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“Right,” I agreed.
“But to be safe, we’re not gonna touch this shit,” he told me, holding the gun in one hand, then going over to his nightstand to open a drawer, and pull out a small box with a handle.
“What’s that?”
“Gun safe,” he said, tapping a code, then opening it to reveal, well, a gun. That he casually took out, placed back in the drawer, shut it, then put Clay’s gun inside instead.
When he was done, he stuck it up on the top shelf in his closet, then came to sit next to me, pulling off the gloves and tossing them onto his nightstand.
“You alright?” he asked.
“My head is spinning,” I admitted. “A gun? Stacks of money? I’ve never seen that much money,” I added, shaking my head. “How much was it?”
“Those were ten grand stacks. Looks like, rough guess, a hundred grand. Maybe more.”
“A hundred grand?” I gasped, eyes huge. “How? I don’t…”
I didn’t understand.
Clearly.
Because the brother I knew was a law-abiding citizen. I often wondered if Brooks’s choice not to be was part of what had driven a wedge between them.
But the cash, the gun, the car he shouldn’t have been able to afford, the scary guys with his watch?
It wasn’t looking good.
“We’re gonna figure it out,” Brooks assured me, his hand landing on my thigh, giving it a squeeze. “That note he left me is making more and more sense now.”
“You think he was worried about me?”
“I think whatever he was wrapped up in was dangerous, yeah. And it was in his nature to worry about and protect you.”
“I’m sorry he dragged you into this,” I said, shaking my head.
“Hey,” he said, his tone having a bite to it as he snagged my chin, and forced me to face him. “Don’t do that. First, none of this is your fault. Second, I’m happy to be here to help.”
“You won’t get in trouble with your, er, boss?”
“President,” he corrected. “No. Fallon and I are close. And, fuck knows, he’s used to the women in our lives bringing their own particular brand of crazy into the club. It’s fine. But the sooner I can give him the answers to the questions he’s gonna have, the better.”
“Let me see the paperwork,” I demanded.
“We don’t have to do that today,” he said.
“Might as well try. At least it will be off our plates if we can figure it out.”
“Alright,” he agreed, getting off the bed to pull a box out of his closet, placing it on the bed, then removing the stacks he’d sorted everything into. “Do whatever you want to it. I was just trying to see if organizing it might show me something that the mess didn’t. But that got me nowhere.”
With that, he left me with the papers as he went to my purse, removing all the cash, and stacking it on the dresser.
“Was your estimate right?” I asked, looking up from a stack of bills, all of them having the word Paid on them, along with a date.
“One-twenty,” he said.
Jesus.
That was an unfathomable amount of money to me.
It wasn’t that I was struggling or anything. I made a decent living. I generally lived right below my means. I could cover the cost of an emergency car repair, but not much else. You know… like the average American my age. So the idea of that kind of cash was insane.
Brooks, on the other hand, seemed unfazed.
How much money did bikers make?
Enough for this much cash to not make his eyes go wide, it seemed.
And whatever he made, he likely had in savings, since he didn’t seem to have a lot of living expenses, living in the club.
“What?” Brooks asked, making me realize I’d been staring with my brows pinched.
“Do bikers make a lot of money?” I asked.
It was a rude question, of course. You weren’t supposed to ask what someone made. Other countries thought it was incredibly tacky how we so freely asked that kind of thing, like your income had something to do with your worth or something.
But this was Brooks.
I didn’t have to feel weird around him.
“We make a nice living. All of us. But some of us more than others.”
“Because you have a higher rank.”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “Most of us, when we’re ready to move out of the club are able to buy our houses outright,” he said, shrugging that off.
In this area, that was hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“Maybe I should be a biker,” I mused, thinking of all the clothes I could buy with that kind of income.
“It pays based on the risk involved,” he reminded me.
That was true.
And it was something I hadn’t really stopped to consider since things had gotten more than friendly between us.
If I wanted him—and there was no denying that fact—then I would have to live with the fact that he was an outlaw biker, that he did illegal things, that he might get in trouble for that. Or, worse yet, get hurt or killed because of that.
