by Hazel Parker
Finally, I got Lane to really laugh. Like, the kind of laughter that only a couple could have over an inside joke told for the first time in ages. The kind of laughter that told me he had finally let go of the fear that I was going to abandon him and surprise him with a flight home to Georgia.
Well, at some point, I did want him to come with me to Georgia. I didn’t expect him to retrace the dark steps of his past one by one, but I certainly wanted to get out of the state for a bit.
But I also knew I wasn’t going to get out for good. Why would I get out of the place that was making me the happiest?
“So if I’m understanding you right,” Lane said nervously. “You’re not going to move away?”
I sat up, put my hands on his thigh, and looked him right in the eyes.
“It wouldn’t be too much to ask if you could help me get a new store open, would it?”
Lane smiled and put his hand on the back of my head.
“It’s about damn time that you weren’t too proud to ask for help.”
I barely had time to muster a smile before he pulled me in, and the two of us were kissing like we had on the night of the best date of my life.
Yes, it was about damn time that I wasn’t too proud to ask for help. It was about damn time that I had finally found a home for me. It was about damn time that Lane and I didn’t have any more questions, any more stalkers, and any more danger around us.
We could just explore our relationship, each other, and our futures together.
As it turned out, it was what I’d wanted all along—I had just used practical excuses to cover up for emotional ones. But no more.
Our kissing quickly turned erotic as Lane lifted me off the couch and carried me to the bedroom. In the long term, yes, I had what I wanted. But before I could think any further about that, I had some short-term needs that Lane was more than willing to take care of.
Once we stumbled onto the bed, I helped him get my clothes off. Our movement was not slow, but it was not exactly done at breakneck, clothes-torn speed; it was a more methodical pace, the kind where every sliver of my body was explored, but not at a snail’s pace. When he removed my shirt and bra, he made sure to suckle on my breasts and fondle them, but when he got there, he wasn’t too gentle.
He removed my jeans and underwear next, and the same thing played out. When he kissed my leg en route to my sex, he moved quickly, but not until drawing an appropriate reaction of excitement.
“Promise you’re not moving back to Georgia?” he said just before his lips pressed down on me.
“Oh, you’re evil,” I said, feeling so wet and teased that I almost just pushed his head down. “You know the answer to that. Yes, yes!”
Lane smirked, kept his eyes locked on me, and started eating me out. His hands pressed down on my hip bones, preventing me from squirming out of place—which just made it that much better.
I tried to sit up and look into his eyes, but the pleasure was like a crushing tidal wave coming in and obliterating my attempts to control my actions. With Lane’s tongue serving as the driver for said wave, there was no escaping the blitz of pleasure that filled me from head to toe.
Whether because of the near-death experience, the sheer physical work he was doing, or just how I felt about him, it took seemingly no time for Lane to get me to orgasm. When I did, I screamed his name in pleasure. It was a surprisingly emotional orgasm—I had to turn away from him for a few moments in the immediate aftermath so I wouldn’t look like a blubbering mess.
Why wouldn’t I? I had never understood before today why Lane treated me like an angel. I knew I’d helped him as a child with some bullies, but I had never understood just how much that impacted him.
But today, he had finally returned the favor in a way that I now understood. I could see what I’d done for him and just how much that had changed his life. While childhood changes had a longer-lasting impact, him saving me had already changed me in one unexpected way.
I wasn’t going to become a Georgia resident, after all.
“Carrie?”
I took a deep breath, turned over, and smiled.
“Come here, love,” I said.
“Love,” he said, repeating the word as he crawled over to me naked. “I like that.”
“I love it,” I said as I took his face in my hands. “Just as I love you.”
Lane smiled and kissed me on the lips. He stayed there for what felt like a full minute. The world around us stopped. What had started as an erotic fulfillment of the day had become one of the most romantic moments of my life.
And I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“And I love you too,” he said.
He inserted himself into me, but it felt wrong to describe what happened in the next ten minutes as fucking or having sex. I felt like, for the first time in my life, I knew what it meant to make love.
The sex was just a means to making love; this moment went so much deeper than him thrusting or me pulsating around him. It was like we were becoming one entity, one unit that could survive anything. If I had survived the absolute worst that life had thrown me in the span of a week and a half through Lane’s help, we could get through anything.
True, not every fight would be external. We’d have our own internal struggles, our moments where we fought or where we had doubts in our head. Those moments wouldn’t be perfect.
But what we had would be perfect in the end. We could transcend those moments with magical ones like these. We were no longer just Lane Bentley and Carrie Griffith; we were something that had no name.
Of course, as we had sex, I felt great physical pleasure; I came again. I felt him twitch, groan, and start to harden. But these were passing sensations in comparison to the way he was making me feel at the core of my being.
We collapsed together into the bed, cuddling and being as close as we had been while he was inside of me.
“Lane,” I said.
But I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was so totally immersed in what we had experienced that words failed me.
