But… well. Some days, you wake up changed. That change had happened to her many times before, always in bad ways, ways that she was painfully aware of, ways that she’d give anything not to have happened. But this change, it was different.
For the first time since she’d changed her boring-as-dirt name all those years ago, Annie felt that same frisson of glamour – that tiny glimmer of being something a bit special. Not super-special, or Hollywood-level glamorous, but still… she felt… well. Honestly?
She felt like a princess. Sam’s princess. And she was hesitating about sharing that with anyone. Even her best friend.
She wasn’t totally sure why she was hesitant, but she thought that it had something to do with an expression that she’d heard once, about how exposing monsters to the light turned them to stone. She thought that was true, and she also thought that it worked in reverse: that exposing beautiful secrets to the world at large took away their light, their purity, their rarity. Made them just one more random story out there, added them to the mindless noise and mess and confusion, led to them losing their fragile uniqueness and delicate beauty.
She didn’t want that, didn’t want to turn what had happened between her and Sam into idle gossip passed on in a diner kitchen. She wanted to protect it, keep it safe and warm and almost sacred – and right in this moment, the only way that she could think how to do that was to stay silent, and keep it to herself.
Just for now. Maybe just for a little while longer.
No way that Talia was going to let that happen though; one look at her face told Annie that. So here she was, standing in a kitchen that reeked of fried food, oil spitting and hissing on the grill as Damon cooked more home fries and bacon, scrambling to figure out how much to spill and how much to stay mum about.
“So?” Talia said impatiently. “So why didn’t you sleep with him?”
Carefully, Annie set the stack of plates next to the sink, shot a look at Damon to see if he’d heard. The man never said more than twelve words in the average nine-hour shift, but just because his mouth was crazy glued shut didn’t mean that his ears weren’t wide open.
“OK, look,” Annie said quietly. “I didn’t because he said he wanted to wait.”
“Wait?” Talia’s voice was raised pretty high, and Damon glanced over. “Wait for what? The zombie apocalypse? The wind to change? The freezing-over of hell so you can go skating?”
“No!” Annie hissed. “He wants to wait until it’s right.”
“Right for who?”
“For me. OK, Talia? Right for me.”
“For –” Her friend stopped dead. “Wait. You got issues with this?”
“Some.”
“Ohhhhhh.” Talia stared at her unblinking, unmoving, unspeaking. Then she said, “You want to talk about it, sweetie?”
Now it was Annie’s turn to stare. She’d known Talia for thirteen years, and she knew everything about the woman’s life, from her childhood back in Louisiana to this exact second in time as they stood in this kitchen in Colorado. They’d spent countless nights sharing a bottle of cheap white wine or gut-rot whiskey and talking until the sun came up, so Annie knew all about Talia’s nightmare upbringing that wasn’t so different from her own.
She knew all about Talia’s marriage, which also wasn’t so different from her own – except for the fact that Talia had left her deadbeat, alcoholic husband, instead of waiting for him to leave her, the way that Annie had done. Of course, Talia had left in the middle of the night, and she’d been nursing three broken ribs and a fractured cheekbone and could barely see out of a swollen black eye when she’d run for her life… but she’d left.
So it was a surprise to Annie that Talia could surprise her still – but she did, and she did pretty often. In this second, the smart-ass, sassy, hard-boiled, feisty Talia was gone, and she was shy and compassionate and uncertain. She had this side, naturally, but she thought of it as weakness and she rarely showed it, even to Annie.
Here it was, though, in all its sweet, gentle glory, as Talia stood there not demanding or pushing anymore… just worried and genuinely wanting to help.
Unable to stop herself, Annie hugged her friend. Talia was startled, but returned the embrace.
“I don’t need to talk,” Annie said. “I’m OK.”
“Yeah? You sure?”
“Yeah and totally and really. It’s all so sudden, you know? I just need an adjustment period, and I need to get to know him. I – I have a few trust issues where men are concerned, and I have some baggage to set down on the floor and walk away from. I just need a bit of time.”
