Maybe Cash was right in insisting I lay low.
“Augh,” I grimaced at even thinking that he was right about something.
It wasn't that I hated Cash. I didn't have the kind of animosity he seemed to harbor for me. If anything, I actually liked the bastard. He managed to belong to a bike gang and not be a chauvinistic pig. He was confident and endearing. He was charming. But underneath all of that, he was a cool, calm, collected, merciless, unshakable man. I'd seen him walk into a loathed skin trader's house and keep his very obvious rage under control and let me take the lead. Then when shit went down, he dove into the thick of it like he was raised in chaos, never once hesitating or second-guessing himself.
All of that, though, was exactly the problem.
I respected him.
On top of that, I was attracted to him.
And I was proving wholly incapable of fighting it.
That was simply unacceptable. I wasn't that kind of woman. I had always been able to keep myself under control. I always took the lead. I never let a man get the better of me. Well, at least it had been a long, long time since I had let that happen. But there was Cash, younger than me, less serious in all ways than me... and he was making me lose control. How the hell did that happen?
And, more importantly, how could I stop it from happening in the future?ElevenCashI dialed in the combination at her locker, more than a little curious about what she might have stored away, what little pieces of her I could pick up on. She kept herself locked down so tight and I found myself wanting to know more. But my excitement quickly got extinguished when I pushed the garage door up and found the entire unit empty except for the large Army green duffle bag in the center of the cement floor.
Who the hell rented a large storage unit to store a bag?
With a shrug, I hefted the considerable weight up and tucked it into the trunk of Lo's little car and hit the road again.
Reign had been texting me all morning, asking about the Mallicks at first while he was still tucked away at home with Summer. But then, when he got to the compound and found that Wolf still hadn't checked in, he was all up my ass about getting over there and checking on things. Wolf may have been a bit of a recluse, but he always showed his face around the clubhouse if something serious was going on.
So I drove out of the industrial part of town, through the shitty part, and further out to where it went woodsy and rural. Wolf lived up a hill that made climbing it by anything other than foot (or his monster-sized truck) all but impossible. I parked at the bottom and cursed him in new and inventive ways as I hauled it up the hill and through the woods to where it finally broke around a small log cabin that Wolf had taken years to build by his own two hands.
“You better be shacked up in here with some grade-A pussy if you're not showing up at church,” I called through the door, not bothering to knock. The place was small, he would hear me if he was inside. When I heard nothing from inside, I turned and looked off into the seemingly endless woods with a growing sense of dread. “Oh you fuck. If I have to hunt you down...”
The door swung open behind me, making me whirl back around to find Wolf completely overtaking the doorway, his hand on the side of the door as if blocking my entrance. “Cash,” he said, nodding his head at me.
“The fuck you doing up here when bombs are going off?”
“Anything I can do?” he asked, knowing damn well there wasn't, that we had it handled.
“That's not the point, Wolf. You don't miss church. Reign was worried. Now that he knows you ain't dead in one of your fucking tree stands or something, he's gonna be pissed.”
“I'll deal with him,” he said with a shrug.
He'd... deal with him? Wolf may have been our oldest friend, the little (but giant) quiet kid who used to stand lookout for me and Reign when we were getting ourselves into trouble, the guy who once took on half a bar of rival bikers when Reign refused to 'move out of their section'... but that personal history never changed the fact that he always treated Reign and the club with respect. He always showed, he always did his part, let his loyalty speak for itself seeing as the bastard never really said much of anything.
Something was up. And fuck if I didn't need one more god damn complication in my life at that moment.
“What the fuck did you get yourself into now, man?”
“Nothin',” he said, but he wouldn't meet my eye, he was looking off over my shoulder.
“There are fucking bombs going off all over. No one has a god damn idea who is setting them. Repo is up my ass about not being around enough and I can't be around because I got fuckin' Lo begging asylum at my house 'cause she got trouble and she won't involve Hailstorm in it...”
Shit. Fuck god damn it. Me and my big mouth. No one was supposed to know anything about Lo, not even Wolf who would probably never string enough words together to tell anyone anyway.
“Lo?” a female voice asked from inside, making me quiet my internal battle and look at Wolf.
His head was thrown back, facing the sky, his eyes closed, like he thought someone just fucked something up.
I felt my smile quirk up, my sour mood lifting slightly. “I fuckin' knew you had a skirt in there,” I chuckled, ducking under his hand before he could stop me and pushing inside his one-room house.
There was a small kitchenette to the left against the side wall, a little table beside it, a recliner in front of a massive TV, and his giant bed. That, and the door to the bathroom, was all he had inside his house, not that it would fit much more than that anyway.