Burning to Ride

by Michele De Winton

  He stopped holding on and let himself pulse deep inside her, his breath leaving him, his back arching, his thrusts meeting with her thrumming muscles and the two of them spiraling up into a burst of bright white light.

  For a moment there was nothing else. The world was quiet perfection. Glorious, simple, silent.

  He felt his breath settle, his heart still racing. Then as if a switch had been flicked, noises started to creep back around the edges of Cole’s perception: their breath, the creak of the couch, her sigh. She rolled off him and discreetly wrapped the condom in a tissue from the end table.

  “Well,” she said, turning back to him on the couch.

  “Indeed.”

  She sat up and a long strand of black hair fell over her shoulder to coil around her pinked-up nipple.

  “Sorry I didn’t go along with your tie - me - up - and - leave - me plan.”

  She played with the strand of hair. “It was fun while it lasted.” She put a finger to her mouth and his stomach tightened again. God, she was something else. Something delicious. Coiling the strand of hair around her finger, her eyes widened as his cock threatened to harden again.

  “Already?”

  “Apparently.” He laughed as she blushed. “Of all the things I would have called you, coy and pretty are not two words that would have sprung to mind. And yet, there you are. Coy and pretty with your flushed face and your glorious hair.”

  She smiled and her rosy cheeks deepened in color. “Be right back.” She jumped up, wrapping a blanket from the end of the couch around her, and ran into what he assumed was a toilet. He wasn’t going anywhere, so he shut his eyes and settled back a minute to wait for her.

  * * *

  He closed his eyes and the darkness swallowed him instantly. Black figures walked toward him, their low muttering of you’ll never make it work filling his ears. Batting at them ineffectually, the figures only laughed as they tore apart plans for the L.A. development. You’ll never make it work. Failure, failure, failure. Their hisses echoed around him and then a face leered in close: Martha, laughing and jeering just like the rest. Men’s faces followed hers, all of them laughing at him, all of them threatening to destroy his chance at proving he was done with the blackness. That he was back in control now. “No.” He struggled to sit up. “You can’t take this away from me, too.”

  “Hey.”

  A strand of hair tickled his nose and he batted it out of the way, reaching for the woman beside him instinctively. He opened his eyes to lustrous black hair.

  “You fell asleep.”

  He shook his head to rid it of the last vestiges of his dream. “Seems so.” He pulled her down to his side and she snuggled into his arms. Nice. For a minute he allowed himself the pleasure of having a naked woman by his side who had no hold over him and who could do him no harm. She fit well and he slid an exploratory hand down her thigh to check her reaction to a repeat performance.

  She stopped him. “Who’s Martha?” she asked cautiously.

  He froze. “What do you mean?”

  “In your sleep you were muttering her name. You were more than muttering, actually. I thought about taking notes. Sounded like you were issuing execution orders for a bunch of people.”

  “Martha’s my ex.”

  “Huh. She the one that ran out on you then?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You hinted at it earlier when you were talking about me running out. And you didn’t exactly sound like you wanted to meet up with her for coffee.”

  “No.” Cole’s jaw tightened.

  “And Jeremy? Paul?”

  He frowned. She doesn’t know any of them, chill. True, his hit list was hardly going to interest anyone who wasn’t in the commercial development industry. And it wasn’t like he was about to eliminate any of them, except financially.

  “How long was I asleep for?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No, it was kinda cute. I wore you out.” She tweaked his nose. “So? It sounded like you need a good vent. What’s the deal with the rest of your hit list?”

  She said hit list. Cole took a long look at the gloriously naked woman by his side. It didn’t mean anything. It couldn’t. She was a bartender at a biker bar. He let out a breath full of bourbon and post-sex drowsiness and stared at the ceiling a second. “I’m new in town, and not one of those shmucks is happy about it. They’re scared I’m going to take their business from them.”

  “Should they be?”

