FILLED: Berserkers MC

by Sophia Gray

  My eyes snapped open and I realized what I was doing. How wrong this was.

  My hands left his hair and went to his shoulders instead. I gripped them, then I put as much force as I could behind them. I pushed. It was barely enough to move him, his body too huge, too muscled, for me to do more, but it was enough.

  Enough to break the kiss, enough to slice a knife through the heat that had been consuming us.

  Still feeling shaky, but a little stronger now, I shoved at him again. This time he backed away further, his eyes wide with surprise—and maybe hurt?—as he did so. Wanting to lick my lips, but afraid to do so because tasting him seemed like a really good and a really bad idea right now, I shook my head.

  My chest was heaving from our heavy passion, but I couldn’t let it overwhelm me. I had to settle back down. I had to get a grip.

  Finding my voice, I forced the words out of my mouth even though a huge part of me didn’t want to say them. “Get out. Get out now.”

  I didn’t look at him, because I was worried whatever I found there would start things all over again, and this time I wouldn’t have the will to pull away. But I heard him as he moved. I heard the heavy footsteps as he moved towards the door, stomping angrily away. I heard the door slam shut, flinching at the sudden loud sound. I heard his bike start and then drive away, knowing that there was a good chance he would never come back again.

  This was going too far.

  When I knew he was gone completely, I let myself slide down the wall. “I can’t believe I just let that happened,” I murmured to the empty kitchen.

  What the hell had I been thinking? What kind of a woman was I? I eyed the heavy rock on my ring finger, feeling disgust swirling deep in my gut. Here I was ready to let Nester strip me and fuck me until I begged him to do it a thousand more times while I wore the engagement ring given to me by another man. And not just any man, either.

  Santos DeArma.

  Letting my face drop into my hands, I fought back tears. This wasn’t how things were supposed to go. When I met Nester in that rock quarry all those years ago, it was a strange twist of fate. I’d been contemplating some pretty dark things at the time, struggling with my own inner demons. Nester had been proving to a bunch of idiot friends no one even remembered anymore that he was as tough as nails and not afraid of anything.

  Both of which were true.

  When we’d collided, it was like the world had shifted just to bring us together. I didn’t know it in that moment, and I would spend the next couple of years skirting around what had already started to build in my heart, but when I finally admitted it to myself, there was no going back. I’d fallen heavily in love with Nester.

  He’d consumed my whole being until I didn’t want to know what life was like without him. He’d encouraged me when I was struggling in nursing school. He’d chided me when I thought for sure I couldn’t do anything right. He taught me when I didn’t know. For a man who could be so hotheaded and angry, it was incredible how patient he was with me.

  And how impatient he always was for me. Not that he’d pressured me. Instead, he always told me it was my choice, but that I should never question how much he wanted me.

  Sometimes he even liked putting my hand on his bulging pants just to remind me.

  And the sex was undeniably good. The sex was mind blowing in ways I didn’t know sex could be, but that wasn’t what pushed me over the edge and into love. No, it was the way he supported me and cared about me and made a point of doing better even though he might have screwed up before.

  That was the Nester I’d fallen head over heels for.

  “Not that it matters anymore,” I said angrily to myself.

  I’d broken it off with Nester five years ago—and I’d hated doing it then, too. Although I knew that Nester had been hurt, maybe even heartbroken when I did it, there had been other things going on that I just couldn’t tell him about. He was in big trouble. The kind of trouble that would put him away for a lot longer than a measly five years. He was busted for drugs and not just a little bit of them. They were looking for closer to fifteen years if they could swing it, and I just couldn’t let that happen.

  So when Santos approached me and said he had an offer, there was nothing I could do but listen.

  “I can’t get rid of the charge,” Santos told me, sounding contrite, though I couldn’t imagine that was honest. “But I can get the sentence reduced. No reason he has to spend the next fifteen years in prison, right?”

  I’d been eager, probably too eager, for anything that could help Nester. “You can do that?”

  Santos smiled at me and in that moment, yes, he looked like a snake. Maybe the devil himself, who can tell? But I didn’t care, because I knew that whatever offer he made me, whatever deal he put on the table, I would take. No matter how much it ate me up inside.

  “I’ve always admired how beautiful you are, Zelda. Absolutely stunning.” He lifted a curl from my chest, just barely brushing a breast. I had to force myself not to jerk away. “And I think that it’s not unreasonable for a man like me to ask for a shot with a woman like you.”

  From there, the deal was obvious. He wanted me and in exchange for giving Nester his freedom a whole ten years earlier. I couldn’t turn that down, no matter how much my skin crawled at the idea of being with Santos DeArma.

  But I did it anyway. And when he asked me to marry him, I agreed to that, too.

  The only thing I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do, not yet, was sleep with him. There was something too wrong about the idea of letting him slide between my legs like he belonged there. There was only one man who belonged there, and that was Nester.

