Steel: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 4)

by Serena Akeroyd

  She was a stranger, essentially, but she was mine.

  I’d known that pretty much since the first time I’d gone into her room in the bunkhouse across the way and she had peered at me through those long lashes, catching me in a chokehold with a single glance.

  I’d never believed in love at first sight until her, but now I did.

  I knew what she was, knew I’d be patient for thirty years if it meant getting her close to me, making her accept that she was mine without fear.

  “Maverick?” she murmured softly, her voice soothing me just like my momma’s had when she talked me to sleep.

  “Yes, Ghost.”

  “Why was he screaming?”

  “You mean, is he dead?”

  She tensed up a little. “Yeah. I guess that’s what I mean.”

  “Because Lodestar hurt him. He isn’t dead. He might wish he was.”

  She sighed. “I’m glad.”

  My lips twitched. “You are, huh?”

  “Yes. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “No, I think it makes you fucking normal.”

  She snickered a little. “Normal? Me?”

  “Yes, well, remember who’s telling you that,” I said dryly.

  “True. But I prefer to be your kind of normal. Your normal makes me happy.”

  My throat felt thick. “It does?”

  “Yes. It does.” She sighed. “Do you mind if I stay here?”

  “Please do,” I rasped, even as she stunned the hell out of me by gently lifting her leg and resting it on my calves.

  It wasn’t a play, if it was, she’d have nudged my dick with her knee, pressing the heat of her pussy to my thigh.

  Instead, it was just her way of getting closer.

  I felt like a human teddy bear, and I’d never been happier about my fate.

  When she sighed against me, the soft sound hitting me keenly, I whispered, “You can stay here every night if you want, Ghost.”

  Her lips moved into a smile—I felt them against my arm. “I would like that.”

  No more than I would.

  I pressed a kiss to her temple, then murmured, “Go to sleep. Tomorrow will be here sooner than you like.”

  She sighed. “That is a sad truth.”

  Wasn’t it just?

  But tonight, it was that much sweeter because she was here, and in the morning, it would be brighter still, because she was tucked against me, and I was more than happy to wake up with her at my side for the rest of my fucked-up life.

  Seventeen

  Steel

  When I woke up, it was like every part of me flashed into ‘on’ mode.

  I’d been shot before, had been put in comas before too, so I knew what it felt like to come awake after that.

  This time, however, it was different.

  Why?

  My brain, some part of it, was aware that I’d been shot while being a coward as I turned tail and ran home, rather than go to my woman who’d been kidnapped by a whacked serial killer.

  Shame hit me, and it was followed by the thought that, for some reason, I was waking up again.

  Was it weird to know that you’d almost died?

  I knew I had.

  When I’d felt the bullet’s trajectory, as it tore into my body like a stray tennis ball on a court, I’d known that death was likely.

  Sure, I’d been pissed about it, but you went into this life knowing that it would probably end early.

  What I couldn’t forget, though, was the last thought that had brushed my consciousness before I’d snuffed it.

  Unto death, I’d vowed to protect Stone from myself, and I’d fulfilled that vow.

  I’d died.

  That meant I could have her now, didn’t it?

  Nineteen-year-old me was shaking his head. But the guy who’d spent nearly two decades avoiding the woman he loved? Desperate to lose his principles, to accept that, finally, he could have Stone in his arms, in his bed.

  Fuck, that man would settle for having her just in his life.

  I reached up with my good arm and scrubbed a hand over my face.

  “Thank fuck.”

  The mutter had me squinting as I peered over the side of the bed to find Link watching me.

  He yawned when I caught his eye, and I slurred, “How’s Stone?”

  His brow furrowed. “What do you care?”

  Anger flashed through me, and though I was definitely awake and aware, I was still very much sluggish. Too sluggish to be dealing with Link when he was in a mood, to be handling the temper he usually triggered.

  I loved the fucker, he was my brother in more ways than just the bonds of the MC, but Christ, he did my head in.

  I spent most of the time wanting to break his nose, but unfortunately for me, I was tethered to the fucking bed with all kinds of wires and shit.

  “I care.”

  Two words, simple, but his eyes flashed wide in surprise—not at the admission, I figured, but that I was admitting it.

  “She had a turn for the worse,” he said, and his tone was cautious now, like he sensed he’d baited the bear and knew to back the fuck up.

  My jaw clenched. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s been better.”

  More of the messing around with words.

  I growled at him, then as I moved my hand, I brushed the remote thing they gave you and pressed the nurses’ call button.

  When someone dropped by a few minutes later, I ground out, “I need to be in a wheelchair.”

  “Mr. Pringle, you have to stay in bed!”

  “Don’t call me Pringle,” I ground out. “The name is Steel.”

  The woman, in her late fifties, just arched a disapproving brow at me as Link sniggered beside me. “Mr. Pringle,” she enunciated, “we use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in this hospital. You need to stay in bed.”

  “I need to visit my woman.”

  The nurse’s crinkled brow crumpled further at that. “Your woman?”

  “Stone Walker,” Link clarified, evidently sensing that I was about to get into a fight with a woman who was close to retirement.

