Page 1 of Priest’s Sunbeam (Renegade Souls MC: Next Generation #2)

Sunshine

“Is your name really Sunshine?” Sunny Hawk looked up from her tablet when she heard a guy’s voice.

Not like Byron, the show-off, who considered himself king of campus.

“Yes, as you’ve asked before, and as I’ve told you already, Byron, Sunshine is my given name. Maybe book a brain scan about your poor memory.” His sidekick chuckled.

“Weird fucking name,” scowled Byron. “Your parents must be hippies.” Smiling, Sunny slipped her device into her bag, followed by her textbooks. She was about to school a jerk. It would be good practice for when she was teaching children.

She climbed to her feet and looked the blond guy in the eye.

“No, my parents aren’t hippies. My mother is a well-renowned psychologist. And my father, you might have heard of him. He’s the VP for the Renegade Souls MC.”

The moment she finished her sentence, poor Byron’s face turned ashen, and Sunny smiled wider when his gaggle of boys began cackling with “Oh fuck!”

The Souls’ fame spanned the entire US, especially the mother chapter where she was raised.

“Your… your dad is part of them?”

“Yep.” She popped the P, sweet as could be.

Everyone always said she was sweet.

Sunshine, isn’t she a sweet girl?

Sunny, you’re so sweet .

But they didn’t know that she could get downright vicious if she had to be. Coming for her or her family would turn her into a crouching tiger.

“Shit. I didn’t know. I was only joking about your name, Sunny. I was messing around, and there was nothing in it. You don’t have to mention this to anyone.”

“Who would I mention it to, Byron?” she tutted like she was talking to a toddler. “Don’t be so silly.” She smiled. It wasn’t as though she’d sic one of the many Souls members onto him for his constant verbal picking. Any of her friends would dole out the punishment if she mentioned it.

But Sunny could handle Byron all by herself.

Putting the messenger bag on her shoulder, she picked up the coffee shop bill to pay it, but he tore it out of her hand. “I’ve got this, Sunny.” He handed it off to one of his minions.

“That’s so nice of you,” she smiled, fake as Christmas in March.

She figured she wouldn’t be hearing any more jibes from Byron from now on.

It was the first time she’d dropped the Souls into any conversation in her two years there.

There had been no conscious decision to leave her Souls connection back in Colorado, but it happened anyway.

She told people she lived in Denver and that her parents were blue-collar workers.

Her biggest secret was that she came from a prominent US motorcycle club family.

The notorious, most sought-after Renegade Souls.

There was a chapter in every state now, so if she ever got into trouble, no matter what, her first call would be to them.

Never the police. Some might think that it was crazy not to call the police, but legacy kids were brought up being told to turn to family before anyone else.

She headed home after an afternoon of studying.

There was a final exam tomorrow, and she was doing her usual cramming.

It was all in the hands of the exam gods, for which she’d given several offerings of chocolate and wine.

The rest of the night would comprise a big bowl of homemade ramen, putting a hair mask on her naturally chocolate brown hair, and watching the mushiest romance movie she could find on one of the streaming services.

She was a spoiled firstborn child and couldn’t function without full access to every TV station that was ever invented.

“Hey, Sunny.” One of her neighbors called out as she took the stairs to the second floor of her apartment block.

She remembered that first visit with her parents and how her dad, Colton Hawk, had glared at the four-room apartment as if it were infested with fleas.

He’d been against her moving out of state for college and had even tried bribing her to change her mind.

No one could blame Sunny for being a daddy’s girl; she’d charmed him into giving in.

“Hey, Marc. Good game last weekend.” She remarked, smiling at the senior quarterback. She was sports-hopeless but read the college newsletter and bulletin boards, so she remembered he’d scored the winning ball.

“Thanks. Am I going to have a better chance today?”

“Sorry, not today.” She smiled. Now and then, he asked her out in the nicest way, not too pushy, and every time, she politely declined.

He shrugged and shot her a smile. “One day, I think I’ll wear you down.”

She didn’t want to break his spirits, not when he must be riding the high of his current win. She heard sports people took that kind of thing seriously. But there was little chance of her dating him.

Or any other man.

Familiar emotions washed over her as she briefly thought about the reason before quickly locking that up. She’d gotten good at it over time.

And there was no reason to put herself into a raging emotional funk, not when she needed all her brains for tomorrow’s exam.

After a hot shower, the hair mask was soaking into her scalp as she wandered into the kitchen, dressed in lounge pants and a tank top, to start the ramen. Sunny scrolled through some texts, answering the most important ones first.

It had been over a week since she’d heard from her sister, Clover, so she shot her another text to ask how things were going at home.

They were five years apart, but not as close as they once were as little kids.

It wasn’t something Sunny worried about.

Not all siblings were best friends. When she noticed the text had been read, the minutes passed, and there was no reply.

She shrugged and discarded her phone. Clover was probably going through something drastically important that only sixteen-year-old girls could. She’d get back to her, eventually.

The chopsticks hadn’t even touched the spicy noodles when her phone vibrated with a call. Sunny couldn’t stand being startled by ringtones, so she’d never used them. Missed calls? People called a second time, or they weren’t important.

She smiled, seeing who it was.

“Hi, Mom. How’s things?”

“Things are complicated, honey. I hate to say it,” Gia Hawk started, and it was a different tone she usually used in their daily chats. That serious tone focused Sunny’s attention span.

