Lake: A Steel Paragons MC Novel (The Coast: Book 5) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE Lake

  CHAPTER TWO Bridget

  CHAPTER THREE Lake

  CHAPTER FOUR Bridget

  CHAPTER FIVE Bridget

  CHAPTER SIX Lake

  CHAPTER SEVEN Bridget

  CHAPTER EIGHT Lake

  CHAPTER NINE Bridget

  CHAPTER TEN Lake

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Lake

  CHAPTER TWELVE Bridget

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Bridget

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Lake

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Lake

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Bridget

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Lake

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Bridget

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Lake

  CHAPTER TWENTY Lake

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Lake

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Bridget

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Lake

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR Lake

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Find Her

  Other Works

  Lake

  A Steel Paragons MC Novel

  (The Coast: Book 5)

  By Eve R. Hart

  Copyright © 2018 Eve R. Hart

  All right reserved.

  The scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof my not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is purely coincidental.

  Warning: This book is intended for readers 18 years and older. This book contains violence, harsh language, and explicit sex scenes.

  Cover image credit Shutterstock.com- Serge Lee

  Dedication

  To the ones that see life like a movie in their heads.

  And everyone, no matter how old you are, that laughs like a perverted teen at the words boobs and porn.

  Prologue

  Lake

  My mother always used to say that I had a big heart.

  I never really gave it much thought.

  I was me and there wasn’t much about that I would change.

  But if I thought about it, I would have said that she was right. I had a lot of space in there and though I held a lot of memories already, I knew there was room for more.

  Memories of my fallen brothers.

  Memories of family I would never see again.

  Some believed death was the end, the final beat.

  But as long as I kept those souls alive inside me, then were they really gone? If I didn’t forget, then would their souls be lost for eternity?

  I supposed these were heavy questions to ask but this was what I thought of every single day. These were the things that plagued my mind, keeping me awake at night.

  I couldn’t forget because I couldn’t let them go.

  With that said, my heart wasn’t just for the departed. It was for the ones that were still here, too. The ones that showed me that life was as great as I allowed it to be.

  I wasn’t one of those people that were desperately seeking love and attention but I also knew better than to turn it away when it smiled at me. Because those that usually looked my way with kindness in their hearts were the kind of souls that understood me.

  And isn’t that what we all really want?

  To know that we aren’t alone.

  To feel like we are perfect the way we are— broken pieces, weird quirks, strange ways of thinking, and all.

  To go out with a smile on your face and a bright warmth in your heart.

  I know I did.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lake

  “It’s fuckin’ creepy out here at night.”

  “You scared, prospect?” I asked with a hint of laughter in my tone.

  “No,” he said shaking his head as he brought the flame up to light the cigarette dangling from his lips. His eyes scanned the shipping container yard as he took a deep inhale then slid the cigarette from his lips. “Just all the quiet and the moon being full and all. It’s fuckin’ creepy.”

  I rolled my eyes at him even though he had a point. Maybe I’d been in the city too long, but I was used to noise. But then again, the compound was rarely quiet and since I was living there, it seemed like I never got a moment of peace. That was one of the reasons I didn’t mind pulling the night shifts patrolling the place. I didn’t sleep much anyway so it wasn’t like it threw my schedule off either.

  “When I was a kid, my baby sister would always wake me up around the full moon,” he said a few moments later. “It made the shadows of the big oak tree right outside the house move on her wall. She’d say there were monsters trying to put a spell on her. No matter how many times I explained it to her and went in there and showed her what was going on, she still came into my room. I remember giving up eventually and just letting her sleep in the bed with me.”

  “Yeah, my sister did the same thing. Only it was every night for like three years. It was monsters under her bed. And I tried to tell her that it was always her dirty clothes that she never put in the hamper.”

  “You got a sister?” he asked, his head turning to look at me.

  “I did,” I said then walked off.

  I had no clue why I opened my mouth and now that I did, the last thing I wanted to do was talk about it.

  Besides, there was work to do. It was called patrolling, not standing around talking about shit.

  Luckily, the prospect took the hint and I heard his boots head off in the opposite direction.

  Two hours later, the sun was coming up and our replacements would be there any second. It had been another quiet night, but I honestly didn’t think that anything would go down here.

  We’d upped our patrols and were working on making the compound more secure. After Crazy Steve tried to fuck with us, we decided it wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Plus, there was still the matter of his boss. The very one that we had no clue about. While it seemed like taking Laurel had been Steve’s personal quest for vengeance, we weren’t sure that this other guy didn’t have something against the club as well. I always thought it was best to assume the worst. And since we were, in fact, very clueless, it was smart to never drop your guard.

