Who Do You Love (Rock Royalty Book 7) (6 page)

If the trend for craft beer continued, then hip breweries might move into the industrial section and, within half a decade, the tasting rooms/brewpubs springing up around them could change the future of the neglected properties and the shoddy single-family homes.

Already a couple of the Unrulies were making beer out back for club consumption, and Eamon could see his father, “Irish” Rooney as he was known, pushing to make that process a commercial enterprise. Maybe that was also why his dad had purchased several of the crappier houses in the surrounding blocks as they came up for sale. Irish was a clever man who liked money and who also liked to survive.

When interclub feuding had turned lethal and the cops ever more diligent, Eamon’s father had insisted on diversification. It wasn’t easy, even as president, to persuade the members to give up running drugs and guns, especially when there wasn’t an alternative as profitable. But turning barley, water, hops, and yeast into an authentic MC alcoholic beverage was rather brilliant when he thought about it. A livelihood for the club that could provide real stability and income.

The guys who didn’t have the temperament or the talent for babysitting the ingredients from malting to bottling could do a variety of other tasks, up to and including rehabbing the shitty homes as the whole neighborhood came to new life.

Of course, then the clubhouse would likely move. The Unruly Assassins were a group of bikers, not a country club, and they were better suited for seedy environs. Fix up the area and the guys would have to find a new place to party hardy on Saturday nights—and any other time that suited them—and hold church when the president decided he had an issue requiring he pound the gavel.

Eamon knocked back the rest of his beer and tossed the cup into a nearby trash receptacle. Time for another drink. He’d come to put a certain female from his mind, and that was going to require more alcohol and maybe some woman to later warm his bed.

“Hey, uh, hi,” a voice said, and Eamon looked up.

A young man stood near the table, red Solo in hand. “Smitty” was penned in Sharpie on the side, which made Eamon smile. The bikers’ kids were always after them to re-use and recycle.

“I’m new,” the guy said. Even in the dim light there was a hard look to him, his muscles wiry, his hair overgrown, a chinstrap beard edging his jaw. “Name’s Smitty.”

“I see that.” Eamon obligingly moved down the table so the younger man had room to take a place beside him, ass on the top, boots on the bench. “Like it so far?”

“Hard not to say yes,” Smitty answered, gesturing with his cup to a pair of dancing women illuminated by the flames of a nearby fire pit on wheels.

They were young and nubile and wearing the kind of outfits you expected to see on a chick at biker party—that is, tight and showing lots of skin. But it was early hours yet, and so their movements were tame as they chatted and moved to the music.

“Wait until later,” Eamon advised, as a passel of elementary school-age kids raced by intent on some game of their own. “When the under-eighteen crowd hits curfew hour and heads home, the action heats up.”

Smitty nodded. Guys like him were “hangarounds,” here to get a feel for the club while the members and those attached to the Unrulies got a feel for him. If that went well, then he’d move up and become a “prospect” for an unspecified amount of time, ordered around and expected to do shit until the day he’d be allowed full membership.

“How long have you been…visiting here?”

Since birth.
Hiding his next smile, Eamon swallowed the words. Couldn’t blame the kid for assuming he was a hangaround, too, because he didn’t wear a leather vest that either proclaimed him a full-patch member or identified him as prospective candidate just waiting for the word before taking his ink and his place in the club.

“Been a while,” he said.

His grandfather, Black Irish Rooney, had started the MC after returning from World War II. Years later, after his grandfather had retired, his son, the younger Irish, had come home from fighting in the first Gulf War and taken over the reins of the club. However, the Rooney Unruly Assassins’ dynasty was going to die with Eamon’s dad.

“You still here?” a gruff voice asked.

Eamon turned his head to take in the new arrival, a rangy man in his fifties with gray hair that hung to his shoulders, brushing the black leather of his vest. His mustache was bushy and accentuated his right gold incisor. The original tooth had been lost in a fight with a member of the Savage Sons when Eamon was a baby. The Son had lost an ear and the vision in one eye.

“Even the six-year-olds are still bellying up to the buffet table, Irish,” Eamon said to his father. “You’re not kicking me out already?”