  He nodded grimly then couldn’t stop himself. “Jeremy Holder has been doing dirty deals since he was in diapers. Half the LAPD is on his payroll. And Paul Manning is a plain-out bastard. He bullied his brother out of the country, fired his board of directors, and now thinks he’s king of the world. Just because people let his company build those nasty apartment blocks doesn’t mean they should. His contractors cut corners every chance they get. Someone is going get killed on one of his sites soon, you can count on it.”

  “Shit.”

  He took a deep breath as the mix of alcohol and post-sex haze wrapped itself tighter around him. “We had that. An accident. Bloody mess that I was left to clean up.”

  She was quiet, her breathing thick and even, and he was lulled into continuing. It felt good to talk. It had been a long time since he’d let anyone in. “One of our partners pushed too hard to get a contract done in record time. A guy got hurt. Bad. Stupid corner cutting. It should have gone to court, my company could have paid out, we have insurance, but I found out too late. Our guy threatened to destroy the injured worker if he squealed, and in the meantime a bunch of builders got pissed on his behalf. There was almost a walkout. That would have made the papers and it would have been game over. I ended up having to pay all of them off. I’m just glad to be here, starting over, where no one knows about it.” He rubbed his jaw. “Man, makes me look worse than Paul Manning and that’s saying something.”

  “Hang on,” she sat back. “Builders? Apartment blocks? Paul Manning as in the guy that runs Manning Construction?”

  “The very same. Bastard.”

  Cole felt the change in her before he saw it.

  “And . . .” She gulped. “Jeremy Holder who built that crappy mall downtown?”

  “The one that’s falling apart. Yep. That’s partly why I’m here. The other firms are so awful everyone’s gonna jump at the chance to work with someone with integrity. Well, that and it means I can run this project on my own terms.”

  “The other firms. Development firms.” She paused, took a break. “What’s your last name?”

  Her face was pale and her eyes had darkened to midnight black. Uh-oh. “Knight.”

  “Any relation to Frank Knight?”

  He nodded. “He’s my father.”

  “The one who’s trying to buy this hotel and everything around it?”

  He paused a minute. “Not him. Me.”

  Now her face faded to a sickly wash of parchment white. “But Frank Knight runs Knight Industries. Eighty-year-old, hunched, and faraway Frank.”

  “Seventy-eight, actually. We kept him on as director because I couldn’t take that title from him, would have broken his heart. The company has been his life. Is his life. The board made me the chief operational officer five years ago, of that and my other two companies. But that hasn’t stopped them from meddling when it suits them.”

  Her mouth opened and closed.

  “You never told me your name. We’re not secretly related?” He tried for a joke, but knew, even as he said it, that the miscommunication circling the room was about to drop and drop hard. Tick, tick, tick. Boom.

  She stood up and wrapped herself back up in the blanket. “It’s time for you to leave.”

  “Leave? Now? Okay. If you can point me to another room.”

  “No. Leave. Get out.”

  “It’s pouring out there. I thought this was a hotel?”

  “My name,” she said, drawing herself up as tall as
she could manage. “Is Briony Wilde. Of Wilde’s Hotel? Ring any bells?”

  Now it was his turn to balk. “Shit. Why didn’t you say—”

  “Say what? That developers aren’t welcome? Shit is right. You’re an asshole. Coming in here, acting all knight in shining armor when the whole time you were trying to soften me up before you crush my family business. The only home I’ve ever known.”

  “Crush your family business?”

  “My family, my business. Now. Get. The. Hell. Out.”

  Chapter Three

  Briony looked at the floor for a good minute after he’d gone, hoping that it might swallow her. “Frank frickin’ Knight’s son?” She sat on the couch, then remembering what had just gone on there, stood again, realizing as she did so that the remains of his tie were still in the floor. “Oh. My. God. Shower.”

  Even though she scrubbed her skin raw, Briony couldn’t get the sensation of Cole Knight’s eyes stripping her down off her skin. And the thought that she had been the one to tie him up and ride him . . . no, she wasn’t going to think about it.

