“Are you kidding me?”
“The pole, blondie. It’s been awful lonely this afternoon.”
She blinked back at him and then eyed the pole. It sat atop a five by five stage of painted wood that was maybe two feet high. It was also painted with a purple leopard print for extra class. She wondered if the groupies coordinated their outfits with it. They probably did, not like they had anything else going on in their lives.
“Are you kidding me?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “If you want to talk, then you give me something out of the deal. So hop up.”
The stereo over head was already blaring something that made her teeth ache and her head pound, something from Def Lepard or Quiet Riot or some band she’d never given a shit about but that VH1 seemed to lionize.
More hair metal bullshit.
“I---”
He slouched down in his seat and watched her. “Your call, but if it’s that urgent, a little lap dance action shouldn’t hurt. Now hop on the pole, blondie, or get out.”
Hesitating for just a moment, she slipped off her heels, and walked over to the box. If doing a stupid dance was going to help her case, then so be it. She’d come too far for this to be the pressing road block in her life. The stage felt oddly sticky beneath her feet, and she had to hope whatever was there was gum or spilled Coke. She put her hand on the pole and spun once, feeling awkward. It was like she were eight and leaning on the tether bar pole. She made a full rotation and stopped in front of him with her hands held up.
“See, are you happy?”
“That was pathetic. I said a dance.”
Tess gritted her teeth and thought of Lizzy and of her family. She needed a solution to this problem, so she just had to go with it. Closing her eyes for a moment, she pushed the sounds of the bar away---the men shouting, the mugs of beer clanking, and the strike of cigarettes and chink of Zippo lighters. Instead, she focused only on the music. Providence or perhaps some horrible joke arranged by Derek himself had led to “She’s My Cherry Pie” being on the speakers. It was a booming bass that she could find herself working toward, her hips moving with the rhythm at first.
Opening her eyes, she focused solely on Derek. This was all for him, and he was the only one she wanted watching her. She started to really feel the music, to sashay her hips. Reaching down, she pulled off her t-shirt. Underneath was just a thin pink cami. She’d been so stressed that she hadn’t felt like she had time to find a bra. She’d used that instead.
Now as her anxiety flowed through her and, frankly, arousal, her nipples were pebbling. Running her fingers over her breasts, she twisted her hips further, everything a serpentine motion that she used to beckon Derek closer. He was leaning in now and licking his lips fervently.
Tess grinned, encouraged and with adrenaline flowing through her. She stepped back to the pole and lifted her right leg, wrapping her leg around it. Arching her back, she ground a little against it, even as she ran her right arm up and down the pole’s length. The music boomed, and she shook her head down and then up, her hair falling in a riot of gold over her face. Reaching higher, she climbed the pole a bit, finally finding purchase, and raising high enough to spin.
Her left leg was held out under her and perpendicular to the pole as her right clung to it for all she was worth. The denim caught some, but she made do, sliding down to the floor and holding her hands out like a cheerleader landing the perfect move.
Standing up, she sauntered to him, licking her own lips back at him and blinking her long lashes at him. Leaning over, she ran her nails over his dark black t-shirt. Underneath, his muscles quivered and he felt hard like stone.
“Is that all you wanted? Do I pass the pole test, Derek?”
He swallowed, and she loved the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he did it. “I think I’m still wanting, Tess. You need to have that time to talk to me, then I need a little bit more in the equation.”
She huffed, but she knew that a part of that was for show, for the role she was playing for him here on this stage. Her clit was already throbbing, and her nerve ending were on fire. She was so worked up that it seemed natural next to straddle him, leaning in close and let her lips almost touch his. He tried to lean the rest of the way in and kiss her.
Tess turned her head to the side at the last minute and grinned to him when his lips only graced her left cheek.
“Not fast enough, Derek.”
“I haven’t been quick on the draw at all this week. It’s costing me everything,” he said.
She sat down on him and started to grind her hips, enjoying the friction of her core riding up against the rock hard bulge in his jeans. As her pace intensified, her hips thrusting up against his lap, she felt her clitoris swell and pulse with the rhythm. He reached up and cupped both her breasts through the thin fabric of her cami, and she moaned at the strong, flat thumbs working over her areolas, making them seem to shiver under his touch.
He leaned up and kissed her throat. “You’re so damn sexy, Tess, but let’s take this in back. I need a minute, or we’re going to have a problem.”
She smirked and ground harder against his crotch. “Getting excited there, what was it Smitty said? Grinder, was it?”
“Yeah.”
“I can grind some things,” she purred.
His cock jerked beneath her, and she had to laugh at his reaction, at how easily she was able to get to him. “I don’t want a floor show for probies and sweet butt anyway. Come with me to one of the little used offices, blondie. We can finally talk.”
She smirked. Victory was hers after all.
Hopping up, she stood and had to smirk again at his groan. “Turnabout is fair play. You’ve been driving me nuts for a while, so let’s march.”
Chapter Twenty Five
“Alright,” she said, as they shut the door to what looked like a pantry. It had whatever dry goods they seemed to use for the bar’s questionable food, including tons of cooking oil and frying batter. Clearly a chicken wing type place then. Tess rolled her eyes at that as she put her hands on her hips and glared up at him. It was hard to do and strained her neck. With no shoes on at all and him well over a foot taller, it was like looking up at the Jolly Green Giant or something. “You need to tell me whatever the hell is going on. There’s human blood on that blade, and I know it’s connected to the warehouse shootout. You say you’re not a murderer, but why do you need it that badly, and then there was so much more. So talk.”