“You know you’re welcome,” Irish mumbled, then brought his beer to his mouth as if that might cover the lie.

“Thanks, Dad,” Eamon said, then felt Smitty’s stare on him. He turned his head. “Smitty, my man, you’ve met the Unrulies’ prez, right? My dad, Irish?”

The kid nodded, yet still looked flummoxed. Apparently so green that he didn’t know the Unruly Assassins’ number one rule—that Eamon Rooney was never to be offered a real place in the only family he’d ever known.

So, even though he’d come tonight to forget by being close to near and dear, he still stood, as always, a man apart.

“Good thing I’m two-fisting it.” A new person strode up to join their conversation, and he pushed a full cup of beer into Eamon’s hand. “You look cheery,” Spence Sadler told Eamon, “not.” Then he turned to the older man. “How goes it, Irish?”

His father smiled, looking relieved to have a buffer between himself and his son. Or between himself and the guilt his son represented. Eamon was never sure.

“Goin’ well, Spence.” Then he glanced at the hangaround. “You come with me, kid. Get you some food. Find some of the members.”

The ones who really belonged to the club
, Eamon finished silently for him as Smitty stood and followed Irish toward the grills. Then he looked to his best friend and business partner. They’d lived next door to each other in college and roomed together in law school. Gone into a partnership in a firm that had taken on a different shape when Eamon had discovered he was as ill-suited to the formal aspects of the practice of law as the Beast was to Beauty’s drawing rooms and dining tables.

Now Spence handled the legal proceedings while Eamon focused mostly on the investigative side—background checks and hunting down some witnesses and following others to find their weaknesses. If their firm needed to talk to the cops in Fayetteville about a new client’s former arrest, Eamon got on the plane. If another client needed a character witness in the sentencing phase, Eamon was dispatched to Bakersfield or Buffalo or the Bellagio to see if an old teacher or a former wife or a slots-playing granny might help the jury or judge better understand the true nature of the guilty party.

Theirs was a criminal defense operation.

Spence turned his head, as if noting Eamon’s study of him. “What?”

“I thought you had a date tonight. The production assistant for the legal procedural?”

His partner quaffed some of his beer. “I think she was only interested in my mind.”

Eamon snorted. Spence was his bookend in size, but with golden hair, genial brown eyes, and dimples when he smiled. Which he did. Often. While Eamon was regularly labeled intense, Spence was considered much more laid back.

“They don’t care about your brain.”

Nor did women give a hoot about Spence’s lineage—which was as blue blood as one could get in California. Eamon’s partner came from old L.A. money.

“At least that’s what you’ve always said,” he continued. “The true draw is your big dick, right?”

Spence nodded. “Well, there is that.” He said it like the truth wearied him.

“Asshole,” Eamon muttered, but he had to grin.

“That’s what I like to see!” Spence elbowed his side. “A little levity. You’ve been a dull and dreary dog recently.”

Ever since the break-up with Cami Colson.

Shit
. An image of her bloomed in his brain. The accusation in her eyes at the motorcycle show, the antipathy in her brother’s. Payne would have told her by now who Eamon was and would have warned her off—because a man like him wouldn’t want his little sister even peripherally involved with a MC.

But it was more serious than that.

He forked his free hand through his hair. “Fucking Wick.” His cousin Rick Rooney had dubbed himself that nickname as a child, and it had stuck.

“He’s a screw-up,” Spence agreed.

When Irish had decreed the Unrulies wind down their involvement in the opiates business—prescription pills and heroin—Eamon had been starting college and busy with his own life. Living on campus, he’d rarely spent any time at the clubhouse because his mother didn’t like it and she’d wanted to ensure that his tuition and expense money was untainted by any MC criminal business.

Frankly, he hadn’t been interested in drawing lines or neat boxes like that.

But when the newspaper plastered drug busts from around the county on the front page, he’d worried about his father and his MC family, and he’d applauded Irish’s decree from afar. Though not a geographical distance, a dorm room filled with books, empty beer bottles, and new friends who thought a club meant tennis racquets and rounds of golf had seemed like a different continent.

Eamon couldn’t say his was a moral stance at the time—though older and wiser he saw how those drugs ruined people’s lives—he’d only been concerned about loved ones being behind bars.

