I grabbed my mug and headed for the door before they could organize a committee. “Nobody is coming.”
Regan called after me, “You at least need a plant!”
“No, I don’t.”
“A snake plant. They’re impossible to kill.”
“Watch me.”
Emily yelled, “Get curtains!”
Tank added, “And another towel!”
“What this?” I picked up a pamphlet of the counter featuring goats and woman in tight spandex.”
“Therapy,” Regan, snapped, snatching the brochure from my hand.
Edge rolled his eyes. “Bad news brother. The women decided they needed a spa and yoga weekend the same one we booked Tank’s stag.”
“No… Absolutely not…,”
Regan winked at me as she poured me more coffee. “You’re my favorite bodyguard, Mase. No strippers and beer for you. Goat yoga is so?—”
“Fuck, no” I snarled like a bear. Their laughter chased me out. My mood going from mild to mad in seconds.
I stepped outside into the morning, coffee in hand, the sun already climbing hard over Santa Fe. The air smelled like dust, warming asphalt, and breakfast smoke from the kitchen vent. Bikes sat lined up in the lot, chrome catching light. My body still ached from the ride. My knuckles were sore. My bad knee complained when I hit the first step.
I kept walking.
The clubhouse noise faded behind me. Laughter. Voices. Regan yelling at somebody not to touch the bacon with bare hands. Edge saying something that got him cursed at. Family, loud and messy and alive.
I loved them.
But the itch under my skin had teeth now.
Move.
Shift.
Build something.
I didn’t know what yet. Didn’t know why the road that used to be enough had started feeling like a loop. Didn’t know what kind of man I’d be inside my own walls, with no bar noise, no nameless women, no brothers twenty feet away, no easy distractions.
But I knew one thing.
I was done standing still.
CHAPTER 3
SIENNA
The truck soundedtired in a way I found deeply personal.
Every time I pushed past sixty-five, the engine rattled like it had legal grounds to file a workplace complaint. The temperature gauge kept flirting with red, easing up, dipping back, then climbing again with the smug persistence of a man who said calm down while actively making things worse. I’d been trying not to look at it every six seconds, which meant I was looking at it every five.
Bandit hated me. That much was scientifically observable. He had spent the last hour glaring from his nest of towels in the passenger seat with the kind of sustained resentment usually reserved for dictators and bad veterinarians. Maybe I had ruined his life. Maybe he was dramatic. Both things could be true.
The desert heat still clung to everything even though the sun was dropping lower, burning orange behind scrub and jagged rock. My AC had stopped working two states ago, which meant I was driving with the windows down, inviting hot air, dust, and whatever agricultural smell had attached itself to the highway into the cab. My hair felt gritty at the roots. My skin felt sticky. My tank top had surrendered. I smelled like road, gas stationbathrooms, and the kind of poor decision-making that usually came before a Dateline episode.
