“You are SO a wedding girl,” Connie said. “Some people are meant to shack up and live in sin. Like me. People like you, however, who hide a fundamentally conservative nature behind a streak of wild, are meant to wear tulle, dance to “At Last” by Etta James, and have a happily ever after.”
“You’ve got it backward.” Evie gave in to the tide and let the crowd push her forward. “It’s the wild in me that’s gone into hiding. When Zane and I were in high school, we’d do all sorts of crazy things—climb trees, walk fences, drag race … stuff like that. One Saturday night we got up on the church roof, watched the stars, smoked a joint, and talked until dawn. Then we rang the church bell and just got away before my dad and his deputy showed up. Jagger used to have fits when we told him what we did, although I think secretly he was jealous. He was just too responsible to join us.” She hesitated, bit her lip. “I always felt the most like me when I was with Zane, like I could do anything and he would be there to catch me. I still miss that feeling.”
She made it to the front of the crowd just as Ty came down the steps. “And, by the way,” she said over her shoulder. “If I was going to have a wedding, my first song would be Radiohead’s, ‘True Love Waits.’”
Connie laughed. “I’m definitely wearing leather.”
“Hey, bud. How was summer camp?” Evie squeezed Ty in a hug as soon as he stepped off the bus. He had grown over the last two weeks. She didn’t remember his head coming up to her shoulder, or his dark hair brushing his collar, but he was thinner, and deeply tanned. Had they not given him enough to eat?
“Great.” He returned the hug and then just stood in the circle of her arms, still young enough not to be embarrassed by her affection like some of the older kids were. Her Ty was quietly affectionate, grounding himself in stillness. Just like his dad. She suspected he would never be one of the kids who pushed their parents away. After what they had been through in Stanton, they were very close.
“Hi, Tiger.” Connie ruffled his hair. “Check out my streaks. Who does that remind you of?”
Ty pulled out of Evie’s embrace and frowned. “Superman?”
“No.”
“Fourth of July?”
“No again.” Connie gave an indignant sniff. “One more wrong answer and you’re back on the bus for another two weeks of starvation.”
“Is Connie joking?” Ty looked to Evie for confirmation and she laughed. He was always so serious and intense, and Connie, with her sharp wit, took full advantage.
“Connie’s always joking,” she said, taking his bag. “That’s why I don’t pay attention to anything she says.”
“I heard that, and now I’m only talking to Ty. Not you.” Connie put an arm around Ty’s shoulders and led him to her car. Evie followed behind, warm in the knowledge her son was home.
He was like Zane in so many ways, and now that she knew Zane lived in Conundrum, how could she not tell Ty he was here? Over the years, she’d shared as much of the truth as she thought Ty could handle: his father left before he was born, and although she tried to find him, she’d been unsuccessful. She had been careful to make sure he understood Zane’s absence wasn’t a rejection. There was no point in sharing her bitterness or turning him against a father he didn’t know. Maybe because she’d always hoped one day she would find Zane again.
Well, now she had found him, but things hadn’t gone as she imagined they would. Her anger at his abrupt departure had paled beneath her outrage when he told he had come back and left again when he’d seen her with Mark. All those years missed with his son, and he had the audacity to be angry with her. With so much hurt and so many secrets between them, she couldn’t imagine they would ever find their way back together, but she didn’t want to stand in the way of a relationship between Ty and his father.
If that’s what Zane wanted.
“Should we go out to lunch to celebrate?” She gave Ty’s hair a tug from behind. He had been fair until he turned four, then his hair had darkened and he’d taken to wearing it long—too long for a mother’s taste. But now, having seen Zane, the resemblance was unmistakable. No one could doubt he was Zane’s son.
“Can we get pizza? Camp food was crap, except for campfire nights.”
“Don’t swear, Ty. You know I don’t like that language.” At least not from him. But at Bill’s shop, swearing was a way of life, and she’d long since stopped trying to get the mechanics to curb their language.
“You swear,” he said. “All the time. You say ‘damn’ when things don’t go well.”
“And I put a quarter in the swear jar every time.” Good thing he had never heard her when she hung out with Zane and Jagger. They’d given her an entirely new vocabulary of swearwords that had taken a long time to shake after she became a mother and adopted a more conservative outlook—one that apparently made Connie think she was wedding material.
