by Mia Malone
Black was gone. He’d said that he’d go and deal with the laptop and that apparently meant him leaving with it for places unknown.
I asked Gee, and she said it was club business and wouldn’t tell me more.
So, I asked Roddy, and he said it was club business and wouldn’t tell me more either. I glared at him, and he glared back until I started wondering if could perhaps ask someone to go to the local pharmacy for eye drops because my eyes would be drying up if this continued. I wasn’t going to back down, though, and to my surprise, Roddy’s lips suddenly twitched.
“For fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “I’m an old man. Let’s sit down, and I’ll tell you.”
I smirked, which he saw, and gave me a soft slap on the back of my head as if I was a teenager misbehaving, and my smirk widened into a smile.
“You’re not that old,” I said with a chuckle. “Now tell me. What’s going on?”
He told me that Black had gone to talk to some other clubs, “Down south.” I didn’t ask what that meant, mostly because I suspected that I didn’t want to know. One of the clubs was apparently good at finding shit. Then Black had moved on to talk to a friend who was with law enforcement.
“Joke’s friend,” I said calmly.
“Yup. Mac. He’s a good guy. He’ll handle the legal part of shit.”
I blinked, opened my mouth but closed it again.
If there were a part of shit which was illegal, I decided that I did not want to know about that either.
“Good girl,” Roddy murmured, and his face softened.
“When is Black coming back?” I asked and felt a blush creep up my cheeks.
I didn’t know the man, for crying out loud. He’d had his hands on my ass and his tongue in my mouth, and I touched myself each and every goddamned night thinking about him.
But I didn’t know him so I couldn’t miss him.
Could I?
Roddy narrowed his eyes slightly but shrugged and said casually, “He’ll be back when shit’s sorted. I’m calling Ice back too.”
Ice.
It would be interesting to meet him, I thought.
Black’s twin brother, the easygoing and charming one if Ronnie was to be believed, which I suspected she was.
“When shit’s sorted?”
“Yup.”
“What if he can’t sort shit out?”
Roddy laughed then and gave me an exasperated look.
“You really don’t know my boy at all.”
His boy hadn’t been a boy in the past thirty-five years, but I didn’t correct him because he was right.
I didn’t know Black.
So I shouldn’t miss him.
But I did.
***
Black
DeeDee was an airhead with a pretty face and fucking fantastic boobs his twenty-year-old self would have done anything to get his hands on. Black looked at her, and his fifty-something self mostly felt like roaring at her to get a damned grip, which he didn’t because it would lead to absolutely nothing except another round of tears.
“Give me your phone,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
Why? He’d just told her he wanted the image of Desi deleted so what did she think he wanted it for?
With a sigh, he stretched out a hand and pulled the thing from her, used her thumbprint to unlock it, and turned to make a small gesture at his second, Brooks.
“Yup,” Brooks said and stepped forward to face DeeDee while Black walked away.
DeeDee whined while he searched through her pictures, and – whoa – she really did have fantastic knockers. He knew this because she’d taken pictures of them.
He grinned when he saw Desi holding a joint. The girl looked uncomfortable and had puckered her mouth up tightly enough to sharpen a pencil in it. Any police officer seeing that would rip up the charges immediately. Or when he’d stopped laughing, at least.
Black airdropped the picture and a select one with DeeDee in it to his own phone, deleted the one on Desi from the girl’s phone, checked for cloud storage or anywhere else she could have saved it and turned back to the girl.
“I hope you haven’t sent this somewhere?”
“No,” the girl mumbled.
Yeah, that was a lie.
“Good. Because if it shows up anywhere, the one with your tits on display that I now have will show up somewhere too.”
“What?”
“A lesson for you, little girl,” Brooks rumbled. “Don’t take nudie-pics. Stupid as fuck. You won’t like what we could do with them, and your papa won’t like seeing them all over the internet.”
DeeDee was about to protest, but Black glared at the girl, and she blanched.
“I only had that one. And I only sent it to the Sheriff.”
Black sighed and went through her email until he found the offensive one and deleted that too.
“She deserved it for being such a boring bitch,” DeeDee said.
Yeah, Black thought. Airhead.
“Not a very clever thing to say to my face about our girl,” he said.
Then he dropped the phone on the ground and put the heel of his boot on it until he heard a satisfying crunch.
DeeDee squealed, and but he didn’t care.
“Let’s go,” he grunted, and Brooks nodded.
They were on the road toward his sister’s home within minutes and arrived that evening in time to visit the local bar.
“Shit sorted?” Joke asked and handed him a beer.
“Far as I can tell.” Black drank half the beer in one go, set it on the bar and nodded. “Yeah. All images of Desi are taken care of. Doug got the ones from the scumbag. I got the ones from the girl and the records.”
“You –” Joke winced. “I assume that meant you somehow got into the C-Springs police department and stole evidence, but I don’t wanna know.”
“Knew my sis wouldn’t hook up with an idiot.”
“She didn’t. Mac has the computer?”
