Page 35 of The Devil's Viking

“Oh, my God.” Viking was beside himself. “Where?Where? I need to go take pictures of this, I swear.”

“Wolf made me swear not to tell, and I am a woman of my word.”

“Damn.” Viking shut the closet door. “There goes the framed picture for over my fireplace.”

The women laughed, and Zoe looked at Iris.

“You ready to go do some damage?” she asked. “The all-night mall sales wait for no woman.”

“Yep. Let me just run upstairs and grab my money.”

“Oh, I almost forgot. Wolf kicked in another hundred and fifty bucks,” Zoe told her. “Scars has it for you.”

“He – what?” Iris said. “Why?”

“Because you worked a twelve-hour day today, and he’s paid you for it. It’s not riches, but it’s cash-in-hand and tax-free. Shhhh, don’t tell our accountant. Wolf will sort it out with her when she’s back at work.”

“I’ll have to thank him,” she said, flustered. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Thank him tomorrow,” Zoe said. “He’s ice skating with a little girl in a tutu right now. I meanKeirais wearing the tutu, not him.”

Iris laughed. “Thatis quite a mental picture. OK, I’ll be right back.”

They watched her go, then Viking turned to Zoe. “Any word how Jolene is doing? Has Silver called from Open Skies Ranch?”

“Scars talked to him today. He said that Jo is actually doing well, much better than she was. Her head is healed and she’s walking around slowly, but she’s mobile.”

“But mentally?”

“Yeah.” Zoe sighed. “That’s the part that will take a while, huh? I mean, she knows that it was either kill or be killed, and she knows that everyone except us and Wolf and Scars thinks Silver shot her ex, but she’s feeling – well. Fragile. She also feels terrible that Silver’s taking the rap for what she did, but he’s insisting that this is what he wants.”

“The Enforcers know too,” Viking reminded her. “Ice and Cain were on the cleanup and saw what happened.”

“Oh, right. True.”

“As for everyone thinking that Silver did it, I think that’s highly unlikely. If I were a betting man, I’d say that every Road Devil knows what really happened in Jo’s bedroom that night.”

“You too, huh? Me and Scars are sure thateveryoneknows the truth, even if nobody is saying a word.”

“Us MC boys aren’t so dumb, are we doll face?”

“Yeah, you guys do surprise me once in a while.” Then she thought about Wolf taking Keira skating, and about Scars first offering Iris a job, and about Silver claiming to have killed a man to spare his woman the stigma. “Actually… more than once in a while. All the time.”

Chapter Thirteen

One week later

Iris was in her room, looking at herself in the mirror above the dresser. She’d already showered and pulled her hair into an elegant bun – and now she was embarking on her recent morning routine of standing naked and comparing herself to the other women she saw daily.

Ever since she’d been a child, she’d been complimented for being slim and petite, and she’d spent her life believing that these were desirable things, things that every man wanted in his bed and every woman strove to attain in herself. But this week at Satan’s Bar had opened her eyes to beauty in ways that she’d never contemplated.

Look at Zoe: so tall and imposing, almost regal. She was a real force of natureandof womanhood: she was the manager at the tattoo place, she was a mother to a beautiful little girl, she was Scars’ fiancée – and it was all wrapped up in a blonde, emerald-eyed, absolutely stunning package.

She made Iris feel small, and not just physically. Small in terms of her accomplishments, her abilities, her goals, her wholeself. Iris had never considered what she could be, as a woman and a person, but Zoe made her start to wonder. Maybe Iris was more than someone who could bake bread and cook stir fries and scrub toilets… maybe she could do those things,andsomething more.

But if Zoe made Iris feel unaccomplished and immature in her life, it wasnothingcompared to what she felt when she stood next to Vixen.

Vixen was a waitress at the bar and she worked five nights a week, so she was always in Iris’ orbit. She was a dark-eyed, bottle-blonde who seemed positively allergic to the clothes that hugged her wickedly-curved body. Vixen’s breasts were always threatening to escape the thin material covering them, her generous ass was barely covered by the skin-tight skirts she somehow wiggled into, her firm thighs were always exposed and made your eyes travel higher to the sweet spot between her legs. It wasn’t actually visible, but it seemed like itcouldbe, at any second.

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