by Megan Crane
It didn’t sit well.
“On my way,” he said into the phone, his gaze on Merritt.
Roscoe grunted his goodbye, and Greeley shoved his phone into his jeans again. And then he was back to his woman in his kitchen, still too pale, watching him a little too warily. He could already see her building up the same excuses and coming up with reasons to deny what they both already knew. He knew exactly how this would play out. It was how shit always went with Merritt and unlike the other crap in his life he had to suck up, he didn’t have to sit with this.
“You’re coming to the clubhouse with me,” he told her.
Of course she balked. “What? No. I’m convinced that if I sit in the wrong place in that building I’ll break out in meningitis. From, like, a chair.”
“I wasn’t asking you, babe.”
She ignored him like that little moment about why she’d come home hadn’t happened. “Just drop me off at my father’s house.”
“I’m not going to do that,” he told her, impatient. With all of this. “Because we both know what’s going to happen. You’re going to sit around and think too much the way you always do. You’re going to get a little crazy with it. You’re going to decide to do something stupid, like take off, and it’s seriously going to piss me off if I have to hunt you down, Merritt.”
“You told me if I left Lagrange I could do whatever I wanted. Including strip, if memory serves.”
He shook his head. “That was last night and let’s be real. It was bullshit. You’re mine.”
He saw something go through her, but he couldn’t read it. Then she blinked and it was gone.
“What if I don’t want to be yours?”
“Let me know when that happens. When you wake up one morning and don’t want me anymore. We can fight about it then. But it’s been five years and it hasn’t happened yet, so I’m going to be honest with you. I’m not all that concerned.”
Merritt only eyed him for a moment. Then she looked away and he wanted to put his hands on her and convince her the only way he knew how. But he needed to be at the clubhouse in twenty minutes, so that was a spectacularly bad idea.
He almost did it anyway, but she turned around. She reached across the table, grabbing her bag and tossing her phone in it. The bag was one of those big and slouchy types that mystified Greeley since it might as well have been a duffel—in which case, why not use an actual duffel. She riffled around in it for a moment before she pulled out a wad of clothing.
“I’m not going into the clubhouse dressed like a stripper,” she said when she caught him looking at her. Her voice was a little flat, maybe, but she wasn’t giving him that look that promised she’d try to run off into the bayou if he turned his back on her. “Give me a minute to change into something else.”
“You have maybe thirty seconds,” he told her, just to annoy her. “And that’s generous.”
Merritt rolled her eyes. Then she acted like he wasn’t in the room. She pulled off his T-shirt and left it on the table. Then she shimmied out of those fucking hot pants that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life and put them down on top of the T-shirt. Then she was standing there in his kitchen in a tiny gold bikini top and a G-string, instantly making him horny and a little bit desperate, which was not a good way to roll up to a meeting with Digger.
She stepped into the same cut-off shorts she’d been wearing yesterday, pulling them up to fasten them around her hips. Then she pulled on the same flowy, long-sleeved T-shirt, ignoring it when it slid down one shoulder, exposing the gleaming gold bikini string around her neck. And Greeley didn’t get how she was doing this. He’d probably watched every strip show in Cajun country at least twice, and yet Merritt Broussard putting her clothes back on was hotter than all of them put together.
Not touching her was so hard it actually made his fingers ache.
She was digging around in her giant bag again. This time she pulled out a pair of flip-flops that she dropped on the floor and a pair of sunglasses she stuck on the top of her head.
“Ready,” she murmured. But he didn’t move.
“You got anything else in there?” he asked. Maybe through his teeth, he wanted her so badly. “Like a summer house or some shit?”
She eyed him a little bit narrowly as she worked her feet into the flip-flops. But it was better than that scared look on her face, which was fucking unacceptable. The only man on this earth she needed to worry about, ever, was him. And he had nothing to do with the fear that made her go pale.
“You’re welcome to take me to my father’s house,” she told him, back to that snotty tone of hers that he could admit, in this brave new world of theirs where all his cards were on the table, got him a little hot and bothered. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry what I keep in my bag or who calls me or anything else.”
Greeley didn’t get pissed, which was a minor miracle. He grinned and watched her melt at that.
“You’re not really fighting me,” he pointed out. “You’re just saying shit. And you know you can get away with it because we need to go. Enjoy that power, baby. I’ll tie you up later and remind you how dumb it is to fuck with me.”
She sniffed at that as if she was outraged, but he saw the way her lips twitched and he knew he had her. He pulled on his cut, then jerked his head toward the door, his grin getting wider when she managed to sling her giant bag across her body and then walk out ahead of him with her spine so straight it might as well have been a raised middle finger.
He knew he’d already won. It didn’t matter if she thought she was biding her time so she could really try to fight him later. She was his.
She never would have come back here if she didn’t know that as well as he did. And the longer she let things go without freaking out and bailing when it got too intense, the more she would settle into it.
Greeley was sure of it.
Besides, she had no other option. This time, he wasn’t letting her go.
