Free Shift (The Disciples' Daughters #2) by Drew Elyse Page A

ice, I was confronted with every man’s least favorite thing: pissed off female.
    “You’ve got a lot of nerve,” Cami snapped at me.
    Yeah, I was not in the mood for that shit. I didn’t want some woman I was getting it regularly from being snippy with me, I certainly wasn’t taking it from some chick whose pussy was firmly off limits.
    No fucking thank you.
    “Yeah, I do,” I said back, walking away while using a key from my pocket to pop the cap off the bottle in my hand.
    “How could you do that to her?” she said before I got more than a couple steps away.
    I tried to swallow it down. Out of respect for my brothers—both her dad and her new husband—I tried to hold it in, but I was done.
    “How could I do that to her ?” I returned. “How could I get some fucking pussy even though she’s around? Guess what? I’d gladly have not gotten that from anyone but her for fucking years. She’s the one who took off. She’s the one who left me here. She’s the one who kept that fucking little girl away when she might be my goddamn daughter!”
    “I know that,” Cami whispered.
    “Then what the fuck did I do that was so fucked?”
    She shook her head. “Did it have to be her? Of all the women in the world—hell, of all the women here tonight—did it have to be her?”
    “What are you talkin’ about, Cam?”
    A look of surprise passed over her face. “You don’t know. You didn’t remember her.”
    I waited for a second for some more explanation before I warned, “Cami.”
    “Did you get her name?”
    Valid question. “Veronica? Valerie? Something with a V?”
    Cami looked sad before she informed me, “Victoria.”
    Victoria?
    I turned it over in my head, trying to understand why that mattered.
    Victoria…
    “Tori,” Cami offered.
    Tori.
    Fuck.
    “No.”
    Cami nodded in a sad way that only confirmed what I was realizing.
    My head whipped around, searching the yard for Ash.
    “She left,” Cami informed me. “Right about the same moment you took the bitch inside.”
    Fuck.
    “She went home?”
    “Yeah. Ace drove her. She wasn’t good to drive herself.”
    I extended the open bottle her way with a jerk. “Take care of this?”
    The moment her hand wrapped around the beer, I started to move around her. Good fucking thing I’d only had two beers all day. I’d been preoccupied with Emmy.
    “Sketch,” Cami called.
    I stopped, but I wasn’t giving her long. I needed to get out of there.
    “I know you’re still pissed at her, but she’s hurting. Not just about Tori, about all of it. Go easy on her.”
    Anyone else would have gotten a “fuck off” and nothing more. Cami grew up with us. She knew as well as I did how sensitive Ash was, how easily she shut herself in.
    “She’s my girl, I won’t hurt her.”
    Without giving her a chance to respond to that, I hightailed it the fuck out of there. I blew out of the clubhouse lot on my bike, the memories from years ago reminding me just how much I messed up.

    Six months back, Gunner finally delivered on the promise he made me years ago. When I turned sixteen, if I kept my nose clean, he would move me out of the trailer with my fucked up parents to live with him. I kept up my end, and the day after my birthday, he kept his.
    Getting away from the two alcoholics who made me was good enough, but it also meant I had to change schools. I finished my sophomore year by driving over to my old high school, but transferred the start of junior year. For the first time, Ash and I were going to school together.
    I was fucking thrilled. Ash had been mine since we were kids, even if she didn’t realize it yet. She was a freshman now and two years ago, Indian told me she could date once she was in high school. I’d finally be able to make it real, and I could do it while walking the halls with her and keeping all the assholes after her at bay.
    Only, it wasn’t going that way. We didn’t have classes together since we were in different grades. I’d