by Megan Crane
“You’re pissed,” Chaser said. “I get it. You’re not exactly subtle, kid. But you can’t seem to tell me why you’re so pissed that you’re acting out and shooting your mouth off, insulting members of the family. Your real family, Kaylee. It’s the club who took care of you and made sure you grew up safe and clean and happy. Not some junkie bitch.”
But she was closing down in front of him, her gaze going flat. “I already told you.”
“You’re lying.” He shook his head. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what the problem is. And the more you don’t tell me, the more I think it’s just bullshit anyway. You know better than to listen to your aunt Liz. You used to call her on her poison. Now suddenly you’re paying attention to every crazy thing that comes out of her mouth?”
“Dad…” But she trailed off.
“I’m not a hypocrite, baby girl,” he told her. “I think you know that. I don’t really care that you decided to get drunk. What I am is fucking disappointed in you that you decided to tie one on and roll into your history class. That’s sloppy. It’s beneath you. It’s begging for trouble and I know you know better.”
She looked miserable, but he couldn’t help her with that—and more, he wouldn’t. He knew she loved him. He even knew that this was a part of how much she loved him, all this pushing and testing and telling him how much he sucked. He remembered his own teenage bullshit too well to think otherwise. But he wasn’t going to give her a hand while she was being an asshole. If she wanted to hate him for it, that was her call.
“I’m sorry,” she said, stark and plain.
Then she didn’t say anything else.
And Chaser was kind of fucked, because he’d always told her an apology was a full sentence. The end of a conversation, not an invitation to begin a new one. That when he apologized, that was the whole conversation right there, boom. So he couldn’t exactly interrogate her now.
He had the feeling she knew it, his little smartass.
“Don’t be sorry,” he told her, fighting to keep his temper out of his voice. “Stop fucking up.”
And long after she stomped off to bed, he sat there in the den with the television on low, seeing nothing. Not whatever old-ass movie was playing on some cable channel, more commercials than actual movie. Just like he wasn’t thinking about what a shitty father he was and how he was probably messing Kaylee up—though really, anything that wasn’t a flophouse had to be an upgrade. And he wasn’t thinking about Digger and Whale and the rest of the club shit show that got worse every day, threatening everything he cared about.
All of that would have made sense. But nothing made sense tonight.
Because instead, Chaser was concentrating on a hot little piece of ass who shouldn’t have been such a puzzle in the first place, wrapped up tight in her teacher clothes when she was so hot and dirty beneath them, and all the ways he was going to have to get another taste.
Soon.
Chapter 5
Sheriff Grady Archer was a great date.
He was considerate. He picked Lara up at her door and he drove her to the restaurant he’d chosen in nearby Baton Rouge, without all that back and forth and what do you feel like eating and do you have esoteric dietary considerations nonsense. He simply made the decision about where to go, clearly assumed she could handle her own dinner order off the extensive menu, and then executed the necessary steps to get them to the restaurant. He was a grown man instead of the indecisive, overly solicitous boys Lara had dated in the past who’d preferred to have exhaustive conversations regarding their feelings about gluten before the date even started—which usually meant Lara was already fatigued by the whole thing before they’d eaten the first safely vegan bite.
Not Grady. Which wasn’t to say he was any kind of domineering asshole, because he wasn’t. Unlike certain Devil’s Keepers enforcers she refused to let herself think about. Grady had those Southern gentleman manners that came as such a shock to a woman raised in the brutal shitholes of the California desert, where might was right and bitches were much better off keeping their mouths shut. Grady was self-deprecating and smart, and didn’t appear the least bit intimidated by the fact Lara was, too. And more than all that, he was so good-looking that other women in the charming little restaurant he’d found ogled him openly, some without bothering to hide from their own dates that they were doing it. Even better, he appeared completely oblivious to their stares as he concentrated on Lara instead.
There was no getting around it. Grady Archer was the perfect date.
“Did you always know you wanted to be one of the good guys?” Lara asked him over her plate of steak cooked to perfection. “Were you born with a superhero cape around your neck?”
There was a dent in his jaw that suggested a smile he hadn’t gotten around to flashing yet, and his green eyes gleamed. “I tried being an evil mastermind for a while after college, but it wasn’t for me.”
“Not such great pay, I guess, unless you’re taking over the world and can help yourself to all the banks.”
“It was really more the hours.” He leaned back in the booth across from her. “World domination is nothing more than another entrepreneur trying to get noticed in a crowded marketplace.”
“Visibility is key, I hear.”
“And that takes a twenty-four/seven approach.” His gaze was filled with laughter. “It turned out that running for sheriff was a better fit. I’m actually pretty lazy.”
By the time they made it to dessert, Lara was convinced that the sheriff of St. Germain Parish was the most perfect man she’d ever met, much less dated.
And of course, because her life was nothing if not a farce, she felt nothing.
