Bad Apple (The Uncertain Saints MC #4) Read online

  Dedication

  This has to be the hardest part of writing this book. I struggle every time when I get to this page in my word document. Who the hell do you thank for giving you everything you ever dreamed of?

  My readers: Hell yes, this wouldn’t be possible without y’all.

  My mom: Thank you for being there for me. Thank you for letting me move back in after you thought you got rid of me.

  My mother in law: Yeah, y’all can thank the shit out of her. I likely wouldn’t be writing right now if she hadn’t gotten me hooked on reading.

  My husband: You may drive me nuts, but I love you anyways. There are no limits to my love. Even when you piss me off. It’s always there. I hope you know that.

  Acknowledgements

  Furiousfotog: This photo is gorgeous. Thank you so much for sharing your talent with the world.

  Alex Minsky: The same goes for you. You really made this character come to life. Thank you for sharing yourself with us, too.

  Danielle P.: You seriously have no clue what you mean to me. Thank you so much for everything you do.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Coming Next

  Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:

  The Freebirds

  Boomtown

  Highway Don’t Care

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Last Day of My Life

  Texas Tornado

  I Don’t Dance

  The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC

  Lights To My Siren

  Halligan To My Axe

  Kevlar To My Vest

  Keys To My Cuffs

  Life To My Flight

  Charge To My Line

  Counter To My Intelligence

  Right To My Wrong

  Code 11- KPD SWAT

  Center Mass

  Double Tap

  Bang Switch

  Execution Style

  Charlie Foxtrot

  Kill Shot

  Coup De Grace

  The Uncertain Saints

  Whiskey Neat

  Jack & Coke

  Vodka On The Rocks

  Bad Apple

  Dirty Mother

  Rusty Nail

  The Kilgore Fire Series

  Shock Advised

  Flash Point

  Oxygen Deprived

  Controlled Burn

  Put Out

  I Like Big Dragons Series

  I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie

  Dragons Need Love, Too

  Oh, My Dragon

  The road to hell may be paved with good intentions…

  Apple “Core” Drew needs The Uncertain Saints MC like he needs air. He is barely making it through the day, and each one that goes by takes him closer and closer to hell. Literally, not figuratively.

  He’s a half breath away from stepping over that line. The one that will be the life altering decision between breathing and taking away the pain.

  But then he meets an angel. The sister of one of his club members. The one woman who’ll tear his world apart.

  Just not for the better.

  As surely as he ruined his life, he’ll ruin her life, too. One lapse in judgment on his part, and his one night of happiness turns into the worst nine months of his life.

  But is the road to heaven paved with good actions?

  It was the beard. The beard made her do it.

  That’ll be her excuse for having sex with a man she just met, and she’s sticking to it.

  Yeah, who was she kidding? It wasn’t the beard. It was the solemn and dejected way he looked at her. The almost desperate sadness she sees in his eyes that calls out to her. The way his rough hands move over her skin that has her longing for more.

  She was sure she’d have given anything to take that look out of his eyes, but she never anticipated that in doing so things would go from bad to worse.

  She wants more, but one day is all he’ll give her.

  Until she dies, that is. Then it’s too late.

  Chapter 1

  Everyone’s brave until they figure out the roach has wings.

  -Fact of Life

  Kitt

  I walked into The Uncertain Saints’ club house, completely expecting that I would get trashed.

  What I didn’t expect, though, was to get pregnant.

  However, life works in mysterious ways.

  Ways that seem to take a hold of you and shake you until you get your shit straight.

  That was what Apple Drew, aka Core, was to me…the shake up I needed to get my head on straight.

  I was going to school to become a family law paralegal and I was on the verge of quitting.

  When I’d started going to school to become a paralegal, they never told me that I’d have to deal with the kind of trash that I did on a daily basis.

  Today, for instance, I realized that maybe family law just wasn’t for me.

  People were assholes, pure and simple.

  And all I wanted to do was see my brother.

  My brother who’d bet me that I wouldn’t come.

  But I’d show him how wrong he was.

  I smiled at the man that opened the door for me.

  “Hey, Mig!” I waved excitedly. “How’s the baby?”

  Mig smiled, and his wife, Annie, came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

  “The baby is being a rotten turd,” Annie offered as she stuck her head under Mig’s arm. “He takes after his father.”

  Mig snorted.

  “That’s what you say every time he keeps you up all night,” Mig said to his wife. “But then he starts walking two months before most kids, and you say he takes after you.”

  Annie grinned unrepentantly. “Yeah,” she admitted. “I do do that, don’t I?”

