2. Crash
CRASH
The lights are on in my bar when I pull in.
Seven-forty a.m.
We don’t open until eleven, and I’ve got the only key that matters.
Except I don’t. Not anymore. Duke handed a key to Cassidy Harlan last night, and there she is through the front window, set up at the rail with a pen behind her ear, ready to take this job seriously.
Of course she’s early. She didn’t even have to commute. She just walked over from the clubhouse.
I kill the engine and sit there with both hands on the wheel, losing an argument with myself.
Last night there was a plan. The plan had a name—Dana or Deena, fuck if I can remember. She came with a low-cut top and zero complications. She’d been on that clubhouse stool an hour, laughing at everything I said, and I’d already decided how the night would end. With her sucking my cock.
She’d made her intentions very clear, and I wasn’t going to object.
Then Cassidy walked in. And the woman whom I’d planned on fucking no longer held my interest.
I haven’t seen Saber’s kid sister in four years. I was always out of state on runs when she came for Christmas. She is not what I expected. For starters, she’s no longer a kid. She’s twenty-two years old with blonde hair, blue eyes, and curves that would feel so fucking good naked against my body.
That thought is the reason I cracked the glass. Saber would fucking kill me if he knew where my head was at. So I walked out of the party and didn’t come back.
I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve been talking my way into and out of trouble my whole life. I run this bar. On a good Saturday night, I can keep the whole bar laughing for an hour straight. And one look from Saber’s little sister and I’ve got nothing to say.
She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and she is the one woman on this earth I am not allowed to touch. Off-limits to every member in this club. Me most of all.
Saber’s sister. Saber, who is my club’s President. My best friend since grade school. The man who once got stabbed in the leg, because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
I’d take a bullet for that man.
And now she works in my bar and sleeps in the clubhouse. There is no square foot of my life she isn’t standing in.
Now I have to try to act normal and face her.
“Good morning.” She doesn’t look up when the door swings shut behind me.
It gives me another moment to compose myself.
“Hey.”
That’s it. Hey. I closed this room at two a.m. last Saturday with two dozen people hanging on every word I said, and this morning, my mind only produces one syllable.
She keeps working, so I get busy behind the bar. Pull bottles. Check the cooler. Anything that isn’t the line of her neck or the curve of her ass.
She flips a page. “Duke met me here at seven. He walked me through the first ledger, then a kid called with a question about dinosaurs. He went home after that.”
“His son. Leo.”
“He looked like a cute kid on the video chat.” She smiles. “My brother said these books were a mess. They’re actually a trainwreck, just so you know.”
“My fault,” I respond. “Duke is stretched thin. So I took over the books for the bar.”
“So, this disaster is yours.” She draws a line through a whole row of numbers, execution-style. “Good to know who to bill for the aspirin.”
A laugh gets out of me before I can kill it. She glances up at the sound, like she caught me at something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.
A smirk plays on her lips before she looks down again.
I stay at the register end, as far away as I can.
“You want coffee?” I jerk a thumb at the kitchen. “I’ll put some on.”
“Sure.”
I go make her coffee. In the kitchen, I put both hands on the counter and stand there a second, getting myself together.
She’s going to be here every day now. Every fucking day. Sleeping in the same clubhouse.
I pour hers and start shoveling sugar in. Four spoons. Same as when she was sixteen, perched on a clubhouse stool doing homework while the rest of us shot pool and pretended we weren’t a pack of criminals.
I set the cup next to her ledger. She looks at it. Then at me.
She wraps both hands around the cup and takes a drink. “You remembered the sugar.”
“Lucky guess.”
“The absurd amount of sugar I like in my coffee is not a guess, Crash.”
The front door saves my ass.
Saber comes in with his cut on, riding gloves hanging out of one pocket, and a gun tucked into a holster. That combination at eight in the morning means club business, not a social call.
“There she is.” He kisses the top of Cassidy’s head, lifts her coffee out of her hands, drinks, and grimaces. “Fuck, Cass. Still with the sugar.”
She takes it from him. “Serves you right. Get your own.”
He leans on the rail across from me, and from the look on his face, I’m about to get orders.