“He knows how you’re feeling?”
“Yeah. He gets me, Talia, really gets me. He’s not going to rush me or make me do anything I don’t feel ready for. He’s – well.” How to sum up Sam in a few words? “He’s great.”
“OK, then.” Talia gave her a smile. “I’ll stop asking, alright? You tell me what you want when you want. I’ll spring for the wine. Hell, I’ll even pay more than six bucks for the bottle for once.”
“You know it.”
“Orders up!” Damon bellowed, effectively using most of his speaking quota for the shift. Both women jumped, then laughed. And they went back to work.
Chapter Six
Matt ‘King’ Kingston stood in Dangerous Curves, glaring around the bar. No real reason for the glare, since nothing was going on that remotely deserved it, but it was King’s normal expression most days. It had a preventative effect on the rough clientele at Curves, for damn sure, and more so when King was flanked by Jax and Mac, since all three men were towering and glowering. Throw in Aidan Carter and Luke Rhodes pouring drinks behind the bar, and Dillon Saunders and Curtis Manning bouncing, and even the drunkest, rowdiest, most brain-dead motorcycle club member, or ex-con, or drug dealer, or general idiot, paused in whatever stupidity they were contemplating and decided against it.
“Hey,” Aidan said to him now, passing King a beer. “What’s going on, man? Who you contemplating killing?”
King shifted his gray glare to the Texan with the golden eyes and hair. “Nobody.”
“No?” Aidan grinned, all sunny charm and honeyed manners. “Nobody yet? Or nobody at all?”
King took a swig of beer. “Nobody at all… that I know of.”
“Ah. So nobody yet.” Aidan took a look around himself, shrugged his massive shoulders. “Seems like most everyone’s cool and calm, man. Things have been pretty subdued since that whole Fallen Angels thing went down a few weeks ago.”
He shot King a sharp look, watched the man closely. Aidan was an ex-cop, an ex-DEA officer from Texas, and he knew how to read people like books… but Matt Kingston rarely gave anything much away. His military background, coupled with his special-ops experience with King’s Men, had resulted in an implacable and emotionless exterior.
But Aidan knew that King and his Men had been involved in the Fallen Angels motorcycle club massacre. Hell, every one of King’s friends knew it, but as with everything to do with his work, King had been tight-lipped. The only thing that he’d said was that without Wolf Connor and Scars Innis, the President and Vice-President of the Road Devils MC, things might have gone differently the night that King and his people had stormed that warehouse to rescue Ace Cuddy. Ace had been the President of the Fallen Angels MC; he’d also been King’s informant. His life had been in danger from the moment he’d first betrayed his own MC, his brothers, his family – and when his time had run out, he’d been taken. Beaten. Cut up. Disfigured. The man had been through hell, but he’d walked out the other side in one piece. More or less.
Where Ace had ended up, Aidan had no clue – but according to Mac, he was gone, and he’d gone with his ex-boyfriend, Spider Valance. The only reason that Aidan knew this for sure was that Spider had given his business, The Web Café, to Mirrie Kane, Mac’s fiancée, as a wedding gift. Spider still retai
ned some percentage, but Mirrie officially had the controlling stake. She had no expectation of Spider ever returning to Denver, though, so she was the one making the decisions, and according to Mac, she’d never been happier at work.
Mirrie wasn’t totally happy, though, despite being the owner of a successful business and being engaged to the man she’d loved so much that she’d left him to save his life. Her older brother, Donovan ‘Joker’ Kane, had been one of the Fallen Angels MC members killed in that bloodbath – and although she’d always, always known that her brother would die a violent, awful death, she’d never thought that a good friend of her fiancé’s would be the one to orchestrate it.
Aidan knew that King’s guilt at being a party to Joker’s death was real, but it was minimal, all things considered. King felt badly for Mirrie, knew that she was hurting… but he also knew that the world was a much better place without Joker Kane and his fucking criminal ilk in it. And that was the overreaching sentiment in King’s heart: that Joker had had it coming, that he’d made his choice a long time ago, that he’d been lucky to go as quickly as he had, because God knows, he hadn’t deserved that tiny kindness that King had shown him, that small mercy that King had extended him. Kane had deserved to suffer, to be made to beg for release from his agony, he’d deserved to hurt – but King had spared him all of that.
