Chapter Thirteen
Ifollowed Katherine out of the police station, fighting back the urge to shiver. It was like an icebox in there. As if facing down cops wasn’t bad enough without the bonus discomfort of being covered head to toe in goose bumps.
I paused just outside the door and let the Texas heat wrap around me like a blanket.
The sun sat low on the horizon, but even as it set, it burned with an intensity that drove away my lingering chill.
I closed my eyes and turned toward its warmth, rejoicing in the fact that I wasn’t behind bars.
Engines revved at a nearby stoplight. A gentle breeze brushed past me, carrying the scent of freshly cut grass.
I took a deep breath of freedom and turned to face my savior. “High five?”
Katherine lifted her hand. “High five.”
We smacked our palms together and then headed down the front steps.
Movement caught the corner of my eye. I turned to see Jakob push up from a park bench beneath a nearby stand of trees.
Instead of his Kings jacket, he wore a loose, sleeveless leather vest over his black T-shirt, the MC logo emblazoned on the right breast. I felt like a fool for not seeing the similarities between the Kings’ and the Specters’ patches sooner.
Where the skull in the Specters’ patch wore a skullcap helmet, the one in the Kings’ had a broken crown perched on its head. Otherwise, they were exactly alike.
Jakob emerged from the shadows of the trees out into the burnished gold of the dying day.
I swear the darkness clung to him for a heartbeat too long, like it didn’t want to let him go.
He paced toward us with that particular gait that was all Jakob, long legs eating up the pavement, his focus lasered in on Katherine and me.
“How’d it go?” he asked when he reached us.
“As good as can be expected,” Katherine said.
“She’s being modest,” I told him. “She destroyed Officer Sanders.”
“Poor guy,” Jakob said, but I could tell from the slight lift of his lips that he wanted to smile.
Katherine checked her watch. “Okay, I need to get going.” She turned to me. “If anyone from Kearny PD contacts you, direct them to me.”
“Can do,” I said. “Thank you so much again.”
She smiled and squeezed my arm. “You’re welcome. We’ll talk soon.”
We said goodbye and watched her climb into her vehicle.
A few minutes later, she waved as she pulled out of the parking lot.
I’d vacillated between including her in the conversation I needed to have with Jakob or not including her.
Ultimately I decided against her inclusion.
She might need plausible deniability if the Kings did anything with the information I had. Well, thought I had.
I turned to Jakob. “You remember that guy you stared down when we were checking into Magnolia?”
He nodded.
I thumbed toward the front door. “He was inside. I’m pretty sure he’s the one pushing for charges against me, and the more I think about it, the more I’m sure he’s involved in all this.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“For starters, he has to know that guard is fake. Who else besides a manager would have the power to bring in gang members and cover everything up from the inside? And pressing charges against me is kind of a genius move, as much as I hate to admit it. It might throw any testimonial or accusations against them into question.” I waved my hands in the air and let a little insanity slip into my eyes.
“That crazy chick is just making shit up to get out of assault charges. What grand conspiracy, Officer?”
Jakob turned toward the police station. If he had superpowers, the intensity of his gaze would have set it on fire. “Did you get his name?”
I dropped my hands. “No. I didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that I recognized him. Do you know him?”
Jakob glanced back at me, a little furrow between his brows. “Maybe. His face is familiar, but I can’t put a name to him.”
“Want to wait in the car until he comes out so you can get another look at him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “We can’t. We have to go to Daniel’s for a cookout.”
I frowned. “What?”
“He called while you were inside and invited us. Made a point to remind me that you told him you’d like to go over for dinner sometime.”
Damn my past self. “I don’t want to leave Gran alone in a strange place for too long.”
Jakob stepped close and put his hands on my shoulders. “I get it, but we have to go.”
I stared up at him. Shit. He had that intractable look on his face again. For some reason he really thought we needed to go. Whether it was because he didn’t want to piss off his gang leader or because something was going on between the two of them after all, I had no idea, and I didn’t like that.
The need to question him about this was strong, but I pushed it down and did my best to remind myself that it was none of my business. I’d gotten into enough trouble already by involving myself in the Kings’ problems.
“Okay, but I have to call Gran first,” I said.
He nodded and let me go.
I called Gran as we pulled out of the parking lot.
She’d roped Jennifer into watching her favorite telenovela with her, and the two of them had spent the past three hours chumming it up together.
