Doc’s Obsession (Forsaken Angels MC #4)

Chapter 1

ONE

EVIE

I dropped the tray.

Not a gentle fumble. Not a graceful save where I caught the glasses mid-air and laughed it off. The whole thing went sideways out of my hands, three beers and a whiskey neat, and hit the floor with a crash that silenced the entire bar.

Glass everywhere. Beer spreading across the boards in a slow, golden tide. The whiskey glass had somehow survived, rolling in a lazy circle near a biker’s boot, and every set of eyes in Angel’s Rest swung toward me while I stood there with my empty hands and my face on fire.

“Shit,” I whispered. Then louder, because apparently I was committed to the performance. “I am so sorry.”

The biker whose boot the whiskey glass was kissing leaned down and picked it up. He was enormous. They were all enormous in here. Shoulders like doorframes, arms thick with ink, leather cuts worn soft from years of road and weather. He looked at the glass, looked at me, and grinned.

“That was good whiskey, sweetheart.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll get you another one. On me.” I was already crouching, picking up the biggest pieces of glass, my hands shaking just enough to make the whole thing worse. “I’ll get everyone another one. On me.”

“On you?” He raised an eyebrow. “Darlin’, you’ve comped more drinks than you’ve served this week.”

Someone at the next table laughed. A warm sound, no meanness in it. “She dropped my wings yesterday.”

“In my defense,” I said, straightening up with a handful of wet glass, “the plate was hot.”

“The plate is always hot. That’s why there’s a towel.”

“I know that now.”

More laughter. The kind that invited you in instead of pushing you out.

I’d been here five days and I’d broken more glassware than any bartender in the history of the establishment, mixed up orders so badly that one man got a Caesar salad instead of a cheeseburger but just ate it without complaint, and made the till do something on Tuesday that Bree said she’d never seen before and genuinely didn’t know how to fix.

And yet they kept smiling at me.

I didn’t understand it. Where I came from, mistakes had consequences.

Dropped the wrong fork at the wrong dinner and my mother’s eyes would go flat across the table, a look that could freeze champagne.

Wore the wrong shoes to a charity luncheon and the silence in the car home was so thick with tension, it felt like you could slice it.

Every interaction was graded. Every moment was a performance review.

You were either an asset to the Carrington name or you were a problem.

I’d been a problem exactly once. Three weeks ago, sitting in my parents’ dining room with the chandelier throwing little rainbows across a table set for five.

My mother, my father, and two people I didn’t recognize.

A man in his fifties with a handshake that lingered too long and his wife, who looked at me the way you’d look at a car you were thinking about buying.

That was the Ashfords. Before them there’d been the Drakes, then the McDaniels, then a man named Peter Whitfield whose family owned half the commercial real estate in Cherry Hills Village and who’d looked at my chest instead of my face the entire evening.

Four families in six weeks. Four dinners where I sat with my ankles crossed and my napkin in my lap and smiled the smile I’d been trained to produce since I was old enough to hold a fork correctly.

My mother called it introductions. My father called it networking.

It was a lineup.

They were selling me. The Carrington daughter, twenty-four, educated, presentable, excellent bone structure, minimal opinions. A package deal with the family name, the connections, the social calendar. Pick one, darling. Any one you like. They’re all perfectly suitable.

Good girls don’t argue. Good girls don’t make scenes. Good girls sit with their ankles crossed and let the adults decide what’s best because the adults have always decided what’s best and questioning it was something that simply wasn’t done.

I’d been a good girl for twenty-four years.

I’d worn the right clothes, attended the right schools, smiled at the right people.

I’d swallowed every opinion that didn’t match, every preference that didn’t fit, every small rebellion that flickered to life behind my ribs and died there because the cost of lighting it was more than I could afford.

The Ashford dinner was the one that broke it.

Gregory Ashford wasn’t worse than the others.

He was perfectly polite, perfectly groomed, perfectly terrible in the way all of them were terrible.

It was the moment between courses when my mother looked at me across the table and gave me the nod.

The little chin-dip that meant good. I was performing well.

