Loving The Enemy's Biker

"Your father was killed by the Copperheads, Georgie. Everybody in this county knows it."

Georgia Pryor has heard her uncle say it for ten winters, and for ten winters she has believed him.

Her father, Sheriff Ed Pryor, went off the river road at the Narrows on a wet night and died in the ditch below the curve. The county blamed the Copperhead Riders, the motorcycle club that lives in the old feed mill on the ridge. A copper snake patch was found in the mud beside his car. Ed's brother Glen pinned on the star the next morning and swore he would never rest.

Georgia runs Pryor Towing now, her grandfather's old yard by the bridge. She hauls the wrecks, writes every one in the green logbooks, and keeps away from men in leather vests.

Then on a rainy night at the same curve, she finds a Copperhead in the same ditch.

Wyatt Maddox, the club's road captain, was run off the road by a white truck that never stopped. Georgia should leave him for her uncle's deputies. Instead she kneels in the mud and keeps him breathing until the ambulance comes.

When she tows his wrecked bike home, she finds white paint on it and a high scrape, the kind a push bar leaves.

In the oldest green logbook, in her old driver Hap's handwriting, the entry for her father's car says the same thing. White paint. High scrape like a push bar. No snake.

Wyatt wants his bike back. Georgia wants answers. So the sheriff's daughter makes a deal with the enemy's biker: she keeps the bike, and he tells her what the club knows about the night her father died, one piece at a time.

What he doesn't tell her is that he was there.

Ten winters ago Wyatt came home early from a ride and found Ed Pryor's car in the ditch. He made the anonymous call. He held the sheriff's hand until the sirens came, and he heard his last words. Before morning Glen Pryor had locked him in a cell and told him exactly what would happen to his mother's club if he ever said a word.

Now his mother, Delia, the club's president, is dying, and she wants one thing before she goes: the Copperhead name cleared.

The closer Georgia gets to the truth, the more Cutter's Ferry turns on her. Her office burns. Her old driver disappears. Her own town calls her the club's girl. And every road keeps leading back to the one man who raised her when her father was gone.

To find out who really killed her father, Georgia will have to trust the man she was raised to hate and face the man she was raised to love.

On the first frosty night of the year, she goes back to the Narrows to hear her uncle say it.

This time, she won't be the one left in the ditch.