If only that were true, I thought wistfully.
What was so fucking special about me? I was a red-haired, blue-eyed, white girl, born and bred in Northern Nevada. Both my parents were immigrants from Wales but had lived more time here in the States than in their homeland. Yes, I had my fancy education and wild club pussy, but I was no one of a kind bitch. No chick grew up in the club and behaved any different from me.
Was I more refined?
Obviously, but, at the end of the day, I was still Jonesy Hughes’ oldest little girl and the Prez’s daughter. I still felt like trash when Gisela and I met up with our classy friends from Stanford and Harvard. Where she felt like their equals, and just as good as them—if not better—I felt like an imposter.
It was funny, I thought as I poured a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon for myself. Gisela marrying someone like Cillian took nothing away from her natural elegance and grace. Hell, she wouldn’t even fit into the conventional mold of an old lady. That didn’t mean she couldn’t handle the responsibility that came along with the title, but she would do it with class, dignity, and grace.
Just like her mother.
Gisela’s mother hadn’t been the typical wife of an American gangster either. She’d come from old European money, but she never allowed anyone around her to forget she deserved a modicum of deference when in her presence. I didn’t have that kind of example because both of my parents came from middle-class homes - neither had grown up surrounded by the luxury of wealth.
Perhaps that was one of the main reasons I felt like Trey and I were more alike than different. We both felt like fish out of water that’d adapted but acclimating didn’t mean either of us had truly changed. It only implied we’d mastered the old adage of “fake it till you make it.”
When it came down to it, we were equally culpable and comfortable living within the cocoon of our counterfeited personalities. Only hints of the people we really were revealed at times, but safe in the knowledge the only souls in the world who could expose us for what existed beneath the mask was ourselves, and each other.
Lost in my thoughts, I didn’t feel Trey’s presence until he was behind me. I’d grabbed a beer from the fridge and closed the door.
“Is that for me?” His question, obviously rhetorical, didn’t stop my heart from thundering in my chest.
“Yes.” I turned around to face him.
He reached out, his hand purposely brushing my own, as I relinquished the bottle. He walked over to the island, and looked through the various kitchen drawers until he found the bottle opener and popped the top.
I grabbed the glass of wine, secretly praying I wouldn’t do something stupid, like allow it to slip from my hands. We moved into the living room together and he sat down on the sofa before I sat down, Indian-style, on the seat next him. The silence he dreaded filled the room as he swigged from his beer and I sipped from my wine.
I bit my lip. “So, you were saying something about why you left the club…”
“Yeah, it’s complicated,” he offered, smirking as we faced once another.
“You are so full of shit, Trey Lennon!” I exclaimed. “That is such a total chick answer. I know I’m being a bit contradictory because it isn’t my business but…I’m only human. What happened between you and my dad? I promise I won’t tell another soul.”
His eyes centered on mine and a solemn look slipped over his face. “I’m not your client though.”
“It doesn’t matter… I’d never betray your trust. If you tell me why you left, it isn’t for me to divulge. I would be putting other people’s lives at risk that are my clients, and it would be extremely unethical. Hell, you could file a report on me with the State board, and start legal proceedings to have me disbarred,” I explained as I traced the hem of my pajama shorts.
“What if the reason I left has nothing to do with any of your other clients?”
I sipped from my wine again, buying myself time before looking into his gorgeous eyes again. “Somehow I find that hard to believe. We grew up in a small town. Secrets tend to fester in places like this because the atmosphere seems so innocent and wholesome, even when it’s nothing like the illusions we convince ourselves exist.”
He nodded. “How very perceptive of you, Ms. Hughes.”
“I’m an attorney, Mr. Lennon, I aim to please. It’s my job.”
Trey’s lips parted and I couldn’t help myself from studying them. “Okay, you win. The situation wasn’t complicated at all. My mother…she’s got a complicated past. She wasn’t a woman of easy virtue but she did have something going with a very powerful man until she found out he was already married. She couldn’t have known—his wife was stashed away in Northern Ireland while he lived footloose and fancy free in Boston.”
“Go on,” I said as my free arm snaked around his shoulders and my hand rested on his bicep.
“My father loved her but so did another man who was single and driven. She had to make a choice and she didn’t choose my dad, not even after he promised to leave his wife for her. By the time she and her newlywed husband started their lives together, she discovered she was pregnant - they both knew it couldn’t have been his. She was too far along and they hadn’t made love until their wedding night.”
Trey paused and swigged from his beer. “What I’m tryin’ to say is I’m a bastard…the tainted seed of Desmond Cox. He carried on an affair with my mother and I’m the end result. He knew I was his—so did my father and mother. Dad tried not to treat me differently but there were signs throughout my childhood I wasn’t like Tristan or Trista. He cherished them. They were his world and my mother was the center of it; I always felt like an outlier. I didn’t belong in their perfect family no matter how smart I was or how much I wanted to please him.”
I should’ve been surprised, maybe even shocked.
My parents didn’t have an ideal marriage by any stretch of the imagination. Over the years, they’d both cheated but, in the end, they were committed and forgave each other’s transgressions.
