by Rie Warren
“So I’m to take you at face value,” she stated.
“Yeah.”
“And trust you?”
“Yes.”
“Angelo,” she hummed my last name. “Italian. That explains your looks.” She slipped to her feet and walked around me in a slow ring.
I thought she’d touch me. My skin tingled as if she did. Her fingers didn’t connect with my body, just her eyes, watching me hungrily.
“The black hair, your golden brown eyes, bronzed skin,” she murmured.
The hot flash of our attraction flared brighter. JB faced me, her cheeks tinged pink, highlighting the tiny freckles on the bridge of her nose. It was my turn to circle her. I strolled around her, admiring this new view of a career woman. My fingers skimmed down the center of her back, rasping against the silk of her shirt along the line where her butterfly tats marked her skin.
Standing behind her, I unpinned her hair. The wavy tresses fell into my hands. “What about you, JB? Harley Momma. Tank Girl.” I nipped her earlobe. “Kindergarten Teacher.”
“Riding is my escape. My time away from million-hour work weeks.” She spun in my arms. “I love the kids, love what I do, but I need time to be me too.”
“Mm.” I agreed.
Her eyes were hooded. Her ripe lips parted. The thin blouse did nothing to hide her pronounced nipples. Her desk looked sturdy enough for a fuck. I cupped her breasts in my palms, angling my head for a kiss when she pushed me away.
Adjusting her hair, her shirt, her skirt, she hissed, “This is a professional meeting, Mr. Angelo.”
Her harsh rebuff splashed across me cold as water. She was absolutely right, and I had no rights coming onto her in this setting or probably any other one.
“Hands off the teach. I got it.” I backed away until I found Jack’s diminutive desk.
Folding my body near in half, I sat down in his bright yellow chair. My knees knocked together. My thighs spilled over the seat. It was like sitting in a dollhouse.
Front and center on Jack’s desk was a card addressed To my Daddy. On the cover was a blobby coloring of me—the giant of course—and him sporting the same wild black hair with a big red clown smile.
I picked up the card and opened it:
Besd things bout my famlee.
I read the paragraph inside, Jack’s misspelled words scrawled in huge looping letters, through a blur of sudden tears I blinked away. He named his favorite stuffed animals first. Then he wrote about how he liked making pancakes with Momma. The final sentence was about me, how I kept him safe, checking under the bed and in the closet at night before I tucked him in.
“He’s a good kid.” I cleared my throat and put the card in my pocket.
“Yes, he is.” JB smiled. “He’s wonderful to have in class. Helpful, bright, he does get distracted and socializes a bit too much sometimes, but they all do.”
I laughed. “Socializes? That a polite way to say he’s a motor mouth?”
Her sparkly laughter joined mine.
Jesus. I could see why Jack loved her. Funny and sweet and smart. And damn, she was so beautiful.
Feeling the need to explain the situation, I said, “We’re not together, his mom and me. Not married. We were never like that. I mean we love each other, more like friends now. Weren’t ever in love . . .”
“You don’t have to tell me anything, Hunter.”
“Considering what we got up to the other night, I think I do.” I scowled.
“And I think we should focus on Jack.”
Sighing, I sprawled in my chair, as much as I could anyway. “He loves your class. Can’t stop talking about you.” I knew the feeling. “He’s fitting in okay, isn’t he?”
“He’s fantastic. You and his mom must be doing a good job with him. He’s right on track with the learning curve. He follows rules well. He’s smart. Loquacious.” JB slid onto her desk again, giving me an incredible view of her stocking-clad legs, again.
“Lo-qua . . . huh?” I stuttered.
“Do you need a lesson, Mr. Angelo?”
I dragged my gaze from her legs to her face where a wicked smile gleamed.
“You can’t blame me for not concentrating when you’re sitting there looking like a sexy naughty teacher fantasy.”
“Oh.” Her red lips ovaled.
I still want my blowjob.
“Do you have one of those?” she asked.
“Huh?” Jesus Christ. I sounded like I needed to go back to school.
She swung her coltish legs and crossed them at the ankles. “Do you have a naughty teacher fantasy?”
