Cash (The Henchmen MC Book 2) (2 page)

“I'm just going to go ahead and say what everyone else here is thinking,” I said as I looked around. “This has got to be the weirdest fucking dinner party that has ever happened.”

And it had to be.

We were in the home of a my brother, gun running biker leader with his wife who had an almost alarming love of said guns. Her father, a notorious cocaine crime lord was standing in a corner in a three-thousand dollar suit looking wholly uncomfortable. Wolf, Reign and my oldest friend, was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, looking scary as fuck with his long dark beard and haunting eyes. It didn't help that the fucker never said more than a handful of words at a time. I turned my head slightly to find Lo watching me.

Seeing her was like a kick to the gut. First, because she was gorgeous- tall, long blonde hair, a face full of sharp edges and keen brown eyes. She had long legs, great hips, and a fucking phenomenal rack. She was a couple years older than me and she was probably the sexiest woman I'd ever seen. She was just not the kind of person I wanted to have anything to do with. Unfortunately, my cock did not get the message about that second thing. I was half hard just looking at her in her tight light wash jeans and white tee with a gun strapped around her thigh.

Holy fucking shit she was hot.

A slow, knowing smile spread across her features as she watched me looking her over. “Tuck your tongue back in your mouth, Cash,” she said, tipping her beer up at me before taking a swig.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said, smirking. “If you had any idea what I could do with my tongue, there's no way you'd be telling me to tuck it back into my mouth.”

I was rewarded by her choking hard, beer spurting out of her mouth as she coughed.

“If you could try to refrain from killing my guests,” Summer said, handing a paper towel to Lo, “I would really appreciate it.”

“Hey there, gorgeous,” I said, smiling at her before swinging her off her feet and swirling her in a circle.

I had a soft spot for Summer. Maybe it was because she was the first woman in a long time that I had never had any sexual interest in. It wasn't that she wasn't gorgeous with her long red hair and her delicate face, but it had been clear from day one that she belonged to my brother. Lord knew the man needed some softness in his life and that was exactly what Summer gave him. She helped smoothe his rough edges. She also kept him on his toes. There wasn't a day that went by that they weren't arguing and making up, when they weren't challenging and comforting one another.

She gave my brother someone to come home to, someone to remind him to shrug the weight of leadership every now and then. For that, I would always feel like I owed her. Which was why I was at her asinine dinner party in the first place.

It didn't hurt that she threw an absolute shit-fit when any of us had tried to come up with excuses to not show up.

“Hands off my woman,” Reign said, walking up as I put his woman down, wrapping an arm around her waist, half gluing her body to his. “You gonna behave?” he asked me, giving an almost imperceptible chin-jerk toward Lo who was squatted down, wiping her spilled beer off the floor.

I gave him a smirk. “Oh, you know me. Fucking angel, man,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder and moving over toward Wolf.

“'Sup Wolf?” I asked, reaching behind him for a beer.

“Weird fuckin' party,” he said, using as few words as possible, as was his nature.

Wolf was a lot of things, not one of them being talkative.

“Yeah. If Repo and about three dozen armed psychopaths were here, it'd be like a fucking reunion.”

“I get us,” Wolf started, waving a hand toward himself, me, and Reign. “Don't get them,” he said, gesturing toward Lo and Richard Lyon, Summer's cocaine kingpin father.

“Well, he is her dad,” I shrugged.

“And Lo?”

That was a good point. “Maybe Summer feels like she owes her? Lo was really the only reason we could go in there and get her out.”

Lord knew we, The Henchmen, owed Lo and Hailstorm a big, bloody fucking favor in the future, a fact that had been weighing more heavy on me than Reign for some reason. I guess he figured that whatever it was, would be worth having the woman he loved back.

“All together?” Wolf asked, turning his light, fathomless eyes at me.

That was another good point. Sure, it made sense for Summer to want to see her father. It also made sense for her to want to see Lo again. She invited Wolf and I over all the time. But why, all of a sudden, did we all need to be in the same room, especially given that quite a few of us didn't exactly get along?

“Dunno,” I said, watching as Lo walked over to Richard Lyon like he wasn't one of the biggest dealers on the East coast. Then again, I had seen her walk up to a ruthless, heartless fucking skin trader like they had shared Sunday brunch every day for years.

“Bitches, man,” Wolf said and I turned to find him smirking fondly at Summer.

“Got that right,” I agreed, lifting my beer to him. “How was the run?” I asked, watching Lo throw her head back and laugh at something Richard said, her laugh a strange tinkling little sound that carried across the room.

“Hand me one,” Reign said, walking up, gesturing to my beer.

I handed him one and, unable to help myself, smirked at him. “How fucking pussy whipped are you to allow this clusterfuck to happen, bro?”

Reign snorted, shaking his head at himself. “You've seen Summer get a bug up her ass about shit before. She starts using six syllable words and shit, day and night, never letting up.”

“Other ways to take her mind off of it,” I suggested, raising a brow. He knew what I meant.

“Man, I fuckin'
tried.
Ten minutes after, she's sitting up and starting again. Figured, what harm could it do?”

“Lo's got a gun strapped to her thigh,” I pointed out.

“You got a gun in the small of your back. Wolf has one on his hip.
Summer
,” he said pointedly, “has one inside her boot. Don't think we can judge.”

“How many courses is this thing?” I asked, looking around at all the serving trays (yeah, serving trays... in my brother The Henchman leader's house) laid out on the kitchen counter, just waiting for food to be placed on them.

“Dinner and dessert,” Reign said with a sigh. “Talked her down from four courses.”