—
One week bled into another, the spring days warmed and shimmered with the promise of the coming summer in all that soupy bayou heat, and Merritt told herself she was letting Greeley protect her. That maybe he was right and this was why she’d come back to Lagrange. To drift off into a dream world where she stopped worrying about everything and anything and let him do it instead.
Oh, she knew better. On some level she was well aware that she was living on borrowed time and that the fact Antony had stopped calling was much, much worse for her in some ways than the barrage of calls and nasty texts. She knew it couldn’t last.
Maybe that was why these stolen days, laced through with nostalgia for that long ago summer and all the dreams she hadn’t let herself have during her amnesia years up north, felt so sweet.
They were all lies. But it turned out she really liked the lie.
Because, while she refused to admit it out loud, or even to herself, she liked being Greeley’s woman. She liked pretending that he really could protect her from Antony, and no matter that she knew better.
Her father wasn’t here, so there was no one to question the company she kept. There weren’t even any snide comments about missing her father’s funeral as she’d anticipated. The townspeople probably talked themselves hoarse about her in private, but in public they were all smiles and a gentle welcome home, because no one wanted to insult Greeley Shaw’s woman. That was straight-up suicide.
“I think Shanice Townsend was a little too close to making out with me in the country store today while I was getting a coffee,” she told Lanie one afternoon, sitting on the porch of Lanie’s little house out in the middle of nowhere, with sugarcane fields surrounding her on all sides. She held her sweating glass of iced tea between her hands, enjoying the chill of the glass against the skin of her palms. “That was how much she wanted to express her delight that I was back in town. She even claimed she could feel my daddy’s approval from beyond the grave, which is when I think we both knew she’d gone too far.”
&n
bsp; Lanie laughed at that. She was fixing a chipped nail in her otherwise perfect pedicure, standing at her porch rail with one foot propped up before her in a show of limber ease that made Merritt feel old and creaky in comparison. And Lanie was four months older than her, which made it that much more unfair.
“Her man keeps making bets and losing,” Lanie was saying. “She probably wants you to say something to Greeley before the club comes by to collect.”
“She knows better than that.”
It wasn’t until the words were out of her mouth that Merritt realized she sounded a whole lot like all the biker old ladies she knew around town, like Crystal Guillot, the magnificently breasted wife of the longtime club president, Digger. Crystal always had a lot of people coming at her for favors from her husband and by extension the whole club, something even Merritt knew after having been away for years. Everyone knew. And this despite the fact Crystal was famously about as approachable as a hatchet.
What was more concerning than the fact Merritt was talking like an old lady herself, however, was that she seemed to have lost the part of her that was rightly horrified by the club and all its works.
She’d even found herself considering the fact that while Greeley had the impenetrable wall of club business, in the normal scheme of things she’d be bound by attorney-client privilege. There would always be all kinds of things she couldn’t talk about with the people in her life. If anyone understood privacy concerns, it was her.
Then she’d asked herself what the hell was the matter with her.
What does it matter now? a small voice inside her asked. Antony will be here soon enough. There’s no harm in admitting that maybe there’s as much to love about the club as there is to hate about it.
Or maybe she didn’t mean the club. Maybe she meant Greeley.
“What a woman knows and what she hopes are two different things,” Lanie was saying, snapping Merritt back to the here and now, out on the porch in a sweet spring afternoon. Lanie glanced over her shoulder as she dipped the delicate nailbrush into the thick, red polish. “I know you know that.”
Hope was a bitch. That was what Merritt knew. It inspired her to let down her guard. It encouraged her to believe that this little interlude with Greeley was real and could last. That this was what she’d always wanted most. And more, that she could have it. Hope was a fucking liar.
But she only smiled at her friend.
“Of course,” she said.
When Lanie started getting ready for work, Merritt drove back into town in the pickup truck Greeley had insisted she use after he’d had a couple of prospects take her rental back to the airport in New Orleans. Without asking her.
No point keeping that rental, he’d told her when she’d complained—at some length—about his high-handedness. He’d had some business up in Shreveport and had come back late that night, tired and shorter-tempered than usual. You’re just wasting money.
And then, when she’d remained unconvinced by that argument, he’d taken the conversation horizontal, and here she was driving a late model pickup truck he’d insisted was just sitting around at the clubhouse waiting for someone to use it.
Greeley won a lot of arguments that way. Pretty much all of them, in fact.
Maybe she let him win. She couldn’t really tell, given the end result was always her limp and strung out on him all over again, feeling like she’d won the entire world and everything in it and no matter that she might have been mad at him earlier.
But that was one more perk of being Greeley’s woman. People in town who had never given her the time of day went out of their way to be nice to her. The contingent of women she and Lanie had always sarcastically called the Lagrange Ladies Association—because they were tough-as-nails biker bitches who would eat the actual debutantes in St. Germain Parish alive and have fun doing it—started nodding their hellos and sometimes even pausing to have a brief conversation. Not Crystal Guillot herself, the grand high queen of the biker bitches, but a couple of the other long-term old ladies in particular. It was a whole new world. Her daddy’s lawn was mowed every time she drove by. People she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager and who hadn’t liked her much back then were unfailingly polite when they ran into her. When she walked into the diner in town there was always a table ready for her. Trucks appeared for her use and there was always gas in the tank.