  That wouldn’t look good for my street cred, that was for sure. But if she called me fucking Pringle again, I wouldn’t be held responsible for my actions.

  “Oh,” the nurse muttered, then she winced and conceded, “I’ll get a wheelchair, but you have to do as I say and must return here when I tell you to.”

  That she was compassionate told me what Link hadn’t—Stone had been in a bad way.

  I blew out a breath, feeling like death warmed over twice now, and carefully began to raise the bed.

  I needed to do that when she wasn’t watching, because if she did, she wouldn’t let me off the mattress.

  “I’m surprised you’re not knocked out,” Link muttered, watching me before he started helping me sit up.

  My body was totally asleep, but I was making it move. Will alone would bring things back into full working order, because every part of me wanted to see her. I just needed to bring my limbs up to par.

  Fucking drugs.

  Hated them.

  I grunted. “I need to see her.”

  “What’s changed?” Link asked softly, even as he propped me up when I sat upright, panting like a dog who’d been left in a car in the summer heat with the windows up.

  I swallowed. “Timing.”

  “Timing?” I felt his confusion. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “It has everything to do with it,” I rumbled. “I nearly died. You don’t have to tell me for me to know it’s true. How my head wasn’t rolled over by the trucks on the road with me was sheer fucking luck.”

  “You flew into the median and, lucky for you, you landed in a flower bed,” Link informed me, ever helpful when I didn’t actually need him to spell it out for me. “Plus you had some help from a Five Points’ man.”

  I rolled my eyes at him, then muttered, “You’re a pain in the ass, do you know that?”

 
; “Exactly how I like it,” he teased, smacking his lips.

  I shoved him away. “How Lily puts up with you is beyond me.”

  He laughed, like I’d intended, and my lips were twitching too as Nurse Ratchet made an appearance, wheeling in a chair for me.

  “I wouldn’t ordinarily do this, but everyone knows that Stone has been through a rough couple of days. If you’re her boyfriend, then my goodness, it’s even worse than I first thought.”

  I wasn’t about to correct her, and Link, smart fuck that he was, didn’t correct her either.

  With a lot of grunts, groans, and my head turning light to the point where I legit thought I was going to pass out, I finally made it into the wheelchair.

  Every part of me screamed that it was too soon to be moving around, and I felt it in every inch of me, but you’d never have gotten me back into my bed. Not even with a shotgun at my back.

  As I was rolled down the corridor to the end, I sucked in a breath, preparing myself for when the door opened and I could see her.

  I didn’t expect to see Rex, snoring away, first, but I was glad to see that she’d had someone sitting with her.

  Wasn’t it weird how it would never occur to me that one of my brothers wouldn’t be in here, keeping her company?

  Just like Link had been here for me.

  That was what we did. How we rolled.

  We were never alone in a crisis. That was the joy of the MC.

  As I squeaked in, feeling weak and pissy, he woke up, but my eyes weren’t on him at that point. They were on her.

  She looked…

  Fuck.

  She looked sick.

  Her face was kind of yellow, in a weird way that looked like she’d been colored in with a yellow felt pen, and then she was a lot thinner than she’d been the last time I’d seen her.

  How long had I been out of it?

  It figured Rex would know the foremost thought on my mind. “You’ve been unconscious for four days.”

  Jesus. That was why my body was wrecked.

  I really had pushed it by coming in here after being still for that length of time.

  “She’s been like this for three.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I rasped, reaching over so I could curl my fingers in hers.

  Whatever I’d expected when I woke up, it wasn’t this.

  Truth be told, I’d thought she’d be back home in West Orange, setting up her life, getting things back on track.

  But she wasn’t.

  Couldn’t.

  She was here.

  Looking even sicker than I felt.

  My throat was thick, choked, as I turned to look at Rex, who appeared to be as exhausted as Link, the same as usual, a bit pale, maybe, with his black eye having faded into a khaki green.

  I couldn’t blame them for being tired. We’d been sleeping away on comfortable beds, while they’d been on those godawful chairs that seemed to be the standard in all hospitals.

  “She’s got jaundice at the moment,” the nurse explained softly, her gaze flickering between me and Stone. “Then we had a major complication when a peptic ulcer that was previously undiagnosed burst.”

  I winced. “She always did live on her nerves.”

  “Well, her stomach told the tale of that particular truth. She’ll need a dramatic change of pace if the ulcers are to be kept at bay.”

  Oh, she’d have a change of pace, all right.

  The whole point of me fucking off out of her life was for her to live a good one.

  For her to attain everything she ever wanted, to grab the goals that kept her up at night. For her to be a better woman than her momma had been.

  Mostly, it had been a certainty that I could never give her what she needed. That, with my twisted blood, somehow, I’d poison the one pure thing in my life.

  But as I stared at her, realizing that she hadn’t been living her best life, I knew I could have her anyway, and make her see the woods for the trees.

  “What else is wrong with her?” I mumbled, because that wasn’t enough to explain why she looked like a ragdoll.

