1
Hunter Tanner
“Hunter, this is horrendous.” Forrest’s muffled voice carried to me where I was lying on my bed. I flinched as he rustled around in my closet, back straight as an arrow. There wasn’t much else to look at in my room aside from him, only a beat-to-hell old dresser that had the right-hand side ripped off, so that I could see into the tops of the drawers there. I owned about as much as I’d come to the Kings of Men clubhouse with, mainly my motorcycle and a few changes of clothes, and I’d also shoved an old Glock in a shoebox under my bed.
The Kings weren’t like the Demons. I hadn’t needed the throwaway gun. They didn’t send me out to do bloody jobs the real members should handle.
The dusty white walls, littered with grease smudges near the light switch by the door, also hadn’t changed since I moved in. The clubhouse wasn’t the Ritz, and I didn’t see the point of trying to turn it into something it wasn’t.
“Clean and snazzy isn’t a biker look,” I murmured.
The short, sharpzingof metal hangers sliding from one end of the clothes pole to the other—I didn’t have much that required hanging—went on for a while. He let out disappointed sighs every time he shifted things back and forth. Grumbling under his breath, he bent down to flip through a stack of jeans folded on the closet floor. They were all exactly the same, some were just older and more stained than others. Since he had a thing for being dressed up, I was wearing my newest pair of pants right now. Me dressing better seemed to make him happy, which was… nice.
Forrest was a mystery. I stared at my twin brother, tried to figure him out, but so far I was as lost with him as everyone else I’d ever met. He kept his hair cut better than me, and the sun that filtered through the smudged, dirty window made it gleam golden. I reached up and ran a hand over my head. It hadn’t been too long since we’d met, and I was never sure what I should say to him. The good part about Forrest? He wasn’t shy about filling in the silence with—
“My God, do you own anything that isn’t made of cotton or leather?” He tossed up his hands and scowled at the clothes.
“No.”
“Why?” He whirled in place and ended up on his knees, arms crossed, in a maneuver so flawless it seemed like he’d practiced it. I fought not to cringe. People didn’t like it when I acted all “wilting flower,” as my last foster mother used to say, and Forrest seemed to take it as a personal affront when I got shy. Puffing up my chest, I rolled to sitting and tried out a smile on him that instantly had him smirking. He came over to sit down beside me on the bed. When he was comfortable, he knocked his shoulder against mine.
“It’s fine, don’t you worry. I have enough clothes for both of us back home at the Virtue. Actually, I probably have enough clothes that we could both wear them for a month without repeats, but don’t tell Rourke. He already makes fun of me.”
Frowning, I glanced at Forrest. Was his boyfriend that kind of an asshole? But he seemed like maybe he was joking about Rourke being a jerk. What I wanted to say was that I didn’t know if I really wanted to go visit a whorehouse; it wasn’t anything I’d ever wanted to do, though I’d been to the Courtesan to deliver messages for King. The people there were always nice to me, especially Mrs. Winters. No, the reason I didn’t want to, wasn’t because there was anything wrong with those types of places, or the people who went there, but I couldn’t stand the idea of strangers seeingmenaked. And a lot of those people had probably seenForrestnaked.
Was that like seeing me naked? Were we any different?
But I wanted to get to know Forrest. If I refused to go, he would be upset, and he was the only brother I had—as far as I knew, anyway. The way King was, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had twenty other brothers floating around in the world. Huffing out a breath, I tried, for the thousandth time, to think of a way to ask Forrest how he made himself okay with being on display for people. The question was loaded, and I knew it. I was in no hurry for a repeat of the only time he’d seemed mad at me. Last time he mentioned being a whore, he was upset because he thought I was being mean about the fact that he’d slept with people for money. I had no good way to tell him that what he did so easily was literally one of my worst nightmares.
“Will I want to… er… wear any of your clothes?” I fought not to wring my hands, but my thumbs danced around each other.
He sent me a sly grin and then let loose an easy, breezy chuckle that also had me envious. “Maybe you should bring some of your own in case you, my small-town dreamer, can’t keep up with a big-city boy’s wardrobe.”
“New Gothenburg is a city. The big NG.”
He snorted and bumped his shoulder against mine again. “Say that after you’ve been to NYC.”
Groaning, I flopped back onto the bed and slid my hands under my head, staring up at the dented ceiling. The plaster was cracked, and I imagined that somehow, someone’s head must have made that strange dome-shaped hole I’d never bothered fixing. Somewhere downstairs was a thump, and the sound of music started blasting loud enough the floor vibrated. Forrest snickered and walked his fingers along my shoulder. Normally I would run the other way with someone touching me, but he was always friendly, and there was never anything else in his touch. He reminded me of the one foster sister I’d liked, Poppy. She was sweet too. I missed her sometimes.
“They get started early,” he said, tapping the floor with his expensive leather boots—short, brown, and high-gloss, definitely not for riding—like I needed that to know who he was talking about.
“Every day. This is when most of those guys wake up.” The late-afternoon sun streaked through the room and cut into my eyes as if to remind me how ridiculous it was that some days this was morning. Summer was in full swing—hell, it was nearly fall now—and that meant the boys stayed up later and got up later, everyone feeling okay with the situation so long as the sun was still around when they stumbled out of bed.
Forrest brushed his fingers through my hair and I startled. “What?”
“It’s weird.” He tilted his head. We hadn’t been alone much. For whatever reason, it was easier to lie still and let him stare at me than it would have been for me to do that with someone else.
“Seeing your own face?”
“Yeah. And—” He flopped down beside me and nudged me until I slid over so we could both stare at the crack in the ceiling above the bed. “—it’s too bad we didn’t know a few years ago. We could have made a killing.” His green eyes nearly glowed as he rolled over and propped his head on his hand, looking down at me. He kicked at my shin, and I studied him.
“Wh—what do you mean?”
He rolled his eyes, lashes fluttering in a way that was sort of sweet as he smacked my chest lightly. Like the staring thing, him touching me didn’t annoy me like when some people did it, like that asshole Barnes who wouldn’t leave me alone. It would be nice to get away from him.
Barnes.Why was it the one guy who’d taken notice of me in the last few years was a jerkwad who thought he’d be able to strong-arm me into a fuck out back behind some scrap metal?
“We’re twins.” Forrest jolted me back to the present when he spoke. “We’re twinky blond twins. Do you even know what sort of cash people would have thrown at us? Uuuugh.” He flopped over dramatically onto his stomach and hid his face in his hands. “We could have charged ten grand, easy. Maybe twenty.”
