by Vivian Gray
She went to him and kissed him as hard as she knew how. He didn’t respond with a snarl this time; she had to take his hand and put it in her hair to let him know she still wanted his roughness.
“Jacob, I’m going to say this once, and very slowly, so that you understand. I’m choosing you. I’m choosing us, this. I want us to be a family. You and me and Izzy, but you and me as well. I want you to live here with us, and I want us to have competitions on the weekends to see who cooks the better bacon.”
“I do. I have skills.”
“Hush.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The only time he’d ever said that in his life, she was sure of it.
“The point is that this is our house. Our room.” She hooked a finger in his belt loops and took a step back, tugging him with her. “Our bed.”
There was that dark heat in his eyes again. “Is it now?”
“Yes, it is. And right now, I want very much for you to fuck me on our nice new bed.”
“We’ll get it messy,” he said, laughing.
“One can only hope.”
She was already half naked, so it was easy to pull her T-shirt up over her head and free her breasts from her bra. She enjoyed him pulling his belt free from his pants. He doubled it and slapped it against his palm, making her shiver, but then he tossed it aside. He shucked his pants and boxers, tossed his shirt into a corner, and then he was just as naked as she was.
He came down onto her quickly, his mouth closing over hers as his fingers stroked her pussy again. He pressed into her, spreading her open with more purpose this time. She was still sensitive from before, and she whimpered just a little, but not enough to make him stop. Which was just fine with her.
This time, when she wrapped her hand around his cock, he didn’t swat her away. He was hard, but the strokes of her hand made him harder, left him panting against her. He wanted her just as badly as she wanted him, and God that felt good. When her breasts and belly were painted with stretch marks, when her stomach wasn’t as firm as it had been, that felt good.
He took her hair in his hand and pulled while he sank into her. She let out a long, slow noise, relishing the sweet compression of her cunt around his cock as he made room for himself inside of her, and then he began to move. Every sensitive nerve fired at once, and suddenly she was gasping and hungry for him all over again. He lowered her head to bite her nipple while he continued his leisurely pace inside of her. She bucked her hips, trying to get him to move faster, harder, anything at all, but he was taking his damn time. Figured. He moved at the pace he wanted, and when he wanted more, he took it. Between one thrust and the next, he was harsh, hard, fucking her as viciously as he ever had. He took her knee in his hand and lifted it up, giving himself the angle he wanted as he slammed into her cunt. All she could do was hold on as he fucked her, feeling pleasure swirling and collecting in her low belly all over again. She wondered if she was going to come a second time, if his frantic, desperate movements were going to be enough to drive her over the edge.
He must have seen the need in her face because he slowed just enough to get fingers between them and pinch her clit hard, twisting just enough to make her cram the heel of her hand into her mouth to keep from screaming as she came, as hard as she’d ever wanted. That, more than anything else, seemed to be what tipped him over the edge. He came with a slow groan, spurting inside of her so hot and thick that the sensation was unmistakable for anything else. He kept moving for several long moments, his thick cock pulsing against her taut walls, letting her milk his cock for everything it had to give.
He sagged over the bed, then rolled to the side before he crushed her under his weight. “Good?” he asked with a soft sigh in his voice.
“So good.” She curled up into his open arms. “You?”
“Fantastic. But there’s one more thing I need to show you.”
She blinked hard, trying to keep sleep at bay for a little longer. Sex was good, but whoever had said to sleep when the baby sleeps wasn’t kidding; she got half her rest these days when Izzy was napping. “What is it?”
Her eyes were closed, even though she was sure she was still awake. She didn’t notice at first that he was manipulating her hand, not until there was something cold pressed over one of her fingers. She opened her eyes and saw a small, tasteful diamond set in platinum on her ring finger.
“Jacob.”
“I’ll take it back if you don’t like it, and we can find something else. But I wanted an actual ring to offer when I asked, so I picked this one. I’m not sure if you even like rings, I just—”
She kissed his chest, the closest part of him. “I love it. And yes.”
“I want to ask it. Just to be official.”
“Okay.”
He leaned back. “Laurie, mother of my child, will you marry me?”
She’d already said yes, so she kissed him instead.
THE END
***
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And then… keep reading for a sneak preview of Book 1 in the Outlaw MC Romance Collection – SILAS!
Sneak Preview of SILAS
Read on for a sneak preview of my first book, Silas!
Silas: A Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance (Death Knells MC)
Biker. Outlaw. Bad boy. Killer?
On his deathbed, my MC president made me swear to keep his daughter safe.
