Who Do You Love (Rock Royalty Book 7) by Christie Ridgway Read Free Book Online Page B

blame the kid for assuming he was a hangaround, too, because he didn’t wear a leather vest that either proclaimed him a full-patch member or identified him as prospective candidate just waiting for the word before taking his ink and his place in the club.
    “Been a while,” he said.
    His grandfather, Black Irish Rooney, had started the MC after returning from World War II. Years later, after his grandfather had retired, his son, the younger Irish, had come home from fighting in the first Gulf War and taken over the reins of the club. However, the Rooney Unruly Assassins’ dynasty was going to die with Eamon’s dad.
    “You still here?” a gruff voice asked.
    Eamon turned his head to take in the new arrival, a rangy man in his fifties with gray hair that hung to his shoulders, brushing the black leather of his vest. His mustache was bushy and accentuated his right gold incisor. The original tooth had been lost in a fight with a member of the Savage Sons when Eamon was a baby. The Son had lost an ear and the vision in one eye.
    “Even the six-year-olds are still bellying up to the buffet table, Irish,” Eamon said to his father. “You’re not kicking me out already?”
    “You know you’re welcome,” Irish mumbled, then brought his beer to his mouth as if that might cover the lie.
    “Thanks, Dad,” Eamon said, then felt Smitty’s stare on him. He turned his head. “Smitty, my man, you’ve met the Unrulies’ prez, right? My dad, Irish?”
    The kid nodded, yet still looked flummoxed. Apparently so green that he didn’t know the Unruly Assassins’ number one rule—that Eamon Rooney was never to be offered a real place in the only family he’d ever known.
    So, even though he’d come tonight to forget by being close to near and dear, he still stood, as always, a man apart.
    “Good thing I’m two-fisting it.” A new person strode up to join their conversation, and he pushed a full cup of beer into Eamon’s hand. “You look cheery,” Spence Sadler told Eamon, “not.” Then he turned to the older man. “How goes it, Irish?”
    His father smiled, looking relieved to have a buffer between himself and his son. Or between himself and the guilt his son represented. Eamon was never sure.
    “Goin’ well, Spence.” Then he glanced at the hangaround. “You come with me, kid. Get you some food. Find some of the members.”
    The ones who really belonged to the club , Eamon finished silently for him as Smitty stood and followed Irish toward the grills. Then he looked to his best friend and business partner. They’d lived next door to each other in college and roomed together in law school. Gone into a partnership in a firm that had taken on a different shape when Eamon had discovered he was as ill-suited to the formal aspects of the practice of law as the Beast was to Beauty’s drawing rooms and dining tables.
    Now Spence handled the legal proceedings while Eamon focused mostly on the investigative side—background checks and hunting down some witnesses and following others to find their weaknesses. If their firm needed to talk to the cops in Fayetteville about a new client’s former arrest, Eamon got on the plane. If another client needed a character witness in the sentencing phase, Eamon was dispatched to Bakersfield or Buffalo or the Bellagio to see if an old teacher or a former wife or a slots-playing granny might help the jury or judge better understand the true nature of the guilty party.
    Theirs was a criminal defense operation.
    Spence turned his head, as if noting Eamon’s study of him. “What?”
    “I thought you had a date tonight. The production assistant for the legal procedural?”
    His partner quaffed some of his beer. “I think she was only interested in my mind.”
    Eamon snorted. Spence was his bookend in size, but with golden hair, genial brown eyes, and dimples when he smiled. Which he did. Often. While Eamon was regularly labeled intense, Spence was considered much more laid