Kennedy (The Phoenix Club Girl Diaries #1)

by Addison Jane

  “Thanks,” Shotgun called as she ducked out the door.

  “You thanking her for the sex or for the info?” I teased.

  “You’re a fucking dick, you know that?” He pushed his hair back from his face then shook it out again. “You and Kennedy have looked cozy the last couple of days.”

  “Comfortable,” I corrected, loitering just inside his office. I knew he had something to say, and while I was ready to head into Empire and see if I could help out, I had respect for the president of my club, and I would stop and listen.

  “You thinking about claiming her? ‘Cause you know that could mean the difference between us going on offense as opposed to defense.”

  Claiming her?

  Because I could just imagine how Kennedy would go with that label right now after I’ve spent so long telling her she doesn’t owe me shit, she doesn’t belong to me.

  “No,” I answered even though I kind of wanted to say yes. The thought of someone else touching her, it sent my blood pressure through the roof. “I can’t do it. Not yet anyway. I’m not really sure what she wants. I’m not fucking sure what I want.”

  But having her would be fucking nice.

  Shotgun nodded. “Just thought I would check. So we all know where we stand.”

  “I’ll catch you at Empire?” I asked as I turned and headed for the door, satisfied that the discussion was done. Shotgun was the president for a reason. He liked to know what was going on, where things were headed, so he couldn’t be blindsided.

  It was his job.

  And he was fucking good at it.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there in a couple of hours to trade with Shake.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he pulled off when we hit the city. Apparently, he’d told her not to work tonight but she’d texted him to say too bad.”

  Shotgun rolled his eyes. “He’s a fucking trier. He’s trying to get Meyah to stay off her feet and not do so many long hours.” He chuckled, the both of us knowing that wasn’t going to happen.

  I lifted my hand in goodbye before heading back outside to my ride, starting her up, and taking off toward the city lights in a cloud of gravel. I wanted to appreciate that Kennedy had stepped in and offered to help, but I needed to remind her she wasn’t obligated.

  Fuck, the woman deserved a break. She deserved to just to breathe for a moment. But I guess I was already beginning to understand that it was not her personality. She wanted to help. First, it was with her mom when she got sick, then with her sister when her dad clocked out.

  You had to appreciate a woman who wasn’t afraid to work hard. Those were the kind of women who made amazing old ladies.

  Fuck my life.

  I parked around the back entrance and nodded to Tyler who was standing guard at the door.

  “Kennedy around?”

  He nodded, pointing up. “VIP.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  The moment you entered the building, the bass from the music smashed you right in the chest. It felt like there was someone slamming their hands against it, or that there was something inside trying to break out. Then it wasn't long before the heat slapped you in the fucking face, all the hot bodies dancing inside filling the building with hot air which instantly makes you start to sweat. Even with the industrial fans we had put in, they were no match for the amount of people we had in the building on a daily basis. Being around this amount of people instantly sent my anxiety through the roof.

  It had taken a lot of getting used to, and I coped pretty well with it now. But years ago, I would never have been able to walk into a room with hundreds of people—the likelihood of someone brushing up against me being fucking one hundred percent—without wanting to rip someone’s head off or light my skin on fire.

  I managed it now, though. I learned how to focus my mind somewhere else.

  And as I walked up the stairs to the VIP area, I realized there must have been a private party going on there tonight. Some kind of business, something with a heap of dudes in suits. The stage was set up down the middle of the room which meant they’d paid for the extra entertainment that we offer—strippers.

  I was about to move around the edge of the area and head to the bar until something sparkly caught my eye at the edge of the stage.

  The first look was just a blur, but when I did the double take and realized the thing that was sparkling was around Kennedy’s neck, and she was standing at the edge of the stage in some school girl skirt and button up shirt, my feet began to move on their own.

  KENNEDY

  “Kennedy, honestly,” Meyah tried again, her brow furrowed in worry. “I’ve got a couple of girls coming in who used to work for the club, they’re happy to do this, and earn a little extra cash, and you can just help me back behind the bar.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “Meyah, it’s fine. I danced for well over a year full-time and still do… or well, did… occasionally when I was needed. It’s no big deal.”

  “I can think of one person who will think it’s a big deal.”

  The music I’d requested and knew so well started to play, and I turned toward the stage. I honestly didn’t mind this. Dancing had, at one point, been a way for me to pretend I was someone else for a second—someone more confident, someone stronger and more assertive.

  I never expected to be a parent at eighteen years old, looking after a thirteen-year-old who had essentially just lost both of her parents in the space of a couple of months.

  Even though getting on stage to start with almost killed me, it really did make me stronger.

  “Oh crap,” I heard Meyah curse and looked back at her just in time to catch the cringe on her face as something connected with my body, and I was lifted up off the floor.

  I screamed, my entire body going over his back, my eyes instantly catching the patches across his cut as he carried me through the pool of businessmen—every single one getting the hell out of the way of the angry biker stomping through.

  “Repo, put me down,” I yelled, knowing he probably couldn’t hear me over the loud music, and even if he could, doubting he was about to put me down anywhere until he was ready. So instead of wasting my energy, I just huffed and held on as we made our way down the stairs and out past the bar to a familiar spot—Shake’s office.

