“Ahh,” he said. “That’s where my granddaughter lives, too.”
Wonderful.
Like I needed her any closer.
“Nice area?” I asked, hoping to hide my reaction to his news.
“The best,” he confirmed. “I live in the back of the store still. Been there for going on thirty years now. But Knotting Pines is where all the rich bitches live. I bought Crockett a house when her parents kicked her out. Bought her one right next door to them that was bigger.”
My lips quirked.
“She was kicked out?” I asked.
He nodded, not elaborating on that one. Obviously, it was a more sensitive subject than the one we’d been talking about earlier. Noted.
“So what’s the condition that requires her to eat regularly?” I found myself asking the old man, unable to help my curiosity.
He grinned. “She gets all hangry. All that runnin’ and racin’ she does is my guess. Trust me when I say, she needs to eat regularly, or the girl literally will make your life a living hell and not even mean to.”
My lips twitched.
“Damn.” I shook my head. “That’s mean.”
“It’s the truth.” He shrugged. “I’m telling you what. When she was a kid, she was literally so fucking pissed off. Her sister touching her made her scream bloody murder. We were in the car for an hour. Her brother was beside her, trying to stay really far away from her so he didn’t get screamed at like her sister. And she was in just this really shit mood. I’m talking, look at her and she’s growling and biting your hand off. And then I see this great little Mexican food place called Nicky’s, and I’m like… this is good. She likes Mexican food. That’s the one food she’ll eat. So, I pull off, hoping that when I feed her, she’ll at least not go all asshole on her siblings for the entire trip home. We pull in, they put a bowl of queso in front of her, and she goes from growling and snapping to excited and dancing within the span of a few chips.”
My lips were twitching hard.
“Yeah?” I grinned. “That’s fucking great.”
He held out his hand to me and I reached forward and shook it. “Name’s Murphy Archer,” he said. “I used to own this place before I sold it to my granddaughter, Crockett. Crockett’s the brunette who went to start making you that burger.”
I introduced myself also.
“Zachariah Caruso. Call me Zach.” I shook his hand one more time.
“Order up!”
I looked over to see Crockett holding my burger and a bag of chips at the end of the counter.
I walked toward her and took my plate.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
She smiled at me, “No problem.”
I went and sat down, then had the best damn burger that I’d had in years.
Hell, it might’ve been the best one I’d had in my life.
• • •
CROCKETT
“What the hell was that?” I breathed as the sexiest man I’d ever seen in my life walked back to his table after refilling his drink.
In my sweats.
That he hadn’t paid for.
That I’d willingly give to him, over and over again, as long as he graced me with his eyes.
Jesus, those eyes were to die for.
“That was us doing a favor to a man that could use it right now,” my grandfather said carefully.
I looked over at him.
“And you told him your story,” I said. “And you also told him I was a hangry person.”
He grinned. “You are a hangry person.”
“Still, you don’t tell the hot guy that!” I cried.
“Well, all it took for your attention to be grabbed was for a tall, dark and handsome ex-con to walk through the door?” he teased.
I rolled my eyes.
The man wasn’t just ‘tall, dark, and handsome.’ He was tall, sure. Way over my five-foot-four-inch frame. He had to be at least six-foot-three, if not more. Because my grandfather was six-foot-three. I knew what six-foot-three looked like. I’d been staring at it for most of my life.
But that was the least of what attracted me to him.
Because holy God, was I really attracted.
The man was sex personified.
If one of my book boyfriends had come out of the pages and stood before me, this was exactly what I would picture.
Honestly, if I was being one hundred percent truthful, I didn’t think that men like him existed.
I mean, he had it all.
The height.
The sexy beard that was just a tad too bushy, but still he worked it.
His dark brown hair was a bit overly long for my usual tastes, but for that man, I could definitely get used to it.
Then there were his eyes.
Not green.
Not blue.
A combination of both that started darker green in the middle nearest the iris and flowered out to sea glass around the edges.
And he had chest hair.
A lot of it if what I could see poking out of the top of his sweatshirt was anything to go by.
Again, usually I didn’t go for chest hair. But I had a feeling that anything that had to do with this tall, dark and obviously dangerous guy would do it for me.
As long as he had a somewhat semi-decent sized dick, I had a feeling I could live happily ever after with him.
He was just that hot.
“What’s that look for?” I heard said.
I jolted as I turned and looked at Murphy.
“What look?” I lied.
He grinned and rolled his eyes. “You know what I’m talking about, girl.”
I did.
I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Still…
“Can you deal with this while I go dump the oil out?” I asked, gesturing toward the now-dirty grill.
He looked at the grill, and when he didn’t immediately open his mouth to say ‘yes’ I knew that today was one of the days that he couldn’t clean the grill.
My grandfather had lived a hard life.
