Whiskey Neat (The Uncertain Saints MC Book 1)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  I chuckled and hugged her tighter to me, relishing in the comforting weight of her body on top of mine.

  I hated that, in just a few short hours, I’d have to let her go for God only knew how long.

  Chapter 13

  What’s worse than a man that wants his woman? A woman that wants her man.

  -Note to self

  Lenore

  I don’t know what I expected when it came to ‘avoiding’ Griffin Storm.

  What I hadn’t expected, though, was to see him everywhere I turned.

  It was like he hadn’t left me at all. He was everywhere.

  I saw him at the supermarket.

  I saw him at the store when he came for batteries.

  I saw him at the diner.

  I saw him out of town at the hospital when I went for my checkup.

  Sighing, I laid my head back against the soft cushion of my couch.

  Old re-runs of Roseanne were playing on the TV on TBS, something I found out just lately.

  Well, the last three days, to be specific.

  It was a special kind of torture to say the least.

  Especially with that last night we’d spent together.

  The entire night.

  We’d gone until the sun had peeked out over the horizon, and only then did he have Alison take me home.

  Alison had wisely gone to sleep in hers and Peek’s room.

  Something I hadn’t noticed since Griffin had brought me to his room and hadn’t let me up for air until I could see him clearly in the rising sun.

  Now here I sat, three days after I’d seen him last, and I was already thinking this was going to be impossible.

  Really impossible.

  Because my body yearned for his.

  I wanted to talk to him.

  To tell him about my day.

  My phone rang about thirty minutes later when the rolling credits on the last Roseanne they would play for the day flashed over the screen.

  “Hello?” I answered breathlessly.

  I didn’t know why I was holding out hope for it to be Griffin.

  He’d flat out said he wouldn’t be calling me.

  Even on a burner phone. Apparently those could be traced, too.

  Something I hadn’t known, and had told him so.

  You read too many books. The government can do anything it fucking wants to.

  “Hey, honey bee. I know you’re not going to like this, so I’m just going to cut to the chase,” my father said without preamble. “A little girl is missing in the woods behind our house. Their boat capsized when they hit an exposed tree stump in Lake Caddo.”

  My heart plummeted.

  I knew what he was going to ask me even before he asked me.

  “I’ll be there,” I whispered.

  I changed into a sturdy pair of jeans, knee length snake boots, grabbed my shotgun off the wall over the door, and strolled out of the door with my phone to my ear.

  “Hello?” Remy answered, sounding groggy.

  “I need to borrow your handheld GPS…and you if you’re here,” I said quickly as I hurried down the sidewalk to my car.

  I loved my car.

  It wasn’t the best in the world, now that it was over five years old, but it was mine.

  I’d bought it used. Now it was what I would consider ‘well used.’

  I yanked the door open, dropped into the seat, and immediately started my baby up.

  “Yeah,” Remy said, sounding clearer. “I’m at home taking a nap. But I can go with you when you get here.”

  I nodded. “I’m already on my way. A little girl’s missing in the woods behind my dad’s place…they think.”

  “Shit,” he hissed. “I have to call the neighbor over to watch the girls, but I should be ready when you get here. The GPS is charged, thank God.”

  He didn’t say a word about the fear he knew I was experiencing.

  He would know.

  Hell, everyone in the town would know.

  But I knew those woods like the back of my hand.

  My father had over fifty-five acres that spanned the length of Caddo, and Remy and I had explored them relentlessly when we were children.

  In fact, other than my father, the two of us were probably the best bets at finding the child.

  I just hoped I didn’t have to get near the water.

  That really wasn’t something I wanted to do if I could help it.

  At least it was daylight and sunny.

  It could’ve been way worse.

  Like raining…and being fifteen again worse.

  The moment I pulled into Remy’s driveway, he was in my passenger seat, slamming the door behind him.

  I backed out and waved to his girls as I nearly peeled out of the parking lot.

  “Shit,” Remy said, pulling a shirt on over his naked chest. “You don’t have to drive like that when I’m not buckled in.”

  I snorted.

  This was a usual argument for us.

  Remy didn’t like not being in control.

  It must be a man thing or something.

  A man argument I would never win with Griffin, because Griffin would’ve just manhandled me into the passenger seat before he rode anywhere in the passenger seat.

  “Did your dad give you any more details?” He asked once he buckled his belt.

  I shook my head.

  “No. He was pretty short. Like usual,” I answered.

  My father was a hardworking man at a steel plant in town.

  He was the man that supervised the workers over night.

  He’d been just a peon when he first started, but had graduated to the man that everyone feared, with not a little hard work and a lot of determination.

  Which meant he should be sleeping right now instead of looking for a lost kid.

  There was no way he wouldn’t have done his bit to help find the girl, though.

  He was a good man.

  However, after what had happened to the two of us, he’d gotten downright overprotective of not just me, but everyone.

