Page 5 of Broken Deeds MC: Second Generation #12

– LYLA –

“You’re sure you don’t need anything?” Pax asks as he closes the hotel room door behind him.

I give a quick shake with my head. “Nope, I’m good. You can lend me a shirt to sleep in and I’ll use your toothbrush in the morning. It’s my way to compensate, and yours as well by leaving my shit in my hotel room.”

He grumbles something incoherent. I keep my smile to myself and glance around Pax’s hotel room.

“Are you going to work?” I wonder out loud. “If so, can I help?”

Now he’s the one shaking his head. “It’s club business.”

I narrow my eyes. The asshole called his president this morning and clearly said I’m his old lady. I didn’t agree to anything, but if he’s going to be an ass, I can be one too.

“So, calling me your old lady was a load of crap? I was raised in an MC, remember? Which means bikers choose how they treat their old ladies and what level of information they get. Now, the MC I grew up in is close with Broken Deeds. You might even say I’ve known them longer than you’ve been with them.

” Jerking my chin in the air I add, “Oh, and I’m not getting your name tattooed on any part of me.

I might be a girl and not a member of any MC, but my family is AF MC. ”

The muscled biker in front of me smirks. “Wrong, sweet thing. Your family got bigger the moment you reentered my life.”

Crossing my arms in front of my chest, I confront him with the fact, “Nice to be your old lady when it suits you. Indicating I’m Broken Deeds, but I’m really not since you don’t want my help.

Is this going to be an example of how custody or parenthood of our little girl will be?

Say one thing but take a spin whenever to suit your needs? ”

“The fuck?” he grunts. “We’re both responsible for the upbringing of our girl, and I intend to be there every damn day.”

I hold his gaze. “Sure, you say that now. How about when there’s a tiny human screaming her lungs out every minute of the day?

Stinky diapers, puking milk all over you, more crying, no sleep.

Are you saying you’re signing up for all of it or just for the fact you knocked me up and need to step up for responsibility’s sake?

Because I will tell you right now, I don’t want to get back together ’cause I peed on a stick and it showed we managed to multiply ourselves. ”

“Changing diapers doesn’t scare me, neither does the lack of sleep due to taking care of my two girls,” Pax states with resolution.

“My two girls,” I echo under my breath.

Why does he have to be less than an asshole?

If the idiot didn’t follow his president’s order to get his dick pierced by me, but actually came to me himself?

Then I’m sure we’d still be together. It’s not just following his president’s order, though.

My brother’s interference, along with the thought of all of them scheming together about my freaking life.

“Fine,” Pax suddenly states. “If you’re willing to do this together then I’ll pull you into this case.”

I can’t believe he’d offer to let me work a criminal case.

“Really?” I gush and then sober a bit to ask, “You’re going to let me work a huge serial killer case with you without rules or giving me any shit?”

Pax shrugs. “As long as you’ll stay by my side, let me take lead, and don’t run off doing shit on your own or talk to anyone about the case.”

I roll my eyes. “Who would I talk to? You know I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”

He shoves his hand in my direction. “Then we have a deal? We’ll work the case together and it will give us a chance to make it work between us.”

Narrowing my eyes at his outstretched hand, I realize the man just played dirty. “You totally twisted this to suit your own plan, didn’t you?”

His sexy chuckle releases a few butterflies inside my belly. “Just take the deal, sweet thing.”

“Cut the sweet thing shit and you have a deal,” I state and shake his hand.

The moment my palm glides over his is when an electric current zings up my arm. My breath catches and the memory of having sex in my workspace enters my brain. Having his engorged dick in my hand, veins wrapped around his hard length...delicious the way he completely filled my pussy.

I clear my throat and tug my hand from his grip. “Okay, let’s get to work.”

My gaze hits the tiny box of cinnamon mints on his bedside table and I stalk over to grab it and ask, “Why do you have this? You don’t even like cinnamon.”

Pax turns his face away from me to grab a thick folder. “They remind me of you.”

All I can do is freeze and keep staring at the man who just admitted to having something so he could remember me.