So yeah, he’d been glad for the change. It had taken some years, but the club had stopped trafficking.

Not all of its members, however. Because recently Wick—claiming to be acting for the entire MC and with their full approval—had gotten involved in a scheme with some guys in another club to smuggle into the country and distribute “V,” a new strain of human growth hormone. You could buy the regular shit from the zillions of anti-aging medical practices in L.A. But V was a brand-new formulation purported to offer faster, better, more long-lasting results. Of course the beauty- and performance-obsessed celebrities created an instant and avid client base. No amount of money was too much to pay.

Then his hapless—foolish, reckless, idiot—cousin had been arrested.

One guy, caught red-handed, wearing his Unruly Assassins colors. It had taken some persuasion on Eamon and Spence’s part to convince the authorities that Wick, despite the patch, had acted outside of his club. But with the cooperation of another.

Now the Feds were offering him a deal if he’d rat out the others in on his scheme.

The Savage Sons.

Eamon brought his beer to his mouth, then drew it away again. “Suze saw some of the Sons at the rodeo grounds when we were there over the weekend.”

Spence straightened. “Anybody say anything? Anybody say anything to you or send a message of any kind?”

He was already shaking his head. “I didn’t catch sight of a single one. Suze made herself scarce.”

“Good. It’s been quiet since their little sit down with you, right?”

“That charming encounter.”

Five of the members of the Savage Sons had cornered Eamon in the back parking lot of his favorite coffee place right before it closed at 9 p.m. They’d wanted him to deliver a message to his cousin. A very succinct message—no squealing.

Eamon had first played it cool. Explained to the band of merry men that he wasn’t an Unruly. He didn’t act as a message boy to them or for them, either.

They’d moved on to threatening Irish if Eamon didn’t persuade his cousin to keep his mouth shut. He’d had to laugh at that and then wished them good luck at getting close to his dad. The old man hadn’t been around this long to get caught with his pants down.

They’d growled and grumbled, and for a moment Eamon wondered if they’d try hurting him instead, but he supposed his status as Irish’s son stood for something, if not for getting him into the club.

One of the Sons had stepped forward, his beady eyes boring into Eamon’s. “You gotta girl? Somebody you care about?”

Though his blood had chilled, he’d managed to laugh again and toast the dude with his cardboard cup. “Just the barista at my favorite coffee place.”

Twenty minutes later, fifteen minutes after Eamon had driven away, leaving the frustrated Savage Sons in his dust, a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through the front window of Bean & Bagels. Eamon’s favorite barista had been washing down tables at the time and suffered burns and a long cut that required dozens of stitches.

It sent a cold knife blade even now down his spine. Hearing about it the next morning, he’d considered his options on the way to pay for the damages, the hospital bill, and a month of daily flower deliveries for the barista.

Due to an abundance of caution and a tragic incident in his past, he’d been careful when it came to Cami. Other women he’d publicly dated, but not her. Some sixth sense, maybe, had urged him to keep her—what they had together—out of sight. After the Molotov cocktail incident, he’d congratulated himself for that caution.

Then he’d dumped her.

Never would his fairy be a target of any kind of harm thanks to him.

If he couldn’t forget the hurt look on her face when he’d told her it was over…well, small price to pay.

Small fucking price.

Spence poked him another time with his elbow. “I can hear the gears, partner.”

“I’m letting her go,” he said.

“Cami? I thought that decision was a done deal. Weeks ago.”

“Yeah.” Eamon pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve been having a couple of the guys on her tail.”

“What?” Spence gaped at him. “That sounds stupid. Maybe they’ll attract attention to her.”

“Bart’s point man.”

His partner relaxed. “Okay. He knows what he’s doing.”

“I should tell them to stop, though.”

“It can’t hurt until you feel more easy…” Spence’s voice trailed off. “Oh.”

Smart guy, his partner, his best friend. The passage of time wasn’t going to make him more
easy
. Still being connected to Cami, even from this distance, wasn’t getting her out from under his skin. When they were together, the sense of rightness, the sense of
belonging
, had been like a spell that took him under.