Page 2
Two
Cheating should affect your credit score. If Susan can’t trust you, why should Nationwide?
— Cutter to Doc
DOC
“Why are we here again?” I asked Cutter.
“Because you’re being a sad sack, and I felt like you could use some greasy food,” Cutter answered.
Preacher snorted from his seat next to Cutter.
“I’m not being a sad sack,” I disagreed. “I’m being a normal person that just had to deal with an unwanted breakup.”
“That chick was fuckin’ stuck up her own ass. Sure, she was hot as hell, but she was just a regular bitch taking advantage of you,” Cutter pointed out as he reached for the menu.
Before he could get to the reading of the menu, the woman that I’d seen the moment I walked in started to yell. “We are not serving anything but grilled fucking cheese! If you don’t want grilled cheese, you can see yourself out!”
Cutter grinned and put his menu back.
“Oh, and we can add ham or turkey, and all condiments to that grilled cheese. But don’t ask for anything else, because we ain’t cookin’ it.” She turned her back on the room and yanked a menu out of a woman’s hand that was sitting nearest the door. “You’re allowed to go now.”
“Well, I’ve never…” The woman, dressed in spiked heels that did amazing things for her ass, clip-clopped out of the door.
“She’s hot,” Preacher announced.
That she was.
She was also a bit crazy.
Then again, I seemed to lean toward the crazy.
What did that say about me?
“Yo,” the big man with the buzz cut said as he arrived. Definitely some type of military. I could spot them from a mile away since I was military myself. “What can I get y’all to drink?”
“Dr Pepper,” I answered, my eyes once again trailing to the woman.
She had her hair, which was thick as fuck and so curly it appeared untamable, up on the top of her head with a couple of forks holding it in place.
Forks.
For real, forks.
Her t-shirt was tight. Her shorts were short.
And she had on the rattiest pair of running shoes I’d ever seen.
I could even see her big toe—which wasn’t covered in socks—through the hole at the tip of that shoe.
But man, oh, man, did she have some great legs.
As in, they were the best things I’d ever seen in my life.
Long. Tan. Toned.
“Be right back,” the big man said, breaking me out of my contemplation of the woman’s amazing features.
“You’ve got a bit of drool there.” Cutter grinned as he pointed at his chin.
I flipped him off and grumbled, “Fuck you.”
I wasn’t too broken up about Elisha not to notice the beauty that was right in front of me.
Elisha and I had broken up two weeks ago in a blaze of fiery glory.
She’d wanted me to take her to a black-tie event.
I’d told her not only would I not take her, but I refused to ever go anywhere near those kinds of events, and she got butt hurt.
She’d told me that that was her world, that I couldn’t just not go because I didn’t like my parents.
I didn’t bother arguing with her.
That wasn’t her world. That was the world she wanted to be a part of.
That was the exact world that I wanted to be so far away from that I didn’t even hear about it.
When she expected me to fall in line, and I didn’t, she’d thrown an ultimatum at the ground and expected me to gather it up and run back to her with my tail tucked between my legs.
I didn’t.
And we’d been broken up now for two weeks because of it.
Truthfully, I should’ve gotten shot of her months ago.
I’d known the moment she told me who her parents were that she’d expect me to go to the society functions with the upper crust of Dallas.
I guess I was just hoping that if I ignored it, it wouldn’t come up.
She was tall, stacked, and beautiful. I could ignore a lot of things when the owner of that body gave great head, took care of me, and loved that I was a rough biker.
But, sadly, the society functions had come up.
And I’d had to let her know that I wouldn’t live in her world.
Which had pissed her off, and now she was calling me every single day to ask me if I changed my mind and would go with her.
I wouldn’t.
I wouldn’t step back into that world for anyone, not even her.
My parents weren’t bad people.
But my brother, who had known how to manipulate my parents since he was a kid, was.
And I wouldn’t go anywhere near him ever again if I could help it.
“Whoa.”
“What?” I asked, glancing where Preacher was now staring.
I felt my mouth go dry when I saw the waitress on the other side of the room man handling a table and chairs back into position from where they’d been smushed together for multiple occupants to sit.
I watched as the muscles in her thighs bunched and retracted, and damn if I didn’t feel Preacher’s “whoa” in my soul.
That woman had great legs.
Like Carrie fuckin’ Underwood.
My god.
She was bent over the table, pushing the large table with the power of her hips. When she was bent over slightly, I could see straight up the back of her shorts, and let’s just say, I was really likin’ what I was seein’.
“If that doesn’t help you get over Elisha McClure, I don’t know what will,” Cutter joked.
I turned back toward my friend, one of my fellow brothers in the Truth Tellers MC, and asked, “Do you think Milena would like you lookin’ at another girl?”
“Please,” he snorted. “We’re not blind. I just caught her watching goddamn Riley Green on replay on YouTube TV today because she thinks he’s sexy as fuck. We’re human, and we can appreciate the human form. I’ll never do anything but love her for the rest of my life, but a man has eyes.”
“True,” Preacher agreed.
Preacher wasn’t actually a preacher.
Preacher was an AC repair man, and an online-ordained minister that married people for fun.
He’d gotten his name ‘Preacher’ because he’d officiated at the marriage of our club president, Webber.
