Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 75450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
But before I could get any more information out of the open book that was Sofia, the front door opened and Carmen’s voice carried through the house, excited for a moment, then falling off as she noticed me.
I’d wanted to surprise her, sure. But I didn’t take any pleasure in the way the color fell from her face, how her eyes went round, and her lower lip trembled.
I was raised to take care of and protect women.
It felt shitty to put that look on a girl’s face.
Even if she did try to kill me.
Sofia, seemingly oblivious to her sister’s distress, flitted around until, finally, we were alone.
I hadn’t been planning to grab her and force her to sit with me, and I damn sure hadn’t been prepared for the jolt of desire that moved through me as soon as she dropped down half on my lap.
She was clearly worried about her life.
She was also much more worried about her sister becoming collateral damage.
Maybe I should have been a better man and admitted that I wasn’t in the business of hurting, let alone killing, women. Keeping her a little on edge, though, might help me get the answers I needed. So I had to play my part for the time being.
“I wanted to kill you a lot longer than that.”
“Okay. Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Seeing as you had a gun aimed at me over it, I feel like it does.”
“Just kill me if that’s what you’re here to do. I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Why doesn’t little sis know what you were up to last night?”
“This doesn’t involve her. Leave her out of this.”
“Won’t need to, if you’ll cooperate.”
“Why does the why matter? I did it.”
“Because I need to know if you’re involved with anyone else.”
“I’m not. I was working on my own.”
“And I’m just supposed to trust you?”
“What do I have to gain from lying about that?”
“Protecting someone else. You’ve already made it clear you want to protect people you care about.”
“I have no one left to care about other than my sister,” she countered. The words were just sharp enough to ring true. “Why didn’t you let your club kill me last night?”
“I wanted answers. Wasn’t gonna get ‘em if you were bleeding out on the floor.” I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth when her whole body tightened. Making sure I took any bite out of my voice, I asked, “Did you really think you were going to walk into an outlaw biker clubhouse, shoot one of us dead, and walk away?”
She said nothing to that, just shifted in her seat, making my fingers move from her rib area to tease under her breast, the touch making her breath catch before I could move it away again.
“You could have shot me while I was running the beach in the early morning. No one would have seen. You’d probably have gotten away with it.”
“I didn’t even know what you looked like,” she admitted.
“Then how’d you find me?”
“There’s not a lot of men named Rune in the United States. Six hundred twenty-three, actually.”
The way she said that made it sound like she’d tracked down every last one of us until she found the one she was looking for.
That took dedication, commitment, motivation.
“Did you know it was a biker clubhouse when you showed up?”
“I saw the bikes. I assumed.”
“But you didn’t know who we are and what we do?”
“What do you mean ‘what you do’?”
“Christ, baby,” I sighed, shaking my head. “You had time to research over six hundred names, but didn’t think looking into a one-percenters club was worth your time?”
“One-percenters?”
Reasonably sure this was not some threat against the club, if she didn’t even know who we were, I slid my arm away from her and raked that hand down my face instead.
“Carmen, what the fuck did you get yourself into?”
She hadn’t moved right away. But at those words, she lurched to the other side of the couch, turning to face me fully.
“I didn’t get myself into anything. This is all on you and your—”
“Can you get Hammy some cold water?” Sofia called from the back of the house. “It’s too hot out here for her.”
“Yep! On it!” Carmen injected some false cheeriness into her voice as she shot her sister a smile before she disappeared again. Then, turning back to me, she shot me a look she probably thought was threatening, but I could see the fear around the edges. “If you’re not here to kill me, get the fuck out of my house.”
CHAPTER SIX
Carmen
He actually left.
I still couldn’t wrap my head around that hours later, after Sofia finished and called me out to look at our new garden, then declared we deserved pasta for a job well done, then decided we also needed to grow basil and oregano in the garden to ‘take our pasta up to the next level.’ She was clearly envisioning a world where we were making all our own tomato sauce from the garden, even though we only had three tomato plants growing. And I wasn’t even sure what varieties they were.