And best of all, she got Greeley.
Not in the way she’d had him that breathless summer, when she’d had to walk that fine line between being the adult she’d grown accustomed to thinking she was at college and her father’s insistence on treating her like she was still fifteen, mixed with his healthy disapproval of Greeley. There’d been a lot of sneaking around that summer. A lot of pretending she was hanging with Lanie—who her father had deemed a terrible influence back in kindergarten, a position he hadn’t shifted from thereafter—in Lanie’s mom’s old trailer down by the river. A lot of cloak and dagger silliness, looking back, that probably hadn’t fooled her father at all.
But this was different. Two days after the morning he’d dragged her to the clubhouse—to sit there smiling politely at the sleepy-eyed brothers and very distantly at the mostly naked women who’d already been doing their thing at 11:45 a.m., while he’d been off tending to some or other club business that left him in a shitty mood—he’d announced he was done with her always claiming she had to go back to Doc’s house to change.
Bring your shit over here, he’d told her.
He’d had her spread over his thighs while he lounged back on his couch, having worked out yet another bad mood from his weekly Devil’s Keepers full patch brothers’ meeting—he called it “church”—in a way that had left her deliciously spineless against him. Maybe that was why she hadn’t instantly noticed that he hadn’t been offering a suggestion, he’d been delivering an order.
I’m not moving in with you, crazy man.
He’d sat her back, his hands wrapped around her hips, holding her so she could feel him still deep inside of her.
Oh, I know it, baby, he’d said, that dangerous glittering thing in his gray eyes. You got one foot out the door at all times. So what does it matter where you crash while you’re here? Besides. This makes it easier for me to protect you from that dick.
And if she was staying—if she hadn’t known full well how this was all going to end, badly—she might have fussed about that. The fact of it as well as his delivery. But this was all temporary. This was a little dream she got to lose herself in before Antony caught up to her, so why not take it to places she’d never allow herself to go if it was real?
He’d brought her duffel bag and what was left of her groceries over to his place that same afternoon and she’d stayed there ever since.
It turned out that outlaw bikers didn’t sleep the days away in piles of naked groupies, as she’d always assumed. Or anyway, Greeley didn’t. He claimed it was because he was one of the club officers and that meant he had things to do every day. Sometimes he drove out to Shreveport, into Baton Rouge, or down to New Orleans for a variety of reasons he didn’t share. Sometimes he drove up to Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, or other prisons dotted across the state to see locked up Devil’s Keepers brothers. Sometimes he didn’t tell where he’d been. So Merritt got to make up all that time she’d lost with Lanie, who was usually waking up around the time Greeley headed off to do whatever he did. Then when Lanie had to work, Merritt usually went back to Greeley’s and either waited for him there or waited for him to call and tell her where she should come meet him.
It was no way to live a real life. But this was her dream, and more than that, it was a much-needed vacation from the daily threat of Antony after so many months of creeping terror and that knot in her belly. She knew his silence meant bad things. She knew it. But that didn’t keep her from basking in it all the same.
“You bored yet?” Greeley asked her one night.
They’d ridden out of Lagrange on his bike, deep into the
Louisiana countryside. She’d held on to him while she’d tipped her head back and laughed the way she always did at all that wind in her face and through her hair. It still felt like flying. It still made her imagine she was free. They’d stopped by a lake, where they’d broken several laws out there in the dark with no one but the soft stars to see them. As an officer of the court, Merritt knew she should have been appalled at her reckless behavior. But she was much too busy trying to catch her breath.
“With you?”
He laughed. Of course he laughed. A deep, real laugh that made her smile as it rolled through her.
“This bullshit life of yours,” he said when he stopped laughing. “You’re acting like a lazy college kid on summer vacation.”
“I was never lazy on summer vacation,” she said, pushing herself up from where she’d been using his bicep as a pillow, stretched out in the grass, so she could frown at him. “If I didn’t have an internship somewhere I worked in my daddy’s clinic.”
He was still grinning. “Yeah, baby. I know. Cute as it is, it isn’t like you to sit around doing nothing, waiting for me to call you.”
“I thought that was what you wanted.”
“If that was who you were, sure,” he countered, his eyes serious. Maybe a little more serious than she was ready for. “I can take care of my woman. You don’t have to do a thing except keep me happy. Some women don’t want more than that. Are you one of them? Is this the life you want?”
If she’d been staying, if this was real, she would have taken this conversation to heart. It would have been a lot harder. Tonight she just wrinkled up her nose and shrugged, holding his gaze because it didn’t matter.
“Maybe.”
“Bullshit.”
“Even if I wanted to practice law right now, I couldn’t. I’d have to pass the bar down here. So I guess I really am on summer vacation.”