  When it came to water and boater safety, he was the man you didn’t want to catch when you weren’t following boater safety rules.

  Idly, wondered if the person that’d been driving the boat that capsized had done something stupid.

  “Let me borrow your fingernails to open this piece of shit to replace the batteries,” Remy said, handing the handheld GPS over to me. “It’s not turning on. Good thing I brought extra batteries.”

  I took it from him, ignoring the way my body reacted to the word ‘batteries,’ and drove with my knee as I pried the back of the GPS open with my fingernails.

  Once opened, I handed it back just in time to make the turn into my parent’s driveway.

  I wasn’t surprised to see nearly half the town there.

  The only ones that weren’t there were the ones that worked out of town.

  And front and center, was Mr. Griffin Storm and his motley crew.

  Even Alison was there, causing me to smile.

  I really liked Alison, even though she reminded me of my mother more than most.

  “Your man’s here,” Remy said, getting out.

  He had his belt undone, and he tucked his shirt into his pants before doing the zipper and the belt up moments after.

  My eyes, however, stayed on Griffin as he took in Remy, then me.

  His mouth got hard, and he turned his back to me, pissing me right the heck off.

  I staunched the desire to go to him, and instead walked to my dad who was talking to the Sheriff.

  “Dad,” I called, hurrying to him. “You ready?”

  He nodded. “Ready. You’re taking a small group. Glad to see Remy’s here. He can take another. I’ll take one as well, and the rest of these people can just spread out from there. Sound good?”

  I nodded, and started to move towards the woods when I realized someone was behin
d me.

  I didn’t have to turn around to know it was Griffin.

  I could feel his body. It was like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket whenever he was in my general vicinity.

  “We’ll stick with her since we’re not used to these woods,” Griffin’s deep voice said as he moved directly behind me.

  I didn’t wait for my father to agree or disagree, only walked past my parents’ house and down the side yard into the woods.

  I took an immediate left and followed the fence line.

  “This trail will lead us around the outer edge of the property,” I told them.

  The road was a little over a hundred yards away, but if we spread out, it should be covered quite well.

  Especially with seven men at my back.

  Seven huge, tattooed, men.

  “You okay?” Griffin asked me, placing a hand on my backside for a short time before taking it away again.

  I nodded, took a deep breath, then released it.

  “If anyone knows what it’s like to be lost, it’s me. So I’ll search for the girl, but I’m not promising I’ll be able to get very close to the water,” I answered honestly.

  “The tracks run straight from your dock into the woods,” Griffin said. “We know she’s on the property somewhere, and there was a trail of blood on the doc leading into the woods before the trail was lost. So they know she’s at least pretty far from the water now that they’ve been looking for the last hour.”

  I’d wondered how they knew she was on my father’s property.

  It made sense that Griffin would know.

  He was the only one dressed for ‘work’ in faded blue jeans, a long sleeved chambray shirt, and his cowboy hat.

  He even had his pretty badge tucked next to the gun at his hip.

  “Is it normal for you to be in town so much?” I asked as we looked.

  “I was stationed here by my boss. I’m not supposed leave the forty square mile area surrounding Uncertain without explicit permission from my superiors,” he answered.

  I wanted to roll my eyes.

  The man at my side did whatever the hell he wanted, and didn’t ask permission from anyone.

  “And why are you stationed here? I would think this area would be a gray zone. There’s nothing here,” I said.

  I’d been wondering this for a while.

  There was literally nothing here.

  Why wouldn’t he be stationed somewhere further South, like Houston? Or possibly north, like Dallas?

  He hummed, stooping down to look at a track on the ground before standing and answering.

  “The river,” he answered, adding no explanation.

  “That sure clears up a whole lot,” I said dryly.

  He turned his head to the side, and smiled at me.

  My heart started to flutter.

  “The waterway is a breeding ground for criminals. The rivers and bayous go from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up here crossing through Caddo Lake. It travels through Louisiana on the way down, which makes it a perfect shipping route for illegal goods,” he answered.

  I blinked.

  “You’re shitting me,” I said, stepping over a log.

  Griffin steadied me as I moved to the other side before gracefully following me over.

  But it was the man named Mig that answered.

  “You remember that big weapon shipment that was caught just north of here?” Mig asked.

  I nodded my head. It had been big news at the time. A huge bust, and the cops had been astonished when they found it.

  The weapons had been stashed in the hull of a boat behind a layer of spray foam. The many assault rifles they discovered were each individually wrapped in plastic to protect them from the foam.

  “Yeah,” I nodded my head. “I do.”

  “That was shipped from the Gulf by a couple of Cubans looking for a huge payout. They traveled all the way up the Red River and were in the heart of Texas without ever being noticed. Caddo regulars all the way down remembered seeing the boat, and called in the tip once they spotted the boat on the news,” Mig explained.

  My eyes widened. “That’s amazing.”

