26. Cam

twenty-six

Cam

Leaving Riley got harder and harder each time I did it. I could kid myself that I watched her walk away to make sure she was safe, not the overwhelming urge to look at her. The way the boots accentuated her long legs all the way to that tight ass drove me out of my mind. I'd just had her, and somehow my cock twitched to life again.

I took a deep breath and forced those thoughts away. She glanced over her shoulder at me, caught my gaze, and flashed me a shy, knowing smile.

Mine.

And she was the sexiest goddamned thing I'd ever seen. Two parts of me warred against each other. One wanting her gone, knowing she'd be trouble for us both if she stayed and the other that would do anything to keep her.

Preacher, the Club, losing Archer…none of it mattered when I was with her, when I was lost inside her. I'd never imagined it possible for me to be so consumed.

I'd seen guys be so twisted from drugs or alcohol that they couldn't focus, lost control of their lives, and ended up in jail or worse—losing their patches. But none of that had ever been a problem for me. Hell, the only thing in life I could get addicted to was Riley Bowman.

A hand smacked me on the shoulder with the familiar thump of a long-standing friendship. Puck had patched in a few years after Merc and I, but had always hung around the two of us. To the point Archer had affectionately called us knuckleheads. I rubbed the patch opposite my VP patch, the one that Archer had made for the three of us.

Felt like someone was punching me there. I reached into my pocket and twisted the old man's bike key around. Keeping him close.

"You good, brother?" Puck's eyes creased around the corners as he studied me.

"Yeah." I was whole, so was Riley. And now that the adrenaline had faded and I could assess myself, I was pissed. "Still want to hit something." Or someone.

"Maybe you'll get a chance." He sneered with a short laugh and tied his hair back.

"He one of them?" Puck's ex-ole lady had messed around with one of the peckerwoods.

"Yeah, you pulled a damn gun on his ass." He chuckled. "I was half hoping you'd shoot the bastard."

I almost had. The fierce protective instinct wrapped me up so tight I paused in the doorway to the chapel. I glanced across the room, more dark paneled meeting space than actual place of worship. Though the reverence we showed this room was very similar.

Preacher sat in Archer's seat. It made me angry. I shook that off and took my place directly to his left, AP sitting across from me. The other guys spread out around us. Not assigned seating, but everyone knew where to go.

When the thick door thudded shut and the lock clicked, I took the fat envelope from my vest, and plucked the individually wrapped stacks of cash from inside. The stack of bills was substantial and had weighed heavy in my cut. I racked the cash against the table, watching Preacher's fingers twitch to reach for it, and then passed the money to AP to count as he always did. He split the stack, counted out most of the cash, passing that portion to Merc, and then racked the remaining bills against the table before turning to stash them in the safe.

Why would Preacher want the cash? The treasurer counted it, kept it, and put it away. Always had. He only passed the Ukrainian's part to Merc.

When I looked up, Merc frowned just a little. He'd seen it too.

"All there?" Preacher's voice was strained, the corners of his eyes tight.

Maybe I was imagining shit because I wanted somewhere to focus the anger that burned in my chest, and made my entire body vibrate. I didn't know where it came from or what it meant, just that I didn't like how shit was shaking down. I'd reached my limit with it.

"Think I'd short the Club, Preach?"

The dull murmur of conversation around the table stopped so suddenly that I almost thought it had been swallowed up by the roar of blood in my ears. To his dad's right, Merc's head snapped up, and he shot me a look that was half warning, half question.

Both Preacher's bushy eyebrows flicked up in shock, but there was a callousness in his beady eyes. "Intentionally, no. But you've been distracted."

" Distracted ?" I enunciated the word slowly, each syllable filled with more petulance than the first. "How's that?"

"Break in at Archer's, the girl showing up right under your nose, now this." He flipped his hand up. "Ain't like you, Cam."

I leaned back in my seat, flexing my fingers as I crossed my arms over my chest. The urge to sock him right in his smug mouth was so strong I half thought I might do it. "A bunch of peckerwoods chasing me through the desert is my fault?"

