Page 16 of Diesel’s Desire

And I can’t lie to myself about it anymore, not sitting here with my pulse doing this, not after two weeks of catching myself thinking about him at the worst possible moments—brushing my teeth, running radar on Route 9, lying awake at two in the morning staring at my ceiling.

He’s been on my mind since the wedding.

Every single day since.

11

DIESEL

Bone’s numbers don’t lie, but I still make him walk me through them twice.

“Buyer in Knoxville’s offering sixty on the dot for what we pulled off that van,” Bone says, tapping his pen against the ledger. “Kentucky boys want to lowball us at fifty-five, say the AR platforms need refinishing before they’ll move.”

“They don’t need shit.” Jenson leans over the table, one hand braced flat against the wood, reading the numbers upside down like he’s got nothing better to do with his eyes. “Tell Kentucky no. We wait a week, Knoxville pays full price or somebody else does.”

I nod along, but half my attention’s already drifting. Hell, it’s been drifting for two weeks straight, ever since a wedding and a woman in a blue dress left me unable to get Penny out of my head.

Jenson’s phone buzzes against the table. He glances at the screen, and something in his face softens the way it always does now, that stupid, lovesick tell he can’t shake no matter how many years he’s spent being unreadable to everybody else in this club.

He answers, listens a moment, then hangs up. “Sasha,” he says unnecessarily. “Needs a ride from lunch.”

“With who?”

“Penny.” He says it easily, not thinking twice about it, already reaching for his keys off the hook by the door. “They’re having lunch together. Didn’t I mention that?”

He hadn’t. Doesn’t matter. My mouth’s already moving before my brain finishes catching up.

“I’ll go.”

Jenson pauses with his keys half-lifted, one eyebrow climbing slowly. “You’ll go.”

“Yeah.”

“You. Volunteering to run an errand.” One corner of his lips twitches. “Since when do you do prospect work, Diesel?”

“Since right now.” I’m already holding out my hand for the keys. “Kade and Wyatt are on the range with Riot. Everybody else’s busy. I’m not doing anything.”

“You were doing numbers with Bone,” Havoc counters.

“Bone doesn’t need me. He needs a calculator.”

Bone, without looking up from the ledger, says, “He’s not wrong.”

Havoc studies me a beat longer, and I can feel him calculating my behavior since the wedding. Since Penny was there in that blue dress with her hair down and her badge out of sight. He doesn’t say anything out loud. Just shakes his head slowly.

“Take the truck,” he says. “Not the bike. You’re picking up my wife, not racing her.”

“Wasn’t planning on racing anybody.”

“Sure.” He tosses me the truck fob. “Go on, then. Don’t scare Penny off. Sasha likes her.”

I don’t answer that. I’m already walking.

The drive into town takes six minutes, and I spend every single one of them running through what I’m going to say when I get there, which is stupid, because I already know I’m going to forget every word of it the second I see her.

Main Street’s quiet this time of day, lunch crowd thinning out, and I spot the green awning before I even get the truck fully stopped along the curb. Two heads at a table—one gold and loose around her shoulders, one pulled back tight and neat, and even from here, even through a windshield and a stretch of sidewalk, I feel my pulse pick up its pace.

I cut the engine and cross the street without checking traffic, because apparently I’ve survived the Kings just to get flattened by a fucking delivery truck. Sasha spots me first, waving like I might walk straight past them, but my eyes have already found what they came for.