been bad enough he was uncertain if he was going to be able to save me once he got me into our rough but effective operating room. According to Top and a few of the other members, Kody’s newfound half sister refused to leave, even though it would have been in her best interest. She scrubbed in and assisted Stitch until everyone was mostly certain I would pull through. She’d broken any number of laws in the process and now the club, and I, owed her more than we would ever be able to repay.
I hated it.
The feeling of being in debt to her, the anticipation of waiting for her to call in her favor, grated on my nerves and made me twitchy and uncomfortable every single day. I wanted the slate cleaned…now. I was going out of my mind waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Considering I literally owed the woman my life, I’d done what any reasonable person would do and had dug up every single thing I could find on her. There wasn’t a ton of information on the medical examiner, and what I did find was pretty basic and tedious, right up until her path crossed with the Lawtons. The Lawton family was infamous around this small town in central Texas. The patriarch had left a legacy of corruption and crime, all while wearing a badge and pretending to serve and protect. Not too long ago it was revealed that Conrad Lawton had been a philanderer, on top of his other misdeeds, when it came out that he was being blackmailed by his mistress to keep their daughter’s existence quiet. After the mistress passed away, her daughter—who turned out to be Dr. Baskin—found out about her father, the blackmail, and the fact that she suddenly had a whole new family living a few miles away in Loveless.
Presley Baskin’s life had been boring, boring, and more boring up until a few months ago. Now she was all tangled up with the Lawtons’ constant chaos, and doing her best to hide out from a killer. The same killer who’d tried to run Kody down, and who had burned the Lawtons’ family home to the ground. The same killer who had once been Presley’s one and only friend. I’d heard about how scary the woman after Presley was from Kody, and through the gossip circulating around town. In fact, it was all anyone was talking about for a while. Considering she had all of that going on, I expected her to put her favor to good use anytime now, but she’d yet to reach out to the club. We’d heard nothing from her since the night she saved my life, and I was getting impatient.
“Are you sure this isn’t considered stalking?” Top’s sarcastic statement was issued with a slow southern drawl.
We’d been sitting on our motorcycles outside of Presley’s apartment since the sun went down. The apartment complex was fairly small, and the parking lot remained mostly empty. It was quiet and dull, so the irritation threaded throughout that drawl was hard to miss.
I cut a look at my VP and shrugged. “I consider it recon.”
Top—or Simon Riggs, as he’d been known before starting up the Texas branch of the SoS alongside me—had been my right-hand man, my ride-or-die, and my second-in-command since our military days. We’d done our initial training together at Parris Island and had had each other’s backs ever since.
“Consider it whatever you want. Lurking outside of a woman’s home is still a little bit creepy and totally out of character for you.” A Low Country native, his drawl was slower and deeper than the melodic Texan twang we were typically surrounded by. His voice often sounded soft, which was a total contradiction to the man himself. Top was ruthless. The line between right and wrong tended to be very blurry where my VP was concerned, which made him a perfect balance to me and my typically black-and-white way of thinking. He could see the gray in dicey situations when I was color blind.
He also knew me better than anyone else. So when he said it was out of character for me to be keeping tabs on the lady doctor who saved my life, he was absolutely right. I had enough on my plate, including tracking down the angry redneck who’d filled me full of holes in retaliation for taking his older brother out. There was no way I or the club could let the ambush