  Unable to spend another minute by herself, she headed for the bar. Perched on a stool she knocked back another shot of bourbon and instantly regretted it. A hangover on top of everything was not what she needed. “Jeeeeezus.”

  “Where’d your knight in shining Armani get to?”

  Briony couldn’t look Rocco in the eye. She closed her eyes and realized the room was spinning.

  “Oh. Like that, is it? You want me to give him a talking-to? No one turns down our little Bri-bird and gets away with it.”

  “No.” She looked up finally. “He didn’t turn me down. Quite the opposite. What the hell was in that drink you gave me? I would never have done that if I hadn’t been half off my face.”

  “If you say so.” Rocco chuckled. “Seems to me all I did was give you a little liquid nudge to do what you wanted to do in the first place.”

  “More like a tap with a sledgehammer.”

  “So it was a bit strong. Put hairs on your chest. Cheer up.”

  Briony sighed but the end came out more like a sob.

  “Hey.” Rocco’s voice softened. “What? He run out on you after? Or what, he couldn’t get it up? That’s his problem, not yours.”

  “Ha!” She couldn’t help herself; the thought of getting the Hell’s Boys to talk up a tale of Cole Knight’s limp dick all over L.A. was awfully tempting. But it wasn’t true. She sighed. “The problem is he’s Cole Knight. I just slept with Cole Knight. Ohmygod, I’m such an idiot.”

  “Yeah, not ideal. But hey, might be useful.”

  She did a double take. “Useful?”

  “He’s Frank Knight’s son, right?”

  Her eyes widened. “How did you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Lifted his wallet. In case.” Rocco held up an expensive-looking billfold. “So what happened?”

  “I’m not telling you that. But turns out it’s his company, the son’s, not the father’s, and he’s petitioning to bring a big fat wrecking ball through that door.” She pointed at the door to the bar.

  “Asshole.” Rocco stood up. “Shall I go bring him back for a little chat?”

  Briony put a weary hand on Rocco’s arm. “I didn’t give him a chance to tell me, really. Not entirely his fault.”

  “Ah.” Rocco pulled at his beard.

  “That’s it? Aren’t you supposed to go take him down for disrespecting my honor or some shit? No ‘What the hell were you thinking, Briony?’ or ‘I could still rough him up for you, Briony’?”

  “I can, but you don’t want me to. You and Hade are the ones who want us to clean up the gang’s act. Don’t go calling a hit on a guy unless you really mean it, babes. You want me to come up with something better.”

  Briony laughed as tears threatened to fall. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Rocco’s jaw clenched then his scar twitched as his eyebrows shot up. “Think about it as an opportunity.”

  For a moment, Briony let the sensation of being with Cole Knight come back to her. Asshole he might be but . . . those eyes, that body, that . . . “I don’t see any opportunity here, except for me feeling like an idiot.”

  “I’m serious.” Rocco sat again. “This might be some silver lining shit. Were you in your room or in your lockup?”

  Briony frowned. “I don’t see how feeling like an idiot and looking forward to the mother of all hangovers is going to have anything shiny attached. And I really don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It’s important. Where?”

  She sighed. “My lockup.”

  “Thought you might. Get dirty where it’s dirty.”

  Briony scrubbed at her face. “Kill me now.”

  “Don’t need to do that.” Rocco grinned at her. “How about that credibility transplant instead?”

  For a second the room ceased to spin and the noise of the Hell’s Boys dimmed to a buzz. Rocco only got that look when he was about to do something either incredibly stupid or incredibly smart, usually both at the same time. Her mind flicked through the possibilities. She had nothing. “You lost me.”

  Rocco was pulling at his beard again. “He spill any trade secrets with you when he didn’t know who you were? Have a heart-to-heart?”

  She grimaced. “He did, actually.”

  “Boom. Got him.”

  “Got him how?”

  “You need a credibility transplant. Mr. Armani-pants is all sorts of credible, isn’t he?”

  Briony shook her head at him. “Sure, but were you not listening to what I said? I slept with the guy, then threw him out because he’s about to take down Wilde’s and put up some crap housing development or something. He’s the reason the planning department and the bank are on my ass.”

