Huck Read online

  With that, he jumped in his car, turned over the engine, and peeled off.

  "You gonna get off the ground now?" the stranger asked, looking down at me, blocking the sun as I glanced up.

  "I, ah, yeah," I said, nodding, not wanting to seem like the freak he probably thought I was. I'd actually prefer to sit for another ten or so minutes, but sometimes you had to power through to appear normal.

  With that, I got to my feet, brushing off the seat of my pants.

  "I, ah, I'm Harmon," I said, offering my hand. I didn't know much about bikers, but making nice right off the bat seemed like a good idea. Especially if they just did a nice thing for you.

  "Huck," he said, taking my hand, nearly crushing it for a second before dropping it. "Probably should have introduced myself when you moved in. But I'm not the baking sort," he said, eyes bright.

  "I'm not exactly an 'I'll keep an eye on your house when you're out of town' kind of neighbor anyway," I admitted, shrugging. "So there didn't seem to be a need to make introductions."

  "So... you good?" he asked, waving at the space where the car had been.

  "Oh, yeah .Yeah. Jones is a good guy. He can just get pushy about some things he shouldn't be pushy about. Thank you for stepping in."

  "Yeah. It's nothing. If you need anything," he said, already turning to walk away.

  "Huck?" I called, wincing when he turned, not knowing if I was asking too much.

  "Yeah?" he asked, turning back, brows raised.

  "Can you... is it possible for there to be one hour a day when the music is turned down a little? I mean, I just... I work from home and I need about an hour without background noise. I can be really flexible. And I mean, it doesn't have to be off or anything. Just..."

  "What hour?" he cut off my babbling.

  "You know... whatever hour works best for you is fine by me."

  "Harmon, what hour?" he asked.

  "Oh, um, eight?"

  "Morning or night?"

  "Morning."

  "You got it."

  And with that, he was gone, making long strides across our properties before I could even thank him.

  So, I'd finally met the scary biker neighbor.

  Who wasn't so scary after all.

  And, what was even better, I was finally going to be able to get some work done again.

  All the excitement was over.

  Or, you know, so I thought.

  Chapter Two

  Huck

  The music was on to make sure no one heard the screaming.

  Before they finally found someone to bite on the place next door, it hadn't been much of a concern. But once we saw the moving trucks , we knew we had to improvise.

  So up cranked the music.

  Then we went ahead and opened the doors for parties, giving ourselves dozens of people who could attest to being in the house, and not hearing or seeing a thing. Just in case the body would be found. When we were done with it.

  It worked because we were banking on the fear-factor connected to a biker club, believing that no one in their right mind would call the cops on us for a noise complaint.

  And she hadn't.

  But I kind of felt like a dick that she hadn't been able to work now that I knew.

  I hadn't given that any thought. I hadn't even considered the fact that our neighbor would probably need some uninterrupted sleep every now and again.

  Well, now I knew.

  I would try to keep it down on occasion. The blasting music had just been easier. Now, I would check on shit, make sure there were times when the music wasn't blasting.

  Especially since the woman clearly had some issues. My sister who'd worked in the medical field, always used to say that the crazies got a little crazier when they didn't get enough sleep.

  We'd find a way to give the woman a break here and there. Just in the interest of not being assholes. Sometimes doing shit just because you could get away with it wasn't the right move.

  "What was that?" Che, my Road Captain, asked, nodding toward the front window. Tall, fit, with dark hair, dark eyes, and his olive toned skin from his Cuban heritage, he'd once been a street racer, then one of my right-hand men when I'd started chopping cars years back. Before we'd decided to make the small leap to becoming an actual MC.

  "Meeting the new neighbor," I said.

  "The guy with the spiked mohawk, or the girl with the blue hair?" he asked.

  She'd moved in about two weeks before, but no one had ever gotten a look at her. She was never coming and going from the house. In fact, she didn't even have a car, even though we lived in an area where you needed one. I guess I now knew why.

  "With the blue hair," I told him.

  "Looks young," he said, getting up when I walked over to turn down the music slightly.

  "I dunno. Mid-to-late-twenties. Something like that."

  "Who's in their mid-twenties?" McCoy, my vice president, asked, coming up from the basement. Not covered in blood for a change. I guess he'd been feeding the man down there. He had to eat if we were going to keep him alive for more questioning.

  McCoy was dark-skinned with long, loc'd hair, dark eyes, and had a more solid build than the leaner Che.

  "New neighbor," Che supplied.

  "Yeah, she's pretty," I admitted. Because it was the truth.

  When I'd first seen the scuffle going on, all I caught was some long blue hair flying around. And by the time I'd finished dealing with the man trying to force her in the car, she was starting to snap herself out of her fit—or whatever it was—drawing my attention down to her.

  I hadn't exactly been starved of hot women. That was one of the things that came naturally to running an MC. Booze, fights, respect, and lots of T&A.

  But she still managed to have an impact.

  Because she was that kind of pretty.

  Make you stop on the sidewalk kind of pretty.

  The blue hair made her porcelain skin look even paler. With her strong jaw, high cheekbones, generous lips, and blue eyes, she was a kick-to-the-gut kind of beautiful.

