the club, her muscles ached from being wound so tightly. One wrong word and Connall would face her snapping point. However, he didn’t speak when he came to help her carry groceries. How strange to perform such a domestic task after coming from the bloody havoc in the Gearhead.
She was too aware of him behind her. And when he reached past her to set a gallon of milk on the counter, she couldn’t stop the thrill of interest at the chunky silver rings he wore.
They went outside for another load of bags in time to see Harris driving the black van through the gates.
“I’ll go check on Bones,” Connall muttered.
Good. She needed a little breathing room. Whenever the doctor was near, she wanted to throw herself at him and taste his hard lips, lick his neck, and press her aching breasts to his chest. He roused a deep need in her body, but she wasn’t interested. Not even in a gorgeous badass doctor who wore knuckle rings.
As she hauled more bags inside and dumped them on the nearest table, she caught a raised voice—Connall telling off Bones for being in the wrong place.
What the…
Dammit, was she the only one with sense around here? Striding to the door between kitchen and the big room where everyone congregated, she settled her hands on her hips. “He’s just been shot. You can’t ease up?”
Connall shut his mouth with a snap. “Not your business.”
Bones limped past her with Harris’s support. He shot her a wink and Connall made a noise that sounded like a growl.
She spun away from the irritating man and hurried to her refuge—the kitchen. She put away all the groceries then laid out the ingredients for Ace’s birthday cake.
While she mixed the batter and then the frosting, she couldn’t shake her worry for Bones or even Connall. Twenty scenarios ran through her mind, beginning with Connall being a rival hunted by his own and leaning more toward him going into the bar for whiskey and coming out with a broken nose.
Either way, a rival club was after him but she was still unsure who the bad guys even were.
Chapter Two
When Connall was seated at the big table alongside his brothers, a feeling of peace stole over him. No matter what was to come, everything would be okay because they were all in it together.
Jamison looked up at him from the head of the table. “What happened?”
“It’s the Falcons.”
Silence crashed over the room. After a long beat, Jamison templed his fingers. “You’re sure.”
He nodded. The Falcons were bad news—one percenters through and through. That meant they were dirty murderers and everything they did was illegal, not just something here and there like the Hell’s Sons.
“What the fuck are Falcons doing in Heller’s Gap?”
“Getting their bottom rocker?” This was from Harris. Several biker clans claimed territory rights to both Tennessee and Alabama. The Tennessee charters wore rounded patches—or rockers—on their backs with their territory conquests. In this case, Heller’s Gap.
“Fuck, this is bad, man.” Ace banged a fist on the table and his dog, a huge beast, whined at his feet. Resting a hand on the dog’s head, Ace looked from man to man. “We’ve got one-percenters in our town, and first thing they do is walk into our bar and shoot one of our club members?”
“Blood spilled means they’re going to fight us for every last fucking city block,” another guy interjected.
Connall stared at the wood grain on the surface of the highly-polished table. Was Sarah the person who rubbed all that oil into the wood?
“I caused the fight,” Connall said quietly.
Jamison’s expression was grim. “You’d better tell us.”
“They were lined up in front of the diner on Thirteenth Street. Maybe ten bikes total. I recognized their bikes and gave them the finger. They came right after me. So I picked out the group leader by his placement in the formation and I ran him off the road.”
Harris gave a low chuckle, but Jamison shook his head.