CHAPTER 1
DUKE
She’s back.
I see her before she sees me. That’s the only advantage I’ve had over Violet Monroe in three years.
I’m at the gas station pump across the street from Ash Valley Diner. I’m topping off the tank, and she’s in the booth by the window.
Same hair, longer now. She’s just as fucking hot as she was last time I saw her. And she’s doing that thing with her bottom lip. It’s caught between her teeth.
Fuck.
It’s been three years since she left, and my dick is already hard just looking at her.
My body doesn’t give a shit that this woman gutted me. It wants what it’s always wanted. Her under me. Her on top of me. Her any way I can get her.
There’s a kid in a highchair next to her. Small. Brown hair. A toddler. He’s mashing a fist into a pile of scrambled eggs and grinning at the mess.
I cap the tank and cross the road without checking for traffic.
Three years. No note. No call. No forwarding address.
One morning I rode to her apartment, and the place was cleaned out. The landlord said she paid through the month and dropped the key in the mailbox. Gone.
Like two years in my bed meant nothing.
She didn’t know I was going to ask her to be my Old Lady. I had a cut made for her and everything.
I kept it. Bottom drawer at the clubhouse. Never threw it out. I still think about her every fucking day.
Her car is in the lot. Same blue sedan. Arizona plates. I walk past it on the way to the door and see the car seat in the back.
The kid in the diner is hers.
She has a kid. She left me and had a kid with somebody else.
My hands ball at my sides.
I pull out my phone and text our club President.
Me:Gonna be late.Violet is back.
I pocket the phone and push through the door.
The bell rings. Violet’s head snaps up.
Blue eyes. Fuck, those blue eyes. The ones I used to stare into while I was buried inside her. The ones that crinkled at the corners when I said the dry, blunt shit that made her laugh.
She’s thinner. Sharper collarbones. Harder angles in her face. Circles under her eyes that weren’t there before. She hasn’t been sleeping. Hasn’t been eating right. I know this because I spent two years memorizing every inch of this woman’s body, and my brain won’t let me unlearn it.
She ruined me for every other woman I’ve touched since.
And I’ve tried.
I’ve tried to fuck her out of my system with sweetbutts and townies and anyone who’d let me pretend for an hour. None of it worked. I only wanted her.
I slide into the booth across from her. The vinyl creaks.