The Kings of Kearny

by Navessa Allen

Genres: Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Jakob Larson is going to be the death of me.

That’s what I think every time he strides into my bar. The Kings of Kearny run this small Texas town, and Jakob is their chief enforcer. The Viking, they call him. He’s a criminal. As dangerous as he is sexy. The kind of man who makes my inner cavewoman sit up and take notice. Him big. Make strong babies. Bring home mammoth for dinner.

I’m ready to indulge her desires, but just for one night.

Unfortunately, Jakob has other plans. Someone in town is breaking one of the cardinal rules set by the leader of The Kings. And Jakob thinks they’re using my grandmother’s nursing home as a front for their illicit activities. Now I’m neck-deep in trouble with him, and every time I think I’ve figured out what’s really going on, Jakob reveals another piece of the puzzle. I need to figure out how far I’m willing to go to protect this town. How far I’m willing to go with Jakob. Because if I fall for him, there’s no going back. No hope for a peaceful ending. But Jakob is the kind of man who makes me think that peaceful is overrated, and that descending into darkness with him could lead to something even better than a Happily Ever After.

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

Jakob Larson was going to be the death of me.

Beneath the dim amber lighting in the bar, he was six feet of sin draped in darkness. The sleeves of his leather jacket hit him at his wrists. A pair of sinuous tattoos slithered out from them like twin snakes, black ink whorling over the back of his hands. He turned his head to the left, and another tantalizing hint of tattoo peeked out above his collar.

I stared at his wide back like I had X-ray vision, wondering how much of his skin was covered. Whoever needled all that ink into him was one lucky bastard. To be bent over him for hours on end, his big body laid out beneath me...

God, it’s hot in the bar tonight, I thought, wondering how conspicuous it would be if I started fanning myself.

I lifted my gaze, taking in the rest of Jakob. His dark blond hair was cropped close at the sides but was long enough on top that you could dig your fingers into it. A beard obscured the lower half of his face. I’d never been a massive fan of facial hair, but he kept his trimmed and neat, which made me wonder if the rest of him was just as well-groomed.

No one would ever call him a pretty boy; his features were too stark for that. He looked like the by-blow of some cruel Norse god. With cheekbones cut at sharp angles, lips set in a hard line, and heavy brows forever pulled down in a scowl, he had what I liked to call resting fuck you face.

Still, he held a kind of carnal appeal. He moved with the intrinsic grace of an athlete, like someone who had pushed his body to the limit, learned just what it was capable of, and now it performed for him in a way that was damn near preternatural compared to the rest of us. Except he wasn’t an athlete; he was a fighter. There was a notch halfway down his nose from a past break. His knuckles bore the scars of a man who liked to hit things with his fists. Larger bikers gave him a wide berth as they moved through the crowd, parting around him like a tide for Moses. Even standing still, he projected an aura of something barely contained and half-feral.

I read somewhere that women know within five minutes of meeting someone whether or not they’ll sleep with them. With Jakob, you needed all five of those minutes to decide if the risk of fucking him was worth the reward. I couldn’t even look at him without picturing him naked, biceps straining as he rose above me, abs contracting as he thrust inside. I usually didn’t go for the whole alpha-male vibe—too many guys who projected that aura were possessive, borderline abusive douche nozzles—but Jakob seemed to be the exception to my rule. I blamed my inner cavewoman. He was the kind of man who made her sit up and take notice.

Him big. Make strong babies. Protect cave.

It made me feel marginally better that I wasn’t the only one staring. Three women about my age at a nearby table kept cutting glances at him. A few more on the dance floor sent him come-hither looks.

The sound of an angry voice rose above the bar’s music. I forced my gaze away from Jakob, searching it out. In the far corner, two men faced off over a pool table. Like the rest of our patrons, they were members of the local biker gang, the Kings of Kearny. Both of them were older, one a dark-skinned black man, the other a redheaded white dude wearing sleeveless leathers that left his prison tattoos on full display. It was too loud in here to catch their words, but their body language told me they were about a heartbeat away from coming to blows.

Nina, my fellow bartender and good friend, stepped beside me and stood on her tiptoes, trying to get a better look. At five-foot-nothing, it wasn’t going to happen. She swayed a little to the left, searching for a different angle. Her dark hair was loose tonight, and it fell in a cascade over her shoulder with the movement. Like me, she wore all black: the standard uniform at Charley’s Bar and Grill.

Because it hid the bloodstains, we joked.

“Who’s yelling?” Nina asked. It was a testament to her looks that even while frowning, she was stunning. With a whip-sharp sense of humor, light brown skin, cheekbones I would kill for, and full lips that seemed forever on the verge of a smile, it was no wonder she was the highest tip earner on staff.

