All of the Nevada Bulls were single except Zach, which made Lyra their de facto queen, he supposed, butJesus, that chick was taking over the joint. If they didn’t get this place hopping like a fucking MC house soon, she’d have garden gnomes and those stupid old-lady-butts stuck all over the place.
Inside, Kai and Ben were at the bar, each with a beer in his hand. They lifted their bottles at him. Zach was parked on a sofa nearby with Lyra on his lap, making googly eyes at each other. They did not acknowledge his arrival.
Then a very cute chick he didn’t know came around from the kitchen with two plates of rice and beans in her hands. The food smelled amazing, but his focus was mainly on the chick. She was short and young—probably not jailbait young, but only probably—and obviously Native, with straight, thick black hair parted with mathematic precision down the middle and wound into two braids that ended lying on top of a really great set of tits. Which he could see most of, as her clothing consisted of a pink top that was more like a bikini top than a shirt and a very small pair of cutoff shorts. A couple inches of the white cotton of her pockets hung past the fringe of her shorts.
She swung a nice set of hips over to the bar and set the plates down before Kai and Ben. Then she spun pertly and smiled. “Hi! Can I make you a plate?”
“No, you can’t make me a fucking plate. Who the fuck are you?” he asked, deeply unsettled to have a stranger in his house. Her smile broke apart and her jaw drooped open, but before she could answer, a vacuum started upstairs. The only thing upstairs was the weapons locker and his fucking office! “Who the fuck isthat?”
He stomped toward the stairs. “Coop! Prez!” Zach called. “It’s okay!”
Stopping at the foot of the stairs, he swung around. Zach was now standing, and Lyra had gone over to the pert little Native chick, who looked scared.
In fact, everybody was looking at him like he’d turned into a werebear or something. The fuck? He flipped back through the past couple of minutes and heard himself. Shit. He’d been yelling. No, he’d beenroaring.
With a deep breath and a clearing of his throat, he gathered himself. More calmly, but still pissed, he said, an order to everyone and anyone in earshot, “Explain.”
Speaking of earshot, the vacuum was still going; now that he was at the stairs, he understood that it wasn’t upstairs but down the hall. The chapel door was closed, so whoever was vacuuming was probably in the weight room. Not his office. Not their weapons locker.
Kai came forward. “It’s on me, Prez. We’ve been talking and talking and talking about needing girls up in here, but then we all go our own ways and put this place at our backs. It doesn’t feel like a clubhouse. I know that’s ‘cuz we’ve been waiting until everything’s up and running, but ... I don’t know. I need this to be a place that feels like it wants us. So I brought some girls from the rez over now.”
Cooper almost smiled. He understood what Kai meant; he’d been feeling it himself, and a knot inside him loosened a little to hear someone else express the feeling.
However, he was the president, so the fact that the clubhouse didn’t feel like a home yet was really on him, wasn’t it? He was fucking up so badly a new recruit had taken it upon himself to start ‘decorating’ the clubhouse.
Cooper must have banged a couple dozen different hotties since September, and not just for the aerobic exercise. He’d been recruiting, and he had a list of names and numbers of girls who’d expressed interest in the clubhouse or whom he’d figured would be interested. He hadn’t done anything with that list because ... why?
Well, because they weren’t officially in business yet, and they’d been waiting for everything to be ready before they were. Also, every girl who might end up on their roster needed to be vetted so they didn’t have some cop’s daughter in their house, or worse, an actual plant. But all he’d have needed to do was pass the names on to Kai, their technology officer, who would vet them.
Why hadn’t he given Kai any names? He’d had a reason, right? He was sure he had, but it was escaping him now.
The real answer was he didn’t know what he was fucking doing. That was sort of a blanket category.
So he was failing the club, and the newbies had given up on his leadership and were now filling in his gaps. Fuck, he needed a drink. A big one.
Cooper supposed he could assume Kai had run the appropriate checks on these girls, but he wanted it confirmed. “They’re clear?”
“They are,” Kai assured him. “Known ‘em since they were born, but I ran ‘em anyway. All clear and totally on board with hanging with us and everything that entails.” With that, Kai put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and blew an ear-splitting whistle. The vacuum stopped at once.
“This is Rosalie,” Kai said, indicating the cute chick Cooper had frightened. “Rosie, this is our president, Cooper Calderon.”
“Hi,” she said shyly.
“Hi, hon. Sorry I scared you.”
She smiled. “It’s okay. Sorry I surprised you.”
“That you did.”
Another girl about the same age came up the hall from, he assumed, the weight room. She was taller than Rosalie and rail thin, dressed in skinny jeans and a plain white t-shirt. Her black hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail, and she wore long beaded earrings.
“Hey. I’m Cooper,” he said as she came up alongside him.
She gave him a performative once-over. Apparently she liked what she saw, because she met his eyes and smiled in a way that was unmistakably inviting. “Hey, Cooper. I’m Belle.”
A third girl had come out from the kitchen. Pretty; slim; long, dark hair. A little older than the others, maybe pushing thirty. She wore black yoga pants and a slouchy orange top. It slid off her shoulder and showed a red bra strap. A dish towel was draped over her other shoulder.
“And this is Helena,” Kai said.