STONE KINGS MOTORCYCLE CLUB: The Complete Collection

by Daphne Loveling

  And now, he was some big, bad, alpha male in some stupid motorcycle club.

  Hell, whoever it was who had shot him, Caleb had probably deserved it.

  “The PT clinic is downstairs on floor three,” I said briskly, straightening my sweater. “You’ll need to come in daily for the first couple of weeks. The first session will be two hours, and subsequent sessions will be about an hour per day. You’ll need to set up the appointment with them. You can call them, or else they’ll call you if they haven’t heard from you by tomorrow.”

  I reached into my pocket and handed him a card. “I urge you to take this therapy seriously, Ca… Trig. It could make the difference between you walking again without assistance or you spending the rest of your life using a cane.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” he murmured, his voice low and sensual.

  Between my legs, the puddle was growing to a pool. I caught myself right before my traitorous eyes glanced back at his groin to see if he was still hard. Damn. I had to get out of here.

  “Well, that’s all, then.” Taking a deep breath, I turned toward the door. I’ll see you in therapy.”

  “Eva.” His low, rumbling voice stopped me at the threshold.

  I turned, my actions jumpy. “Yes?”

  His expression was unreadable. “How’ve you been?”

  A tangle of emotions flooded up inside me, none of them good. It had been so long since high school, I couldn’t believe the stupid memory of it still had the power to upset me so. But damned if I couldn’t feel a painful lump welling up in my throat.

  No, damnit. I am not going to give him the satisfaction of crying in front of him.

  I swallowed. “I’m fine,” I said brightly. “I’ve been fine.”

  Then I was out the door and back into the merciful coolness of the hallway.

  Caleb Jackson.

  My God.

  What the hell was I going to do?

  5

  Trig

  Cal wandered through the open door to my room just as Eva was leaving.

  “Whew!” he whistled, watching her ass as she walked away. “Who’s that? Your nurse?”

  “I wish. That way I wouldn’t have to see her again after I left the hospital. It’s my fuckin’ physical therapist.”

  He whistled again. “She’s hot.”

  “She’s a pain in the ass, is what she is,” I growled.

  “I dunno, man. I’d take a lot of grief from someone who looks like her, in exchange for some one-on-one ‘physical therapy’,” Cal grinned. “You’re lookin’ a gift gunshot wound in the mouth.”

  “Fuck you, Cal,” I grumbled. Normally the little punk cracked my shit up, but I wasn’t in the mood after the last couple of hours.

  “Come on,” I said, swinging my legs over the side of the bed. “Grab my duffel bag from that closet and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The doc hadn’t officially released me yet, but I didn’t give a shit. I was releasing myself, effective immediately. I needed to put some space between me and the woman who had just flounced out that door.

  Even more, I needed some time to mentally prepare myself for the hell that was about to be the next six to eight weeks.

  I had the feeling that it was gonna be a fuckin’ doozy.

  Eva.

  Jesus, she was always prettier than she knew. You could always tell in high school she was going to end up being a knockout. But now, holy hell.

  Over the years, she’d gone from a girl who was still not completely at ease in her own body, to a gorgeous, confident woman. One who moved with an effortless sensuality that I was pretty sure she was still mostly unaware of. She had clearly taken good care of herself over the years. Hell, as a physical therapist, she probably took her own health seriously, and one look at her tight, slim body in those yoga pants had me itching to peel them off of her and stick my face between those toned, shapely thighs.

  Except.

  Except she fucking hates you, Trig.

  I never really knew what had happened between us. Or rather, what had almost-happened between us.

  In high school, I had always been a player. Started early, I guess. I matured faster than most of the other guys my age, and girls began noticing me seriously when I was around fourteen.

  Not just girls, either. Women, too. I had my fair share of sweaty back-room fucks with young, hot teachers who just couldn’t resist my charms. I’ve always had it easy with women, what can I say? My life is an ocean of pussy.

