Blacklisted (Loveless, Texas #3) - Jay Crownover Page 0,75

in Loveless and wanted to come back home.”

He hadn’t told me he was sick and living on borrowed time. He also hadn’t told me he was leaving me the ranch in his will. What he had told me was that being a Son, and the son of one of the founding members of the Sons of Sorrow, meant I was never going to be able to walk away from my legacy. I hated the way my father lived, but I didn’t hate being part of a club and having a group of men who I knew would unquestionably have my back. He left instructions to set up my own chapter and coolly reminded me that when my dad was gone, I would be up for the vote to sit at the head of the table for the entire club.

“When he passed away I got the ranch and all the property. I was out of the military by then and had no intention of going back to Denver, so really Loveless was the only place I had to go.”

Top didn’t have a home to return to, either, and by then I’d been collecting misfits and outcasts who didn’t fit into any mold or box. We weren’t meant to fit in. We were made to stand out. I was a pro at being blacklisted by polite society.

She gave me a crooked grin. “It’s weird that in a town called Loveless, people seem to be tripping over the people they’re meant to spend the rest of their lives with. When I first heard the name of the town, I expected something very different.”

Honestly, so had I.

I hadn’t expected to find a place that finally felt like home. I hadn’t expected to find a place and people I was eager to return to whenever I left. I hadn’t expected to find friends like Kody, and enemies I respected the hell out of like Case. And I definitely hadn’t expected to find a woman who was going to make me realize that while I might live in a place called Loveless, I didn’t actually have to live a life that was loveless.

Chapter 16

Presley

I was exhausted.

My hiatus from work was the longest period of time I’d gone without being in the trenches. While I hadn’t left under the best of circumstances, the break ended up being a nice way to hit the reset button. I loved my job. I believed it was important. But I had a tendency to forget how much it could take out of me emotionally. Working with the dead didn’t have the same kind of pressures that came with trying to heal and save the living, but there were unique drawbacks and downfalls when you worked in a morgue that somehow had slipped my mind while I was dealing with the rest of my life crumbling around me.

Before my mother had passed away, it was a welcome distraction to be caught up in other people’s worst-case scenarios. What I dealt with at my job was a good reminder to be thankful for what I had, for every single moment I still had my mother around. When I left work for the day before my hiatus, I’d always had something dealing with my mother waiting for me, so it was easier to flip the switch from professional to personal mode. Now that she was gone, I was finding it difficult to drop the harsh realities of my career at the door. Even with all the crazy currently going on in my life, some things lingered and affected me long after the case I was working on was closed.

One of the big things that I’d forgotten about my job was the strong smell of disinfectants and chemicals, as well as other things no one wanted to think about, that seemed to cling to me no matter how hard I scrubbed after a shift. It probably wasn’t noticeable to anyone not familiar with what a morgue smelled like, but to me, it was overpowering and felt like it was embedded in my skin and wrapped around each of my hair follicles. I usually showered once before I left work, and then again as soon as I got home. Shot complained about the janky shower in my apartment every time he stayed the night, and I was starting to agree with him that when I found a new house, I needed to look into building some kind of luxurious master bath. It’d be nice to have