I was being appropriate. The Ashfords were pleased. The product was meeting expectations.

I’d excused myself, gone to the bathroom, locked the door, and sat on the floor with my back against the tub. My hands in my lap, my dress pooling around me on Italian marble. Breathing.

The face in the mirror when I stood up looked like mine.

Same blonde hair, same brown eyes, same careful mouth.

But something behind it had shifted. Clicked into place, or maybe clicked out of it.

I couldn’t go back to that table and keep pretending this was a life.

I couldn’t sit through one more dinner, one more evaluation, one more approving nod from my mother that really meant you‘re doing what you‘re told.

I went back to the table. Finished the meal. Smiled.

And the next morning, before anyone else was awake, I packed a bag, took the cash from my nightstand, got in my car, and drove.

That was three weeks ago. The cash started to run out in nine days.

My cards stopped working on day four, which was faster than I’d expected and told me everything about how quickly my parents could move when their property went missing.

My phone lasted until day six, when I pulled the SIM card out in a gas station bathroom in Wyoming because I didn’t know what was on it and who could use it to find me.

I’d ended up in Forsaken, Montana, because my car needed gas and there was a sign for the town and it felt far enough from Denver that I could breathe for the first time since I’d left that bathroom floor.

Angel’s Rest was hiring. Cash, daily, no references required. The woman who ran the bar, Bree had taken one look at me and said, “Can you carry a tray?”

“Yes,” I’d said. Which was technically true. I could carry a tray. I just couldn’t carry one with anything on it.

“Good enough,” Bree had said. “Start tonight.”

I’d started that night. And every night since, I’d proved that my confidence in tray-carrying had been wildly misplaced.

I couldn’t work the till, couldn’t pour a beer without half of it being foam, couldn’t remember which brother drank what, and couldn’t make it through a single shift without breaking something.

The bar was loud, rough, full of men who moved through the world like they owned it, and I navigated it the way a tourist navigates a foreign city. Badly, but with enthusiasm.

And for reasons I genuinely couldn’t explain, they let me.

“Here.” Bree appeared beside me with a dustpan and a bar towel, already crouching. She swept up the glass while I mopped beer off the floor, both of us working fast. “You okay?”

“Fine. Mortified, but fine.”

“Don’t be. Razor broke a whole shelf of top-shelf bourbon his first week prospecting. Like, the actual shelf. Ripped it right off the wall.”

“That makes me feel marginally better.”

She grinned. “It should. That was six hundred dollars’ worth of whiskey. You’re still in the minor leagues.”

I managed a laugh. A real one, the kind that surprised me every time it happened because I wasn’t used to the sound of it yet. Not this version. Not the unscripted one that came up from somewhere unclenched.

Bree had that effect. She was warm without being careful about it, a woman who touched your arm when she talked to you and it didn’t feel like a strategy.

She’d shown me how to close out a tab, how to read a room for who was getting too drunk, how to handle the brothers when they got rowdy.

She’d given me shifts, patience, a constant supply of encouragement that didn’t feel earned but I held onto anyway.

She was watching me now with something sharper than her usual warmth.

“You eating tonight?” she asked. Casual. Like she was making conversation.

“I had something earlier.”

“Earlier when?”

“Earlier.” I didn’t look at her. “I’m fine, Bree.”

She let it go. That was the thing about Bree. She noticed everything and pushed nothing. It was so different from what I was used to that it made my throat tight every time.

I got the replacement drinks. Delivered them without incident, which felt like a victory worth celebrating.

Took two more orders, got one of them right on the first try.

The bar was filling up, the Friday-night crowd settling in.

Locals at the counter, passing bikers and truckers and brothers from the Forsaken Angels, The club owned this place.

I was learning the rhythm. Slowly, badly, but learning. The muscle memory of a place that ran on cash, volume, and the gravitational pull of men who wore leather and patches and moved through the room like they were the architecture.

I’d never been anywhere like this. My whole life had been white tablecloths, wine pairings, rooms where people spoke in modulated tones about nothing that mattered.

This was loud, rough, real. The floor was sticky.