  Eva, though? She was a challenge.

  I don’t know what it was about her. Maybe it was just the fact that she was the only girl who didn’t seem to be gaga over me. She was petite and pretty, even behind those serious glasses she used to wear. The ones that made her look like a young, hot librarian. She didn’t wear any makeup that I could tell, and her clothes weren’t chosen for their ability to tempt.

  But even so, somehow I was obsessed.

  I used to watch her from behind in the two classes we had together senior year. She had this habit of nibbling on the end of her pen when she was thinking, and then biting her lower lip. My young, testosterone-crazed mind would watch those plump lips, and imagine her wrapping them around my cock. Instead of paying attention to chemistry or English, I’d envision fisting my hand in her cascade of blond hair, telling her in a whisper how good it felt to have her lips wrapped around my dick, and instructing her on just what to do to make me come in that sweet little mouth of hers.

  I jacked off in the restroom after those classes more times than I could even count.

  I started hanging around Eva’s locker every day, and eventually got her to start talking to me. Soon, I was walking her to the classes we had in common. I kept thinking I was getting closer to scoring with her… only somehow, it didn’t exactly feel like it would be just a “score.”

  On the rare occasions that I could get Eva Van Buren to smile at me, or laugh at one of my jokes, it felt like the clouds had parted and a rainbow had appeared. I remember the actual physical sensation of my chest swelling one day when I made some offhand remark and she started laughing so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks.

  Eventually, in the early spring of our senior year, I finally got up the nerve to ask her to hang out with me outside the walls of the school. I don’t know why I was so fucking nervous about it — normally, with girls, all I had to do was crook my finger and they’d come running. But I was legit worried that if I asked Eva out, she’d turn me down. And it took me a while to screw up my courage and risk it.

  Finally, the day came. I had just bought my first motorcycle, with funds I’d scraped together from odd jobs and selling my shitty old pickup truck. That bike was my pride and joy, the first thing I was ever proud of owning.

  And more than anything, I wanted to take Evangeline Van Buren for a ride on it.

  At first, I thought she was gonna say no. When I led her out to the parking lot, the skeptical way she looked at the bike told me she had never been on one before.

  “Come on,” I urged. “You’ll love it. Trust me. Look,” I said, pointing to the side. “I even have a helmet for you to wear.”

  I thought my heart would bust out of my chest when she said yes.

  I had grown up around bikes, having had my first ride on the back of my uncle’s when I was five. When most kids are learning to ride bicycles, I was learning to lean into turns and avoid burning the shit out of my ankle on the tailpipe. But I had never had one of my own before, bought with my own money. And I had never carried a passenger on the back.

  There was no way I could have prepared myself for what it felt like when Eva tentatively climbed on behind me and gingerly wrapped her arms around my waist. By that point in my life, I had already fucked so many girls and women that I’d pretty much lost count. But nothing had ever felt like this.

  I was all jumbled up between the pulsing erection that felt like it was going to rip a hole in my jeans, the powerful surge of protectiveness that coursed t
hrough me knowing she was trusting me to keep her safe on the bike, and something else I couldn’t quite name. Like, pride, almost. Like I was proud and happy to be the first one to show her a new experience.

  As we rode out of the parking lot of the school, a group of the more popular kids stared after us, and I gave them a quick one-finger wave. Even that made me feel kind of funny. I knew they were staring because Eva Van Buren wasn’t the kind of girl I usually hung out with, and part of me felt kind of weird and almost defensive. Like I could already anticipate the ribbing I was gonna get from some of the guys on Monday.

  But in a way, I didn’t care. Hell, I had never been one to follow any particular crowd, and I wasn’t gonna start now. I made my own rules. I didn’t follow the ones other people tried to make for me.

  I took her out of town almost an hour north. My destination was the Piñon Valley Hot Springs, which I remember she said in passing she had never been to. I drove mostly in silence, noticing every subtle shift in her body language. Eventually, her thighs, which had been clamped around the outside of mine, began to relax.