King was a man who did hard, questionable things, but he always checked with his most moral, pure self before he did them, and he stood by that night at the warehouse; he’d stand by it until his dying day. And though he’d have happily made Joker Kane crawl on his belly to his slow, painful death and been perfectly OK with that, he hadn’t done it… and he hadn’t done it because of Mirrie. He had no illusions that Mirrie would appreciate that, though, mainly because he had no intention of telling her. Not ever. Some things were just better left unsaid, and choosing how to kill a woman’s brother fell pretty firmly into that category.
King was silent now, choosing not to respond to Aidan’s casual mentioning of the Fallen Angels. Yeah, it was true that since that MC had been blown off the planet, to all intents and purposes, the criminal element in Denver had been shocked and awed into subdued contemplation. Losing the one-percenter MC had disrupted pretty much everything and everyone – from the drug dealers to the strip clubs to the weapons smuggling businesses to the sex trafficking rings – and the ripple effect went far beyond the city limits. It crossed state lines and went up into Canada, and it had resulted in a gaping power vacuum. King knew that other MC’s and criminal groups all over were jostling to gain an advantage in this new, wild-west world they found themselves in now.
Adding to the whole mess was the fact that Kirk Jensen – local criminal mastermind, with a reach that crossed the whole damn continent, including Mexico – had been killed a couple of months earlier. Jensen and the Fallen Angels were intricately linked, and the fact that King and his people had wiped out most of Jensen’s local people in the warehouse was also huge.
In short, they’d blown a hole through every significant criminal operation in Colorado, and they’d done it in one fell swoop… and everyone was still trying to find their feet. It was a weird, tense time for the cops, the feds, the DA, the Road Devils, and King’s Men. It felt like a maybe-calm-before-the-storm, but it might also be a death whimper that was going to trail off to not much at all. Only time would tell… but King wasn’t all that goddamn good at waiting.
He knew that his friends knew that he’d been involved in the shitstorm – he’d made that much clear – but they didn’t know specifics, and that’s how it was going to stay. The only person that King would go into any detail with was Mirrie, if she asked about her brother’s last minutes on earth. He wasn’t sure she would, but if she did, King was prepared to tell her as much truth as she could handle, as much as she asked for from him. He’d do this for her; he wasn’t going to do it for anyone else. Not even his fiancée and the lifeblood of his heart, Naomi.
“Anyway,” Aidan said now, clearly noticing that King wasn’t about to say anything. “You heard about Curtis and Tessa?”
“No,” King said, his gaze automatically swinging over to Tessa Mahoney as she served up shots to a table of rowdy types. He wasn’t too worried, though, because Curtis’ baleful stare clocked her every move. Curtis was protective of all the female staff at Curves, as per his job description of kickass bouncer, but seeing as Tessa was the love of his life, she got special attention when she was around the drunk and leering customers. “What about them?”
“Tessa!” Aidan called over to her. “C’mere a sec, hon.”
She nodded, her curly blonde hair falling forward over her shoulders, framing her large, rounded breasts. The woman had a figure that could stop traffic – curvy, lush, generous – and she looked just as going coming as she did going. As she crossed the bar to where Aidan and King stood, every man watched her graceful movements, and Curtis watched them watch her, his ice-cold blue eyes narrowing.
“Yeah?” Tessa said to Aidan now, oblivious to the hungry stares behind her. “You got a drinks order for me that I forgot about?”
“Nah, hon,” Aidan said. “King doesn’t know the news.”
“Oh!” Her heart-shaped face lit up, her green eyes sparkled. She held out her left hand and King look down to see a ring with a tiny diamond glittering there. “Ta-da!”
“Holy shit,” King said, genuinely delighted. “Tessa… congratulations!”
