“Do you think bringing her here was wise…I mean right now of all times?”

Dax was sitting on a barstool watching Angel play pool with some of the club girls. He was impressed at how well she seemed to fit in. He was impressed with her in general. He’d picked her up in the bar and brought her back to the club because he wanted to get in her panties. Sometimes he just took the girls he met there into the bathroom and fucked them…but this one had seemed different right off the bat. He not only got the feeling she wouldn’t go for that, but he also couldn’t get past the fact that he wanted more time with her than that. For the first time in a long time he’d met a woman that in the first five minutes intrigued him and made him want to know more. He still wanted to get in her panties, almost desperately at this point, but he wanted more than five minutes up against the chipped and peeling wall of the women’s bathroom in the bar. He wanted her in his bed all night long…and deep into the morning.

Chain Dog, his vice president and best friend, was sitting on the stool next to him. Chain was suspicious by nature and usually that was a good thing in their business. But Dax had spent the better part of the day with Angel and in this case he didn’t think Chain’s suspicions were warranted. “I bring women here all the time, and so do you.”

Dax watched his friend’s eyes search Angel out. He rested them on her for a few seconds and then said, “There’s something about her that bothers me. She doesn’t seem like the type to go home from bars with men she doesn’t know, especially with one that takes her to his MC clubhouse.”

“I sincerely doubt that she’s ever done anything like this before. But she seems bored with her life, like she’s looking for something different and exciting. Isn’t that why most people join up with us?”

Chain’s dark blue eyes lingered on Angel a little longer than Dax was comfortable with. They’d shared many women over the years, but this one was different somehow. Dax knew for sure that when he did get into those panties, he didn’t want anyone else in there with him. “You’re not even a little concerned that maybe the Sinners sent her? I mean, it’s convenient that a woman like that shows up right in the middle of this war we have going on with them.”

Dax smiled. “Not even a little bit. Have you seen the women that ride with them? This woman wouldn’t touch any of those guys with a ten-foot pole.”

“Okay then, what about the cops? They’ve got this ‘task force’ now since the thing with Mayhem. How do you know she’s not a part of all that?”

“Does she look like a cop to you?” Dax hadn’t overlooked the possibility, but he couldn’t imagine that the cops would be stupid enough to send a petite little sex goddess into the lion’s den just for a little information.

Chain shrugged. “Cops look different now than they used to.”

“True, but I just don’t see it. I think you just worry too much, my friend.”

“And you usually worry just enough, that’s why you’re in the position that you are. But you seem completely infatuated with some pussy you haven’t even fucked yet. That’s not like you, especially in the middle of the biggest job we’ve ever taken on.”

“I’m not ‘infatuated’ with her pussy. But rest easy, I will be fucking it…probably before the night is out.” Dax chuckled, and Chain Dog sighed and shook his head. Dax glanced over at Angel again. She’d had a couple more shots, some beer, and several hits off the blunt the girls were passing around now, but impaired wasn’t what he was looking for. He didn’t want to fuck her drunk. He wanted her inhibitions lowered enough that she’d agree to stay and then when she was comfortable being there, that was when he wanted to fuck her. He wasn’t sure why, but he had the idea in his head that it was going to be phenomenal.

Chain was wrong, though, if he thought Dax’s fixation on Angel would get in the way of what he had to do when it came to the Sinners. Dax’s eyes went dark as he thought about Grant “Hawk” Benning. Hawk was the president of the Sinners, and there was no one on this earth that Dax would like to see suffer more than that man. He’d also love for that suffering to come at his own hands.

Years ago, when Dax was still a boy and his father was the president of the Skulls, Hawk was a Skull and his father’s best friend. The two older men grew up together and they both joined the MC when they were only sixteen years old. Dax’s father came from an upper-class family. His father was a doctor. Brett Marshall always knew he was different and when he was only sixteen years old, he and his best friend…a guy named Grant Benning from the south side…ran away together and ended up becoming prospects for the Southside Skulls.

The years passed and the men grew closer as friends. Hawk was hot-tempered and impulsive, but Doc had a cool head and although he was as lethal as any of the rest of them, he was known for thinking before he acted. That trait, along with his uncanny knack for business and making money, sent him up the ranks fast. He took Hawk with him and by the time they were thirty, they were running the club.

Things went well for a while, but at some point, Hawk grew tired of Doc’s laid-back approach to things. He started to make a lot of noise in their meetings and even behind Doc’s back about all the things they could be getting into, but didn’t because Doc worried too much. Some of the men thought that Hawk should have been stripped of his patch, and grumbled that Doc was too soft on him. Doc did his best through it all to keep the men together, and then about ten years ago, the VP of a club out of New York was found dead in Connecticut. The police investigation revealed that the biker had been in Connecticut making a gun deal with the Skulls. Unfortunately, it was a deal that Doc knew nothing about. Dax was young and had recently gone from prospect to full-fledged member of the club. He vividly remembered the agony on his father’s face when he realized that he’d been duped by men that he trusted with his very life…men that he considered his family.

When the police investigation was over, two of the Skulls had been arrested for the murder and Doc discovered that Hawk had plotted behind his back to steal guns from the New York club. He had aspirations of running his own club, and the money he made from the sale of those guns was going to fund it. Doc also found out that Hawk had threatened the families of the two men who ended up taking the fall for the whole thing and going to prison. Doc met with the rest of the executive branch to talk about what to do, and the consensus was that Hawk deserved to die and Doc should be the one to kill him. But for whatever reason, Doc would never go through with it. He always said that he didn’t want to start a war, but a young Dax suspected that even the rough old biker didn’t have the heart to kill his best friend.

Hawk disappeared for a while and the club muddled through, but none of the remaining members held the same respect for Doc that they used to. When Dax was twenty-one years old his father died from a heart attack, but he’d always suspected that it was more like a broken heart. At the time, Dax was sergeant at arms of the club, but he was tough and smart, and the respect the men had lost for the old man was given to the younger one. By the time he was twenty-five he was voted in as president, and for the past six years he’d been running the club effectively, efficiently, and with the continued respect of his brothers. The one thorn, however, that kept poking at him was the man he believed had killed his father…Hawk. Hawk resurfaced after Doc died as the founder and president of his own club, the Sinners. At first the club was based in a small-town way on the other side of the state of Massachusetts, but over the years Dax kept his ear to the ground regarding their movements; for the past three years they had been moving in the Skulls’ direction, all the while gaining members, and momentum.

When the Sinners finally began infringing on their territory, Dax gave them an ultimatum—leave or end up in a war that he didn’t believe they would win. He wanted to go after Hawk himself, badly…but he couldn’t put his entire club at risk for his own need for revenge. Hawk actually made the decision easy for him when his club massacred the men from Mayhem. Mayhem was a club that the Skulls had formed an alliance with. That night, the Sinners had wiped out not only the men that Mayhem had lent to Dax to guard a shipment of guns awaiting sale, but they’d stolen the product as well. Dax couldn’t let that slide, and somewhere under the surface he was almost glad that it had happened. Hawk was going to finally get the reckoning he so richly deserved and Dax so badly wanted to give him.