by Tia Lewis
“Plan what? Bree, the man, isn’t like other humans. He doesn’t think the way we do. He’s one of those types who would probably wire a pregnant woman with a bomb, the way they do in those countries overseas. Ace and Phil saw that when they were over there. That’s the kind of person Hawk is. He doesn’t care who gets hurt or killed, as long as he gets what he wants.”
“What does he want?” I trembled.
“The Club—the club’s business, really. That’s it. Hawk wants to expand, and he wants to take us out. It’s not enough to negotiate or earn something. He’s trying to take it and wipe us off the map. Period.”
“Wow. I don’t even know what to say.” I didn’t know it was that deep between the Blood Riders and the Cobras. Evidently, my father hadn’t told me everything about his job.
“You don’t have to say anything. Look, I’m glad you’re safe, and that’s all that matters.” He wrapped his arms around my back pulling me close to him. He squeezed so hard I almost couldn’t breathe.
“What could he have done to us in the middle of the supermarket?” I asked, trying to be reasonable.
“I don’t even wanna think about it,” he said, hugging me again. I let him hug me until he felt better. Then, when he released me, “I don’t want you going anywhere by yourself. You hear me? Nowhere.”
“Drake—”
“I mean it! Nowhere. I can’t take a chance with you. Is that understood?”
It was flattering, but… “I don’t want to feel like I’m your prisoner.”
“You’re not a prisoner. It’s for your own good. It’s for all the girls, too, not just you. I want you safe. You’re the most vulnerable ones of the Club, and he knows that. And he knows we would do anything to get you back if he took you away from us.” He ran a warm, gentle hand down the side of my face. “From me.”
Something stirred, deep inside me. I didn’t know what to think or how to feel. On the one hand, I wanted to pull away and tell Drake I didn’t belong to him. Nobody could take me away from him because I wasn’t his in the first place.
On the other hand … I wanted to sink back into his embrace and never come out. It wasn’t wrong of me that I’d referred to the Club as “us,” as in “he’s watching us.” It was also wrong of me that I’d told Drake about Hawk in the first place. What did I care what happened to the Club? I hated them.
Didn’t I?
16
Drake
“Dinner’s ready!”
Bree looked up at me. “Come on. It’s time for dinner. I worked my ass off on it, so you better eat it.” She grinned, trying to lighten my mood. I could have kissed her for it.
“Shit, I don’t have an appetite now.” I leaned my head against the door, looking around the room. The last thing I could think about was eating
“Well, you better pretend to have one,” she commanded. I looked at her in surprise and was even more surprised at the way her eyes burned into mine. “I mean it, Drake.”
Lost in a trance I begin to ponder. What this Club needs is a strong leader. You’re their leader. You have to put on a show, if only for their sake. Don’t let Hawk get to you like this. He’s not here. They are. Show them you’re not afraid.”
“I’m not scared of Hawk, Bree. You have nothing to worry about.” I said. And I wasn’t. But I couldn’t tell Bree how much deeper the story went. Not yet.
“Then prove it. Go out there and eat a plateful of spaghetti. I made the sauce with these two hands, damn it.” She grinned, holding her hands up. I kissed both palms then moved my mouth over hers. She was more precious than anything I knew. I had no idea they made women like her anymore.
“Okay. Dinner.” I opened the office door, and she followed me through the lounge, into the dining room. The place was a zoo, everybody practically climbing over each other to get their food. It smelled great, and my appetite actually woke up a little. I grinned down at her as I plated up some spaghetti. “Is this enough, Mom?”
“Shut up,” she muttered, taking food for herself. I saw her glance at Violet, who sat in one corner, alone. “I think I’ll sit over there, with her.”
“You sure?” I asked, looking over at Violet.
“Yeah. I don’t want to twist the knife.” She went over to the table, put her things down, and started talking. I couldn’t hear what she said, but at least she was trying. She was so thoughtful, I couldn’t believe it.
I couldn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, either, since I had bigger problems to take care of. Namely, Hawk. I looked around the room for Creed, and when I caught his eye, I jerked my head in the direction of the bar before going to it myself. I wanted to be alone, without everybody else. I had to tell him what Bree told me.
“So, what do you think?” I mumbled with a ridiculous amount of food in my mouth. The food was delicious. I would have to thank Bree and Darcy personally.
“What do I think? I think he’s a fucking slimeball,” Creed muttered. “I could kill Hawk with my bare hands. Threatening our women like that. Watching us. He has no fucking soul, I’m convinced.”
“I know. He’s a mad dog, and we’ve gotta take him out.” I replied. I didn’t know how, yet. I just knew we would. The thought alone was enough to get me excited.
“You think the girls are safe?”
“No, I don’t. That’s why we can’t let them out alone. I already told Bree. We have to tell the others, too. No way they can go out on their own. You know that’s the first fucking thing he’ll do—follow them, take them and do God knows what.”
“Right.” Creed nodded.
“It’s how that piece of shit thinks, and he wants us to know he’s thinking about it. That’s why he made sure they saw him at the supermarket.”