I laced my fingers together and bent over. “Here, I’ll give you a boost, and you can see for yourself.”

Anyone else would have told me to shut up or that I wasn’t as funny as I thought I was, but Nina grinned and lifted her foot toward my hands, calling my bluff. I unlaced my fingers and took a step back. No way in hell was I actually going to touch the bottom of her shoe. It was past midnight, and the floor behind the bar was sticky with spilled liquor and covered with tiny shards of glass, some of which must have lodged into the soles of her high-tops.

“Coward,” she said.

I opened my mouth to fire an insult back at her, but a deep voice tolled out from behind me.

“It’s Micky and Rob.”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Tiny, the third bartender on shift tonight, staring out into the crowd. Tiny was one of those ironic nicknames. He was a behemoth of a man. Well over six feet and broad as a barn door, he doubled as a bouncer when we needed him to. The overhead lights gleamed off the top of his bald head. His dark eyes were troubled. A slight flush appeared on his olive skin, but a stillness had settled into his limbs. He looked like a man bracing himself for a fight.

“Hey, man. Can I get another beer?” a woman called to him.

“Yeah,” he said, moving toward her, his eyes still on the crowd.

The good thing about our bar was that Charley, the owner, was a biker himself. The Kings of Kearny took care of their own. It was in their self-interest to keep the peace in here, and whenever a fight broke out, it was usually quashed before any lasting damage was done—to the combatants or the bar.

Tonight proved no different. The redhead, Micky, barely had time to shove Rob before three men intervened. Jakob was one of them. Unfortunately for him, Rob was already swinging for Micky, and he got in the way of the punch. I grimaced when the blow landed. It would have laid me out flat, but it only snapped Jakob’s head around to the side.

The crowd around me went still as everyone tensed against the threat of more violence.

Jakob’s resting fuck you face turned murderous. He spat out a wad of blood and looked up at Rob. The bar had gone so quiet that I heard him clear across it. “I’ll give you that one for free.”

Rob had fifty pounds and several inches on Jakob, but he instantly backed down. “Shit. Sorry, man,” he said, hands up like Jakob held him at gunpoint.

“You two done here?” Jakob asked, looking between Rob and Micky.

The men nodded and made a show of going back to their pool game. It was only when Jakob turned away from them that the entire crowd let out the collective breath we’d been holding.

Nina elbowed me. “The Viking strikes again.”

“Why is everyone so afraid of him?” I asked.

A guy nearby hailed her, indicating a round of shots.

“One sec, Bill,” she said, grabbing glasses for him and his buddies. She sent me a look as she poured their whiskey. “I keep forgetting you’re new here.”

I frowned. “Three months is new?”

She barked a low, throaty laugh. Several patrons turned to stare at her. I couldn’t blame them. I was mostly heterosexual, but every time she laughed like that, a little shiver of awareness ran through me.

“Honey, three years is still new in this town,” she said. She finished pouring and handed the shots over to Bill with a megawatt smile. “Thanks for being patient, sweetie.”

The grizzled old biker went pink in the cheeks. “No problem, Nina.” He tipped her ten bucks for her trouble, and it made me wonder if maybe I should smile more.

“Can I get some ice?” someone asked from behind me.

I turned and saw Jakob settling his large frame onto one of my empty barstools. His left cheek was red and starting to swell. The scowl on his face made him look even less approachable than usual—not an easy feat. This was only the third time he’d spoken to me, and of course he had to be pissed off when it happened. So much for my harebrained idea to hit on him tonight.

“Sure thing,” I said. We kept stacks of clean towels on a shelf beneath the bar. I snagged one, filled the middle with ice, and tied off the extra cloth. With one final tug on the knot, I handed it over to him. “Here you go.”

He reached out, but instead of taking it from me, he grabbed my wrist, so fast that I barely registered the movement. I sucked in a sharp breath. His skin was warm, grip firm, fingers long enough to wrap all the way around my wrist. Yes, I wanted this man to touch me, but that desire was now warring with my irritation over him laying hands on me without asking first.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I said.

He pushed up the sleeve of my T-shirt with his other hand, callused fingers roughing over my skin, raising goose bumps in their wake, stopping only when he revealed the tattoo on my upper arm. It was a stylized AC-130 gunship flying in front of a skull.

“You’re ex-military?” he asked.

“Yes.” Demonstrating one of the skills I learned when I was in, I wrenched my arm up and around, breaking his hold on me. “And if you ever grab me like that again, I’ll call in a favor and have a Maverick dropped on your house.”

