I surged upright, unable to stop myself from sliding my hands around her throat and up to cup her cheeks. Within seconds, my mouth was on hers and I was thrusting my tongue between her lips.
She moaned the second we connected, and for a little while, she let me play. I sucked and flicked, teased and enticed, loving that she let me sup from her, adoring the way she arched her head back to give me full access.
I tasted everything she had to give.
But I gave her more than I took.
So many men in her life had taken from her, but I didn’t want to be like that. I really fucking didn’t.
And that was why I pulled back.
I wasn’t like them.
So, even though it pained me, I stopped making goddamn love to her mouth, I stopped teasing her by sliding my tongue against hers—even though I knew she liked it because she dug her nails into my shoulders with each parry—and I drew away.
It hurt.
Fuck, it hurt.
But shit.
A woman tells you that you’re her first crush? That she likes you when she’s been raped and psychologically abused?
That was the biggest goddamn compliment I thought I’d ever received.
When I pulled back, we were both panting, and I pressed my forehead to hers, needing to retain the connection. The heat between us was off the charts, and I’d only fanned the flames.
“Why did you stop?” she bit off, each word punctuated by a heavy gulp of air.
“Because I won’t take from you.”
“It was freely given.”
“I know, but I’m different. You just said so yourself.”
She froze for a second, then whispered, “I-I could love you, Link. That scares me.”
“You think that doesn’t scare me?” I blew out a breath. “Never loved anyone except my momma, my grandmother, and then a dumb bitch who was only using me.” Another breath escaped me. “I feel the same way.”
“We’re not right for each other. We’ve got different paths.”
“We do, but that doesn’t mean those paths can’t cross over along the way. Just because we were heading in one direction doesn’t mean we can’t change destinations.”
“Would you want to?” she asked sadly.
“For you? For this?” I squeezed her waist. “Yeah. I would.” When she shook her head, I sighed and squeezed her waist again. “I have a question.”
She bowed her head and pressed it to my shoulder and cemented herself in my memory like no other ever had. The trust inherent in that move, the affection and intimacy…I’d experienced nothing like it in my almost forty years of fucking living.
“What did you hope to find when you went looking in Luke’s office?”
“A way out.”
“Of marrying Fieri?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t find it.”
“No.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“A businessman? Obviously, my father and he want to cement ties—”
“Why would your father want to tie you to a criminal?”
She waved a hand. “My father was a banker, Link. Before my mother, that was his trade. Lots of bankers and investment gurus go to jail.”
“There’s being friends with someone in jail, there’s even being associated with someone in jail, but marrying them to your daughter? Bringing them into the family? Isn’t that something else entirely?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, and to be honest, I don’t care. I was hoping—”
“What? What were you hoping for?”
“That things would change with Luke gone.”
“You had the chance of becoming the heiress.”
“Yes. It put a deadline on things.”
“You mean, you were wanting to kill your father before Fieri was released?”
“Yes. I don’t want to marry him,” she whispered. “He’s creepy.”
“He’s more than creepy,” I muttered, and I squeezed her again, this time to comfort myself as well as her. Fuck. Fieri? What in God’s name was Lancaster thinking? Tying his daughter to that goddamn monster? He made Nyx look like a fucking saint! His rep preceded him in certain circles all over the country, for fuck’s sake. “Babe, you know who he is, don’t you?”
She shook her head. “Just one of Father’s friends.”
“No, love. He’s the son of Benito Fieri.” When she didn’t react, made no other response than a shrug, I had to sigh. “Benito is the head of the Fieri crime family. He’s La Famiglia, babe. He’s mafia.”
A long, slow breath escaped her. “He’s mafia?”
“Yeah. Your dad’s obviously more fucked up than—” An explosive breath escaped me. “Sweet fuck, of course.”
She jerked back. “What is it?”
“Of fucking course. The Famiglia are involved in the skin trade. That’s how your father and Luke bought the women.”
“The skin trade? Bought? What the hell are you talking about?”
“The women in the videos, the women here, they were bought, Lily. And the Famiglia are known for trafficking women and…” I blew out a breath. “Kids.”
“No. No way!” She started off squeaking, then she burst into a shriek that had my ear drums ringing even as she tunneled into my arms, trying to escape what I was telling her.
I hugged her tightly, held her close in the vain attempt of making her feel better. But the more she huddled into me, the more I knew she was trying to overcome what I’d just told her about the kind of man her father wanted her tied to.
I closed my eyes, surprised by the path my thoughts took me down. I wasn’t frightened, wasn’t even freaked. This was right.
What I was going to do was how it was supposed to be.
“Babe, this changes everything. You know that, right?”
She quivered in my embrace before she whispered, “I need to run away.”
The prospect of her leaving had me holding her tighter and, furthermore, it cemented the rightness of my actions.
“No. You’re not going anywhere,” I told her gruffly. “You’re going to stay here. With me.”
She shook her head. “No, Link, you don’t mean that. Your world would…” She pushed her face into my throat and I felt her tears. “I don’t want to share my partner.”
