Page 68 of Savage Lust

Preacher’s face was like granite, each line like a roadmap that told the story of being rode hard and put away wet. “I’ll take the new kid and Ghost and check it out myself.”

“Fight night,” Drop Top Randy said. “Let’s iron that out before Merc heads to the Black Cat. You know the Ukrainians get a hard on for this shit.”

The rest of the meeting went by like usual, leaving me tossing everything around in my head. When things slowed down, when I could think, I wanted to think about Riley. Especially the defiant way she’d told me to fuck off at that bar, then stood up to the rednecks.

It wasn’t until we were filing out of the room that it hit me. “Yo, Preacher.”

The burly man’s brow furrowed as he paused, half standing from the table. Around us, everyone hung back listening, waiting on a bomb to drop.

I tossed down a grenade. “Garza wants a meet, just you. Says its personal.”

Gesturing to Merc, I ducked off down the hall ignoring Preacher’s dumbstruck gaze. Whatever the cartel wanted,couldn’t be good. And his reaction told me he didn’t want the club to know.

Now they did.

“What was that?” Merc hissed in a whisper, looking over his shoulder.

I shrugged, because there was more, waited until no one else filed out and Preacher was behind those doors alone, pulling his shit together before facing everyone after that.

“Nobody that associates with the club was in that bar,” I whispered under my breath. “I never said where we stopped.”

Merc’s brow furrowed. “Brother…”

“I know.” Because that meant Preacher knew a good deal more about the peckerwoods than he let on.

“Think they knew you had that much cash?”

It was more than most people saw in a lifetime. I didn’t need to count it like AP had to know that. “Yup.”

There wasn’t anyone else I trusted with my suspicions.

He brooded in a way that was innately my best friend, brow furrowed like he was about to say something really fucked up. “Think he might owe Garza?”

My silence told him exactly what I thought.

Merc changed the subject as we walked out of the hallway and into the main part of the clubhouse, passing other guys. “Riding to the Cat with me?”

Ride or die.

“Yeah…” I glanced to where Riley was walking out of the kitchen.

“Better get permission before we leave the valley.” I snorted. I was still mad, but burying it was easier the second I saw her.

“From her or Preach? The Black Cat might not be her style.”

Oh, I was betting it was more her style than even I imagined. Riley was full of surprises.

twenty-seven

Riley

I must have looked toward the hallway one too many times.

“Chapel can last hours, if something big is going on,” Kenna piped up from her seat at the small table with us. She expertly ran a polish brush across a perfectly manicured fingernail and held it up for inspection. “And I’d say being chased through town by a bunch of meth heads is a lot.”

“There was a fight,” I whispered.

“With the peckerwoods?” Dylan popped the top off of a bottle of beer and stashed the flat opener in her back pocket as she sat down. “Or with you and Cam?”

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