Judge (Shady Valley Henchmen 1)

“Let me guess. They did the whole ‘You stay away from our baby sister’ thing.”

“Can’t blame them,” I said, shrugging. If I had a sister, I was sure I’d want to keep guys like me away from her too.

“No, it’s sort of sweet, actually. So why the hell are you trying to talk to her then?”

“Fuck if I know,” I admitted. “Can’t get her out of my mind. Figured maybe it was the guilt.”

“And you wanted to, what, apologize?”

I had no idea what was in my head. All I knew was that I saw her and needed to talk to her.

“The fuck if I know,” I admitted, reaching up to rub the back of my neck. “Just wanted to talk to her.”

“And that would be worth another ass-kicking?” she pressed.

“Guess I figured so in the moment.”

“Hm. Interesting. Well, you took your risk. It’s Conor working in here tonight. You might want to get moving,” she warned.

And, with that, she was gone.

“You good?” Slash asked when I walked back into the pool hall.

“Let’s take this back to the clubhouse,” I suggested. “I need a fucking drink.”

Or thirty.

Sure, the chicks flocked back with us. I was even pretty sure one of them put on a striptease on top of the fucking coffee table a few feet away from me.

But my dick stayed unimpressed.

I went ahead and blamed the copious amounts of alcohol I consumed.

But a part of me knew the truth.

I did want pussy.

But it was only Dell’s that I wanted.

What the fuck was that about?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Delaney

“You said you wanted to go,” Nyx said, pouting those bright red lips of hers.

“I do. I was just wondering why all of a sudden?” I said, wiping down the bar.

Tuesday nights, even in a small town with little going on, were almost always a bust.

So we did what we could.

We chatted up the few who did show up in hopes of a higher tip. We did some side work that we’d been putting off. And, apparently, we planned a last-minute trip to Vegas.

I mean, yes, she’d floated the idea to me almost two weeks ago. But I figured it was just one of those things you say you are going to do, but never actually get around to it.

Or, if you do, it is because you’ve been talking about it for a year, and you decide you need to stop talking about it, and do it already.

But after the one mention of it, we didn’t talk about it again.

It seemed more like something she was just saying to cheer me up than an actual plan for the future.

And definitely not the near future.

“I just want to get away,” Nyx said, but I knew her well enough to hear a false note in her words. That said, I also knew her well enough to know that if she was being cryptic about something, I was never going to get her to crack. “And if I am getting away, I am taking your cloistered ass with me. When is the last time you even left this town?”

Years.

Actually, aside from day trips to do some shopping—usually with one or more of my brothers in tow—I hadn’t actually left Shady Valley since I came back from L.A. that time I was sent away until the dust settled on their little business issue.

“A long time,” I admitted.

“And never unsupervised,” she said, giving me a knowing look.

“No. Never unsupervised.”

“You are twenty-fucking-one years old. You deserve a trip with a girlfriend, and no one looking over your shoulder.”

She wasn’t wrong.

My first thought when she’d mentioned it was My brothers would never let me go.

But she was right. I was an adult. If I wanted to go out of town, that was my right. And what I did on that trip was no one’s business but my own.

“It’s going to be hard to get out of town.”

“I already got the day shift to agree to take ours. With the understanding that at some unspecified time in the future, we would be willing to take their shifts.”

“That’s fair,” I said, excitement starting to thrum through my system.

If I were being honest, I needed to get away. Because my pathetic ass couldn’t stop thinking about and looking for Judge.

Especially after encountering him in the alley that one night.

Was pretending I didn’t know who he was the most mature move? Probably not. But, you had to admit, it was a power move. And it made me feel a little bit like I had some more control over the whole thing.

Since then, I hadn’t seen him.

If he’d come into the bar, he did so when I wasn’t working. And I had too much pride to ask the others if they’d seen him.

Getting out of town might finally put enough space between me and him and that damned prep table.