His pale blue eyes rose to mine, glinting like frost in the overhead light. “That’s a big-ass bomb.”

“I don’t fuck around,” I said, a hint of warning in my tone. “You want your ice or what?”

In answer, he snagged it from me. “Air Force?”

I nodded. “Aerial gunner.”

He looked me over like he was trying to picture it. I prepared myself for a sexist comment.

“Sorry for grabbing you,” he said instead.

The tension in my shoulders eased a little. “Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t,” he said, holding my gaze.

Weirdly, I believed him.

Another biker in my section lifted her glass in the universal symbol for I’ll have another. I left Jakob to refill it. My shoulder brushed Nina’s as I walked toward the draft beer station.

“You’ll have to show me that move,” she said.

“Soon as our shift is over,” I told her.

Working around rough men and women didn’t come without risk, and I’d been teaching her some basic self-defense. It looked like tonight’s lesson would be on how to break holds.

“Here you go,” I said, passing the beer to the woman who ordered it. “On your tab?”

“Yup. Thanks, Krista.” She left a dollar on the bar for me before turning away.

I scooped it up and went to the register. Because Charley was a King, he let his fellow bikers keep running tabs that they didn’t have to pay off until the end of each month. I didn’t see the wisdom in the practice. Some of our customers ran up astronomical bills, buying rounds of shots they couldn’t afford because they didn’t have to pay for them for another two weeks. Most had the mindset that they’d find the money before then, but they rarely did.

Part of me worried that was what Charley wanted. He was one of the founding members of the Kings, along with Daniel King, the president and man the club was named after. I’d seen Daniel pay off the tabs of his bikers when they couldn’t cover them, telling them he knew they’d find a way to settle their debt. It kept them loyal to him, beholden to him in a way that troubled me. I imagined them doing all sorts of illegal shit to pay him back.

“Krista?”

I turned toward the sound of my name.

Jakob rested a leather-clad elbow on the bar top, the ice I’d given him pressed to his cheek. “Can I get an amber ale?”

“Sure.” I poured it out and set it in front of him, careful not to get too close this time.

“Why haven’t you applied to join the Kings?” he asked.

The Kings of Kearny motorcycle club only admitted members with prior military experience. Every single man and woman who wore their leathers had fought for this country. It was part of why the local cops gave them some leeway, and why a lot of people in town put up with their bullshit. Jakob wasn’t the first person to ask me that question, but he was one of the few I wanted to answer.

“I didn’t come to Kearny for the club,” I said. “My grandmother is in a nursing home in town.”

His eyes were steady on mine, that big body still on his barstool. Most people fidgeted when they sat down, but not him. He was like a wolf sighting a deer. This was one of the things that was so appealing about Jakob. When he spoke to you, it felt like you became his entire world. I could only imagine how well that focus might translate to sex.

“Magnolia Hills?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Let us know if you have any trouble with her there,” he said.

A frisson of unease slithered down my spine. “Why? Has there been trouble there?”

He nodded and cut his gaze to the right, away from me, and I swear to God, it felt like the temperature dropped. Like the sun had just disappeared behind a cloud.

“Uh... you care to elaborate on that?” I asked him.

His gaze came back around, and he shook his head. “What time do you get off?”

“I’m closing.”

Beer in hand, he stood from his seat.

I blinked as he started to turn away. “Dude, seriously, you’re just going to—”

Yup, he was. Without a backward glance, he tossed some cash on the counter and disappeared into the crowd.

I shoved my irritation down and got back to work. My gran was the only person I had left in this world. Oh, my parents were still alive, but they were garbage human beings, and if I never saw them again, I’d count it as a blessing.

Gran was my paternal grandmother. She’d taken me in the first time my parents got busted for drugs—Dad for possession, Mom for driving under the influence with me in the back seat—and never gave me back. After their first stint behind bars, my parents skipped town, and now the only time we heard from them was when they needed bail money or briefly attempted to sober up.

Not all addicts are assholes. I knew that many of them were good people with a disease that could lead to them doing terrible things, but my parents didn’t fall into that category. They were rotten even without the drugs or the booze. I’d learned that firsthand during one of Mom’s brushes with sobriety. She hit me for crying. Not a slap or a smack but a full-on punch to the gut. It worked. I stopped crying. Because I couldn’t breathe.

I was four at the time. Gran never left me alone with her again.

To say that my grandmother meant the world to me would be a massive understatement. And Jakob just told me that the cognitive care facility it took me months to get her into might be shady.

