She Never Sat on His Bike

Rowan Caskey has kept the books for her father's welding shop since she was nineteen and kept herself for a man who left Corpus Christi nine years ago and never came back. When Case Delacourt rides in as the new president of the Gulf Coast Renegades, asking her to file the club's 990 forms, Roe says no. He waits her out anyway. Three months of tax paperwork and diner coffee later, Roe lets him upstairs and gives him the only thing she's saved for twenty-nine years. She wakes up happy. She wakes up again to a text blast sent to the entire Renegades chapter: Case in a Rockport motel room, shirt off, headboard. Roe files the 990, closes her laptop, and takes the bus to Austin to work for the state comptroller. Thirteen months later she's part of an investigation into the club's boat-yards — and Case walks into her office with an ATF badge number and a memo that explains everything. The motel room was an undercover meeting. The woman was an informant. And her own father asked Case to keep her out of the file. Roe is furious. She's also in love. She gives him a duplex, a cat, and a promise that she will never sit on the back of his motorcycle again — because she's buying her own.