“So you know what this is like?”

“The seventh ring of Hell?” When she laughed again, he twisted to the side and kissed her. “Wait, I know. You’re going to tell me this is like being on a beach. Without the sand. The ocean. The sun . . . okay, so this is not like being at Wianno.”

“This is having meatloaf for breakfast.”

Lane popped his brows. “Wow, and I thought my Cape Cod metaphor was a left fielder.”

“We’re accomplishing the same thing as being in bed, right? I mean our stomachs don’t recognize the difference between having meatloaf at seven in the morning or seven at night.”

“I think my brother Max would argue that depends on how much tequila you’ve had the evening before, but I’m kind of splitting hairs here.”

“You get my point, though. We’re off our feet, relaxed and pretty comfortable. Does it really matter that we’re out in the hall? I mean, who’s coming with a clipboard and a list to check off that we’re not in our room? Ohhhh, you get a demerit because—”

“Have I mentioned how much I love you lately?”

“I’m not sure. How about you tell me again—”

When the muffled sound of a ringing phone cut her off, Lizzie went quiet.

“Shit, that’s my cell.” Lane jumped to his feet. “Miss Aurora.”

Twenty minutes later, Lane squinted and leaned into the Rolls-Royce’s windshield as he pulled in to the White Snake’s parking lot.

Most of the vehicles in the bar’s spots were trucks, but there were a couple of motorcycles, and as he parked the Phantom between two Fords, he saw Max’s Harley right in front. Opening his door, Lane was about to get out when the bar’s entrance was thrown wide and three big-and-burly’s pulled a Richard Pford and stumbled onto the walkway. They noticed the Rolls immediately and started talking among themselves—like they were of half a mind to try to steal it.

Lane reached across to the glove compartment and took out the handgun kept in there.

When he stood up from behind the wheel, he tucked the weapon into the small of his back. Then he locked the Phantom, its Spirit of Ecstasy disappearing into the hood.

“That your car?” one of the three-hundred pounders asked him.

“Just an Uber.”

“What?”

As he brushed past them, they were sweating so much alcohol out of their pores, he nearly got a contact high. And fortunately for them, they let him go on about his business.

Inside, the White Snake was your standard-issue beer-bucket dive, the redneck hangout sporting Coors and Bud neon signs on its rough wood walls, and seventies-era carriage-house chairs around tables that looked like they had been rescued from the bottom of a bog. Given that it was two a.m., there were only fifteen people in the place, but they were hardies who had been drinking since happy hour at five—in other words, they appeared to be only two functioning brain cells away from a coma.

Unfortunately for the clientele’s livers, the bartender, who was like a bearded Jabba the Hutt, was still throwing the hooch behind a beat-up stretch of countertop, his meaty hands refreshing those pitchers with pulls of golden-bodied, white-froth-topped domestics.

Yup, this was definitely a fuck-craft-beers establishment. And as the piped-in music registered, Lane thought of The Blues Brothers movie, where the woman in the honky-tonk bar says of its music, “We got both kinds. We got Country and Western.”

Looking through the dim, smoke-filled air, it was clear that the no-smoking laws were being ignored—either that, or someone had spontaneously combusted thanks to the hot wings.

Where the hell was he, Lane thought. That SOB was—

In the back corner, an argument exploded between two men, the pair of them standing up and knocking their chairs over, a woman leaping out of the way—and yet somehow being quick thinking enough to take the beer pitcher with her.

But at least it wasn’t Max: Neither of them had a beard.

Lane walked through the place, trying to be discreet. Except no one paid him any mind, and he didn’t find his brother.

Heading back over to the bartender, he had to wait as a couple of Coors were drained from the tap and handed off to a pair of women who stared at Lane like they were hoping to be chosen for a school kickball team.

He ignored them and nodded at Jabba. “I’m here for my brother.”

“Do I look like I know you or your kin?”

“He’s tall, bearded, tattooed?” Yeah, like that cut through the other candidates. “And he rides a Harley.”

Annnnd that was going to help, too. Although in Lane’s defense, it was two o’clock in the goddamn morning, and he wasn’t thinking much more clearly than anyone else in the joint.

“Check in the back if you don’t see ’im.” The bartender nodded his head to the side. “Go past the bathrooms and down that hall.”

“Thank you.”

Lane walked all the way to the rear and proceeded past the women’s room, which had a broken sign, and the men’s room, which had a broken door, to a barely lit storage area so choked with crap, it could have been on episode of Hoarders.

He was about to take his brother’s name and give it an f-bomb workout when he heard the moan.

From behind the stacks of extra chairs and tables.

Following the sound, Lane looked around the barrier of cheap wood and chipped varnish—

—and got a gander at his brother braced like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, arms out and feet spread, with a woman on her knees in front of him.

“Christ, Max, what are you doing?”

His brother snapped his lolling head up. “Oh, hey, Lane.”

Like they’d unexpectedly met in the middle of a shopping mall or something.

The blond just continued working on things, her halter top and blue jeans covering at least some of what would have gotten her arrested—although this lewd sex act in a public place could well have led to handcuffs, clothes or no clothes.

Please let him not have paid for this, Lane thought.

“Come on,” he muttered as he turned away, “let’s go.”

“I won’t be long.”

“What the hell, Max!” Lane went back around to the far side of the tables and chairs—because there was no way he was having a conversation with the guy while watching all that. “You called me to come get you.”

“I’m drunk.”

“No shit—”

A man with a handlebar mustache, arms like an ape, and faded military tattoos came tooling into the storage area like he’d been told someone had said something bad about his momma in this land of discarded junk.

“Reggie! Where you at, Reggie!”

Oh, dear God, please let that blond’s name be Agnes. Colleen. Callahan—anything but Reggie.

“I know you back here, girl.” The guy stopped short as he noticed Lane. “Hey, you seen a blond—”

Reggie came out from behind the tables and chairs, making like she hadn’t just been doing anything even remotely blow-ish or job’y. “Baby, I was just—”

Naturally, Max emerged zipping up his fly.

Holy. Jealous. Former. Marine.

Reggie’s BF, or whoever he was to her, went for Max like the dumbass was an intruder in a private home, but Max was ready for it. As fists flew, big bodies slammed into things, toppling stacks of furniture, knocking over empty kegs and crates of glasses, crushing debris on the floor.

Lane had to admit that the two of them were far better at the fighting than he and Richard had been. These guys were professionals, not amateurs, and Reggie—just like the woman who had deftly saved a pitcher out in the bar proper—knew exactly where to stand so she avoided the churning men. She even took a cell phone out of her back pocket, turned the camera on herself, and checked her lipstick.

I don’t have time for this, Lane thought.

Just as the boyfriend slammed Max back into a door, Lane took the gun out of his waistband and went across to the altercation.

Placing the muzzle at the boyfriend’s temple, he said, “Let him go. Right now.”

And didn’t that put everything on a freeze frame.