“Is Dad alright?”

“Yes, baby, he’s fine. But we need you to come home as soon as possible.”

“What’s happened? Is someone else hurt?”

“No one is hurt, but it’s important.”

This wasn’t anything new.

Being a Souls legacy kid, they’d been through a few dangerous times in her life. Times when they’d needed a lockdown within the clubhouse compound to keep everyone together and safe.

They’d never called her home from Texas, though.

“Is someone being targeted?”

“Yes.”

“Us?”

“Yes, honey.”

Sunny’s blood ran cold, and she immediately sprang forward in the comfortable armchair she’d bought on a shopping trip with her mom.

It didn’t matter how far she went, Sunny would always be who she was. A Renegade Souls legacy.

Other people didn’t understand how important that was.

The family worked hard to provide them with the life they live today. Though she didn’t know many details, they’d heard snippets over the years that helped them understand how their fathers had gone through dangerous and gritty things to safeguard their future.

Enemies would always happen. She knew that. She wasn’t so na?ve as to believe that the Renegade Souls were on the up and up.

“Mom, I have my exam tomorrow morning.”

“I know, but you’ll have to reschedule it.”

“It’s not that simple. I’m not saying I won’t come home if you insist it’s important, but I’m saying, can’t I come right after my exam? I’ve been studying all year for it.”

She heard her mom sigh. “Your dad is picking up Clover from a school trip, or he would have come for you. I told him you’d get the first flight out tonight.”

She was handcuffed to what she could ask over the phone; it had been drummed into her from a young age to never give too much on open lines for fear of who might be tapped in.

“I won’t go anywhere. I’m already tucked up for the night, anyway. And tomorrow, I’ll go to the exam hall and head straight to the airport afterward.”

“Fine, but someone from the chapter there will be stationed outside, okay?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.” It was a relief to know that. “You’ll tell me everything when I get there?”

“As much as we can.” Her mom’s voice was tense. Though she’d made the hard decision to live out of state for college, Sunny was a home girl through and through.

The following morning, at precisely 7 a.m., she headed to the large hall across the quad. The Harley Davidson was parked across the street. She didn’t recognize the white-haired man in the familiar Souls cut, but she felt closer to him than she did to the hundreds of other students.

Sunny had to clear her mind to write the three-hour paper.

And when it was finally over, she dropped her pencil and sighed. It was time to head home. But the heavens had opened, and it was lashing with rain as she pushed the door open. Lightning bolts flew everywhere, as if Thor were mad at his wife.

She quickly pulled out her phone and switched to the airport app. The red banner on the top of the app made her heart sink. All flights out of Texas were currently grounded.

“Shit. Shit.”

In a cab, with a purring Harley Davidson following behind her, she headed to the airport, hoping that things would have improved by the time she arrived.

However, nothing had changed six hours later.

She was sitting in the waiting area, looking at the departure boards. Every flight, incoming and outgoing, was delayed.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” her mom said. “We had a second plan organized. Someone is coming to you.”

It was Sunny’s mistake not to ask who.

She assumed someone from the Texas chapter would escort her home.

The last person she wanted to encounter emerged from the throng of stranded passengers, resembling an avenging demon intent on global conflict.

His muddy brown hair was wet from the rain, and his six-foot-two, wide-shouldered stature towered over most people.

It should have been impossible to sense one person through a sea of people, but her body turned into a tuning fork, almost as if a vibration were rattling her bones, as her heart started a slow pitter-patter until the beats boomed in her ear canal.

He never stalled in his steps. People got out of his way. The man wore a black leather jacket, heavy biker boots, and a leather vest with rocker patches on the front, declaring him a Renegade Souls member.

The urge to run to him was strong, almost a natural-born compulsion, like a magnet wanting to meet its mate. But Sunny remained seated, snuffing out the feeling.

Time was such a fickle thing.

For as much as Sunny persuaded herself that her feelings for the man striding toward her no longer mattered, it was as if time stripped her of the distance and placed her right back at that moment where her heart beat only for her best friend, her soulmate, the other half of her.

Time didn’t heal.

Time hadn’t allowed her to move on.

Because her heart was racing as she swallowed, unable to draw her eyes away.

Not so long ago, there was a time when she would have jumped up from the seat and raced to meet him halfway with the speediest of steps. And then she would have jumped into his arms, declaring how good it was to see him and wanting to know every detail of his life since she’d last spoken to him.

But that was long past, and Sunny refused to throw away her heart on a careless robot like Sebastian Priest.

Before she was ready, there he was. Right in front of her.

Standing as tall as a tree with his broad shoulders, tapered waist, and oh-so-long legs encased in the softest, worn blue denim jeans, damp from the rain.

The outfit was all biker, and he wore it well.

She tried not to notice how good he looked, but she failed big time.

He’d grown even more handsome in the time apart.

Cranking her neck back, she clung to the messenger bag on her lap as if she could use it as a buffer.

“Sebastian.”

His jaw flexed when she used his full name. She’d rarely, if ever, called him Sebastian. It had always been Seb. Since she learned to talk, she’d called him My Seb .

“What are you doing here?”

“To take you home.” His rich voice went through her like a flying bullet, hitting all the major organs.

Especially her aching, pining heart, which would always belong to him.

Even though she knew he didn’t want it.

And then he fired his most perfect bullet.

“Have you missed me?”