Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75478 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75478 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
“Think the guys around here call that Pennsatucky,” Sully said with a little grin.
“Are you from here?”
“I’m from… all over,” Sully said. “My old man traveled for work a lot. How long have you been in town?”
“Just two years. Why?”
“I’m assuming that means you don’t know where you are.”
“What do you mean?”
“This clubhouse,” he said, gesturing around.
Clubhouse?
“What do you mean by clubhouse?”
“This is a biker clubhouse, honey. An outlaw biker clubhouse.” He paused for a beat. “Do you know what that means?”
Of course I knew what that meant.
I’d read that trope more than a few times before. It wasn’t my favorite genre. Those biker guys always ended up with kick-ass heroines who were bold and confident. I had a hard time putting myself in their shoes or relating to their stories.
“Yes,” I said, looking at him again with renewed interest. But nothing about him screamed ‘biker’ to me. If anything, he had a sort of beach bum and former frat boy vibe to him.
“You can say it.”
“Say what?”
“That I don’t look like a biker.”
“It might just be the shirt,” I said. “And slippers.”
“That’s fair,” he agreed. “But if you know what we are, you understand why going to the cops isn’t exactly our first instinct. But I’m not gonna tell you not to go to them.”
I would love to say that I came up with some great, logical reason to decide not to go to the police. But it really just boiled down to feeling like I was strangling at just the thought of having to go to the police station to tell someone at the front desk my crazy story, then watch as they didn’t believe me, only to have to repeat it to a detective, and maybe a DA one day.
It was all too much.
I’d heard once that there was more to human instinct than fight or flight. There was also fawn. And, of course, the one I related to most: freeze.
When faced with an anxiety trigger, I just shut down. Did nothing. Tried to pretend it didn’t exist.
Healthy? No.
But it was where I was at.
“Are you going to try to find him?”
“No ‘try’ about it. I’m gonna find him,” Sully said. And it was the first time I saw something darker beneath his light and friendly exterior.
I wasn’t an idiot.
This was the part in those biker books where the hero turned over every rock to find the man who hurt his woman, then dispatched him in a brutal way.
Except, of course, I wasn’t Sully’s girl.
“And I will keep you safe too. I know you gotta be thinking about that.”
I hadn’t been, not until that very second. I’d been too wrapped up in the past and present to be giving the future much thought.
“How?” I asked.
“However I need to that makes you the most comfortable. You could stay here. I can hang at your place. Both. I can meet you at work each night to make sure you’re safe walking out of there. You’re not gonna be alone in this.”
Anyone familiar with the deep well of loneliness that had been plaguing me for the past several years would understand that it was those simple words, that promise of no longer being alone, that had me agreeing.
“Okay.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Sully
I expected to need to do a lot more convincing. Everything about this girl said she was timid, shy, and wary of strangers. And I was not only a stranger, but the reason she had a suicide vest strapped to her body.
That said, she’d mentioned having no friends or family, no partners. She was all alone in the world. No one, least of all a girl with a lot of anxiety, wanted to go through shit like this alone.
Especially since we didn’t know if this was random for her or targeted. Clearly, for me, someone had a grudge.
“So, do you want me to take you ho—no?” I asked when she immediately started to shake her head. “You wanna hang here tonight?”
“Yeah,” she said, brows scrunching at her own admission. Like she didn’t understand why she would make that decision. “I mean I… oh no,” she gasped, throwing off the blanket.
“Whoa. What’s up?”
“Work. I should be at work,” she said, but she wobbled the second she got to her feet.
“Honey, there’s no work today. I didn’t even clean up your head yet,” I reminded her, gently placing a hand on her shoulder and pressing her back down on the chair. I didn’t like how pale she looked when she was on her feet. “How about I call you out of work, okay? Say you had an accident and hit your head. It’s not a lie.”
“But...”
“Hey, your boss did it without you before, right? She can handle it for a day or two. Let me just go see if your phone was in your—“ I said, but was cut off by a light knock at the door. “One sec,” I told her, moving out into the hall to find several of the guys standing around.