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The cool air was like a slap to my overheated, overwrought system, shaking the confusion free, allowing me to think straight again.
“Come on, sit,” Seth said, pushing me onto a couch as I focused on breathing, on grounding myself.
“I’ll get her something cold to drink,” the Texan said, walking off to do just that, then coming back as Seth sat on the coffee table in front of me.
A bottle of water was pressed into my hands, the sides already sweating, cooling me even further.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked, looking right at Seth.
“Funny,” Seth said, nodding. “I have the same exact question. You were here to buy a gun?” he asked.
“I… it looks like I should have gone to the other place.”
“What other place?” Seth asked, body tensing.
“The Vultures,” I said.
“You stay the fuck away from the Vultures,” Seth said, voice firm, making me stiffen.
“What? Why?”
“Because they’re bad news.”
“Ah, Seth… it looks like you might be bad news too,” I said, waving around the clubhouse.
Actually, it was pretty nice.
You usually thought “biker” and imagined something dark and seedy. The kind of place where if you touched anything, you had the immediate urge to wash your hands.
This wasn’t that.
Sure, it looked like what it was. A place for a bunch of guys to hang out. There was a pool table, a dart board, an actual full bar, and a giant TV with several gaming systems below it.
But it was nice.
Clean.
Even, in some ways, kind of upscale.
Nice floors, quality furniture.
Not a single dust bunny or cobweb in a corner.
I knew Seth was in a biker club, of course. He’d mentioned it more than a few times. He rode a bike. He was friends with Sully who was also a biker. As was his father.
I just… I don’t know. I guess I’d pictured those kinds of clubs where people just hang out and take rides together and stuff like that.
But Seth had said that the club was his profession. So… what the hell had I thought that meant? I guess in some very distracted way, I’d figured there was some sort of business attached. Bike parts or a bar or… something legitimate.
Which was clearly flawed thinking because how could the man afford to open a big, fancy range on a bike part employee or bartender salary?
Honestly, I have to admit that I just hadn’t given it any thought at all. I was too busy worrying about my own problems and catching feelings for the guy.
I’d like to think that, eventually, I would start to think more rationally about the whole situation, but who knows?
I had just been enjoying him. For the couple of days I had with him so far.
Seth winced at my words, though. Clearly, he didn’t want to be thought of as ‘bad news.’ Even if all the signs were pointing in that direction.
Hell, he kind of even looked like bad news, to be honest. A little rougher than he looked at home. With his little leather vest thing with patches on it. And, well, the black eye that was fading, but still pretty prominent. Granted, I’d given him that, but it really did add to the whole ‘bad news’ look he had right then.
“Lana, why do you need a gun? A black market gun, to be precise,” he added. Because, yeah, I mean… if I didn’t have a criminal history, and I just wanted a gun for my own peace of mind, why wouldn’t I just go through the legal channels to get one? Sure, gun laws were strict in this state, but you could totally still get one if you wanted one.
The only reason people wanted black market guns was to do something shady with them. Something they didn’t want to trace back to them through any official channels.
“You sell illegal guns?” I shot back, not quite ready to let that whole thing drop.
“I was going to tell you,” he said, exhaling hard.
“When? On our golden anniversary?” I asked, brow raised, getting a small smirk out of him.
“It’s not exactly an easy conversation to have,” he said. “Hey, the coffee is hot. And by the way, I’m an arms-dealing biker.”
“No, I… I guess I get that. But the situation is… complicated,” I said, thinking of my kids.
“Yeah. That’s what made it even harder to try to say anything. If you were from the area, you would have just assumed, I guess. But you’re not, and it was hard to figure out where I could admit something like that.”
“Because not a lot of single moms want to date someone who works on the wrong side of the law,” I concluded.
“Yeah, honey, something like that.”
Suddenly, other things were making even more sense.
Like how close his found family was.
Sure, I guess biker clubs could be like that.
But it made more sense if an outlaw biker club would be like that. Because your life had to be very insular. You couldn’t have outsiders in your business. And anyone who wasn’t in that lifestyle couldn’t truly understand what it was like. The risks involved.
