“You got called out already this mornin’?” Devilman asked, still inside the club.
Dev was his best friend and had been practically since birth. They’d grown up in the club and were the youngest club brothers to ever get their cuts. Dev had been the first and only person Keyes had ever confessed his sexual orientation to. From that point on, Dev had been his personal defender. When Keyes had continually passed on the whores always hanging around, he’d started getting shit. Dev’s response was to fight every single one of their brothers in his defense. He took on anyone who dared to even give a questioning look Keyes’s way. Dev was a big guy, trained since pre-school on the finer art of fist-fighting. He could kick some ass and did, over and over again, until it finally sunk in their thick skulls what was going on with Keyes. That was one of his first lessons about the kind of guys that hung out with the club—intelligence didn’t always come easy for some of his biker brothers.
“Yeah, sort of,” Keyes answered. It wasn’t necessarily a lie.
“Business dried up quick for everybody else.”
Keyes silently nodded even though Dev couldn’t see. Everything seemed ruined. He hadn’t even had time to really process what they could salvage from the business.
“Get your lazy-ass movin’. We ain’t got no one at the shop to open the place up,” his old man called from the doorway.
“I fuckin’ hate that sorry jackass,” Dev growled with a vengeance. Dev couldn’t have been more than thirty feet from his father’s position at the door, but Dev didn’t care whether he was overheard. Keyes didn’t spare his father a look, nor did he pick up speed as he went for the shop truck. “You need to cut that fucker loose.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Keyes countered.
“The fuck you can’t,” Dev argued, repeating a conversation they’d shared many times before. Shit was getting harder to deal with between him and his old man, but Keyes wouldn’t risk his father bringing their bullshit to the center of the club and creating a divide between him and his brothers. So Keyes sucked it up, because this was all he had.
“You dropped somethin’,” a prospect said from behind him. Keyes turned back to the guy, watching as he swiped a business card off the ground and handed it over. He hadn’t even known the card had fallen out of his pocket. Keyes took it and kept going, not breaking stride until he hoisted himself into the cab of the truck.
“Wanna get some grub?”
“I can’t. I gotta go see what’s goin’ on at the shop.” Keyes looked down at the card in his hand. His dick plumped at seeing Alec Pierce’s name in embossed script. But in the next second, he nearly lost his shit at seeing the line underneath the name on the card. Attorney at law. In the bottom corner it stated Dallas District Attorney office. His heart stuttered violently in his chest.
What the fuck?
“Brother, did I lose you?”
“Uh…” His brain might have actually exploded, stars sprinkling his vision as he stared at the business card. Alec Pierce, the hottest dude on this planet, the one he’d envisioned fucking no less than a hundred times in the last three hours, worked in the fucking DA’s office? A deep breath escaped his lungs, and he gripped the steering wheel for support as he tried to digest the information. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ.”
“What happened?”
Keyes could hear the concern in Dev’s voice and envisioned him walking across the clubhouse to come to him, help in whatever way he needed.
“Nothing, brother. I gotta call you…” Keyes managed to say, before he set the phone in his lap and groaned out loud. Which prospect had handed him this card? Had he seen the name? The pounding in his heart double-timed. His brothers would never see this as a coincidence.
He lowered his gaze to his hand, again scanning Alec’s name. Alec Pierce was an attorney in the DA’s office. Of course, he was.
“Motherfucker.” He should have just left the guy out there on the road to figure out his own shit. “Goddamn.” Keyes shoved the key in the ignition with more force than necessary. He pressed the gas, and the engine roared to life. He yanked the truck into reverse, before peeling out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell in his old rickety ride.
What he planned to do about this new revelation, he didn’t know, but damn, this complicated things.
=?=
This might rank in the top five worst ideas Alec had ever had. He downshifted, turning the wheel and taking the corner from Zang Boulevard onto West Davis Street.
What he should be doing right now was turning this car around, heading straight back home. Wait there for the dealership’s concierge to make contact. They would handle everything. He’d even get a loaner car for the inconvenience. Purposefully driving an hour into what could only be described as the inner-city area to visit a man who he had seen on the morning news as the poster boy for last night’s raids was asinine to say the very least. Yep, he was a dumbass who deserved to have his precious car stolen right out from underneath him then be fired from his job for fraternizing with the enemy.