He threw his head back and laughed. “Holy shit, the lady has a sense of humor!”
Laughing with him, she punched him in the arm.
When he looked down at her again, his smile faded from his face but remained alight in his eyes. “Yeah, let’s give it a shot. But when I piss you off—and I will piss you off—no burning my house down, or putting sugar in my gas tank. Let’s just avoid destruction of property in general, okay?”
“I’m not sure I’ve earned this besmirching of my character.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her.
She laughed. “Okay, it’spossibleI might have anoccasionaltendency to overreact. So I promise not to take my rage out on your personal property. But no going out in search of nice, easy fucks whenIpissyouoff. Which I am equally likely to do.”
“Agreed. How about a nice, easy fuck with you, though?” He ducked his head and sucked at her throat. “Right now?”
It wasn’t easy to think with his tongue playing along her jawline like that. “I can’t stay. Geneva’s asleep next door.” She wanted to invite him to spend the night with her, but she couldn’t surprise her sister with him in the morning. Especially not after the talk they’d had.
“Okay. Can you stay a little, though? I feel like we need to redo the last bit from earlier.”
Suffused with a lightness so unfamiliar it hardly felt real, Siena wrapped her arms and legs around him again. “I can stay for a little.”
Grinning his megawatt grin, Cooper clutched her close, rolled up to his feet in pretty much the most graceful, sexiest move she’d ever experienced in her life, and carried her to his bedroom.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Cooper stood insidethe main door of what would soon be RockSteady Racing and sighed. “You have got to be shitting me.”
Reed shrugged. “It’s bullshit, I know. But I don’t know what we can do about it. At least they got the container off the ship.”
Reed had just informed him that the shipment of about eighty percent of their stock would be delayed because the ship moving it overseas had sunk. Apparently it had sunk slowly enough to get the crew off the ship, as well as a fair number of containers, including the one carrying their stock, but the shipping company had alerted them to expect a delay oftwo to six weeks.
And that was on top of the delay that had already threatened to fuck their opening day.Andjust a few days ago they’d had to send the shop sign back because a rock or something had flown up from the road and broken the R in ‘Racing’ while it was on a flatbed on its way here.
“FUCK!” Cooper kicked an empty box and sent it flying across the nearly empty shop. “I wish the damn container was on the bottom of the ocean. At least then we could get a refund or insurance or something and start over. We are never gonna get this goddamn compound on its feet. I swear to fuck, this charter is cursed.”
He didn’t believe in shit like curses, but he was starting to reconsider. They’d established the founding membership on a dark night in Idaho, in the middle of a bloody job that had ended with Gargoyle getting killed and Zach getting shot, as well as the seven Silver Dragons they’d stopped breathing. Since then, it seemed like every damn thing that could go wrong had gone wrong. Cooper, Caleb, Gargoyle, and Zach had arrived in Laughlin to set up the charter inSeptember. That night in Idaho had happened just a couple days later. They’d bought this property around the same time, too.
The Tulsa crew had come in October to bury Gargo and officially sanctify the charter. October. Now it was almost March, and they still didn’t have a business, had run only once for the Volkovs, hadn’t had a party, barely had any girls, no prospects, no hangarounds of note to draw one from, didn’t even have non-club employees for the shop they couldn’t fucking open yet.
To top all that off, Tulsa was due in on the weekend, for the next gun run, and Eight Ball was on the run. The mother charter president was about to see exactly how half-assed the new charter was. Cooper was the goddamn president of this half-assed charter. The buck stopped on his head.
Yeah, maybe he was superstitious after all. It all felt cursed.
“FUCK!” There wasn’t anything else he could kick without fucking it up, and he wasn’t stupid enough to tear good shit apart when he was pissed, so he clenched his fists and just ...growleduntil the urge for destruction passed. He needed to head over to Tri-State after this and beat the shit out of Dave so he could expel all this angsty bullshit out of himself.
He’d suggest getting into the ring with somebody here, except their ringwasn’t fucking up yet.