  “She had some complications from the drugs she was poisoned with,” the nurse explained. Then, she whistled. “I’m not going to lie, Mr. Pringle—” I gritted my teeth at that. Fucking Pringle, my ass. “I’ve never seen quite a concoction of drugs. It’s had us all a little bewildered by what the intention behind the draft was.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “The angel of death in her hospital was a pharmacy tech, and she had access to a lot of meds which she evidently used liberally when she was making up the medication she used on her—” She winced. “Victims. It appears that she gave Stone a smaller dosage than what she ordinarily would have done, but thanks to the potency of the poison, it’s still done a lot of damage.”

  “Will she recover?” I questioned in a soft voice.

  “Yes, in time,” was the cautious reply. “If she doesn’t have any further complications.”

  My brow puckered, and I curved my fingers about hers. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t have any.”

  “Unfortunately, that’s not how it works,” she said dryly. “As it stands, we’ve managed to treat every issue she had, some of which were pre-existing, just undiagnosed. The truth is, Mr. Pringle, she was a little like a walking time bomb anyway.”

  My mouth tightened. “In what way?”

  “She has heart issues.”

  I gaped at her. “What?”

  The nurse winced. “The irony is, the dose of drugs she was given contained a large amount of aspirin. It caused the peptic ulcer to explode, but it stopped her from having a heart attack. She’ll need some real R and R once she wakes up from the coma we have her in.”

  I rubbed my brow, then I muttered, “I’m surprised you’re telling us any of this.”

  From out of nowhere, she grinned at me, and as she wandered out, making my eyes widen, she called, “Tell Ripley I said hi.”

  Rex laughed as the door closed behind her. “Yeah, apparently Nurse Ratchet was a clubwhore back in the day. Ripley told me about her, and I had things arranged so that she was working on our girl and you.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  My voice was hoarse with emotion, husky with fucking fear.

  I could deal with bullets. They were in and out—well, hopefully. But illnesses? Heart conditions? Fuck. What the hell had Stone been doing with herself?

  “You don’t have to thank me. I feel like I fucking failed her. You heard what she said. A goddamn time bomb. She’s not even thirty-five yet, for fuck’s sake.”

  Link rumbled, “She takes too much onto herself.”

  “You got that right.” Rex pinched the bridge of his nose. “Truth is, I was proud of her when she graduated early, but I never thought about the health repercussions—”

  I bit my bottom lip. “Where’s Mrs. Biggins?”

  Rex shook his head at my question. “Tiff’s looking after her.”

  “Must be fucking love if you remember her cat,” Link muttered.

  I ignored them both, relieved to know the cat from hell was cared for, and demanded, “Is she covered? Insurance wise?”

  “She’s on the MC’s plan,” Rex assured me.

  Catching his eye, I stared him down. “Whatever it costs, it comes out of my cut.”

  He scowled at me. “That’s stupid. You don’t need to—”

  “It’s from my cut,” I ground out, unwilling to accept anything else.

  She was my woman.

  Her debts were mine too.

  Rex grunted, but Link just snorted out a laugh. “And they say romance is dead.”

  “It is in capitalist America,” I grumbled, then I squeezed her fingers and muttered, “Does that mean the old bitch knew my name all along and called me fucking Pringle anyway?”

  Rex chuckled. “Yeah.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Figures.”

  Stone

  He was the first thing I saw when I woke
up, and I knew, if I had my way, he’d be the last thing I ever saw.

  Truth was, I hadn’t been sure if I was going to live or die that last night I’d passed out, and to wake up and for him to be here?

  I couldn’t say it was a dream come true, because from all the pain in my body, this was definitely more of a nightmare, but still…having him here was wonderful.

  That he was sitting in a wheelchair gave me the stark reminder that he’d been hurt too. His head was tipped forward at an awkward angle, meaning I couldn’t see his face to judge how he was doing, but he was snoring like a trooper which had my lips twitching at the sight, even as I devoured every other part of him.

  Having the ability to watch him without feeling like a creep, while being able to feast on him like my eyes truly wanted, was heaven.

  Absolute bliss.

  I’d never allowed myself that treat before, because I never wanted him to see the hurt in my eyes, the need and the want in my soul.

  My name was Stone, and I had a rep for being a stone in temperament, but I wasn’t like that. Not really. He was the reason I’d changed, shifting from someone who was open and loving to cold and hard with everyone except my patients.

  I knew what it was like to hurt because of this man, but I also knew what it was to feel. And the love in my heart for him was so large that sometimes, some days, I felt sure it would explode out of me.

  I’d been dumb to think that I could just wash this man right out of my hair, by thinking it was as simple as that…

  Nothing was simple. Nothing at all. Not when love came to mind, and a love this old? This pure? This untouched? Nothing could tear it asunder.

  So that was why I feasted. Because I accepted that I would always love him, and accepted that even though he was here, and that he was sitting with me, it probably didn’t change anything on his end.

  He would be here because of who I was to the club. That was it.

  They never left anyone out in the cold, and certainly not someone like me, who’d been one of the tagalongs back when I was a kid and they were teens.