PREGNANT AT THE ALTAR: Immortal Souls MC

by Claire St. Rose

  When I sat down on him, he groaned. Air rushed out of my lungs in a gasp at the same time. No matter how many times we did it, I didn’t think this was something I was going to get used to. I moved my hips forward and back, sliding him deeper into me. I lifted my hips and sat down on him again. He looked at me with drooped eyes and lips slightly parted, eyes sliding from my eyes to my mouth to my breasts and back up again.

  I stooped low on top of him until our lips met. My breasts pressed against his chest, and I moved on top of him so that my body moved all over his. It took concentration to keep it up, keep my hips in my place and my mouth locked on his, but somehow I managed.

  When I sat up again, I got down to business. I started moving my hips faster and faster. I was aware of my knees rubbing against the sheets in a friction that heated up but not enough to cause them to rub raw. Daniel’s hands were on my knees, the friction rubbing against the palms of his hands.

  My breasts jiggled and my hair swayed, and I looked him in the eyes as I rode him. This time it was not about me, but I orgasmed anyway. It built and built and suddenly it took over. It started at my core, as if Daniel’s cock was where it started, and it shattered through me so that I cried out and collapsed on his chest. I gasped and panted and moaned into his shoulder as it ripped through me.

  My orgasm set off Daniel’s, and he came inside of me with a groan and jerks and twitches underneath my thigh and inside of me. We came together, his arms wrapped around my shoulders, my hands gripping his arms as if I was hanging on for dear life.

  And then it was over, and it slowly started fading. I was the first to come out of it on the other end, and then Daniel was right there with me again, and we lay together in a tangle of damp sheets and limbs, breathing hard. This was about him. This was about me. This was about us, together, doing this thing.

  We were two people, equals, and I wanted him to know that even though the circumstances we were in wasn’t what I wanted for my life, it didn’t include him as a person.

  I wanted him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Emily

  Something about my relationship with Emily had changed. I didn’t know where it had happened, but it was between the sex in the shower and the sex in the bed. Both of them had been mind-blowing, but the one had been something like a starter course and the other had been a dessert. For the main dish? Hello, life-changing confessions.

  The bit in between was what really got me. Emily had somehow been more understanding than anyone who actually lived in my world could ever be. And she’d made me feel like no matter what happened, she wasn’t going to hold what I was involved in against me as a person. It was a sight more than the usual judgment I got from anyone, even the boys in my gang. We all accepted each other, and we didn’t judge because we were all caught up in the same shit. But Emily not judging me? It was a big deal because she was so solid on her straight and narrow.

  It was a nice feeling, knowing that I could change my circumstances if I really wanted to, because she would still be interested in me as a man. I could be a different person in the end, and she would still stick around because she wasn’t sticking around for the thrill of it. She was sticking around despite it.

  This was besides her abilities in bed. If I’d known she was that good, I would have let her take control a lot earlier than now. She’d loved me and kissed me and all that romantic shit that had just made me turn to mush on the inside, and then she’d gotten on me and fucked me like there was no tomorrow, and it had made me feel like a man…even though I’d broken open my emotional side. I never showed my emotional side to anyone because the boys would call me a pussy and Taylor wouldn’t understand. But Emily? Somehow she understood that even though there were two sides, it was still one coin.

  And the sex had been fucking fantastic. Then again, everything about her was. I was really starting to fall for this woman. That was saying something; I didn’t fall for anyone. It wasn’t safe for either of us, usually. Not for them, physically. Not for me, emotionally. But with Emily, it was different. Not only because she was a hell of a doctor and I didn’t doubt she could fix anything, even my banged up old heart, but because I believed that she could keep me from getting hurt. And I didn’t mean physically with blood and guts. I meant love and all that fuzzy shit.

  I was just hoping that whatever we were going to run into now that we were after Ruby wasn’t going to be so bad that she’d change her mind about me. That would totally suck, given how far I’ve come. Give how far we’d come.

  We got up at five thirty because Ruby hadn’t exactly given us a time and sunrise seemed like the thing to do. I didn’t want to keep her waiting. The longer she had to play, the more damage she could do, and she had Sarah. I didn’t know Sarah very well, and she didn’t mean very much to me, but she meant a lot to Emily. That meant that this whole thing meant a lot to me by default.

  I glanced over at Emily sitting in the passenger seat. She was sucking on her bottom lip, grating it between her teeth, looking out of the window. The sun had just started reaching over the horizon and the rays illuminated her face, lifting out the things that made her, her. Showing the signs that she wasn’t a hundred percent okay. She was a nervous wreck, and something told me that this was more than it seemed to her. A lot more. This had opened doors to a past I had the feeling she didn’t want to revisit.

  A past that I had yet to learn about. But it made sense. No one was as tough as she was without paying her dues.