Fortunately, they didn’t fail Lane. He knew just what to say.
“Carrie…I love you. I do. This is love, and this is going to be the only love I have.”
I still struggled to form words, but my kiss to him and my cuddles told me that I felt the same way.
There was no reason to go home when I already had it right here.
Epilogue
“Is it like you remember it?” Carrie asked.
I had found myself in Atlanta, Georgia. I somehow had been convinced by Carrie to return to the state that I had sworn never to come back to.
If that didn’t say that I loved her, then nothing did.
Really, getting a break from New York City was the ultimate show of how much I loved her. After the rescue, we’d turned about a half-dozen Bloodhounds over to the police. Those Bloodhounds were happy to confess to the plan, but with Damon gone, there was no one who knew of the connection to Kyle Stone.
But that was fine. That was a fight for another day. That day was coming soon, sure, but it wasn’t something that was necessarily at the front of my mind.
Instead, what was there was the disbelief that I had followed Carrie down to our home state.
For vacation, that was.
Thankfully, Carrie had seen the value of staying in New York City, and we were going to have the best of both worlds. I was going to get to stay in the club, and she was going to get a second chance at opening a store—this time, a steakhouse with better margins.
“It’s better,” I said as I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “It’s better because I’m spending it with you.”
“Oh, Lane,” she said with a goofy eye roll. “If your club friends knew that you could be so sappy with me—”
“Never!” I said with such conviction that Carrie could only laugh at the idea.
And why shouldn’t she? She’d gotten a second chance at life thanks to a rescue that probabl
y didn’t have much business working out. That wasn’t to say that I was some sort of savior. Rather, it was just an acknowledgment of the truth—life was a lot better when one had tasted death.
“It’s OK,” she said, slinging her arm around me. “As long as you never change with me, then you can be however you want with the club.”
“That’s how I intend it to be, my love,” I said, turning toward her. “I’m a sergeant-at-arms with the Saints. And with you, I’m a loving boyfriend.”
“Aww,” she said as we shared yet another perfect kiss.
And then, just as things seemed to be settling down, my phone rang. It was Biggie.
And he was only supposed to call me if things were getting bad.
“Well, this should be fun,” I said with a sigh as I answered it. “Biggie.”
“Niner, I know you’re on vacation, and there’s no rush—”
“Then why did you call?” I said.
“Because,” Biggie said with a gulp. “Kyle has promised us that he’s going to fight the ‘final’ battle to take us down. It sounds like he’s going to throw everything at us to destroy us. I think we’ve pushed him too far, Niner.”
For the shortest of moments, I felt a pain in my stomach and a fear of what could happen. If Kyle was serious and was using both legal and illicit means to hurt us, yeah, we were in trouble.
But it faded when I remembered not everything that we had come from New York City. In fact…
“If it’s a fight he wants,” I said, “it’s a fight he’ll get.”
“Niner?”
“We’ve got our resources,” I said. “I suggest you reach out to Marcel. Have him contact our friends out west. Tell him it’s time to call upon the help we were promised.”
It’s time to bring all the Savage Saints together.
BIGGIE
Prologue
Jack “Biggie” Stone
The rain was just minutes away from pouring down on the streets of Brooklyn, but as I sat outside smoking a cigar, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a good day.
The Savage Saints, Brooklyn chapter had largely become self-sustaining at this point, thanks to word-of-mouth business in the area and support from the Las Vegas and Green Hills Savage Saints. Though we had to deal with a few questions about if we were actually a gang, by and large, Brooklyn loved us, and we loved Brooklyn.
We had eliminated a rival that had seemingly popped up out of nowhere, the Bloodhounds. Though we all suspected—really, outright knew—that my brother, Kyle, a politician in the area, had secretly funded the club, it was still a victory worth celebrating. That was doubly true when we learned what their leader, Damon, had done throughout his adult life.
And finally, we were all finding love. Yes, that sounded sappy and silly, but I could see the change in how our club members behaved; we had gone from a bunch of tough, gruff assholes to…well, still tough and still gruff, but with better empathy skills than before.
Oh, and my older brother, Marcel, the club president, had now fully recovered from the gunshot wound inflicted by the Las Vegas Savage Saints—now that was an interesting story.
All of this to say that even if a massive storm was set to hit Brooklyn, even if we were warned we might temporarily lose power, even if the ensuing storm caused damage or forced us to close for a few days, what did we really have to worry about? Life was good. Life was really, really good.
I supposed I could find myself a woman too. I was a little more unashamedly interested in relationships than the rest of the club, which made it a little painful to see them all find someone, but I just figured life was saving the best for life.
If Marcel were here, he’d tell you to stop being so goddamn optimistic and naive.
And I’d say right back to him that the club needs someone to believe good things will happen.
I took another puff of the cigar. The first pellets of rain began to fall.
I guess before I got a girl, I needed to get an umbrella.