“Guys from National decided to leave today.” He checks his holster. “Razor, Viper, and I are riding out with them, then we are going on a run.”
Cassidy stops writing. “What kind of run?”
“Club business, Cass. You know not to ask.” He says it gently.
She holds his stare a beat, then drops her eyes to the ledger.
His attention swings to me. “We’ll be gone a week. Maybe ten days. You’ve got the gavel while I’m gone.” He looks over at his sister, then back to me. “Trapper and the other prospects will keep an eye on Shelby. You take care of Cassidy.”
Shit. The one job I shouldn’t take, but can’t refuse.
“Anything she needs.” He ticks it off like a grocery list, no idea he’s reading my death sentence.
“Most of her stuff is still in her car. Get a prospect to haul it up to her room today. She needs furniture for that room, take her to get it. Car acts up, you fix it. She wants anything in town, a brother goes with her.” He points at me.
“She’s sleeping under the club’s roof and working under yours, and I want my best on her. Okay?”
He wants his best on her. Jesus fucking Christ. Why did he have to say it like that?
“Yeah.” I keep my eyes on him and off her. “Of course.”
“I’m an adult.” Cassidy straightens in her stool. “I’ve been living alone for years. I agreed to the clubhouse. I didn’t agree to a babysitter.”
Saber shrugs. “You’ve got one, anyway.”
“Saber!” That’s her whole argument.
“Cass.” Just her name. The President surfaces in his face for half a second, even for her. “Warriors have been quiet two months. But I can’t promise that will hold. Don’t fight me on this one.”
She wants to fight back; anybody could see it loading up.
Then she trades it for leverage instead. “Fine. But we do it my way. He keeps me company, but he doesn’t hover. And he has to take me out for tacos as often as I want. Because if I’m stuck with a babysitter, I’m at least eating well.”
“That’s the spirit,” Saber says.
She points her pen at her brother. “Then it’s a deal.”
She smiles. Aims it straight at me, first one since I walked in, and I’d hand over a year of my life to be allowed to do a single thing about it.
Saber checks his phone and rounds the bar to hug her. Her arms come up around his ribs and hang on.
It’s obvious how much she means to him.
“Be safe,” she says into his cut.
“Always am.”
She chuckles. “No, you’re not.”
“But I always come home.”
He turns her loose, knocks his fist on the rail in front of me, and stops. Saber looks at me longer than he needs to, and for one cold second, I’m sure he’s seen straight through my skull to the thoughts I’ve had about his sister since last night.
“Take care of her,” he says.
“With my life.”
It comes truer than I meant to let it sound.
Saber nods once—satisfied.
The door swings shut behind him.
His bike fires up outside, and he’s gone.
And then it’s the two of us.
She clicks her tongue. “So… A week.”
“Ten days, maybe.”
“Then you’d better get used to me.” She takes a slow sip of the coffee. “You’re feeding me the whole time.”
“That so?”
“There’s nothing we can do about it. It’s the deal I made with the club’s Prez.” She sets the cup down and turns it a quarter turn, lining the handle up like it matters. “Starting today. Tacos. The good place, not the gas station one.”
“It’s barely eight in the morning.”
“So we have time to plan.” She tips her head back against the wall behind her stool and looks at me down the length of the bar, and there’s that smile again, the one that ought to come with a warning label. “Unless the VP of the Hellborn Kings can’t manage lunch.”
I should keep the bar between us. Instead, I lean on it across from her, because apparently, I’ve decided to make my own life harder this morning.
“I can manage lunch.”
“Good. Noon. You’re buying. And if you order for me, I’m telling Saber you let me starve.”
“I would never order for you.”
“You absolutely would. You’re the type.” She puts her pen behind her ear. “But I’m warning you not to try, Crash. You don’t know the first thing about what I want.”
I could think of a few things. I keep that thought to myself.
“Tacos,” I say. “Noon. You order for yourself.”
She holds my eyes a second longer than she needs to. “See? You’re trainable.”
I push off the rail and go find something to do with my hands before they do something on their own.
It’s going to be the longest week of my life.