Beast: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Hounds of Hades MC) (Asphalt Sins Book 3)

by Naomi West

  J.T. wheeled his bike out of the shop and then revved the engine, looking pleased with the way that she purred. “That's a beautiful sound,” he said, grinning lopsidedly over at me.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes a little. “You're going to have the nicest bike on the ride. Don’t worry, I know it.” I grinned over at Jessi, slinging my arm around her shoulder. “But at least I'm going to have the prettiest girl on the ride—and the latest hotshot designer, to boot!”

  Jessi ducked her head a little. “Don't bring that up again or we're going to end up with more business than we know what to do with,” she warned.

  “I'm still so proud of you,” Mick told her, leaning over to give her a one-armed hug before we climbed onto my bike. “The Severn's Young Talent Award for Design and the finishing touches on J.T.'s bike, all in the same week. What are you going to do next week?”

  Jessi snorted. “Sleep, I hope,” she said. “It's been a lot of long nights and early mornings lately!”

  “I second that,” I said, snorting too.

  As Jessi swung onto the back of my bike, I grinned, feeling her arms settle around me. “You know, I never thought I would take someone else on this bike, but this is becoming a pretty regular occurrence,” I said.

  “I know,” Jessi said. “I mean, I tried to tell you that we could take that experimental one that I've been working on, but ...”

  “Anything that you admit to as being 'experimental' isn't something that I want to fly down the highway on,” I told her. It was a conversation that we had already had, but that made it easy and familiar rather than boring.

  “I told you, the 'experimental' bit just has to do with-”

  I revved the engine on my own bike, effectively cutting her off. “Come on, enough shop talk for the day,” I told her. “Let's get going.”

  There were a lot of bikers out at the meetup point when we got there, and I looked around for familiar faces. Of course, Jessi had already met most, if not all, of the Hounds of Hades' club members, but there were a few guys from different clubs that I wanted her to meet—guys from different parts of the country that I rode with whenever they were in town. And Jessi seemed to be game to meet them all, fortunately.

  We flew down the highway together, starting at 10am. J.T. was out in front of the Hounds of Hades group, and I could tell that he was loving his new bike—and if I could tell he was loving it, I was sure that Jessi could as well. She was good at reading people. That was part of why she was such a good designer.

  Around noon, we stopped off to barbecue some lunch, and I made the rounds with Jessi. “This is Nick, but we all call him Chainsaw,” I told her. “And that's Rooster over there.”

  “Chainsaw and Rooster,” Jessi said, shaking her head and laughing a little. “I bet there are some pretty good stories behind those nicknames?”

  “Yeah, but not as good as the one behind Rip's nickname, which is just 'Asshole' because-”

  “Hey!” I said, lunging playfully towards Mikey, who easily fended me off.

  “We're going to have to give your wife a nickname as well, if she's going to be hanging around with us,” Chainsaw said seriously.

  I blushed a little, and when I glanced over, Jessi was blushing as well. “She's not my wife,” I said to the guys. “We're just ...” I trailed off, because Jessi and I hadn't really had that conversation yet, despite the fact that we had cleared everything with her father.

  “I'm his girlfriend,” Jessi said, looking over at me with a challenge in her eyes.

  “She's my girlfriend,” I affirmed, smiling at her. Surprisingly, the words weren't as difficult to say as I'd expected them to be. I didn't feel any reason to go running for the hills now that we were getting closer to one another. We worked well together as a partnership, both professionally and personally, and now that Ellsmith was out of the picture, everything was good.

  “Guys, hotdogs or hamburgers?” one of the guys asked, coming around from the grills. We put in our orders and he walked off.

  “Can I get you a drink?” I asked Jessi, slipping an arm around her waist. “There should be beer somewhere. Or there's water, probably.”

  “Water would be great,” Jessi said, smiling up at me.

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “And I can't tempt you to even a single beer?”

  I didn't miss the way her hand strayed towards her stomach, although it didn't quite come to a rest there. “No, no alcohol for me today,” she said pointedly.

  I blinked at her and then pulled her into a hug. “Jesus, woman, you're going to drop something like that on me in front of all these people?” I asked in an undertone. “Why not tell me about that when we can celebrate it properly?”

  Jessi laughed and pulled away. “Well, I've been trying to figure out how to tell you for days now,” she said. “This just seemed like the perfect opportunity.”

  J.T. chose that moment to wander over, a huge smile on his face. “I'm loving the bike,” he said. “She handles so smoothly, and she just really lays into those turns. Man.” He tapped Jessi on the nose. “But there are a lot of other guys who are eyeing the bike and seem pretty interested, so I have a feeling you're going to get plenty more work out of this deal.”