  Of course, telling Santos that was a bad idea, so I’d fibbed a little and told him that I wanted to wait. Plenty of women waited until marriage—which was likely why Santos was so intent on marrying me in the first place, I thought—and it had been relatively easy to convince Santos of that.

  But it wasn’t the truth. The truth was, Nester Perry was the only man I would ever love, and I couldn’t bring myself to betray the memory of us together like that.

  Too bad that soon I wouldn’t have a choice either way.

  Chapter Five

  I was reading, or trying to read, but was having a hard time focusing. The passion that had exploded between Nester and me the previous day still lingered in my veins, causing crazy ideas to fly through my head.

  Nester still loved me, I thought. Sure, he was obviously still angry—the rivalry between him and Santos had been going on for ages. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone was just going to give up overnight. I understood that, and didn’t even blame him for being angry with me. After all, I’d broken his heart; I couldn’t expect him to just shrug that off like it was nothing.

  I wouldn’t want him to, I thought to myself, my eyes staring at the pages of the book I was reading, though I couldn’t make out a single word. My mind was way too far off.

  But despite his anger and the sting he felt from Santos, I knew he still loved me. Or maybe that was just really wishful thinking on my part. I told myself that you didn’t kiss someone like that if you didn’t still love them terribly, but how true was that really? Maybe not at all.

  “It is true,” I mumbled to myself, tucking my feet up beneath me as I sat in the overstuffed chair tucked into the corner. My “reading” corner. I’d spent countless nights studying for my nursing degree right in this chair, though that was all gone and past now. Santos didn’t need a smart chick, as he liked to put it.

  Putting the book aside, having given up any hope of reading, I gave in to my desires and let my mind wander.

  We could run away, I thought. It was a romantic, albeit childish thought. Unrealistic to say the least, but what was holding us anymore? Neither of us had family to tie us down. And I wasn’t in school anymore, so there wasn’t an issue there. I frowned, honestly thinking it through even though there was a reasonable part of my mind that already knew it was never going to happen. T
he MC was here and Nester wouldn’t just abandon them, but most of their ranks had scattered, hadn’t they? Santos always liked to talk about it, mentioned how they were dwindling and pathetic now. How they had no resolve, no backbone. Maybe that was reason enough for Nester to leave them and start over with me.

  You’re dreaming, Zelda, I thought, but I continued to dream anyway.

  I thought of how we could run off to some tiny little town, maybe buy a little land. I had some money set aside now. A security blanket just in case things went horribly wrong with Santos. Just in case I…needed to get away.

  We could use that. And I was sure Nester had something set aside. Maybe we’d try farming. Or I’d be a waitress again, but at some diner in the middle of nowhere. Hell, maybe he’d be a mechanic and I’d be a schoolteacher.

  My fantasies were anywhere from mundane to wild, doable and completely impossible. They would flood my mind and for a second, I felt hope flood my chest like a crazy drug that I couldn’t get enough of.

  But every time I got too far involved with them, I would remember that there was a huge rock sitting on my finger, reminding me every waking moment that I belonged to someone else now.

  It didn’t matter that I didn’t love that someone else.

  Shaking my head, I got up from my corner and finally just accepted the facts: Nester was no longer in my future. It hurt my heart to even think the words, but I had to. I had to move on from him, because there was no getting around who I’d made my deal with, and Nester was probably angry enough that he didn’t love me anyway, and what sort of man kissed a woman who he knew was engaged?

  I felt a trickle of anger enter my system and clung to it desperately. It was the only thing that was going to keep me sane. Period.

  Feeling the need to do something, I went to cleaning the house. Again. I had dinner that night with Santos, but the day was mine, and though the house was spotless thanks to my rampage of cleaning the previous day, I went to the kitchen and started all over again. I went top to bottom until my nostrils burned with the smell of bleach and my hands were dry from being dunked in chemical addled water and dried a thousand times.

  It didn’t really address what I was feeling inside, but it made me feel a little better.

  ***

  I put on a pair of somewhat gaudy dangling earrings. They were diamonds, real, Santos had told me, and since they had been a gift, I thought he probably wanted me to wear them. And since my hair was straightened and then deliberately curled only to be piled on my head like some sort of hive, I figured the noticeable and altogether too large dangly earrings wouldn’t be too much.

  That was my hope anyway.

  I’d changed into a slinky red dress that was ankle length but had a slit between my legs in the back and had a plunging neckline that put the ladies most noticeably on display. Maybe I should have felt beautiful, but mostly I just felt…cheap.

  It was hard not to when you were dating a man only to keep another man out of prison. It made you feel like you were little more than a toy to be bargained with.

  Shaking the feeling aside, I went to my closet and found the heels. Thankfully, Santos wasn’t as tall as Nester was, so the heels were kitten only so that I wouldn’t become taller than him. It was a small thing, but it made me feel a little less like I was some kind of paid escort. I’d take what I could get these days.