And yet sometimes the rebel in her broke free—the rebel Zane had fed with his own kind of wild.
What would Zane think about her dating Viper? Or would he even care?
FIVE
Before you start, get comfortable with your tools. You never know what you will need, and when.
—SINNER’S TRIBE MOTORCYCLE REPAIR MANUAL
Zane knew Jagger would find him.
No way would his best friend let this one slide. But he was grateful Jagger had, at least, given him a few days to get himself together after seeing Evie. Too bad he’d used that time to fall apart instead.
“I heard this has become your new home.” Jagger pulled out a chair at Zane’s table and waved his hand vaguely at the room in front of him, encompassing the full expanse of Rider’s Bar. The Sinners owned several legitimate businesses in Conundrum, including bars, strip clubs, nightclubs, trucking companies, and shops, all convenient for laundering money, hiding shipments of stolen goods, and turning over a profit for the club. Some members worked on the legitimate side. Others, like Zane, Jagger, and most of the Sinner executive board, handled the sale and supply of illegal arms.
“What of it?” He raised his voice over Foghat’s “Slow Ride.” One thing about Rider’s Bar, they always played good tunes. Too bad they couldn’t do something about the smell. Usually, Zane didn’t notice the thick yeasty scent of beer overlying the more pungent aroma of cigarette smoke, but tonight his belly roiled with every whiff.
“How many have you had, brother?” Jagger settled himself in the chair and pushed aside the collection of bottles Zane had asked Sherry to leave behind. Once a house mama at the Sinner’s Tribe clubhouse, Sherry had been thrown out of the MC after Axle used their relationship to steal guns from the club. At the urging of the executive board, and because Sherry had been physically coerced, Jagger had partially forgiven her betrayal and agreed to let her work at Rider’s Bar. Sherry had accepted her dismissal with good grace, but everyone knew she was just putting in time, hoping Jagger would let her back into the club.
“Sherry’s counting. Not me.” He stared at the sea of bottles, unable to meet Jagger’s gaze. This was not a conversation he wanted to have, and especially when he couldn’t think straight. Jagger had a way of cutting through the bullshit and right now the bullshit was the only thing keeping his heart from spilling out of his chest.
“She says you’re not fit to ride.”
“Sherry doesn’t know dick all about me.”
“Apparently, neither do I.” Jagger leaned back in his chair, folded his arms behind his head. “All these years, you’ve been going on about the woman who betrayed you and ripped out your heart, and you never told me it was Evie.”
“She tell you that?”
“Nope. But you just did.” Any other man would have smirked, but Jagger wasn’t the smirking type. He just laid it on the line.
“Didn’t matter.” Zane drained his bottle and shoved it across the table as the bitter taste of beer lingered on his tongue. Usually he went for the harder stuff, whiskey or rye, bourbon if Cade, the club treasurer was pouring, but when Sher
ry had come to take his order, he’d asked for beer—Corona—the kind he’d dropped on the kitchen floor of Jagger’s house after he saw Evie in his best friend’s arms.
“I’d say from the bottle count on the table it matters a hell of a lot.”
“Fuck off, Jag. I’m not in the mood.” Zane lifted a new bottle and Jagger grabbed his wrist.
“Fair warning. We had an executive board meeting scheduled for this afternoon. When you didn’t show up, I postponed the meeting and sent Shooter to hunt you down. The meeting is being reconvened right here at your table. You got ten minutes to sober the fuck up and do your job, so you might want to reach for the water I told Sherry to bring you instead of that bottle.”
They locked gazes, and tension hung in the air between them. “Get your fucking hand off me.”
Jagger released his wrist, and Zane tipped the bottle into his mouth. The vile taste of warm beer spread across his tongue. But damned if he would let Jagger tell him what to do.
“Wrong choice, brother.”
Zane snorted. “My life has just been one wrong choice after another. At least I’m consistent.”
