With that, I walked into my room and shut the door.
I locked it, then bolted it for good measure.
Because my roommate had a bad habit of coming into my room, borrowing my shit, and then not putting it back.
It was also why I had a fuckin’ refrigerator in my room, because the bitch ate all of my leftovers, and drank all my beer, out of spite.
That, or she poured it out/threw it away.
I wasn’t sure which.
Whatever her reasoning behind doing what she was doing, she was officially the worst roommate ever.
It might make me come off as heartless, kicking her out when she didn’t pay the rent.
But eight months ago, when this deal was struck, Lindy came up with the most ridiculous demands to allow me to ‘continue’ to be her roommate.
Early on, she knew the renter, and they’d switched the name on the lease—which had been in my name—into hers to try to kick me out. When I’d fought back and threatened to take the bitch to court, she’d allowed me to stay. But on a conditional basis.
At the time, I hadn’t much cared. Matters had hit the fan with other things in my life, and the last thing I really needed to worry about was Lindy and her demands.
Now, my life was a little more turned around, my business was booming, I had money in the bank to blow, and Lindy had shown me what a real bitch she could be.
Voices sounded from the other room, and I groaned.
All I wanted to do was go to bed.
All I would be able to do now was listen to Lindy have sex in the living room because she knew that it was ‘her’ room, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
God. Fucking. Dammit.
I hastily changed my clothes, took a shower as fast as I could, and then got dressed again.
This time in clothes that weren’t grass-stained and smelled of gasoline.
Gathering my dirty clothes, I walked out into the living room, finding Lindy there with her new ‘man’ on the couch.
If you could count a man in jeans tighter than my sister wore a ‘man.’
He looked at me and his eyes widened.
“Don’t mind me,” I said to them both, watching the man’s hands still on the back of Lindy’s shoulder where it’d been headed south. “Just gonna do some laundry before I head to bed.”
My lips tipped up in a grin as I started to do my laundry, tossing Lindy’s into a hamper that was for sure to wrinkle her favorite tops despite the fact that I knew she’d hate it.
See, I didn’t do anything to Lindy that she didn’t to me, first.
But Lindy always took it a step farther.
When I had clothes in the washer and she wanted to use it, sometimes she’d stop my clothes in the middle of a freakin’ cycle just to take them out, put hers in, and forget about mine.
She’d leave mine in a sopping heap in the middle of the laundry room, fuckin’ water pouring out of it and into the damn walls.
Needless to say, no, I didn’t feel guilty anymore because of everything that she did so vindictively to me.
It wasn’t my fuckin’ fault I couldn’t finish all my clothes in the time she ‘allotted’ me during the day.
After getting my clothes started, I walked past her basket, into the living room, and started doing the dishes. The dishes that she’d purposely left in the sink because my peanut butter had gotten all over them.
Rolling my eyes, I finished those up, snatched a beer, then walked back into the living room while whistling.
Of course, I happened to be whistling Jaws.
The man who’d been kissing her earlier was now sitting beside her with his arm around her shoulder. Lindy was pressing her lips to his jaw, but the man’s eyes were all for me as he stared at me with worry.
“Good night,” I called out, heading to the bedroom.
At least, out of it all, I got the master.
Because when I got the master, she got the rest of the house that she wanted.
Whatever.
It only meant that when I got to my bedroom, I had a bathroom, massive walk-in closet, and a pretty big window that overlooked the road beyond.
It also meant that, when I climbed out the window two minutes later dressed in jeans, a white t-shirt, biker boots, and my Battle Crows MC cut, it was fairly easy to slip out.
But I paused and turned up the mood music before I left, mostly because I knew it’d piss her off and there wasn’t a single fucking thing she could do about it.
When the first croon of the guitar started playing, I giggled like a goddamn girl, then slammed my window closed.
The next ten minutes were spent rolling my bike down the driveway so she didn’t know I was gone and heading to the bar that was in the middle of Intercourse, Texas. The one place that I probably should’ve avoided tonight with my sour disposition.
Not because it was a bad place or anything, but because I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone.
And I knew, the moment I walked through that door with my cut on, people would come over.
It was just the name of the game when you were a Crow in Intercourse, Texas.
People either loved you or hated you.
Either way, people didn’t stay away.
CHAPTER 2
It’s called gross pay because it’s disgusting to see how much you would’ve made before taxes.
-Iris to Shine
IRIS
“Your parents are dead?”
I overheard the women and the men at the next table talking, and I glanced surreptitiously over my shoulder to see if I could make out the face that belonged to that annoying as hell voice.
She sounded like a balloon that was losing air.
“Yep,” the guy said.
The guy’s voice, however, wasn’t nearly as annoying as the woman’s voice.
He sounded like a sexy beast of a man that gargled with gasoline and growled out obscenities at the top of his lungs for fun.
At least, the hoarseness in his voice spoke of that anyway.
Maybe he was a smoker.
I hoped not.
Smokers made me want to vomit.
Not because of the habit being bad for you—though it was—but because the smoke literally made me nauseous.
That, sadly, was a childhood memory that I couldn’t quite shake.
I looked again over my shoulder and finally pinpointed the man that was talking.
And, oh, holy shit.
Just staring at him made my freakin’ heart skip a beat.
He looked like Thor.
Like, no joke, that golden-blond hair and beard, paired with all those muscles, fit underneath a white skintight t-shirt? Yeah, he could easily pass for the God of Thunder.
The black motorcycle vest on his back made me even more curious.
I hadn’t lived in Intercourse—God, gag on that name—Texas for long.
In fact, it’d been a little over six and a half months since I’d moved into town, but in that time, there was one particular group of people that I’d been warned about, over and over again.
And that was the Battle Crows MC.
I’d heard good things and bad things, but out of all of those things, the bad far outweighed the good.
Take my coworker, for example.
A coworker that’d dated one of the members of the Battle Crows MC.
Granted, I didn’t know which one, but the way she spoke about him made me genuinely curious about why she’d stayed with him for so long.