  The door slammed shut behind us with a hard kick from Repo’s boot, and my muscles tightened.

  He was angry.

  My stomach immediately twisted into a knot as he dipped his body and pulled me back up. I thought I was waiting for my heels to find the floor, but instead my ass hit a hard, extremely cold surface that I quickly realized was Shake’s large wooden desk. I grabbed the edge with both hands, trying to steady myself now that I was back up the right way.

  “The hell are you doing?” he growled, pulling back a little, so he was standing tall. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared down at me like a naughty child.

  “I was trying to help,” I told him, still feeling a little dizzy. “Meyah was short some dancers.”

  “We have plenty of girls on call for that shit, you didn’t need to get up there and do it yourself. That’s not what the hell you’re here for, Kennedy. How many times do I have to tell you. You don’t fucking owe anything!”

  “I wasn’t doing it because I thought I fucking owed anyone,” I yelled back at him. “I was doing it because I wanted to. And because as much as it irks me, I’m fucking good at it.”

  He placed his hands on either side of my legs, leaning down so we were face to face. His eyes in that moment weren’t the blue of a warm summer day. They were ice cold like winter. The intensity almost had me wondering whether he might even conjure up a storm. “I don’t want you up on stage, shaking your ass for those assholes, or any fucking assholes as far as I’m concerned.”

  My spine prickled, and I shook my head. God, this was starting to sound far too familiar. “So this isn’t about me not having to help? This is about you wanting to control me.”

  “Kennedy…”
he growled, but I shook my head again.

  Tears were burning my eyes, and I kept blinking and trying to keep them at bay. This, though, this hurt. “No. Get out of the way, I want to leave.” I stared him down, looking him directly in the eye. No, this wasn’t fucking happening again, I wasn’t going to let it. “Move, Repo.”

  “No fucking way,” he scowled, but still he pulled back, clenched his jaw so tightly I could see the muscles moving. I should have got up, used that moment to walk away. But I felt like my heart, at that moment, was just hovering inside my chest. Like it was waiting for him to say something to make me stay, so I didn’t have to feel it torn from my body and tossed onto the dirty floor. “I’m not trying to control you.”

  “Then why the hell can’t you let me make my own choices?”

  “Because stripping was never your choice,” he snapped, stepping into my space and cupping my face with his hand. I wanted to pull away, but I was addicted to being near him. Even with this swirling storm growing around us, he was still the weight holding my body on the ground. “I know you say you’re good at it and all that bullshit, but it’s not something that made you feel fucking good, was it? It’s not something you look back on and think man, I wish I’d been forced to get naked in front of more fucking men.”

  He wasn’t wrong. I cried night after night when I was stripping.

  Sure, there were girls out there who were made for that kind of thing, who loved the attention, who loved to be adored. There were girls out there who just did it because it was what made them the most money, it was what paid for them to go to school and raise their kids. For me, though, it wasn’t my choice.

  I wasn’t making any money out of it. And I hated the way they watched me when I was on stage. I was pretending to be someone else, so I didn’t have to think about how I was standing up there all because my dad skipped out on us. I was pretending to be more confident and more powerful so when I got off the stage and had to step out the back and have a sixty-year-old man fuck me, that I didn’t have a mental break down that would end in me walking away from this life and leaving Brook all alone. Hot tears dripped down onto my cheeks.

  “I’m not trying to control you, Kennedy,” Repo tried again, this time his voice was calmer, more apologetic. “I freaked out when I saw you up there. I freaked out because I don’t want you to associate those times in your life with me or with the club here. The bad shit needs to stay in the fucking past.”

  I swallowed a hard lump in my throat and closed my eyes nuzzling my face into his hand and sniffling softly. “I honestly didn’t think those things, the things I had done, would affect me like this. You know, it hurt then, but I keep thinking I’m moving on, I’m getting stronger.”

  “When we’ve been through hell, our minds sometimes forget how we felt during that time. They just remember the times where we were really strong or it lets the good times become more prominent to take away some of the pain,” he explained, his hand slowly moving from my cheek, up around the side of my head. “It’s why people get back together with exes over and over again. Because they remember how happy that person made them during that ten percent of their relationship.”

  I licked my lips, tasting the salt of the tears that had settled there and opened my eyes, looking up at him.

  The warm skies were back.

  The ice had melted.

  “How do you know all this stuff?” I whispered, wanting to know more about him. He let me catch a few moments here and there, but mostly, he kept his past pretty locked up. Even Meyah couldn’t really tell me much, and she’d known him for a couple of years now.

  He smirked. “I went through a lot of shrinks and psychologists and shit when I was younger. They thought I was just a dumb kid. But I listened to everything.”

  The corner of my mouth turned up, and unconsciously I reached for the bottom of his cut, pinching it and rubbing my fingers across the leather. It made me feel close to him, and while things over the past week or more that I’d been here had changed between us, this was something I kept coming back to. The feel of it between my fingers was calming and reassuring.

  He was there.

  He was going to protect me.