All while he didn’t even know I would be coming to his hotel room.

He showed up in my room yesterday and I’ve been with him since.

Slowly, I place the tiny box back down and wander over to Pax who hands me the folder.

“Are you going to give me your version or do you want me to read everything and then give you my opinion?” I ask.

Pax jerks his chin in the direction of the information in my hand. “Take your time to read through it, then we’ll talk. I’m going to take a long shower.”

He stalks off and grabs some stuff from a bag next to the bed and disappears into the bathroom. I need to keep my head busy instead of letting my mind drift to the fact that Pax is getting naked in the other room. Wet and naked.

I toe off my shoes and climb onto the bed. Taking out pages filled with information, photographs of rooms, bodies, details. Okay, I might like watching crime shows, both fiction and reality, but these are gruesome.

There are six murder cases and when I glance through the details, I don’t even see how they linked these cases together.

Ages are not the same, neither is gender, type, or whatever.

Even the bodies don’t look the same except for the fact they were all strangled according to the autopsy report.

Each of the reports states that the hyoid bone is fractured.

Good thing they were at least dead when their body was mutilated. All of the reports mention scrapings against the ribs, the femur, and the humerus. Bodies were dumped alongside forest roads where they took weeks to be discovered.

“There hasn’t been a fresh body in the past few weeks. The forensic pathologists I’ve questioned about these cases all agreed the bodies were killed around eight to ten weeks from one another. Which means she’s already killed but we haven’t found the body yet,” Pax rumbles.

I keep my eyes locked on the files in front of me.

“How did you guys connect the cases if everything isn’t exactly similar?

I mean...” Rummaging through the papers I hold them up one by one.

“Woman, twenty-four, lives in Forth Worth, Texas. Man, thirty-nine, lives in San Diego, California. Woman, forty-three, Youngstown, Ohio. I could go on, but they’re all living across the country, different ages, careers, everything. Except for the fact they were killed.”

“There are certain similarities,” Pax argues and it’s then I raise my gaze to see he’s dressed in black boxers and nothing else.

Well, he’s sporting muscles. Inked muscles and I know exactly what his cock looks like underneath those tight boxers. I swallow hard and barely manage to drag my gaze away from him.

I clear my throat, which does absolutely nothing to my voice when I croak, “And those are?”

“The scrapings on the bones are similar to a butcher’s knife.

All of them were either coming back from traveling, in the middle of a vacation, or just started.

Somehow, they all crossed paths with a killer.

I’ve been researching in the hope to find something all of their trips have in common.

” He wanders over to his bag and pulls out a sketchpad.

I take it from him and glance over the scribbled notes. One thing instantly triggers something inside my head, and I glance around for his laptop.

“What?” Pax rumbles.

“Where’s your laptop? I want to check something.”

He grabs it from his bag and fires it up. Placing it on the bed in front of me, I open a search engine and type in what I did a few days ago when I booked my trip here.

Then I turn the laptop to show Pax. “When I search for a nice hotel in this town the search will also give you options about what you can do. Suggestions for hotels, activities, nice places to eat, or let’s you get a package for a great deal to save money, or get coupons and–”

“Holy fuck, that’s it,” Pax grunts and takes the laptop from me. “We checked out the travel arrangements of all the victims, nothing was similar. These package deals explain why if they are made through different websites but still end up in the same hotels.”

I watch as he places it on the desk, walks to where his jeans are to fish out his phone, and makes a call. As soon as he starts to talk, I become aware he’s on the phone with Bee, his president’s old lady.

She’s one of Broken Deeds’s computer savvies and he’s asking her if she’s able to run some kind of check to see if all victims booked the same travel package. Once he’s done, he turns to face me. I’m feeling a bit weird with him standing there in his boxers, staring and not saying a word.

Which is why I get a bit snappy. “What?”

“I gave you all the information not knowing how you’d react.

Not many can handle autopsy or crime scene photos.

When I walked back into the room, I found you going through everything without a look of horror on your face.

” He shakes his head. “You have detective skills,” he adds on a grunt as if it’s an insult instead of a conclusion to his ramblings.