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

by Serena Akeroyd

  No, this wasn’t the first time he’d left, but it was the first time he’d gone in anger.

  Would he—

  He’d come back, wouldn’t he?

  Shit, why had I riled him up? Made him angry?

  Why—

  I heard the thundering of boots once more and was stunned when he made a reappearance. His face was still white, his jaw like stone, but his head was wet. Like he’d splashed water on his face.

  He sat back down in his chair, pulled his laptop onto his knee, and began working.

  Neither of us said a word. Not for a good six hours. He worked, I watched him, letting my breath regulate, my panic die down—what the hell had that been about?—until I recognized he wasn’t going to leave again and that I didn’t have to watch him at all times to know he was staying put.

  That he hadn’t gone mattered.

  That he’d come back meant more to me than he’d ever know.

  And that I was coming to depend on him, his presence, was a fact I could no longer ignore. But it was something to worry about at another time, another place. For right now, I was just glad he was here.

  Steel

  It was hard to accept that I was jealous.

  I wasn’t sure of what though.

  Of the men she’d fucked? Of the kisses they’d shared? Of the secrets they had together? Of the lives they’d had as a pair?

  How many had she fucked? How many kisses, secrets? How had they been together?

  Harry.

  That was his name.

  Fucking Harry.

  I wanted to kill him, throttle him.

  How dare he kiss her?

  How dare he—

  Of course, that was when I knew I was being irrational. But I was often irrational around her, and I recognized that she was the same around me. From her never arguing with me, suddenly things had shifted.

  We bickered. A lot.

  Fought. A lot.

  And we both simmered down, watching each other warily, wondering what the other was thinking but not asking.

  Each time, I’d storm off and head to the bathroom to splash my face, to calm down.

  Each time I returned, she’d watch me with big eyes, registering the whole, hard truth.

  No matter how many times she pissed me off—and she did that a lot—I’d come back.

  I was going to be a fucking boomerang.

  Heaving a sigh as I stared at my face in the mirror, at the tired lines under my eyes and the weariness that made me look gray, I rubbed a hand over it to slough off the excess water, and then grabbed a paper towel.

  When I was dry, I headed out of the bathroom and back down the hall to her room. I wasn’t surprised when she wasn’t alone. It was visiting hours, but the people there weren’t anyone I knew.

  She’d had a lot of guests visiting her. From coworkers to old colleagues and friends from med school. Each new face was a reminder of how much I’d missed out on, and I didn’t appreciate the goddamn prompt.

  Seeing the bunch of dudes sitting on her bed, guys that weren’t my brothers, immediately got my back up.

  I’d been in the bathroom for twenty minutes. Each one had been used to cool off. To calm down. Whenever she threw the shit I’d done in my face, it always sparked up into an inferno, and we always ended up snarling at each other.

  Once, I’d almost gotten kicked out over an argument, so we always made sure to argue in whispers.

  Truth was, much as I wished we didn’t argue so fucking much, I knew what it meant.

  These angry words were healing words.

  Each time she pulled off a scab, exposed it to the air, it allowed it to heal without bitterness infecting it.

  Seemed like I’d done a lot of shit in my life, shit I couldn’t fucking remember anymore.

  I nodded at the guys, received some nods in return, but I ignored her and went over to my laptop. She didn’t mention me to them, and though I sensed their curious looks, they didn’t ask.

  They shot the breeze with her, talking about people I didn’t know, about things I didn’t understand. Each reference was a smack in the face I needed to get over, and I did.

  Barely.

  Until they started to leave. Three of the four guys just waved at her, told her they’d visit again soon.

  The fourth?

  Leaned down and kissed her.

  Kissed her.

  In front of me.

  Sure, my head was turned to the side and I had my boots on the wall as I faced the window, but I saw everything.

  The fucking kiss, the way he touched his lips to her temple. The soft whisper in her ear, the way she smiled at him with affection in her eyes.

  Each one was a death knell.

  For him.

  Whoever the fuck he was.

  But I let him go and stayed silent until the door was closed, then she threw gas on the fire. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

  I could hear the taunt in her voice, and fuck me, she was working up to getting her ass spanked. I could almost imagine the way her butt would bounce with how hard I paddled it, but I cracked my knuckles instead.

  If anyone had ever needed to be spanked, it was her.

  Sweet fuck.

  Because the only shit I could say was going to cause another argument, I stayed silent. I heard her huff, but I ignored it.

  Then, when she was playing a game—I knew because she kept cursing it out—I rasped, “You kiss another man again, and I’ll gut him.”

  She fell silent. “You have no right to say that,” she said eventually.

  I cut her a look. “I have every fucking right. And you know it.”

  Her jaw tensed, but though she looked mutinous, I saw something she didn’t.

  Hope.

  It made her eyes gleam.

  And that made the itch in my palm lessen some.

  Where there was hope, there was a promise for more, and that was something I could handle.

  I just needed to prove to her that I wasn’t the dumbass she’d come to know. I was the same guy she’d fallen in love with all those years ago.