"You took the girl, put her in danger, and you rode alone to meet the Mexicans when you shouldn't have—"

I slapped my open palm on the table. "It's been your idea all along that we split up, make it look less like a money drop—"

"You made the call, Savage. You . Taking the girl was stupid, you were paying more attention to her than your surroundings and got made. If it wasn't for the pretty little piece of pussy you got strapped to your ass, you wouldn't have made that mistake!"

I was on my feet, Puck's big arm around my chest before I could blink. I didn't care what he accused me of, but talking like that about Riley…

"Watch your fucking mouth, Preach." My voice sounded feral, wrong, and not my own.

Preacher stood slowly, knuckles on the large table in front of him, his arms outstretched as he hovered like a gorilla. "This is exactly what I'm talking about.

"You took Archer's kid past county lines twice, alone, within weeks of his death. Ro told me about your visit when I stayed over there last night. Archer's kid has got you thinking crazy, pissing off rednecks in bars, and starting shit you can't handle."

"Cam." Merc's voice was all warning, and unease travelled across the rest of the table, bodies shifting restlessly in the brief silence. Preacher and I were top of the food chain, the buck stopped with us. For the rest of the guys, Mom and Dad were fighting, and they didn't know what to do.

I had to calm down before I did something stupid. The edges of my vision were clouding the way it did when…bad shit happened. When he couldn't get close to Riley, he'd went for Ro. And she hadn't told me.

With a hard shrug, I flung Puck's arm off me, straightened my cut and slid into the chair. Any point I wanted to make about my relationship with Riley, he was going to make about Ro. He'd been after her for years.

I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. "When's the damn benefit ride Dylan has planned?"

Preacher nodded, as if that was done. It wasn't. I sat in my seat, listening to club business. It wasn't business as usual, hadn't been since Archer died. Preacher could blame Riley all day long, but if I was all twisted up, it wasn't because of her. It was because Archer hadn't killed himself, and I knew it to the depth of my soul.

The Desert Kings weren't whole, wouldn't be, until we did something about that.

As they droned on with the meeting, I kept replaying that day in my head. Finding out Archer was dead had rocked me, reminded me of the person I'd been when Archer had saved me. I was so close to falling back to that and then I'd found Riley sneaking around in the house and everything changed.

I had purpose. Hell, this time Archer's daughter was the one saving me from myself.

"All right, let's talk about the peckerwoods." Preacher looked around the table, his gaze finally landing on me with a half-bored expression, like he already knew the answer. "What happened?"

"Noticed a truck following me, stopped to eat. When we left, they chased me." Simple. To the point. No bullshit. That was the biggest different between Preacher and Archer. Preach talked in circles, Archer didn't. And Archer had made me.

"Know why?" This from Puck beside me.

"Nope. They were on me almost as soon as I left the meet, like they knew we'd be there."

"Bullshit." Preacher spat, rolling his eyes. "These guys are tweakers. Meeting place changes every time. They probably just followed you out."

"They didn't." I levelled my gaze on his and left it there, challenging him to doubt me.

Jester piped up. "Cam's too smart. He'd have noticed them at the diner. And if he hadn't, the cartel damn sure would have. They had to pick him up after he left the drop."

Preacher had already argued with me at the table, made a scene. He wasn't about to press someone else. I added Jester to the list of guys who probably had my back. I hated that I was doing that, questioning the loyalty of my brothers.

"So now what?" Preacher moved on.

"Go down to the trailer park, fuck some shit up, send them a message." Jester again, but the jovial nature of his tone was a testament to how much he'd enjoy doing that.

"Let's do it. I can't stand those white-trash tweakers." From someone else down the table.

"Retaliate against something that could have been avoided?" Preacher spoke at me, like he was chiding a child—something Archer had never done, even when I was young and hotheaded. "Nah, the Kings are better than that."

This time it wasn't Merc who whispered, "Easy," but AP from across the table. That Preacher dug at me twice meant he was baiting me, trying to make me pop off. I didn't need AP to remind me of that. I saw it coming.

"How's that?" Merc asked him.

"It's not just that she's a hot piece of snatch," Preacher grumbled. "She's Archer's kid, and he had enemies."

"Especially the peckerwoods," Drop Top added. "His beef with them went way back. Preacher's right, you shouldn't have been riding out of town with her alone. Not so soon after…" He trailed off, not wanting to finish that sentence.

