Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
With all but West and Colson—a single father and therefore not one inclined to partying it up—married and the club business relatively stable—as stable as an arms-dealing biker club in a town full of criminal empires could be—I was starved for any kind of entertainment.
"Are you fucking blushing?" I asked, watching as he turned to me, confirming my suspicions but also giving me a look that said if I dared repeat that phrase again—especially in front of our brothers—he would drag me out back and shoot me like a rabid dog.
I was almost desperate enough for some action to take him up on the offer.
Almost.
Let's face it, when it came to a fight, West had a good decade of ass-kicking under his belt while I was busy touring with my band. While there was always the occasional fight when it came to the music scene, I was in no way equipped to take on a furious and embarrassed West.
Sometimes, you had to accept your weaknesses in life.
I'd made my peace with mine.
For the most part.
After all, West had been living a criminal lifestyle, scraping by, scuffling and smacking down, for years while I had been writing songs and playing tiny gigs that slowly but surely led to larger gigs that actually made us more than gas money and pocket change.
I never planned on becoming a biker.
For most of my life, all I could think about was getting out of my oppressively religious household, rebelling, making a name for myself doing what I was passionate about.
Then, well, things changed.
It all started so innocently. Taking my sister and her best friend to a shopping center after they cut school.
Then it all went to hell.
Iggy's best friend was taken.
Imprisoned.
Irreparably changed.
Then she disappeared again.
There had been cracks in me then that afternoon. The literal ones. From trying to fight off the abductors. Those ones healed relatively easily, leaving no lasting marks.
The others, though, I had no idea they were there. At least not after the shock wore off. I thought I had gone back to normal. Or to what had always passed as normal for me.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
It took a while for my foundations to settle.
That was when the cracks started to show.
Little by little over time.
Until they could no longer be denied.
Until everyone else could see them too.
That was where everything changed once again.
And how I ended up at the doors of an outlaw biker club, demanding the president—the father of the girl I had once tried to save from kidnapping human traffickers—to let me prospect, to let me become a brother.
I could never be sure if Reign actually wanted me in his club, or if he was simply letting me in because he felt obligated, because he knew I had once tried to save his little girl.
I would likely never know.
But I was grateful, nonetheless.
The Henchmen MC wasn't exactly where I had planned on landing, but I found security in the clubhouse, in the brotherhood.
Even the pain in the ass West who took it upon himself to be my personal nag, always insisting I was in a dark mood, that I needed to get out more, that the surefire cure for my bad moods was hitting the bar, drinking to near oblivion, finding a hot, willing woman, and taking her to bed.
Sometimes, I placated him. Sometimes, I thought that maybe he had a point, maybe the root of my problem was being on my own too much, getting lost inside my own head too often.
Maybe the cure was time out with friends. Maybe some pretty woman who wanted me was what I needed to replace some of the other thoughts in my head.
Just as often, though, West ended up going home with one or more of the girls while I headed back to the clubhouse to chase a couple ibuprofen with a gallon of water in the hopes that I avoided a hangover.
"So, which of your sisters is now wearing your balls for earrings?" I asked when he threw down his phone on the couch, sitting, cradling his head in his tattooed hands like it was pounding. Hell, it probably was. At the beginning of the conversation, I could hear his sister's raised voices from clear across the room.
All I got from him was a grumbling, pained sound.
In a rare surge of sympathy for the poor bastard, I grabbed a bottle of booze from the back bar, dropping it down on the table in front of him, watching as he grabbed for it greedily, chugging down the contents.
"What are you in the shithouse for?"
"Not coming home for my mom's birthday last week."
"We were doing a drop," I said, brow furrowing. We'd been down in North Carolina for the better part of the week before, dealing with some cheap-ass low-level Irish mob guys who suddenly decided Reign was gouging them on the guns.