Page 17 of Texas Hold Em’ (The Devil’s Luck MC #3)

JAMESON

I ’d been cruising through Reno for half an hour looking for my Texas Ranger girl and had come up empty.

There weren’t many places she could go at this time of the morning.

Sure, some cafes that catered mostly to truck drivers and early morning workers were beginning to open, and the McDonald’s were open twenty-four/seven, but Carrie wasn’t there, and I’d have been a fool to think she’d left my house two hours before dawn just to get an egg McMuffin.

No, this was about something more than that.

You know what this is about, I thought morosely. This is about Bates.

My mind flashed with terrible images of what might have happened to her, and I thought of Tracy Kiss, the poor stripper who’d been found murdered in a ditch almost two months ago.

Two months.

Where was the time going?

How had so much time passed since the bastard rolled into town and turned everything upside down?

I had half a mind to call Jackson and tell him that Carrie was AWOL, but I didn’t want to risk what he’d do to her if he found her.

She thought he’d been hard on her the other day?

Not even close. If he thought she’d snuck out and was making moves behind our backs, he’d do what he had to in order to protect the MC.

Which is what I should do.

I pulled down a side street and kept my head on a swivel as I searched for her. My bike rumbled loyally but I didn’t push her to her limits. I had to keep the speed off if I was going to spot Carrie. She might be in trouble.

Or worse.

I gritted my teeth.

I had to stop thinking like that. She wasn’t mine to protect, and for all I knew she was selling us out this very minute.

I wanted to trust her. Hell, I wanted to trust her more than anything.

But I couldn’t. Not yet. She still didn’t make sense to me, and she still wouldn’t let me in enough to tell me what she was really plotting.

If she brought us down, I’d never forgive myself.

It would all be on my head. A pair of pretty blue eyes and a killer ass made me dimwitted and weak.

So weak.

I gripped the handlebars and took another turn. Up ahead, a neon Open sign flashed at a dingy bar. I’d never set foot in the place because I knew it was owned by Bates.

A lightbulb flashed in my head and I cut across traffic to pull into the nearly empty parking lot.

A big bouncer stood at the front door, and he glowered at me as I moved through the doors.

No host greeted me, so I wove around tables and made my way to the bar where a gray-haired man poured a cocktail glass full of tequila and slid it down the bar to a guy in a trench coat who looked down on his luck.

I leaned on the bar but didn’t sit down. “Hey, man,” I said, “have you seen a girl in here tonight? Blonde hair, blue eyes, real smoke show, would’ve looked out of place?”

The bartender stared blankly at me.

Grumbling, I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet and slapped it down on the counter. “She’s about five foot three, slender, fit, too stubborn for her own good?”

“She was here. ”

“When?” I heard the relief in my own voice.

“A while ago,” the bartender said with a greedy smile. He was missing an eye tooth and the others looked like they were rotting out of his mouth.

I put another twenty down.

He swiped it off the bar and tucked it in the front pocket of his button-down shirt. It was stained with grease and liquor. “About an hour ago. She came in alone, sat down for about half an hour, and then received company.”

“Who was it? Did you know them?”

The bartender shrugged.

I cast a wary glance over my shoulder. The bar was practically empty. A group of four played a quiet game of pool, and the drunkard three stools down from me nursed his tequila.

I turned back to the bartender and lifted a hand to curl my finger in a come-hither motion.

The bartender frowned.

I beckoned him forward again, and the fool leaned over the bar.

With one hand, I seized the front of his shirt and hauled him right up against the bar. He wheezed in pain as his gut hit the edge and knocked the air out of him. I gave him a rough shake and tightened my hold on the collar of his shirt, nearly choking him.

“Listen,” I growled, “I need to find that girl. She’s in trouble, and an asshole like you isn’t going to stand in my way. Do you fucking understand?”

He nodded weakly.

“Tell me who came in with her.” I loosened my hold on his shirt so he could speak.

“Caroline Bates,” he managed.

Fuck me. “Did they leave together?” I asked.

“Yes, after fifteen minutes of talking. The girl you’re looking for followed Caroline out the back door into the parking lot. When I went out there to take some garbage out, they were gone. That was about twenty minutes later.”

“That doesn’t make sense. ”

“She was waiting for her.”

“Come again?”

The bartender clawed at my hand, but I didn’t let him go. “Your girl. She was waiting for Caroline.”

“Why?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

I searched his eyes for a trace of a lie but saw nothing but genuine fear, so I released him—after plucking my two twenty-dollar bills from his front pocket. He staggered back and smoothed out his shirt while the drunkard watched us both with wide eyes.

I held up the two twenties. “If you hadn’t been such a pain in my ass, I might have let you keep them.”

The bartender rubbed at his neck and I pushed away from the bar.

What the hell was Carrie up to?

On my way out, I handed the drunkard one of the twenties and told him to make it count. He thanked me with a wobbly nod while the bartender glared daggers at my back. I returned the other twenty to my wallet.

Outside, I breathed in the fresh early morning air as the horizon turned a lighter shade of blue.

What was Carrie playing at? Whose loyalty did she hold? Had she been playing me all this time and I’d been too blind to see it because I was thinking with my cock, not my head?