Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
“Probably,” I agreed, admitting that it was really out of my control. This was Levee and Raff’s party. We were all just tagging along. “But we have to be home early tomorrow,” I added, reaching for a sandwich too.
“What for?” Eddie asked as he squeezed clear ‘sunblock’ into the soda he’d taken a chug out of to make room.
“Prospects,” I told him.
“Been a while,” Eddie said, looking at me.
And that was true. Levee and I were the newest members of the chapter, and we’d been around for a long time.
“OG guys have been busy building families,” I said, shrugging.
“It’ll be good. We could use some new blood around here.”
We all had to agree with that. All things considered, we had a small club, given how long we’d been around now. Nothing like our mother chapter, of course, that had been around for generations. But the crew in Shady Valley was growing at a much faster rate.
Granted, they lucked out that their clubhouse is near a prison, and they can recruit new members from the inmates being released.
But we had close enough proximity to Miami, and the crime going down there, to be able to find new brothers too. It just hadn’t been a priority until business started picking up.
Now, we needed fresh blood and quickly.
It was the first time the club had ever had a sort of recruiting process. Huck, Che, McCoy, and Remy all knew and worked together before the club formed. Seeley had been at the right place at the right time and proved his worth. He brought Levee and me in. Che brought in Donovan and Alaric through old contacts. And Eddie, though he wasn’t officially a club member.
This would be the first time that men would be joining up without some prior involvement with the club or its members.
Shit would be interesting.
And I had a feeling the club was going to be hopping more often than it wasn’t with some new guys around.
Normally, that would have at least had some appeal to me. But I found over the past couple of days, that I was just not feeling the partying vibes Levee and Raff were creating.
I’m sure if I tried hard enough, I could convince myself that it was just a funk, that I needed to shake things up, find some new, crazy hobby to get the adrenaline going, and then I’d feel right again.
Thing was, I wasn’t trying to find some bullshit excuse. I knew what the problem was.
A fucking knockout of a woman had swirled into my life, a tornado that had sucked me up, then spat me back out in a different place, and I was feeling a little fucking off about it still.
Crazy?
Sure.
But I wasn’t going to try to blame anything else for the weird headspace I was in.
I mean, last night, Levee and Raff had no less than half a dozen girls playing strip poker in the backyard, and I’d just walked by, grabbed a beer, and went up to bed.
Without even stopping to think how fucking weird that was.
Even now, on the beach, I could be watching the chicks playing volleyball in bikinis, bodies jiggling in all sorts of interesting ways. But my gaze was scanning the beach and boardwalk instead, wondering if there was a chance I could catch sight of that long, gleaming black hair, those tattoos, that gorgeous face with the fucking dimples.
But she was nowhere.
Of course she wasn’t there.
First of all, the chick was pale. Not the kind of woman to be lying out on the beach.
Second, it was a big fucking town. The odds of seeing her again on the rare occasion we were in Miami were low.
I needed to get a fucking grip.
That was why I agreed to hit the town after the sun went down and the guys weren’t ready to go home.
I wanted to get my head off of the random woman, and back in my current life.
“My friends!” a familiar voice called as we were getting in line for one of the many clubs on the strip.
Turning, we found the man himself, Zayn, our international arms dealer, sliding out of the passenger seat of a white Pagani Huayra with a black and red interior, its gull-wing doors up, and drawing looks from everyone around.
Including Eddie.
“Man, that’s a cool one-point-five mill for that baby,” he said, a gleam in his eye as he looked at it.
Zayn was already out, leaving his right-hand-man Daniyal in the driver’s seat, waiting to make sure he didn’t want to get back in.
Zayn was tall and slim, but fit, under his perfectly tailored short-sleeved dress shirt and slacks. He had black hair, a black, neat beard, golden skin, unknown heritage, and warm brown eyes.
“Hey, Zayn,” Levee greeted, moving away from the line to do the whole handshake / one-armed hug thing.