“And you won’t. I wouldn’t do that to you.” And I meant it. Even though the offer stunned the fuck out of me.
“It’s a part of your world. Storm didn’t stop sleeping with those women for Keira,” she pointed out sadly, making me regret sharing that fucking story with her.
“I’m not Storm. I’m not a dumbass. I know what I’ve got in my arms.”
She quieted down, like she was listening, willing to absorb what I had to say.
“You can’t run from the Fieris, babe. They’ll find you. Wherever you go.” I blew out a breath. “The only place you’re safe is here. With me. With the MC at your back.”
She gulped. “I can’t bring this to your door.”
“I’m asking you to. You mean something to me, Lily. I’m not good with words,” I said shakily. “I-I just know that I’ve never felt this way before, and I don’t think I will again. Maybe it’s nuts, maybe it’s been too short a time to really know what either of us wants, and that’s good. That’s fine. But I want to know you’re safe. That’s what matters to me.”
“W-We might be incompatible,” she whispered, the words tickling the tender skin of my throat.
“Of all the stuff you’ve said tonight, that’s the craziest. Baby, we’re so beyond compatible my dick is aching from that kiss alone.” I squeezed her waist once more. “But we’ll take this slow. We’ll take this however you need to go.”
“That isn’t fair to you,” she argued, but I heard the yearning in her voice, and fuck me, if that didn’t make my dick harder than it already was, I didn’t know what could.
“Let me decide what’s fair for me, okay?”
“If I stay here, Fieri
isn’t going to let this drop. He’ll come for me.”
“Let him,” I ground out. “You know those Five Points you mentioned before? When you were trying to keep us in the loop?”
“You mean when I was trying to be your informant and failing?” she countered drolly.
“Yeah, then,” I retorted, amused. “Well, they’re the Fieris’ natural fucking enemies. With me at your back, we have a battalion of the Devil’s soldiers ready to roll into battle the second you become my woman. And through them? You have the Five Points.”
She shifted her head back, her brow furrowed as she stared at me. “What do you mean?”
“Which part? About the Five Points?”
“No. You say ‘becoming your woman’ like there’s a ceremony.” She gulped. “You want to get married?”
I had a feeling that one day, sometime soon, I’d wife this woman and tie her to me in all the fucking ways I could, but no. Not yet. She wasn’t ready for that, and neither was I. “There’s a process. To come under the club’s protection, you’ve got to be recognized as my Old Lady.” I ran my hands up and down her arms.
“Does it involve hazing?” she questioned warily.
My lips twitched. “No. Nothing like that. That’s for shit with the Prospects.”
Her eyes flared wide. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. Best not to ask. And,” I blew out a gusty sigh, “while we’re talking about that, there will always be some shit I can’t tell you. Shit that you don’t want to know because I don’t want you to get into trouble.”
“I know how that works,” she rumbled. “More than I’d like.”
“You need to know that I get involved in some shit that no woman would be happy with—”
“Do you sell women and children to men like my father and brother?” she demanded rawly.
“No. I defend them. Avenge them. Well, help avenge them,” I whispered back at her.
“Then that’s all I need to know. My father is the biggest criminal going. He has his hands in more pies than a baker. I don’t even want to know how dirty he is, but because he hides behind companies and umbrella corporations and only God knows what else, he’s considered legitimate. Well, that’s bullshit.” She swallowed, and I wasn’t surprised when she reached up, her hands cupping my biceps as she dug her nails into my arms, and whispered, “Promise me, Link, that if one day I want to go, you won’t trap me here.”
The idea that she’d want to leave me didn’t sit well with me. I was, by nature, a positive person. I liked to start shit off the right way, with the right frame of mind.
That wasn’t what she was asking of me at the moment.
But because of her past, a past I didn’t understand but could empathize with, I got it. I really did.
“I promise to do everything in my power to make you want to stay,” I conceded, unable to give her the vow she wanted, but giving her an oath I’d live up to.
For as long as I lived.
She bit her lip. “That’s a caveat.”
“And that’s a fancy word.”
“I’m an economist and I went to finishing school. What do you expect?”
“True,” I rumbled with a snort. She was so fucking smart and too good for me. I knew that. “Finishing school, huh?”
“Father insisted.”
“Don’t you think it’s time you stopped calling him that? You won’t ever be seeing that fucker again.”
She nibbled a little harder on her lip. “You think?”
“That’s a fucking promise.”
Her nod was resolute. “Okay. Donavan, then. He insisted I be finished.”
My eyes widened. “That sounds ominous.”
“It wasn’t actually. But I had to walk around with a book on my head and learn where to set cutlery on the table. There’s also a whole damn protocol about where to sit a prince next to an oligarch—tedious as fuck.”
My lips curved even as I got, even more so, a sense of the yawning gap between us. Oligarchs and princes were not in my world.
“Babe, you become my woman, my Old Lady, you’ll be safe. I will never let anyone harm you. I will make sure that you’re safe from that cunt of a father, and I’ll go to war with the Famiglia to keep you out of their paws but…”
When my voice waned because she was looking at me like I’d set the planets in the sky, I didn’t want to finish my sentence.