He has married quite a few people since then, too.
The military kid came back to us with our drinks and said, “We’re only doing grilled cheese.”
I grinned. “I heard.”
“We can put anything that you want on it, hell, we can make it a patty melt, but when it’s just us in here, it’s easier to just make the sandwiches.
We ran out of potato salad and macaroni when some rich bitch came in here and bought it all for a work function.
And my mother agreed to it because she was thinkin’ ‘oh, this is great, let’s get rid of all the food so we can make more money.
’ But she wasn’t thinkin’ about how we don’t have time to replenish the stock, or the fact that we’ll have people coming in here wanting something other than grilled cheese and fries. ”
I nodded, but it was Cutter who said, “We order grilled cheese anyway. They’re the best.”
We didn’t get over here often.
The diner, Hodges, was well out of the way of anything and anywhere that we went or did.
It was on the very outskirts of Dallas, right off the interstate, which was why it was as busy as it was—which admittedly wasn’t all that busy most of the time.
But for us, it was well over forty-five minutes away from the clubhouse, and even farther from most of the club members’ jobs.
The only reason we were out here today was because I’d invited the boys to come out to the ranch—the place that I owned and ran—to get free food and beer if they’d help me fix a couple of barn doors.
The only takers I’d gotten were Cutter and Preacher.
Though, the rest had said that they would take me up on my offer this weekend if I still needed help.
They’d spent the morning with me building the barn doors and fixing up places that needed patched, and I’d kept them full up on beer and then had offered to take them to the diner for lunch for a break.
Which led us to here and now.
Hodges really was fuckin’ great.
I loved it, and was ordering food almost every other day. Though, most of the time I sent my ranch hand, an eighteen-year-old wanna-be bull rider that had better luck grooming the bull than riding it.
Hodges was about eight minutes from the ranch, and usually I didn’t have the time to just go out and get the food because there was too much to do at home.
Eight years ago, I’d been in the military, working as a Navy SEAL, thinking that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
Then I’d gotten a call from my superior officer letting me know that my stepmom and dad had died in a car wreck, leaving me custody of my little sister, Scottie.
I hadn’t thought too much of the next step.
I’d gotten out of the Navy and headed right home.
I hadn’t realized how rundown the ranch had gotten until I arrived home to see it in such disrepair.
See, once upon a time, my mom and dad had been happy. They’d bought the ranch and had turned it into a large cattle operation.
Over the years, Mom had gotten pretty used to nice things, and had turned into a more critical, expectant form of her old self.
Then tragedy struck, and nearly three-quarters of our herd went down in a freak tornado accident that literally gave the scene from Twister with the cow in the air a run for its money.
We had over a thousand head of cattle die, and we were picking them up for months.
That year our ranch went from a thriving, well-tuned machine to a shell of its former self.
Mom realized that she would rather live large than live happy, so she divorced Dad and found a new man that could give her that life.
Dad had been understandably devastated and content to live his life alone after that.
That was until Rosemarie stepped into his life.
They got married fast and had a kid even faster.
And they spent the rest of their days in love, trying to bring the ranch back to what it once was.
At the time of Dad and my stepmom’s—though I called her “Ma”—death, Scottie had been nine years old.
Now she was seventeen, and not necessarily thriving, but making it.
She graduated a few months ago, and she was already gearing up to go to college in the fall.
Her goal was to go to Texas A&M and get her degree in Agricultural Science so she could come back here and help me on the farm.
I would be grateful for the help.
Though I had a degree, it was only in a bullshit field so that I could say that I’d graduated college.
There was nothing in my art degree that would help me navigate this so-called life I found myself living.
I was winging it the best I knew how, and some days it worked just fine, and others I was served with a late bill that I forgot to pay to the point that they were shutting off the water.
Luckily, I solved that issue by digging my own well.
I had the money.
The club generated quite a bit of random income that I could easily live life comfortably without working another day again.
But there was this driving light inside of me that wanted to see Hicks Ranch restored back to its former glory.
Which was why I was working my ass off to make things happen despite not knowing what the fuck I was doing.
It seemed like I fixed one thing only to make another thing broken.
Ultimately, I could keep the ranch running.
I could buy the cattle, take care of them, and sell them.
I could fix up the ranch.
I could even take care of my little sister.
But there were just so many damn things that were broken that sometimes it felt like it was overwhelming.
When the tornado hit, Mom had accidentally let the insurance on the farm lapse, and we were hit hard with nothing to cushion the blow.
The tornado not only took out our cattle, but our house, two barns, and miles and miles of fencing.
Dad had spent the twelve years after my mom left him repairing the fencing and the barns.
I’d spent the last eight years after his death fixing the house and the grounds as best as I could.
And I was just now seeing a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
If all went well, I might be able to tip on the right side of black this year barring any huge complications.
“And you, sir?”
I winced, forgetting where I was for a second as I thought about how life had turned out.
“Just the plain grilled cheese. But add mayo and tomato. Fries with jalapeno sauce.” I handed him the menu that was useless.
He nodded, not bothering to take a thing down, and left without another word.
My gaze once again went to the blonde bombshell.
Which was also why I saw her come in.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, my eyes closing and my head dropping.
“What…oh,” Cutter said. “Fuck’s right.”