I looked at him while I shoveled my food in, seeing the seriousness in his eyes.
“Got a problem,” Steel murmured.
I bit into my slice of toast and waited for him to elaborate.
“What kind of problem?” Linc asked, sitting back in his seat.
He’d completely cleaned his plate, and there wasn’t even any runny yolk left over from his eggs to show.
I looked at him. “Hungry?”
“Starved,” he agreed.
Steel gagged. “If you two are done, I’ll tell you why we came.”
I stuck my tongue out at Steel but went back to my own breakfast and stopped making googly eyes at the man I was currently using as a chair.
Linc’s hand started to slowly creep up my exposed thigh, but luckily with the way we were sitting I was covered and the other two men at the table couldn’t see what his hand was doing.
I’d just put a bite of egg into my mouth when Steel threw a couple bombshells our way.
“Had a tip that something we got going on at home is going to come crashing down on y’all,” Steel rumbled.
Linc’s hand stilled its ascent up my thigh.
“What do you mean?” Linc rumbled.
Steel’s eyes hit mine for a second, then he looked away.
It wasn’t until Jessie’s eyes did it, too, that I realized that they weren’t really wanting to talk in front of me.
Well, too damn bad.
I’d be staying. Especially since it involved Linc and them.
Steel sighed and pushed his plate away, wiping his hand down his trimmed beard before saying, “A couple of months ago there was a motorcycle club that tried to move into a few of the chapters’ towns. Benton, Louisiana. Mooresville, Alabama. And Bare Knob/Little Rock, Arkansas.”
I held my hand up before they could continue. “There’s a town in Arkansas called Bare Knob?”
Steel gave me his most effective glare that clearly told me to shut up.
I held my hands up in the air. “Okay. All right. I’ll shut up.”
I pantomimed zipping my mouth shut for added effect.
Linc’s hand on my thigh tightened for a moment, causing me to smile.
That smile fell off my face moments later when Steel continued.
“This club is targeting everybody affiliated with the Dixie Wardens. They’ve gotten four other clubs loyal to us, and we have reason to believe that they’re going to target y’all next,” Steel explained.
Linc opened his mouth to ask something, and Jessie held up his hand.
“Before you say that’s not fuckin’ possible, let me explain why it is,” Jessie said. “I’ll tell you about the one closest to us, and we’ll go from there.”
Linc sat back against his chair and waited impatiently.
I shifted on his leg—which was really fuckin’ hard and starting to make my ass fall asleep—causing Linc to move me into a better position. This time my ass was squarely in his lap, and I could feel everything.
Before I had too much time to get all excited about what I was feeling between my ass cheeks, Jessie’s words caught our attention.
“It started out with little stuff,” Jessie began. “The club, the Wind Furies MC, came into what the local MC considered theirs. Made nice. Acted like they were visiting and watched.”
Before I could think ‘that’s not illegal,’ Jessie continued.
“Once they get the lay of the land, and see what kind of people you are, they make their plan. They try to decide whether they should approach you, or just set an example,” Jessie said.
“With the MC that’s closest to us, the Wind Furies MC decided that whatever they said wasn’t going to convince that MC to just turn on us, and instead started setting their club members up. Various accidents began happening with the club members. At first it was pesky little shit like flat tires and vandalized bikes. Then the accidents started. It was when the fourth member of the MC got targeted—and also the VP—that things finally started making sense. But in case they were too clueless still to realize that they were being targeted, the Wind Furies decided to leave a little note.”
“A note on the motorcycle that says ‘Give them backup and die.’”
My head whipped around to see Bayou standing there with a note in his hand, and a face like thunder.
“Was pinned to his bike,” Bayou mumbled as he walked farther into the room and slapped the note onto the table with a little too much force.
My eyes automatically went to the paper, and my head tilted as I read the hastily scribbled letters.
“If my dad weren’t here explaining it to me right now, how the hell were we supposed to connect the dots to ‘them’ being ‘the Dixie Wardens?’” Linc questioned. “This doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. And, not to mention, there was no buildup here. It’s only been Hoax’s accident.”
“My bike’s been vandalized twice,” Bayou paused, his eyes meeting every man’s gaze in the room but skipped over mine. “But both times they were different bikes that I owned, and I think maybe they didn’t realize that it was me that they hit twice. Once I was at work, and the other time I was at the fire station responding to a call. I had to take the brush truck out for a pasture fire.”