  I skittered past them into the main room of the clubhouse.

  The place itself was located just off of Caddo River, a nifty little river/lake that ran from Texas all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

  A long time ago, the river was used to transport goods that were sold in the southern states. It was a main source of income for the small town of Uncertain, Texas.

  However, over time, it had become just another river until a few years ago, when bad things started happening in all the cities that the Caddo ran through.

  It was suspected that the river was a main transport route for illegal goods.

  Since the river was relatively unsupervised, a lot of the time people got away with their illegal activities.

  Then The Uncertain Saints got involved, effectively tearing a hole in the bad guys’ plans.

  The clubhouse was deliberately located on the river in a very popular part which saw a lot of traffic.

  The building stood on stilts that lifted the entire thing up one story. It resembled more of a beach house, which was unexpected on a lake, but I loved it.

  It wasn’t old, per se, but it had quite a bit of that old feel to it.

/>   When the Saints had built it, they’d used reclaimed wood from old houses and barns in the construction.

  Now, although it was less than ten years old, it looked more like it was hundreds.

  “Hey sweetheart,” my brother, Ridley, called.

  I turned to find him staring at me with an expectant look on his face.

  I sighed and pulled a Hershey’s bar out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  “Happy?” I asked.

  He glared at me.

  “I don’t mind you living in my house…” I interrupted him before he could get any more words that might offend me out of that stupid mouth of his.

  “It’s our house,” I snapped. “It’s no more your house than my house.”

  He shrugged.

  “Papaw signed it over to me, and you know it,” he shrugged, knowing it would rile me up.

  I ignored him and walked to the cooler that was sitting out on the back deck that overlooked the river.

  Lifting the lid, I reached in and grabbed a Mike’s Hard Lemonade that my brother most likely bought specifically for me.

  The ladies who had recently started becoming permanent fixtures in The Uncertain Saints MC were more wine drinkers.

  I was most likely the only one that drank actual ‘wiener drinks’, as my brother liked to call my beverage of choice.

  Apparently, there wasn’t as much alcohol in it, and he liked to tell me that all the time.

  He also didn’t like that I always had my drinks on hand at home, but we never seemed to have any of his.

  Yes, my brother and I lived together.

  No, neither of us had anyone.

  And yes, I have brought men home. Well, only two.

  My brother didn’t bring any women home, but it had more to do with the fact that he was still in love with his dead wife.

  I’d just closed the cooler lid when I heard the new prospect.

  Well, I didn’t know for sure if it was him, but the plain leather vest on the man’s back was a good indication he was the one my brother had been telling me about.

  He’d been there for a while, but this was my first club party in well over six months.

  He was clearly comfortable here, and by the look of all the ladies crawling all over him, he was popular to boot.

  Then he had to go and open that mouth of his, and at the sound of his deep, raspy voice raced down my spine, causing me to shiver.

  I immediately took my drink and headed the other way, not wanting to get caught up in the mess that usually was a prospect.

  The Uncertain Saints didn’t let many people into their fold.

  In fact, there were only six members total in the club, and none of them seemed to have the time or inclination to add more to their group.

  I knew there had to be some kind of special circumstances for the men of the Uncertain Saints to even consider adding that man to the group.

  Which meant he was fucked up.

  And I didn’t do fucked up.

  I had my own fucked up to deal with.

  Kind of like quitting my job.

  Two hours and four hard lemonades later, I was feeling quite nice.

  I hadn’t thought about my job once, and I was having a great time watching the comings and goings.

  “Why the long face?” The man I’d been studiously avoiding all night, Apple, asked.

  I turned my face and shrugged. “Nothing.”

  And at that point, there really was nothing wrong.

  “You look like you’re about to kill someone,” the annoying man observed.

  I shrugged, picking at the invisible lint on my shoulder before I picked up my spoon and shoveled another bite of the chicken spaghetti someone had made into my mouth.

  It was pretty good, but it wasn’t like Papaw fixed it.

  There was good, and then there was good. And this wasn’t it.

  We sat next to each other in companionable silence as we both ate our food.

  I glanced over at the man’s plate and nearly laughed when I saw how much food was on it.

  His helping of food mounded high on his plate, and I feared for the integrity of the Styrofoam that was straining to maintain its form under the weight of all that food.

  “What are you looking at?” He grumbled, not bothering to turn his face.

  Instead he kept shoveling his food into his mouth in a great imitation of a Hoover Vacuum

  “I was just wondering if you left any for the rest of them,” I waved my hand at the room absently, going back to my food.

  “Everyone has already eaten,” he muttered. “Apparently, when you’re a prospect, you eat last.”

