Silver Bastard (Silver Valley #1)(9)
Author: Joanna Wylde

It took Teeny six months to “forgive” me after Puck and I rode north. Mom had called all excited, saying I should come back home. Earl declared I’d be leaving over his dead body, and that was the end of it. I’d lived with him and Regina through high school and while I spent a year working and saving up my money. After that they gave me one of their apartments over the old pharmacy building at the friends-and-family rate.

Regina and Earl were the best thing that ever happened to me, and I loved them for it.

“Lookin’ good, Becca,” said Jakob McDougal, settling himself at the counter. Today he had four of his buddies in tow. He was loud, rude, and one time he’d left me a penny underneath a turned-over glass of water for a tip because his breakfast steak was overcooked. (I don’t know if you’ve ever seen someone do that, but it’s a straight-up dick move—one that takes real effort, too.)

Long story short, Jakob McDougal was an asshole.

He also wasn’t real bright, because after pulling that shit he still thought he had a shot at getting me naked, no matter how many times I shot his ass down. Now I resisted the urge to flip him off because I was still six months away from dumping this gig to start cutting hair, and Eva could be a real bitch if we were rude to the customers, even if they’d earned it. (Eva could be a real bitch about a lot of things, which was part of why I was working so hard to get my license and leave the waitressing behind.)

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” I told him, my voice tight, because guys like him pissed me off. Giving him my back, I reached for the next ticket and prepped my tray.

“I’m tired and need some coffee,” Jake said, ignoring the fact that I’d just told him I needed a minute. Dumbass. His friends Cooper, Matt, Alex, and one other I didn’t know laughed like a chorus of braying jackasses. “I was up laaaate last night making Sherri Fields a very happy girl, and I want something to get me up again. I got needs, baby.”

The jackasses grunted and snickered, giving each other high fives. One of them made a slapping noise and another moaned in a way that I suspected was supposed to sound like the unfortunate Sherri Fields in the throes of ecstasy. More like a dying elk, in my opinion.

I counted to ten and stared at the plated food in the window, jaw clenched. Blake caught my gaze, and his eyes narrowed. Uh-oh. Blake wasn’t a big fan of customers giving the waitresses shit at the best of times, and he got mean when he had a hangover. I saw him reach for his big, flat metal spatula with the sharp edge on one side and my eyes widened.

Crap. Did I want Jake and his friends to suffer? Absolutely. But not if it got me fired.

“It’s all good, Blake,” I said quickly. He shook his head slowly as Jake and his friends laughed harder. That’s when I remembered they’d gone to school with Blake, over in Kellogg. Seniors together on the football team. Then the other guys got jobs at the Laughing Tess mine . . . Blake had claustrophobia, so he slung hash browns in the mornings and went to community college in the afternoons. He was a smart guy, and personally I thought he had a much brighter future ahead of him than the losers behind me.

I felt his pain, though. Taking the high road can wear a person out.

“We got an issue here?” a deep voice asked, sending shivers all up and down my spine. I closed my eyes, wondering if the day could possibly get any more fucked up. That was the voice that haunted my dreams, although I hadn’t heard it for six months. (Six months and eight days . . . give or take. Not that I was counting.)

The voice belonged to Puck Redhouse.

The same Puck Redhouse who—in one monumentally fucked-up night five years ago—made me come harder than I knew was possible, poked me in a most uncomfortable place, and then set me up to get my ass kicked when he complained about how bad I was in the sack.

I sort of hated him for that.

The next morning he’d hauled me all the way back to Idaho and deposited me on Earl and Regina’s doorstep like a lost puppy. After that he disappeared into the night. I saw him around on and off, but the guy was mysterious.

Kind of like Batman. On a motorcycle.

In a weird way, I owed him everything . . . the man still scared the shit out of me, though. Scared me, turned me on, you name it, because if there was one constant derailing my quest for happy normalcy, it was Puck Redhouse and his stupid, sexy voice. The man was my own personal North Atlantic iceberg, lurking under the cold waters, just waiting to shred me wide open.

Fucking biker. I’d had enough bikers to last a lifetime—I didn’t need him in my life.

Not that he’d ever said anything to indicate he wanted me in his life. But over the years he’d watched me . . . Sometimes I got the feeling he wanted to do a lot more than watch.

I shivered, because I’d never forget how he’d felt pushing deep inside, stretching and filling and blowing my mind all at once.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to give my stupid body the lecture about why Puck was all wrong. I had a feeling we were one step away from a bloodbath right at the breakfast counter. Too much testosterone. I needed to do something—break the tension and smooth things over.

“No issues—” I tried to say, but Blake cut me off.

“Yeah, we got a fuckin’ issue,” he snarled, pushing through the swinging doors from the kitchen into the counter area. “These cocksuckers think you can come in here and treat the girls like shit. Outside, McDougal.”

Across the dining room people fell silent, and then I saw Eva stand up and start toward us, her default scowl growing uglier than usual. Fuck. I was about thirty seconds away from unemployment, and believe me when I say there weren’t exactly an abundance of work opportunities in a mountain town of eight hundred people.

“Blake, please go back into the kitchen,” I hissed, deciding to ignore Puck because I just didn’t have enough space in my brain to deal with him. “Let me get coffee for everyone, and a slice of pie. It’s on me.”

“Can I eat it off you?” Jake asked. Apparently he didn’t have a highly honed sense of self-preservation. His friends burst out laughing as all hell broke loose.

I’m still not entirely sure what happened next.

I do know that Blake slammed his big spatula down on Jake’s hand right as Puck punched him. Jake’s jackass chorus might be idiots, but they weren’t cowards because suddenly they were all up and fighting. That’s when I discovered Puck hadn’t walked in for breakfast alone—nope, he’d come in with two other Silver Bastards (Boonie and Deep), Boonie’s old lady (Darcy), and another girl named Carlie Gifford. Carlie was about my age, and she’d been hanging around with the club for a while, which I knew because I knew everything about Callup. (I might not be a native, but the Breakfast Table was Grand Central so far as this town went—if something happened, I heard about it.)