  It killed me that it was because of me she was reliving whatever it was that was eating at her.

  I put my hand on her thigh, and a moment later, she glanced at me. A smile flitted over her face, lighting up her features, and it was genuine. It was beautiful. She was beautiful.

  “You doing okay?” I asked.

  She nodded. Then shrugged. “I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what we’re going to find.” The last bit—all the OD victims that hadn’t made it—went unsaid. They haunted me and I hadn’t even seen them. They’d died on her watch. In her arms. How much more were they haunting her?

  “It’s going to be fine,” I said. I sounded confident and calm, and Emily blew out a long breath as if she’d been holding it. I wished that I believed what I was saying. I wished that there was some sort of reassurance I could give her. The problem was that I didn’t know what to expect either, and I was scared, too. I was just very good at hiding it.

  Ruby was volatile as a person under normal circumstances. These were not normal circumstances. That woman had gone loco, and I didn’t know what we were going to walk into. This was why I’d told Taylor to go home and not be dumb and play hero. This was why I’d wanted Emily to stay out of it, too. I hadn’t been able to dissuade her. Maybe one day I would understand why.

  We arrived at the address Ruby had sent us from Sarah’s phone. The building seemed dead. This early, there was no one.

  “What is this place?” Emily asked, leaning forward so that she could look up at it.

  “It’s a mortuary,” I said. I recognized it now. I’d been here once before, even though I’d forgotten about it. It had been when Ruby had started her sideline job, working with the dead.

  How fitting it all seemed now.

  Emily looked grim. Ruby had been working the nightshift at the mortuary for a long time. It made sense. And the ingredients in her little mystery drug were from here, too, no doubt. The list of ingredients had bowled me over when I’d heard about them. It was the first time I’d really started thinking that Ruby was behind this all. I’d been shocked then; I shouldn’t have been.

  Anger bubbled under the surface—not enough to bring me close to exploding, but it was there. She’d caused us so many problems. Emily, Sarah, Taylor, and how many unknown people had she left for dead? And those were only the ones we knew of. How many other victims in other hospitals hadn’t made it? Unless she’s kept her victims around Emily’s hospital to make a point. I hoped that was the case…a lot less peopl
e had died then. It wasn’t the happiest of thoughts, but it helped.

  “Stay here,” I said. Emily glanced at me.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to check it out.”

  I expected an argument from her, something along the lines of last night’s argument, but she didn’t fight me on it. In fact, she looked relieved to stay behind. She was scared. I didn’t blame her. I was the big bad bounty hunter, and even I was just short of terrified.

  “I won’t be long, but I want you to lock the doors and stay safe, okay? And if anything goes wrong, you honk that horn, and I’ll come and get you.”

  She glanced at the horn and nodded. I wished I had some kind of weapon I could leave her with, but in the madness last night, I hadn’t thought about going home or to the club to grab a gun. Besides, leaving Emily with a weapon like that would be an excuse for someone to shoot at her. The moment you had a gun, there were people with itchy trigger fingers wanting to return a favor that hadn’t been offered yet.

  “Daniel,” she said when I started getting out. I looked at her.

  “Be careful.”

  I leaned toward her and kissed her on the mouth. Then I got out without saying anything more. I waited for her to lock the car and then walked slowly toward the building. I wished I had a gun on me. Sneaking up on a dark, ominous-looking building felt ridiculous without the weight of a gun in my hand.

  I knew the danger of guns though. If someone that wasn’t on your team saw you with one, you didn’t even have to fire it before getting fired at. This was safer. Did I really believe it? No, but I was trying very hard to convince myself that I wasn’t in too much danger.

  The building was old, like it had been here for a long time. The reddish brick that it was built of had faded so that it was a strange gray color and the lack of sunlight—it was blocked off by a clump of trees on the horizon—gave it a haunted feel. A haunted morgue. Perfect.

  The front doors weren’t glass—the way business buildings had them to invite visitors. I guessed that most of their so-called visitors were already dead. Ha. Ha. But surely they had live people coming in here, too? Instead of glass and a welcome mat, I was greeted by metal doors that looked like they belonged on a meat locker and no mat at all.

  I inspected the doors. I could knock like an idiot and hope someone would open, but then said person might have a gun and my rescue mission would be pointless. I glanced up and noticed a security camera. If someone was watching, they already knew I was here.

  I could kick the door down—hopefully—and make a hell of a lot of noise. If somebody hadn’t been watching, they would know I was there after that. Neither plan was very good, and I felt like an ass. I glanced over my shoulder at the car where Emily was sitting, watching me, and swallowed. If for nothing else than for her, I had to man up and look like I knew what I was doing. I took a deep breath and pushed the door, hoping for a miracle.

  And, whadaya know, it happened.

  The door swung open. It had never been shut properly.

