Read Heart of Steel (Demon Riders MC Book 2) for Free Online

him alone in her bedroom for a morning, and he’d re-ordered the books in her shelves into genre and alphabetical order by author.  At the time she’d thought that it was sweet and thoughtful, looking back at it, with the full benefit of hindsight, she realized that it was just weird.
     
    “So you’re working at The Shop now?  I saw you there a few days ago.”  Elyse tilts her head, taking in Lance’s new threads.  He’s wearing ripped jeans and a black t-shirt, fitting in nicely with the other men in the bar. 
     
    “I saw you, too.”  Lance smiles at her in a way that makes her insides squirm and not in a good way.  “You were with Fletcher.”  He almost spits the words out, his gaze flicking towards the pool table where Elyse had last seen Dane.
     
    Elyse has experienced Lance’s jealousy before; she doesn’t have any intention of explaining herself to him.  They aren’t together anymore; it isn’t as if she owes him any kind of explanation about her relationship with Dane.  “I was a little surprised to see you there.  I didn’t know you knew anything about being a mechanic.  I thought all that manual labor stuff wasn’t really your bag.”
     
    Lance smiles at her in that indulgent way of his that makes her feel like a stupid little schoolgirl.  “Like I said, I’m not the same person I was before.  There are probably a lot of things you don’t know about me anymore.”  He shrugs enigmatically, and Elyse has to resist the urge to roll her eyes at him.  Lance has always had a flair for the dramatic, acting as if there is a camera filming him at all times.
     
    “Well, I can see there’s one thing that hasn’t changed.”  Elyse flicks her eyes towards the notes that sit by his right hand.  “You think you’re ever going to trade in your notebook for a laptop?  Or, in your opinion, is technology still the big bad that’s destroying the publishing world?”
     
    Lance shakes his head at her, looking at her patronizingly as if she couldn’t possibly understand what he’s no doubt about to explain to her.  If there was one thing that Lance enjoyed more than coming first, it was imparting wisdom to the less gifted.  “It’s not an opinion, Elyse. It’s a fact.”  He says this as if it were a universal truth.  “I know you mean well, but blogs like yours, online news feeds, all that stuff, they’re like a disease, eating at print.” 
     
    “Gee and I just thought that it was called progress.”  Elyse doesn’t make any effort to stop herself from rolling her eyes this time.   There was a time when she would have put up with Lance’s extreme views, thinking that he was an idealist. Now, she knows that he is just stuck in the past.  He doesn’t like change. Keeping everything the same, ordered, and in check, it is all part of his compulsive behavior.  When Elyse had suggested that perhaps he talk to a therapist about the root of his problems, Lance had gone postal.  She hadn’t brought it up again.
     
    “It’s not progress because technology is never going to win.  You can’t undo hundreds of years of paper, the Ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus, the Romans on tablets of stone.  What will our legacy be?”  Lance looks off into the distance, posturing just like he always does.  It was as if he were giving a speech to an imaginary rapt audience.
     
    Elyse was barely even listening.  It was a line of thought she’d heard before, any number of times from him.  Lance would constantly make fun of her blog or her posts on forums and websites.  He would tell her that it wasn’t real writing, because it only existed digitally and there was nothing tangible that you could hold in your hand.  At first his words had upset her, that perhaps he was right, later she had realized that he was just being cruel.
     
    “Elyse?”  Lance’s tone jerks her out of her thoughts, and she realizes he must have been speaking to her while she had zoned out.  “I