“He’s an animal, man,” Creed muttered, tearing a piece of bread apart with his hands. I knew he wanted to tear Hawk apart so easily. “The worst part is, they’re all like him. It’s as if he went from door to door at the asylum, asking the guys inside if they wanted to be part of his club.”
I barked a harsh laugh. “Too true.” I hated to even think about going head-to-head with them. We had the manpower and the muscle, but we didn’t have the brutality. I shuddered to think how it would turn out. If it came down to it, we would go in with guns blazing.
Why did the thought bother me more than it normally would have? Any other time, I’d be on my bike already, itching to go. I knew the answer, but didn’t want to admit it to myself. I looked over my shoulder into the dining room. Bree sat with the other girls, including Violet, and all of them laughed together. I couldn’t imagine leaving her. I didn’t want to get myself killed and leave her. But I would go into it if it meant keeping her safe.
What the hell had happened to me in one day?
“Okay. It’s your turn. Tell me something about you.” Bree’s head was on my chest, one of her long legs wrapped around my hips. She was a goddess. I stroked her thigh—not sexually since we had just finished our first round of the night. I just wanted to touch her.
“Let me see.” I thought about it. “I still watch cartoons sometimes.”
“You do? Me, too!”
“Liar.”
“I’m not lying. I swear!” She picked up her head, looking me in the eye. I could just about make out her face in the darkness. “I mean it. I watch them.”
“So, what’s your favorite cartoon, then?”
“Spongebob.” She didn’t even have to think about it. I was impressed.
“That’s a pretty good show,” I admitted. “Okay, that was my thing. Now it’s your turn.”
“Hmm. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until I was twelve.”
“I never learned to ride a bike,” I admitted.
“Stop playing! Really? And yet you ride a motorcycle.” She ran her nails over my chest.
“I know. Weird, huh? We could never afford a bike.”
“Huh. But you could afford a motorcycle?” She didn’t sound convinced.
“That was diff
erent. When I was thirteen, I started doing odd jobs around here for the money. I would sweep up, empty ashtrays, wipe down the bar. Stuff like that. And they would give me money which I saved up for three years.”
“Wow, no way. So you got your license as soon as you turned sixteen? That’s so cool, a teenager on a motorcycle.”
My mood shifted. I felt it clearly. “It didn’t happen quite that fast. I didn’t learn until I was eighteen.”
“Oh.” She didn’t ask any questions, which I thought was interesting. Didn’t she want to know why it had taken another two years?
“Yeah. So by the time I had money for a real motorcycle, why would I bother getting a bicycle?”
She snickered. “That makes sense.” We both went silent. Then, she asked. “What did you do for those two years? If you don’t mind my asking. Were you here, with the Club?”
“No.” My body tensed, and I willed myself to relax. It wasn’t her fault, any of it. She wasn’t there. And it was ages ago.
“What happened?”
“I was away.” What would she think if I told her? It was the one thing I felt she needed to know about me, so I had to tell her. Otherwise, if I waited, she might think I was holding something back. I didn’t want to hold anything back from her. “In juvie. Have you heard of it?”
“Juvenile Detention Center?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” She didn’t move away. She didn’t flinch. She took it like a champ. “So, I guess it would be rude of me to ask what happened to put you in there.”
“Not rude. Curious.” I shrugged then laced my fingers together behind my head. It would be better for me not to touch her while I told her. I didn’t want to feel her flinch away.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Nah, it’s cool.” I cleared my throat. “I beat the hell outta my stepdad. He was hitting on my mom, and it was just one time too many.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. I was tired of listening to him hurt her. It had been years since he first started. Do you know what it’s like to hear to somebody you love suffer again and again? And you can’t do anything about it?”
“No.”
“So, when they first got married, he was okay. Everything was great. I was eight then. By the time I was nine, he had started with it. When I was thirteen, he stopped using his palm and started using his fist. That was when I started working out. I wanted to bulk up, so when it came time to take him on, I could do it. He didn’t hurt her all the time, you see. Only once a month or so, when he got really drunk or really pissed off about something. But that last time—”
“What happened?” she asked.
I shuddered when I remembered it, and it took me awhile before I could talk again. “He had her on the floor, and he was just beating her. She was unconscious by that point—good thing.”
“That was a good thing?”
“Yeah, because she didn’t have to see what I did. I pulled him off her and asked him how he would like it for someone to beat him. He tried to shake me off, told me I was just a bastard anyway so what did I care, all this shit. I didn’t care what he said, though. I couldn’t stop looking at my mom. She was just—bleeding. Bleeding everywhere and unconscious. And he was hitting her anyway, you know? I couldn’t understand that part. He was still hitting her even though she wasn’t conscious anymore.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Then I lost it. I punched him once, laid him out flat. I got on his chest, the way he was on her chest, and I just wailed on him. I couldn’t stop. I waited until he was unconscious, just like he did with her. Then I hit him a few more times. It’s a crazy thing what happens to a person when they finally get to do what they’ve been waiting to do for years, you know? I only stopped because I was afraid I might kill him. I had that much built up rage in me that I could have killed him.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. When she did, it was, “What did you do then?”
