Gunner was looking at the beautiful blonde whispering in Dax’s ear. He got the feeling by the way Dax looked at her when she came into the room that he shouldn’t be looking at her at all, but damn, it was hard. She didn’t look like a biker chick. She was dressed in a white pencil skirt and a peach-colored silk blouse and she carried a fancy-looking leather briefcase. She seemed like an attorney. He’d had plenty of those in his life, court-appointed of course, but if she was Dax’s attorney, she was a lot more than just that. She looked at Dax almost as hungrily as he looked at her. Gunner wished they’d give him a lawyer like that when he got arrested in Texas.

Dax finally looked up at Gunner and he averted his eyes as quickly as he could from the lady, or lawyer, or whoever she was. Damn, she’s hot. “Adam, this is my wife, Angel.” His wife? Gunner didn’t see that coming. Not that he didn’t expect Dax, with his long blond hair, clear blue eyes, and “built” body, to have one hell of a fine-looking old lady, but this chick seriously didn’t look like she’d ever been inside of a bar, much less a biker hangout.

“Um, hi. It’s nice to meet you, Mrs.…” She smiled. Fucking knockout.

“It’s just Angel. It’s nice to meet you too, Adam…or Gunner, Dax said you prefer?”

He tried to swallow. His mouth was bone dry. “Uh, yeah. Gunner. Thanks.”

“Gunner, I’m an attorney,” she said. He’d gotten that much right. Dax Marshall, the president of the Southside Skulls, was married to an attorney. This was a whole different world than Gunner had been expecting.

“Oh…okay…”

She smiled again. He wished, for the sake of not getting a hard-on and dying at Dax Marshall’s hand, she would stop doing that. “You’re not in trouble, at least not that I know of.”

“Well, that’s new,” he said and laughed nervously. Dax wasn’t smiling, but he looked slightly amused.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Anyway, Dax asked me to sit in on this meeting. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Um…No, I don’t know what it’s about, but I’m sure it’s fine that you’re here.”

“Hawk and some of the old-timers tell me that Doc spent a lot of time in Texas in ’95 and ’96,” Dax said. “I’m guessing you were born in 1996?”

“Yeah,” Gunner cleared his throat. “I was born March 6^th, 1996. I mean, that’s the day I was told was my birthday.”

“Hawk also says my father had a…girlfriend…” Dax said.

“It’s okay if you call her a hooker. That’s what she was.”

“Well, that might have been what she did for a living but I happen to know my dad had a weakness for women with addiction problems. I don’t know if he thought he could fix them or control them. Either way, it fits the timeline and the fact that Hawk said this ‘girlfriend’ of Dad’s was Mexican.” Dax winked and Gunner guessed the old guy was like half of Texas—if you have dark skin and a Spanish name, you’re Mexican. There was a time and place to argue it but Gunner had learned to pick and choose. “He said this woman lived in San Antonio and Doc spent quite a bit of time with her, so Angel is here because I wondered if you might want to take a DNA test and find out for sure if you hauled that old vest around for a decade for a reason.” Dax did smile then.

“This test will tell us if he was really my father?”

Dax nodded. “And if we’re brothers.” This whole time Gunner had been focused on who his father was, but it hadn’t sunk in that if Doc was his father, then he’d have a brother as well. A real brother. A family.

He didn’t want to look stupid, so he tried to sound cool as he asked, “Yeah, sure, is it like blood or spit?”

Angel and Dax looked at each other. Dax smiled and said, “Angel will just swab each of our cheeks with a Q-tip thing and that’s it.”

“Okay, cool.”

Angel got up and started taking things out of her briefcase and laying them on the table. “You don’t like needles?” she asked him.

“Not really, not like doctor needles.”

She laughed. “I’ll bet you have tattoos.”

“A few. I did them myself.”

“Let me see,” Dax said. Gunner felt intimidated, taking his shirt off in front of Angel and Dax, but it was the only way he could show him the tattoo he had on his left biceps. It was high up on his arm, a colorful tribal band that went all the way around. “You did that yourself? How did you reach it all?”

“Had to get in some weird positions, but yeah, I did it.” He pulled up his pants leg and showed him the skull on the side of his right calf. He wasn’t sure what Dax would think of that one. He’d copied the skull off Doc’s vest. The outline was black, and he’d shaded it with white and gray.

“Nice,” Dax said. “Any others?”

“I have one on my right thigh and this one,” he said turning his left arm over. On his forearm, he had two black Chinese symbols. He’d copied them out of a book of tattoos that he’d traded some kid a tat for in Juvie. Billy had the same one on his arm. It was the symbol for brothers, or so he was told.

“What’s that mean?” Dax asked him. Gunner hesitated, wondering if this whole brother thing was as weird for Dax as it was for him. He just seemed so cool about everything, like nothing ever got him rifled. Gunner would love to be that way.

“Brothers,” he said. “My best friend has one just like it.”

“Nice.”

