After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  I swallowed my laughter as the blush in her cheeks travelled down her neck into the slice of skin revealed by her blouse just over her breasts.

  The female student made a noise of distress in her throat and turned big eyes to Cress. “Is he really your boyfriend, Professor Irons?”

  I wanted to tell her no. Cressida was not my “girlfriend”. What a fuckin’ paltry term for what she was to me. Our relationship felt as elemental to me as Adam and Eve’s. As if we were born of each other and meant for each other. As if there was no other choice in the world as inevitable as our decision to be together.

  I wanted her to be my wife as well as my life because then maybe people would have a better chance at fathoming the depth of my feelings for my woman, but I couldn’t do that.

  Not now.

  Not when I was prospectin’ for The Fallen and shit with the Venturas was so bad, I was thinkin’ we’d be mountin’ a full-scale gang war against them sometime soon. Not when Staff Sergeant Danner was makin’ it his mission to take down my father by any means necessary. Even if those means weren’t so legal.

  How could I ask the best woman I knew to put herself in the line of fire just so I could have the male satisfaction of seein’ my ring on her finger?

  The only reason I’d waited so long was to give her time to know her new self, the one born of our love that she’d been hidin’ inside herself like a second soul for so many years. Wasn’t fair to my girl to make her mine before she’d even really had a chance to be hers.

  So I didn’t like Cress bein’ my “girlfriend” or this kid callin’ her Professor Irons instead of Professor Garro, but I could live with the bad taste in my mouth so long as she was safe.

  “Yes, unfortunately sometimes, this bossy boy is mine,” she said with a frown that she undercut with twitchin’ lips. “I’ll be in my office next week if you need any help then, Mary. Okay?”

  Mary nodded her head, shot me a quick look accompanied by a fierce blush, then hustled up the stairs and outta the room.

  “Having fun?” she asked me with a cocked brow and a hip at the same time, sass personified.

  I smirked at her. “Always, with you.”

  She shook her head at the ceiling. “How am I supposed to be irritated with you when you’re always romantic as hell?”

  “Is hell romantic?” I asked, leanin’ forward to tag her hand and pull her between my legs so I could fit my hands around her waist.

  “For the morbid and the literary.”

  “Dante might argue that.” I ran my nose down the line of her open shirt so I could smell her warm apple scent. “Not sure he found anything romantic in the circles of hell.”

  She shrugged, but a hand found the back of my head and began to comb through my curls. “I think anyone who’s read the Inferno or Purgatory would disagree even with the author himself. An adventure to the bowels of hell is not without its magic and beauty. And isn’t that what romance is?”

  “You tell me.” I softly bit the top inner crest of her breast and looked up at her with my cheek to her chest.

  “That’s what you make me feel,” she whispered as she tipped her head down to feather her lips and her words against my forehead like fairy dust. “Magical and beautiful.”

  “You are,” I agreed easily as I let one hand wander down her outer thigh, then back up under the hem of her tweed skirt so I could feel the texture of her thigh-high stocking give away to silky bare skin just before I reached the satin of her panty-covered sex. I traced my index finger along the edge of the fabric and ran my thumb over her clit. “Show you just how much magic and beauty we can make, babe.”

  She softened slowly, melted warmly like butter poolin’ in my palm, but her low-lidded eyes darted toward the door at the top of the stairs. “King…” she breathed, but it wasn’t a true protest.

  My girl liked the risk, the tang of danger that resonated metallic as blood on the back of the tongue.

  I planted my palm on her belly and pushed her backward until her ass hit the desk, then farther until her hips canted and my momentum pushed her on top of the wood. I swallowed her gasp and ate at her sweet mouth until that lost breath turned into a deep moan.

  My cock throbbed harder and harder as she sank deeper into her desire for me. I loved the evolution of this classy, educated woman into a sensual wanton who came alive just for me.

  Nothin’ else made me feel worthier of my namesake.

  More like a fuckin’ king.