The rest of my shift passed in a blur. I served beers, poured mixed drinks, shot down the people who hit on me, and struggled to stay focused, my thoughts circling like water rushing down a drain. What was up with Jakob’s cryptic question about when I got off work? Was it his subtle way of telling me he didn’t want to answer me in a packed bar? Was I supposed to wait for him?

I checked my watch. We’d closed at two a.m., but I had to get through my nightly checklist before I could even think about leaving. It was almost three now. My chores were done, and I just finished showing Nina four different ways to break someone’s hold when they grabbed your wrist.

I glanced out the front window. There was no sign of Jakob’s bike in the parking lot. My coworkers were slipping out the back door one by one, and I wasn’t about to stick around and wait for him by myself. This bar wasn’t in the best part of town, and even with my years of hand-to-hand combat training, I didn’t relish the idea of putting my skills to use against a drunken biker who probably had a knife or a gun on them.

“You coming, Krista?” Tiny asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

A few minutes later, I stepped from the air-conditioned bar out into the sultry heat of night. It might have only been early May, but in southern Texas, summer started in April and lasted right through November. Deep heat had descended on the small town of Kearny a few weeks ago, smothering us in its warm embrace. The hum of insects from the nearby trees was deafening. Humidity hung heavy in the air, making my movements feel slow and lethargic. What didn’t help was my exhaustion. I hadn’t escaped unscathed from my time in the military, and my scarred body felt battered and bruised from being on my feet for so long.

I said goodbye to my coworkers and moved toward my car with halting, pre-arthritic gracelessness. One of the reasons Gran and I chose to settle in this town, aside from the allegedly stellar nursing home, was because of the nearby military hospital. I had an appointment with my physical therapist there in a few days, and it couldn’t come soon enough.

I slipped inside my car, locked the doors, and headed home. Visiting hours at the nursing home were from ten to five. After what Jakob said, I wanted to get there when the doors opened, which meant I’d be lucky if I got five hours of shut-eye. At least I never had trouble falling asleep. Combat vets are known for their ability to pass out anywhere, and I was no exception.

I eased to a stop at a red light two blocks from the bar. An engine thundered to life nearby and roared into the night like a lion claiming its kill. A few seconds later, a motorcycle pulled up next to me. It was loud enough to be a Harley, but when I glanced over at it, I saw the word Victory splashed across the side of the gas tank. Its driver wore a skullcap helmet and goggles, but I knew from the beard alone that it was Jakob. He turned toward me and then jerked his head to the left in a distinct command to follow him.

Okay then.

The light flashed green. No one else was on the road, so I threw my blinker on and turned, trailing the bike as Jakob wound up a side street.

I wasn’t an idiot. Yes, I lusted after Jakob’s body and magnetic sexual energy, but the truth was I knew nothing about the guy. He could be a complete psychopath.

I kept one hand on the wheel and popped open my center console with the other. Inside was a 9mm I’d purchased when I was still in the service. As an aerial gunner, I didn’t go for the bells and whistles of flashier handguns; I went for sturdy design and a robust reputation. This brand wasn’t super popular, but the reviews for it were stellar. The people over at Guns & Ammo had buried one in the mud for a day, froze another in a solid block of ice, then defrosted it beneath the blazing sun and tossed another from a ten-story building. All three guns fired over a thousand rounds without failing afterward. No, it wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done. I stashed it in my purse as I pulled into a small residential parking lot behind Jakob.

He cut his engine and slipped his goggles and helmet off. One long leg swung over the back of the bike, and then he was moving toward me with quick, sure strides.

I left my car running and kept the doors locked as I rolled my window down. “Well, this isn’t weird or anything.”

Jakob leaned forward and rested his elbows on my window frame. The smell of him hit my nose: leather and motor oil and a hint of dark cologne. This close, his eyes were startlingly blue, like he’d captured an arctic sky in his gaze.

“I didn’t want anyone overhearing at the bar,” he said. “Wanna cut the engine and follow me up? Better if anyone watching us thinks we’re fucking instead of trading secrets.”

And there went my thoughts, straight into the gutter.

He took my momentary breathlessness as hesitation. “I’m not a threat to you,” he said. “That’d be like hurting a family member.”

I shook my head to clear the fog of lust from my mind. Did he just say something about us being related? “What?”

He pulled up his right jacket sleeve just enough to reveal a length of corded forearm. The whorls of ink I’d spotted earlier were the tattered edges of a stylized specter’s cloak. Over the grim creature, the words Death Waits in the Dark were written in stark black font.

I lifted my eyes to his. “You were a Night Stalker?”

He held my gaze and nodded.