  At one point, I felt rather than heard a deep sigh escape her as she nestled into my back. I knew she had no fucking idea the effect she was having on me. I wasn’t planning on pushing her to go any further with me than she was willing that day, and I was pretty sure I was gonna end up with a case of blue balls, but I didn’t care. It was worth it just to be with her.

  We pulled up to the hot springs about an hour later. It was a Friday afternoon, and a few families with young kids were already there getting an early jump on the weekend. We hadn’t brought swimsuits, so we spent some time hiking around the rock slabs and in between the trees, enjoying the sights of the lazy heat trails drifting up from the water and the sounds of the water as it burbled and pulsed to the surface.

  “It smells like sulfur,” Eva said, wrinkling her nose. “This is so cool!” She turned to me, her eyes shining. “How have I never come here before?”

  “I dunno, you tell me,” I grinned. I resisted the urge to kiss her, but screwed up my courage and took her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Come on, there’s a place over here I want to show you.”

  We crunched through the pine needles, up over the damp, uneven rock to a secluded area not far from the springs. There was no one else there, but we were close enough that we could still hear the muted sounds of laughter and people talking as the splashed and kicked in the pool. I sat down on a low bench that had been constructed from the rocks and she sat down next to me.

  Eva heaved a happy sigh. “Gosh, this is so relaxing. I don’t want to go back.”

  “You don’t have to,” I teased. “We could just stay here forever.”

  She laughed. “What would we do for food? Where would we sleep?”

  “Hey, I’m sure there’s a snack shack around here somewhere. We could exist on hot dogs and stale popcorn. And I could build us a lean-to out of branches.”

  She smiled at me warmly, then gazed over toward the area where the springs were. Her face turned more serious. “Caleb, what are you going to do next year? After high school?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. Haven’t really thought about it yet.”

  “Really?” She looked at me curiously. “I mean, haven’t you thought about college, or something?”

  I snorted. “I don’t think college is for me. I’m fucking sick of classrooms.”

  She frowned. “Well, what then?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know.” I was getting a little irritated. This was starting to feel like an interrogation, when I’d brought her out here to try to get to first base. Impatiently, I turned the question back on her, hoping she’d stop asking me about a future I couldn’t even begin to envision. “What about you?”

  “University of Washington,” she said promptly.

  Something inside me drooped a little. “Really? That’s pretty far away. Are you already accepted?”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “I really need to get away from here.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do.” She looked down at her hands, then back up at me, her eyes strangely intense. “Have you ever felt like you were going to explode if you didn’t get out of your life?”

  Wow. That was sudden. But curiously, even though I had no idea what she was talking about, I knew exactly how she felt. “Yeah. I have. Pretty often, in fact.”

  “I just…” She frowned, then took a deep breath. “I just want to go somewhere else. I want the chance to be someone else for a while.”

  I moved closer, and without even knowing exactly what my body was doing, my hand reached up to her face. I softly stroked the curve of her jaw with my thumb.

  “I think who you are already is pretty fucking great,” I said.

  Lowering my head to hers, I brushed my lips against her mouth in the softest kiss I could manage. A bolt of electricity shot through me at the contact, racing straight to my dick. I felt her gasp as her lips parted under mine.

  My hand went to her hair, and I cradled the back of her head in my palm as I leaned in further, deepening the kiss. Our tongues met. She hesitated for a moment, and then the tip darted out to meet mine.

  Then, without warning, everything tilted on its axis, and suddenly we were devouring each other.

  She moaned softly into my mouth and tangled her tongue with mine. My heart started slamming like crazy in my chest as I pulled her even closer to me. I felt her own heart fluttering against mine in response. Jesus, it was amazing. Never in my life had I ever felt so shattered by one simple kiss. I was almost paralyzed by the force of it — on the one hand, I never wanted to do anything but this for the rest of my life, and on the other I wanted to pull her down to the ground and fuck her, press myself inside her and let loose the desperate ache in my balls that I always felt whenever she was around.