  Once our replacements arrived, I nodded to the prospect as he took off on his bike and made my way across the street.

  There was only one house around for miles and that was where I was headed.

  “Get your young ass in here,” Mr. Watkins called out after I knocked. “I’m old as fuck, don’t make me walk across the house. Tell you the same thing every damn day.” The last part was mumbled but I still heard it.

  I found him in the kitchen, like every morning that I came over here after I got done with my shift. He was standing at the small, outdated stove frying up some bacon.

  “Well, get you some coffee and have a seat. Don’t hover over me. I’ve been doing this long enough you don’t need to worry.”

  I laughed as I walked over to the cabinet that held the coffee mugs. I pulled down the one with an owl on it surrounded by the words ‘I’m a hoot.’ I turned it over to look at the bottom even though I already knew the date written on this one. September thirteenth,
nineteen eighty-three.

  “Since I’ve already told you the story of that one, it means it’s your turn to tell me one,” he said and I hadn’t even seen him take his attention off the bacon to see which one I had picked up.

  He was right. Those were the rules after all.

  “Alright,” I said as I pulled a plate down and covered it with a few paper towels.

  I took a seat at the small, round table in the middle of the tiny kitchen. The thing looked like it was from the fifties and the metal legs were doing their best to continue to stay upright. I knew if I didn’t get out of his way he’d yell at me and I was just too tired to get under his skin like I usually did. He secretly loved it. It wasn’t like the man had anyone else around.

  It was sad and I figured he was just lonely. That was the only reason he put up with me. But over the last year, I’d come to care about the old man. And I secretly think he cared about me, too.

  “I suspect,” he said after I hadn’t said anything for a long while, “that you need to talk. Why else would you have pulled down a mug with a story you already know?”

  “It’s one of my favorite ones,” I replied with a small smile. “Maybe I was just hoping that you forgot that you’d already told it to me and would tell it again.”

  “I’d believe that, boy, if your eyes didn’t look so sad today.”

  “You’re too wise for your own good.”

  “Or yours.”

  I laughed as he shook his head at me.

  Once the bacon was on the plate, he got to working on the scrambled eggs.

  “Like most kids, I loved Christmas. But it wasn’t about all the gifts. My mom always went the extra mile to keep the whole Santa thing alive.”

  “Pish,” he grumbled, the spatula whipped through the air and a piece of egg landed on the counter. “I always told my Gertie that if we had kids we weren’t going to let them buy into that nonsense of Santa.”

  “What?” I screeched, my eyebrows going up to my hairline with shock. “What about the magic of it all?”

  “Kids don’t need to be lied to in order to see the magic in it all. Magic is in the love that comes with each gift. The appreciation that someone knows you well enough to get you that one special thing. Why the fuck should you let some fake, made-up fat fuck take that away? I wanted my Gertie to know how much I loved her. Me. And I would have wanted my kids to know the same.”

  While his words made sense, I wasn’t quite sure I agreed. But it wasn’t like it mattered because the idea of kids was nowhere in my thoughts. Not even the outer, possibly-one-day ones.

  “You should never hide how much you care about someone. Love… love can be endless, even when the life ends. Love goes on for eternity and while you have that person by your side, you should never let them question how much they mean to you.”

  I nodded even though his back was to me and he couldn’t see it.

  His wife had been gone for twelve years and it was clear that not a day went by that he didn’t think of her and miss her with every beat of his heart.

  “But go on. Santa shit,” he said snapping me out of my head.

  “Yes,” I said then cleared my throat. “So there was the whole bake cookies from scratch and leave them out thing. But then after we went to bed, she would scatter the soot from the fireplace all over the carpet. And place a few ornaments on the floor. She even went as far as leaving a few scattered strands of white hair from a cheap wig. I mean, at the time I thought it was real.”

  “And you believed it all?”

  “Yep,” I said with a firm nod and a smile. “Until I was ten.”

  He turned to me then with a shocked look on his face. His eyes looking even bigger behind his thick glasses.

  “Even though the kids made fun of me at school, I still believed in the whole thing,” I said remembering the parts of my childhood that always made me smile.

  Sometimes, I still wished I was that ten-year-old boy. What I wouldn’t give to go back to then. To have everything back.

  “Breakfast is ready,” he said setting down the plate full of bacon, biscuits, and steaming hot eggs in front of me before taking his seat on the opposite side of the table.

  He looked at me for a long moment before digging in.

  “So what was your favorite gift as a kid?” he asked like he saw into my soul and realized all the things I didn’t want to talk about.

