Two Princes
by Victoria Danann
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.
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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