  She was bitter, even a little twisted over what had gone down during those years, but I could deal with that.

  They’d forged a woman who was worthy of being my Old Lady. Who could deal with any of the shit the life threw at her, and fuck knew, there was plenty of that.

  Before, she was so young, she wouldn’t have been ready. Even with as much as she knew about our world, she didn’t know it all—the bad or the ugly, because there was barely any good. But after a lifetime without me in it, stitching up people who’d been torn apart from GSWs to car accidents, I knew she could handle anything.

  Everything.

  And she’d have to.

  Because once she was better, I was making her mine.

  She could hiss and kick at me, bitch about it, but that wouldn’t change the unrelenting, undeniable, tireless truth.

  She was my woman.

  My future.

  I just needed to make her realize that.

  And, five days later, when the same guy who’d kissed her before visited again, she didn’t let him kiss her. I felt like that was a huge leap forward.

  Because maybe, at last, she was starting to see the lay of the land.

  Twenty-One

  Stone

  Three weeks later

  I was grumpy, grouchy, cranky, and every other -y word that could describe—no, that could define just how pissed off I was.

  Short-tempered wasn’t the word.

  I was itchy too. My belly was on the mend, the surgical sites having healed and, in doing so, were itching up a storm, even though they weren’t infected, just getting fucking better.

  Nothing hurt as bad as it once did, but I was still stiff and sore, and the last thing I wanted was to be driving in a cage today of all days.

  I wriggled my shoulders, well aware that I was in a mood and that only one person could handle me like this—Indy.

&n
bsp; Only, Indy wasn’t here. She was at my new apartment in West Orange, setting shit up for me so that when I got home, I could essentially curl up in bed and do shit until I was in a better frame of mind.

  I had another six weeks to lie around and do nothing, and that was way too much in my opinion.

  I wasn’t made for stillness, and the only consolation was the fact that, at last, I was getting better, and the only other time I’d tried to push it in the hospital, I’d almost passed out from the acute agony it had caused when I’d pulled a muscle in my torn up stomach.

  The memory alone was enough to make me crabbier, and I glowered at nothing, fuck, I glowered at how high the sun was and how it glinted off cars’ bodywork, because yeah, that was enough to piss me off.

  “What the hell are you huffing about now?”

  And here was the crux of my biggest problem.

  Steel.

  I ground my teeth at his question, then huffed again as I turned my face to the window.

  The bastard was still here, hadn’t gone anywhere through the long weeks at the hospital, and here I was, wondering when the other shoe would drop, when he’d fuck off like he always did, because now that I was out, the rules of the game had changed.

  Now I was on my way to my new home, he’d probably leave me alone again, alone after months in his company, and I just couldn’t deal with that right now.

  And my huffing? Because I was scared.

  Terrified.

  Not of being by myself, but of being without him.

  I sucked in a breath, released it, tried not to be angry with him for being who he was, even though that was damn hard, and then I bit off, “I’m in pain, all right?”

  I wasn’t lying, because I was. I was more than in pain. I was uncomfortable, felt like a thousand mosquitos had bitten my stomach, and I wasn’t that enamored about being in the truck for an hour in busy traffic.

  I knew he’d planned it so that we were supposed to be driving around during a non-rush hour period, but a pile up had fucked us in the butt, and here we were, in a truck, stuck together, when I both wanted to be stuck with him forever, all while being unsure if I could handle it when we were torn apart.

  Trust, that was what it boiled down to.

  I could love the man, I could want him with enough of a fever that it distracted me from my body’s woes, but trust him?

  Nope.

  I didn’t have that, and I was finding it interesting that trust outran love. Before I woke up, he’d been there for three weeks. Watching over me. Then, for five weeks, he’d been at my side.

  For five weeks, he’d been there when the doctors talked shop with me as I learned the repercussions of the strange doses of drugs Annie Young had used on me—a lesser form of the poison she’d used to kill her patients, a clever concoction of OTC medicine as well as some drugs used in cancer treatment so that, if an autopsy did go down, nothing appeared to be totally irregular—and as I went through the aftercare of surgery that kept throwing complications my way. Whether it was fever or infections, if it could go wrong, it had.

  But today, I was better than I’d been yesterday, and the day before that, and I was well enough to go home.

  I just wasn’t sure if I wanted him or Indy sitting here, because though I wanted him to be driving me there, though I wanted us to be going into a house we both shared and for him to be there all the rest of my fucking natural life, I didn’t think he would.

  And that was why I was grouchy.

  Why I was huffing.

  Because I got the feeling that as soon as I was home, wherever home fucking was—Indy had just told me she’d found me a nice place close to the hospital—he’d be out of the picture, back to the clubhouse, and I felt sure it would be like nothing had changed.

  My throat thickened with tears at just the thought. I wanted to cling on to him, wanted to glue myself to him and beg him not to leave me, but I had some self-respect. Something that was forged in lessons that I’d learned from being around so many bikers.

  A woman who had no self-respect was a woman to be used and abused.

