by Megan Crane
Devil’s Mark is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2017 Loveswept Ebook Edition
Copyright © 2017 by Megan Crane
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN 9781101968192
Cover design: Derek Walls
Cover photograph: © FXQuadro/Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Dedication
By Megan Crane
About the Author
Chapter 1
Killian “Uptown” Chenier clocked the exact second pretty little Holly Chambless, the dirtbag mayor’s squeaky clean, sorority girl daughter with her famously sweet ass, high tits, and the glossiest brown ponytail in the entirety of southern Louisiana, walked into Dumb Gator’s.
So did everyone else with a dick.
Tick and Butler, the two degenerate fucks sprawled in Uptown’s booth, practically knocked over the table with their instant hard-ons at the sight of her. The perverts were his good friends and full-patch brothers in the Devil’s Keepers Motorcycle Club—the outlaw club that pretty much owned every last person, place, and thing in the sleepy little bayou town of Lagrange, Louisiana. From the pompous aldermen who pretended to be horrified by the biker presence on Main Street to a rough and isolated dive bar like Dumb Gator’s that openly courted the “bad element,” everyone and everything in this little corner of southern Louisiana catered to the club.
Everyone and everything except Holly Chambless, that was. She was the bright and shining emblem of that fake version of Lagrange that everyone pretended they believed in while getting in deep with the Devils on the sly.
“Looks like the princess is slumming,” Butler muttered. “And without her douchebag daddy’s protection for once.”
“She can come on over and slum on my lap,” Tick replied and both of the dirty bastards laughed at that.
Because Holly Chambless didn’t slum. Or hadn’t before tonight, not in all her twenty-two or so years of being the mayor’s pampered and spoiled little toy doll, paraded around the parish like the second coming of the Virgin Mary. The mayor had always kept his sparkly little diamond of a daughter on a very tight leash—or maybe locked up tight in a chastity belt, assuming the rumors were right. The whole town had always treated her like she was theirs. Holly hadn’t actually had a parade the day she’d gone off to Ole Miss in a cloud of the town’s good wishes, but the way they talked about her big smile and what a sweetheart she was every time she came on home for the holidays, you might have been confused into thinking otherwise.
The town’s sweetheart had never, ever strayed across the lines everyone in Lagrange grew up seeing clearly, which made her presence here tonight that much more surprising. She’d never set foot in Dumb Gator’s before. She’d never attended one of the more PG-rated, family-friendly parties the club threw from time to time, chock-full of mudbugs, wives, and old ladies instead of the more extreme activities—usually of a sexual nature, sometimes more bloody—that took place out there in the lonely bayou every other night of the year.
Most of the so-called good girls who grew up around these parts took at least a peek into club life at some point or another, either before they graduated from high school or in those steamy summers while they chased their MRS degrees in various junior colleges across the South. Uptown couldn’t count the number of “good girls” who’d crawled out bedroom windows in their parents’ houses to take a little trip to the dark side on the back of his bike.
But not perfect little Holly. Not the mayor’s pride and joy.
Not until tonight.
The door slapped shut behind her, blocking out the steamy heat of the May evening, but she only stood there in the entryway for a moment as if she was unsure of herself. A new look for her. She looked around as if she’d never been in a bar before, something Uptown found hard to believe after she’d spent four years in college. He studied her face from across the room, looking for…something. Evidence of her father’s brand of two-faced betrayal and outright theft, maybe. But all he saw was that same sweetly pretty face, put together even better than he remembered it. Big brown eyes, that wide mouth that was tipped up in the corners even when she wasn’t smiling, and that way she held herself—as if she expected and deserved good things to happen all around her.
Like a fucking Disney princess who might belt out a song at any moment, given the opportunity or the odd swelling soundtrack.
There was nothing about her that should have made Uptown hard as a rock in under two seconds. She wasn’t his type. He liked easy and forgettable, and he’d never much cared for sweet when there was tart on tap. But there he was, suddenly uncomfortable in his booth when until now he’d been enjoying the evening, kicked back with a beer and a few shots while he contemplated which biker groupie he was going to let suck him off to start the night right.
He should probably be pissed that as usual, when a member of the Chambless family showed up his night went straight to hell. The way it had been since he was a kid and good old Mayor Benny had pretty much ruined his life. But he couldn’t quite get there.
“I’m waiting for one of the mayor’s minions to come swinging through the door behind her,” Butler said, rolling his beer between his palms, his eyes on Holly. He made no particular attempt to be anything but lascivious as he watched her. “Her daddy would have a shit fit if he knew she was here.”
“Her daddy has other things to think about,” Uptown replied. With a deep satisfaction he, too, did nothing to hide. “If you take money from the club and then double-cross us when we’re paying you and your slimy lawyer buddy to keep us out of jail instead of in it, you don’t send your boys into a bar where we hang out. Not even after your sweet little princess. Not unless you want to pick up pieces of your boys all over St. Germain Parish.”
“I hate that smug bastard,” Tick muttered, like punctuation.