“Nope. We looked through it, and it’s full of shit of the kind that is not so good for Sheriff White. It’ll be with Denver PD tomorrow. A buddy will leave it with a buddy there. He found it laying around, it seems.”
“They’ll get the man.”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t?”
“Dad says that Cas wants him to pay the legal way. Can’t say I agree, but there it is.”
“Huh.”
“What does that mean?”
“You going back to the Wolves MC for the weekend? They’re having a party, I hear.”
Black knew what kind of party they’d have at the Wolves’ compound. It would be one for the inner circle, and there would be women. The evening would end with everyone fucking whoever they felt like doing, and if a couple of them felt like doing the same person, then that happened too. He’d been there more than once and had enjoyed it, but it seemed... He just wasn’t in the mood for it.
“Nah. Heading home.”
“Huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
The look in Joke’s eyes was way too innocent, and Black sighed.
“Get the hell off my back.”
“Wasn’t aware I was on it,” Joke said calmly, and added, “She’s pretty.”
Black didn’t even try to pretend he didn’t know who the fucker was talking about.
“Not my type,” he said.
It wasn’t a lie. Cassandra Davis was not his type. She was too soft. A woman with her background would get chewed up by just about anyone in a club like Thor MC. Everyone would be nice to her, but they wouldn’t respect her and a man like him needed –
What in the holy hell was he thinking? He wasn’t going to settle down with anyone. He’d tried that once and the past ten years without being tied to a woman had been the best of his life.
“But pretty,” Joke pushed.
“Sure,” Black agreed with a shrug.
Fucking gorgeous, was what he would have said,
but pretty worked.
***
He was supposed to report to Roddy directly when he got back, but his feet took him to Cassandra’s cabin. He told himself that it was because he needed to inform her of what they’d done and what would hopefully happen next, but it wasn’t.
He just wanted to see her, which was stupid.
Through the window, Black saw Cas and Desi. They were cooking something, and music was blaring so he couldn’t hear them, but it looked like they were singing, and their hips were swaying to the music. Cas was in a pair of tight jeans, and he couldn’t look away.
Jesus. Her ass swung from side to side and he felt how all blood in his body moved south.
Then Desi turned and squealed, which he couldn’t hear but saw clearly when she moved toward the door.
Cas turned, and a smile spread on her face as their eyes met. She had a tight tank-top and no makeup, and her hair was held back in a messy bunch, and yeah.
Fucking gorgeous.
“Black!” Desi shouted when the door flew open, and he turned. “When did you come back?”
“Just now.”
“Come,” she said and pulled the arm of his leather jacket. “We’re cooking. Come eat with us.”
“I was just –”
“You have to.”
Desiree was right.
Right then, when he was pulled into a kitchen where something smelled fantastic and a woman with soft brown eyes watched him with a smile on her lips... He absolutely had to.
Chapter Four
Border crossings
Black
“Come on,” he said and stretched a hand out toward her. “We’re going for a ride.”
“What?”
“You need to see a little bit more of Rogan than the inside of the Thor compound, babe.”
“I can’t leave Des –”
“We won’t go far,” he said smoothly. He’d known she’d say that and had made sure Desiree would be busy for a few hours. “Desi is with Roddy and Gee, and there’s no way anything’s gonna happen to her in their kitchen unless she cuts herself on a knife. Or, since they are currently trying to sort out the bottomless pit that is Mom’s accounting system, more likely a paper cut.”
“She’s quite disorganized.”
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “Tried to show her how we do it in the garage, and she stabbed me.”
Cas’ eyes widened, and she blinked slowly, but he held his laughter back and watched her calmly.
“She stabbed you.”
“Yup.”
“With what?”
“A needle.”
She did that owl-blink again, and this time, he couldn’t hold his grin back.
“Where?”
He tapped his ass with two fingers and muttered, “Should have known better than to be condescending when she was trying to act like super-woman.”
“Super-woman?”
“Mom can’t sew worth shit, but she likes to pretend she can. She also likes to add patches to her vest, and she likes to add them herself.” He grinned and added, “Looks like shit, so Dad gets one of the other old ladies to sort it out when Mom’s off somewhere, and Mom pretends she doesn’t notice.”
That got him the smile he’d aimed for, but it didn’t reach her eyes. Not fully.
Perhaps it never did, he thought. Maybe he was wrong, and the tense edge in her pale brown eyes was just how she always looked.
“Come on, Cas. A short drive, some lunch. We’re back again in an hour.”
“Um,” she mumbled and glanced toward his parents’ house. “Yeah. Okay. It would be nice to get out of here, but only for a little while, though.”
“You wanna use Sissy’s bike?”
“Nu-huh,” she said, and added, “My butt still hurts from the drive up here.”
“Can’t have that,” he muttered and motioned for her to climb up behind him.
When he started up his bike, he tried to not think about her ass. Or how he could offer to give her a massage to ease the pain, which would be beyond sleazy, and he was a lot of things, but he wasn’t that much of a douche.