“What happened between you and Evie that night of the party when you two ran off and left me playing vids on my own?” Jagger cut to the chase; he wasn’t a man who had time to waste. As president of the MC, he had over one hundred men depending on him, a multitude of businesses to run, and politics to handle. Although the executive board helped spread the load, in the end, he was the man in charge. And he loved it. Zane had never been interested in leadership, but he did enjoy his position as vice president and Jagger’s right-hand man. Power from the shadows. That was him.
“You mean the part before her dad tried to kill me and I became a wanted man? Nothin’.” He took another swig from the bottle and thudded it on the table. If Jagger kept this up, he’d be forced to leave and he didn’t know if he’d be able to stand, much less walk a straight line through the bar.
“Does it have something to do with Mark?”
“Jag.” He barked the name, cutting Jagger off. He couldn’t talk about Evie and the thought of her married to that no-good piece of slime made his stomach twist. Anyone who spent their study breaks getting drunk under the bleachers wasn’t good enough for Evie. In his eyes, no one had been good enough for her, and he’d made sure every guy in Stanton High School knew the score.
Lucky for Jag, the executive board made a timely arrival. Sparky and Gunner pulled up some extra tables. T-Rex and Tank, the junior patch members-at-large, brought chairs. Dax followed them in with Cade and Shaggy on his heels.
After Sherry served their drinks, Jagger gave the floor to Cade for the treasurer’s report. Tall, blond, and nicknamed “Thor” by the sweet butts for his resemblance to an actor who played the character in the movies, Cade had enjoyed the fringe benefits of being a biker—a new woman in his bed every night—until he met Arianne’s best friend, Dawn. Now the club’s notorious manwhore had an old lady, two adopted daughters, and a baby on the way. Zane had taken up the mantle of “Brother Least Likely Ever to Get Hitched” that Cade had passed down to him, and he expected to keep it until the day he died.
Cade reported that the war with the Jacks had drained their finances, and although the Sinners had some robust long-term holdings, they needed short-term gains to pay salaries and keep their businesses afloat—gains that were usually financed through the arms deals that the Jacks now sought to take over.
Dax, the club torturer, and father of five boys, offered to hire out his services to other MCs to bring in some extra cash. Lean and dark, relished his victim’s screams. Not many of the brothers could stomach Dax’s “work,” but Zane didn’t have a problem watching Dax use his psychology background to inveigle information from those who had been deemed a danger to the club. And when the psychology failed, and the tools came out, well, Zane had screamed louder the night after he got his mother’s name tattooed on his arm, and his dad cut it off with a rusty blade.
The whiskey went down smooth, with only the slightest burn, and for the first time since he’d seen Evie in Big Bill’s shop, Zane felt a flicker of warmth in his chest. He slumped back in his chair and prayed the meeting would be over soon so he could go back to the clubhouse and crash.
After turning down Dax’s offer, and similar suggestions from board members, Jagger turned the focus of the meeting back to the Black Jacks and their ambition to become the dominant outlaw MC, not just in the state, but nationwide. Instead of a full-on assault, the Jacks had infiltrated Sinner support clubs, turning members into puppet Jacks, willing to do their dirty work in exchange for the promise of being allowed to set up their own chapters. The Jacks had undercut some of the Sinners’ more lucrative arms contracts by using locals to run guns and evade detection.
Fed up with being on the defensive, Jagger and the national Sinner’s Tribe president had come up with a plan to plant an informant inside the Black Jack clubhouse who could feed them information, allowing them to gain the upper hand. National would be fielding candidates, but did the board have anyone in mind?
“I’ll do it.” T-Rex, now sporting a massive bruise on his forehead from Axle’s blow, jumped up when Jagger threw the question to the table. Easygoing and good-natured, T-Rex was well-liked and respected by the club members, but he didn’t have the edge that their rat would need to stand up to Viper, president of the Jacks.
“Needs to be someone connected to the club,” Jagger said. “But not in an obvious way. We have to assume they know who we are, so we’re looking for people who owe the club a favor. They gotta be smart and savvy otherwise Viper will sniff them out. We all know what happens to rats.”
“Same thing that shoulda happened to Axle, but the bastard got away,” Zane mumbled.
“Hard to believe he got away from you,” Gunner said. “You’re the fourth best shot in the club.”
