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Not only had her parents come, but so had her uncles and aunts, as well as her grandfather and his wife.
All in all, twelve people sat at the table, and all of them had their eyes on me.
I’d known Silas, of course. It was hard not to when your grandfather was part of the same MC as the man, but it was only by association. My parents didn’t frequent the club parties as much, and when I’d gone to live with my uncle, he sure as fuck hadn’t spent time with them.
When I did spend time with my grandfather at those particular parties, I sure as hell didn’t go about spending time with the man. He’d been scary as fuck then, and it was easier to avoid him than meet his gaze.
Pru didn’t worry about my discomfort. She was too busy downing chips and hot sauce to spare me a glance.
Apparently, El Torros had the same effect on her as it did on me.
I’d managed to hold off on the chips for all of eighteen minutes. Then they brought the queso and tortillas out, and I was a dead man.
“What do you do for a living?”
I glanced up to find Pru’s mother, Cheyenne, staring at me with curiosity written all over her face.
I picked my glass of water up—I’d much rather be having a large glass of sweet tea—and took a small sip before biting the bullet.
“I’m active duty Army,” I told her. “I’m currently on medical leave for another two weeks until I can get this off.”
I held up my cast-wrapped arm and showed it to her.
The cast looked like crap today thanks to my workout and then firewood chopping. It had a smear of what looked to be pine sap on it, and I hadn’t been able to wipe it off. The white gauze that they use underneath the plaster was stained brown with sweat and dirt.
Though, it’d looked pretty bad before my attempt at keeping in shape, as well as busy, today.
“How’d you do that?” Sam, her father, took a sip of his beer.
He looked suspicious as hell and very unsure about me.
Then again, I’d gotten the same look from her grandfather and uncle as well.
“Motorcycle wreck,” I said. “Some guy forced me off the road and I fell into a ravine and impaled myself. Broke my arm on something on the way down.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed.
“This the trouble the club was experiencing a while back?” Sam turned to his father.
The ‘trouble’ he was speaking of was actually a man who had a hard-on for the Dixie Wardens—Silas’s club, and didn’t like them to have back-up in the form of clubs that supported them. I was one of the unfortunate examples of what would happen if we continued to support them the way we had been.
Unfortunately for them, the Bear Bottom Guardians MC didn’t like being threatened and intimidated into doing what they thought we should do. We did our own thing, and we asked no permission.
“One and the same,” Silas Mackenzie muttered.
It didn’t surprise me that they knew my business. The Dixie Wardens—which both Silas and Sebastian, Pru’s uncle, were members of—had once been the intended club for Bear Bottom, Texas.
I’d missed all of that hub-lub. I’d agreed to go…when I could. Being career military as I was, I didn’t have as much time to put into the club as the others.
As the new members had volunteered to come down here, it’d been decided that we no longer wanted to be the Dixie Wardens. We wanted to make our own life—form our own club. And we’d done that, much to the annoyance of our fathers and the Dixie Wardens. Silas Mackenzie had been one of the most vocal about not liking the change.
“You’re the one that got ran off the road,” he stated. “What happened to the snake?”
I grinned.
During that rescue, I’d fallen down into the ravine. A ravine that had water running through it and goddamn snakes making it their home. During the time where medics were called and when they showed, a snake had happened upon Conleigh—who’d come down to help me—and me. I’d caught it by the throat and drowned the motherfucker.
I’d saved the damn thing, too, and had it stuffed. “It’s stuffed and sitting on the counter at Bayou’s house.”
Pru gagged. “That’s gross.”
I shrugged. “It is what it is.”
It was actually a kind of cool memento to memorialize the moment that I had almost died. Would have died had Conleigh not stumbled along and seen my bike laying on the side of the road.
She’d saved my life, and I would forever be grateful to her for that.
It was also nice that she was friends with the woman that I had a desire to get to know better—both the usual way and biblically speaking.
“What happened?” Pru asked, trying to appear as if she was uninterested when we both knew that she was very interested.
