“Thank you for getting the door. There was someone out there,” I told him. “Creeped me out.”
His eyes narrowed. “You know who it was?”
If I knew who it was, I wouldn’t have been scared to death in my own restaurant for the last half a year.
“Nope,” I said. “I don’t.”
When I led him farther inside through Murph’s apartment and then the break room, I barely looked at where I was going.
The man, Zach, however, did.
He took everything in as he followed me to the store.
When we got there, I saw that he’d already cleaned up his trash and put up the chairs.
“Thank you,” I said softly. “I appreciate it.”
He grunted out something unintelligible and then headed for the front door.
“Thank you for the food and the clothes.”
Then he was gone, and I felt like he took a piece of me with him.
CHAPTER 2
I need to start making healthier choices.
-Me as I walk into a bakery
ZACH
Present day
“Hey, who are you?”
I looked up from the truck that I was working on to see a little girl, about six or seven, standing in my garage.
I blinked.
“I’m Zach. Who are you?” I asked, looking around for a mother or a father to this little kid that was trespassing on my property.
“My name is Zakelina.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you make so much noise?”
My lips almost twitched. “I don’t intentionally make too much noise. Did I wake you up?”
It was after nine in the morning. I didn’t know a single kid that would still be home at nine o’clock in the morning on a school day. Let alone not awake.
“You didn’t.” She shook her head. “My mom and dad forgot about me. Do you think you can give me a ride to school?”
I felt my stomach clench. “They forgot about you?”
She was about to open her mouth to say more but a car came zooming down the road and pulled into the driveway so fast that she slid a little onto the grass.
“Oh my God. Zak!” the woman cried frantically, leaving her car running and her door hanging open as she sprinted toward the house.
“Mom!” the girl, Zakelina, yelled. “I’m right here! I was just asking our new noisy neighbor if he’d take me to school.”
The woman’s head whipped around so fast that she likely had whiplash.
Her eyes went wide as she frantically searched the area for her.
When she finally found me, her eyes went even wider.
“Zak, get over here, baby,” she said, looking at me with disgust in her face.
I narrowed my eyes, knowing exactly what she was thinking.
I didn’t like it one bit, either.
I was many things, but a fuckin’ pedophile wasn’t one of them.
“Maybe you should pay more attention to your kid,” I suggested when she met Zak halfway across the lawn. “And not forget that you left a young girl at home alone.”
The woman swallowed, and I could see that she wanted to say more, but common sense dictated that she not.
Especially when she took me in, top to bottom.
I was a big guy.
Six-foot-three and a half and filled with so much muscle that it was more than obvious that I worked out.
Which was funny, because that seemed to be the only thing that I had to do some days.
Then again, other days I worked so much that I barely had time to catch any shut-eye or eat.
Working for Lynn, the man that’d gotten me out of prison after serving only a fraction of my sentence, wasn’t what I was used to.
But after losing my medical license, there was nothing else I could do.
Unless I wanted to be a midwife, which I most certainly did not.
At this point, based on my looks, I had a feeling that no rational woman would want me to be anywhere near her and her vagina.
At least, not a well-balanced one, anyway.
“I didn’t mean to leave her,” she said. “Today was rough.”
I studied her eyes, took in her stiff figure, and wondered what ‘rough’ was to her.
I doubted that it was anything compared to my rough.
“Sure,” I said. “And I didn’t call her over here or anything. She came on her own. I didn’t even know there was a kid over there until today.”
She swallowed and then nodded. “I’m sorry.”
She was sorry for automatically thinking that I was a sicko.
Nice.
“Have a good one.” I turned and walked back to my garage.
I was working on restoring a 1965 Chevy Corvair for a friend.
It definitely wasn’t the flashiest of vehicles—I couldn’t do paint and body for shit—but I could work the hell out of an engine.
And that was exactly what I was doing.
Making the baby sing.
My good friend, Ford Spurlock, had bought it for a fraction of its value off of a car lot. And though it needed a hell of a lot of work, we both could see the potential.
He had the paint and body know-how, while I had the rest.
Together we would make one hell of a car and sell it to make a pretty penny.
That pretty penny would then be split, and together we would find the next vehicle to do the same to all over again.
It was a fun side job that had definitely kept me sane over the last six months after getting out of prison.
When Lynn didn’t keep me busy doing my real passion—medicine.
Just last week I had to patch up a few of the Revenants when they’d gotten into a fight saving a group of boys from sex traffickers out of Tennessee.
Granted, I’d been with them at the time and had sustained similar injuries, but I’d been able to do my job until another one of the guys’ wives, Wyett, could patch me up.
“Have a good day, Mr. Zach!” the other, much younger and cuter Zak, called.
I waved without saying anything, and then went back to my work until I got hungry an hour or so later.
Looking at my watch, I grinned.
It was an acceptable time to eat.
My body started to pulse with anticipation, the thought of seeing Crockett again playing havoc on my soul.
It hadn’t been that long since Juniper, the woman that I’d had intense feelings for, broke it off.
And it had taken time to get myself straightened out.
Only, I’d never thought that another woman would catch my eye, and hold it, even better than Juniper ever did.
Getting on my bike, I headed to Crockett’s Corner before I’d even given myself time to think, only realizing about halfway there that I probably should’ve changed my clothes.
I was in a pair of old sweatpants, a tight black wife-beater, and flip-flops.
Hell, I’d even forgotten to put my cut on, which I never did.
When I’d joined up with the MC, I was one of the only ones in the club who really understood club life.
The Souls Chapel Revenants was supposed to be a cover for the side business that Lynn had us doing. A way to cover up our movements, explain why we were all in podunk Souls Chapel, Texas.
At first, everyone didn’t quite understand the rules of MC life.
So I’d taken it upon myself to teach them the ways of this new world, and one of those ways was to always, always, always treat your cut like the valuable possession that it was.