  “Oh, that’s easy.” I took a bite of my bacon because I couldn’t resist it any longer. “A fishing pole when I was seven.”

  “You like to fish?” This brought excitement to the old man’s face.

  “No, never learned how.”

  “So then why was it your favorite?” The confusion was clear as day in his voice.

  “Because with it came so many possibilities.”

  Possibilities that my father would take us to my grandfather’s cabin and the three of us would spend the day out on the lake. Possibilities of becoming the son that he always wanted. Possibilities of making great memories.

  “You’re telling me that the possibilities of one gift meant more than the memories you didn’t make with that gift?”

  “Yeah, because to a seven-year-old kid, the idea that one thing could happen meant that a million different things could. It opened up things that I never even imagined before. So why should fishing be the limit?”

  “You’re a strange fuckin’ kid,” he said then shoveled a forkful of eggs in his mouth. “But also very smart and wise.”

  I smiled.

  We ate in silence and I thought about just how much these mornings meant to me and how they even came to be.

  He had been a scared old man, afraid that no-good bikers were doing shady things across the way. As a concerned citizen, he called the police. Lucky for Knight and I, Connor was the one that had showed up. I still remember that day and the calm feeling I had as I jogged up to his house.

  He had been hesitant to let me in and that was alright, but after I introduced myself and told him that we were there to make sure that no funny business was going on, he seemed to relax. He let me in and gave me a cup of coffee. By the time I headed out, he shook my hand and told me to stop by whenever I was out there.

  And so I did.

  That eventually turned into a breakfast thing whenever I had the night shift over here.

  “Alright,” I said after I helped him clean up the kitchen. “I have to get going this morning.”

  “I get it, boy. Thanks for the conversation.”

  “I’ll see you later in the week. I’ll bring some groceries over on my next shift.”

  He waved me off but knew better than to say anything at this point. He knew I’d do it no matter what he told me.

  “Don’t break a hip, old man,” I called out as I opened the door.

  “Don’t catch crabs from those loose women,” he called back.

  I laughed as I jogged down the three rickety porch steps. As I made my way back to my bike, I made a mental note to fix the loose boards on his porch the next time I was there.

  When I got back to the compound, I found Iron sitting at one of the long tables in the kitchen. I didn’t have to check in with him every morning, but I did most of the time.

  “Hey, Lake. Breakfast?” he asked as I took a seat across from him.

  I looked up and saw a tall blonde at the stove making… something. She turned and looked at me with a wide smile but I shook my head letting her know I wasn’t eating. I was a little surprised that Abigail wasn’t around. Dade’s sister had started taking over the kitchen on most mornings. And sometimes in the evenings as well. She kept the food hot and the coffee fresh even though we told her a million times that she didn’t have to do it.

  We didn’t have club girls in the way that Moon Hill did. So far, there were none living at the compound. But lately, it seemed like some of the girls that were around more than most, hung around long enough to make breakfast in the mornings. It kept the guys happy, so I wasn’t about to
say anything.

  I wasn’t sure if I liked how different things were down here yet. The unsaid rule of no club girls living here was something new. It meant less drama, which I was all for. Sometimes women were too territorial even if they knew they were just a piece of ass. I wasn’t a fan of drama. That said, I also didn’t mind the availability of having strings-free sex when I really needed it.

  But that wasn’t the point now.

  I always treated them with respect, no matter if it was my bed they’d just left or someone else’s. Some people might have just thought of them as whores, and sure, they were willing to take any of us without a care, but they were still people just like me.

  “How’s the old man?” Iron asked like he knew I’d already eaten.

  Ever since the Laurel thing, he’d made a point to be in our business more. Not in an overly protective parent way, but in a way that he didn’t want to miss anything ever again. Things that happened outside of the club were still things that could affect the club. I think we all learned that harsh lesson quite recently.

  No one was safe.

  Not as long as they knew us.

  Not as long as we could have the potential to make enemies.

  Which seemed like something that would always be there.

  Even when we thought things were going smoothly.

  “Crotchety as ever,” I said with a laugh that he joined in on.

  Iron hadn’t met him but he had a good idea from the few stories I’d told.

  “Everything else good?”

  “Yep, night was quiet.”

  “Prospect do okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a bobbing nod. “Even when he stopped to chat for a minute, his eyes and ears were always scanning. I didn’t once catch him slacking off.”

  “Good,” he said tucking a stray strand of hair behind his ear. “Something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Here?” I asked because we were out in the open and there were ears close enough to listen in.

  “Yeah. I want you and Ky to watch over the prospects.”