But marrying the girl is a dangerous mistake.
She’s in my house now – and I can’t keep my hands off of her.
Which is how she ended up pregnant with my baby.
JESSA
Silas has always done what he needed to do to survive.
But I could never be with a man whose hands are covered in innocent blood.
It doesn’t matter that he’d do anything to keep me safe.
I don’t need to be protected – I need to be free.
Free from pain.
Free from violence.
Free from my past.
But I’m trapped in a contradiction.
Because the only place I truly feel alive is on the back of Silas’s bike.
I can’t submit to this life.
I’ve got a bright future, far away from here.
At least, that’s what I used to think.
But now, every time Silas lays his hands on me…
Every time he takes me to his bed and shows me what my body craves…
I’m forced to admit:
I belong to him.
SILAS
Jessa tried to run away from the biker world.
But I jumped into the deep end.
I’ve done bad things in my time down here.
Robbed. Hurt. Killed.
All for the club. For my brothers.
But my sins have changed me. Marked me.
I can’t be near a woman anymore.
Especially not one as pure and innocent as Jessa.
If she gets too close…
There’s no telling what I might do to her.
Which is why this fake marriage is a huge mistake.
I swore to her father – my dying president – that I’d protect his only daughter.
But I never expected it to come to this:
Her walking through my house.
Sleeping in my bed.
And – God help us both – having my baby.
Chapter One
341 B. 341 B.
Jessa swallowed a sick knot in her throat as the room number ran through her mind. The hospital had too many damn hallways. She skidded to a stop in front of a plaque with room numbers pointing in opposite directions. The anxiety made it impossible to digest what she was seeing. She pressed a hand to her forehead.
341 B.
She hung a left, her legs feeling wooden as she remembered the phone call. One of the motorcycle club brothers. A guy she hadn’t seen in yea
rs – telling her she needed to come to the hospital ASAP. Her father had been shot.
Most times when a brother got shot, it didn’t even warrant a second glance.
If they had been instructed to call her, the estranged daughter of the Death Knells’ president, then it could only be bad.
Bad bad bad. 341 Bad.
The breath whooshed out of her when she finally found the room. Hands shaking, she turned the door handle. She hadn’t seen her father face-to-face in two years. Even then, it had been fleeting and perfunctory. A sort of “let’s try to make this relationship better” meetup that had ultimately led to nothing changing.
Because how could it? Her father, Stone, was committed to his MC. Jessa’s little brother had died at the helm of it, too, so Jessa never wanted a part of their fake trappings of security and brotherhood.
Better to just go their separate ways.
And now look where the MC got you, Dad.
The door creaked as it swung open. A dimly lit room greeted her. And six Death Knells members turned to look at her.
The room seemed to shrink under the quiet protectiveness of the club brothers. There was barely a sound as she stepped in, save for the weak beeping of a machine hooked up to her father. His grizzled features looked even more war-torn than she remembered under the dim light of the room.
He gestured for her to approach, an IV stuck in his hand.
Jessa looked at the brothers as she headed for the bed. There wasn’t animosity necessarily, but rather a feeling of two species of different worlds acknowledging each other. A rabbit nodding at a dinosaur. A scientist stepping into the world of a porn star.
“Jessa.” Her father’s rasp was weak – almost sounded like a different person entirely. “You came.” The surprise registered in his voice despite the breathing tube. After all, he had good reason to think she might not come.
But Jessa had debated, then realized, at the end of the day, that she at least needed to see the old man off.
“What happened?” She slid her hand into his rough outstretched fingers. His familiar warmth brought back tender memories of childhood – the way he used to lead her to her favorite ice cream shop on Sundays, the effortless way he could throw her up, high into the sky, while she shrieked with joy, and the overall sense that her daddy would always be her protector. No matter what life threw their way.
Except he couldn’t protect your brother. And he couldn’t protect himself. So you had to protect yourself through distance.
“I don’t think you want to know.” He managed a weak laugh. Jessa was acutely aware of the brick wall of brothers surrounding her and her father. The men were motionless, stoic – always there to do the president’s bidding. “It was tense. We lost a brother.”
She sniffed. “And now you.” Her gaze traveled over the bandages wrapped around his bicep. He shifted in bed, wincing. “Where were you shot?”
He let out a rattling sigh. “My gut and my chest.”
“So why aren’t they just sewing you up?” She glanced around the hospital room. A few pairs of eyes were on her. Who could tell what these guys knew about her, much less what they thought of her? Two she recognized from her childhood; longtime pals and brothers of the club. The rest were strangers; probably recruited sometime in the past six years that she’d distanced herself fully from her father and the club.
