Page 1 of Havoc

CHAPTER 1

AVA-ROSE

Nine years I’d sewn for the Unholy Few. Every brother in that club had stood at my counter. Well, all except one of them.

So when the bell rang on Tuesday and that one man walked into my laundromat, I lost my grip on a roll of quarters and sent half of them across the counter.

Havoc took up most of my doorway. Dark hair that went its own way, a jaw he shaved maybe once a week, and eyes so pale they looked stolen from somebody else’s face. He wore his cut over a black T-shirt with the short sleeves straining against his muscles, and across his right shoulder I could just see the tattoo of a hawk spreading its wings over a skull. His knuckles were scarred shiny. I’d been looking at that man since I was sixteen years old, and my stomach still dropped every time.

“Bolton,” he said with a nod.

“Havoc.” I trapped a still-spinning quarter under my hand. “If you’re after Brynn, she’s at work.”

“I know where she is. I’m here for you.”

My face went hot. He let me stand there in it for a full second. “For me?”

“Need a patch sewn on,” he said.

Of course he did.

He hooked his thumb under the name patch on his chest and lifted the corner to show me. HAVOC, white on black, held to the leather by a few loops of clear thread. I leaned over the counter to see.

“Is that… fishing line?”

“Yeah.”

“You sewed this on yourself?”

“Sewed all of them on myself.”

“I can tell.”

“It held.”

“It held on one side.” I straightened up. “So why bring it to me now?”

He took a while to answer. “Line snapped. You going to fix it, or bust my balls?”

“Both. Come on back.”

My sewing room was built for one person and a machine. With him in it, I had about a square foot left to stand in.

He reached for the front of his cut to take it off.

“Leave it on a minute,” I said. “I need to pin the patch where it sits on you. Leather hangs different on a body than it does on a table.”

He dropped his hands. I picked up my pincushion and stepped in close.

He gave off heat like a truck that had just been parked. I pressed the patch down with two fingers and felt his chest rise and fall under it. My mouth went dry. I could thread a needle in the dark, and right then I had to think about which end of the pin was sharp.

I slid the first one through the leather. My knuckles brushed his T-shirt, and the muscle under it jumped.

“Hold still,” I said.

“I am.”

He was at least trying to. He’d locked up from his boots to his jaw, hands in fists at his sides, staring over my head at my thread rack. My face was about four inches from his throat. I watched him swallow, and I wanted to put my mouth right there so badly that my thighs pressed together on their own.