Two Princes
by Victoria Danann
Sanctuary Sons MC #1
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Two brothers, one a player, one a playboy, are on a collision course with destiny and a woman who thought she won a prize when she was allowed a look inside the Sons of Sanctuary MC.
Brigid Roan is a graduate student at the University of Texas. She had no trouble getting her thesis approved, but finding a Hill Country motorcycle club willing to give her access to their lifestyle was looking impossible. Then she got a lead. A friend of a friend had a cousin with family ties to The Sons of Sanctuary.
What Brigid wanted was information to prove a proposition. The last thing she had in mind was falling for one of the members of the club. Especially since she was a feminist academic out to prove that motorcycle clubs are organized according to the same structure as primitive tribal society.
Brash Fornight was standing in line at the H.E.B. Market when his world tipped on its axis. While waiting his turn to check out, his gaze had wandered to the magazine display and settled on the new issue of “NOW”. The image on the cover, although GQ’d up in an insanely urbane way, was… him.
After reading the article, Brash threw some stuff in a duffle and left his only home, a room at The Sons of Sanctuary clubhouse, with a vague explanation about needing a couple of days away. He left his truck at the Austin airport and caught a plane for New York, on a mission to find a mysterious guy walking around with his face.
EXCERPT:
“Sir?” Brash Fornight gradually became
aware that someone behind him in the grocery checkout line was trying to get
his attention. “Sir?” He refocused and glanced behind him. The woman leaning on
a cart overflowing with chip bags and cookie boxes nodded toward the cashier indicating
that it was his turn to move forward. Brash looked her in the eye and had to
give her props. Most people wouldn’t have the balls to try to herd a guy
wearing Sons of Sanctuary MC leather.
The club employed a woman who cooked and
did grocery shopping several times a week as part of her job description, but
Brash didn’t like to explain his relentless craving for peanuts and he liked
being teased about it even less. He didn’t know whether it was the Vitamin B or
the fat or just because he liked the taste, but he couldn’t imagine going a day
without them.
That’s how he came to be standing statue
still in the grocery checkout line, being prompted by some woman with more
nerve than sense. While he was waiting, his eyes drifted over the magazine
display and settled on the cover of “NOW”, on the Most Eligible Bachelor
edition no less. The debonair figure staring back was wearing Brash’s own face
and body. He looked different with short hair and a four thousand dollar suit
with the shirt fashionably open at the neckline, but the similarity was
inescapable.
On impulse he grabbed the magazine and
tossed it onto the conveyor belt with his week’s stash of peanuts.
He stuffed the bags into the saddlebags of
his bike and roared toward home, nervously tapping his fingers on handlebars at
red lights, riding on shoulders to keep from slowing down. He was anxious to
get to the privacy of his own room and read about Branach St. Germaine.
Two beers, one jar of peanuts, and one
“NOW” article later, Brash was sitting on the edge of his bed looking at the
wall, seeing nothing but his own heavy thoughts. He pulled out his phone,
looked up a website, and waited on hold for ten minutes to hear the time of the
next flight from Austin to New York.
There was a flight to Newark in a little
over three hours. He looked at his watch and calculated the time it would take
to drive from Dripping Springs at that time of day. As he booked the flight, he
stood up, walked to the small closet, grabbed a duffel bag, and began shoving stuff
into it. Ten minutes later, he closed his door and locked it, threw the duffel
over his shoulder, and headed straight for the office downstairs. He dropped
the duffel on the hallway floor beside the closed door and knocked.
“Yeah?” Brash looked inside, glad that his
dad was by himself, and stepped in. “What’s up?”
“I’m takin’ personal time, Pop. Gonna be
gone for a couple of days.”
“What the hell is ‘personal time’?”
The gruffness made Brash smile. “It means
I’m not gonna be here if you call and I’m not tellin’ you why.”
The Sons of Sanctuary President looked up
at Brash, over the top of his readers, and narrowed his eyes. “You got a
secret?”
“Everybody’s got secrets.”
Brandon Fornight studied his son for a
minute. “True enough. Is it the kind of secret that could affect this club?”
Brash shook his head. “Don’t see how.”
“Well, then. See you… When did you say
you’d be back?”
“I didn’t.”
“Bein’ purposefully vague, are you?”
Brash grinned. “That’s why they call it
personal time. But I expect to be back Friday.”
“You gonna have your phone with you?” When
Brash nodded, Bran looked back down at his ledger in a deliberately dismissive
gesture. “Well, get outta here then.”
Brash parked his bike in the airplane
hangar. The structure had already been on the property when the club had bought
it and turned it into a compound twenty years earlier. They used part of it for
vehicle maintenance and repair and part for parking.
Some of the guys who were working looked
over and shot curious glances his way when Brash threw his duffel into his
pickup and started it up, but it wasn’t their way to ask questions. The Sons
figured that if somebody wanted you to know something, they’d tell you.
Brash took a cab to a midtown hotel,
wondering all the way why human beings would choose to live in such a place. As
he slid his credit card across the hotel counter to the agent on duty, he
glanced at the name, Brandon Fornight. It seemed unlikely that it was a
coincidence that that the mysterious look-alike’s first name began with the
same four letters. He ordered room service and pulled out his laptop.
Getting intel on the guy didn’t take
advanced ops. Within an hour Brash knew where Brannach St. Germaine worked,
what kind of car he drove, what kind of women he dated, who his tailor was, and
where he liked to dine. There was no shortage of photos online, but the one
that grabbed his attention wasn’t one of the many with starlets or debutantes
on his arm. It was the one taken with his arm around his mother as they were
arriving together for some red carpet fundraiser. Brash had an almost
irresistible compulsion to reach up and touch her face on the screen in front
of him.
The knock on the door signaled that room
service had arrived. It cost a fortune, but looked and tasted like shit. So he
closed the computer and went out for a walk to clear his head and find
something edible.
~~
Also look for A Season in Gemini, Sons
of Sanctuary MC series, Intro – in the Summer Fire anthology,
available everywhere.
About Victoria Danann
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