“I do now.” My voice dropped to a deeper timbre.
She moved behind her desk and sat in the chair, hiding her legs from view. “Is this better?”
“No.” Because I could be under that desk right now, my face between her thighs, no one the wiser.
She drew her hair up and pinned it back in place with a shaky laugh. All I thought about doing was taking it down again and burying my face in the silky strands.
“Let’s get back to Jack, shall we?” she asked.
Probably a better idea than whipping out my cock and jacking off in front of her. I nodded.
For the remaining fifteen minutes, we played concerned dad and dedicated teacher.
Hot, hot teacher.
“Any questions?” JB asked at the end of our meeting.
I had a few. None of them were suitable for an elementary school classroom.
At the threshold of her room, I braced an arm against the door, looming over her. “I don’t think we should do that again.”
“The conference thing?”
I looked around to make sure we were alone before I said, “The fucking thing.”
“I see.”
I cupped her chin in my hand. “No, you don’t. I’m no good but I’m doing my best, which is hard enough on any given day. You’re my son’s teacher. He likes you a lot. Hell, I like you a lot.” I released her and shook my head at the floor. “I got way too much baggage, and you look like you’re fresh out of college.”
“You didn’t have an age issue Sunday night, and you can’t be that much older than me anyway.”
“Maybe not in years, but experience.”
JB drew herself taller. In the high heels the top of her head reached my nose. I inhaled the perfume clinging to her skin, holding my groan inside.
“Experience, my ass. You’re a damn coward.” She shoved me out the door.
I swung my arm up to catch it before she could slam it in my face. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” The muscle in my jaw flexed with tension.
“I know this: I could ride rings around you with my bike, and I could fuck you until you didn’t even remember any of your fake names. But I guess you’ll never find out.”
She kicked my shin then triumphantly banged the door shut with a click of the lock while I hopped on one foot with a wince of pain. Then I started laughing. The rumble came from deep inside. I’d just been outgunned by a goddamn sexy-as-sin kindergarten teacher. And I liked it.
If she was a bad decision before, she was definitely a no-go now.
I hobbled out of the school with a completely incongruous grin on my face.
At the end of a very long day, I entered Retribution clubhouse. I figured Cole was still on Probie status even though he’d made full member because the interior fucking sparkled. It was no dirty biker club, although what happened in the backrooms and bunkrooms was anyone’s guess. I hadn’t partaken of any of the pussy thrown my way, opting instead for the highest quality woman—JB. Seemed my instincts were still working because I’d chosen not only one hot biker babe but a classy career woman.
Yay me.
Round tables huddled together between the shiny steel-topped bar on one side of the room and the red baize, dark wood pool tables at the opposite end. There was room for dancing, a quality sound system pumping out rockabilly tunes, and even a small stage I’d never seen in action. The usual Mil
ler High Life and Budweiser neon signs hung around the joint, but over the years they’d been “custom detailed” with slick graffiti. For example, the flashing Miller High Life sign showed the profile of a goateed dude toking a spliff, his hair spiked in a cannabis leaf formation. That right there was good art.
I scanned the room from under lowered brows. No sign of JB. I exhaled, only partly in relief. I was such a fuck up.
Seconds after I sat my ass on a barstool, I felt someone breathing down my neck. Spinning slowly around, I came face to face with JB’s fake girlfriend, a very furious Rayce.
She hauled back and slapped my cheek with a stinging blow. “That’s for Jessica, you dick-hole. She told me what happened.”
I grabbed Rayce’s wrist before her second slap connected with my face. “Exactly what did she say?”
“That you’re a liar and a loser, Hunter Sexton.”
I released her when she mentioned my UC name—the one I used here. JB would only get herself in trouble—and not by me—if she went around talking about Hunter Angelo or anything else I’d said in confidence.
“Yeah, she’s probably got that right. So no worries, girlfriend. I won’t be darkening Jessica’s door again.” Reaching back for my third whiskey shot, I dismissed Rayce.
“Better not.” She sneered at me.
