Page 4 of Crash’s Secret

CRASH

The lights are on in my bar when I pull in.

Seven-forty a.m.

We don’t open until eleven, and I’ve got the only key that matters.

Except I don’t. Not anymore. Duke handed a key to Cassidy Harlan last night, and there she is through the front window, set up at the rail with a pen behind her ear, ready to take this job seriously.

Of course she’s early. She didn’t even have to commute. She just walked over from the clubhouse.

I kill the engine and sit there with both hands on the wheel, losing an argument with myself.

Last night there was a plan. The plan had a name—Dana or Deena, fuck if I can remember. She came with a low-cut top and zero complications. She’d been on that clubhouse stool an hour, laughing at everything I said, and I’d already decided how the night would end. With her sucking my cock.

She’d made her intentions very clear, and I wasn’t going to object.

Then Cassidy walked in. And the woman whom I’d planned on fucking no longer held my interest.

I haven’t seen Saber’s kid sister in four years. I was always out of state on runs when she came for Christmas. She is not what I expected. For starters, she’s no longer a kid. She’s twenty-two years old with blonde hair, blue eyes, and curves that would feel so fucking good naked against my body.

That thought is the reason I cracked the glass. Saber would fucking kill me if he knew where my head was at. So I walked out of the party and didn’t come back.

I’m thirty-one years old. I’ve been talking my way into and out of trouble my whole life. I run this bar. On a good Saturday night, I can keep the whole bar laughing for an hour straight. And one look from Saber’s little sister and I’ve got nothing to say.

She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on, and she is the one woman on this earth I am not allowed to touch. Off-limits to every member in this club. Me most of all.

Saber’s sister. Saber, who is my club’s President. My best friend since grade school. The man who once got stabbed in the leg, because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.

I’d take a bullet for that man.

And now she works in my bar and sleeps in the clubhouse. There is no square foot of my life she isn’t standing in.

Now I have to try to act normal and face her.

“Good morning.” She doesn’t look up when the door swings shut behind me.

It gives me another moment to compose myself.

“Hey.”

That’s it. Hey. I closed this room at two a.m. last Saturday with two dozen people hanging on every word I said, and this morning, my mind only produces one syllable.

She keeps working, so I get busy behind the bar. Pull bottles. Check the cooler. Anything that isn’t the line of her neck or the curve of her ass.

She flips a page. “Duke met me here at seven. He walked me through the first ledger, then a kid called with a question about dinosaurs. He went home after that.”

“His son. Leo.”

“He looked like a cute kid on the video chat.” She smiles. “My brother said these books were a mess. They’re actually a trainwreck, just so you know.”

“My fault,” I respond. “Duke is stretched thin. So I took over the books for the bar.”

“So, this disaster is yours.” She draws a line through a whole row of numbers, execution-style. “Good to know who to bill for the aspirin.”

A laugh gets out of me before I can kill it. She glances up at the sound, like she caught me at something I wasn’t supposed to be doing.

A smirk plays on her lips before she looks down again.