I hurried to finish the rest of my cigar. I got to the end and turned to head back inside to try to finish the last of our repairs.
“Brother!”
I froze. That was not Marcel who had called to me.
I turned, knowing only one other person could have said that. One other slimy, slender, slick—and probably sick—guy who just couldn’t let us be. One other person who was both a person I wanted to love as my brother and a person I needed to hate as the club rival.
Kyle Stone.
Sure enough, no one had tried to punk me by pretending to be him. He walked up in an oversized black suit—though, at his size, practically everything was too big on him—brown shoes, and sunglasses. He had taken to spiking the front of his hair a little bit, perhaps in an attempt to look cool or, I don’t know, differentiate himself from Marcel and me. Understanding Kyle’s rationale was a difficult task, though I had never stopped trying to do so.
After all, if I had any hope of getting him to stop before we shot him, I had to understand him.
“Well, well, well,” he said. “You look like you’re mighty and fine. Smoking a nice cigar on a Saturday morning here.”
“I am,” I said, though interactions with Kyle always left me a little nervous. “How can I help you?”
“Help me?” Kyle said incredulously. “Help me? After all that we’ve been through, you want to help me? How pathetically naive are you, Jack?”
I stood firm and didn’t say a word. Whatever Kyle had come to say, he wouldn’t be able to resist saying it at some point. And that point usually came sooner rather than later.
“Well, soon it won’t matter, because you won’t be able to help me. All that you’ve done is prolong the inevitable. You haven’t accomplished shit.”
“What do you mean, accomplished shit?”
But Kyle was too good. He wasn’t going to incriminate himself by saying something out loud. Although, I realized as he stood before me, the fact that he was physically present was a telling sign that he was starting to lose control over his behavior. He never would have risked looking so angry and so ominous before us in the past; now, thanks to our efforts to thwart him politically and with power, he had seemingly become desperate.
“I am about to throw everything in my power at you to make sure that you don’t make it out of the month solvent,” he warned, and it didn’t take a genius to realize that he wasn’t referring to just destroying the company’s finances. “You guys won’t be around to tell anyone about what happened. Think of it as the final battle between us, Jack. The last time the brothers get together.”
My eyes went wide. That could constitute a legal threat.
Not that we would push it in the courts. We had easier and quicker means of resolving the issues. It just floored me that Kyle was now willing to say things so explicitly.
“Why?” I said. It was all I could muster in response because of my shock. “Why are you so hellbent on killing us?”
Kyle grimaced, but he couldn’t hide the fact that that was his true intent.
“People are dead because of you. Boyfriends, husbands, fathers, sons—they’re dead because of your actions. You can hate us all you want, but no one deserves that. So why are you insistent on doing this, Kyle?”
I could only hope that my plea would give me something—even a morsel of hope—for me to use against Kyle. So long as we continued this fight of violence, neither side was going to truly emerge victorious. Even if Kyle fell, the Savage Saints would be a target of the Brooklyn political system. If we fell, well, we’d be dead.
And for just a split second, I thought I got something. Kyle’s face, I swore, showed some signs of remorse. It wasn’t much; in fact, I only knew it was remorse because I knew Kyle’s expressions in general.
But there was no context other than what I had said, and the next thing that followed was Kyle scowling at me like I had just called him a skinny shithead.
“When you and Marcel know what it’s like to be mock
ed and left for ruin…when you and he know what it’s like to truly go through hell…when you two know that? Then I’ll tell you why I’m insistent on doing this. But until then, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you guys wind up in hell.”
The door opened behind me. I heard the chuckle of Uncle, but his presence was one of the last things we needed—Uncle was the most abrasive and grating member of the club.
“Well, well, well,” he began. It’s just like Kyle. We’re all Stones here, I guess. “If it isn’t the little political shithead, coming to cry about all that’s happened to him.”
“I’ve come to tell you that your time here with your little club is about to be over,” Kyle said, looking much more prone to an outburst than he did with me. “You think just because you’re rich, you’re going to keep getting your way, Uncle?”
“Yep!” he said with a laugh. “Money takes care of a lot of things, kiddo. Maybe you’d learn that if you hadn’t spent so much time crying about how the world wasn’t fair when you should have been doing more push-ups and less bitching. Hmm? Did you ever think of that? Maybe if you did that, you’d get your way—”
“Uncle, that’s enough,” I said, but it was more of a plea than a demand.
I knew Uncle would give me grief as soon as we got inside. You don’t break down the team before the opponent. You stand as one.
Too bad Uncle’s aggressive nature is hurting the team.
“You know what?” Kyle said with a smirk, nodding toward Uncle. “You’ll be the first.”
“The first to what? Kiss you goodbye?”
Kyle just smirked and looked to me.
“You all will see soon enough.”
With that, he turned and walked away. Both Uncle and I stood there, even as the thunder grew louder and the lightning blinded us. The rain would only be minutes away now, if not less than a full minute.
