Page 7 of The Kings of Kearny

Wait. What?

I peered around the doorframe. My eyes adjusted to the weak light of my phone, and Daniel King materialized in front of me. The meanest son of a bitch in Kearny sat in the middle of the apartment on the couch I had so recently lusted after. No one else was in sight, so he must have been the one to bust the door open.

What the hell was going on here?

Chapter Three

Jakob flicked the lightson as he strode into his apartment. I scooped my purse from the floor and followed a few steps behind him.

The Kings of Kearny were a rowdy bunch, the kind of men and women who were more concerned with their badass reputations than they were with aesthetics. I figured Jakob’s place would be sparse: a couch, mattress in the corner, dirty clothes strewn about the floor, maybe a coffee table with pizza boxes and empty beer cans crowding the top of it.

His place wasn’t sparse; it was spartan.

The military affects us all in strange ways. If Jakob wasn’t a clean freak before joining, service had turned him into one. His apartment was larger than mine, with an open-concept kitchen and living room. Through a door to the right, I caught sight of a gleaming bathroom. Another door stood farther down on the same wall. Most likely a bedroom. The few pieces of furniture he had weren’t new or trendy, but they looked well-made and were visibly spotless. Lord only knew what a black light might reveal. Jakob had a reputation for more than just violence, and I had a feeling his apartment had been painted floor to ceiling by his past sexual encounters.

The only thing that didn’t fit was Daniel King. He sat in the middle of the couch with his arms spread over the top of it, taking up as much room as humanly possible. If I uploaded a picture of him to Twitter with the comment “Look at the manspread on this one,” I’d get ten thousand responses from fed-up women within an hour. Road dust clung to his riding leathers. He’d propped his dirty boots on the coffee table like he owned the place. Between the break-in and his body language, the message was clear:I have no respect for you or your shit.

The man was in his late forties, and damn it if he didn’t look good for his age. He wore his raven black hair long enough to show that it had a bit of a curl to it. His face was made to grace wanted posters. Three-day stubble covered his strong jaw. Those dark, piercing eyes landed on me, and I almost shuddered. There was a sardonic set to his lips that made me feel like someone had just told him a dirty joke about me and now he was picturing me naked.

He’d helped himself to one of Jakob’s beers, and as we walked in, he lifted it to his lips and took a long swig, watching us over the top of it. Something about his expression reminded me of one of those cats you see on YouTube that just knocked a glass off a table for no apparent reason other than to be an asshole and was now looking at its owner like “The fuck are you going to do about it?”

I moved closer to Jakob and stashed my gun back in my purse.

“I don’t speak Army,” Daniel said, grinning. “That was funny.”

I forced myself to smile at him. “Thanks.”

As if it was an everyday occurrence to have your gang leader break into your apartment, Jakob hung his keys by the door and shrugged out of his jacket. The dark T-shirt he wore beneath it clung to his muscles in a way that would have had me drooling if not for our audience. His arms were sleeved in tattoos. My gaze stuck on them for a second. With some heavily tattooed people, you can tell that they didn’t plan their ink out in advance but had it slapped together piecemeal. The result can be a jarring mix of styles and patterns. Jakob must have taken meticulous care designing his. They featured a military theme throughout, and each tattoo flowed so seamlessly into the next that it looked like one cohesive masterpiece of ink. It must have taken him years to complete and, judging from the quality, cost nearly as much as his bike.

He paused beside the fridge and turned to Daniel. “Need another beer?”

“Yeah,” Daniel said.

Jakob’s gaze cut to me. His voice softened and dropped half an octave into something low and husky. “Want a beer, babe?”

I stood stock-still, staring at him.Babe?

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