“Fourth?” Tank, a dark-haired, slightly stockier version of T-Rex, scratched his head.
Gunner glanced over at Jagger and smirked. “Me, then Arianne, then Jagger, then Zane, then Cade.”
Cade bristled. “Girls don’t count.”
“And even if they did,” Jagger’s lips quirked at the corners. “Arianne can’t outshoot me.”
“That’s not what she says.” Gunner turned his attention back to Zane. “So now you’re bumped up to third. Makes it even harder to understand how Axle got away.”
“I had him trapped behind Big Bill’s shop and I ran out of ammo.” Zane didn’t see any need to mention Evie, or the fact he’d let Axle go to ensure she got away safely. Nor did he feel a need to mention the fact that Evie and Axle knew each other in what seemed to be more than a business-related way. Not until he understood what the fuck was going on.
“You ran out of ammo?” Gunner’s incredulous look would have been almost comical if not for the fact he sounded really pissed off, and pissing off the MC’s sergeant-at-arms was never a good idea. At six feet five inches tall, and heavy with muscle, his bald head tatted and his fists like clubs, Gunner could beat any man in a fight without breaking a sweat. Although Zane was vice president, Gunner was in charge of order in the club, and Zane was pretty sure letting a Black Jack go was a serious breach of the rules.
“I ran out of ammo. You got a problem with that?” Obviously Gunner did have a problem because he was now out of his chair and eating up the distance between them with easy strides of his long legs.
“What were you carrying?”
“Full-size Springfield XD.” Too late Zane realized his mistake—a mistake he would never have made if he’d been sober. Gunner came by his road name because he knew everything about weapons, and he would know exactly how much ammo Zane’s weapon held.
“The magazine holds thirteen. You missed thirteen shots?”
“Maybe I emptied it out earlier when I used your bike for target practice.” Zane pushed his chair away from the table. If Gunner wanted a fight, he’d get a fight. Something to liven up an othe
rwise dull meeting, and take Zane’s mind off the woman who had dominated his thoughts all week.
“Stand down.” Jagger shoved Zane back in his chair. “Gunner, take a seat. I’m not paying to have this bar redone again. The Jacks did enough damage the night they came here after Arianne.”
“Fucking Jacks,” Zane mumbled. And they were. Fucking. Jacks. They’d shot up Rider’s Bar in retribution for the Sinners blowing up their ice house, and only Arianne’s timely intervention and skill with a weapon had saved the bar from being totally destroyed.
“Fucking Axle,” Gunner said as he settled back in his chair.
“He’s like a cockroach.” Cade drained his glass. “No matter what we do, he keeps coming back. We can’t catch him. We can’t kill him—”
Gunner cut him off with a snort. “He’s been at Big Bill’s shop twice in the last few days. There’s something there he wants which means he’s gonna be back. This time, I’ll be there waiting for him. I don’t mind keeping watch, especially if that cute little detailer is around. Man, she’s got the sweetest little ass, and those jugs…”
Zane pushed himself up so fast his chair fell backwards. He didn’t want any of the Sinners around Evie. Although she was married, he knew his brothers, and some of them weren’t deterred by things like wedding rings or kids.
“Christ. Not again. Get a fucking grip.” Jagger held out an arm, blocking Zane’s path to a stunned Gunner.
“She’s an old friend.” Jagger raised his voice over Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever,” now blasting through the speakers. “Zane and I both knew her growing up. So no disrespect.”
Gunner held up his hands in a placating gesture. “No disrespect intended, brothers.”
Still primed and ready for a fight, Zane turned and pounded his fist into the wall, leaving a dent beside the many other dents from the many other bikers who came to the bar to drown their sorrows and vent their rage during a war that had seen far too many causalities.
“I agree with Gun.” Jagger folded his hands on the table as if Zane wasn’t about to explode beside him. “We need someone posted inside Big Bill’s shop during work hours and someone outside when it’s closed over the next few days. It’s our best shot at catching Axle. Evie said he was there for personal reasons. I’ll give her a call to see if she’ll give me any more information, but she’s reluctant to talk because both the Jacks and the Sinners are potential clients for her.”
The Sinner’s Tribe Motorcycle Club, Books 1-3 Page 70