by Megan Crane
“There doesn’t have to be a chain around my dick for me to notice the fact our president hasn’t been around much lately. And with all the usual bullshit going on, that can’t be a good thing.” Greeley eyed his VP. “He got some fancy new pussy stashed away somewhere? That’s not his style but you tell me that’s what’s happening, brother, I’ll believe you.”
Roscoe shook his head, a little harder this time. “It’s not my fucking business what he’s doing. Not sure why you think it’s yours.”
What he didn’t say, Greeley noted, was that Digger had indeed found a spectacular piece of civilian ass, worth holing up somewhere to indulge himself in the taste—far away from his old lady’s various spies here in Lagrange, where everybody knew everybody else’s business, and somewhere outside the clubhouse so he could keep his new toy away from his greedy brothers.
What he didn’t say was a lot.
“There’s going to come a time we can’t avoid this conversation,” Greeley pointed out quietly, more to his beer than his brother. “You know it.”
“Not tonight.” Roscoe slid him an unreadable look, then shifted his gaze back to the room. “You want to get into it before there’s some reason to get into it, bring it to the table.”
Greeley wasn’t going to do that and he was pretty sure Roscoe knew it. He didn’t want to step to his president with a few weird feelings and nothing else to go on. He was loyal as fuck or he wouldn’t be here, rocking the sergeant at arms patch. What he wanted—what he always wanted and always would—was to protect the club. He was still hoping he didn’t have to choose between the two.
Roscoe slammed the rest of his beer, then tossed the can over his shoulder, smirking slightly when it hit Drop down at the other end.
“Thank you, sir,” the prospect said.
“Don’t fucking call me sir,” Roscoe growled, sounding like he was about to commit murder.
Drop gulped. “Sorry, s—Roscoe.”
Greeley bit back his grin. Roscoe rubbed his hands over his face, then focused on Marla and her little dance for a moment, all that metal gleaming.
“I think my dick is getting hard again.” He slid a look at Greeley. “Which is the point of a party. You know you think too much, brother. Let it go.”
Greeley shrugged. It wasn’t the first time he’d been accused of thinking too much. It wouldn’t be the last. And in the meantime, his thinking too much always seemed to benefit the club, one way or another. Though it wasn’t so great for anyone around him being an asshole, it was true. Go figure.
“I can’t tell what that means,” he said, not exactly working overtime to keep his irritation out of his voice. “You in the dark on this? Or are you neck deep in whatever the hell is going on and don’t want to be straight about that?”
“It means I have shit to do, first up being that little redhead who’s been eye fucking me since I walked over here,” Roscoe said in his usual easy manner, no hint of the tension he’d been stiff with a few moments ago.
He straightened from the bar, but then he didn’t move away. Greeley’s neck itched again, the longer Roscoe stood there, like he was fighting with himself. A moment passed. Then another, and his VP was still standing there, scowling out at the party instead of joining it.
“Dick not hard anymore?” Greeley smirked. “I hear that happens after a certain age. Condolences.”
But Roscoe didn’t laugh and tell him to go fuck himself, which was telling in itself.
“I’m not going to talk shit like a little bitch.” Roscoe’s voice was gruff. “But I thought he’d be here.”
That, Greeley thought as his VP walked away to go handle the redhead, was not good.
None of this was good. Digger wasn’t just the club president, he was an institution. He’d held the club together for decades. He was one of the original Devil’s Keepers from the North Dakota mother charter—one of the few old men still riding strong. Greeley didn’t want to think about the kind of shit storm that was coming if Digger had decided to go ahead and stick his head up his ass after all this time. The man was in his early sixties. He didn’t have much time left at the head of the table. Was this really how he wanted to go out?
Greeley was going to have to think about how to handle this. He had his suspicions about what was going on, each and every possibility bad fucking news on top of more of the same. Roscoe not being in on it meant Digger was out there on his own doing God only knew what. Also not good, given their president was as well known for his volcanic temper as he was for his tendency to use his fists first and any nod toward diplomacy second, if at all. That was why he’d picked a deceptively charming bastard like Roscoe as his VP. Digger out causing trouble was a problem, with the Black Dogs always circling and the usual cartel bullshit making everyone jumpy as fuck.
