I lifted a beer to my lips and took a thirsty swallow. Had it been one of the parties my mother had once made it her goal in life to host, I would have been sipping expensive strawberry champagne.
Of course, if this was one of those stupid-ass parties my mother had become famous for in her circle of friends, I wouldn’t have been hanging out with a group of bikers and their families. I would have been forced to wear a trendy little black dress with heels that killed my highly-arched feet, listening to some pompous old fart tell me how he had made his living dealing in blood diamonds or some shit.
I wouldn’t have just shoved one of the world’s best hot dogs into my mouth, curtesy of Aggie, who was the world’s best cook in my eyes, with a group of women who were just as badass as the men they belonged to. And I sure as fuck wouldn’t have just had wild, hot sex with the biker who had talked me into having a little fun in the little supply shed behind the clubhouse.
At just the thought of Colt and all the wonderfully naughty things he could talk me into doing, my body flushed with a need that had yet to be fully sated.
But with the burn of desire and a need that had started to consume every part of myself, came the guilt.
What the hell was I doing?
The problem was, I knew exactly what I was doing, and I would continue to do it until I was told my job here was over. Then I could go home.
I didn’t belong in Creswell Springs.
But it was starting to feel like home.
I didn’t belong to Colt Hannigan.
But a part of me wanted to. I couldn’t admit it out loud, not even to myself, but if things had been different, if we had been different people—if I was really the girl I was pretending to be—maybe I could have belonged to him.
As that thought floated through my head for what felt like the hundredth time, my phone buzzed in my back jeans pocket. My gut clenched at the sound, knowing who it would be. It was getting late, so I knew he would be checking in.
And I had no choice but to answer. Just as I had no choice about being in this part of California.
I waited, however, letting it ring and ring, knowing he would get pissed at being kept waiting. Even if it was for only a few extra seconds.
I counted the rings, taking just a smidge of pleasure in what little sign of defiance I could.
Pretending to be as careless as I wished I could be, I finally pulled my phone from my back pocket and swiped my thumb across the screen as the words “Unknown Caller” seemed to glower up at me. It wasn’t that this particular number was unlisted, but a damn burner phone.
He never contacted me on anything but, too scared it would leak to the public about who—but more importantly, why—he was talking to me. The press would have a fun little field day with all that hellfire if they dug deeper into his life, past and present.
“Yeah?” I said by way of greeting, unable to say the words I wanted to speak.
If I pissed him off too much, then my mother would be the one to suffer, not me. I couldn’t let that happen. This piece of shit was the only thing standing between my mother and total desolation. Maybe I had never accepted my mother’s lifestyle, but I loved her more than any other person on the planet. She was all I had left in the world, and I would have sold my soul to the Devil himself to keep her safe and cared for.
Oh, wait. I already did that.
I couldn’t fight the grimace that twisted my lips at that mental reminder.
“What can you tell me?”
No, “hello.” No, “how have you been?” Not even a, “happy birthday, my darling daughter.” Like that would ever happen.
I was twenty-two years old as of the stroke of midnight, yet the man who had helped my mother give me life didn’t give two shits about me. I would never be anything more to him than the mistake he had made with his mistress.
Kevin, on the other hand, had been his pride and joy. His only son. The legitimate Samson who could do no wrong.
The fact that I shared DNA with either of those two men still made me want to gag. One was a narcissistic asshole; the other a drugged-out rapist who was now six feet under. Fuck, I wished the same could have been said for the former of the two men, even as I hoped the latter was burning in the deepest, darkest part of Hell where his charred body had gone when he had burned down the Hannigans’ bar.
Senator Calvin Samson made an impatient noise when I didn’t answer him fast enough. “Kellianne, I asked you a question,” he barked into the receiver.
I hated that name just as much as I hated him. Mostly because he had talked my mother into giving it to me, even as he denied me the sanctuary of his last name.
Using my free hand to rub at the pressure that was starting to build behind my eyes, I leaned my head back against the side of the clubhouse and wished myself anywhere but there. “I have nothing new for you.”
The impatient noise he had just made became one of disbelief.
I didn’t care enough to make him believe that I was telling the truth. I was nothing more than his minion, had been from the day my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s three years before. Without him, Leslie Murdock would have wasted away in some state run nursing home and probably would have died by now. Calvin had set her up in a top notch, full-care facility that cost an obscene amount of money each month, but it gave her around the clock care by professionals.
He didn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart, though. Fuck, I was pretty sure he didn’t have one.
I had to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it done, or he would stop the cash flow that kept my mother in the lap of luxury she had become used to over the twenty-five years she had been Calvin’s mistress. A role she could no longer preform, and one I was sure had been filled by some eighteen-year-old model wannabe. At least that was what my mother’s old friends had let slip the last time I had gone to visit.
At first, I hadn’t cared about doing my father’s dirty work. It had been simple, stupid things that mostly involved keeping an eye on my older half-brother. Kevin was the reason I had come to Creswell Springs in the first place. I had gotten a job that would help me keep an eye on him and still give me enough money to live off of.
