Page 39 of Ride or Dies

“Jenna called,” Mason said as he came over to me. “She was trying to get ahold of you.”

“Is she okay?” I blurted out the question before realizing that if something had happened to Jenna, her brothers wouldn’t have been acting like I was the one they needed to protect from whatever this was.

“I don’t know how she found it, but there’s an article about you she sent us a link to,” Levi explained.

Mason held out his phone to me, his fingers brushing against mine. I couldn’t stop the little tingle that spread across my skin, but I didn’t let it show.

“I left the article open,” he said quietly before moving back to stand next to Levi.

While Tucker picked up his jeans, I looked at Mason’s phone and felt my heart plummet.

Country Star or Country Slut?

Two weeks ago, the country world was shocked when rising star Evelyn Hayes ended her romantic relationship with publicist Randall Downs, accusing Downs of being unfaithful. While this reporter hasn’t seen any evidence to support those wild accusations, an inside source has suggested that Hayes might not be the innocent she’s led people to believe. Hayes’ disappearance from Nashville hasn’t raised any alarms, even though no one seemed to know where she went. My source, however, has revealed that Hayes was spotted in her hometown of Bedford, Kentucky, but not to visit family. Instead, country music’s sweetheart has been shacking up with not one, but three notorious bikers from a local gang. And that’s not all. These men are brothers. So maybe the question country fans should be asking isn’t “How could Randall Downs cheat on someone as sweet and innocent as Evelyn Hayes?” but rather “Is Evelyn Hayes someone we should even support?”

“What the fuck?” Tucker nearly shouted the question, and I looked up to see him holding Levi’s phone in his hand. “Fucking Becca James.” He handed his brother’s phone back.

“She didn’t say anything about an article she was putting out today?” Levi said. “Looks like she posted it right after you left.”

“You went to see this woman?” Mason asked with a frown.

“She’s been writing shit about Evie for a while,” Tucker explained. “And she just happened to be one town over for the last few days.”

“She’s here?” I held Mason’s phone out to him, my fingers feeling almost numb.

“Not in Bedford,” Levi said. “Mayfair.”

“That’s only like fifteen minutes away,” I said. “What’s she doing here?”

“Writing shit like this, apparently,” Mason muttered.

“She said she was doing some sort of story on a new brewery,” Tucker said. “I don’t really remember the details, because she was coming at me like a cat in heat.” He glanced at me, worry in his eyes, but when I smiled at him, some of the tension seemed to leave his body. “I guess that was less about me knowing Evie and more about distracting me from this article and whatever else she’s been up to.”

“You think she might’ve been the person who broke into my mom’s house?”

The brothers shrugged, the motion so similar it almost made me smile. Almost, because even these three men weren’t enough to distract me from the reality that had just come slamming back into me.

I’d come back to Bedford for many reasons, including to try to get away from the person who was harassing me in Nashville. I’d really believed that if I just disappeared for a while, they’d forget all about me, and instead I’d brought them here and put the people I cared about in danger. There was still a chance that the break-in was because of some unsavory people my mom knew, but the other pieces of the puzzle made a compelling argument against that.

And now that I knew it was possible that Becca James had been behind all of it, I needed to stop pretending that I didn’t have a shitload of stuff to deal with in my real life. A life that might not be able to fit in these three men.

But one thing at a time.

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, taking the sheet with me. “I need to go talk to her.”

The guys exchanged looks that said they were going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

“You can’t,” Levi said. “If this reporter is behind the break-in at your mom’s place, she’s crossed the line from hiding behind her computer screen. She could be dangerous.”

“And we don’t know who this source is, either,” Mason said. “For all we know, she’s had someone in Bedford spying on you, and a person who’d do that might be willing to do other things.”

“Well, I can’t just sit here and let her get away with it, hoping she’ll go away if I ignore her.” Even if that had been my original plan, it wasn’t a good one.

“She’s not going to get away with it,” Mason promised, his expression hardening into something that brought out his resemblance to Levi. “The three of us are going to take care of it. You stay here, and we’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”

If the past week had taught me anything, it was that arguing wasn’t going to do me any good. I had to be smarter than that. I’d play the good girl now, but once they left, they’d find out just how much I hated being told what to do.

Chapter Twenty-Two

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