“Thank you,” she said, beaming as she accepted King’s hug. “He asked me this afternoon. I practically killed him when I jumped on him as I said yes.”
King laughed and looked over at Curtis. The other man was clearly wondering just why the hell King was hugging his drop-dead-gorgeous fiancée, and so he grinned and held up Tessa’s left hand. Right away, Curtis gave a rare smile of his own back, returned King’s nod, turned his attention to a table in the corner that was getting a bit loud.
“So, it looks like the last one of you determined single-guy types has taken himself off the market,” Tessa said to King . “First Jax and Sarah, then you and Naomi, then Dillon and Maria.” She turned to Aidan. “Then you and Gabi, then Mac and Mirrie, now Curtis and me. It’s too big of a loss to the hot man pool around this place. The women of Curves are weeping rivers, I tell you. The woman’s bathroom floor is awash with tears, to the point that you need rain boots to cross it.”
“No kidding, right?” Aidan said. “You and Curtis were the last to jump on the engagement wagon, but y’all are welcome.”
“Dillon’s best man for Curtis, and he’ll let you guys know about the stag party stuff,” Tessa told him. “And Gabi’s my maid of honor, so besides my bachelorette party, she’s also already planning a girl’s night with wine and bridal magazines. I’m really sorry, Aidan, but I think you’ll need to make yourself scarce for a few hours over the weekend.”
“Aw, no problem,” Aidan said gruffly, looking over at Gabriela Torres serving some food to a group playing pool in the next room. “She loves all this wedding stuff, so if she wants to have all you blushing brides-to-be over for drinks and dresses, I’ll stay away.”
“You can have a blushing grooms-to-be night with the guys,” Tessa teased them. “Beer and boutonnieres?”
Aidan and King glared down at her, only half-jokingly, and she laughed. Yeah, it was pretty hilarious how every one of these former womanizing bastards had fallen hard for their women. Tessa had been sure that the guys were dedicated, hardcore players who’d rather gnaw off their own arms than get married… but she’d been wrong. Glancing over at Curtis, taking in his tall, muscled frame, his hard face and cool eyes, his full lips that did naughty, delicious things to her, she shivered with happiness. She was thrilled to have been wrong, and she knew that the other women felt equally lucky, that they counted their blessings just as fervently as she did.
“Back to work!” she said brightly, sashaying off to a group of
guys from the Road Devils MC who had just sat down. King caught the eye of the VP, Scars Innis, gave him a chin raise. The other man stared back, his eyes the clearest blue that King had ever seen. Even from this distance and in this dim light, they were as pure and bright as a waterfall, and even a guuy like King who had no real appreciation for the color of a man’s eyes noticed them. Yeah, Scars was a tough son-of-a-bitch, a dangerous man, a former one-percenter who’d done some pretty bad shit – and as an individual very much like that himself, King had eternal respect for him, and saw Scars’ decent heart under the club cut, under the ferocious scowl.
Scars nodded back, gave his attention to Tessa as she spoke to him. Tessa was so bubbly and charming, and very few guys were immune to her sweetness. Sure enough, Scars suddenly smiled, and as always, the sight of something so open and warm in that badly-scarred face pierced King somehow, hit him in places and ways that surprised him.
“King?” Jax had appeared out of nowhere, and now stood next to him. King jumped, surprised that a guy Jax’s size had somehow managed to sneak up on him. “You got a sec, man?”
“Yeah.”
“My office?” Jax looked nervous, and King’s alertness level went up a few notches. “Just us?”
“Yeah, sure.”
King grabbed his drink off the bar, followed Jax down the hallway. Jax’s private office was where some pretty intense discussions had taken place over the past few years, and King braced himself for bad news. Maybe Jax had heard something from one of the bar’s patrons about some new local threat or worry? God knows, Curves was crawling with Denver’s criminal element, which made it a hotbed of gossip and information. Maybe Jax had picked something up, and he thought it important or legit enough to share with one of his best friends, who also just happened to run a special-ops-for-hire group.
Lush Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 8) Page 10