Stripping was not the Julliard ballet my mother had always dreamed of me doing, but it paid my bills and had been the place to scope out what my idiot brother was up to the majority of the time.
Then he had pissed off the local MC, and they had burned down his frat house.
Typical trouble for the notorious son of California’s most vocal senator, Kevin had been kicked out of one college after another. Each time, Calvin had swept the trouble his son had caused as far under the rug as he possible could. I had been sent in to try to minimize the blow up of any and all trouble he was likely to make at his newest college.
Easy, right?
Oh, how wrong I had been.
Kevin had started fucking with the dangerous, one-percenter MC. Petty stuff at first, like slashing the tires of the enforcer’s wife’s car. Then he had moved on to bigger things and used one of the club’s own to get inside intel on them.
That was when he had burned down the Hannigans’ bar, a place that the MC had considered their most holiest of places. Then the stupid fuck had gotten himself trapped in the fire and had more or less killed himself with his final act of revenge.
With the death of my half-brother, I had thought my work was done and I could go home to be closer to my mother.
Wrong again.
Calvin had brought in the Feds, attempting to make the MC accountable for Kevin’s death. Instead, he had made himself look like a dumbass, and the Feds had told him to back off. Which was where I had come in again.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I muttered, keeping my voice low so that, if anyone happened to be within hearing range, they couldn’t have heard me. “I haven’t learned anything new since I talked to you. That was only last night, for fuck’s sake. I am not a miracle worker.”
The
re was a pause on Calvin’s end before he sighed in frustration. “Fine. We will talk again tomorrow. By which time, I expect more details. Otherwise, I may find that I can’t afford the experimental treatment Leslie is receiving.”
Every muscle in my body clenched as I fought the urge to explode then and there. It was the same threat each and every time I didn’t have the answers he wanted; forcing me to dig deeper, to come up with something—hell, anything—that would make him happy enough to back off from pulling the plug on the money that went for my mother’s care.
My mother was taking an expensive new drug that was still in the experimental stages, but she was already showing signs of improvement. She had actually known who I was the last time I had driven down to spend an afternoon with her. It had only been for about half an hour before she had completely forgotten that I was her daughter. Nevertheless, just to have that brief time with the old her had been magical.
I hated what I would have to do, what I did every single day that I was still in Creswell Springs. Lie to Colt, to Quinn. Hell, to all of them, really. I still had my job at Paradise City, the strip club owned by Bash Reid and James “Spider” Masterson. Working there, I was able to get the occasional detail about what the MC was up to, but it hadn’t been enough.
When Quinn had been searching for a roommate, I had jumped at the chance, only because I knew she was close to Colt Hannigan. Moving in with her, seeing Colt almost every day, had been a lucky break, giving me a little more insight to the MC and what they were up to lately.
I hadn’t taken into account the fact that I would grow to care about Quinn.
And Colt.
If I let myself, I could have fallen in love with the biker. We were good together, and not just in bed. When I was with him, I felt a peace that I hadn’t felt since my mother had first started getting sick. He could make me smile, make me burn, make me ache, body and soul.
And all I was doing was using him.
I thought Calvin would just hang up, but when I continued to hear him breathing, I gritted my teeth. “Is that all?”
“No. Actually, I have something else for you to do.”
Giggling came from my right, and I turned away from it, moving toward my car. “What?”
“I have been in contact with the local DA. He didn’t help me at all when I tried to get the Feds to deal with the biker gang fuckers.”
I bit my tongue to keep from correcting him that it was motorcycle club, not a damn biker gang, but I restrained myself, finding a more secluded spot so I could deal with my bastard of a father.
“He has had an abrupt change of heart, and I want you to meet with him.”
I tapped my nails on the side of the building at the description of the District Attorney having an “abrupt change of heart.” I could just imagine what Calvin had done to get the man to change his mind about helping him put the MC behind bars. I would have laughed at it, had I not already been dreading this newest job the old man wanted me to do.
How the fuck was I going to meet with this guy without it getting back to my roommate or boyfriend?
“When?” I would work out the how later.
Calvin told me the date and time, and I quickly opened up a new text message to add the number for the DA. I added the guy to my contacts, setting his name as DonnA, just in case someone saw my phone. Fuck, I felt like a spy for the government. Like some CIA agent doing a freaking covert op for the protection of my country.
“Are we done?” I asked once the contact was set up and I had lifted the phone back to my ear.
“I’ll speak to you again tomorrow. I expect new information.”
Before I could say anything, the line went dead.
I dropped the hand holding the phone to my side. “Happy fucking birthday to me,” I muttered under my breath.
Chapter 10
Raider
After riding all night, I was in no mood to deal with any of my brothers’ bullshit the next day, whether it was blood or club. All I wanted to do was go home and sleep for at least twelve hours.
No, what I really wanted to do was knock on Quinn’s door and see if she was okay. Then spend the rest of the day showing her all the ways I knew to make her body melt for me.