Greeley snapped himself out of his unpleasant thoughts when one of the more seasoned prospects walked in from outside, dressed to ride and making no move to shift into the party instead. His head moved around like he was looking for someone until his gaze landed on Greeley. He lifted his chin. Greeley did the same, then made his way over to the door, skirting the edges of a little party Uptown—deceptively pretty for a stone cold bastard—was throwing with a sorority girl on his face and a biker groupie on his dick.
“Thought you were taking it easy tonight ahead of that bullshit up in Shreveport,” Greeley said when he reached the prospect, giving the man a complicated handshake, complete with a bump of shoulders. A few brothers and a couple of the prospects were heading up to Shreveport for the weekend to put in an appearance at a party at the Devil’s Keepers charter up there, mostly to keep General, the Shreveport president, from getting his panties in a twist about the disrespect he claimed he was always feeling from Lagrange.
Trying to keep panties from twisting unnecessarily, it turned out, was a key part of Greeley’s role in the club these days. Something he sometimes wished had been explained to him ahead of his accepting the sergeant at arms patch. But there was no whining about it now.
Pony stepped back and straightened his shoulders. He was tall like Greeley, and still held himself like the Marine he’d been a few years ago, despite the Devil’s Keepers cut he wore now with its PROSPECT rocker on the back.
“I was heading home after a couple at Dumb Gator’s,” he said. “Saw some headlights out behind Doc’s house.”
Nothing changed. The party was the same. The music was still playing too loud, just the way it should, not that anything blocked out Waco when he got going or the way his piece of ass was squealing while she came. If something went silent, it was in him, except that was impossible.
Greeley told himself the only reason he was interested in Pony’s news was because the house was empty and headlights could mean squatters or meth heads—likely both. Doc Broussard’s place had been under club protection for years now. The doctor had been cold as fuck and no one you’d want to have a beer with, but he’d taken bullets out of brothers without blinking—or calling the cops—for as long as anyone could remember.
He didn’t think about the old man’s only daughter because that shit was history and Greeley wasn’t a punk bitch anymore. That had died the day he’d asked her stay and she’d left him anyway. Fuck that.
“I circled back on foot,” Pony was saying. He kept his gaze on Greeley’s, expressionless. “Some bitch was holed up in there. Looked like she was making herself at home.”
“There are a lot of bitches in St. Germain Parish,” Greeley growled at him. “This one look familiar?”
He thought there was a flicker of something in the other man’s gaze then, gone almost before Greeley even saw it. Because of course Pony knew the story. He hadn’t been around the club when that shit went down, but that didn’t matter. Bikers loved nothing more than talking shit. They were basically twelve-year-old girls with too many guns and bad fucking attitudes.
“Kind of tall, skinny, but a great rack,” Pony said, as if he was listing the attributes of a stripper
he was considering paying for a little personal time after hours.
But his gaze stayed steady on Greeley, and Greeley sucked up the dangerous thing in him that didn’t want to think of her that way—or let anyone else, even a prospective brother, talk about her that way. If it was her at all. Besides, even if it was, who was to say she wasn’t a stripper after all this time? What the fuck did he know? It wasn’t his business and lord knew she wasn’t his.
She hadn’t wanted to be his.
“Decent ass. Dark hair, blue eyes. Kind of hot, but you know.” Pony shrugged. “She looked pissed.”
That could be anyone, of course. It could be some brand-new junkie bitch like all the other junkie bitches who thought they could do their thing in Lagrange despite the club’s zero tolerance policy for that shit within the town limits. It could be some random relative of Doc Broussard’s from down near Bayou Cane, where they said the man was originally from, come up to deal with the shit he’d left behind.
