Page 14 of Devil's Own: Roughneck

“Fair enough.”

It’s not fair. The woman is lumping me in with all the assholes she’s known in her life. I have no idea where this’ll end up. What I do know is that I want to find out. There’s a strong connection between us apparent from the moment she sat her fine ass down on the stool next to me after she ran to Nutty’s rescue.

Electricity snaps between us every time we’re close or catch each other’s eye.

“What do you do in the club?” she asks.

“Some things I can’t tell you yet. But I can tell you that I’m a shop rat. I fix cars in the garage the club owns.”

“Do you like it? That’s a big leap from an oil rig.”

“Yeah. I actually do. I like working with my hands.”

She laughs, lightly slapping my chest. “Don’t I know it.”

“Mostly, I like the freedom the life provides. I’m not tied to a job for forty-plus hours a week. We all take turns doing whatever needs to be done to run the club. Then we all get a cut of the profits.”

“So you’re kind of like a biker co-op.”

“Maybe. I never thought of it like that before.”

“You are seriously like no bikers I’ve ever met.”

“How many bikers have you met?”

She rolls to rest her head on my chest, moving her bent knee to lay it across my thighs, slinging her arm around my waist. I never thought I’d be so comfortable being used as a body pillow. “I worked at a bar.”

I nod.

“Well, a lot of bikers frequented that bar. The clubs that got along. I didn’t know about the bikers when I took the job. I’d burned out from working in the nursing homes. It’s a physical job and an emotional one. You get attached to the residents, but it’s a nursing home. You know what that means.”

This woman. Yet another layer of Gia Fredricks to peel back. She was sexually assaulted, punches like a brawler and fucks like a goddess, yet she raised her son in a loving home and gets attached to her residents in a nursing home? How has she kept her heart so tender after the life she’s lived? I want to ask, but I’m not sure it’s the right time. So instead I go for, “You still certified?”

“Not anymore. It got to be too much losing so many patients iin the nursing home. You get attached, you know?.”

“Is a nursing home the only place you can work?”

“No. I was CNA. But that’s where the jobs were where I lived. Why?”

“Just asking.” Actually, I’m wondering if Dusty needs anyone. She’s got Betty, who’s an RN, but I don’t know that she’s got any other employee besides Aja, who works the desk, and they’re busy all the time. I’d rather have her working for Dusty than in a bar. I don’t want to have to kill a man for getting too friendly with my woman.

Isshe my woman?

Well, fuck… I’m not letting her go anytime soon. What more do I need to classify her as my woman?

“We need a meeting with my brother in the morning, though.”

I give her waist a squeeze. “He’ll accept this. He just has to get over himself.”

She sighs.Shit.“That’s not it.”

“It’s not?”

She shakes her head. “You have to remember, I didn’t know when I headed up here that my brother is the president of the Horde.”

“And you came up here for more than a reunion with your kid and Vlad?”

“Yes,” she says worriedly. “And I’ve wasted time by getting upset.”

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