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I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be with himforever.

But I didn’t want him to break my heart again.

24

ACE

“Heads up, Ace. We’ve got a walk-in.”

Hawk’s voice broke my focus. I exhaled hard into the undercarriage of Harley’s white rental SUV. I was repairing it myself, to make sure she wouldn’t get dinged at all for the damage on the rental.

It was a quiet day at the garage. We didn’t accept walk-ins, and everyone in Lakeview knew how booked we got. But Tank, who had good connections in the police force, gave me the heads-up about this last week.

I slid out from under the car and got to my feet. As I wiped my hands on the hem of my white Cole’s Garage shirt, I approached Chief Forest with a friendly smile on my face. “What can I do for you, boss?”

Forest smirked at me. “I need you to pause work for the day.”

“All right, any reason why?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

Forest brandished a sheet of paper in my face. “We’ve got a warrant to search the place. Top to bottom.”

Sighing, I waved Forest and the rest of his lackeys into the garage. “We’ll stay out of your way, then. My office is unlocked, too.”

I turned the music off. “Take a break, guys,” I said to my employees. “Outside.” The four guys I had on shift today—not clan members, community members, all formerly incarcerated—shrugged and headed out of the garage.

I leaned against the back wall of the garage while the cops began to ransack the place. They moved through the garage like a tornado, throwing open toolboxes, opening car doors, and climbing the stairs to my office.

Hawk leaned on the wall next to me and crossed his arms over his chest. “They gonna find anything?”.

I shook my head. “Nope.”

Hawk shot me a sideways look, and I grinned.

“Good,” Hawk said. “Good. You know he’ll be looking everywhere.”

I watched Forest climb the stairs to my office, so angry it looked like steam was coming out of his ears. “Yeah, he’s still not over high school.”

“Well, we’re going to lose some money today with this bullshit going on,” Hawk muttered.

I nodded. Forest had been a scrawny nerd in high school, a year below Sean and me, and Sean had been a real dickhead to him. Now that Sean was out of the picture, all that anger had been turned on me. My stint in prison had only made it worse, and he’d made it his personal mission to get me back behind bars. Even though the Lakeview clan had done nothing but support the town, Forest hated that some of the money was dirty.

I clenched my jaw as Forest and his guys ruined the careful organization of my garage. After a certain point, they realized they weren’t going to find anything and instead focused onmaking my cleanup as difficult as possible. I didn’t even want to think about the state my office would be in after all of this.

It took nearly two hours, but finally, the cops gave up on finding anything connecting me to guns or drugs. Forest marched out of my office and stomped down the stairs.

Smiling, I pushed off the wall and met Forest in the middle of the trashed garage. “Find what you’re looking for?”

“You wipe that shit-eating grin off your face,” Forest snapped. “I know you’ve got some shit going on, and once I find out where you’re keeping your stash, it’s over for you.”

“I keep telling you, Forest, it’s all clean. You can look all you want, but you’re not gonna turn up a damn thing.”

“That’s bullshit. You’ve always been a liar. A criminal. You can’t help yourself. And once your little girlfriend realizes that, she’ll leave you in the dust like she did ten years ago.”

My dragon reared up with a speed I hadn’t felt in years. Anger animated me, and before I even realized what was happening, my fangs had dropped and I’d bared them in Forest’s face. Hawk grabbed my shoulder and jerked me back before I could maul him.

Forest’s eyes were wide, and the color had drained from his face. I wasn’t the type to lash out like that, and he knew it.

But you poke the dragon enough, and it bites back.