  “Hmm,” I drawled. “Imagine that.”

  He snorted.

  “Why are you a prospect, anyway?” I asked.

  “Because I want to be,” he muttered, and I felt the instant coolness that came with the words.

  I didn’t say anything else, only went back to eating my food.

  It was him that went back to the companionable silence, the weird wall of tension between us slowly dissipating until the only thing left was awareness.

  He was a sexy man.

  He was tall with unusual blonde hair that I couldn’t decide whether or not had a hint of red running through it.

  He had a blonde beard that was trimmed close to his face, and wasn’t over the top like some of the others in the MC.

  He had light blue eyes that were rimmed with a hint of green and a very muscular body.

  Not Hulk muscular, but a nicely toned body that looked to be from working rather than working out.

  Not that I didn’t think he did one over the other. He just didn’t look like he was the type of guy to go to the gym all the time.

  “So what do you do?” I asked curiously.

  “I’m a game warden…and a lumberjack,” he muttered, slurping up another forkful of chicken spaghetti.

  “A lumberjack?” I asked. “Is that even a real occupation anymore?”

  He turned to look at me.

  “Yes.”

  One word was all I received, and I knew better than to continue with that line of questioning.

  “I’m in school to become a paralegal,” I told him, sensing a change of subject was needed.

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “I heard.”

  “You did?” I asked in confusion. Had I already told him that?

  No.

  He nodded. “Your brother, Ridley, told me.”

  I blinked.

  Ridley didn’t often talk about me to other people.

  I was a very private person, but then again, having what I had, and experiencing what I did, there was a good reason for it.

  “Oh,” was the only thing I could think to say.

  “He said you hate doing it,” he commented.

  I snorted.

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  “Then why do you do it?”

  He was a persistent bastard.

  “Because I need the job…and the money,” I said, raising my brows at him.

  And it was hard to find a job that would work around my ailment.

  “What’s so bad about it?” He pushed his plate away from him.

  It was completely empty and looked almost as if he’d licked the damn thing.

  “You really wanna know?” I wondered.

  He nodded.

  “Well, my day started off a little like this: I walked into the building to hear a man say, ‘You’re always looking for a man to sweep you off your feet. Well, let me tell you something, woman!’” I imitated the way the man had sounded. “’Sweeping is your job!’”

  And that had been the turning point…the fork in the road, as one would say.

  “I knew, as soon as I heard the man say that, that it wasn’t going to be a good case. Then he’d gone and proved me right by continuing to verbally beat down his wife over and over again, forcing her to ag
ree to his edicts, all because he controlled the money and she didn’t,” I sighed, dropping my head into my hands. “I hate it. But I like it all at the same time. I like helping my clients win. I like my part in helping the kids get what they deserve.”

  Apple nodded.

  “I’m not a full time lumberjack,” he said finally, going back to our earlier topic. “But my dad’s business is his livelihood, and if I’m not there to do it, he can’t pay his bills.”

  That made more sense, and I now had a reason for him and his reluctance to speak more on the subject.

  He got up and grabbed himself a beer from the cooler, along with another drink for me.

  He handed them both to me as a commotion at the front of the room had me smiling as another member’s wife, Tasha, was giving her husband, Casten, the verbal smack down.

  She was a fireball, that was for sure.

  “Thank you,” I muttered, reaching for the bottle to twist the lid off.

  He took it back out of my hands and twisted the top of effortlessly before handing it back without another word.

  I thanked him again before taking another sip.

  I was going to regret drinking in the morning, without a doubt. But I couldn’t get my thoughts sorted out, and to do that, I needed to let go a little bit.

  “Are they fighting about goats?” He asked.

  I nodded. “She wants some, and he doesn’t.”

  “I can tell that,” he sipped his beer. “But don’t they live in the city.”

  I nodded. “She saw a video last week about a goat as a house pet. The owners even took them on walks and everything.”

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “I have goats.”

  “You do?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah, but they’re not pets.”

  I smiled, unable to help myself.

  Hearing that this big badass in his tight red t-shirt, faded blue jeans that had holes in both the knees, as well as where I guessed his keys were held in his pockets, with his tight leather vest had goats really made me want to laugh.

  He was the exact opposite of what I expected him to be when I walked into the clubhouse today.

  Fun, came to mind.

  I drank my lemonade, smiling from time to time when the man would have something funny to say.

  And when he asked me to help him start picking up the trash, I didn’t even hesitate. I just helped him.

  My brother gave me a weird look, but ultimately ignored me for the conversation he was having with a few men from the police department.