But Greeley knew, somehow, that it was Merritt. He knew it.
Every damned muscle in his body tensed.
“I got this,” he told Pony, and if it cost him something to sound that unbothered he’d die before he’d admit it. Even to himself. He nodded toward the party. “Get in on some sorority girl action if you got your second wind. Not untapped at this point, I grant you, but decent.”
“Appreciate it,” Pony muttered, already eyeing the talent, now that Waco was done and his dirty little sorority girl was dancing around on top of the pool table in nothing but a flimsy little miniskirt tugged up to show most of her ass cheeks and a hint of the pussy he’d just reamed.
Same old shit.
Greeley left the clubhouse then, pushing his way out into the spring night. He nodded at the prospects sitting out there in the dark, tasked with keeping an eye on all the bikes and the long, flat approach road that hugged the encroaching edge of the bayou and was impossible for anyone to sneak down without being seen. He’d sat in that exact same spot himself, back in the day, staring at that bayou road wishing some asshole with a death wish would come roaring his way to relieve the boredom of keeping watch.
No one ever had. Back in Greeley’s prospect days, Digger had run a tight ship with the help of other old-timers like Big Roscoe and Rooster, and their brothers doing time for the club behind bars these days, like Jameson and Sugar. No one fucked with the Devil’s Keepers, especially not on their own territory. No one would dare.
He didn’t want to think about what it meant if that was changing.
Greeley swung his leg over his bike, backed it up from the line, and then took off. Digger and all the club shit disappeared. Straight out of his head like it had never been there in the first place.
That was what Merritt Broussard did to him. Five years ago he’d thought it was love. Now he knew it was nothing more than his own version of Oxy. A little slice of oblivion at too fucking high a price. That being his goddamned self-respect.
He blazed into town, as into the roar and the noise and the rumble of the machine as he was into the wind in his face and the night wide open before him, his to take however he wanted it. The same feeling he always got on his bike. It was a feeling worth living this outlaw life for. It was a feeling he’d risk anything for. It was the whole fucking point. He hauled ass past the mayor’s house, that douchebag with far too high an opinion of himself, and made a note to bring the mayor’s latest bullshit up at the table, too. No one was bulletproof in this town unless they wore a DKMC patch, something the mayor should have known better than anyone. But tonight he cared about a tool like Benny Chambless about as much as he cared about that toothy sorority girl whose face he couldn’t even remember.
Not when Merritt was back.
You mean if she’s back, he cautioned himself, but he was past that.
It was her. And if it wasn’t her, he’d have some fun rousting whoever the fuck it was out of Doc’s house. It was win-win any way he looked at it, especially on a night like tonight, with a substandard blow job and too much shit he didn’t like hanging in the air like a summer storm.
He shot farther down the road, then roared straight up old Doc’s cracked and beaten up driveway. He didn’t even slow down, hoping the bike rattled some plates off their shelves as a little greeting from him to her.
He wasn’t exactly trying to hide.
There were faint lights on inside the house but only on the bayou side, almost like someone was keeping to the rear of the house so as not to be seen from the road. Greeley parked around the back next to a forgettable brown sedan. He shut off his engine and rolled the bike onto its kickstand. He swiped his soft helmet off and hung it from one of the fuck you high handlebars, raked his fingers through his hair, and when he looked up, she was there.
His cock didn’t give a fuck that it had been five years or that she’d left him in the first place. It only knew that in a whole wide world of pussy, most of which he’d sampled and enjoyed, there was an endless supply of the same old black and white shit. Decent enough, in its way, and good to scratch an itch. Occasionally fucking great. But he’d only found one burst of bright, electric color out there and it was standing on the other side of that screen door.
Finally, something in him whispered, and he cut that shit off immediately.
He had to give it to her. Some women would have hidden when they’d heard his bike. Tried to pretend this wasn’t happening. But not Merritt Broussard. She came right out to face him like she thought she was tough or, even funnier, like she imagined she could take him if it came down to it.