  As I slipped on the heels, I heard the knock at the door. Santos had asked for a key several different times, but I always told him that I never gave out keys to my house. Period. It was one of those things that irritated him, but he conceded. It was less of a point of contention these days since I had agreed to marry him and soon it wouldn’t matter whether I gave him a key to my house or not, because I wouldn’t have a house anymore. Instead, I would live with Santos and sell the little place that I had grown so fond of.

  Sighing, I finished putting on my shoes, glanced once more in the mirror to check my hair and makeup, then headed downstairs to greet Santos.

  For a wild moment, right before I grabbed the handle of the door, I thought it might be Nester. It was a silly, impossible idea. Nester wasn’t going to show. And if he was, it wasn’t going to be now. It was Santos on the other end of the wooden door and I knew that.

  And yet I couldn’t deny how much my heart fluttered at the thought it could be him—or how disappointed I was when I jerked the door open to discover that it was, in fact, Santos on the other side.

  Covering up my disappointment as quickly as I could, I greeted Santos with a smile, and when he stepped closer to plant a kiss on my mouth, I didn’t resist. It felt nothing like the passionate one I’d shared with Nester the previous day, and instantly I felt guilty for thinking that.

  What sort of woman kissed two men one right after the other like that?

  “Are you ready, babe?” he asked me, looping his buff arm around my waist. Santos wasn’t necessarily an unattractive man. He was on the shorter side for a man, closer to five feet ten or five feet eleven, but was big still. He was stocky, bulked up from intense work outs that were borne of a mixture of vanity and a need to be able to break people. His face was long with hard lines and angles that made the toughness within him more noticeable. His eyes were narrow and wrinkles licked around them like crows scratching at the skin. Brown hair was kept so short that he was often mistaken for a military man, though I knew for a fact that Santos had never served.

  Forcing a smile on my face, I nodded. “Yeah, let’s go.”

  Santos had brought his car tonight, for which I was grateful. My dress didn’t really lend itself to riding a motorcycle. If anything, I’d end up ripping it, or having to pull it up so high on my hips that I might as well have just worn my damn panties.

  He opened the door for me and I slid in, thanking him. He closed the door after me and rounded the front of the car to get into the driver’s side. He started the car and we were off. I didn’t know where we were going tonight, but made the assumption that it would be some place “nice.” Or at least, nice in terms of expensive. It wouldn’t be quaint and the food would probably be fancy, but generally tasteless, and it would feel like a library or a museum where you basically felt like if you were going to talk you had best whisper.

  It was the type of place Santos always took me and though I never complained, I missed the days where Nester and I would go to some hole-in-the-wall café and have breakfast for dinner, because I was wearing my comfy sweats and my favorite holey t-shirt and he didn’t care. He’d still call me sexy.

  Stop thinking of Nester, I admonished myself. You’re not marrying him.

  The ride to the restaurant, wherever it would be, was mostly quiet. We made polite conversation in the way of me asking how his day was and him telling me that I looked beautiful—or at least perfect, which he thought was the same and I didn’t. Beyond that, there wasn’t really much substance to the whole thing.

  I found out when we parked that the restaurant that he picked was that French place—I hated French food unless it was toast or fries—where he’d asked me to marry him. It was one of his favorites and I hated it because the only thing I could ever find on the menu that I liked was a damn salad.

  Again, Santos opened the door for me, helping me out. Again I said a polite thank you. Then I looped my hand through the crook of his arm and allowed him to lead me into the restaurant. I told myself that everything was going fine, that this was a good place to eat—even though I hated it—and that Santos was a good man—even though there were so many reasons I didn’t think that was true.

  Santos had reservations and gave his name to the host, a snooty-looking man with one of those tiny mustaches that made it look like there was something unfortunate and a little slimy crawling across his upper lip. After a moment, the man escorted us to our table, gave us each a menu, and informed us a waiter and a bottle of chardonnay would be out in just a moment.

  I reached for my menu and began perusing the options, though there wasn’t really any point
. I already knew I was going to get a Caesar salad with dressing on the side and breadsticks. And they weren’t even the good breadsticks. They were the small, thin, crunchy ones that you always had to wash down with a lot of water.

  Gross.

  But I made a point of looking at the menu anyway, because if I didn’t, Santos would frown at me disapprovingly and ask if I didn’t like the restaurant. And that if I didn’t like it, I should have said something. Then he’d go on and tell me how he understood, that it was okay, because I’d been dating a ruffian for so long that of course I didn’t know good taste when I saw it. And then he’d insist on ordering for me, because he knew what was good here and he’d turn me into a cultured woman in no time.

  It was a miserable conversation to have with anyone, especially Santos with his deep, kind and condescending tone, and I was loathe to have it again.