  That was why I was a bitch to him. That was why I didn’t let him get away with shit.

  I wanted to. I fucking wanted that so badly. I wanted to just sink into him and allow myself to relax, not to give him shit, just for us to be at peace together, but I knew how he’d take that.

  He’d see it as a weakness, and while I was pathetically weak where he was concerned, he’d never know just how rotten I was to the core because of my love for him.

  It had never felt like that before, but I was different now. I was ill, coming off of months in a hospital bed, and the Stone of before was not the Stone of now.

  My time in my hospital room had changed me in ways I was only just starting to see, and I wasn’t sure if I’d ever return to normal. Sure, when I was back on my feet, I felt certain there’d be an improvement, but equally, an improvement wasn’t how I’d been before, was it? Even if I’d been in denial, because that didn’t take into account the lifestyle changes I’d need to make to ensure my heart condition didn’t flare up or that my stomach ulcers didn’t give me crap.

  The upcoming days, the stress and strain, the physical and the emotional pain, all of it had me feeling the tears dampening the upper curves of my cheeks, and I was grateful for the sunglasses I wore, just because they covered them up.

  We had NOFX playing on repeat, one of my favorite CDs, and I even had a paper bag of MickyDs that he’d grabbed for me which I was picking at. I had a favorite pillow from home, a blanket that I knew Indy had to have given him because he wouldn’t know the difference between a blanket and a comforter, and even though he’d done everything he could for me, none of it would make up for him leaving me when we got to my new place.

  So I stayed sullen and silent and probably gave him every excuse in the book to make him be grateful he could fuck off to the clubhouse and get some pussy at long last.

  The journey took place in that grim silence for the entirety of the drive back to West Orange. I half expected him to dump me there and then, but he didn’t. He carried on driving past the area where the hospital was located, where I thought I was staying, and we rolled on up the large hill to where the compound was situated.

  My brows rose with each mile we took, and when we made it to the gates, which opened instantly, and we drove on through, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

  The compound was quiet. Deadly so. It was weird, in fact, because I was used to it being busy, rippling with life and energy from so many people living together, but it wasn’t like that today.

  He didn’t stop driving until he drove over to one of the bunkhouses that was farthest away from the clubhouse and pulled up outside.

  “Just so you know,” he said softly, a low threat in his voice that shouldn’t have made my aching body feverish but totally did anyway, “if you pull this attitude on me again when you’re better, I’ll spank you until you’re sweet again, and then I’ll fuck you until you’re purring.”

  My heart skipped a beat with hope. Hope. Dangerous, toxic hope.

  He rolled his shades down his nose, stared at me pointedly, and said, “Now, you gonna stop being as sour as that fucking cat of yours?”

  I gaped at him over that, even as excitement flushed through me. “Mrs. Biggins is not sour!”

  He snorted. “Trust you to bitch about that, but not the idea of being spanked.”

  I shrugged. “If I need a spanking, then I need a spanking.”

  He hissed, his head jerking to the side like I’d slapped him. His response stunned me, but what he said next?

  Floored me.

  “You can’t say shit like that, baby doll, when you ain’t in fighting form.”

  He reached over, cupped my chin, and pinched the tip between his forefinger and thumb. The move knocked my shades a little, and with his free hand, he reached over and tugged them up so they were lodged in my hair, which made me squint because it was really bright
out, and after so long at the hospital, I wasn’t used to it.

  However, when he let out another hiss, and his thumb traced over my cheeks, I knew he saw them.

  Tear tracks.

  They’d probably dried and messed up the minimal mascara Indy had insisted I wear before she’d left my hospital room this morning to come back here and help set up the place for me.

  It was clear to see why now.

  If I was staying in one of the bunkhouses, they hadn’t been renovated since the sixties.

  Not that I was about to complain.

  Maybe if I was here, and with his words still buzzing in my ears, he wouldn’t forget about me. He’d come and visit, maybe?

  I bit my lip at the thought, and he muttered, “Why you crying, baby doll? You hurting that much?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  I was honest about that, because I couldn’t lie about pain and the management that came with it.

  Sure, I’d lie to him about a hell of a lot of stuff, but not that.

  A girl had to have principles, didn’t she?

  He rustled around in the paper bag that my burger and fries had come in, grabbed a napkin, and tugged it over my still sweating Coke. He wiped the now wet tissue over my cheeks, cleaning me up some, the gesture both unexpected and somehow charming, even if I probably stank of McDonalds’ fries.

  I mean, in all honesty, was there a better scent in all the known universe?

  I bit my lip as he cleaned me up, then, as he started to move back, I caught his hand, my fingers sliding around his wrist as I held him there.

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Do I mean what?” he asked, his brow puckering as he stared at me.

  “About the spanking?”

  He laughed. “Baby doll, I ain’t never gonna lie to you about spanking.”

  That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear, but it gave me an idea.

  Fuck, if being spanked was all it took for him to stick around, I’d get spanked. It was my favorite thing anyway, and I’d had only one boyfriend who ever enjoyed doing that. Everyone else just thought I was weird.