Shotgun (Black Saints MC Portland #9)

Prologue

CASSIE

“What the fuck?” I hear someone shouting as they are being held by the back of their jacket and moved out of the bar.

It’s quiet now that the guy isn’t shouting anymore.

Looks like he had too much to drink, and they had to throw him out.

I’m just sitting here in the corner drinking alone and I want it to stay that way.

Make myself small and hidden while enjoying the peace and quiet of not running for a few hours.

I picked this town the same way I picked the last four.

It has a plain name. There’s nothing to make it memorable, and close enough to a highway that I can be gone in twenty minutes if I need to be.

I’ve learned to read a room in seconds now.

I find the exits first, then I look at the faces in the room.

With that done I check whether anyone in the place looks like they might know who I used to be.

Tonight the room fails me the second six men in leather cuts walk through the door together. Every instinct I have built over the last two years starts screaming at once. My heart is racing and I need to take some calming breaths to try and slow it down.

I know men like this, or I think I do. My father kept men like this on his payroll, men who wear their violence on their shoulders.

Impossible to ignore. I have spent my whole life learning to make myself small around men like that so they don’t see me in a room.

I don’t need the heat these men could bring to my table.

I drop my eyes to my bottle of beer and count my own heartbeats until it slows down again.

They’re laughing about something, loud and easy, and I notice that nobody in the bar so much as flinches. That is new to me. Where I grew up, a room like this would have gone silent. Who are these men?

One of them peels off from the group before I clock him doing it, and the next minute he is standing at the end of the bar close enough that I have to look up.

He is younger than the others, maybe my age, with a scrap of a beard he has not quite grown into and a leather cut that looks too new against the worn ones on the men behind him.

There is a patch on the front that just says PROSPECT, I know what that means, and everyone else in his little crowd seems to treat him like he still has something to prove.

"You look like you're waiting for someone to tell you it's safe to relax," he says. It’s not a pick up line. Just an observation, delivered easily, as if he’s not expecting anything back from me.

"Maybe I don't relax," I say. "Ever think of that?"

"I think everybody relaxes eventually. Some people just need a reason." He nods at the empty stool beside me. "Mind if I give you one?"

I should say no. I have said no to better looking men than this one, men with better manners and worse intentions, and I have gotten very good at it.

But there is something in the way he asks, like the answer genuinely matters and he is prepared to hear it, that makes the no stick in my throat instead of coming out clean.

"It’s a free country," I say, which is not quite a yes, but he takes the stool like it is.

"Ethan," he says, holding out a hand like we’re at a job interview instead of a bar. I look at it for a second too long before I take it. His grip is warm and easy, nothing that tries to prove itself.

"Cassie." It comes out before I decide to say it, and it is not a lie exactly, just less than the whole truth. Cassandra belongs to a life I left in pieces on a highway two states back. Cassie is new. Cassie gets to decide things for herself.

"Cassie," he repeats, like he is trying the shape of it in his mouth. "You're not from around here."

"Is it that obvious?"

"You've got the look of somebody who's still deciding if they're staying." He says it without any weight to it. There’s no interrogation underneath it, and that alone is enough to loosen something in my chest that has been wound tight for months.

I glance past him at the rest of his group, they’re big men, older than him, and watching the room the way I watch rooms. There’s something in me that wants to bolt, anyway. "Your friends look like they'd break this bar in half if somebody looked at them wrong."

"Brothers," he says. "Not friends. And they would, but only if somebody deserved it.

" He says it like loyalty is just a fact of his life and not something people fight and kill each other over. I don’t know what to do with that.

"We're not looking for trouble tonight. Just a beer and some peace before the week starts back up. "

"What is it you do, that you need peace before the week starts?"

"I'm prospecting. Black Saints MC: Portland.

Basically that means I'm not a full member yet, so right now my week mostly involves doing whatever my brothers tell me to do and hoping I don't screw it up badly enough that they send me packing.

" He says it with a self-deprecating shrug, but there is real pride sitting underneath it too, the kind that comes from wanting something badly enough that the wanting shows.

I know what an MC is the way I know what a knife looks like before it is pointed at me, a fact filed away for danger, not for comfort.

But there is nothing about the way he is looking at me that reads as dangerous.

If anything, it reads like the opposite, like he has decided I am worth being careful with, and nobody has decided that about me in longer than I can remember.

"Sounds like a hard way to live," I say.

"It’s the best thing that ever happened to me." He turns his glass in a slow circle on the bar top. "You get handed a family that actually wants you around. Not everybody gets that."

Something in my face must slip, because his eyes go soft in a way that has nothing to do with flirting and everything to do with actually seeing me, and I have to look back down at my drink before he reads any more than I want him to.

"I didn't mean to hit a nerve," he says.

"You didn't." I didn’t mean to let it show, and that scares me more than the five men by the door ever could.

We talk for another hour, about nothing that matters and everything that does.

He doesn’t once ask where I’m from or who I’m running from, or even why a woman is drinking alone in a town like this and jumps at the sound of the door.

He asks what kind of music I like and whether I have ever ridden a motorcycle.

He also asks whether I would let him teach me when I said no.

Every question is a door he is holding open rather than one he is trying to force.

When the last call comes around, he walks me out to my car instead of asking to come home with me, and stands a respectful distance back while I unlock it, his hands are in his pockets like he is making a point of not crowding me.

"I'd like to see you again, Cassie," he finally says. "No pressure if that's not what you want. I just figured I should say it out loud instead of leaving you to guess."

Nobody has ever said anything out loud to me instead of leaving me to guess. My whole life has been decoding what men wanted from the set of their jaw and the weight of their silences.

"I might like that," I say, and for the first time in two years it does not feel like a lie or a strategy. It just feels true.

He grins. "I'll take might."

I drive away with his number saved under a fake name in my phone, the same way I save everything, and I tell myself this is nothing, a drink, a conversation and a man who is sweet in a way I am not built to trust yet.

I don’t let myself believe, not that first night, that I have just met the person who is going to make me stay in this small town.