Shaft's Sacrifice

He's slow to speak, steady as stone, and when he puts himself between her and danger, he doesn't move.

Shaft has been the Deadwood Hangmen MC's enforcer for years — quiet, patient, and lethal when the job requires it. He doesn't rattle, doesn't rush, and doesn't let anyone close. The only thing that's cracked his iron composure is a baker who works before dawn and told a protection racket to go to hell with flour on her hands and steel in her spine.

Tessa Bowen doesn't need saving. She built her bakery from nothing — ten years of four a.m. starts, a loan she's almost paid off, and her name on the awning in letters she painted herself. She feeds half the restaurants on Main Street and asks nothing from anyone. When two collectors show up at her delivery door with a number and a threat, she sends them away with a smile that's all sugar and a spine that's all steel.

Then the racket sends men who don't smile back, and the only other person awake on a dark Deadwood strip is a shaved-headed biker who steps out of the shadows and says one word: Don't.

She didn't ask for a protector. He didn't ask for permission.

But the deeper the danger pulls them — into his club, into his war, into each other — the harder it gets to pretend that the man standing in her alley at three-forty every morning is just keeping her safe. Because Shaft doesn't just want to stop the men who are coming for her bakery.

He wants her. The flour on her hands, the fire in her voice, and every four a.m. morning for the rest of his life.

SHAFT'S SACRFICE is book 8 in the Deadwood Hangmen MC Series. No cliffhanger. HEA guaranteed.