“Fuckin' serious?” Wolf asked, dangerously close to laughing.

“Serious about what?” Lo asked. I hadn't even seen her walk up, but there she was, at Reign's side.

The silence after her interruption was palpable and awkward with Reign recovering first, taking a swig of his beer and answering, “Summer wanted this to be a four course thing. Speaking of,” he said, swiveling his head over his shoulder to where it looked like Summer and her father were having some sort of heated debate, “I gotta go see what's up.” With that, he was gone.

Wolf looked at me with a silent shaking chuckle in his chest and said, “You're on your own.” He grabbed a fresh beer and moved away, inclining his chin at Lo as he passed. “Woman,” he said in his deep voice before he was gone.

Lo turned to watch him walk away, a strange small smile playing at her lips. When she turned back to me when Wolf was out of sight, she said, “I like him.”

“Want me to hook that up?” I asked, taking a long swig of my beer. Jesus fuck if she would just hook up with one of the men, if she would just make it about loyalty, then I could stop fucking picturing her naked, riding me hard and fast, her tits jumping as she did, her head thrown back as she moaned my name...

Lo was giving me a sly smile. “As much as I like the strong and silent type,” she started, taking a few steps forward so that her front was practically plastered against mine and for a horrifyingly hot moment, I thought she was going to kiss me. Then she reached behind me for a fresh beer and stepped back. It was then I realized I had been holding my breath and sucked in some air. “He's not meant for me.”

“Meant for you?” I asked, smiling. “Baby, we ain't talking about forever. We're talking about tonight.”

Unphased, she shrugged. “Not meant for that either. And I'm not your baby.”

“Oh sweetheart,” I said, smirking, getting up in her space until she took a step in retreat, “I can get you to the point where you're begging me to call you baby.”

“Pretty confident in that, huh?” she asked with what I could only describe as a challenge in her eyes.

“Yep,” I agreed with a nod.

She took her step back, making her press her tits into my chest and angle her head up to look me in the eye. “Never gonna fucking happen, Cash.”

Two

Lo

When I was eight years old and told my father that I wanted to be in the Marines just like him when I grew up, he told me that women in the military were nothing but a liability or a distraction and that it would be a cold day in hell he let any daughter of his be the reason a platoon of good men lost their lives.

When I was sixteen, I went into a convenience store after school. While I was looking through my junk food options, a man came in with a gun, demanding money. The man behind the counter, in his forties, foreign but in a way I couldn't describe, reached into the register but must have simultaneously reached for a gun. It was half raised in the air when the gunshot went off and I watched in absolute horror as the bullet wedged itself between the store owner's eyes with a spurt of impossibly red blood out the back of the man's head, spraying all over the cigarette stand. His body hovered on his feet for a nauseating few seconds before he collapsed forward over the counter.

The robber, undeterred, reached into the register, stole the money, and took off.

I stood frozen as the wife of the store owner came in from the back having, no doubt, heard the gunshot. She stopped for the barest of seconds in the doorway, looking around until her eyes fell onto her husband. She flew at his body with a scream I could still hear when the night got too quiet, a scream that sounded like with him, a part of her died as well.

The police poured in, my father came, questioning was carried out. I answered in a strange numbness as I watched the wife have to be pried from her husband's dead body, her body shaking so hard from tears that she looked like she was having a seizure.

And I knew, in that moment I knew with a blinding sort of clarity, that I would never in my life ever know a love like that.

They were strange memories to have your mind constantly roll over, especially given that decades had passed. The fact of the matter was, those were two of the five biggest game-changing moments in my life that made me into the woman I had become. They were memories I worked hard to remember in excruciating technicolor detail, fearing that if I lost even a second of them, I would lose an integral part of myself.

They were the thoughts I had on my mind when the door to Reign and Summer's house opened and in walked Cash.

Cash, that was actually his real name, like Reign was his brother's real name. Power and money, they were the only things that mattered to their old man. Reign looked like their father, tall and muscular, dark hair, light green eyes. Fierce. Everything about the leader of The Henchmen MC was fierce, dark, and dangerous.

Cash, much to the detriment of every damn woman who crossed his path from the day his voice dropped, inherited his looks from their mother. He was every bit as tall as his brother, but where Reign's looks ran toward dark, Cash's ran toward light. He had his dirty blonde hair long on one side of his head and shaved to a peach fuzz up the other side. His eyes were a deep shade of green and his lips were almost perpetually turned up at the sides. Then, of course, there were the tattoos. I didn't even want to get into the tattoos. Oh, my
god.

See, the problem with Cash was, he was likable. A man like him didn't cross your path and rub you the wrong way. He was laid-back, funny, flirtatious. If he was in the presence of a woman, you could tell he appreciated her and not just if she was hot shit (though he certainly...
appreciated
those ones all the more). It was almost as if you could just sense that he just genuinely
liked women
with all their contradictions and complexities. He wasn't the kind of man who bitched and moaned about us being emotional or needy or hard to get (because, to him, they never were). He just took women as they were.

And, fucking hell, it was like catnip.

Let's just say, it was no secret that Cash was a whore. Hell, no one could even blame him what with looking how he looked, walking like he walked (he simply... swaggered), talking like he talked (the silver-tongued devil), and riding around on his bike with his leather cut. Yeah. He could have any woman he wanted. And Cash wanted a lot of different women.

I didn't particularly have a problem with manwhores. If women want you and are happily giving of themselves to you, well, why
wouldn't
you indulge? He was youngish, he was hot, he was single. I didn't care how many women he dipped his wick into.