  I don’t know how long we stayed like that. I remember trailing my lips behind her ears, nibbling on her soft lobes, the soft sensual beat of the pulse in her neck. I remember my hands traveling to her breasts, thumbing the nipples to hardness through her shirt and bra. I remember the fucking glorious sound of her shallow breaths, the hitch in her throat whenever I did something that excited her.

  Eventually, she pulled away and stared at me, her eyes dark with passion and need. “I… she whispered. “I think we should stop.” She blushed. “For now.”

  “Whatever you say, princess.” I whispered the words against her neck, reveling in the shiver it sent through her. I was willing to go however fast or slow she wanted. All I cared about was that she was with me, and that maybe next time, she’d let me go a little farther. It would all but kill me to wait, but I’d take all the time she needed if it meant that eventually she’d be mine.

  We got up from the bench, me struggling to contain my raging hard-on and her looking flushed and a little flustered. Wordlessly, I took her hand and twined my fingers through hers. I couldn’t ever remember having done that with a girl before. It felt good. Natural. I wanted to keep doing it.

  We wandered around the trails surrounding the hot springs for a while longer, talking softly, me occasionally pulling her close and nuzzling her neck. Eventually, she told me with a sigh that she needed to get home.

  We headed back over to the bike and I handed her the helmet. She strapped it on and got on behind me, her arms wrapping around me tightly, but not nervously this time. Somehow, I could feel the difference. I reached down and caressed her thigh through her jeans, grazing a fingernail slowly as high as I dared. My heart leapt with pleasure as I heard her sharp intake of breath.

  Then I fired up the bike and pulled out toward home.

  I didn’t know where Eva lived, so she had to give me directions to her house. It was in a neighborhood not too far from the school, working class and a little run-down in places, like my own. A couple of kids were playing with a ball in the street, and I was careful to swerve around them as they stopped their play and stared wide-eyed at us and the
bike. I heard and felt Eva chuckle behind me, and I couldn’t help but smile, too.

  I pulled up at the curb in front of the house she had indicated and shut off the bike, holding it steady for her as she got off. She took off the helmet and handed it to me. Her hair was disheveled, her cheeks flushed. She looked gorgeous. “Thanks, Caleb. I had a great time.”

  I grinned at her. “Me, too. Maybe we could do it again sometime?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but a loud screaming cut her off. From the front door of the house, a woman emerged. The screen door banged loudly shut behind her. “God damnit, Eva, where the hell have you been?”

  The woman was dressed in an ill-fitting T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans that looked like they hadn’t been washed in a while. “Get in the goddamn house, now!”

  The woman’s hair was a shade darker than Eva’s, and her face was prematurely aged in that way that alcoholics and heavy smokers look, but the resemblance was still there. This had to be Eva’s mom.

  “Get the hell away from that bike! What the hell is wrong with you!” she screamed. Eva glanced at me, her expression scandalized. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, and fled up the walk toward the house.

  Brushing past her mother, she ran inside, the door slamming again behind her. The woman continued to yell, and began to berate me as the little kids stared at us in silence.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I did the only thing I could think of. I strapped the helmet on the back of the bike, fired it up, and got the hell out of there.

  I had never thought to get Eva’s phone number from her, and I didn’t know anyone who would have it, so I had to wait until Monday to see her. The weekend dragged by slower than any weekend ever had. And even though I got some invitations to go party with people, I found myself leaving early and riding the bike around restlessly.

  Monday finally came, and I couldn’t wait until the first class we had together to see her. I went to her locker before the first bell, hoping she’d show up, but she never did. Disappointed, I went back before chemistry, when normally I would walk her to class, but she wasn’t there. She didn’t show up to chem, and she wasn’t in English, either. I had no idea what to make of it, and was antsy as fuck all day.