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CHAPTER ELEVEN

V elina…

I hadn’t expected Garnett’s club to accept my offer, but they did. Honestly, my meeting with the detective on my brother’s case left me feeling like even if I did get any information, up to and including a recording of a confession straight from the horse’s mouth, that he wouldn’t do anything with it.

In the absence of justice for my brother, revenge would suit me just fine.

Saint came and got me out of the back, where I waited, protected by the thick cinder block walls of the garage. I wondered if they would ever use the front of their clubhouse again after what happened to my brother.

I didn’t want to ask.

If you had told me when I’d started out from California that I would abandon literally everything – my job, my home, - all of it – to pursue revenge for a half-sibling I hadn’t even gotten to meet yet before he was murdered, I would have said you were crazy. But this wasn’t going to be an overnight kind of a thing here.

As the boys of my brother’s club had laid out, this was going to be one of those things that took time and potentially a lot of it.

They suggested I start looking for work out here, and they weren’t necessarily wrong.

I had some serious choices to make and little time to make them.

Of course, I was also the kind of girl who figured you might as well go big or go home, and going home wasn’t an option for me.

Not once had anyone in Garnett’s life showed up for him, and I maybe knew a thing or two about that. I would be damned if I was going to be yet another in a long line to let him down, too.

Wild? Sure, but also true.

“So, fill me in,” I said, sitting down with Saint in the back. It was just him and me right now. The rest of the men were still in the chapel.

“Where you want me to start?” he asked.

“Let’s start with motive,” I said, automatically falling back on what I knew.

“You’re thinking like a cop,” he said sourly.

“Sorry, not sorry. I was raised on the right side of the law, but that’s where we’re at,” I said. “So, let’s start with why. I’ll try to keep the big words like ‘motive’ to a minimum since they seem to chap your ass.”

“ Watch it, ” he warned me.

I sucked in a deep breath and let it out slow and measured.

“Sorry, I’m on edge and I’m angry. I guess I’m used to fighting for literally everything – so it’s my default setting.”

“We’ll get into that later,” he said, and my eyebrows went up at that. “Right now, let’s get into it. You want to know why – why what?” he asked.

“Why are the Bayou Brethren so hard up to bone you boys?” I asked, and he barked a laugh.

“You’re picking up biker life quick,” he said. I shrugged.

“Not so far from trucker life,” she said. “Lewd, crude, tattooed, with a heaping side of chauvinism and misogyny – about right?” she asked.

“You forgot loyalty,” he said.

“Territorial?” I countered. Oh no, I got that.

He laughed and said, “They don’t even sound the same.” He shook his head finally and made to get up.

“This’ll never work,” he muttered. I reached out and caught his index finger with my hand, wrapping it around it like a child.

“Wait,” I beseeched him, staring fixedly at my hand wrapped around the thick digit of his finger, the Harley Davidson logo of his bulky silver ring, looking suddenly vicious over stylish. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know this is a lot, and I’m scared. I deal with being scared with sass.” I swallowed hard. “I’m not very good at peopling.”

“That’s not going to work for this kind of a thing,” he said gently, sinking back down into the folding metal chair across from mine, extracting his hand from mine.

“No, I know,” I said, lacing my fingers and wrapping them around my knee that was up over my other one. I let the sweat collecting in my palms be wicked away by the denim of my jeans.

“Having second thoughts?” he asked.

I shook my head, stopped, nodded once, and then resumed shaking my head.

“You’re right to be scared, but you can’t show it,” he said. “I need you to deal with them with the same confidence you have around me.” I looked up at him, a little surprised. He thought I was confident around him? “But take the sass down several notches. These motherfuckers don’t play, and to answer your question? We don’t know why.”

I frowned. “You don’t?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“No,” he said. “They just started muscling in on our turf, acting like the baddest motherfuckers on the block, and like we had beef when we don’t have a clue why . But that’s not what we need to worry about right now. Right now, we have to worry about you going in there, not knowing how this all works.”

“How does it work?” I asked softly.

He sighed and said, “That’s gonna take some time, so settle in. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before we can even consider turning you loose into the beast’s lair.”

“Okay,” I said warily.

It wasn’t a no, and he was right. I needed to learn how to operate within their organizations – even though, by the sounds of it, biker life was more like barely organized chaos rather than a criminal mastermind organization.

“So how’s this work?” I asked.

He smirked and said, “You’re gonna hate it, but you’re gonna need to leave all this feminist bullshit at the fuckin’ door. You start that up, they’re liable to bend you over the nearest pool table and fuck that attitude right out of you.”

I shuddered, the thought coming unbidden of Saint doing that very thing, which I was more than a little confused at the tingle in my vag and the way my nipples hardened at the thought.

His deep brown eyes met mine, and his grin turned something akin to feral. I realized that the tank I wore and the bra I had on underneath didn’t do much to hide my sudden arousal at the thought.

“You’re something else,” he said with a bit of a chuckle.

“Shut up,” I said, flustered and growing redder by the minute with embarrassment.

He laughed then, a real laugh, long, genuine, and loud. All I could do was sit there in the flaming wreckage of my embarrassment of having been caught out and wait for him to finish.

“You done?” I asked when his laughter died down, and he wiped tears from his eyes.

“Not even close,” he wheezed, trying to get a grip. I rolled my eyes and threw up my hands, which just made him laugh harder, but I had to admit, I was having a hard time keeping from smiling and laughing with him.

Maybe I was nuts.