“I called an ambulance. The police arrested me that night. I spent almost two years in a juvenile detention facility. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I would fucking do it again. Because he never touched her after that. When he got out of the hospital, she had already left town—I think she was ashamed that people knew what happened. Women like her always believe that they can hide the truth from people, you know? Like nobody knew he was beating her. Once I made it to juvie, that was it. She couldn’t take the shame. She moved to Brooklyn, and he stayed in Queens. I keep an eye on him sometimes, just to make sure he leaves her the fuck alone.”
“Wow,” Bree breathed. “That’s incredible.”
“Incredibly bad,” I said, joking.
“No. It’s incredible, period. You did that for your mom. I mean, he sounds like the kind of person who wouldn’t have just stayed away if you had asked him to.”
“You’re right,” I agreed. I took the chance of touching her again, and she didn’t jump or flinch. I was never so relieved. “He needed to be taught a lesson. He needed to feel how it felt.”
“That was brave of you. Not that I condone that sort of thing, but you were very brave to do it. And to sacrifice all that time in a detention facility?”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking about what would happen to me at the time,” I admitted. “I’m not a hero.”
“No, but you probably saved her life.” Bree moved on top of me, her lips finding mine in the darkness. I held her close, crushing her against me. I had to feel all of her, once she knew what I’d done. She accepted me and didn’t judge. It was the greatest gift I could ask for. Someone who accepted me for me and didn’t judge me by my past.
When I slid into her minutes later, it was the second greatest gift. Being inside her, losing myself the way she lost herself. I thought I might like feeling that way. I might like it so much, I’d want to feel it for the rest of my life.
17
Nicole
I had a lot of thinking to do. It was the first thing I told myself the minute I opened my eyes that morning. It was only my second morning waking up in the Blood Riders’ Clubhouse, and already my life had been turned upside down. I didn’t know who I was anymore.
On the one hand, I was still Nicole. I still needed to know who’d killed my father. I needed to have that closure in my life so I could move on and heal.
On the other hand, I was Bree. The girl who slept with Drake. The girl who was—God help me—falling for him. When he told the story of his mother and stepfather, I didn’t see him as the scum who’d nearly killed the guy. I saw him as the man who’d almost killed the scum, and I’d cheered for him inside. Who did that make me? Who was I anymore? I felt like parts of me were slipping away, replaced with parts from a different person. A person who already considered herself part of a club full of people who I would ordinarily have crossed the street to avoid. I didn’t know what to think about myself anymore. So much was changing in such a short amount of time.
He was sleeping soundly. I looked up at him from the place where my head touched his chest. His gorgeous profile, sharp jawline, and cheeks covered with early morning stubble. All that thick, dark hair I loved tangling my fingers in. His perfect mouth with its full lips, just right for kissing and pleasuring my body. I felt a warm surge between my legs in response thinking about the magic he wove whenever his mouth was on me. I couldn’t imagine parting with that feeling.
More than that. It was a sort of nobility that kept me in Drake’s arms. His nobility. He had it, and I would never have guessed otherwise. From the way my father had always described the Club, he was nothing more than a smooth-talking criminal. Well, he might have been a smooth talker, and he might have been a criminal, but he was more than that. He wanted to lead his men, the way any good leader did. He wanted to keep them safe, as he did the girls under his protection. He was strong. Protective. He was good. He wasn’t the demon my father had always made him out to be. I didn’t know what to think, torn betwee
n two sides of the same coin.
He stirred, and I smiled. Was it possible to miss a person whose arms you rested in? Strange but true. The world seemed a little brighter when he was awake.
“Hey, beautiful,” he whispered, breathing in his hand to test his morning breath before he kissed me. I thought that was a nice touch.
“Hey, yourself.” I hoped my breath wasn’t bad because I couldn’t wait to kiss him again.
“How was your night?”
“Surprisingly peaceful. Yours?”
“Why surprisingly?”
“I don’t know. I never thought I would be able to spend an entire night with my head on your chest like that. I mean, I would have to move, right? But I didn’t. I just stayed there. I’m usually a restless sleeper.”
“Oh. I guess I knocked you out then.” He grinned.
“Yeah, I think I had something to do with that, too.” I had ridden him like there was no tomorrow. The insides of my thighs were still sore from the effort.
“Ugh. Do we really have to get up? Can’t we just stay in bed all day?”
I smiled, loving the thought. “And we could just stay naked, too. Just touching each other and kissing each other—” My hand slid down the length of his chiseled torso until I found his cock already up and looking for action. I gave him a quick stroke.
“Mmm—that’s a nice thought,” he said.
“But you have a meeting, don’t you? And I have to do—something. I don’t know what, but something. Maybe I’ll stop home for a little while if you’re going to be busy.”
“You already forgot.”
“Forget what?” I asked.
He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. “I already told you. No going out by yourself. Period.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Come on, Drake. There’s no threat to me. I’m just a regular person. I haven’t even been with you all that long.”
