He reads every room he walks into. But she's the one hand he never saw coming.
Payout spent ten years reading cards and liars on the Deadwood casino strip — until he refused to run a crooked game and the house broke his face in an alley for it. Now he's the Deadwood Hangmen MC's enforcer, and the strip that pushed him out is the strip his club watches. The only clean thing left on it is a bar on Main Street and the copper-haired woman who pours there like she built the place with her bare hands.
Because she did.
Nadine Foss doesn't need a protector. She's run the Pickaxe Saloon for eight years — bought it, paid it off, and turned it into the one honest room on a dirty strip. Her staff gets a fair shake, her count stays clean, and she answers to no one. Especially not the dangerously quiet biker who drinks bourbon on her corner stool every night and watches her like she's the only lit window on a dark street.
Then a casino's silent partner decides her bar is the perfect front to launder his skim, and the suits stop asking and start threatening. Nadine can swing a bat and hold her ground, but she can't fight a crew with casino money and bought cops alone — and Payout isn't asking permission to protect what's on Hangmen ground.
She's not his to claim. She'll break a bottle over anyone who says different.
But the closer the danger drives them — into his compound, into his war, into the dark behind her own bar — the harder it gets to tell where her stubbornness ends and his claiming begins. Because Payout doesn't just want to save her saloon.
He wants her. All of her. And he's not the kind of man who bluffs.
PAYOUT'S RAGE is book 11 in the Deadwood Hangmen MC series. No cliffhanger. HEA guaranteed.
