Page 45 of Duty and Desire

Instead, he picked up the paper, turned it over and read it again.

It stated, plainly, he was fucked.

More alarmingly, it stated, chillingly, Mac was in danger.

This was a problem more than it was already a colossal motherfucking problem.

Any other one of his girls, he’d pick up the phone to Lee Nightingale, the man behind Nightingale Investigations, the commander of the baddest badass motherfuckers in Denver. He’d hand over this letter and he’d get this problem solved.

But Mac was Charlotte McAlister, Jet McAlister Chavez’s little sister. Jet was married to Eddie Chavez. Eddie was Lee’s best friend. And Jet worked for Indy, Lee’s wife, the Queen of the Rock Chicks, and thus Jet Chavez was a bona fide Rock Chick.

Mac might not be a card-carrying member of the Rock Chicks, mostly because she had a job where she worked nights, the time those crazy bitches instigated the most fucked-up of their varying antics. Though they weren’t averse to mornings and afternoons. It was just that the stun-gunnings, kidnappings and the like mostly took place at night, and Mac was busy then.

She was still a Rock Chick, or at least she was by association.

Considering the Rock Chick link and the blood ties to Jet, if Lee knew Mac was in danger, he’d tear the town apart to put a stop to it.

And Eddie…

Now Eddie, Smithie didn’t even want to think about it. The man was a cop. The shit Lee and his boys did with flair and a flagrant disregard to just about anything, Eddie could not do.

But Eddie wouldn’t blink at doing whatever he had to do to make his sister-in-law safe.

And the man had mouths to feed.

So yeah.

This was a problem even more than it already was a colossal motherfucking problem because Smithie couldn’t call Lee.

Which meant Smithie had to find a different set of badasses to deal with it.

His first call would normally be the Chaos Motorcycle Club. Mac wasn’t one of theirs, neither was Smithie, but they had ties to Lee, they could keep a secret, and they didn’t dick around when it came to women and their safety.

But they’d just come out of a war, and like any war, that had been some serious fucked-up shit.

They needed a breather.

Lee, and Chaos, also had ties to…

“Well, hell,” Smithie muttered, the words on the letter blurring, the sick feeling in the back of his throat easing.

He dropped the letter and picked up his cell.

If you couldn’t call a badass…

Then it was far from second best to call a commando.

“Let me see it.”

Smithie lifted his eyes from his laptop on which he was doing the club’s accounts to the tall, built, black-haired man prowling through the door.

Behind him strode a man that even gave Smithie, who this didn’t happen to often, a tingle of, “Holy fuck, don’t let me meet that guy in an alley.”

“Well, hey there, motherfucker,” Smithie greeted the man in the lead. A man known as Hawk. “And by the way, come on in.”

Hawk Delgado had made it to the front of Smithie’s desk.

He stopped there and held out his hand.