Page 32 of Lush Curves

“Hey,” Aidan said to him now, passing King a beer. “What’s going on, man? Who you contemplating killing?”

King shifted his gray glare to the Texan with the golden eyes and hair. “Nobody.”

“No?” Aidan grinned, all sunny charm and honeyed manners. “Nobodyyet? Or nobodyat all?”

King took a swig of beer. “Nobody at all… that I know of.”

“Ah. So nobody yet.” Aidan took a look around himself, shrugged his massive shoulders. “Seems like most everyone’s cool and calm, man. Things have been pretty subdued since that whole Fallen Angels thing went down a few weeks ago.”

He shot King a sharp look, watched the man closely. Aidan was an ex-cop, an ex-DEA officer from Texas, and he knew how to read people like books… but Matt Kingston rarely gave anything much away. His military background, coupled with his special-ops experience with King’s Men, had resulted in an implacable and emotionless exterior.

But Aidanknewthat King and his Men had been involved in the Fallen Angels motorcycle club massacre. Hell, every one of King’s friends knew it, but as with everything to do with his work, King had been tight-lipped. The only thing that he’d said was that without Wolf Connor and Scars Innis, the President and Vice-President of the Road Devils MC, things might have gone differently the night that King and his people had stormed that warehouse to rescue Ace Cuddy. Ace had been the President of the Fallen Angels MC; he’d also been King’s informant. His life had been in danger from the moment he’d first betrayed his own MC, his brothers, his family – and when his time had run out, he’d been taken. Beaten. Cut up. Disfigured. The man had been through hell, but he’d walked out the other side in one piece. More or less.

Where Ace had ended up, Aidan had no clue – but according to Mac, he was gone, and he’d gone with his ex-boyfriend, Spider Valance. The only reason that Aidan knew this for sure was that Spider had given his business, The Web Café, to Mirrie Kane, Mac’s fiancée, as a wedding gift. Spider still retained some percentage, but Mirrie officially had the controlling stake. She had no expectation of Spider ever returning to Denver, though, so she was the one making the decisions, and according to Mac, she’d never been happier at work.

Mirrie wasn’t totally happy, though, despite being the owner of a successful business and being engaged to the man she’d loved so much that she’d left him to save his life. Her older brother, Donovan ‘Joker’ Kane, had been one of the Fallen Angels MC members killed in that bloodbath – and although she’d always,alwaysknown that her brother would die a violent, awful death, she’dneverthought that a good friend of her fiancé’s would be the one to orchestrate it.

Aidan knew that King’s guilt at being a party to Joker’s death was real, but it was minimal, all things considered. King felt badly for Mirrie, knew that she was hurting… but healsoknew that the world was a much better place without Joker Kane and his fucking criminal ilk in it. Andthatwas the overreaching sentiment in King’s heart: that Joker had had it coming, that he’d made his choice a long time ago, that he’d been lucky to go as quickly as he had, because God knows, he hadn’t deserved that tiny kindness that King had shown him, that small mercy that King had extended him. Kane had deserved to suffer, to be made to beg for release from his agony, he’d deserved tohurt– but King had spared him all of that.

King was a man who did hard, questionable things, but he always checked with his most moral, pure self before he did them, and he stood by that night at the warehouse; he’d stand by it until his dying day. And though he’d have happily made Joker Kane crawl on his belly to his slow, painful death and been perfectly OK with that, hehadn’tdone it… and he hadn’t done it because of Mirrie. He had no illusions that Mirrie would appreciate that, though, mainly because he had no intention of telling her. Not ever. Some things were just better left unsaid, and choosing how to kill a woman’s brother fell pretty firmly into that category.

King was silent now, choosing not to respond to Aidan’s casual mentioning of the Fallen Angels. Yeah, it was true that since that MC had been blown off the planet, to all intents and purposes, the criminal element in Denver had been shocked and awed into subdued contemplation. Losing the one-percenter MChaddisrupted pretty much everything and everyone – from the drug dealers to the strip clubs to the weapons smuggling businesses to the sex trafficking rings – and the ripple effect went far beyond the city limits. It crossed state lines and went up into Canada, and it had resulted in a gaping power vacuum. King knew that other MC’s and criminal groups all over were jostling to gain an advantage in this new, wild-west world they found themselves in now.

