Page 35 of The Princess & the Prospect

“Just wondering if it’s safe to eat or not. If it is, I’ll throw some hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill for us. I’m starving, and it sounds like you are too.”

“That sounds fine, but I’ll pass on the potato salad this time.”

I looked longingly at the aforementioned dish knowing I wouldn’t eat any if she didn’t. She noticed and laughed.

“For heaven’s sake, Joker,” she called out in an exasperated tone. “It’s not like I poisoned the food. I just taste tested a lot of it before company arrived and it soured on my stomach as a result. Just smelling it right now would probably send me to the bathroom.” She wrinkled her nose, as if she was already smelling it.

I knew she didn’t mean anything by it, but my heart hurt knowing I managed to ruin her birthday celebration with her family – even if it had been inadvertently. Plus, she wasn’t even able to eat the food she had prepared.

“Evan,” I corrected her use of my road name instead of my given name. I needed to at least fix one thing today, and I might as well start there.

“What?”

“You’re still calling me Joker. I thought we worked better using our given names?”

“Oh, I guess so. Your name changed since then and mine was never really…”

It was my turn to wave her words and thoughts away like she normally did to me. “Evan and Anna works for me.”

“Evan and Anna,” she replied in her delicate voice. I had to turn and get busy making us food then, otherwise I wasn’t so sure I could keep my hands to myself for the rest of the evening.

I rolled off the couch when the alarm on my cell phone buzzed me awake. Leaving at 4:30 am had been a shit plan. It was one that might just have Crow eating gravel today. Damn the bastard. I groggily made my way to the hall bathroom, cleaned up, relieved myself, and got dressed in record time. Before I was about to head out, I turned back to the bedroom and opened the door. Anna was there on the bed, fast asleep with her dark hair spilled haphazardly across the pillows. Even in her sleep, she held her belly cradled in her arms as if she needed to protect the child growing there from the world.

I may have been mad about our situation in the beginning, but I was pretty sure Anna was going to end up making a wonderful mother for our children. Shit! What I was thinking? Children? We weren’t even at the kissing stage again yet, let alone at a point where I needed to concern myself with getting her pregnant again. Still, that glow in her skin, the twinkle in her eyes when she talked about the baby, and the way pregnancy had filled out her subtle curves had made her one of the most gorgeous women I’d ever laid my eyes on. Actually, there was no competition from anyone I could think of. She was it. I just hoped I would be able to convince her that my fuck up was truly a one-time deal. There was no way in hell I would ever jeopardize losing her again. I Couldn’t. There was no way I could survive her going missing from my life again.

Against my better judgement, I moved into the room and kneeled down beside the bed. Without thought, my fingers traced over the silky strands of hair on the pillow before I leaned in a placed a gentle kiss on her forehead. “See you later, beautiful,” I whispered. Then I got up and left the room before I managed to call my loyalty to the club in question by staying behind to hold her in my bed. That was another goal I needed to set. The two of us sleeping apart sucked. Even if she wasn’t ready for sex just yet, I didn’t think I could manage to go too much longer with curling up to her at night.

By the time I got outside, Kane and Crow were both sitting at the end of the driveway waiting on me. “It’s about fucking time, Army boy. Didn’t they teach you shit about being on time in the military?”

“They taught me a whole fuck of a lot about how to hurry up and wait. You just did that part on your own this morning,” I called out to him as Kane chuckled. It didn’t take long to get myself situated and the three of us were on the road headed to Jacksonville. Not too long ago, I would have been excited for the trip, and the prospect of branching our club out. When it had first been talked about freely in front of me, I just knew I might jump at the chance to head to Florida if they needed bodies for the new chapter. Now, they couldn’t drag me away from this town. My heart was here, and right now it was beating for two. There was no way I’d even think about dragging Anna away from the rest of her family, and even if things didn’t work out, I wasn’t going to put her through a long-distance custody issue either. That meant staying put. Luckily for me, this was supposed to be a quick run to see if the new location was feasible and to help out some members in the Tallahassee Chapter. Their Prez had gotten in some deep shit while protecting his old lady, and now they were on the ropes for running guns up and down the east coast and a few centralized states on a pipeline directed to and from Canada with pitstops in between.