  Add in her thick thighs and killer ass, and you had one of the prettiest women I'd seen in months, maybe years.

  It was a shame all that pretty seemed to stay stuck in the house all the time.

  "What was going on with the guy?" Che asked.

  "Her brother. Trying to force her to go out with him. Guess she's got some car phobia or some shit. She was not having it. She had a request though. An hour of quiet at eight in the morning, so she can work."

  "Who only works for an hour in the morning?" McCoy wondered, brows squinting.

  "Don't know. Maybe she finger-fucks herself on camera for a bunch of under-fucked husbands," I said, shrugging. "Who cares. But in the interest of being neighborly and shit, we are going to keep it down from seven to ten in the morning. Give her some peace and quiet."

  "We can manage that," McCoy agreed. "He's not making much noise at all these days anyway. Think we're trying to get blood out of a stone at this point."

  He wasn't wrong.

  We'd managed to snag this guy on his way out of his mistress's apartment. It was rare to catch one of the Chechen mafia guys. Normally, we wouldn't fuck with organized crime. But they'd fucked with us first. We had the scars to prove it. Besides, the Chechens weren't anywhere near as powerful as La Cosa Nostra or the Bratva. Hell, they weren't even close to the Irish or the Triad, at least not in this part of the United States.

  So we took him and that was that. Apparently, that code of silence the Italians were so well known for in their glory days still applied with the Chechens as well. He'd given us next to nothing, and what we did get wasn't anything we couldn't have figured out by ourselves with some reconnaissance work. We'd come to a point where we were just prolonging the man's sorry life instead of getting rid of him. So the music wouldn't need to go on for much longer anyway.

  "Has Remy gotten back yet?" I asked, seeing his cat leap onto the top of the TV cabinet from the arm of the couch
.

  Remy—Remington—was the resident collector of animals. Or, rather, It was more fair to say he saved them. Like any rational person, he hated it when people abused their animals. Unlike rational people, though, he would break your teeth out of your face before he saved those animals from you. Which meant the clubhouse was a bit of a menagerie these days.

  Remy was currently out walking his dogs since putting up a fence in the backyard wasn't exactly high on anyone's priority list while we were working our asses off to take over the arms trade in the area and keep control of the port.

  We'd taken out the major players in the area. But it was a funny thing, when you were working your way up to the top of the food chain, you ran across a lot of bastards trying to do the exact same thing. People got hungry and mean when the prize was as big as the one we were all looking at.

  So we had to be a lot hungrier and a fuckuva lot meaner to stay on top.

  "He's coming now," Che said, looking out the window.

  Not two minutes later, Remy was walking in the front door with his five mutts, all saved from various situations. Two pit bulls, three other mixes.

  Remy himself was in a ridiculous yellow and white tank top with green board shorts and flip-flops. With his bleached hair and easy smile along with that outfit, he looked like a fucking college kid on spring break rather than a local.

  "What's up?" he asked, unclasping a hot pink leash from his latest addition. "Did I miss something?" he added, walking over to pluck his cat off the TV cabinet while she tried to bat at a bird on the screen.

  "Huck was just meeting the neighbor," Che supplied.

  "Yeah? With the blue hair?" Remy asked. "What? You guys haven't seen her pacing her porch at night?"

  Judging by the blank looks gathered around, no one had.

  "See? This is why I am valuable to this team."

  That, and his insane violent streak. The bastard enjoyed every second of it, too.

  "Anyone played with the Chechen yet?" he asked, running his hand down the cat's black fur.

  "I think we are almost done with that. It's getting us nowhere," I admitted, sighing.

  That just meant we had to go and find a new lead. Endless hours of surveillance were ahead of us. On top of shoring up deals for new shipments, and trying to find a way to protect the docks.

  We weren't exactly a big club. And until shit was more secure, we couldn't be opening up the books to take on new members. So that meant we were all going to be stretched thin for a while.

  "I mean, I can try my very best to get one final bit of information out of him," Remy offered, giving us a wicked smirk.

  "Maybe later," I said, shaking my head. "We're going to try to give the neighbor some peace and quiet for a few hours a day."

  "Right right. So she can do her videos."

  "Her videos?" I asked.

  "I'm the only one here who does some research?" Remy asked, shaking his head.

  "What kind of research?"

  "Just a basic search for who she is," Remy said. "Thought it was weird she was willing to move in next to us, wanted to make sure she didn't have any ties to some big bad around here."

  "And?"

  "And she doesn't seem to have ties to anyone. Except her fans."

  "Quit beating around the fucking bush, Remy," I demanded.

  "Does she do some X-rated shit?" McCoy asked.

  "No. I mean, I'm sure some of the mouth-breathers still pant over her. But she's a gamer."

  "A gamer," Che repeated. "Like video games?"

  "Yeah. She's really good at Wheel of Life. It's a role-playing game where she's practically royalty."

  "How is that work, though?" I asked. "She said she wanted quiet for work."

  "Right, well. I guess she figured out how to make money off what she is already good at. She records herself playing, posts the videos up, slaps ads on them."

