“Oh,” I said. “Well, either one of those is a mouthful.” I shook my keys in my hand. “You girls have a good rest of your day. Make sure you get some water in you. The heat from the game was no joke.”
I gave each of them a stern look that let them know I wasn’t kidding, causing them to roll their eyes in only the way preteens could.
Seeing as I had sweat running down my ass crack, I knew what I was talking about.
“We will, Dr. Roll Tide,” Ashlie teased.
I felt my eyelid twitch. “Not funny. Don’t call me that.”
“Why not?” Ashlie asked innocently.
“Because I don’t like it,” I grumbled and left.
The ride back home took less than two hours, even though it was supposed to take three—that was the good thing about riding a motorcycle. A lot of times you could make better time because you could fit into smaller places.
Turning down the street to my new neighborhood—I’d literally just bought a house in said neighborhood last week after a bidding war with not one, not two, but eight people—and severely overpaid for it.
Yet, it was mine.
It was at the end of the block, and I owned the acreage on the other side of my house and behind about eight other houses. Meaning, no more houses could be built in the neighborhood, and I wouldn’t have to build my own.
Win-win.
What wasn’t win-win was knowing that Elvis was in the same neighborhood as me.
I eyed all the houses as I drove past them, wondering which one was hers.
I didn’t know any of my neighbors and honestly hoped that I never did. My intention at the end of this was to own the houses on the block, then rent them out to people that I liked. Not to people I didn’t know.
Elvis definitely wasn’t one of them, though.
An older lady that waved on my way past had me raising my hand on instinct, causing her to smile wide.
She probably had no clue, or cared, that I was part of the local motorcycle club.
Otherwise she wouldn’t have waved.
Two weeks before I was set to move in, the rest of the neighbors—at least five of them anyway—found out that I was part of the Battle Crows MC and had been outraged. They’d tried to step in the way of me buying the house, which pissed me off to no end.
Before, I’d been intending to be nice to them. But now?
There was no being nice when you nearly cost a man a house so he doesn’t have to live with his parents anymore.
Something that I’d been doing for the last six months while I’d tried to build a house, only to find that every single builder in the area was busy up to their eyeballs, and couldn’t even spare me a moment to come out and talk.
Buying a house was the next best thing, and it worked out rather well.
If I only didn’t have shitty neighbors.
I wondered if my little Elvis knew that I was coming, and if it’d been her that’d caused the commotion upon me moving in.
My answer was given to me the next morning.
CHAPTER 2
I have got to get normaler.
-Tide’s secret thoughts
TIDE
I yawned hard as I stepped out onto my porch, narrowly missing that fucking asshole of a cat that thinks I’m his owner before he darted out right behind me.
“Don’t come whining and crying to me if you get chomped on by some coyotes.” I looked up to see a dog dart from the woods to a house that was adjacent to mine. “Or eaten by dogs.”
The cat gave me a haughty look like only a cat could do and jumped up onto the porch railing to observe his new domain.
I was tempted to knock him off of the railing like he’d done to my coffee this morning but decided against it.
Mostly because there was a hot chick in the yard glaring at the husky in the yard across the street and I didn’t want her to call me out for animal abuse.
I made my way down the driveway, keeping my eyes on the woman.
She was tall, with legs like a fuckin’ gazelle and hair that looked like it was spun gold.
She was wearing black leggings, a white shirt, and had a rolled-up yoga mat under her arm.
She watched as the dog made laps of the yard, her glare hard.
“Whose husky?” I called out as I reached into my pocket for my keys.
“Oh, that’s my roommate’s dog,” the beautiful woman said, smiling timidly at me.
“What’s his name?” I asked curiously.
“Ricky Bobby,” she answered hesitantly, her face scrunching up in pain as she relayed the words. “It’s, uh…”
“I’ve seen the movie,” I told her honestly, bending down to scratch the dog behind the ears when he came to me.
“Why are you here?” the devil incarnate asked, breaking me out of my contemplation of getting a dog. “And touching my dog?”