She wasn’t bored. He was an interesting guy and entertaining enough, easy to talk to and to look at—but she certainly wasn’t into him the way she should have been. She wasn’t lit up with anticipation or giddiness or anything close. Hell, any rational woman would have been sending out wedding invitations the moment they got back in his car to head home to Lagrange. He helped her into the passenger seat as if chivalry was a real thing he personally cared about deeply, not the stuff of childhood fairy tales no one believed in anymore. Lara had no doubt that Grady Archer wasn’t just perfect in general, he was exactly the right man to cure her of her suicidal fixation on terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad bikers.
But as he pulled off the interstate and made his way down the thick, green roads that lined the bayous on the way into town—dark and sinister, lush and wild—it was like driving back under a canopy of all that biker greed and hunger she knew so well. Lara could feel it pulse inside of her, as if Lagrange sang in her blood. As if these mysterious swamps knew her, could see inside her, down deep where she’d shoved her years in the desert and the life she’d been so determined to put behind her.
As if the obviously, deliberately lethal enforcer of yet another brutal club could look at her and see all the things she least wanted to be true. About who she was. About what she wanted.
About what you’re doing in another biker town, something inside her whispered. Are you saving these kids? Or are you lying to yourself?
Next to her, Grady practically glowed with decency and kindness, all wrapped up in a hot, hard, deliciously male package.
She should be wild about him. On paper, she was half in love with him already. But she wasn’t.
Lara just didn’t want him. She didn’t want that cure. And not only because she hadn’t felt what she should have when he’d taken her hand to help her both in and out of the car. She’d liked his hands, because who wouldn’t? He was a great-looking guy in terrific shape and his hands were big and capable. What woman wouldn’t appreciate him?
But appreciation wasn’t the same as wanting. Appreciation was academic. Intellectual. Wanting was that hollow place in her gut every time she thought of Chaser and the searing, sinking heat that bloomed bright and hot in her pussy.
Lara should have been melting into a puddle in the front seat
of Grady’s car. But she wasn’t. And she didn’t spontaneously combust into a blaze of lust no matter how she yelled at herself to go ahead and do just that as he pulled up to the curb outside the bakery on Main Street.
You’re broken, whispered a dour voice inside of her that sounded suspiciously like her aunt Tammy, Uncle Ray’s bitter wife of far too many harsh years. That much exposure to Ray would warp anyone, but Tammy was the sort of woman who took a certain satisfaction in sharing her own unhappiness far and wide. You keep thinking you’re better than where you came from. You keep thinking you can cure yourself, but you can’t. You’re an Ashburn. You’re rotten straight through.
Lara had been fighting against that idea her whole life. But here she was on a warm summer’s night with the perfect man—and her bad Ashburn blood didn’t heat at all. Maybe she really was a broken, rotten thing after all.
“I hope we can do this again,” Grady said, his voice as pleasant as the rest of him, as he walked her to her alley door.
Because of course the sheriff was the kind of man who walked a lady he’d taken out to dinner to her door. Instead of banging her in a classroom and sauntering off into the night, leaving her to stagger home with the evidence of their passion on her thighs and wadded up in a tissue in her purse.
To pick an example at random.
“That would be fun,” Lara said, because she couldn’t stop herself. Because she should want that, shouldn’t she? She should want the nice Southern gentleman, an officer of the law no less, who wanted to take her out on dates and have conversations with her just for the hell of it and walk her to her door, just because.
Why couldn’t she want—just once—the thing she knew she should? The thing she knew was good for her?
Maybe that was why, when Grady stepped forward and slid his hand over her cheek, she let him. More than let him. She tipped her face up so he had better access, and when his mouth slanted over hers, she responded.
Enthusiastically, even.
The sheriff tasted good. He kissed well, and thoroughly. And Lara imagined that if she hadn’t thrown herself face-first into the seething inferno that was Chaser Frey two days ago, she might have felt the spark between them a little bit more.
Or at all, that voice whispered.
But hell, she tried. She really did try.
When Grady pulled back, his green eyes were dark, glittering with something she didn’t quite believe was passion. It was almost as if he was having as much difficulty getting into this as she was—though she couldn’t have said why she thought that. His thumb moved against her cheek, but he dropped it as he stepped back.
“I’ll see you soon, Lara,” he said softly.
“Good night, Grady,” she replied, and she almost believed the role she was playing in that moment. A hushed goodbye after a more-than-decent kiss. A quiet bayou evening all around them, thick and dark, with only the streetlight out on Main Street to cut through it a little. Louisiana-sized bugs cartwheeled around the soft blaze of light, the way the girl she should have been would have thrown herself at Grady if she’d been smart.
Lara wanted so badly to be that girl. So very, very badly. That was why she smiled so brightly at the sheriff as she let herself into her stairwell and closed the heavy door behind her.
Inside, she leaned back against the industrial metal door and let her breath out in a jagged rush. Her eyes closed of their own accord. And the same images that had been haunting her since Wednesday night swept in, sizzling bright and wild with all that sensation her body could still feel storming around in her as if it was new. Chaser moving across the classroom floor toward her with all that ruthless intent. Chaser lifting her against him as if she weighed so little he could hold her up with one hand, then working her down on his cock, so sure she could take every inch of his thick, heavy length. Or determined she would, either way.
