Total pages in book: 141
Estimated words: 134531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 673(@200wpm)___ 538(@250wpm)___ 448(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 673(@200wpm)___ 538(@250wpm)___ 448(@300wpm)
“He will come around,” Macy repeated my sentiment but more firmly. “Sure, he’ll be a homicidal bastard for the next eight months or so, but that won’t be unlike the time before you met him.” She winked at Freya.
Macy lifted her glass once more. “To marriage and babies.”
We clinked our glasses. “To marriage and babies,” I murmured, thinking about my own alpha male and what his reaction would be if I gave him this kind of news in about two weeks.
Would he come around?
He would have to, I guessed.
And so would I.
The men arrived home, and everyone had congratulated Hades who, unsurprisingly, did not smile or have much reaction to the well wishes. He only had eyes for his wife. Understandable, given what Freya had said.
Then the men had been banished outside to the grill area to cook dinner. Hades only went when Freya stood to whisper something in his ear, and then he leaned to kiss her hard and fast before stalking off.
“Do you ever wish that they moved away from the things that could get them killed or incarcerated?” I asked the women while watching Swiss.
The way he moved was mystifying, enchanting, hypnotizing. It was fluid, strong, purposeful.
Infinitely arousing.
As if he sensed me, his eyes traversed toward our little group, focusing on me.
My body jolted with the electric current of our eye contact.
All of the women quieted at my question.
“Do you mean do we think about the club going in a more legitimate direction?” Macy clarified. “Like the Amber charter?”
The Amber charter was in California, and from what I’d gathered, close with the New Mexico Sons. Macy, Freya and Caroline talked about women like Gwen, Amy and Mia, along with many others with fondness. There was going to be a big trip out that way in a couple of months.
I was incredibly curious to meet all of the people I’d heard so much about, and to see if the hot guy thing was unique to New Mexico—something in the desert air—or if patching into the Sons indeed required muscles, a smoldering glare, a strong jawline and an intensity that brought women to their knees.
I was also incredibly curious because the Amber charter was unique in that they were not outlaws in the traditional sense of the word. I was sure they didn’t live their lives to the letter of the law, but I’d also gleaned that the club operated entirely above board.
This club did not. I’d asked Swiss about the realities of club life, about what he did with his days, how the club made its money. He hadn’t skirted around the truth, not even a little bit.
The club ran guns.
It was a nationwide thing, I’d come to find out, and it was a huge portion of their income. Along with the local strip club they owned, and the garage. There were other, smaller ‘rackets’ but apparently none as lucrative as the guns.
I didn’t know how to feel about that. About the men I’d come to admire and respect contributing to a gun violence problem that was very real in our country. But then again, I couldn’t sit too high on any morality horse, considering the men on Wall Street and in office were committing terrible crimes on a daily basis were celebrated by society for doing so.
Life was very rarely black and white.
“Yeah, like the Amber charter,” I agreed.
Macy sucked her teeth. “Sure, maybe I think about it from time to time. Only because I worry about my Old Man, because I don’t ever, ever want to live through what happened on Christmas.”
She shuddered as shadows passed her eyes.
Christmas. When the club had lost almost all of its members aside from Jagger and Hansen. A massacre.
Just thinking about these people I considered family being brutally killed had my throat closing up. Just thinking about something happening to Swiss had my vision blurring and my limbs going numb.
“But I don’t dwell on it,” Macy continued. “I can’t. This is who they are.” She nodded outside. “The club is part of them. Of who they are at their cores. It has saved their lives.” Her gaze roamed over to Caroline.
I knew Jagger had come back from the Army all kinds of screwed up, and instead of going home to Caroline, his high school sweetheart, he’d let her—and his entire family—think he was dead because he couldn’t face who he’d become. Caroline, in turn, had gone to warzones all over the globe, reporting on foreign bloodshed, looking for a connection to the man she’d thought she lost.
Through an act of dizzying fate, Caroline had decided to do an investigative piece on the Sons of Templar, intending to expose the reality of club life, and instead, she had found Jagger.
Macy’s gaze zeroed in on me. “Without this club, working the exact way it’s working, these men wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t have found them. And though I worry about my husband every day, it’s not the specifics of club life that keep me up at night. It’s a car crash on the way to the grocery store. It’s some fucking illness or brain aneurysm.”