He’d had four back surgeries, multiple shoulder surgeries, a couple of hand surgeries, and just as many knee replacements. The man was falling apart at an accelerated rate of speed, and there were days that he physically just couldn’t handle doing what he was once able to do.
I patted his shoulder. “You just go sit back down, Murph. I’ll handle it. I’m refreshed.”
He snorted.
We both knew that was a big ass lie.
I wasn’t refreshed.
I was tired as fuck and I needed a damn vacation so bad that I could taste it.
I wanted to go to Disney World, and I wanted it so badly that I’d been planning it for years.
The only problem was, Murphy couldn’t man the store by himself, my brother would have to be off to handle it, which meant his own vacation from his job and I wasn’t doing that to him.
And my sister would flat out say no way in hell. At least the one that was old enough to deal with my store.
My stepsister manning this place on her own? I’d come back to the place trashed.
Which meant I was on my own.
Like always.
Unless I finally hired someone to be a manager… which wasn’t likely to happen seeing as everyone considered the hours that I was asking for to be a little bit too much.
“We’ll look again at the applicants tomorrow,” he suggested.
I wished.
The applicants that we had were scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Those that didn’t care about the hours were desperate and the majority of the time, the reason they were looking for a job in the first place was due to the fact that they’d been fired from their last one.
“I’ll place another ad.” I shrugged.
The ads normally did well on all social media until my stepmother saw the ad—and I was convinced that she went out of her way to look for them—and sabotaged them in some way.
Last time it was to comment, every half hour on the hour, about how awful the store was. That the damn place had been held up at gunpoint no less than three times, and that it was a robber’s paradise due to the dark and questionable area.
“I think you should look into blocking your stepmother. Maybe that’ll keep her from seeing the ad,” he suggested.
He may be right.
Instead of talking any more on the subject, because honestly the number of hours that I worked were killing me and making me slightly depressed, I cleaned the grill.
Only when I was done did I gesture toward my grandfather that I was going to take the oil out.
Lugging the rather large bottle of oil outside to the designated spot, I’d just turned to head back inside when I saw a large shadowy figure holed up in the alley.
And he wasn’t the sexy one that I’d been admiring for the last half an hour.
Heart beating a hundred miles an hour, I wondered what I should do.
Normally, I would’ve gone back in the alley door, but in my haste to get outside, I’d forgotten the keys that would get me inside the back door.
Leaving me with no other choice but to go the front way.
Or beat on the back door and hope that my grandfather could make it in time.
I decided to go with the beating of the door.
The guy started to creep out of the shadows. For the first time, I thought I might actually see his face instead of his shape lurking just far enough back that I can’t identify who it is. Just as I gave one hefty beat of my hand, the door opened.
Right into my face.
“Oww,” I whined as I held my nose and headed inside without hesitation.
I did not want to be out there with whoever was stalking me.
Nope. No. Nuh-uh.
“Sorry.”
My breath hitched at the dark and dangerous tone.
“Oh,” I breathed. “Hi.”
He jerked his chin in my direction. “Felt bad for not payin’ for my clothes. I’ll clean up a bit.”
“Thank you for getting the door. There was someone out there,” I told him. “Creeped me out.”
His eyes narrowed. “You know who it was?”
If I knew who it was, I wouldn’t have been scared to death in my own restaurant for the last half a year.
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t.”
When I led him farther inside through Murph’s apartment and then the break room, I barely looked at where I was going.
The man, Zach, however, did.
He took everything in as he followed me to the store.
When we got there, I saw that he’d already cleaned up his trash and put up the chairs.
“Thank you,” I said softly. “I appreciate it.”
He grunted out something unintelligible and then headed for the front door.
“Thank you for the food and the clothes.”
Then he was gone, and I felt like he took a piece of me with him.
CHAPTER 2
I need to start making healthier choices.
-Me as I walk into a bakery
ZACH
Present day
“Hey, who are you?”
I looked up from the truck that I was working on to see a little girl, about six or seven, standing in my garage.
I blinked.
“I’m Zach. Who are you?” I asked, looking around for a mother or a father to this little kid that was trespassing on my property.
“My name is Zakelina.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you make so much noise?”
My lips almost twitched. “I don’t intentionally make too much noise. Did I wake you up?”
It was after nine in the morning. I didn’t know a single kid that would still be home at nine o’clock in the morning on a school day. Let alone not awake.
“You didn’t.” She shook her head. “My mom and dad forgot about me. Do you think you can give me a ride to school?”
I felt my stomach clench. “They forgot about you?”
She was about to open her mouth to say more but a car came zooming down the road and pulled into the driveway so fast that she slid a little onto the grass.
“Oh my God. Zak!” the woman cried frantically, leaving her car running and her door hanging open as she sprinted toward the house.