  “She might not be working around the shop for too much soon,” I said, looking down at Jessi's stomach, even though I knew she wasn't showing yet.

  J.T. raised an eyebrow at me, watching where my gaze went, and then he whistled softly. “You're going to be a father, aren't you?” he asked.

  “And I guess you're going to be some sort of a godfather, aren't you?” I asked, a smirk on my face.

  “Oh, no,” Jessi said, shaking her head. “This kid is having nothing to do with bikes. I'll send him away to boarding school if I have to.”

  I laughed a little at that, even though I honestly had some of the same trepidations that she felt.

  “Well, I'm sure that you'll keep designing, even when you're not working directly in the shop, won't you?” J.T. asked. “And, pretty soon, maybe the newest young talent will have some new young talent to inspire her.”

  Jessi snorted a little. “I don't want this kid anywhere near bikes,” she said. “Last thing I need is for him to grow up anything like me or Rip!”

  “Speak for yourself,” I said haughtily, and she laughed.

  “In all seriousness,” J.T. said, shaking his head with mirth in his eyes. “Congratulations, you two. That's great news.”

  Of course, that meant that things were really happening and that I was going to need to either run through the club rules with Jessi or quit the club myself. There would be plenty that we would need to figure out. But for right now …

  I smiled a little and turned my face towards the sun, already thinking about what it would be like to have a son who I could ride motorcycles with and who I could work in the shop with. Someone who would eventually take over the family business, just like Jessi would when her dad retired.

  I leaned over and kissed Jessi lightly on the lips, stroking her hair back behind her ear. “If there's anything that you need, just let me know,” I told her. “You know that I'm here for you.”

  “I know that you're here for me,” Jessi affirmed, smiling at me. “And thanks for that, Rip. You're a wonderful guy.”

  “I love you,” I said quietly to her, my voice probably as serious as she had ever heard it.

  She looked up at me with the same seriousness in her expression, though. “I love you, too,” she told me. “I love you, too.”

  Epilogue

  Rip

  I glanced over at Jessi, grinning at her. “So how old does he have to be before I can take him on his first bike ride?” I asked.

  Jessi rolled her eyes, then grimaced in pain, and I could tell that she'd had another contraction. I glanced at my watch. Yeah, they were definitely coming more frequently now. But she was staying pretty quiet about them still, powering through them in a way that impressed me.

  She gasped a little
towards the end of this one and then gave me a sheepish look. “Sorry,” she said, as though she'd done something wrong.

  I reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “Should I be saying sorry for knocking you up?” I joked.

  Jessi snorted. “Only if you take the kid on his first bike ride before he's twenty-one,” she told me. “Because if so, I'm going to kill you.”

  I shook my head, laughing a little. “Right, like Jessi Ford's kid isn't going to grow up practically living on motorcycles,” I said. “You're the hottest talent in the country at the moment. That kid is going to be a master of riding bikes by the time he's, like, ten.”

  “He'd better not be,” Jessi said, shaking her head as well. “Not that I have anything against the lifestyle, of course—obviously it's worked out well for me. But do you realize how dangerous motorcycles are? So many people get killed in so many stupid ways every year … and there's no way in hell that I'm ever letting him get involved with a motorcycle club, whether it's the Hounds of Hades or anyone else. The last thing I need is for our son to wind up in jail!”

  “Guess he's not going to be working around the shop much then, huh?” I asked. Jessi still helped out a lot around the shops. At least, she had until her pregnancy had gotten too far along. They were both technically owned by the Hounds of Hades at the moment, just to make things simpler for her and her father to manage.

  Jessi grimaced. “I sound just like Dad did when I told him that I wanted to go into automotive engineering, I know,” she said. “But seriously. This kid is not-” She broke off, her hands squeezing tightly into fists, and I began to drive a little faster. It would have been so much quicker on the bike, but there was no way I was driving a woman having contractions to the hospital on my souped-up motorbike.

  “And we're giving him the least biker-dude name that we can come up with,” Jessi continued, when she was breathing normally again.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “I mean, it's got to be something ...good. Like James.”

  “You do realize that J.T.'s first name is actually James, right?” I asked. “James Thompson—J.T. And he's one of the most stereotypical bikers that I've ever met.”

  “So not James then,” Jessi said. “But, seriously. It's going to be something where we don't have to worry about him-”

  “His name isn't going to determine whether he becomes a biker,” I argued exasperatedly. “But probably the fact that he's growing up with two bikers who own a couple different chop shops around the city … well, that's what's going to do it.”

  Jessi shook her head stubbornly. “Nope,” she said. “That kid is going to become-”

  “Whatever he wants to be,” I finished. “Just like his mama did.” I grinned over at her. “Jessi, you sound just like your dad. And you see exactly how well that turned out.”