I wasn’t too keen on being a part of that shit, but club was club. We had to support one another, and our mother chapter was behind them for the ten years they managed to get locked into running that shit. They had an escape plan at the end. There was even an emergency plan in case shit went south, but that was a nuclear option that would involve all the chapters. It was also one we weren’t able to talk freely about with Kane present. I had no doubts he’d become a member, but the fact of the matter was he was only a prospect at this point.

Hell, truth be told, I wasn’t sure why he was even prospecting for the club. From what Deck had told me about all the shit that had gone down with his woman, I wouldn’t think Kane would want to be a part of the club. Then again, and I hoped I was wrong, he might have the kind of motivation to join that would eventually get him put to ground. Messing around with another brother’s wife and old lady wasn’t looked upon too kindly unless that brother and his woman had an open understanding.

We made good enough time on the road to get there in about three and a half hours since traffic was light early on in our journey. We arrived at one of the favored scouted locations and killed the engines. “Looks like we’re early and the Florida boys are running a bit behind. They were supposed to get in before we did,” Crow commented as he pulled out his cell, presumably to check on the men from our Tallahassee Chapter.

“Damn, since we operate so close to the beach, back home I didn’t expect this area to look like the sticks. Why this place?” Kane asked as we both glanced around.

I shrugged my shoulder. “Don’t know. From what I understand this is the favored spot.”

“Nah, we’re at the Old Kings Road property,” Crow told whoever he was speaking to, and then he hung up. “Idiots went to the second one on the list. I guess they had some reason to think this place sold already.” Crow glanced around. “You want to know why we want this place? Over 20,000 square feet plus a separate office offering another 1,000. Then there’s the two coolers that are each 3,000 square feet.” He waggled his brows about that. If ever there was a built in space adequate to be used as a torture and kill room, an industrial freezer space would do it. It was already nearly soundproofed, the cool temperatures inside would keep any smell down and preserve whatever might need to be saved, plus it would make for an uncomfortable as hell place to be held prisoner. There were other practical uses for the freezer space too, but since Florida seemed to be a hot bed of bullshit we’d be walking into as a club, it only stood to reason that at least one of them would be used for nefarious purposes.

“There’s loading docks and doors, and look at all this glorious concrete,” he mentioned after a bit of pause as he threw his hands out to indicate the giant parking area that used to house more than 50 big rig trucks and trailers. This was a shipping company previously and I could definitely see the allure. With very little work, it could become an amazing compound, especially since it already had a barbed-wire fence around the perimeter.

We all glanced up when we heard the pipes in the distance. The Florida boys had arrived.

“Sorry we’re late,” Crusher stated as he dismounted his bike and came over to greet us. He was the current President of the Tallahassee Chapter, and a hell of a man. The scar that ran through his right eyebrow was a testament to the fight he put up to keep his woman alive when shit went down with her not too long ago. “I seriously thought Ghost had said this place was off the list.”

“Nah, still for sale, and the price just dropped. Something about a vermin infestation on last inspection,” Crow offered up with a laugh.

“Sneaky little shit,” Crusher applauded.

“Well, God willing, and the creek don’t rise, this will be home soon, and I prefer this to the other options. So does the old lady. She has a bit of country in her even though I have her living in the big city of Charleston. If we have to move to sunny Florida, she said she ain’t living in the middle of no giant city.”

“You’re planning to come down?” I asked. I hadn’t been privy to every detail of the expansion plan, it seemed.

“Yeah. After the shitstorm I helped cause with Ever, and the fact that I just can’t move past the bullshit, we all thought it best I head down here as a senior member for a while.”

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