“Mom!” the girl, Zakelina, yelled. “I’m right here! I was just asking our new noisy neighbor if he’d take me to school.”
The woman’s head whipped around so fast that she likely had whiplash.
Her eyes went wide as she frantically searched the area for her.
When she finally found me, her eyes went even wider.
“Zak, get over here, baby,” she said, looking at me with disgust in her face.
I narrowed my eyes, knowing exactly what she was thinking.
I didn’t like it one bit, either.
I was many things, but a fuckin’ pedophile wasn’t one of them.
“Maybe you should pay more attention to your kid,” I suggested when she met Zak halfway across the lawn. “And not forget that you left a young girl at home alone.”
The woman swallowed, and I could see that she wanted to say more, but common sense dictated that she not.
Especially when she took me in, top to bottom.
I was a big guy.
Six-foot-three and a half and filled with so much muscle that it was more than obvious that I worked out.
Which was funny, because that seemed to be the only thing that I had to do some days.
Then again, other days I worked so much that I barely had time to catch any shut-eye or eat.
Working for Lynn, the man that’d gotten me out of prison after serving only a fraction of my sentence, wasn’t what I was used to.
But after losing my medical license, there was nothing else I could do.
Unless I wanted to be a midwife, which I most certainly did not.
At this point, based on my looks, I had a feeling that no rational woman would want me to be anywhere near her and her vagina.
At least, not a well-balanced one, anyway.
“I didn’t mean to leave her,” she said. “Today was rough.”
I studied her eyes, took in her stiff figure, and wondered what ‘rough’ was to her.
I doubted that it was anything compared to my rough.
“Sure,” I said. “And I didn’t call her over here or anything. She came on her own. I didn’t even know there was a kid over there until today.”
She swallowed and then nodded. “I’m sorry.”
She was sorry for automatically thinking that I was a sicko.
Nice.
“Have a good one.” I turned and walked back to my garage.
I was working on restoring a 1965 Chevy Corvair for a friend.
It definitely wasn’t the flashiest of vehicles—I couldn’t do paint and body for shit—but I could work the hell out of an engine.
And that was exactly what I was doing.
Making the baby sing.
My good friend, Ford Spurlock, had bought it for a fraction of its value off of a car lot. And though it needed a hell of a lot of work, we both could see the potential.
He had the paint and body know-how, while I had the rest.
Together we would make one hell of a car and sell it to make a pretty penny.
That pretty penny would then be split, and together we would find the next vehicle to do the same to all over again.
It was a fun side job that had definitely kept me sane over the last six months after getting out of prison.
When Lynn didn’t keep me busy doing my real passion—medicine.
Just last week I had to patch up a few of the Revenants when they’d gotten into a fight saving a group of boys from sex traffickers out of Tennessee.
Granted, I’d been with them at the time and had sustained similar injuries, but I’d been able to do my job until another one of the guys’ wives, Wyett, could patch me up.
“Hav
e a good day, Mr. Zach!” the other, much younger and cuter Zak, called.
I waved without saying anything, and then went back to my work until I got hungry an hour or so later.
Looking at my watch, I grinned.
It was an acceptable time to eat.
My body started to pulse with anticipation, the thought of seeing Crockett again playing havoc on my soul.
It hadn’t been that long since Juniper, the woman that I’d had intense feelings for, broke it off.
And it had taken time to get myself straightened out.
Only, I’d never thought that another woman would catch my eye, and hold it, even better than Juniper ever did.
Getting on my bike, I headed to Crockett’s Corner before I’d even given myself time to think, only realizing about halfway there that I probably should’ve changed my clothes.
I was in a pair of old sweatpants, a tight black wife-beater, and flip-flops.
Hell, I’d even forgotten to put my cut on, which I never did.
When I’d joined up with the MC, I was one of the only ones in the club who really understood club life.
The Souls Chapel Revenants was supposed to be a cover for the side business that Lynn had us doing. A way to cover up our movements, explain why we were all in podunk Souls Chapel, Texas.
At first, everyone didn’t quite understand the rules of MC life.
So I’d taken it upon myself to teach them the ways of this new world, and one of those ways was to always, always, always treat your cut like the valuable possession that it was.
Because if another motorcycle club came into town and saw how they’d disrespected those cuts by not wearing them, they would immediately become suspicious.
It was finally taking root, all those times that I’d hammered it into their brains that it was absolutely not okay to leave the cut at home.
Except, apparently, in my own head.
Then again, Crockett had a way of making me fuckin’ crazy.
Like wearing flip-flops on a motorcycle when the possibility of losing a goddamn toe was very real.
Luckily, I pulled into the driveway that’d become very familiar to me, and parked next to the same truck I always parked next to, which I assumed was either Murphy’s since it never seemed to move or Crockett’s.
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