Greeley took his time looking at her. She still pushed all his buttons, which he didn’t exactly love, but there it was. All that thick, dark hair she’d piled into something careless on the back of her head. She looked a little skinnier than he remembered her, but that only made her legs look longer in a pair of cut-off jean shorts that rode low on her hips. She wore a drapey long-sleeved T-shirt that didn’t quite make it to the waistband of the shorts, leaving him with a strip of her soft belly right there in his face. The T-shirt clung to her tits, still as small and ripe as they’d ever been, enough to make his palms itch. He’d bet a million dollars she was barefoot, and there was no reason that should make his chest feel like someone had dropped a bike on it.
He raised his gaze to her face. She looked unhappy to see him, and maybe a little scared, too, which he was definitely enough of a dick to enjoy. That sulky mouth of hers was pressed into a flat line, which in no way decreased his desire to have it sliding over his cock. She was frowning, of course, and her blue eyes looked smoky in the porch light.
Greeley accepted the fact that he was going to fuck her again. He was already hard as shit, and it was inevitable. What he wasn’t going to do—ever—was fall apart like a little fucking bitch the way he had five years ago. He’d shoot himself in the head first.
He watched Merritt swallow, hard. He hoped she was nervous. If not, she would be soon enough.
His whole night started looking up.
“Welcome home, babe,” he told her, sounding like he’d been smoking six packs of cigarettes a day since she’d left, mean and dangerous. He still didn’t get off his bike. He just sat there, watching her and letting her freak the fuck out, while crickets lost their shit all around them. “What did I tell you about showing your face here?”
Chapter 3
Her memory was full of shit.
That was the only coherent thing Merritt could seem to think.
Because the reality of Greeley, sitting out back on his big, gleaming chopper, leaning forward slightly so she could really get a decent look at him in the half-assed pool of light from the porch, was more than overwhelming. It was like that hard hand of his around her jaw, holding her clamped down and still and exactly where he wanted her, which she could still feel against her flesh as if he’d marked her five years ago.
It was like a goddamned sledgehammer. Or maybe that was just him.
She wasn’t ready.
She’d known this would happen, sooner or later, but she’d been banking on later. Much, much later. She should have climbed right back in the car when she’d heard that first motorcycle. She could have been holed up in a perfectly nice motel down in Lafayette by now, another place no one would think to look for her with the added bonus of not being smack in the middle of the Devil’s Keepers.
But she’d wanted to feel safe. She’d always felt safe in her father’s house, no matter how lonely. She’d wanted that again, after Antony.
Let’s just stipulate that you’re a fucking idiot, a caustic voice inside her suggested, and she could hardly argue. The evidence was clear.
And it was too late now. He was right here. It didn’t matter if she was ready or not.
With Greeley, it never did.
“This is so sweet,” she murmured, her tone bright and saccharine because she had no defense but a useless offense, standing there behind the screen door like that might work as some kind of buffer. Please. Greeley went wherever the hell he wanted and a screen door wasn’t going to stop him. So she kept talking, because there was a slight chance that might. “Did you come all the way out here just to say hello? After all this time? You always were such a gentleman. It’s what I remember most about you.”
His hard mouth curved faintly in one corner, a stamp of a steel-edged amusement that didn’t bode well for her at all. His gray eyes glittered in the dark. She had to remind herself to breathe.
“Not sure I’d go with an attitude straight off the bat after five years and how we left it, babe. I’m not thinking that’s the smartest move.”
He’d said he’d keep her or kill her. She remembered that part vividly, and Merritt had absolutely no desire to explore what he’d meant by either.
“If I’d known you were coming over I would have baked a cake or something, like a good little southern belle,” she continued in the same foolhardy, fake-sweet tone, choosing to go ahead and ignore the way his rough voice slid all over her and ignited a series of very unfortunate, very dangerous wildfires that began to flicker and dance all over her skin. And beneath it, down deep. “We could have made an occasion out of it. Laissez les bons temps rouler or whatever.”
