Contents

  Title

  Rights

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Also by Jessica Gadziala

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Stalk Her!

  DONOVAN

  Golden Glades Henchmen MC #6

  —

  Jessica Gadziala

  Copyright © 2023 Jessica Gadziala

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author's intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.

  "This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental."

  Cover image credit: South_Agency / Getty Images

  “None of this book was written using A.I. tools. Each word was crafted with human hands.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Donovan

  “What’s everyone looking at?” I asked, walking down into the kitchen to find Cato, Levee, and Alaric looking down at something on someone’s laptop while Eddie was at the stove, as usual.

  Everyone was ignoring Mackie, the blue and gold macaw, as he climbed down his cage, and started eating someone’s cereal they’d left on the table, the multicolored rings getting soggy in the milk.

  “The kids finally made it on the site,” Eddie declared, waving a spatula toward the guys while standing there in his Kiss the… apron that featured a prominent rooster under the words.

  “What site?” I asked, snatching the bowl away from the bird, not wanting a lecture from Remy if he somehow found out that he was eating junk food again. Levee had gotten never-ending shit from Remy when he heard that the bird had gotten into a bag of Doritos.

  “Fuck you, Benny,” Mackie grumbled at me—his personal catchphrase—but set his sights on the grapes at the center of the table instead. I wasn’t risking a finger to try to take those away from him.

  “That fan page website,” Eddie said, chest a little puffed because he’d been on that site for over a year. Despite not actually being a member of the club.

  “Yeah? What’d they say about you?” I asked.

  The entry about me was kind of sparse, without any of the gushing I’d seen for some of the other guys. The woman had just stated my general appearance, my penchant for dressing up compared to the others, and my history with setting up street races.

  “Just general descriptions,” Eddie told me. “No gushing.”

  “She must not have met us yet,” Levee decided. “I mean, she gushes about Eddie who isn’t even a member.”

  “Hey, I have many admirable attributes,” Eddie said, smirking, enjoying the fuck out of his apparent superiority on this matter. “The honeys, they love a man who can cook. I would teach you how, but then that would just look like you’re trying to get that fan page updated.”

  “Christ. She’s still updating that thing?” Huck asked, coming in from the front of the house, shaking his head.

  “Not often,” Alaric said. “The girls would have told us sooner if she had updated.”

  “I should probably have Teddy have his lawyers lean on her to take it down completely,” Huck said, looking over at the stove to see what Eddie was whipping up.

  “She’s not giving out anything that a random chick coming to a party likely wouldn’t know,” Alaric reasoned.

  “True,” Huck said, shrugging. “But if anything goes up on there that is giving too much away, I want to know about it,” he said, getting a nod.

  I doubted Levee or Cato would say shit even if they were giving out drop schedules unless or until the woman updated it with some gushing on their sections of the site.

  “Where you headed?” Huck asked, inclining his chin to me as I grabbed my keys off of their hook by the door.

  “Just a ride,” I told him.

  Things had been quiet around the club. I would never say “too quiet,” because that shit was just inviting trouble, but quiet enough that I was going a little stir crazy just hanging around the clubhouse all the time.

  Huck gave me a nod, getting it. I heard him head out on his bike some nights too when he needed to clear his head.

  “We’re having some people over later,” Levee told me as I opened the door.

  “You always do,” I agreed, nodding.

  It wasn’t that I begrudged them their partying ways. They were young. It was expected.

  It was that I was… less young. As much as I hated to admit it, I was getting to that place where the music was too loud and I found myself wanting to head to bed instead of drink and find a skirt to chase.

  At least, I didn’t want that every night. It still had some appeal.

  But it was Tuesday, for fuck’s sake.

  I wanted a drive, some of whatever Eddie was cooking, then some sleep.

  Christ.

  Add in “do a little Sudoku” and “have a cup of Sleepytime tea” and I was my grandfather.

  On that depressing thought, I moved down the driveway toward my bike.

  I had to admit, the bike took some getting used to. Like Che and Eddie, I’d grown up in the street racing world. We’d always been obsessed with our cars. And all the ways we could fix them up, make them run real sweet.

  But when that career path no longer served me, and it was time to pick something else, a biker just made a certain sort of sense for me.

  So I had to almost learn how to enjoy the bike.

  In the past, taking a drive meant rolling the windows down, finding the right mood playlist, and blasting it for hours until my mind was clear, and everything suddenly felt right in the world.

  I still did that on occasion.

  For nostalgia purposes.

  But I’d started to appreciate a ride on a bike.

