Repeat Offender (Souls Chapel Revenants MC 1)

She wouldn’t be changing my mind, either. That was the whole ‘recon’ thing that you did. How, exactly, could something like that be verified? What if that’d been one of the homeowner’s children?

She rolled her eyes. “It is what it is. Or was what it was. I’m more traumatized by my father’s reaction to me wanting a cat. I swear, he acted like I’d committed murder. I hadn’t even gotten the cat into my house.”

“Is he allergic?” I asked, going back to my burger.

“No,” I grumbled. “He’s just against anything that might cause a hair to be on his clothes.”

“So you could have a snake?” I wondered.

“No.” She wrinkled up her nose in disgust. “I couldn’t have anything. Maybe a more apt explanation is that he didn’t much like me, so anything that I wanted wasn’t really a priority for him.”

I did not like hearing that. Not at all.

I’d never really liked Ivan Broussard. We’d never seen eye to eye.

But seeing how he’d treated her at the board meeting, and my inauguration, followed by what she’d just told me about being arrested and forced to sit in a police car? That really wasn’t something that I liked hearing, and my opinion of the man only degraded from there.

“Have you ever been arrested?” she asked.

I took another bite of my sandwich, wiped my hands off by rubbing them together, and then leaned back in the chair as I crossed my arms in front of me.

“Yes,” I answered.

Her brows rose, as if she was half expecting me to say no.

“For what?” she asked. “How many times?”

More than I could count.

“I was arrested when I was sixteen for beating the shit out of some guy that tried to feel up my sister,” I said, feeling a pang go through my heart at remembering that time with my deceased sister. God, she’d been so scared. So fucking scared. “When I was twenty, I was arrested again for popping some old fucker in the face who thought it would be hilarious to beat the shit out of a little boy that tried to come into his yard for a ball. When I was twenty-one…”

She held up her hand. “Let me guess, you beat the shit out of someone because they wronged someone else.”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

Right.

“Have you ever been in the military?” she continued her line of questions.

I nodded once, not giving her any more than that.

That was a part of my life that I didn’t like talking about. A time of my life that was best kept secret.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she questioned.

I decided to distract her.

“What kind of serial killer type person puts” —I pointed at her ketchup drenched French fries— “ketchup on their fries like that?”

She snickered. “You’re lecturing me on the morality of a person when you kidnapped me?”

My lips twitched. “I’m lecturing you on the way you just destroyed your fries. Are you even going to eat all of those?”

I took a bite of my own fries, sans ketchup.

I didn’t use ketchup. It reminded me too much of blood, and I avoided thinking about blood, because it then degraded to things that I’d rather not think about. Like the way that it feels to have blood running down the length of my hand when…

“I don’t know why I do it like this. And to answer your question, no, I don’t eat all of them. I’ll probably eat like half, if I’m lucky,” she answered. “You don’t even put ketchup on yours at all?”

Back to that same line of thinking.

“I don’t eat anything that has to do with tomatoes,” I answered, letting her draw the wrong conclusions—that I didn’t like tomatoes.

The bad thing was, I loved tomatoes. I just didn’t like the memories that popped up when I had tomatoes.

“You don’t eat spaghetti?” she asked.

I shook my head, dropping my burger down onto my plate as memories started to assault me.

“Huh,” she said as she picked up another French fry, this one not nearly as drenched. Still, she got a small droplet at the corner of her mouth, and I had to fight the urge to reach over and clean it off with my thumb. “Are you going to finish that?”

I looked down at my plate where my half-eaten burger was sitting.

“Yes,” I said.

As soon as my stomach stopped rolling.

“Okay,” she said. “Because you really shouldn’t waste Crockett’s burgers. Did you know that she’s a famous chef?”

I frowned.

“No.” I paused. “I’ve never even been to this store before.”

Honestly, it was kind of gross when you were inside of it.

I could tell that the girl was doing all she could to keep it ‘clean’ and looking ‘decent’ but there was only so much you could do with a store that was more of a shack than a ‘store.’

That was likely why there was such a nice setup for eating outside. It encouraged you to leave and not study the integrity of the place that made the burgers.