  I slid my fingers under the crotch of those panties, felt her wet against the back of my knuckles, and ripped. The fabric gave way, and I wasted no time in slottin’ my hot cock against her openin’. I sank my other hand into the thick hair at the back of her head and tugged so that her mouth bloomed open for me, pantin’ and wet, and her gaze clingin’ to mine.

  “You’re mine,” I told her. “And I can take you wherever I want, can’t I, babe?”

  She blinked slowly, lids tremblin’ and heavy. “Yes.”

  I nudged the head of my cock between her silky folds. “I can take you hard.”

  “Yes,” she hissed.

  “Fast.”

  “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “I can take you anytime, anyplace, any way I want,” I growled and then shoved my cock to the hilt in her wet embrace.

  Her head tipped back on a low moan, and I pressed my teeth to her flutterin’ pulse to feel it race under my tongue as I ground even deeper into her.

  As I started to pump my hips against her, holdin’ her so close to me there was no space between our bodies, I pulled back to say against her mouth, “You love the idea of being found because you want people to know that you’re mine and mine alone.”

  “And you’re mine,” she said fiercely, bitin’ into my lower lip and fistin’ a hand in the back of my shirt to draw me even closer. “Your cock, your beautiful body, your heart, and your soul.”

  “Fuck yeah,” I groaned as she moved her mouth across my stubbled jaw and down my neck to suck at my skin.

  Four years with this woman, and I still couldn’t get enough, be deep enough, or love hard enough to satiate my fuckin’ burnin’ need for her. She rippled around me, and her breath stuttered as she started to fall apart around my cock.

  “That’s it, babe. Come all over me.”

  And she did, as if my words were the key to unlock her pleasure. She shuddered in my arms as I plunged harder into her clutchin’ heat, chasin’ my pleasure and heightenin’ her climax.

  My balls were heavy, and the base of my spine tightened as I thought about comin’ inside her bare. As I wished for the hundredth time that I could plant my seed inside her and create life with our love.

  The thought blazed a flamin’ trail down my back and exploded in my groin. I groaned into her mouth as I spilled inside her, and she took my cock, my tongue, my cum eagerly, as though she couldn’t get enough.

  After, our damp foreheads pressed together and our pantin’ breaths slowin’ between our relaxed mouths, I wrapped my hand around her slender neck just to feel her pulse return to normal.

  “Love you,” I told her because I liked to tell her in moments like this that didn’t matter so much and also in moments that did.

  Straight up liked to tell my girl I loved her because life had taught me not to take a fuckin’ thing for granted.

  Speakin’ of… “Gotta get to the compound, babe. Shit’s hit the fan, and that’s why I came to getcha.”

  Her sigh fanned over my face, but when I pulled back to look at her, it was to see her eyes alight with fire. “Of course, it has. Well, whatever it is, we’ll be ready for it.”

  “That’s my babe.” I cupped the back of her neck with my hand and planted a hard kiss on her mouth. “Let’s do it.”

  King

  * * *

  The compound had been my home since I was old enough to cogitate. Knew every inch of the asphalt, the number of bricks that made up the clubhouse, and how many tools we kept in the garage. Lost my virginity in
one of the older brother’s rooms at twelve to a biker bitch ten years older and drank my first pint in the bar with the club like I was of age and not even old enough to drive.

  The club was my home, but I’d grown up thinkin’ it wouldn’t be my life.

  For all the things I loved about the life, I also hated a fuck ton too.

  Most of all, it was the thing that had taken my dad from me too young. Imprisoned for killin’ the son of a bitch who shot through a little girl to get at him, he’d been absent from my life and my little sister, Harleigh Rose’s, for way too fuckin’ long.

  I watched him now, quiet as he sat in church, the room we held club meetings in, his big head propped on a fist, the other hand scratchin’ absently at his beard. There was somethin’ in his face I didn’t like, somethin’ like a warnin’.

  “Gonna stand there all day lookin’ pretty, or are you gonna get your ass in here?” he growled without movin’ his stare from the middle of the table where The Fallen MC insignia was burned into the wood.