  Jessi grinned back over at me and reached out to hold my hand where it was resting on the gearshift.

  “I love you,” I told her, even though I knew she already knew that.

  She smiled over at me as well. “I love you, too,” she said. “Sorry I'm being a bit crazy about all of this. I just already can't stand the idea of him being hurt—either physically or because he's fallen for some asshole biker chick who never gives him the time of day.” Then, she placed a hand lightly over her stomach, grinning that same silly grin that she had got the day that she had told me that she was pregnant. “I love you two—both of you,” she said.

  I gave her a soft smile, still hardly believing that things had worked out so well for us. “We both love you,” I told her just as we arrived at the hospital where our son would be born.

  THE END

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  He Doesn’t Know: A Bad Boy Second Chance Baby Romance (Devil’s Route MC)

  By Naomi West

  HE DOESN’T KNOW I HID OUR BABY FROM HIM.

  It’s been eight years since the night he took me…

  And I still can’t get his taste out of my mouth.

  I’m coming back to tell him about our son.

  It’s time to bring these old secrets to light.

  But there’s something else the biker also doesn’t know:

  There’s a killer coming home to find me.

  Chapter One

  Halley

  I took a sip of my drink, looking around the crowded, rowdy bar and smiling a little to myself. God, my parents would kill me if they knew I was here, I thought. I mean, my parents were so conservative that there would have been serious consequences if they found out that at 18, I had a fake ID — let alone if they knew that I had used it to get into one of the most notorious biker bars in the city.

  But I couldn't help it. It was my friend Tiffany's 21st birthday, and given the amount of money Tiffany's parents had allowed her to spend on this shindig, this was probably one of the hottest parties of the year. And the whole thing had been organized by Tiff's brother — a sexy, late-20's biker. That meant that the whole crowd was pretty much made up of people older and more street-smart than me, with killer tattoos on every visible bit of skin and sexy motorcycles parked out front.

  Anyway, it was nice to just get out from under my parents' strict rules for a night and let my hair down.

  “What's a pretty little thing like you doing standing here, all by yourself?” a guy asked, leaning against the bar next to me. He was standing a little too close, and I could smell alcohol strong and sour on his breath. But it kind of gave me a thrill to think that he was into me like that.

  I mean, I was under no illusions; it was that time of night when people were coupling off. There was a man at the other end of the bar trading sloppy, heated kisses with two hot blonde girls, one on either side of him. There was another couple pressed against the wall just to my right, and with the way the woman had her long, tanned legs wrapped around the biker's waist with her skirt hitched all the way up… Well, I wasn't about to look too closely, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two of them were…

  I blushed a little just thinking about it. But it was nice to think that this sexy, older dude standing next to me might be interested in doing something like that with me. It made me feel older, more mature — kind of powerful.

  So, I grinned at him as though he was the best thing I'd seen all night. And I tossed my hair a little, as though I wasn’t a bumbling virgin. Fake it 'til you make it, right?

  “I guess I was just trying to find someone who would actually interest me,” I lied. Really, I was feeling kind of tired and thinking that it was maybe time to give it up for the night and head home. “These biker dudes, you know, all they ever want to talk about is their bikes and their babes.”

  The man laughed a little, leaning in even closer and putting his arm around my lower back. His hand dropped daringly down to squeeze my ass, and I blushed. But I didn't pull away. I had seen touches like that exchanged all night, and I knew he didn't really mean anything by it. Anyway, what was I supposed to do about it, be the uncool one and be like, “Hey, that's disrespectful. You shouldn’t do that to a woman!”

  I don't think so.

  The man seemed pleased with my neutral reaction, and I preened a little at that. “I'm Halley,” I said, holding my hand out to him.

  He looked amused as he shook my hand, and I realized that that was probably a decidedly uncool thing to do. He was probably looking for some random, anonymous sex, and here I was telling him my name. Next thing you knew, I was going to start babbling my whole life history to him.

  “I'm Danny,” the man said, though, not making any sort of comment about how uncool I might have been. And I was grateful for tha
t, at least.

  I bit my lower lip, trying to figure out what to say next. But before I had the chance to say anything, Danny was leaning in close, and without preamble, his tongue flicked out to trace the shell of my ear. He lightly grazed his teeth against the earlobe, and I couldn't help but shudder, surprised as he awakened a bundle of lusty nerves that I had never known existed. But all the same, there was something holding me back.

  I took a step away from him, awkwardly staring down at my mostly empty drink.

  “Hey, let me buy you another drink,” Danny said, following my gaze. And he probably thought that that would be it, that he could buy me another drink, get me good and drunk, and then have his merry way with me. I wasn't that type of woman, though.