  There was something just as comforting and familiar in the slightly cool metal of the handlebars and the space provided by the open sides.

  There was no music, but the rumble of the bike had become something almost meditative for me.

  It was a moonless night, the only light on the backroads coming from the stars and my headlights that illuminated just a few feet in front of me.

  There was freedom in the way the wind whipped past me, chillier than the stagnant air, cooling me off even in the hottest part of summer.

  As I leaned into the curves of the roadway, a little spike of adrenaline rushed through me, chasing away all those old thoughts and attitudes that had been clinging to me for days.

  It wasn’t long before my shoulders felt looser.

  But I kept going, wanting to chase just a little more peace before I went back to the clubhouse and whatever crazy the guys had going on over there.

  I had to say I questioned Huck’s choice to move the club out of Miami where it had originated. That was where all the action was.

  And, from experience, it was easier to blend into a crowd there if shit was going down than it was in the more rural area of Golden Glades he’d settled on.

  He’d always insisted that the reason rural was an advantage over a city was that you always saw someone coming.

  If there were a shitton of food and road traffic in front of your clubhouse, it was impossible to tell where a threat might be coming from.

  And, when it came to going for a ride, yeah, it was definitely superior to live in the middle of nowhere.

  I’d passed a total of three cars on the backroads before I finally decided it was probably smart to head back home. At least show my face for a couple of minutes at the party.

  If there was one thing I’d learned after living at a clubhouse full of guys, it was that they would always find shit to rib you about. Like being old and boring and going to bed instead of having at least one drink at a raging house party.

  Should it matter?

  No.

  I was a grown-ass man.

  But sometimes it was just easier to give them fifteen minutes of your time to avoid a week of smartass comments.

  It was something like living with a bunch of younger siblings in that way.

  And since I’d had a pain in the ass younger brother growing up, I’d long ago learned how to handle this type of shit.

  The only ones who got to avoid the parties completely were the guys who got shacked up and had kids.

  But I didn’t see that shit happening for me. If it hadn’t happened yet, I doubted it would.

  The thing was, I’d never been avoiding it, either. I hadn’t really been the manwhore that guys like Remy or Alaric have been. Sure, I liked the company of women. Who didn’t? But I’d always thought I’d find someone.

  That someone just… never crossed my path.

  An
d, it seemed, the window was starting to close. I mean, sure, men could technically have kids up until the day they kicked the bucket, but I figured not many women were going to want to start a family with a guy who might be in his mid-fifties—or later if kids didn’t happen right away—when the kid graduated high school.

  I had the club kids to kinda fill that void, though. I hadn’t really expected that when I’d join up. How much of a family aspect there would be to the club. And not just the “brotherhood,” but the girls and the kids.

  Holidays and birthdays and even just random cookouts were always wild and loud and bursting with energy and love.

  It was nice.

  My family had been small.

  It wasn’t a bad thing. Just different. I hadn’t known what a big family could bring to my life until I had one through the club.

  Women who checked in on me when I was sick. My brothers who had my back, no matter what. The kids to watch open Christmas presents, or toss a ball around with. Hell, even the animals that provided love and amusement.

  Just the kind of shit that had been missing. Shit I would have continued to miss if I never got myself a woman or kids.

  That was the kind of shit my mind was on when I was about halfway back to the clubhouse, driving through a backroad that maybe only had four houses total that I’d seen, all of them set back from the street, half-hidden by giant tulip trees and long-limbed oak trees draped in Spanish moss.

  Quiet. Peaceful.

  The kind of place I could see myself settling into one day. When the club life no longer suited me.

  I was so distracted by those thoughts that I didn’t really register the car that came up behind me.

  It wasn’t until I heard it rev that something in my gut tightened.

  There was plenty of room to go around me.

  There was no reason to come up on my ass and rev your engine.

  Unless…

  Before the thought could even fully form in my head, I felt the air change, sensed the impact just a split second before the car rammed the back of my bike, sending it shooting forward, going end-over-end, as I was flung through the night sky, weightless for a long, horrifying moment.

  And then, the inevitable impact.

  I’d never been in a bike wreck before.

  Sure, I’d totaled more than a few cars in my day, but there’d always been at least a small sense of safety. Airbags, seatbelts, shit that kept you from shooting through windshields and skidding across the pavement.

  There were no protections on a bike. Save for the helmet.

  But that did nothing to stop the impact, the crunch, the way my body felt flayed as the road burned across my exposed skin, ripping my clothes, and doing more damage beneath.