Fuck, I would need at least a week to show her everything I knew.
Instead, I was at the bar, where Bash and Spider were already sitting at the Original’s booth with the uncles and Hawk. Colt was behind the bar, grabbing drinks for everyone, and Jet was pulling up a chair for us before taking his own seat.
The sight of my oldest brother once again in his cut pulled at something deep inside my chest. The brief time he had been in prison, followed by the months he had refused to rejoin us in the MC, had fucked with my head. Before all that bullshit had happened, Jet had always been a part of the club. He was the biggest reason I had looked forward to becoming a member. Then he had become president after our father had died, and the club had felt even more like home.
Now he was just a regular member, having turned the reins over to Bash, but it still felt good to see him back in his cut and sitting front and center for a briefing on a run that suddenly needed to happen.
All eyes lifted to me for only a few seconds as I took my place at the table. Colt dropped a beer in front of me, and I found it hard to look him in the eye.
Shit. With everything that had happened with Quinn, I hadn’t really thought about what would happen with my brother if he ever found out. For years, he had made sure I understood that Quinn was hands off, and I had respected that. It had been important to him, and I had accepted it as much a law as the one we had always had beaten into our heads about no one ever touching our sister.
That didn’t mean the hands-off rule hadn’t been bent a little as I had fought my need for that sweet, little beauty. And watching Colt with her over the years had caused more than a few quarrels between the two of us. I didn’t want to admit it had been jealousy, but there wasn’t any other word for what I had felt—what I still felt—whenever I saw Colt and Quinn together.
“I thought we took care of the trouble with the Italians,” Uncle Chaz said as he practically slammed his half-empty mug of beer on the table in front of him. His dislike for anything that had to do with the Italians evident on his wrinkled, old face.
My ears perked up at the mention of our biggest enemy. By Italians, he had meant the Santino crime family. They liked to think they ran the West Coast, but they weren’t much to talk about, not compared to the Vituccis, one of our biggest customers, when it came to security runs. Few men scared me the way Vito Vitucci and his men, Ciro and Dante, did. They were cold, dark machines who could turn their emotions on and off with a flip of a mental switch. I respected them all, but shit, I didn’t want to deal with them often.
We had recently dealt with them when Carlo Santino Junior had shot Hawk and taken Gracie. Our trip had been extended for weeks when Gracie had gotten sepsis from a gunshot wound to her arm and we had attempted to locate Junior in New York and even Chicago. The bastard had slipped through our fingers. I was still itching to get my hands on him.
No doubt, so was Hawk.
“Dante is still in New York with Vitucci,” Bash spoke up, drawing every eye effortlessly to him. When the pres. spoke, everyone gave him their attention. “He’s been going back and forth from there to his base in Chicago, which has left his businesses … vulnerable. His men have been dealing with it, but he has asked us to join the effort to ensure his assets remain intact.”
“Vulnerable to who?” Razor asked with a snort. “Dante De Stefano is a scary-ass mofo. Who has the balls to fuck with his shit?”
“Enzo Fontana,” Jet supplied the answer for him, and it was like the temperature in the bar dropped ten degrees as my blood turned icy.
Enzo Fontana was an evil sonofabitch. Worse than Carlo Junior, whose favorite pastime was beating women into a bloody mess before raping them. I didn’t need my brother to explain to me why Enzo was causing trouble; I alr
eady knew the answer. Fontana’s brother had been Junior’s right hand man, and easy pickings when we had needed answers.
Hawk, and then Andre Volkov, had tortured him for hours to get the answers we had needed. I didn’t want to know what river the man was floating around in now, but I knew he had been a container of acidic human juice by the time Ciro Donati had finished with him. Before that, he had been a whimpering shell of a man from the mess Volkov had made of his body.
So yeah, Enzo had a vendetta against anyone who had been a part of his brother’s disappearance.
Dante hadn’t been present during the torture, but with the underboss traveling so much from Chicago to New York, he was currently the more vulnerable of the Vitucci clan.
“Colt, you and Raider take six brothers and give De Stefano a hand,” Bash commanded. “Whatever they need, make it happen. I don’t have to tell you how invested we are in this.”
I nodded my acceptance. “Will do.”
Colt reached over and squeezed Hawk’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, brother; if we find Junior, we’ll save him just for you.”
Hawk popped his knuckles, one at a time, but didn’t say a word. The look in his green eyes was plenty enough for us. Maybe I should have pitied Santino for what was to come should my brother get his hands on him before Vitucci’s men did, but I didn’t. If anything, I looked forward to watching the bloodbath that was sure to ensue.
After another half an hour or so of being briefed, we were dismissed. Colt and I could pick any six men we wanted, but we tended to depend on a selected few. Tanner, Matt, and Onyx would have been my three, but Matt had fucked up his hand in a fight the week before and couldn’t ride with the way his hand was casted, let alone shoot. So, I decided Clutch, Onyx’s son, would be a good replacement.
Colt had his own go-to team, which usually included Trigger, Creed, and Warden.