I tried to ask a couple of leading questions to check in on her mental state, but she rushed me right off the phone.
The last episode had ended on a cliffhanger, and she and Jennifer were both antsy to start the next one.
“Here, talk to Liam,” Gran said.
I heard muffled noises like she was passing the phone off. “Love you too!” I yelled.
That woman.
“Hey there,” Liam rumbled. “How’d it go?”
I put him on speaker, and together, Jakob and I caught him up on my visit to the police station. I made sure to openly hero-worship Katherine.
Liam chuckled. “That’s nothing. You should see her in a courtroom.”
“No offense,” I said, “but I’d rather avoid that.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “Jakob, we need someone to watch Magnolia. Choose a new guy you trust who won’t be recognized.”
“Already on it,” Jakob told him.
A loud noise echoed over the phone, followed by rapid-fire Spanish.
“I have to go,” Liam said, sounding rushed. “They started the next episode without me.”
The line went dead. I looked from the phone to Jakob.
His dad was nothing like I imagined he would be.
Proud of his son, willing to watch telenovelas with his wife and my gran, and all while simultaneously heading up one of the country’s most dangerous motorcycle gangs.
I really needed to stop making assumptions about people if I didn’t want to continuously make an ass out of myself.
Daniel and Eva King lived outside of town in a large two-story home set back in the woods. They must have owned a decent plot of land because the closest neighbors were over half a mile away. Good thing, otherwise someone probably would have called in a noise complaint.
Music blared from the backyard as we pulled up, so loud that I heard it over the rumble of the car’s engine.
Twilight had given way to dusk during the drive over, and the external floodlights were on, illuminating a driveway crammed full of motorcycles, muscle cars, and trucks.
It looked like over half the Kings had turned out.
Jakob parked a few hundred feet away from the house and cut the car lights. We rolled up the windows, muffling the sound of the thumping bassline.
“You ready for this?” he asked.
I turned toward him. “For my first Kings party? Sure. Can’t be much worse than a rowdy shift at the bar, can it?”
The look he sent me said it could. “You’re cute when you’re naive.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Har har.”
He reached out and tucked a stray piece of hair behind my ear, then slid his hand around to cradle my neck. The pad of his thumb was rough against my skin as he rubbed it back and forth. His gaze fell to my lips. “I’m glad you didn’t get arrested.”
“Yeah?” I said.
His hand flexed, drawing me forward. “Yeah. It would have been harder to break you out of there than it was to get you out of Magnolia.”
I smiled at the joke. He didn’t. Shit, he was serious. Note to self: never get arrested.
He leaned forward and stopped with his lips an inch away from mine. “Why did you change?”
I glanced down. I’d tugged on a pair of jeans as he drove and then slipped my dress off overhead, torturously slow. He’d almost wrecked the car. Now I wore a low-cut tank top that put my boobs on full display.
“You don’t like the new outfit?” I asked.
His gaze dropped straight into my cleavage. “I like the outfit.” He dragged his eyes back up to mine slowly, like he didn’t want to look away from my tits. “Why are you avoiding the question?”
I let out a breath. “Jesus, you really aren’t into small talk, are you?”
He shook his head, thumb still sliding over my neck, lips tantalizingly close.
“I changed because I didn’t want to deal with ten thousand questions from shit-faced bikers about my scars.”
“You’re here with me,” he said. “They won’t bother you.”
The sheer ego of that statement. My God. Trouble was, he was probably right.
I shrugged. “I’d rather not risk it.”
He nodded like he understood. Maybe he did.
“What happened to your leg?” I asked him. I’d been curious about it since our first night together, and thanks to the intimacy of this moment and the fact that he was being kind of sweet with me right now, I thought he might actually answer a question for once.
“Shrapnel,” he said. “An RPG round hit the rooftop I was rappelling onto from the helo, and I took a big-ass chunk of steel to the thigh. Carved the muscle right out.”
“Does your leg bother you?” I asked.
“Not always, but yeah,” he said. “It doesn’t help that I hyperextended that knee, landing hard on another mission, and tore every tendon that runs through it. Surgery helped, but the leg’s still fucked.”
Just like mine. What a pair we made. “Hopefully we never have to outrun anyone.”
He pulled back a little, gaze boring into me. “Do I look like the kind of man to run?”