  "And you can make a living doing that?" McCoy asked.

  "When you're drop-dead gorgeous enough to get nearly a million followers, then yeah."

  "Drop-dead gorgeous, huh?" Che asked, giving me a smirk. "I heard the word 'pretty' tossed around."

  "Yeah?" Remy asked, reaching for his phone, searching for a second before he brought up a video, playing it.

  And there she was, sitting in a room with purple and blue sound panels behind her, a big set of headphones on her ears, yelling at the screen as she sat in her gaming chair in a tight blue tank top and plaid boxers.

  McCoy shot me a sideways look. I knew that look. It was the same one he once shot at me when I'd insisted the crazy chick I'd just slept with was nothing to worry about. Just six hours before she lit my fucking car on fire.

  Of all of us, McCoy was the most observant, the most likely to read between the lines. Though what he thought he was seeing now was beyond me.

  "Vivid Harmon-y," Che repeated, looking at her channel name.

  "Her name is Harmon," I supplied.

  "She can really make money like this?" Che asked Remy who was tapping out of the video so he could tuck his phone away.

  "With her following, a couple grand a month. Lets her work from home. Can't imagine why she'd move all the way out here, though," he added, tapping his legs for the dogs to follow him back into the kitchen.

  "That's a good question," Che agreed, turning back to me.

  "Yeah, not that I don't trust Remy's research," McCoy said. "But you've got to wonder if it stopped when he caught sight of her on that video. Might be worth looking into."

  "I'll get on it," I said, moving past them, going toward the stairs.

  As I walked past, I pretended to ignore the fact that McCoy murmured, "I bet you will."

  I wasn't someone who lied to myself.

  I knew that when I went into my room, pulled out my phone, and started looking into Harmon, it wasn't all to figure out if she possibly had any contacts that we would want to know about.

  We knew how these organized crime guys operated now. While they didn't directly include women in their dealings, they would use them to do certain types of surveillance or information mining. Especially if the women had an in at a spa or school or women's group where chicks would talk shit about their men, which would, in turn, give the wives something to bring back to their husbands, little tidbits of information they might not be able to get otherwise. Like if someone's husband is fucking his maid, if there was some secret vacation house in the west or something. You never knew what could be useful. And we'd come across a few women who sat around in higher crime areas, clearly listening for any information they could relay back to their more recognizable husbands.

  So it wasn't outside the realm of possibilities that Harmon had a connection to some group that decided she would be useful to suss out information about us.

  It was suspect that she would be a single woman with no car who willingly moved next to an outlaw biker clubhouse Not all MCs had morals. Some didn't give a fuck about hurting women. You didn't know. Unless, of course, you did. You came prepared with that knowledge . Because you came here on purpose.

  Maybe that was paranoia speaking, but we had endured more than our fair share of trouble in setting up our hustle. We didn't want to run into any other issues because we weren't being careful enough.

  That being said, as soon as I opened up one of her videos, I forgot all about actually looking into her connections. I could suddenly see how she made a living from streaming herself playing her games.

  Sure, it didn't hurt that she was beautiful, that she usually came to her desk with her makeup done—lips red, eyes dramatic, hair styled. But it was more than that. She had a tendency toward inventive cursing, since, I imagined, the advertisers would pull their ads if they found her language inappropriate. She was also sharp, having quick and scathing, yet hilarious, comebacks to whoever was razzing her in the game.

  On top of her ad revenue, she also had something set up that she linked below her videos where people could pay her for more access. Personal videos
, chats, even one-on-one gaming. Each level cost more and more money. Patronage-Only.

  After six or seven videos, I found myself scrolling through that patron side, considering leveling up. When I didn't fucking play video games. At least not anymore. Life was too busy. I found other ways to play that were more satisfying. Namely the kind of play with another person of the opposite sex.

  According to her account, she had a thousand monthly patrons. Which, even if they only paid the lowest level of five bucks, meant an added income of five grand each month. That was nothing to sneeze at.

  And, really, if she was mobbed up, why would she need to get so inventive to make a living?

  "Pretty chicks with a side hustle can still be the enemy," McCoy's voice declared, making me turn to find him standing in my doorway, shaking his head at me.

  "I realize that," I agreed.

  "Did you even check out her social media?"

  "Heading there now. I think it's a long shot though."

  "Come on, Huck. It's suspect. She's got a car phobia, but moved out here where she would need a car. It's just suspect. Worth a deeper dive than Remy did. Just in case. I don't feel like getting another tooth knocked out because we weren't as prepared as we could have been."

  As a whole, morale had been decent. I mean, considering we were all walking around with part of us aching that had never bothered us before.

  It had been a hell of a year since we'd slipped on our cuts, and got this chapter going. I had to understand if the men wanted a couple months that didn't involve bloodshed and bruises. They'd certainly earned it.

  "We will deal with our guest later tonight. Then we will have a little break," I assured him.

  Of course, as it would turn out, I was just talking out of my ass when I said that.

  Because life had other plans for us.

  And, it seemed, Harmon.

  Chapter Three

  Harmon

  Patrick was up to his old tricks again, it seemed.