Boots

She poured every dime and double shift into saving that bar. He'll bleed on her floor before he lets anyone take it.

Carmen Vega bought the failing corner tavern on Tulsa's alignment with a decade of saved tips and built it back into the block's front room — the place the shift workers unwind, the widowers eat dinner, and the whole strip comes to shoot pool and forget the week. When a smiling loan shark decides her packed, cash-heavy bar is the perfect house for his biggest game, she throws him out three times and means it.

She doesn't need a prospect with cowboy boots and a hero complex. But he won't leave the barstool.

Boots — a tongue-tied farm kid turned Renegade prospect — has been nursing beers at the end of Carmen's bar for weeks, drawn back every night by the tall, unhurried woman who runs the whole rowdy room with a look and a rag. When a collector puts a hand on her across the bar, the prospect who never learned to quit plants himself between Carmen and the threat and won't move until the man is down.

Carmen has rules. She's always had rules. This is her bar, her block, her fight — and if the big stubborn younger man wants to stand beside her, he stands where she tells him. She'll feed his brothers, read his club the shape of the enemy's whole operation, and choose the life on her own terms, but she won't be sheltered like a stray — not by the shark, and not by the man who's claiming her one possessive touch at a time.

As the body count climbs and Sonny Riggs sends his worst onto the strip, Boots and Carmen discover that the most dangerous thing on the Mother Road isn't the man trying to take her bar. It's what happens when a woman who answers to no one meets a man who'll never stop showing up.

Book 15 in the Mother Road Renegades MC series. Guaranteed HEA. No cliffhangers. No cheating.