She stalked off. Electric blue streaks in her short black hair, smoky eyes, smoking body. I knew Boomer Steele had his eye on this mechanic/termagant. I wished him all the luck taming that shrew.
After she left me alone, I downed shot after shot at the bar of Retribution, looking for a little absolution.
What I got an hour later was Brodie sitting next to me. “Bad day?”
“I fucked my kid’s kindergarten teacher.” I was just loose-lipped enough to spill the barest amount of what was eating me up inside.
“No shit? At the school? Man, you got some serious cojones.” His arctic blue eyes twinkled.
“Not at the school. It’s JB. Jailbait. She’s Miss Jessica Barnes, motherfucking kindergarten teacher.”
“Oh fuck,” he said.
“No shit.”
“Cole, he’ll take another double.” Brodie rapped his big silver rings on the bar.
The whiskey burned my throat, but it wasn’t strong enough to incinerate my past.
Five
THE WHISKEY HAD DONE the trick. Cab home. Roll into bed. Lights out.
Whiskey didn’t keep the night terrors at bay, though. I woke to the sound of gunfire crackling in my ears, a rictus grimace on my mouth. Bile rose in my throat and I stumbled to the bathroom, half-blinded by brutal memories. Bent over the toilet, I dry heaved. Cold sweat covered my body. I shivered, heaving again. Nothing would come out. The past was hidden so deep inside it only rose up—wraithlike—in my sleep.
I’d refused sleep aids or any prescription drugs to help with my PTSD. You couldn’t find work if you were on narcotics, whether a doc wrote out the script or not. You couldn’t work if you weren’t stable in the field. And you sure as fuck didn’t collect pay if you weren’t active. So every person I’d lost, every day I’d assumed a different darker persona, every fucking mission I’d survived boiled to the surface during REM time.
Brodie Steele had once accused me of being unfeeling. Cold, calm, cool, detached. He had no idea. The dark calm came from knowing I couldn’t afford to get attached. Once again I was in danger of compromising my one underlying principle, because of JB.
I was trying not to get involved in any more life-threatening cases. The problem was I liked the high. I was a danger junkie, just like Walker. I kept telling myself I could be normal: raise my son, get on the MPPD payroll thing for good.
I needed Jack and Mel to be safe from my dirty past. I needed Jessica to know nothing about it.
I’d been deep cover inside Tampa Bay Outlaws MC for twelve months with only Walker as my outside contact. Everything went down with that club in the very worst way for all involved a mere two months before I relocated to Mt. Pleasant, hoping to find a permanent homestead and finally get off the X-Ops crazy train that threatened to destroy my humanity. I’d put out feelers for a legit position as an LEO. Vice, no more SWAT for me. I’d done danger day in and day out for near on a decade.
While I sat on my hands waiting for Chief Tilden to either pull the plug on me or deem me fit to redeem duty as Lieutenant, I thought about all the other job offers I could accept from underground networks, Walker’s just the latest. I ignored the temptation, at cost. The adrenaline rush needed another outlet. Fucking used to do it for me. Random, anonymous, faceless. That didn’t cut it anymore. Only Jessica interested me.
Walking into the bedroom after some serious tooth brushing and two glasses of water, I quickly changed the sheets. Night sweats accompanied the night terrors. The first time I’d slept peacefully through was after Jessica had come home with me.
I lay down, stiff as a corpse. As soon as I shut my eyes, I heard gunfire shots. Memories chased off any sleep headed my way.
“Tampa Bay Bitches, Kemosabe.” Walker fist bumped me. “RICO Suave is taking them down.”
“Shut the fuck up, cocky bitch.”
After a final run through the plan with Walker and his premature victory dance, I’d led the raid on the warehouse where Tampa Bay Outlaws stored their illegal gun shipments that night in May last spring. The docks had been quiet, only a distant foghorn booming across the misty silence.
I’d determined it was safe. I’d signaled my men to follow me inside. X-Ops mercs like Walker and me comprised the team: wraiths, ghosts, nightwalkers who dealt out silent death on a daily basis. Nameless warriors no one would miss, just like me. Except now I had Jack, and a reason to live.
