Page 26 of The Kings of Kearny

Her dark eyes sparked. “You better.”

I saw motion out of the corner of my eye. Someone was already flagging me down for a refill. I took a step in their direction, but Nina grabbed my arm. I turned back to her.

“Just tell me if it was as good as we imagined,” she said.

She and I had spent an embarrassing amount of time sitting poolside, talking over which members of the Kings would be the best in the sack. Jakob usually landed in the top five. What sweet summer children we had been.

I lowered my voice and leaned down. “It was better than we thought it would be.”

She blinked. “No way.”

I had a flashback then, not my first of the day, to Jakob fisting my hair as he fucked me sideways. An echo of the orgasm he’d given me rolled through my core, causing a full-body shudder.

Nina noticed and dropped my arm. “Holy shit. That good?”

I nodded, expression grim. “That good.”

Which was why instead of trying to rein my temper in earlier, I’d let it run wild. I was worried that if I forgot even for a second who Jakob really was, I would have ended up in some janitor’s closet at Magnolia, pinned to a wall of shelves as he dicked me brainless for the second time in less than twenty-four hours.

“Are you going to see him again?” Nina asked.

“Not if I can help it,” I said. “It was a onetime thing. Can we stop talking about it?”

She nodded.

I went to refill that drink.

Unfortunately,everyonewanted to talk about it. Jakob had told me that several members of the Kings had relatives in Magnolia. It turned out those old busybodies had nothing better to do than to call up their kin the second I walked past with Jakob and say, “You’ll never believe who’s getting a grand tour of the place.”

More than one customer dropped theboyfriendword on me. Each time it hit like a bomb. Within the club, people either fucked, meaning you had promiscuous, no-strings-attached sex with whomever you wanted on any given night, or you had an “old lady” or an “old man,” meaning you were bonded for life like some mated pair of werewolves. There was no middle ground as far as I could tell.

It turned out Jakob had never claimed an “old lady” before—I made a mental note to violently murder the first person who tried to call me that—and the fact that he’d made an exception for me was considered a Big Deal. My customers were treating me with a newfound reverence that made me want to hit something.

One of the younger club members slid me a five-dollar bill after I’d served him a two-dollar shot of the cheapest whiskey we had in the house and then said, “Keep the change, ma’am.”

“I work for a living,” I snapped.

In the military, sir and ma’am were reserved for people with bars on their shoulders. I’d been salt of the earth enlisted, a ground pounder, and I was proud of it. In the Kings, only enforcers and above earned the right to sir and ma’am, and since I wasn’t even in the club, I’d be damned if people started treating me like I was.

It was so backward that just because they thought I was dating one of their enforcers, my value suddenly shot up. Like this was 1600 and I was some scullery maid who’d married a lord. This wasn’t 1600. I didn’t inherit Jakob’s rank just because I slept with him, and the next person to insinuate that I did was going to get an earful.

I would have gone on a feminist rage if I hadn’t seen this same thing happen when one of the women who sat on the council for the Kings got serious with a local mechanic. This wasn’t sexism; this was classism.

Around ten o’clock, a pretty brunette slid onto one of my barstools. I was working the far end of the bar, and she chose the seat right next to the wall, sitting low in it like she was trying to keep out of sight. I recognized her. Beth. I’d seen her and Jakob getting hot and heavy back when I first started working at Charley’s, but they’d drifted apart shortly after, and now she was with a guy everyone called Slim. The two of them seemed pretty happy together, but when I caught sight of her face, a small thread of anxiety wormed through me anyway. She looked like a woman with something to say.

“What can I get you?” I asked.

“Vodka tonic?” She had a nice voice, deep for a woman, melodic, like she could sing. Add a little rasp to it, and she would probably drive men wild with her bedroom talk.

I poured her drink and slid it in front of her.

She bit her lip and glanced around.

“Anything else?” I asked.

She leaned over the bar a little, and her top dipped forward, revealing ample cleavage. Jakob must have been a boob man. I had a fair amount on top too.

“You and Jakob?” she asked.

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