Smoke and Steel (Wild West MC #2)(15)

“You’re impossible,” Hellen hissed.

He turned his grin to her.

She did an eye roll ending on a side-eye with such perfection, he wanted to reward her with a kiss.

Instead, he took a pull off his beer.

“I think you have more explaining to do,” Hellen pushed.

He swallowed and said, “Right. This is how it’s gonna go. He’s going to have an answer for everything she throws at him. You need to prepare because she’s going to believe him. But the reason you don’t tell her this is a larger sting is because she’s going to be so into him, she’s going to tell him everything you say. That means he’ll know you know. And that won’t make him happy. Because those boys aren’t done in Denver, and they’re not gonna have some bitches messing up their paydays. You with me?”

Slowly, Hellen turned her head to Marcy, who was already staring at Hellen, and he knew they were with him.

Neither of these two were stupid, that was clear.

Hellen looked back to him.

“We can’t let him take any more of her money.”

“There is no ‘we,’” he returned. “As of now, you are out of it. You tell her what you know, you’ve done your duty. If she lets him clean her out, that’s on her.”

“But we don’t know anything damning except his partners in crime,” Hellen fired back. “We can’t say, ‘Hey, Bree, you need to dump Christos because we looked into him, and everything checks out, but we continue to have a bad feeling about him.’ We’ve already told her we thought things were fishy.”

“How’d she respond?”

“She got really mad.”

“That’s because you’re trying to come between her and her orgasms,” Core concluded.

“Oh my God. Stop talking about sex,” she snapped.

Core and Marcy exchanged a glance.

Marcy made an “eek” face.

In other words, Hellen also hadn’t been properly laid.

Yet.

Core chuckled.

“I kinda hate both of you right now,” Hellen stated.

“Just trying to lighten the atmosphere, sis,” Marcy said conciliatorily. “It’s getting heavy because everything Core is saying makes sense. This is a bigger bad than we knew, and we’re stuck. Also, Bree is too if she doesn’t get her head out of her ass about Christos.”

Hellen plopped back into her couch and took a long drag off her beer.

This was silent speak, meaning she agreed with her friend, but she didn’t like it.

“I say we wait it out,” Marcy suggested. “If she tells us she’s given him more money or something weird comes up, we give her the three strikes, he should be out talk.”

“And if she doesn’t listen?” Hellen asked.

“We’ll make sure her parents don’t remortgage their house for this guy,” Marcy answered.

Core butted in. “Say what?”

“The Tinder Swindler, it’s a documentary. Have you watched it?” Marcy asked.

He shook his head.

Marcy explained.

“Same thing, except, and I hate it that these words are coming out of my mouth, that man was masterful. We’re talking yachts and private planes. And his bitches weren’t rolling in it. They were opening credit cards and taking cash out of them for his ass. He’d woo one with the money he got fleecing another. He left them hundreds of thousands in debt.”

“Fuckin’ hell,” Core grunted.

“Exactly,” Marcy agreed.

“What happened to the guy?” Core asked.

“He got a little bit of jail time and now he’s putting up pictures of himself in his garage full of Lamborghinis because, whatever his new angle is, he’s got one and it’s working for him just fine,” Marcy told him.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Core growled.

It occurred to him then that Hellen was quiet, so he looked to her to see she was slouched in the corner of the couch, sipping beer and moping.

“You put your ass on the line for your friend, which is really cool, babe, whether she listens to you or not,” he reminded her.

It was then she said something he really wished she hadn’t.

But she did.

She said, “Life sucks all around. You’re born into it being a shitshow. You gain coherent thought and learn what a shitshow is, and you’re in the thick of it. And then you live it, with each day that passes, understanding how huge of a shitshow it actually is.”

After she said that, she sucked back more beer.

But when she was done, she looked tired, sad…

And beaten.

Which was why Core made the decision he made in that moment.

And, fuck him, it was crazy.

She might be uppity and high maintenance, but there was definitely something about her that got to him.

So he made it.

And like any time he made a decision, he wasn’t going to change his mind.

He was all in.





4





BINGO





Hellen





I sat at the desk in my office, irritably tapping the end of my pen against my blotter.

I was irritable because a man I only knew by the biker name Core had strolled into my evening plans, dropped the bomb that Eleanor was up to no good (as usual), horned in on our investigation of Christos, pointed out it was much worse than we thought so our hands were tied, helped himself to my beer (or, to be fair, didn’t say no when offered one) and looked far too good sprawled on my couch…