She's the heart of a hundred miles of highway. He's the man who decided that highway is his to protect.
Grade is the Deadwood Hangmen's enforcer — blunt, slow to warm, and built like the heavy equipment he used to run. He stops at a roadside diner on Highway 85 because the coffee's strong and the woman who pours it doesn't flinch at the cut on his back. He doesn't plan on staying. Then he watches two men lean on her at her own register, and something in his chest locks into place and doesn't let go.
Carol Lindqvist has run her diner for twelve years. She owns the building, the lot, and every mile of reputation it took to make her stop the busiest on the corridor. She answers to no one — especially not the dangerously quiet biker who plants himself at her counter and starts calling her highway his road.
Then a drug operation decides her lot is the perfect transfer point, and when she refuses to play, they start taking her corridor apart — burning trucks, threatening haulers, buying the law. Carol can map every move they make from behind her register, but she can't stop a crew alone — and Grade isn't asking permission to stand between her and what's coming.
She's not a stop to protect. She'll make damn sure he knows it.
But the deeper the war pushes them together — into his compound, into his arms, into a fight neither of them can walk away from — the harder it gets to tell where her backbone ends and his claiming begins. Because Grade doesn't just want to save her diner.
He wants her. All of her. And he's not leaving that counter.
GRADE'S RECKONING is book 12 in the Deadwood Hangmen MC Series. No cliffhanger. HEA guaranteed.