Lara shuddered. All it took was a two-day-old memory and she was alive with longing. Swamped with it. Her nipples were so stiff they ached, nearly painful with need. Her pussy felt swollen and bright hot. She was flushed, everywhere, and her legs felt so weak beneath her that she wasn’t sure she’d make it up the stairs to her apartment. So she stood there for another moment, waiting to see if she’d be able to breathe her way through this.
What you are, said that nasty little voice in her head, with more than a little bit of gloating, just like the real Tammy Ashburn would have sounded in the face of evidence that no one could really, truly escape the life, is screwed.
Lara knew it. She supposed on some level she’d known it since she’d looked up, seen Chaser there in her classroom doorway, and opted to throw down with him the way she had. She certainly knew better than to wave red flags in an angry bull’s face and then complain about the way it charged.
She’d gone over it and over it in her head so many times she couldn’t tell if she was punishing herself or dwelling on what had happened for other, more prurient, reasons. She’d had to look sullen, subdued Kaylee Frey in the face the next morning, and Lara had tried her best not to explode into a thousand shamed pieces at the sight of the catalyst for all her appalling behavior, but the fact she’d managed to do the bare minimum of her job—and not act bizarrely toward a poor sixteen-year-old girl who clearly had her own troubles—was hardly something to celebrate.
What she wanted to do was run. The tried-and-true response to anything involving the life. Bikers were territorial creatures. That meant a lot of things, many of them bloody, but it also meant that they tended to stick to their territories. They didn’t really like it when they found themselves in places where they didn’t know the rules or couldn’t control the situation. That was how she’d left her uncle’s hideous little patch of desert. She’d thrown her shit in the car and driven west to UC Riverside—two and half hours, a scholarship, and enough dormitories and campus police to make sure the distance alone made her safe. Riverside wasn’t Brothers of Goliath territory to begin with and the university certainly wasn’t outlaw biker friendly, if her uncle had cared enough to come after her. He hadn’t, of course.
She’d had no idea it was that easy to leave. That all she’d had to do, all those years, was actually make a decision and then go.
Tonight, standing at the bottom of a dimly lit stairwell in Lagrange, Louisiana, the truth about herself lying heavy on her like an indictment—and a slick, insistent accusation between her legs—she was tempted to try the same solution here.
She was tempted, but she knew she wouldn’t do it. Chaser was a problem, sure, but he would more likely than not get distracted by whatever club ass the Devil’s Keepers had hanging around. He’d already had her easily enough. Why would he come back for more? All she needed to do was keep her head down, stop baiting outlaw bikers when she encountered them, and maybe then she could do the good she’d intended to do here. Maybe then—
Her doorbell buzzed, shrill and loud. It made her jump. She leapt away from the door at her back as if whoever was standing right there on the other side could see her straight through the heavy metal. Her heart slapped at her ribs. Her pulse rocketed. Lara clapped a hand to her chest, then laughed a little bit at her own melodrama.
She didn’t know why Grady had come back, but she decided she was going about this all wrong. Why beat herself up about what she didn’t feel? All she had to do was think about Chaser and she’d be all in. And how would Grady know the difference?
Fake it ’til you make it, she thought, with perhaps a touch of grim determination, and then she tossed the door open. Ready to leap into her cure with both feet.
But it wasn’t Grady who stood there, all chiseled chin and kind smile.
It was Chaser.
And he looked pissed.
More than pissed. Furious, Lara thought as she got a flash of his dark face when he shouldered his way inside. The gleaming, predatory thing in his gaze made her stomach flip over, while between her legs, she was clenched tight and running hot and wild.
And something a
little too close to desperate.
“Enjoy your date?” Chaser growled at her.
The heavy outer door slammed shut, locking them in at the narrow foot of her stairs and then he was there. He was everywhere. Taking over the stairwell. Stealing the air straight from her lungs. Making that panicked, yearning thing inside her twist up and blaze red and crazy as he loomed over her, huge and intimidating without having to do a damned thing but stand there with that scowl all over his hard face.
She scrambled up the step behind her, one hand on the old, weathered wall as if she needed help balancing, and it still didn’t put her quite level with him. But it was better. Slightly better, anyway. And she’d just finished telling herself to keep her head down, to be smart for a change, to stop provoking bikers in general and this man in particular, but it turned out she didn’t know how.
“That was the best date of my life,” she told him, leaning forward to really get in his face. The predatory gleam in his gaze got hotter. More deadly. And as if it was wired straight to her traitorous pussy, she felt slippery. Instantly. “Sheriff Archer really knows how to treat a woman.”
“I saw him sucking your face.” Chaser sounded darker than she remembered him. Harder and much more dangerous. It made her even wetter. So lush and needy she was surprised he couldn’t see it all over her or scent it in the charged air between them. “You looked bored. You know how I could tell? Because you didn’t throw yourself at him and climb him like a fucking tree.”
Lara didn’t know what was wrong with her. Why she couldn’t do the reasonable, rational thing when it came to this man. He was threatening her, for god’s sake. So why didn’t she feel threatened? Why did she feel…exhilarated? Her pulse was thick and wild. She couldn’t quite catch her breath. And she couldn’t look away, even though part of her knew without a doubt that being this close to him was suicide.