The men swore constantly, drank like it was competitive, laughed in a way that rattled the windows.

And underneath all of it, a current that ran deeper than the noise.

Something solid. Like the ground was more stable here than anywhere else I’d ever stood.

I felt him watching me before I turned around.

He was at the end of the bar. The same seat he’d been in every night this week, though I hadn’t put that together until right now.

Quiet, settled, a beer in front of him that he drank slowly.

He wasn’t part of the noise. The brothers around him were loud, animated, taking up space the way they all did, but he sat in the middle of it like a still point.

Doc. That was what they called him. I didn’t know his real name. I didn’t know any of their real names. They were all road names, patches and a shorthand that came from years of shared history I wasn’t part of.

He was older than me. All of them were, but I noticed it with him.

Late thirties, maybe forty. Dark hair, cut short, the kind of face that had seen enough weather and years to look interesting rather than young.

His hands were wrapped around his beer, steady, capable.

Hands that looked like they knew what they were doing whether they were holding a glass or fixing something broken.

Every night this week, he’d been there. Watching the room. Watching the brothers. Watching me.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

The men in my mother’s world watched too, but it was different.

Appraising. Calculating. Running numbers on what you were worth and whether the investment would pay off.

Gregory Ashford had watched me the way you’d watch a stock ticker.

Peter Whitfield had watched my body like he’d already bought it and was deciding when to collect.

Doc didn’t watch me like that. I couldn’t explain how I knew the difference, only that I felt it. His eyes found me in the room wherever I was. There was something about the way he looked at me that hit me somewhere hard and made me want more.

My footing shifted, something under my ribs I didn’t have words for yet.

I worked until close. Last call, lights up, the slow drain of bodies toward the door.

Bree handled the till, which was better for everyone.

I wiped tables, swept the floor, stacked chairs.

My feet ached. My back ached. My hands smelled like beer and bleach and honest work, which was a combination I was learning to associate with survival.

“Good shift,” Bree said, pulling her jacket on. She looked at me. That same careful look from earlier, the one that saw too much. “You need a ride?”

“No, I’m good. I’ve got my car.”

She hesitated. Nodded. “See you tomorrow, Evie.”

“See you tomorrow.”

She left. The bar emptied. I finished the last of the closing, turned off the lights, locked the front door with the keys Bree had given me on my second night because she said she trusted me and I’d almost cried in the storage room afterward.

The parking lot was dark. My car was where I’d left it, tucked around the back where the staff parked, angled so the passenger side faced the wall. I’d learned to park like that. Privacy from one direction, at least.

I got in. Locked the doors. Pulled the blanket from the backseat and my bag from the footwell.

The seat didn’t recline far enough for real sleep, so I’d been folding myself into a position that was part sitting, part lying, entirely uncomfortable, and waking up every two hours with a stiff neck and the disorientation of not knowing where I was for the first three seconds.

The car was cold. It was always cold at night in Montana, even now, even this time of year.

I pulled the blanket tighter and stared at the ceiling and thought about the bathroom floor in my parents’ house.

Italian marble. Heated. A rainfall shower and thick towels and a woman in the mirror who’d finally realized that none of it was hers.

This was mine. The cold car, the thin blanket, the aching feet. The broken glasses, the wrong orders, the tips I counted twice because every dollar was the difference between eating and not eating.

My mother would die if she could see me.

That thought made me smile. Small and private, aimed at the ceiling of a cold car in a parking lot behind a biker bar in the middle of nowhere.

I was terrible at this. All of it. The waitressing, the surviving, the pretending I had any idea what I was doing. I was making it up as I went, stumbling through every day on caffeine, stubbornness, and the quiet mercy of strangers who didn’t ask questions.

But I was here. I was here because I chose it, because I walked out of a life that priced me like livestock.

And every cold night in this car, every broken glass, every shift where I barely held it together was still better than sitting in that dining room with my ankles crossed, waiting to be sold.

Good girls don’t run.

But I did anyway.

I pulled the blanket over my shoulders, closed my eyes, and let exhaustion take me under.