That, to me, was love. That was marriage. It wasn’t always perfect, sweet and kind, because we weren’t like that. We were jealous, selfish, envious creatures who bruised easily and the first casualties were always the people we loved the most. No matter how much we aimed to hurt ourselves, we always wounded those closest to us who would be caught in the blowback.
I knew this firsthand because I’d done it to people I loved. It wasn’t pretty, but it was life in all of its twisted glory.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Trey. You aren’t…tainted or stained or somehow ‘impure.’ Why are you reducing the whole of you as a person to the genetics and choices of your parents?”
He finished his beer and slammed the bottle down onto my glass coffee table. “Maybe because this isn’t the life I fuckin’ wanted but I didn’t have a choice, Kyra. There I was, acceptance letter from California Institute of Technology in my hand, while Dizzy was there, whispering in my ear about how I would have a piece of the club if I decided to stay.”
My hand squeezed his bicep. “What do you mean? He always meant for you to become a Saint?”
Trey nodded, his eyes glassy with unshed tears he blinked away. “It’s always been his plan. When he steps down, Cillian will take over as Prez, and I will become VP - though I have no fuckin’ right to that title other than the accident of birth. Kink will take over as Sergeant at Arms. It’s already been decided…everything is in the cards and that bastard is just waiting to deal them out whenever he gets good and goddamn ready.”
The realization of what he was telling me suddenly hit home.
All this time, I thought my father was trying to keep us apart because he didn’t think Trey was suited for me. Though that may have been the case, it wasn’t the main reason. He always knew Trey would eventually become a Saint and the last thing he wanted was for me to end up with a man from a rival club.
It’s not how the situation should ever play out. If I couldn’t find a man from
within our club, I’d have to settle with someone on the outside, completely uninvolved with our world of motorcycle clubs.
The problem was I couldn’t separate my upbringing from the woman I’d become; I didn’t want to either. I needed to be a part of this world and I wanted to be here with Trey.
He turned toward me and I wrapped my arms around his neck. “Is that the reason my dad never wanted us to start anything?”
“Yeah, babe, ’cause I’m dangerous. My old man is one of the founding members of a one percent club. He never meant for the Saints to be anything other than criminal. What self-respecting man would want his daughter with a murderer, computer hacking thug?
“Hell, my own parents would’ve disowned me if they could have gotten away with it…and they still one-upped me. They got themselves killed off and took their favorite son. They would have taken Trista, too, but she wasn’t with them that night.” Trey’s hands cupped my cheeks, his calloused fingers rough against my soft skin.
“I firmly believe I’m old enough to make up my own mind, babe.” I smiled. “I’m thirty years old. If I don’t know what I want now, when will I?”
“And you want me?” Trey questioned, his dark eyebrows shooting up. “I’m twenty-seven but God knows I feel older. I’ve seen too much shit, lived through too much, sacrificed too much. You’re too good to be someone I have to leave behind, Kyra. I won’t be able to do that, not again.”
I leaned closer to him, our noses touching intimately. “Who ever said anything about you leaving me behind? If we do this, we go all the way—consequences be damned. Will my father be upset? Yeah, he’ll be livid but I don’t care.
“I’ve always done everything he’s asked me to do. I’m as perfect as I’ll ever be but this one choice in my life will be mine alone. Either he’ll accept it or he won’t, but I’m old enough to accept the consequences of my decision.”
“What if he wants me six feet under once he finds out?” Trey whispered.
“Then I’ll own up to what I’ve done because he’ll have to go through me if he plans on killin’ you,” I murmured.
Trey’s lips crushed against mine and I surrendered to our kiss, my mouth opening to his immediately. Warm, wet tongues caressed like old lovers while his fingers massaged my scalp and pulled me closer into his embrace.
My heart thundered in my chest and the breath abandoned me. All around me was this moment, us finally together, claiming each other like we should have ages ago. I knew we were teetering on a dangerous precipice we wouldn’t be able to back away from, but I really didn’t have any fucks left to give. Everything happening between Trey and I was meant to be, neither of us could deny that.
The hard work would come in the morning, when we decided where we would take this game changer of our lives.
If we were willing to work through the challenges we’d eventually face, and whether we held on to what we had, would eventually decide our fate.
That was the difficult part of this whole ordeal. I wasn’t good with uncertainty and I liked to know where I stood.
Unfortunately, this was one situation where my power to control the dynamics wasn’t entirely up to me.
And that scared me more than if Trey rejected me and decided I wasn’t worth the time and effort after all.
Chapter Five
Trey
Trey felt reckless, impulsive, and not like himself.
He knew he shouldn’t have gone to Kyra’s house but her plea for him to join her was too tempting to pass up. Perhaps Cillian knew what he was talking about when he’d advised him to get laid.
Keri was gone and she wasn’t coming back.
When she first died, he’d used sex as an easy elixir to numb his feelings. It’d been easy, losing himself in the haze of booze, coke, and chronic. He hadn’t felt that way since he returned home and, now, he no longer felt like running from anything. He wanted to face everything he’d ever feared.
That included the convoluted and conflicted feelings he had for Kyra.