The Feds had been unable to catch Vicente’s MC in the act. My employers had planted me into Tampa Bay Outlaws, trusting I’d get the job done with my looks that passed as Hispanic and my streetwise Spanish lingo, my MC history, and my ability to blend into any scenario.
And I had. I’d gotten tight with the club. I’d merged with them, risen through the ranks, become badass numero dos right behind the Prez, Vicente Valderas. Gotten in so deep I’d finally been trusted enough to go on gun runs and meet shipments, the coke for weapons trades. I had the location and intel necessary to bury the Outlaws in a rubble of their own making.
The five-foot-high stacks of crates had stood empty when cracked open with crowbars. We’d been surrounded by Outlaws, Vicente at the helm. High-powered Tech-9s pointed at us from all directions, four Cuban illegals to every one operative on my team. I’d raised my hands in defeat. Vicente had grinned harder, like a dark leather-faced alligator with his jaws about to snap shut. It was hopeless. Walker may have been a crack sniper, but no way he could take out the entire tribe before some of us got gunned down.
I’d been made.
“Don’t know how you do eet in Okefenokee, mijo, but we have a rule of honor. And you just took a dump all over la fraternidad.” He snapped his mouth shut with a clack of teeth, black oily eyes on mine as he signaled silently to his homegrown army.
Their weapons raised, the Cuban brotherhood took aim.
“Noooo!” I roared, dodging the spray of bullets, leaping toward Vicente.
My uppercut split his lip. We grappled to the ground. His snaky fist drove into my stomach over and over again. The gunshots distracted me. I watched, I listened, sickened at the sound of bodies hitting the floor all around us.
Vicente raised his weapon above my face. I looked down the barrel, flooded with true fear for the first time in my life. He swiveled it around with a malicious smile.
“Lights out, jefe.”
I felt my flesh pop and break open as the gun butt made contact. The smell of fresh blood spilled filled the air, more than my own, huge quantities shed. The second time his gun slammed into my cheekbone, I blacked out.
Salty air, summery sweet, warm, sand. Death. Above all death. The remembered sounds of my team being slaughtered assaulted me at once,
and I came to, struggling to retch and stand and wrestle away from oncoming death as I was dragged across white sandy dunes too pure in the glowing moonlight to fit with what had gone down earlier.
Vicente made sure I knew, stopping long enough to pull me to my bound feet. “Keeled them all, jefe. Stinking pendejos.”
That little speech made him sound completely fucking loco, but I knew differently. He was one of the sanest men I’d met, which was what made him so successful and so completely dangerous.
His double-barreled shotgun prodded between my shoulder blades as I walked down a long lonely stretch of St. Pete’s Beach in the midnight hours.
Everyone was dead because of me.
“Cazador Saucedo—Hunter Sexton—are you ready to die?” He pushed me to my knees.
“I’ll die honorably, not with a bullet in the back.”
Gripping my long dirty hair, he pulled me around to face him. “Right between the eyes. Si.”
In that moment before my certain death, I saw Jack, my baby boy. I never wanted him tied to me—Hunter the Ghost—or to know how his dad went down, shot in the face from point-blank range.
I kept my eyes open, willing an honorable death to find me.
Behind Vicente, Walker rose from the dunes like a phantom. Covered in seaweed and sea-slime, he slipped across the silent sand, quiet as a harbinger of death. He slammed into Vicente’s back, taking him down.
They rolled in the dunes while I chewed through the tension-tight rope tying my wrists together. Blood dripped to my fingertips, but finally I was free with a quick slip of the knot around my ankles. Outlaws was going down.
Vicente slashed at Walker with a blade he’d drawn from inside his boot. Crimson blood saturated white crystals of sand. He held the knife above Walker’s chest, aiming for the heart.
With an almighty bellow, I dove at Vicente. My punch landed at his temple, a hard enough blow to incapacitate him. Then I made one stupid mistake, checking on Walker, forgetting about the wily Cuban.
When I looked up, he was a dot on the dunes, nearing the street. Unharmed for the most part, and fully armed, he scrambled away.