  “It’s fucked is what it is. This body of water needs a fucking weigh station that can stop boats just like the highways do with large trucks. They also need some dogs that can sniff out drugs and explosives.”

  That was from Wolf.

  Griffin, though, nodded in agreement.

  “That weapon shipment was one of four apprehended shipments last month. Those are just the ones we knew about. There are probably hundreds more that pass through here with some type of illegal cargo,” Ridley offered his two cents.

  I mixed up Ridley and Casten when I glanced at them really quickly. The more you studied the two, though, the differences became more apparent.

  They looked incredibly alike, although I was assured by Alison that they weren’t related at all.

  Both were around six three or four with dark blonde hair. Both had brown eyes, the same hairline, and a cleft chin.

  Ridley, though, was the one with the perfectly manicured goatee while Casten had a well maintained beard.

  “Have they learned the kid’s name yet?” Peek called over from his position about ten feet away.

  “They must not know because no one’s calling her name,” I said, thinking that was the reason.

  “The girl’s deaf. That’s why no one’s bothering to call her name. Her name’s Lucy,” Griffin corrected.

  I blinked.

  “Well…that’s just sucky.” I then added, “How do you know all this?”

  “The man that was with her, the brother, told us before he was transferred to the hospital. The brother thinks that the girl went in search of help. Another boater found the brother clinging to the cooler that came out of the boat,” Wolf said.

  I nodded.

  Made sense.

  And it was eerily familiar.

  Hopefully nothing happened to the girl, though.

  “We’re nearly at the back of the property,” I said, stopping when I hit the back corner. “This property,” I said, indicating the other side of the fence with my thumb, “Belongs to Old Man Johns. He’s the one that lives on the other side of the road that runs along my father’s house.”

  “His property crosses the road?” Griffin asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  “We should send someone over to check that,” Wolf said as he scanned the area.

  I shook my head.

  “No, you won’t. He’s got all kinds of traps covering his property. I wouldn’t go on it if my life depended on it. The girl is on this side of the property if she’s anywhere,” I said in disagreement.

  “How do you know that?” Mig challenged.

  I pointed at the fence, then picked up a worm that was lying on the ground and laid it on the fence.

  The worm got zapped by the electric fence before it fell to the ground underneath.

  “That’s why,” I answered. “Old Man John doesn’t like anyone on his property, so he’s made it as difficult as he could to allow anyone access to it.”

  Hoping to skip the discussion of why I knew all about Old Man John’s land, I started to run at a ninety-degree angle from the fence post.

  Our land was shaped as a large parallelogram, and I was starting in the very middle and working my way back away from the lake.

  Remy was starting in the middle and moving down to the lake.

  My father was leading his own search.

  So, hopefully, between the three parties, we’d find Lucy.

  The next four hours were spent searching for a little girl that seemed incredibly hard to find, and after looking both up and back down again, I was fairly positive she wasn’t on the property.

  My dad’s acreage only amounted to about fifty-five acres, and we would’ve found her by now if she’d been on it.

  Which left me wonder
ing.

  “Anything?” Remy and my father asked simultaneously once we met up again.

  I shook my head. “She either walked past our house or is on Old Man John’s property.”

  “Shit,” both my dad and Remy hissed.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re gonna need to go talk to him,” Remy insisted.

  I ground my teeth.

  “Why me?” I asked a little shrilly.

  “Because you’re the only one he likes,” my father countered.

  “Mother fucker.”

  “Don’t speak like that, it’s crass,” my mother said from the front porch.

  I refrained from asking her why she wasn’t out here helping us as a comeback for her telling me how to talk.

  Instead, I started stomping across the driveway and even further across the street to the old man’s driveway.

  I was very aware of the huge man at my back, and almost happy that he was there.

  Mr. Johns wasn’t my favorite person.

  He was mean, and always kept my balls when they’d roll over to his property.

  Luckily, the driveway wasn’t booby trapped.

  But the moment I set foot onto his turf, the man came out on the porch and started to glare at me.

  His eyes, though, widened when they saw Griffin at my back.

  “What do you want?” Mr. Johns asked.

  “There’s a little girl missing on our property, or yours,” I said without waiting for the niceties of saying hi or anything formal like that.

  “And you think she’s on my property?” He asked carefully.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I do. We’ve checked ours. Yours is the only other option.”

  With the way the lake was situated around both of our properties, it really was just our property or his, unless the girl took to the road, and that was a whole different can of worms that we weren’t thinking about as of yet.

  “Where you been, girl? Come inside,” Mr. Johns said as he made his way back into his house.

  I tossed a look over at Griffin. “Don’t touch anything.”

  He nodded and we both followed him in, walking up to a computer screen he had mounted on the wall next to his TV.

  It looked like it could rival Fort Knox.

  Griffin must’ve known exactly what it was, because he stiffened.

  Me, though; yeah, I had no fuckin’ clue.

  Instead, I just stood there like a dumbass while the two men studied the screen.