Viper's Strike

Mae Brossard keeps sixty hives on forty acres of Assumption Parish dirt her grandmother left her. She works it alone — extracts, bottles, and delivers premium honey to half the restaurants on the river, her grandmother's name on every jar. Then a meth crew sets up on the property line, and the chemical drift starts killing her bees by the thousands. When she drives over and tells them they'll pay for it, they burn her honey shed to the ground.

She's already tried talking. She's already tried a rifle by the door. When the polite options run out, Mae doesn't run.

She calls in something worse than the men who came for her.

Venom is the friendliest brother in the Bourbon Street Devils — a sunburned farm boy with an easy smile, the one who shows up early and hauls the ugly jobs without complaint. Nobody suspects that under the good-neighbor manners lives the most dangerous man in the club, or that a parish council erased three generations of his family's land with a single vote and left him carrying four years of patient fury with nowhere to put it.

Then a beekeeper's forty acres land in his territory, and the fury finally has a direction.

Perry Doucet wants Mae's land for the bayou access. Venom wants the woman who tends it. And when the Doucets poison what she can't replace and stack the empty cans on her grandmother's grave, the friendliest Devil in New Orleans stops smiling — and the parish that's feared one name for seventy years learns what happens when the farm boy's fury comes from a direction nobody watched.

He claims his ground with blood and a farmer's patience. She claims hers with bare hands and ten thousand stings that never made her flinch. Together they're about to teach a third-generation bully that the men who take land from working people always underestimate what the working people have left.

Book 14 in the Bourbon Street Devils MC Romance series. HEA guaranteed.