“Okay Gunner, open your mouth,” Angel said. He did as he was told and she held onto his face with one hand while she used the other to swab the inside of his cheek with the Q-tip. She slid it into a glass tube and put a lid on it and then used a Sharpie to write his name and the date on it. “Okay, baby,” she told Dax, “your turn.” Once she’d swabbed Dax’s cheek and done the same to his tube as she’d done to Gunner’s, she kissed Dax, said goodbye to Gunner and rushed off to go to work. When she was gone, the silence between him and Dax was heavy and uncomfortable. Finally, Gunner said:

“I have a fight Saturday night. You think I’ll be back in time for it?”

Dax chuckled. “I really didn’t send the guys out there to kidnap you. They panicked when they saw you. You’re not a prisoner here, Gunner. You’re welcome to leave whenever you want, although from what I hear, the bike you rode here on isn’t going to take you far.”

Gunner felt another flush of heat to his face. He grinned. “In her defense, nobody thought she was going to make it this far.”

Dax laughed. “Loyalty, I like that. Let’s walk over to the shop and see what old Tool has to say about it.”

Gunner didn’t know who Tool was, but he was like a little kid in his sudden hero worship of Dax. He felt proud as they walked through the great room together and all eyes were on them. He saw Kay sitting at a table near the front door with a pretty lady who was holding a baby. There were two little dark-haired boys, maybe three or four years old, at Kay’s feet playing with toy motorcycles. She looked up and smiled at him as he passed. He winked at her and felt a tug in the front of his jeans. He hoped he got another go at her before he had to head home.

Dax led him across the small parking lot in front of the clubhouse to a dirt area that was filled with old cars and motorcycles. The front of a big shop was rolled open and they walked inside, greeted by loud metal music and the sounds of even louder machinery. A couple of guys in coveralls looked up and greeted Dax with a nod of their heads. They gave Gunner a passing look of curiosity and went back to their work. Dax led him toward the back, where a man in a welder’s helmet and green coveralls was working on the frame of an old bike. He stopped what he was doing, turned off the welder, and flipped up his mask when he saw them. The guy was probably in his sixties, with a white beard that looked happy to escape through the bottom of the helmet as soon as he flipped it out of the way.

“Hey, Dax! What’s shakin’?” The old guy pulled off his glove and shook Dax’s hand. Then he turned his faded brown eyes onto Gunner and did a double take. He looked from Dax back to Gunner and back to Dax with a confused look.

“How’s it going, Tool? This is Gunner.”

“I’ll be damned. The boys told me about…shit. How ya doin’, kid?”

Dax looked amused again as Gunner shook Tool’s hand. Gunner was starting to enjoy the fact that everyone seemed to see the resemblance. It couldn’t hurt his reputation any to be connected to a guy like Dax, that was for sure. “I’m good, thanks.”

“Tool, did you have a chance to look at that old Sportster Cody and Jimmy dropped off?”

Tool took the helmet all the way off. His long, white hair was wet with sweat and stuck to his head. It was thinning and his scalp was visible through it in places. He chuckled as he sat the helmet aside and said, “Yeah, I looked at it. That’s about all I did. I was afraid if I touched it, it might crumble and turn into dust.”

Gunner felt his face go hot as Dax smiled and said, “That bad, huh?”

“Worse. I have no idea how that thing made it here from Texas. Must be where the old saying ‘On a wing and a prayer’ came from.”

Dax looked at Gunner and must have seen the disappointment in his face. “You got anything that is in good enough shape to get this kid home?”

“I got a Fat Boy that came in last week. I went through her with a fine-tooth comb and couldn’t find a thing wrong with her. Whoever had that one babied her like a three-thousand-dollar whore on Christmas.”

Dax shook his head, and they followed Tool over to the office and through another door. Gunner’s eyes almost fell out when they walked through the door. It was like walking onto a Harley Davidson showroom floor. The place was immaculate and filled with bikes ranging from classics to almost brand new. Some of them had custom paint jobs and others were stock. Gunner got the feeling he was standing on the tail end of a chop shop and he felt a thrill race through his veins at the prospect of being a part of it.

“Here she is,” Tool said. “All I really did was give her a tune-up and replace the seat.”

“Wow.” Gunner hadn’t realized he’d said that out loud until he saw Tool and Dax watching him lust over the bike. “She’s…wow.”

Tool chuckled a deep grumbly laugh and elbowed Dax. “I think the boy might need some privacy.”

Dax shook his head again, but laughed. “She’s nice.”

“She makes my bike look like…like…”

“Junk?” Tool asked.

Gunner laughed. “I was trying to find a nicer word, but yeah.”

“Well, this old girl is a few years older than your bike, but she was made for long trips—yours wasn’t. Plus, like I said, whoever had this one gave her a lot of love over the years.”

Gunner wasn’t sure he wanted to be responsible for such a beautiful machine. He also didn’t have a dime to put gas into her to get back to Texas, but for some reason when Dax said, “You want to borrow her to get home for your fight?” he was nodding and grinning like an idiot before the words were out of Dax’s mouth. When he rode this thing up in front of old Kinley’s barn, people who were still on the fence about the fight would bet on him based on the coolness factor alone.