Their friendship hadn’t always been an easy one but they understood each other too well not to be friendly. What ever existed between the two of them, they’d always been open and honest. Each knew they had a role—a part to play that wasn’t genuine but needed in order to exist in the type of world they called their own.
The world they both came from.
Like it or not, Trey may have not been raised in the club life but it was in his blood regardless. He might have called another man “Dad” but his biological father was Dizzy, and there was no escaping that. His destiny, whether he wanted to be a part of this twisted legacy or not didn’t make a damn bit of difference.
Trey understood how Jonesy felt about them ever being together, but it no longer mattered. If he could’ve made different decisions that night, maybe he would have but the shoulda-woulda-coulda of the whole situation would drive him insane. Truth be told, it just didn’t matter to him.
Now that he held her in his arms—her alluring smell tickling his nostrils with her natural feminine scent mixed with the fresh aroma of her body wash and perfume—he knew he had to have her. Their kiss, a revelation unto itself, ignited a fire in his body that could only be extinguished once he was balls deep in this gorgeous woman and spilling his seed inside of her.
They separated reluctantly as their kiss ended. His fingers played with tendrils of her golden highlighted fiery hair, the freckles on her cheeks more pronounced as she stared at him in awe, her mouth slightly parted. Those gorgeous blue eyes of hers, so purely blue, searched his face for something—anything—to let her know how he felt.
He could feel it in his bones.
“We don’t have to do this,” he said in a low voice. “If you’d rather see me leave, I’ll do that, babe. I don’t want to push you into anything.”
Kyra shook her head. “That’s not what I’m afraid of, Trey. I’m scared I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll pretend like none of this ever happened—like we never happened. You’ll go back to mourning the loss of Keri because that’s what you do. You guilt yourself into thinking every bad thing in the world is somehow your fault when it isn’t. You’ll leave me alone, and I’ll be left to pick of the pieces of something that should’ve been but never led to anything beyond one night. I don’t want that.”
Trey laughed, a low, deep sound that rumbled throughout his chest. “Babe, I told ya already. You’re strong, one of the toughest bitches I know. If I fuck you tonight, this ain’t a one time deal. You’re not club ass or some skank or bar bitch. You’re Jonesy fuckin’ Hughes’ daughter. Do you honestly believe I’d have so little respect for you—risk gettin’ my ass shot or beat by your father and brother for just one night with you? Are you outta your goddamn mind? That ain’t me, babe.”
Kyra broke away from him and stood up. She walked a few steps and turned to face him, her eyes bearing into him. “What the hell do you want, Trey? I won’t play this fuckin’ game with you. Do you want me to be yours? Are we gonna date for a bit? Will you be my boyfriend?”
He knew she was purposely goading him into a fight but it wouldn’t work. His cock was hard as a rock, ready to explode. He’d never realized how horny he was or how much he needed to get off until this woman stood before him. Tall and coltish with long legs, generous breasts, and accommodating hips. She worked out and kept fit but there was something about her that was wild, untamed. She wouldn’t ever bow down to him and she would never give in without a fight.
“When the fuck have you ever seen me out on a date?” he questioned as he slid his cut off and threw it on the sofa.
“I haven’t but I’m too old to play games.” She stepped out of her shorts to reveal a skimpy pair of panties that left little to the imagination, including how much hair she had on her pussy.
“So the fuck am I.” He pulled off his long sleeved t-shirt, tossed it to the floor, and stepped forward.
“Good, because I don’t want a damn boyfriend. I have no interest in revisiting
high school. Been there, done that—own the motherfuckin’ t-shirt.” Kyra pulled off her skimpy tank top, revealing a rack that could be on the cover of Penthouse or Hustler.
Her breasts, freckled and fair like the rest of her, were perfect. They hung with the right amount of gravity for tits that weren’t all that big but molded for her body. Quarter-sized, pink areolas with pert hard nipples greeted his view, and he smiled in appreciation.
“I don’t plan on bein’ your boyfriend.” Trey unbuttoned his jeans and dragged the zipper down. “A lover? Hell yeah. Confidant? I can do that. Protector? I wouldn’t be anything else.”
“We do this, Lennon, we do it for real. Yeah?” she asked as she slid her panties down, her breasts dipping as she bent over. She stood upright again, and kicked the strip of fabric to the side, proving she was indeed a natural redhead. The landing strip of orange-red hair between firm, alabaster thighs turned him on even more than he’d thought possible.
“There’s no other way,” he murmured as he pushed his jeans past his hips and they fell to the floor. He went commando, always had. He and underwear were not close pals.
Her hungry eyes raked up and down his body. “Then let’s do this.” Trey needed no further invitation as he closed the space between them and wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her to him. Their lips met again in a hungry kiss but he dominated every move. His tongue swept into her mouth with ease. Their intimate mouth play led to her wrapping her legs around his waist as he pushed them against the hallway wall. He moved his hands down to grip her ass, keeping her steady while she laced her ankles around his calf muscles.
Kyra was no wallflower. She was far from being a whore but she’d seen enough action to know what she was doing and what she wanted. Her soft pants and moans against his mouth vibrated through his body as one of her hands grabbed his cock and aimed it at her opening.
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