  “Gonna sit there all day getting’ older than you already are while we got real problems to address?” I countered, but I pushed off the doorframe with my hip and strolled over to him.

  I waited a beat, towerin’ over him but not by much because my dad was a big motherfucker even seated, and then finally pulled out the chair to his right and sat down.

  “Learnin’ new tricks of intimidation?” Zeus drawled. “’S cute, King.”

  “And your broodin’ is so swoony. Want me to call up Lou and get her in here to properly appreciate it?”

  “Enough,” he said, finally anglin’ his body to face me, a smile in his beard.

  I grinned back at him as we clasped hands and tugged each other in for a hug and a slap on the back.

  “How’d I raise two mouthy kids?” he muttered, but it wasn’t a condemnation.

  His twitchin’ mouth made it a compliment.

  “Pretty sure snark is the Garro family language. Now stop beatin’ ’round the bush. Have you heard from Harleigh Rose?”

  The humour tamped out of his face like a snuffed candle. “Says she ‘needs space’ as if that wasn’t the whole fuckin’ reason she got into this mess in the first fuckin’ place.”

  The brother in me agreed with him. My little sister had been abused by her boyfriend without our knowledge for the past couple’a years, and because she lived down in Vancouver, it was all too easy for her to hide it from us. Still, guilt burned in my gut like an unbanked fire because I was just that kinda man. The kinda man who needed to take care of his loved ones, and when they hurt, it fuckin’ killed me that I couldn’t save them from that pain.

  And there was no denyin’ H.R. was in pain. She’d been forced to kill the sack of rancid shit who had no right to call himself a man after he’d sexually and physically assaulted her two months ago, and now she was like a ghost livin’ among ghosts.

  She didn’t want help. Even when we’d forced her back to Entrance in the aftermath so Cress and Dad’s wife, Loulou, could comfort her and the club could protect her, she’d been an unreachable island.

  It was rough for men who were used to control, to gettin' their way and enforcin’ their protection, to have one of their women refuse to let them do as their hearts and instincts demanded.

  So as a brother and a man, I was bitter with frustration and unrealized revenge, angry with her for scornin’ our care.

  But as the kind of human I’d been born, one with a heart that sometimes felt too acutely and understood others too emotionally, fuck me if I didn’t understand it.

  Since we were kids born into a home with a shit mum and a dad who went to prison, Harleigh Rose had always been my responsibility. Maybe that was why I got that she needed space in order to process before she could come to us. She needed space to find her strength again because she wouldn’t be weak for anyone, not even herself.

  I got it.

  I didn’t like it, but I respected the hell outta it because no one was stronger than that girl, except for maybe Dad’s girl, or mine.

  “She’ll come back,” I told Zeus. “In the meantime, got anything you wanna share with me?”

  There was an edge to my question, but it was justified. I’d been prospectin’ for The Fallen MC for months now, and Zeus still told me dick all about the issues plaguin’ the club. Technically, I got it. Prospects were kept in the dark until they had an opportunity to earn their patch. But I wasn’t just any prospect. I was born King, raised to be king by the current fuckin’ king of our club.

  If there was any time for fuckin’ nepotism, it was now.

  But Zeus wouldn’t crack, and my patience was wearin’ really fuckin’ thin.

  He stared at me for a moment, somethin’ workin’ behind his silver eyes. “You and Ransom got that custom job for that Lombardi actor needs doin’. He’s comin’ for it in a month, and you’ve got a fuckuva lotta work to do.”

  “Don’t be a dick.” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms, facin’ off with the devil. “I want in on real shit. Why’d you think I joined up after so many fuckin’ years? To wear grease on my jeans and a cool patch on my back? I’m not some newbie that needs vettin’ here, Dad. I’m the fuckin’ son you raised for this shit.”

  “And who says I’m done raisin’ ya?” he countered. “You think you’re ready for the kinda pressure I get every fuckin’ day as prez? Let me tell you somethin’, King, you could be born with a crown on your head, raised every fuckin’ day on the kinda shit you need to know about power and keepin’ it, and you still wouldn’t know shit all about the mantle passed to your shoulders. Heavy is the fuckin’ head that wears the crown, even if it’s made of grease, leather, and iron.”