I really fucking didn’t.
I wanted her to look at me that way.
I wanted this princess, this fucking queen, to look at me, trailer trash, like I was capable of anything. Like I was her knight in goddamn shining armor.
But I wasn’t.
My armor was tarnished, and it had been for a helluva long time. She needed to know that. Even if she thought she didn’t, I needed to ram that home because I wasn’t doing this with an expiration date in mind, even if she was.
I was going with a gut feeling. A feeling that appeared whenever she lay asleep on my chest, whenever she cuddled into me at night. When she moaned from a nightmare and it pierced my fucking heart like she’d used a goddamn dagger to stab me.
I was going from the smiles she earned whenever she sent me something funny via text, to thinking about how right it would feel when she rode bitch on the back of my bike…
No, this wasn’t temporary. This was, in my mind, permanent. And the fact that I was willing to wait until she was ready, until she wanted me as much as I wanted her, until she was begging for my touch and not tensing up at it, spoke wonders.
“What is it?” she whispered when I didn’t continue, when I just looked at her, staring into her starry eyes. The abused woman finally able to see the broken pieces of herself come together again.
“I’m not a prince. I’m not an oligarch. I don’t go to the opera and I don’t have a pass to Crosskeys. I used to work there, for God’s sake. I don’t wear Prada, and my hair? I usually cut it in the bathroom. Nothing about me is fancy, and everything about you is—”
Before I could say more, she raised her hand and pressed a finger to my lips. “Do you know how many guys have tried to pick me up at Crosskeys?”
Irritation flashed through me like a tidal wave. “I can imagine,” I rumbled.
She snorted. “Don’t get jealous—”
Fuck. I was.
Me. Jealous!
Holy.
Shit.
If I needed proof that this woman was different, I had it.
Right there.
Right then.
“I didn’t want a single one of them. Dressed in tennis whites, golf vests, Armani suits, or designer casual. I didn’t want any of them.
“It was a biker who made me feel safe. One who cuts his hair in the bathroom, one who wears Henleys and ripped jeans and has engine oil in the tiniest creases in his nails. You, Link. You. You made me feel safe, you made me feel like I wasn’t alone, and when you touch me, I’m not Donavan Lancaster’s daughter, I’m Lily. I’m me. And I like me around you.”
“I like you around me too,” I replied huskily, liking her answer so fucking much I thought I’d burst.
“What do I have to do to become your Old Lady?”
“You get a tattoo.”
“Is that it?” She released a breath that I realized was relieved.
A laugh escaped me. “What did you think you’d have to do?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t sure.” She winced. “I mean, when you join frat houses and sororities they all make you do weird stuff—”
“Well, this is weird enough.”
“I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” she mused.
“This one will tell the fucking world what you are to me. What you mean to this club. It’s a brand, babe. A stamp of protection that will keep you safe forever. You have my word on that.”
Her big blue eyes grew hazy. “You really mean it, don’t you? You want me like that. Even though I…”
“Even though you, what? Haven’t put out?” I arched a brow. “Don’t you
realize that’s half of what makes me know I need you in my life, sugar tits?” As her eyes widened, I told her, “And don’t think that just because I’m taking shit slow, I’m not going to touch you. ‘Cause I am. I already told you I’m going to glut myself on your fucking taste and give you so many fucking orgasms that you’re never going to want to leave me.”
A choked cry escaped her as she plunged into my arms, clinging to me as tightly as a fucking spider clung to its web.
And that was exactly where I wanted her.
Cleaved to me.
Body and soul.
Eleven
Nyx
Three days later
“Tell that moron asswipe that if he brings this shit into me again, I’m telling the sheriff he needs his license revoked,” Link snapped, as he wiped his hands on a rag and hollered his irritation at Gunner, one of the brothers who helped out at the garage as Link’s right-hand man.
“Ain’t gonna tell him shit, Link,” Gunner retorted. “Levi Jamieson spends a fucking fortune on this car. Think of how much money he wastes by being a shit driver.”
“Yeah, and I made it how it is.” Link ran his hand over the sleek, custom-build he’d done last year before we’d moved into these premises, and grunted. “He keeps on damaging it, and I’m going to get a real fucking boner for him.”
“Since when were you into dick?”
My lips twitched even as I launched off the side of the wall where I’d been leaning, watching over shit without anyone knowing the wiser. “Yeah, Lily will be surprised to hear you suddenly prefer cock to pussy.”
His eyes narrowed at me. “Stop fucking talking about her pussy.”
“Wasn’t talking about her pussy, not specifically anyway.”
I pretty much heard his teeth grind as he glared at me, and I almost shook my head at the sight. Giulia had only last night bet me a hundred dollars that Link would make Lily his Old Lady and, though I’d argued against the notion because Link was a manwhore, I had a fucking feeling I was going to lose to my woman…
Forgotten & Found: A Dark & Dirty Sinners' MC Boxset Page 51