toward the table. “You have any suggestions on better recipes?”

  Actually, I did.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll email them to you. Just get me your email address.”

  He reached into his back pocket, pulled out a card, and then tossed it onto my table.

  I only looked at it as I finished off my food.

  “Do you mind if I join you for the rest of the meal?” Benji asked.

  I looked over at the table he’d been previously occupying to see his date, pissed and glaring daggers at the two of us.

  Upon seeing me, I would’ve expected him to leave her to come to me, honestly. Most people had a reaction when they saw me.

  I was what you would call a ‘buxom beauty.’