Benny Chambless had been the mayor of Lagrange for as long as Uptown could remember. Which was too goddamned long. Benny was a talker. He liked to make long and self-aggrandizing speeches that only nodded toward pious. He liked to parade his medicated ghost of a wife around and carry on about the sanctity of marriage, his marriage in particular, despite mountains of evidence that he’d never encountered a vow—wedding or otherwise—he wouldn’t break in as seedy a fashion as possible. He acted like his sweet little Holly walked on water and never wasted an opportunity to remind everyone that if she did, he owned and controlled the pond where that miracle occurred. He lived in that big-ass plantation house on the nicest road in Lagrange, shaded by ancient live oaks and set back from the road a ways so everyone could admire his rolling, dramatic lawn and suck on their jealousy as they wandered by to their much smaller and less impressive houses. He drove around in a shiny, late-model Caddy and he spent long hours out on the golf course with the parish’s richest and most pedigreed, acting like he owned the world.
None of that had anyth
ing to do with why Uptown hated his fucking guts. It just helped cement the loathing.
Like most rich fucks, Benny had been enjoying the sweet life for so long that he’d developed a little amnesia about how he’d gotten there in the first place. He’d particularly seemed to forget that he owed every last part of his shiny little life up there on his high horse to the club. The Devil’s Keepers weren’t real big on that kind of forgetfulness—especially when it went hand in hand with evidence that Benny had “forgotten” to honor a number of his commitments.
The club really wasn’t into broken promises. A man kept his word or he paid for his lies in blood. That was the Devil’s Keepers’ position on the matter of trust between allies. Or anyone else. It also happened to be Uptown’s personal code.
Life had just changed for the Chambless family in an epic fashion, though Uptown doubted they really got that yet. They were tainted with the dirty truth at last, which was something Uptown was deeply and personally invested in. His hatred of that pompous prick Benny went way back. Uptown had grown up in his single mama’s trailer watching the smug, perverted mayor fuck around with her whenever he got the urge, which had been a whole lot when his mama was still young and hot and not nearly as fucked up as she was these days.
He hadn’t liked the mayor much when he was ten and powerless. He’d liked him even less when he was eighteen and hanging around the club, getting an eyeful of the kinds of things Benny enjoyed when he thought he was in a private, safe space, surrounded by generally closemouthed bikers. And he’d been violently opposed to Mayor Chambless when Uptown had patched in at twenty and got the full picture about the bitches Benny liked to fuck, the way he liked to fuck them, and the protection he was supposed to provide the MC in return. But it didn’t matter how much Uptown hated the slimy asshole. The mayor and his special brand of sanctimonious, two-faced bullshit had been officially tolerated for years because he’d been useful to the club.
That usefulness had been eroding like all the rest of the real estate in the low country over the past few years. And the dumb fuck hadn’t listened to any of the approximately eight million warnings the club had delivered to get him back on the right path. There was even proof that Benny, in cahoots with the club’s former lawyer, had deliberately acted against the club and its interests in a number of criminal cases, which had led to longer sentences in some cases and stiffer penalties in others. None of this was good for Benny. The club’s tolerance of Benny’s bullshit had finally ended with a crash a week ago, when the parish’s most obnoxious do-gooder, brand-new Sheriff Grady Archer with that Boy Scout bug up his ass, had arrested Benny on corruption charges.
And the Devil’s Keepers had done nothing to prevent it or help him out. Finally—finally—the club was letting Benny Chambless twist in the fucking wind like he deserved.
As far as Uptown was concerned, Benny’s dirty little tumble from grace—along with a perp walk Uptown had recorded on his DVR to play back at will whenever he needed a happy little pick-me-up—was one of the greatest gifts he’d ever received.
Holly’s presence in Dumb Gator’s tonight was a close second.
Uptown smirked as he watched the most unlikely barfly in Dumb Gator’s history move through the mild Thursday evening crowd with her usual cheerful smile on her face, like her daddy hadn’t been led out of the town hall in cuffs. Like she wasn’t tainted by association. It was as if pretty, completely out-of-place Holly thought she’d stumbled into one of the cheerleading rallies she’d led when she was in high school. Instead of what Dumb Gator’s was and had always been: a ramshackle biker bar on a lonely bayou road leading out of town, filled with all manner of bad men, loose women, and straight-up miscreants. Uptown chief among them.
He swung out of the booth, his eyes trained on Lagrange’s sweetheart as she moved through the bar like liquid. It was as if it hadn’t crossed her mind that she shouldn’t be in here in the first place, despite that moment of indecision by the door. As if she had no idea that the three huge men she smiled at so prettily were assholes of the highest order, all three of them roustabouts drinking their way through their fourteen days off from a land rig out in the swamps and about ten days past anything resembling decent, civilized behavior. What little of that there was around here.
“Oh, come on.” Tick sounded like he couldn’t decide if he was amused or disgusted. A common dilemma. “The princess ain’t gonna want a pretty boy like you when she’s obviously trying to go slumming.”
