Page 16 of Hero: Claimed

“Well, it won’t if you don’t try.”

“Me? If… If…Idon’t try? You brought me to a restaurant two counties away so no one you know will see us together.”

Holy shit. That’s what I thought about the bike, but it’s not why I brought her here at all. They just happen to have the best pancakes around. I wanted to bring her someplace I thought she’d enjoy.

“Swear to you, Brin.” I reach over the table to grab her hand. “I brought you here because I thought you’d like it. Pancakes are my favorite food. They make the best around.”

She softens to me after I tell her that. The woman finally believes me on something. Our waitress comes to take our order and I start in on a few things I wanted to talk about. “The shipping business the brothers own, they’re looking for a file clerk. The receptionist has been so busy, the filing just isn’t getting done. I thought you might want to interview.”

A few beats of time pass before she says anything, blinking at me. “Uh… yeah. That’s nice. I need a job so I can save up more money before I go to Canada.”

“Okay, you bringing up Canada again assures that you’re getting driven to work every morning.”

“Her—Levi,” she corrects herself.

“Give me your phone. I’ll program in my number so you can get a hold of me.”

“I don’t have one. I left without anything, nothing personal. I didn’t even have any shoes.”

“Are you serious?” I sort of yell, then I drop my voice to a strangled whisper. “A single woman traveling alone with no phone? That’s so unsafe.”

“Well, it was safer than having to preform sexual acts on Crush and the boys. Plus, look at me. No one’s bothering me. Women who can easily be overpowered are targeted more often than big girls like me,” she says nonchalantly, waving her hand in the air like my concern means nothing. “But to answer your first question, I like to read. The Pythons kept a close watch on me for my dad, so I wasn’t welcome in most circles. And when someone did offer to let me hang, one of the brothers would ruin it for me. I was basically slave labor for my dad whenever I wasn’t working at the Pork Pit, which a lot of Pythons frequented so they could always keep an eye on me there, too.”

“Are you kidding me?” I ask, but she shoots me thedo-I-sound-like-I’m-kiddinglook and I feel stupid for having asked. “Right.” Time for a subject change. I’m irritated with her lack of emotion over the life she’s lived the past twenty-two years. I want her as pissed off as I am, but I don’t want to argue because she’s not. “You like flea markets? Maybe we can find things you like for the place.”

“What place?”

“Our place.” I thought that was a given that she and I would move in to our own place. The waitress sets our plates down in front of us. Then both Brinley and I get separate plates of whipped butter and our syrups. Finally, the waitress tops off our coffees.

“Need anything else?” the waitress asks.

“No,” I say at the same time Brinley says, “No, thanks.”

Once the waitress walks away, Brin cuts into her pancakes, takes a bite, chews, then asks, “What do you meanour place?”

“Babe, we can’t live at the club. The room is for when we don’t want to drive after a party or if we have to bring the families in on lockdown. Only single brothers and a few hot mamas around to take care of the brothers are allowed to live there. The room is temporary digs.”

“Okay.” She agrees too readily and I’m not sure we’re on the same page. “What do you do for fun?” she asks, then.

I’m going to have to keep my eye on her because I don’t quite trust that ‘okay,’ but let her get away with it because it seems like we’re starting to get along. “I actually enjoy working on cars and my bike. The compound has a garage. I keep my tools there. Then before I joined the club, I used to enjoy refurbishing furniture.”

She pops out a laugh.

“What?” I ask. “Don’t laugh. I was actually pretty good at it.”

“I bet you were. It’s just hard to reconcile a biker refurbishing furniture.” Another bite of pancake and syrup dripping off her fork goes into her mouth and I can’t tear my eyes away. Brinley has an incredibly sexy mouth.

Her eyes fix on mine fixated on her mouth and she swallows hard. “Why did you give it up?”

Give it up? I blink and realize it was an actual question and I need to get my shit together. “My pops had a restoration business. When he died, I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

Surprising the hell out of me, Brinley sets her fork down to reach her hand across the table, grabbing my hand. She squeezes it consolingly. “So, you were close with your dad, then?” she asks.

“Yeah…” I swallow back the lump of emotion threatening to bubble up whenever I think about my dad. “Yeah. Close. It was just the two of us for most of my life. My moms died when I was young, like three, hit by a drunk driver. Pops never remarried or anything. Then when I was nineteen, he woke up one morning feeling like shit. Fever, vomiting—he was pale and had a headache. We’d gone out to eat the night before, so we thought he had food poisoning. Five hours later, he was dead. Fucking bacterial meningitis. Can you believe that shit?”

Shaking her headno, Brin watches me longer.

“Is that when you found the Lords?” she asks.

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