There was a huge part of me poised to argue, but he wasn't wrong.

Smug because someone had made his point for him, Preacher shook his head at me like a sad parent. "I told you not to bring her. We should have left her with one of the guys who could have showed her a real ride." He guffawed, and several of the others chuckled nervously with him.

I counted four who didn't. AP, Merc, Jester, and Puck. Every part of my body went rigid. Merc slid his seat back, a barely perceptible move, in case he had to stop me if I went for the older fucker? No. His cool eyes were dark.

Ride or die, he'd roll with me no matter how I handled this. And that stopped the words on my tongue and stilled the hands I'd fisted in my lap. If I went for Preacher, it would tear the Kings apart. But there was something I could do.

If I was drawing a line, I was going to shove it down Preacher's throat.

"Any man at this table, or in this club, goes near my ole lady, I promise you I will fuck up your entire world." I let my grin slide, mean and possessive. "I'll burn it to the ground."

Merc whooped a laugh so loud that the echoes of it resounded around me. Jester leaned across the table, grinning big and slapping me on the shoulder. "Damn it, man, she's a good one."

"Archer's rolling in his grave." AP snorted, but his eyes were bright.

Staking my claim shifted the room, made it lighter. I levelled my gaze on Preacher and held it there, a clear challenge.

"Sounds like she's getting all the rides she needs from Savage." Jester clutched at his stomach, this time laughing.

The mood of the room shifted. The newest Patch at the table, Paul, looked around dumbstruck. Only minutes before, we'd been halfway to war.

"I say we send a couple of the guys—I think even that Ghost kid has some contacts—and have them ask questions. If we don't like the answers, we set a meet with Wanda." AP threw out the only reasonable way to go.

The queen of the trailer park. Her sons might act like they ran that shit, but Wanda was the OG desert meth cook, and she ran the whole damn scene. Normally she wasn't a problem for us, but her boys had never chased one of us through town, either.

"And if we don't like that, then we fuck shit up." Jester, still grinning, looked to AP for approval, and he nodded.

Preacher's face was like granite, each line like a roadmap that told the story of being rode hard and put away wet. "I'll take the new kid and Ghost and check it out myself."

"Fight night," Drop Top Randy said. "Let's iron that out before Merc heads to the Black Cat. You know the Ukrainians get a hard on for this shit."

The rest of the meeting went by like usual, leaving me tossing everything around in my head. When things slowed down, when I could think, I wanted to think about Riley. Especially the defiant way she'd told me to fuck off at that bar, then stood up to the rednecks.

It wasn't until we were filing out of the room that it hit me. "Yo, Preacher."

The burly man's brow furrowed as he paused, half standing from the table. Around us, everyone hung back listening, waiting on a bomb to drop.

I tossed down a grenade. "Garza wants a meet, just you. Says its personal."

Gesturing to Merc, I ducked off down the hall ignoring Preacher's dumbstruck gaze. Whatever the cartel wanted, couldn't be good. And his reaction told me he didn't want the club to know.

Now they did.

"What was that?" Merc hissed in a whisper, looking over his shoulder.

I shrugged, because there was more, waited until no one else filed out and Preacher was behind those doors alone, pulling his shit together before facing everyone after that.

"Nobody that associates with the club was in that bar," I whispered under my breath. "I never said where we stopped."

Merc's brow furrowed. "Brother…"

"I know." Because that meant Preacher knew a good deal more about the peckerwoods than he let on.

"Think they knew you had that much cash?"

It was more than most people saw in a lifetime. I didn't need to count it like AP had to know that. "Yup."

There wasn't anyone else I trusted with my suspicions.

He brooded in a way that was innately my best friend, brow furrowed like he was about to say something really fucked up. "Think he might owe Garza?"

My silence told him exactly what I thought.

Merc changed the subject as we walked out of the hallway and into the main part of the clubhouse, passing other guys. "Riding to the Cat with me?"

Ride or die.

"Yeah…" I glanced to where Riley was walking out of the kitchen.

"Better get permission before we leave the valley." I snorted. I was still mad, but burying it was easier the second I saw her.

"From her or Preach? The Black Cat might not be her style."

Oh, I was betting it was more her style than even I imagined. Riley was full of surprises.