  It was good for me, but it was a bad sign. I looked over my shoulder one more time, nodded at Emily, and took a deep breath before pushing it open. I popped my head around the doorjamb first. For all I knew, someone had opened it for me and was waiting on the other side with a gun.

  The place was dark and dusky, the weak sun failing to find its way into the one window that was behind what looked like a reception desk. I was in what looked like a waiting room, although I wasn’t sure what anyone would be waiting for. The chairs were all lined up against the wall. At the far end, a pair of feet stuck out from behind the chair, running shoes pointing toes down.

  Everything else was in order and it was quiet. Too quiet.

  I tiptoed toward the body, creeping slowly. Please be dead, please be dead, I thought, nervous that it was still some sort of trap. When I rounded the corner, the dark blond hair and the suede jacket had my heart beating in my throat.

  “Taylor!” I hissed, recognizing my little brother. Please don’t be dead, please don’t be dead, I reversed the mantra in my head. I crouched at his shoulders, scared to touch him. Something had hit him over the head. Hard. He had a welt just above his left temple and blood caked in his hair, running from a wound where the skin had split. It was a while ago because the blood had clotted already.

  I bent over and held my ear close to his nose. He was breathing.

  Relief made me numb, and I all but collapsed next to him, trying to swallow my heart back down. Shit. The second time I’d nearly lost him in how short a time?

  “Taylor?” I whispered, touching his shoulder. He groaned. He was more responsive than I’d dared to hope for.

  “It’s me, lil’ buddy,” I said, giving him the lightest shake. Taylor lifted his head slowly, and it took him a moment to focus. He pushed up slowly, looked like he was going to fall, and then kept going until he was sitting.

  “Daniel?” he asked when his eyes fell on me. He pulled a face and lifted his hand to his head. “My head is fucking killing me,” he groaned.

  “What happened?”

  “I got jumped from behind.”

  No shit. I was starting to really hate the lack of information from him.

  “Where did they get you?” I asked. I wanted to know who it was, when it was, and where it was, and I wanted to track the motherfucker down who thought it was funny to grab my brother off the streets. Taylor swallowed, still cradling his head, but he looked guilty. I knew that look. It was the look that followed a party he wasn’t allowed to, underage drinking when I’d lectured him about it, a failed report card. It was the look he’d had on his face since we were kids.

  “What did you do?” I asked. The sympathy in my voice was gone, replaced by what Taylor referred to as my dad-voice.

  “Don’t start with me, Daniel,” Taylor said, and I realized that the days of my ordering him around and being his father figure were over. I guess that parents everywhere get demoted to friendship only once their kids grew up, but this was weird. I’d been forced to raise him, and now he was forcing me out.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked again. I was starting to think he’d been dumb enough to come.

  “I had to come and get her, Daniel. She’s a woman, the first one I liked even just a little. And she was different, not like the girls we usually run into.”

  He was right about that. Sarah was the same kind of different for him as Emily was for me. But that didn’t change the fact that Taylor had gone against what I’d asked him to do and come here to rescue her.

  “Please tell me you had a plan, at least. Because you obviously had no backup and you had no weapon.”

  Taylor looked down at his hands and winced like even the small movements was too much. If he was walking out of this with just a concussion, he would be lucky. I hoped that it was nothing more serious.

  “I was just so mad that you kept on telling me what to do. I can handle myself, Daniel.”

  I looked at him and color drained out of his face. He looked down again.

  “At least, I thought I could.”

  I shook my head and got up. I held out a hand and helped Taylor to his feet. Thank God he could stand. He looked a little green in the face, no doubt in pain, but he didn’t need physical support. Small blessings.

  “You get outside,” I said to Taylor. “Emily is in the car. I’m going to look for Sarah.”

  “The hell you are. I’m coming with you.”

  “Do you honestly think now is the time to be an ass about this? Look at you, you’re covered in blood and you’ve been unconscious for God knows how long because you were stupid in the first place.”

  Taylor opened his mouth but then screaming cut him off. We both turned our heads and listened. It was muffled, but it was nearby.

  “Sarah,” we said at the same time.

  I took one step in the direction of the screaming when the car horn started honking outside. Not once, not twice, not even in rhythm, but long
and insistent. Like a cry for help.

  “Fuck,” I swore. “She’s in trouble.”

  I turned for the door. If we were going out there now, Taylor would be in trouble again. I looked at him. How was I going to keep him out of the way? By giving him exactly what he wanted.

  I picked up a chair and kicked the leg until it broke off. It was a crude club, awkward to hold with a splintered tip, but it would do. I handed it to Taylor.

  “Take this. Hit anyone that comes at you. Go and get Sarah out. I need to help Emily.”

  Taylor took the makeshift club and nodded. Determination was on his face and the combination with the blood made him look grim. I wouldn’t want to cross his path. I turned and ran for the door.