West (The Henchmen MC 19)

"Yeah," she agreed, drawing in a shaky breath. "You still going to deny there is something here?" she asked, eyes pinning mine.

"I'm not denying there's something here, babe. I'm saying it's a bad idea."

"I don't know. It was feeling like a really good idea to me."

"You know what I mean."

"I know you're misguided," she shot back, seeming to remember herself in that moment, casting a disgusted look around at the water surrounding us, then starting to tread water back toward shore.

"Misguided how?" I asked, catching up to her as we made it to the dry sand, watching as she reached up to squeeze the water out of her hair.

"By thinking it has anything to do with my brother. Or the club. Or anything but the two of us and a surface to have sex on."

"I respect your brother."

"Great. That's fantastic. He deserves your respect. But your respect for him has nothing to do with sleeping with me. It's kind of gross that you would even think that. Your sisters would be ashamed of you."

"Huck..."

"Doesn't care who I sleep with! Jesus," she snapped, spinning, arm waving outward, frustrated. "Really, he doesn't care, West. I casually dated his best friend in high school. He was fine with it. I went out with some guy who used to work for him a few times too."

"Used to work for him."

"He wasn't fired because he asked me out. We didn't click. He found someone he clicked with. They moved to Alabama to be close to his family. Huck is a live-and-let-live kind of guy. Which you should have figured out by now. He knows that I do what I want. He doesn't get bent out of shape about it. He doesn't lose respect for his friends or coworkers because they are affiliated with me. And if you are still too backward to accept that, then, well no one would even have to know."

"You want to be my dirty little secret?" I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

"You have no idea how dirty I like to be," she told me, moving in close, plastering her front to me. "If you decide to get your head out of your ass, you can come get me, and find out firsthand."

With that, she turned, beginning the long trek back toward where we'd swum away from.

With my longer legs, I could have easily gained on her.

But I think what we both needed in that moment was a little distance, some room for rational thoughts to slip in.

Maybe she was right.

Maybe Huck didn't give a shit.

Maybe I was being old-fashioned.

In my head, my sisters corrected 'old-fashioned' to 'sexist'.

I guess I had to wonder why the fuck I was resisting so hard.

I never turned down sex from a woman I was interested in. Certainly not when she was mostly pursuing me.

That said, I typically didn't come across a woman who took up quite so much real estate in my head.

Not even just about sex either. Though, admittedly, there was a lot of that. But about her. As a person. The more stories I heard about her, the more intrigued I found myself, the more I wanted to know.

Like what happened after she hopped on a yacht with some French billionaire. Or why the fuck she apparently kept an old ice cream truck in Ayanna's man's storage shed.

"Thought you maybe drowned him," Remy said as we approached.

"Nah, you know Gus," McCoy objected. "Her revenge will be slow and cold and ruthless."

"Preciosa," Che said, moving in at Gus's side. "You have jelly blobs in your hair," he told her, reaching up to pluck some of the goops out of her hair. She turned to look over her shoulder at me, giving me eyes that said McCoy was right. She was going to make me pay for throwing her in the water.

I was pretty sure my response to that unspoken threat was supposed to be anything—absolutely anything—other than what I felt right then.

Anticipation."Who is the best shot?" I asked the next day since we'd all left the beach, hit a bar, and gotten too shit-faced to talk about the plan.

You knew we were being reckless when Gus ended up being the one to make sure everyone got home safe. She even hung back at Huck's place, doing a much needed deep clean before heading home in the early morning to get ready for work.

"Che," Huck said without hesitation.

"But he hasn't done anything like this," McCoy piped in.

"Killed someone?" I clarified.

"Shot someone who didn't have it coming," McCoy corrected.

"But he has taken a life?"

"Yeah."

"Alright. Well, who is the second-best who has done this before?"

"Huck," McCoy volunteered. "I'm better up-close-and-personal," he added.

"Alright. So you. You're going to trail Melor," I said, meaning the younger of the brothers. The younger and cockier, more careless one, easily found standing out in open spaces without realizing he was easily putting a target on his head. How the Ukrainians hadn't actually taken care of him themselves yet was beyond me.