Her baby brother, Jake, had died at age eighteen as a recruit for the Death Knells. It had destroyed her, and their father, too. But the fact that the old man didn’t give up the MC lifestyle immediately hadn’t sat well with her. It just didn’t make sense for him to support the lifestyle that had killed his only son.
Not that this crowd would be sympathetic.
“The way the bullet entered…” He paused, wheezing. “I’ve got some internal bleeding. It’s real bad, Gem.”
He’d always called her his ‘Jessa Gem’ growing up – pretty like a gemstone. She rolled her lips inward, studying the seam of his hospital-issued blanket. She wouldn’t cry here, not in front of all these men she didn’t know.
Jessa squeezed his hand as she tamped down the emotions threatening to spill out of her. After a few moments of painful silence, she found her voice. Turning to the brothers gathered around them, she said, “Can we have a few minutes?”
The brothers regarded her in stony silence. Maybe her father had instructed them to be invisible, or maybe this was the byproduct of her truly awful reputation. Stone nodded, flicking his fingers toward the door. She watched as they filed out like a bizarre version of a schoolroom line; these grown boys in their matching uniforms, black leather cuts with the same gnarled bell sewn onto the back.
The last man out of the room caught her eye – a guy who looked about her age, hair pulled into a bun at the top of his head with a freshly shorn undercut underneath. Bright blue eyes zapped her to attention. The biker Jared Leto. He looked like he was about to say something, but her father held up his hand.
“It’s fine, Silas. You can go.”
Silas sent her a disapproving look and then retreated from the room. When it was just the two of them, Jessa arched a brow.
“They all but barked at me,” she noted.
“They’re protective.” Her father winced as he shifted on the bed. “They’re good guys.”
Jessa bit back a snarky response. It wasn’t a good idea to aggravate old wounds, not now. Not when this very well might be the last time she ever spoke to her father.
But what else was there to say? The truth was so glaringly obvious; he wouldn’t be dying if it weren’t for the MC. However good those guys were, their every waking moment reinforced a sad truth: Jessa’s brother, and soon her father, didn’t value their lives enough to save themselves.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said feebly, her own voice sounding foreign to her. “I wasn’t prepared for this.”
“Me neither, Gem.”
“But how could you let it happen?” Her brows furrowed, emotion bubbling up and over the top. Tamping it down wasn’t working. It would come out one way or another. “You’ve lived your life on the edge for so long. Wasn’t Jake’s death the proof you needed to take a back seat?”
The sigh that slithered out of her father contained all the exhaustion and annoyance built up over his lifetime. “Gem, I don’t have the words to explain this to you. Not again. Not here.”
“But… you could have chosen life.” Tears welled in her eyes. She thought she had reconciled the loss of her father years ago – back when she decided to act as though he were already dead. But apparently, she was wrong. “You could have chosen a relationship with me.”
“Gem, you think I didn’t choose you?” His hand squeezed hers. “I always chose you. You just didn’t see it.”
“Oh yeah?” She let a sarcastic laugh at the same time tears spilled out of her eyes. She wiped them away hastily. “Sure, looked a lot like choosing the MC.”
He shook his head, the pulse monitor spiking. “It was never about choosing the MC. I am the MC. Don’t you get that?”
A heavy silence settled between them while Jessa focused on the bed. Just let it go. These wounds will heal someday. She had to believe it. And she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life lamenting the fact that she fought with her dad on his deathbed.
“I’ve always loved you, Dad.” She sniffed hard, bringing the back of his hand up to her lips. “You need to know that. I just couldn’t stay close after what happened with Jake. But I’ve always loved you.”
“I know, baby.” The pulse monitor went back to a normal rate. He mustered a small smile. “You’ve always been my baby girl. My beautiful Gem.”
Jessa pinched her eyes shut as the tears flowed. There was no holding them back.
“Daddy, I’m gonna miss you.” Her voice broke as she spoke, and tears were shining in his eyes, too. “I’m gonna make you proud. I’m sorry I wasted our time together.”
Jessa pressed her head to his chest, and he wrapped a big
arm around her. She cried into his chest until she couldn’t cry anymore. When she finally pulled herself off him, he wiped away a few tears from his face.
“There’s something I need to tell you before I go,” he began. “But before I do, go grab Silas from outside.”
***
Silas had been staring at the hospital room door for what felt like hours. Every second away from his president stretched on like an hour. These final moments were precious, and hell if that bitch daughter of his deserved them.