“The princesses always want pretty boys like Uptown,” Butler said on a laugh. “Why do you think they’re always climbing him like a pole?”
“That’s for different reasons entirely,” Uptown returned, treating them to his best shit-eating grin. “It’s the quality of the pole in question.”
His grin got wider when they both shot him the finger in unison. Then he was moving through the crowd, his gaze back on the mayor’s little prize like she had a target on her slender back. She’d made it around the roustabouts—who’d probably let her pass for the same reason that everyone else was doing nothing but stare: either they knew who she was and couldn’t believe she was dumb enough to be here, or they could tell by looking at her that girls like her didn’t belong in a bar like this. Whichever it was, Holly was still forging her way to the bar, her ponytail bobbing and that smile of hers as bright and cheerful as if she were riding in her daddy’s convertible down Main Street in the Fourth of July parade.
Uptown didn’t love the fact that she got him as hard as a carload of strippers and a long, lost weekend to enjoy them, but he didn’t do much to fight it off, either. Holly Chambless had been a problem as a teenager, all silky dark hair and those big brown eyes, to say nothing of a tight little cheerleader’s body that made a man think hard about all the reasons why it might be worth ignoring those pesky Louisiana jailbait laws.
Uptown hadn’t dipped into that pool back then, and not only because the mayor would have lost his mind if anyone touched his favorite prop—which might have been a problem for the club, back when they’d needed Benny’s influence as mayor. Maybe it was because Holly had always seemed like she didn’t actually know what a piece of shit her father was. Still, her obliviousness hadn’t kept Uptown from teaching her a lesson about spying on people when she’d been sixteen, back behind Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church in one of Louisiana’s trademark elevated graveyards. He’d been balls deep when he’d looked up from banging some groupie on an ancient family tomb. He couldn’t remember the groupie. But he could still remember the way Holly Chambless had held her breath when he’d gone over and gotten in her face. He could still see the way she’d blushed, hot and red, suggesting the mayor’s pretty little daughter really was as innocent as she looked.
On some level, he’d found that…remarkable. Memorable, certainly, which was also pretty fucking remarkable, given the amount of pussy he’d had thrown at him in the past month alone. Women were a blur to him.
Holly never had been.
And now she had to be twenty-two or so, a shiny college graduate with a fancy degree to prove it. Not an MRS degree, either, like half the girls she’d gone to high school with here in town. She still had all that long thick hair, swept back into her usual high ponytail that made him want to wrap it around his ugly, tattooed hands to see how prettily she obeyed him when he tugged on it. She still had that slamming body with a tight, round ass, long legs, and impossibly perky tits that made his mouth water a little bit. He mad-dogged one of the hangarounds who was leering at her as she walked—in that rolling, bouncy way of hers that had absolutely no fucking place in a biker bar—straight up to the bar itself. The hangaround actually jerked back and apologized, which made Uptown grin even more. The fat-bellied redneck next to the hangaround took one look at Uptown and cleared off the barstool he’d been sitting on, which meant Uptown could slide onto it right as Holly reached the bar and rested her palms on the scarred and battered slab of wood like she needed it for balance.
Ma
ybe she wasn’t as obliviously perky as she was pretending.
“Don’t you know better than to walk into a place like this?” Uptown asked, maybe a little too close to her ear. He got even closer, to make sure. “Or are you finally looking for a taste?”
That was what he’d said to her all those years ago. He’d looked up from fucking the groupie who’d begged him to do her in the graveyard because she’d been trying to prove how badass she was, whatever, and had found Holly standing there, wide-eyed and red-faced. When he’d stalked over to her, after finishing, he’d put his face in hers for the sheer pleasure of watching her tremble.
You looking for a taste, jailbait? he’d asked. He’d known she’d run.
So he shouldn’t have felt that weird little pang when that was exactly what she did.
Uptown realized he’d forgotten that part. That pang.
Holly didn’t run tonight. She jumped, then shifted so she could look at him. There was an odd light in her soft brown eyes, something anxious and very nearly desolate, but it was gone in the next instant when she recognized him.
“Killian,” she said, and her cheeks went red the way they had years ago. Funny how sharp that memory was to him. He could barely remember what the hell he’d done last night, but he remembered that fall afternoon behind the church as clear and bright as if it had happened last week. “Uh, hi.”
He only watched her, keeping his expression flat and more than a little cold, because nobody called him “Killian” besides his mama—and even she preferred to call him “asshole” these days.
Holly’s smile faltered a little bit when he didn’t relent, but she still kept it aimed straight at him. “I don’t remember your other name.”
Uptown would have had a serious problem with anyone else born and raised in Lagrange who said that shit to his face. But somehow, he believed Holly wasn’t messing with him. Because it was entirely possible that the mayor’s oblivious little princess didn’t know shit about the club the way everyone else in Lagrange did. It would be funny if it wasn’t one more piece of evidence condemning that asshole to his richly deserved fate.