Adding to the whole mess was the fact that Kirk Jensen – local criminal mastermind, with a reach that crossed the whole damn continent, including Mexico –had been killed a couple of months earlier. Jensen and the Fallen Angels were intricately linked, and the fact that King and his people had wiped out most of Jensen’s local people in the warehouse wasalsohuge.

In short, they’d blown a hole through every significant criminal operation in Colorado, and they’d done it in one fell swoop… and everyone wasstilltrying to find their feet. It was a weird, tense time for the cops, the feds, the DA, the Road Devils, and King’s Men. It felt like a maybe-calm-before-the-storm, but it might also be a death whimper that was going to trail off to not much at all. Only time would tell… but King wasn’t all that goddamn good at waiting.

He knew that his friends knew that he’d been involved in the shitstorm – he’d made that much clear – but they didn’t know specifics, and that’s how it was going to stay. Theonlyperson that King would go into any detail with was Mirrie, if she asked about her brother’s last minutes on earth. He wasn’t sure she would, but if she did, King was prepared to tell her as much truth as she could handle, as much as she asked for from him. He’d do this for her; he wasn’t going to do it for anyone else. Not even his fiancée and the lifeblood of his heart, Naomi.

“Anyway,” Aidan said now, clearly noticing that King wasn’t about to say anything. “You heard about Curtis and Tessa?”

“No,” King said, his gaze automatically swinging over to Tessa Mahoney as she served up shots to a table of rowdy types. He wasn’t too worried, though, because Curtis’ baleful stare clocked her every move. Curtis was protective of all the female staff at Curves, as per his job description of kickass bouncer, but seeing as Tessa was the love of his life, she got special attention when she was around the drunk and leering customers. “What about them?”

“Tessa!” Aidan called over to her. “C’mere a sec, hon.”

She nodded, her curly blonde hair falling forward over her shoulders, framing her large, rounded breasts. The woman had a figure that could stop traffic – curvy, lush, generous – and she looked just as going coming as she did going. As she crossed the bar to where Aidan and King stood, every man watched her graceful movements, and Curtis watched them watch her, his ice-cold blue eyes narrowing.

“Yeah?” Tessa said to Aidan now, oblivious to the hungry stares behind her. “You got a drinks order for me that I forgot about?”

“Nah, hon,” Aidan said. “King doesn’t know the news.”

“Oh!” Her heart-shaped face lit up, her green eyes sparkled. She held out her left hand and King look down to see a ring with a tiny diamond glittering there. “Ta-da!”

“Holy shit,” King said, genuinely delighted. “Tessa… congratulations!”

“Thank you,” she said, beaming as she accepted King’s hug. “He asked me this afternoon. I practically killed him when I jumped on him as I said yes.”

King laughed and looked over at Curtis. The other man was clearly wondering just why thehellKing was hugging his drop-dead-gorgeous fiancée, and so he grinned and held up Tessa’s left hand. Right away, Curtis gave a rare smile of his own back, returned King’s nod, turned his attention to a table in the corner that was getting a bit loud.

“So, it looks like the last one of you determined single-guy types has taken himself off the market,” Tessa said to King . “First Jax and Sarah, then you and Naomi, then Dillon and Maria.” She turned to Aidan. “Thenyouand Gabi, then Mac and Mirrie, now Curtis and me. It’s too big of a loss to the hot man pool around this place. The women of Curves are weepingrivers, I tell you. The woman’s bathroom floor is awash with tears, to the point that you need rain boots to cross it.”

“No kidding, right?” Aidan said. “You and Curtis were the last to jump on the engagement wagon, but y’all are welcome.”

“Dillon’s best man for Curtis, and he’ll let you guys know about the stag party stuff,” Tessa told him. “And Gabi’s my maid of honor, so besides my bachelorette party, she’s also already planning a girl’s night with wine and bridal magazines. I’m really sorry, Aidan, but I think you’ll need to make yourself scarce for a few hours over the weekend.”

“Aw, no problem,” Aidan said gruffly, looking over at Gabriela Torres serving some food to a group playing pool in the next room. “She loves all this wedding stuff, so if she wants to have all you blushing brides-to-be over for drinks and dresses, I’ll stay away.”

“You can have a blushing grooms-to-be night with the guys,” Tessa teased them. “Beer and boutonnieres?”

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