Page 44 of Soulless Saint

I’d wait.

Not like she was giving me a fucking choice.

Unless I could slip through one of the cracks in her armor, my dick was going to get a little too well acquainted with my right hand. And since no other ass in Santa Clarita seemed to give me so much as a semi anymore, it was Hot Yoga or fucking bust.

Another message came in from Clay.

Clay: Better hurry if you want to catch her. The class is starting at 2.

It was already 2:01 pm.

Cursing to myself, I pocketed my phone and jogged down the cobblestone alley toward the wooden door set into the brick down near the end. I just needed to talk to her. I needed five minutes.

If I explained some things, maybe she wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss me. To dismiss Hardin. I mean, I understood why she did, knowing her story, but not every gun wielding gang man in Cali was a replica of the sadistic fuckwad that shot her and almost killed her best friend.

Take our cousins, The Crows, for instance. They were good shit. Rook was a little unhinged—okay, fine, more than a little—and Corv a little neurotic, but I wouldn’t want anyone else at my side in a shitty spot. Grey was loyal to a fault and would do anything, and I really meant anything, for their girl.

Was that not something to desire?

I reefed the door open and stepped through into a low ceilinged space filled with yoga gear available for purchase and a pocketed wood box system stuffed with outside shoes and bags. The lighting was so dim I had to squint into past the racks to see the guy lounging in a swivel stool at a desk, keying something into a computer monitor.

Where the shit was everyone?

“Hey,” I called to him. You got a—”

“Shhh,” he hushed me sharply, finishing whatever he’d been typing before he peeled his gaze from the screen to give me his attention, and promptly lost every drop of blood in his face.

He tugged at the collar of his long sleeve shirt, dropping his gaze. “I’m so sorry,” he croaked. “There’s a class in session just down the hall and our clients expect silence in the room.”

I had no fucking idea what he was on about but the word class I focused on. “Modo class?”

He nodded, seeming confused.

“Wait!” he called as I brushed through the racks on my way to the hall. I figured I had about twenty minutes before Dad got really pissed at not hearing back from me. I needed to make this quick.

“What?”

The skinny guy hopped off his swiveling stool, rushing over. He stopped along the way, gathering a charcoal gray rolled matt from a pyramid of about thirty, peeling a pair of matching shorts from a rack. He handed me both, pushing them into my arms. “You’ll need these. On the house for my rudeness when you walked in. Men’s changing rooms are down the hall to the left. The studio is on the right. We’re not meant to admit anyone to class late, but I’m sure Rosana won’t have a problem with it in this case.”

“Right,” I said, looking down at the random shit in my arms. “This all I need?”

His shoulders hitched as he thought of something else, rushing to the counter and back to bring me a bottle of water. “That’s it. You’re all set.”

Maybe it was the guy’s overeagerness to please or the fact that I didn’t want Becca thinking I was even more of an asshole than she already thought from the other day at the cafe, but I decided I should at least attempt decorum.

“Thanks,” I bit out, going in the direction he indicated, to the men’s changing room. The space was almost entirely devoid of all life. Long wooden benches squatted low beneath empty hooks. Only a single hook appeared to be in use which meant I was going to be one of only two shlongs in a lipfest.

Normally, I’d have fucking preened. Not today. Today there was one and only one girl whose attention I wanted.

I fucking prayed that once I had her, and I would have her, whatever fixation I had on her would fade.

She had to see the commitment here. I mean, fucking yoga, just to talk to her. I’d never worked this hard.

I removed my shirt and pulled my Sig from my waistband, looking around for a place to put it. Dad would flip shit if he knew I was unarmed even for a second right now, but I couldn’t risk scaring Becca away before I could get two words out. So, no gun.

“Fuck.” Finding nowhere to stash it, I wrapped it in my shirt and peeled off the rest of my shit, piling it all on top of the bundle. The shorts the guy at the front gave me left little to the imagination, but that could work in my favor. I was more a shower than a grower and all eight flaccid inches of me were on full display in these tiny ass gray shorts. So was what I considered my best ink. The blue-eyed crow in flight painted over the mountain of my kneecap an homage to my cousins in Thorn Valley.

I grabbed the mat and the bottle of water, making my way shirtless, shoeless, gunless—might as well have been fucking naked—to the studio. Hot air slapped me in the face as I entered, and I braced against it. When they said hot yoga, they weren’t fucking joking.

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