Well, I’ll be damned. Jakob was airborne, like me, only from a special operations Army helicopter regiment that flew into enemy territory at night, low and fast. I was stationed with a unit of Night Stalkers in Syria. They were some of the craziest motherfuckers in spec-ops. And that was saying something.

It didn’t make me instantly trust him, but I no longer worried I’d have to shoot him. Only one percent of Americans serve their country. It does make you family, in a way, part of a small percentage of the population that’s been joined together with others from all walks of life, ready to fight and die to keep everyone else free. The fact that we were both airborne combat meant we belonged to an even smaller group of individuals. It was a tight-knit community, and word got around in it. If he hurt me, he’d be excised from it like a cancerous growth at best. At worst, someone might really do a flyover and drop a bellyful of iron onto his head.

Something in my face must have given my thoughts away because he straightened and took a step back, hands loose at his sides, waiting. I rolled the window up, turned my car off, grabbed my purse, and got out. His hands landed on the roof on either side of me, caging me in, and I barely had enough room to turn and face him after shutting my door.

I stared up at him from inches away. A nearby streetlight cast its anemic glow over us, and the dim illumination did nothing to make him look less dangerous. His brows shaded his eyes, turning them into twin pools of cerulean. Suddenly the nickname the Viking made a whole lot of sense. Shave the sides of his head to the scalp, add a few bloodstains and smear some stylized runes across his skin, and he’d be all set to go terrorize a sixth-century English village.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We need to sell the lie,” he said, leaning closer.

Right. The lie that we were fucking.

Oh boy.

“Sure,” I said, settling back against my door.

Approval lit his eyes, like he was impressed that instead of arguing with him, I chose to go along with this weirdness. Little did he know that I was all for anything that brought his big body closer to mine.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, why all the deception? And why did he think he was being watched in the first place? Was he some sort of undercover agent who had infiltrated the club? I looked him over, taking my time. He didn’t seem like a narc. In fact, from everything I knew about him, he was all too happy in his role as an enforcer for the Kings. Was it something else? A rival gang or a rift inside the club?

My questions cut off when he closed the distance between us. At five ten I was pretty tall, but I still had to look up at him. His beard tickled my cheek as he leaned in. I shivered when his lips brushed the shell of my ear. I’d wanted to be close to him all night. Hell, if I was honest, I’d been dreaming about this since the first time I laid eyes on him, and who knew when I might get another shot?

Screw it.

I turned my head and nuzzled his neck. The smell of his cologne was stronger here, dark, heady, spice and musk and the slight tang of citrus. It paired well with leather.

“Why do you walk with a limp?” he asked.

I blinked, surprised out of my dirty thoughts for the second time in less than five minutes. “You ever heard of small talk, Jakob?”

His breath warmed my neck when he answered. “Never saw the point of small talk. It’s just useless words people throw around while they wait for someone to say something meaningful.”

Well, shit, when he put it like that...

“My right leg is basically bionic,” I said. “Hip replacement, pins holding my knee together, steel grafted to my shin and femur, you get the drift. I was medically discharged because of it.”

“Combat wound?” he asked.

I nodded, knowing he would feel my answer because of our proximity.

This was the part where he would pull back and look at me with pity. I’d had other soldiers do it, and I knew they weren’t really seeing me anymore but thinking of people they’d served with, feeling that terrible tug of survivor’s guilt for making it out of some hellhole unscathed when so many others hadn’t.

Jakob didn’t pull away, and he didn’t look at me with pity. He put a hand on my injured hip, gently, and leaned in instead. “What happened?”

For some reason our forced intimacy made talking about it easier than usual. Maybe that was because with his nose buried in my hair, I didn’t have to look at him as I spoke or because he hadn’t reacted the way I anticipated, or maybe it was because as a Night Stalker, I knew he’d seen worse shit than I had and could understand what I was about to say.

“We took heavy fire during the siege of Kolomyya,” I told him.

“Ukraine?” he asked, his voice low enough that it had a little bit of growl to it.

I nodded again, thinking back to the brief but bloody shadow war the US had fought with Russia after they’d claimed the Crimean Peninsula and then tried to drag the rest of Ukraine back into the fold of the new USSR.

“The landing gear was damaged during the battle,” I said. “Our pilot was forced to execute a controlled crash on a dirt road outside the city. Engine number four hit the ground. Its casing cracked, and the oil lines broke, spewing jet fuel everywhere. Something must have sparked because the right wing caught fire.”

“That doesn’t explain your leg,” he all but purred into my ear.

I took a deep breath. “Our equipment broke loose during the c. . .