Smoke and Steel (Wild West MC #2)(53)

Last, this was our first date. I was guessing with how much he was smiling and how hard he came we’d have another one, then more, and it wasn’t easy to date and have sex with a guy who was off to LA to deal with bad dudes.

“It’ll be an in and out, Hellen. I’ll be gone two days, three tops.”

There was that matter-of-fact experience.

I was in too good of a mood to push anything heavy right then, therefore I nodded to him.

“So, just a few more days of women getting screwed,” I remarked.

“About that.”

With the way he said those two words, I grew alert.

“We been taking pics of these assholes out on dates, or in bed fucking, or whatever we can nab that paints the picture that they’re not just hanging with a female friend. Then we email them to the other women each particular guy is fleecing.”

I felt my eyes get big, because that was epic.

“Yeah,” he agreed on a semi-smirk.

“How do you know their emails?”

“Our resource has a lot of skills.”

“So they’re losing the women?”

He did a quick shake of his head. “Some of them are backing off. Some are sticking.”

“Doesn’t that mean Christos and the others know someone is onto them?”

“Yup. Which is why we can’t fuck around taking them down. They know something’s fishy. They’re doing their own investigation, and the local crew is making plans to pull out of Denver. Bree wasn’t a big mark, they got women with a lot more money and a lot more stuff, some of them married, so there’s also extortion going on. This is actually the gig that brings in the big bucks, because these women aren’t hip on their husbands finding out they fucked around on them or having videos they didn’t know where filmed out on social media, and they’re willing to pay to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Holy crap,” I breathed at this news.

“Yeah, these guys are motherfuckers,” he muttered before carrying on with the briefing. “Still, they’ll take what they can get, as long as a woman buys their shit, lets them in her bed so they can get off and she’s got something they can scam off her. But now, they’re winding things up with the women who didn’t scrape them off so they can move to a new city. This means we gotta act fast.”

This bent in conversation obviously begged my next question.

I kept my voice low when I asked, “So when you do whatever it is you’re going to do, do you turn them into the cops?”

“Looked it up,” he began. “The guy from the documentary you talk about served five months of a fifteen-month sentence.”

With that asshole’s path of heartbreak and destruction, that wasn’t fair.

But Core’s response also wasn’t promising.

“Is that a no?” I queried.

He put his burger down, sucked back some pop, put that down, and focused on me.

“They won’t do it again. That’s all I can say for now. You can ask, and maybe we’ll get there one day, baby, and if we do, I can tell you. But right now, that’s all I got to give. Bottom line, though, is they won’t do it again. And that’s a guarantee.”

A guarantee.

I thought about this.

I thought this wasn’t a promising response either, because I could read between the vigilante lines.

I still had questions about why his club got involved with this kind of thing.

Even so, I then thought about Christos making off with Bree’s earrings from her grandma. I thought about how petty that was for him in regards to something that meant the world to her.

I got it. It was a small grab to feel out if she noticed so he could go bigger. When she didn’t notice, he went bigger and she lost something even more precious to her.

I thought about the fact that our justice system was fucked, so if they used the money they stole from women to get themselves a good attorney, it was unlikely they’d pay. And if they did, they’d get out in no time at all, just like The Tinder Swindler, and go their merry way setting up shop again.

But Bree would never get her things back. She was going to question herself and her read on people, maybe for the rest of her life. She was never going to forget that she not only slept with the enemy, she let him in her house to take her precious things and defended him to her friends. And that was never going to sit comfortably.

After thinking all this, I went back to eating my hamburger.

“From the minute I laid eyes on you, I knew you were the shit,” Core said softly.

That felt really nice.

I smiled through chewing.

“You should know, Nails surfaced,” he told me.

My eyebrows shot up as I swiped my mouth with my napkin. “Whoa. Really? Where?”

“She’s back in Phoenix. And it seems she didn’t make a deal with the bad guys down there.”

“Did she come up here?”

“Yeah. Made contact with her dad. He wasn’t fired up his biker bunny daughter showed. She didn’t stay long. We got this from a source close to her down in Phoenix. We’ve had no contact with him, so we don’t know why she came up, but we can guess.”

“What’s your guess?”

“She was bragging around Phoenix she had an in with this crew. We know now she was talking smack, but we didn’t when Rush set Resurrection on your family. Told you, they’re bad news. She’s also bad news. They weren’t feeling an association with her in reality or in rumor. They sent someone to shut her up. She left town because, how they’d shut her up, she wouldn’t like. Since she’s back, she probably got word to them she’ll quit running her mouth.”