  He wasn’t going to let me get hurt.

  And it had been a long time since I’d been able to tell myself that.

  “I gotta admit something,” he murmured, grabbing one of my pigtails and twisting it around his hand and pulling my head back to look up at him.

  This instantly reminding me of the night he took me from Crow. He’d kissed me. It was short, but passionate, and it made my entire body light on fire.

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  The corner of his mouth twitched like he was fighting a smile. “My intentions weren’t all angelic.” He dipped his head just slightly so his mouth was hovering just by my ear. “I was being kind of selfish ‘cause I really didn’t want those suits upstairs to see you take your clothes off.”

  “Jealous?” I taunted, trying to fight back but found myself simply melting into him like he was the sun, and I was a piece of chocolate.

  “Fuck, yes,” he admitted with a chuckle, his lips brushing against my jaw as they trailed toward my mouth. I was eagerly waiting for them, my eyes fluttering shut in anticipation. My pussy was beginning to pulse, and I knew that this attraction, or whatever the hell it was between us, was about to move to the next level. At least, it was if I had anything to do with it.

  I wanted Repo. It wasn’t because he’d rescued me. And it wasn’t because he kept coming at me like this knight in shining moral armor.

  When you’ve spent so long being used for your body, it’s nice to know that you can form a connection with someone when physical touch has nothing to do with it. We’ve connected on so many other levels, and the different emotions that he pulls out from inside me, it’s something different, something new and something far more intense than anything else I’d felt before.

  No one gave a shit.

  No one cared to hear the shit I’d been through.

  He put his ass on the line for me, he put the club’s ass on the line and the threats of a war.

  And not just for me, for Brooklyn, my sister, that he’s never fucking met, but that he knows is a part of who I am.

  I was ready for something more, I was ready to see if we could connect on more levels because goddamn him, he was hot, and I was greedy as hell and just wanted to see how far and how deep this really was, or if it was just my imagination.

  I inhaled sharply as his lips brushed against mine but then pulled back. My eyes shot open.

  He was standing back, watching me, his eyes narrowed but not focused on me or anything in particular like he was fighting with himself about what to do next. I knew, though, and I was going to make this decision for him. I jumped off the desk and reached for him. He caught the movement, and his fingers twitched, but they didn’t pull away. He let me take his hand, he’d been letting me take it quite a bit since I patched him up like he was enjoying the way it made him feel. I held it in both of my hands, tracing the tattoo on the top with my thumbs, studying it softly, following the gentle edges.

  Slowly, I moved up over his wrist and his forearm. I felt his body tense, but I kept my eyes down and focused, too scared to look up, too scared to see something in his eyes that I didn’t want to see—rejection.

  Turned out, he wasn’t going to let me get away with that.

  “Look at me,” he ordered, his tone gruff and raw.

  My hand froze as I reached his bicep

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he warned, but it only made me smile.

  “Oh, I know exactly what I’m doing,” I confirmed with a smirk.

  “You know I’m about three seconds from flipping you onto the desk behind you and fucking you so hard right now.” My body instantly overheated, my skin becoming hot, and my pussy starting to pulse harder. “Three…”

  “Promises, promises.”

  REPO


  Grabbing her hand from my arm, I stepped back. Lifting my hand up and pulling across my body, I forced her to twirl like we were dancing, turning her so she was facing the other way. “Put your hands on the table.”

  She froze for a second.

  I wish I could tell what she was thinking or what exactly it was that shot through her mind in that moment, but it was gone, and her hand slipped from mine as she leaned forward, placing both her palms flat on the desk in front of her.

  I took a couple of steps back, admiring what was laid out in front of me, trying to keep my cock from punching a hole in my jeans. The skirt she had on was no skirt, it was a fucking tartan belt with some ruffles. The cute black G-string was covering nothing and disappeared up between two perfectly round ass cheeks that I couldn’t fucking wait to feel in my hands.

  She looked over her shoulder at me, her eyes bright and excited. There was no doubt in my mind she wanted this just as badly as I did. And after all the shit she’d been put through, part of me wanted to pull back. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to give her exactly what she needed. The level of intimacy that I had, it was low.

  “Stop,” she ordered, turning to look at me over her shoulder. She could see the doubt on my face. “Look at me. I want you. We’ll figure the rest out as we go but don’t walk away.”

  We’d figure it out as we go.

  “Gonna take all that shit off,” I told her, rolling my eyes at the cliché outfit she was wearing. I took a step forward, hooking my fingers through the G-string and sliding it down over her round ass cheeks and letting it fall to the floor. The weird school girl looking belt came next. She stepped out of both of them and kicked them away. “You keep your hands flat on the table, we aren’t gonna have a problem.”

  As long as I could see them, I knew they weren’t gonna touch me. As much as part of me wanted them to, we needed just to figure this out first. I just wanted to make her feel fucking good.

  With her ass back and her legs spread just slightly, I slipped my hand up the inside of her thigh, enjoying the way she shuddered and pushed her ass out toward me, urging me on. Her pussy was hot and bare, and my finger slipped effortlessly through her folds, the wetness allowing it to glide straight through to her clit.