  Pain seared through every inch of my body, stealing my breath, my thoughts. I couldn’t focus on anything for what felt like hours.

  But it may only have been seconds.

  Because then I heard it.

  More revving.

  My gut twisted as I tried to push up, to move, but my body just refused to do anything at all.

  This was it.

  This was how I was going to die.

  On some backroad, run over like a stray dog.

  I couldn’t seem to do anything but brace for more impact, more pain, and then, maybe, nothing at all.

  But then I heard something else. Something other than the revving. And the harsh hissing of my own breath.

  Screaming.

  There was someone screaming.

  No.

  Two someones.

  Female someones.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maeve

  “I feel like my life isn’t enough like a soap opera,” Triss declared as she fell—quite dramatically—and, yes, very much like a soap opera heroine, over the arm of the couch, her delicate arm draped over her forehead.

  Triss always had a flair for the dramatic. It was probably what I loved most about her.

  She was all the things that I wasn’t. Extroverted, confident, boisterous, and, yes, dramatic.

  “I mean, it has been a full three days since something exciting has happened in my life. Three days! Can you believe it?” she asked, turning her head to pin me with her bright, sky-blue eyes.

  “I cannot,” I confirmed. It was hard for exciting things not to happen to Triss. I couldn’t tell if she was just a magnet, and all of that was simply attracted to her, or if she was just crazy and willing to put herself out there and, as such, exciting things were a part of her daily life.

  The most exciting thing that had happened to me all summer was that I’d won a free smoothie bowl at the shop near my house. And, honestly, I still wasn’t completely convinced that the employees hadn’t rigged that contest just to give me a free one since I was in there so much.

  “We are too young and too goddamned beautiful to not have mafia men killing people over us,” she decided with a long-suffering sigh.

  “I really think Gram did you a disservice letting you watch General Hospital with her all the time,” I declared, shaking my head.

  “Or did she do me the greatest service of all?” Triss shot back, folding up on the floral sofa, her long blonde hair falling picture-perfect around her pretty, heart-shaped face.

  “How’s that?” I asked, reminding myself for the billionth time that it was wrong to be envious of all of her pretty.

  “Well, I will never settle for anything less than life-shattering, soul-crushing, can’t-breathe-without-you love, for one.”

  “I think that is the textbook definition of toxic, Triss,” I said.

  “Uhm, puh-please, Miss Maeve. Like Gram wasn’t always passing you all her bodice-rippers. And you weren’t swooning over all the gallant knights and bosom-heaving damsels in distress.”

  Okay.

  She had me there.

  While Gram and Triss watched their soaps, I read my Gram’s romance novels.

  And did I maybe want to live in those worlds? Where the bad guys were horribly scarred, so you knew them when you met them, and the good men were strong, yet gentle, and the sweet, soft, shy women were the heroines that had everyone swooning?

  Yes, I mean… of course.

  It wasn’t long, though, before I realized that, in the real world, shy, sweet, soft women were typically overlooked and forgotten. And brassy, ballsy, confident women like Triss got all the attention.

  So, yeah, I liked my books.

  I liked them enough that I was trying to write my own.

  You know… for the past five years.

  I wasn’t suffering from writer’s block. Just absolutely debilitating Imposter Syndrome.

  So I start, I get going, I get insecure, then I start over again.

  Shower, rinse, repeat.

  I was starting to worry it was never going to happen.

  Triss would sometimes declare that my problem was that I needed more “inspiration.” By that, she didn’t mean taking a trip to see new sights, hear new sounds, or anything like that. She meant I needed to get laid.

  Objectively, she was probably right. But I just wasn’t interested.

  I kind of liked my life just the way it was.

  Safe.

  Quiet.

  Except, of course, for Triss.

  “We should go out,” she decided.

  “It’s almost midnight on a Tuesday,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah, but you don’t have to get up at any particular hour. You’ll be up writing until almost morning anyway. And I’m practically nocturnal.”

  That was true.

  We were both lucky enough not to have to keep any particular hours.

  Triss was a social media manager. Which was a fancy way of saying she worked for herself, doing all of four hours of work a day for her dozens of clients, and raked in almost eighty grand to do it.

  My job was a bit more of a mish-mash of little writing gigs that I could piece together from listings I found online.

  With a bit of hustle, I could bring in forty thousand a year. But I admittedly didn’t hustle as much as I could.

  I wasn’t lazy, per se.

  I was just unsure of myself, and struggled with reaching out to potential clients sometimes.

  That said, I didn’t need to make the kind of money Triss did.