  “Maybe I’d be better prepared if you actually discussed shit with me as it went down? You want me to be like Harry Truman when he took over from FDR? He didn’t know fuck all about the atomic bomb, and then he was being told to drop it on a goddamn city. You want that kinda devastation in your wake?”

  “Seein’ as we don’t got a fuckin’ bomb in our backlot, I’m thinkin’ you’re bein’ overly dramatic. Told you all those books would go to your head.”

  “Yeah, well, they did. I graduated from one’a the top universities in this country with an honours degree in business. At least let me put it to good use. I’m wastin’ away in the garage every day.”

  The fact that I loved having my hands on an engine meant dick all if I couldn’t expend my brain too.

  “Don’t plan on goin’ anywhere for a long time, boy. Got two more kids on the way and a young wife. Trust me, I’m here to stay.”

  “Trust me,” I urged him, leaning forward to bare my teeth at him in a way he would understand. Sometimes, we were less men than wolves in a pack; the young males always testing and trying to outdo the alpha. “You never know what could happen. Don’t want to spend a single day on this earth without ya, old man. You’re my dad, my Prez, and my goddamn hero. But life happens, and we sure as hell know by now that sometimes it happens bad.”

  Unconsciously, Zeus rubbed at the spot on his chest where a bullet had once ripped through a little girl and into him. Years later, that little girl was his wife. If anyone could understand fate and its convolutions, it was him.

  Yet his eyes hardened as they focused on me, and his mouth went tight. “Listen to me. You got a good woman, a woman who’s been waitin’ for you to pop the motherfuckin’ question. If you can tell me why you’re hesitatin’ on that when you haven’t paused even once in your life for anythin’ you wanted, and you want Cress more than any’a that, then you got me. I’ll bring you into the fold in a serious way. And don’t get me wrong, I’ll be happy to do it.”

  There was a trap there, lyin’ poorly hidden in the grass. He’d landed on the one reason he could’ve used against me in this argument.

  Because the reason I wasn’t married to the love of my fuckin’ life yet was a direct result of my participation in the club. Oh, Cress had encouraged me to do wh
atever the fuck I wanted to do. Not because she didn’t care, but because she did. A woman like her, that class and calibre, never would’ve thought she’d end up hitched to a man with a bike and an ironclad association with a criminal outfit. But there she was, and even though she said she loved it and me, a part of me hated that I’d brought all that she was into the shadows.

  So I waited. What I was waitin’ for exactly, I wasn’t sure. Maybe some idea of what my role would be in the club, and how much danger she would be in as a direct correlation of my position.

  I’d spent the past three years watchin’ first Lou and then Harleigh Rose bein’ targeted because of their association with Zeus, and after what Cress had been through already––nails hammered through her palms, abducted and tortured because of me––I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if somethin’ else happened to her because of the club, because of me.

  I looked at the skull and wings burned into the table, drew my thumb over the rough edge of a tattered angel’s wing, and tried to figure out how to outwit Zeus.

  “Thought so,” he finally said into my silence, but he didn’t sound triumphant. Only sad. “You think I’m bein’ a dick, and I can live with it if it means you got time to figure things out in a way you can live with. Can’t keep your woman and this world separate, son. When you figure out how to reconcile that, I’ll be happy as fuck to swear you in real-like, you hear me?”

  Even if I didn’t know him enough to read between the lines, I’d know it was the end of the conversation. Dad had a way of doin’ that, leavin’ things open-ended on the surface so you didn’t feel he’d actually turned you away when he had.

  I blew a deep breath outta my mouth and ran agitated fingers through my hair. “You think Cress has noticed?”

  “Think you got yourself a damn smart woman, so my guess? Hell yeah. Know she’s also a good woman, which is why she hasn’t read you the riot act yet.”

  My lips twitched even though I was irritated. Thoughts of Cress did that to me. “Not so far behind as you think. Started designin’ the ring six months ago.”