  “So you marry him.”

  Briony’s jaw almost unhinged as it dropped to the floor. “I what now?”

  “Marry him. Become Mrs. Armani-pants developer. And convince him not to bring the bulldozers to Wilde’s obviously.”

  Briony took a breath and laughed. The tears weren’t far away, but at least if they were mixed in with the giggles she could shake them off and not freak out the Hell’s Boys. “Good one. Thanks, you’re right, the only thing left to do in this situation is laugh at it.” She punched Rocco on the arm.

  He grinned. “I’m serious.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And he’s going to marry me because . . . ?”

  Rocco’s grin widened. “Because we’re going to blackmail him.”

  She laughed again, this time without the tears. “You’re too perfect. Blackmail some guy who probably has a team of lawyers on his staff. Blackmail him.” She laughed again. “With what? I’m going to ransom the tie that he ruined tearing himself free?” She put a hand to her mouth.

  Rocco’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, well. Aren’t you the dark and shady horse?”

  “Hardly, not like I made a secret sex tape or anything.”

  Rocco patted her on the shoulder. “Now you’re getting it.”

  She rubbed her eyes.

  “You’re going to blackmail him into marrying you because you made a sex tape.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  Rocco coughed.

  Her eyes widened. “You didn’t. Oh my god. You were watching that?” Briony thought the floor might actually open up this time. If this day got any worse it would be a funeral. Hers.

  “No one watched anything. But the security cameras in the lockups were turned on tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “When I found out who he was I . . .” He pulled at his beard again. “Took precautions.”

  “So it’s on camera? Me? And . . . him.”

  “No one has seen it. Promise. That’d be like—”

  She put up her hand. “Wrong. I know. All. Kinds. Of. Wrong.”

  “Yep. But there you go. You can blackmail him.”

  Briony’s mind whirred. “And everything’s there? About the cover-up? And him ba
dmouthing his competition? Not saying I’m pleased that you flicked the switch on the camera, but now . . .” This was not something she did. Blackmail? Briony bit her lip and reminded herself that she hadn’t even thought of it. Her conscience was clear there. But she was out of chances, out of luck. Without a license and more money it wasn’t going to matter if the place was a secret bat-cave with the secrets to human salvation, the bank was going to come after her and take her hotel if Cole Knight didn’t do it first. Then it wouldn’t just be the Hell’s Boys without a bar, it would be her on the street. The sex-tape idea was a silver lining end to a shitty night and it was her last chance.

  “There was a cover-up? Nice.” Rocco paused. “Those cameras don’t have audio. But . . .” His smiled widened. “They might have. And he won’t know any better. If he brings it up you say we had directional mics included in the package. Our business is high risk.”

  “Our business?”

  “Make him think they’re gang cameras. Makes sense we’d have ramped up security. We’ve got a few enemies.”

  “True.” Briony bit her lip. A recording. Of her. Naked. You read about celebrities becoming famous with sex tapes and she’d always laughed at the idea as a sign of desperate attention seeking. And then here she was. Was she really going to do this? “Blackmail.”

  “Yep.”

  “With a sex tape.”

  “Yep.”

  “Give me strength. Or at least a drink.”

  * * *

  “You want to what?” Cole was wet, cold, and exhausted. Being dragged back to Wilde’s Hotel by three Hell’s gang members was not what he’d had planned for the rest of his evening. Although he hadn’t planned on anything that had happened so far.

  When the three Harleys had overtaken his taxi and forced it off the road, Cole’s stomach had solidified into a lump of lead. This was what happened in the movies. This and three large shotgun wounds to the stomach. What is with you choosing the wrong women to sleep with?

  “Oh, Holy Mother. Are you some gangster or something? I knew I shouldn’ta picked you up.” The taxi driver was already shaking. He lowered the window and tried to shout above the noise of wind and rain. “This has nothing to do with me! I just picked him up. I got a wife and three kids at home.”