Cas held her arms around his waist, and he wished they could have gone on a longer drive, but she was strung up tightly and would want to stay where she could still see the compound. He stopped less than half an hour away, spread out the blanket he’d brought, and pulled out a bag of sandwiches he’d gotten from Ronnie and a six-pack of beer. Someone like Cas was probably used to white linen cloths and fancy meals, but he wasn’t going to pretend he was anything other than a roast beef on sourdough and Bud kind of man.
“This is great,” she mumbled around a mouthful of food. “I do this all the time at home. Sometimes I ride too.”
It took his stunned mind a second to realize that she probably meant horses and not something else and he wondered what the heck had happened to his goddamned brain. He liked sex, and he had it but there were other things in life, so it wasn’t as if it consumed his thoughts around the clock. Still, since she showed up in Rogan, he’d been thinking about it, not constantly, but a lot. Or, yeah. Pretty much constantly.
“If shit drags out then we’ll find you some horses, Cas. Not my thing, but Ronnie loves it. Brooks does too.”
“If shit drags out?”
“We’re sorting out stuff, you know that. Should be a few days and then you’ll be good again.”
“Why are you doing this for us, Black?”
He drank some beer and thought about that.
“At first because Sissy asked us,” he said slowly. “Then because we saw Desi and it pissed us off.” He shrugged and added, “Then we found out what that asshole does, and it pissed us off too. That shit isn’t right.”
Black decided not to share why he’d gotten more involved than what strictly was necessary and wasn’t sure if he could have explained it anyway. It had started out as an urgent need to get into her panties, but it wasn’t just that. It made him a goddamned pussy, but he wanted to see her smile for real. Wanted to find out who she was when she wasn’t always looking over her shoulder and pretending to be okay. And yeah. He wanted his hand in her panties too.
“I can’t believe Sissy just called you,” she said. “And I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t found me.”
He snorted out a chuckle and handed her another beer.
“Babe.”
“Babe what?”
“There was no way we wouldn’t find you. You had that half-assed plan to cross the border illegally, but you see, no one crosses the border around here without Thor knowing about it.”
“Really?”
“Kind of what we do, sweetie.”
“You smuggle people across the border? Like Sheriff Wh –”
“Do not compare us to that ass, Cassandra,” he snapped. “We do not do the shit he does.”
“Well, what do you do?”
Black sighed and tried to find good words to describe what they did.
“It started a long fucking time ago, Cas... Ice and I were a couple of years old, Sissy a few months. Mom and Dad went hiking. They did it all the time, still do. We all do. We go skiing or hiking, some like riding and we get out on our bikes or on our snowmobiles... The mountains here, they’re our playground. Our backyard. So, they got one of the old ladies to watch us kids and went off for a few days. And they met a man. He needed to get away for a while. Desperately.”
Black paused and waited to see how she reacted to that fact and realized that she hadn’t reacted at all. She was calmly waiting for him to continue.
“So, yeah. Mom and Dad helped the man over the border, got him a job with someone they knew.”
“They walked him over the border.”
There was still no reaction, and he frowned, but added with a shrug, “It’s not that far.”
“There’s a border crossing out here?”
“Well, there are places you can cross, if that makes it a crossing,” Black said carefully.
“Huh
.”
Huh? Except for a raised brow, was that the only reaction he’d get?
“Yeah,” he said when she kept watching him. “Mom and Dad went across a few months later to see if he was good. He’d saved up some cash, wanted his sister to have it, and they brought it back. That’s how it started.”
“You smuggle people across the border?”
“People, stuff, whatever,” Black said. “It’s not an everyday activity and there isn’t exactly a queue of people skipping over illegally. Also, not something we charge tons of cash for doing, as you can see.”
He made an arc with his hand, indicating the lack of mansions in front of them.
“Drugs?”
“Nope,” Black said firmly. “We don’t deal with that shit. It destroys fucking everything, so Roddy said no to that from the start. Others do, and we see them sometimes. Move them out of our turf if we have to, tip the authorities off if it gets ugly, but it rarely does. We usually don’t have any issues with the ones operating in that area because we never touched it and everyone knows it.”
“You don’t do drugs?”
“No.”
He’d just said so, hadn’t he?
“Um, I beg to differ.”
Black frowned and wondered who the hell had been doing something inside the Thor compound which was the only place she’d been.
“Who and what?”
“Not saying who because I don’t know. Smelled it, though.”
“Smell –” He cut himself off with a grin. “Babe. Pot isn’t drugs.”
“It’s illegal.”
“Not in the state you’re from.” Her pretty mouth snapped shut, and he couldn’t hold a chuckle back. “And actually, not here either anymore.”
“Okay, you have a point,” she muttered. “Do you smoke it?”
She looked at him with a frown, and he had to laugh.
“Not often, no. It has happened, but I don’t like the taste of it. I like beer.” He raised the bottle and wiggled it, but added, “And whiskey. God, I love whiskey.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“So, Sissy called to let you know we were coming?”
That was a change of topic if he’d ever heard one, but he’d anyway prefer to stop talking about club business with her, so he shrugged and said, “Yeah. Called daily until we found you, got Mom all worked up which got Dad on the road looking for you. And there you were.”