Derek sighed and his face seemed more lined, his azure eyes duller somehow. Tough, she might be attracted to him still, but there was lust and then there was love. If she was even going to try loving him, sticking with him, then he needed to be honest with her. If admitting to his actual job as enforcer and explaining why that was okay somehow was what it took, then he’d have to be discomforted for a bit.
“There was a set up. The rival gang, Death’s Head crew, has converted one of our inner circle. They said it was about some peace talks and some territory boundary renegotiations. It wasn’t. They tried to kill my president, and they didn’t. Spike was able to fight them off, and the blade killed one of theirs, Gunner Hansen. We fled, and I took the proof so he couldn’t be fingered. That’s why he put a time limit on me getting it back. He can’t afford to go to jail, and until it’s recovered, it looks incriminating. Hell, it is. Everyone thinks I turned traitor.”
“They’ll kill you? It’s your club,” she said, feeling vaguely nauseated. What he was telling her did make sense. He’d been asking after Spike after all, concerned about him. It would also explain all the threats that Smitty and the others had made to him, the taunts.
“So if you don’t get it back, you’ll be dead?”
He looked at his watch. “In less than twenty-three hours.”
She shivered and, despite everything, reached out for his chin. His trimmed beard felt prickly beneath her palm, biting into her just a bit and grounding her. “It was used in a murder.”
�
��It was self-defense because they were aiming to off Spike and subsume our club.”
“You’re a criminal,” she said, her voice, hesitant and scared. “Have you killed people before?”
Derek sighed and took her hand in hers. “Once, but I didn’t mean to. I’ve ‘enforced’ a lot. I’ve beaten people badly to get them to lay off or follow our rules or cede to what we want. I’ve landed people in the hospital. The one time, though, got me sent for eighteen months to the pen. There was a bar fight at a neutral place, and I beat a Death’s Head crew member to death. He already had asthma or some shit, and it was too much. Kicker is, normal guy? He’d have been fine.”
“But you like to hurt people, and you did kill them,” she continued, and the passion from before had suddenly frozen to ice in her veins. It was getting harder to breathe, and things felt so false; time was ticking by slowly, and she couldn’t think.
Like when Jason had his accident.
So much trauma flooding through her.
“And I’m good at it,” he admitted. “But I don’t kill for fun. I get our point across with broken knee caps.”
She felt the bile rise in her throat and pulled back, starting to pace. “I spend my whole life trying to heal people. I don’t even know how we could work. Jesus, but I don’t have anything else I can do but give you the knife. I don’t want to see you dead.”
“Thanks for your overwhelming concern,” he quipped.
“I’m serious!”
“Well so am I. I care about you a lot. I didn’t just ask you out for the blade. No one’s ever given a shit about me outside of Ron, my best friend, and I thought the club, but a lot of them have thrown me to the damn wolves. You do care, and I thought we had something that night.” He punctuated his point by reaching out to her and cupping her cheek.
She shuddered at his touch. His hand was callused and rough, probably from years of both beating others and from riding in all conditions on the open road. It was a heady combination, and Tess struggled to keep to her principles, to the morals that guided her.
“I felt something too,” she admitted.
“Then we get the blade and we’ll take care of the Death’s Head crew our way, make our traitor pay and tell them the territory war is over.”
“I’d turn it in to the cops if damn Chief Johnson wasn’t bought and paid for by you, or I could guarantee that psycho Smitty and his minions wouldn’t hurt me and mine.”
Derek chuckled, but it was sad and sobering. “Bones and Bullet usually work for me. They’re hard-headed but loyal. They just want the club safe. Besides, how the hell did you know about the chief of police?”
“I’m smart,” she huffed, her stomach roiling as she imagined Derek ordering those mountains of men to beat people with crow bars or baseball bats. How could the gentle man who’d seen into her soul and this man brimming with violence be the same?
Jason’s voice flittered through her mind again, “You’re always stubborn, sis, and you never bend.”
Could she bend now?
Let the club dole out justice in its own way.
Could she really learn to love all of Derek?
Sighing, she tilted her head enough to kiss his thumb. His eyes rolled back a little as she did that, and Tess even snaked out her tongue a bit to tease him, to let him know what else she could do with it.
“God, blondie, can’t you see I care about you? Just get me the blade and let me make you safe. Please.”
“I don’t know. I just feel so much.”
“Then,” he said, reaching down with his other hand to cup her breast. “You should let yourself feel.”
She nodded and, with his prompting, held up her arms over her head. He slipped her camisole over her and whistled at her breasts. She’d always been self-conscious, knowing that they weren’t as big as Lizzy’s, that she’d gotten flack in middle school for them. Still, he was looking at them like a man in the Sahara stared at water.
“Amazing,” he said, and he bent down so he could breathe over them.
His breath was warm, and it made her nipples pebble all over again. They’d relaxed with her stress but now were surging forth, tight buds waiting for their own release. Derek seemed to sense that and cupped her breasts. Then he poked out his tongue and started to lave over her right nipple. At first, it was long, languorous licks, but then he seemed emboldened by everything and started to flick it out over her in short, pointed bouts. It made her areolas pebble even harder, and she moaned against him.
She couldn’t really grind against him as he did that, as he was so focused in his ministrations. He was so much taller than she. Still, she was able to reach out to his jeans. With fumbling hands, she zipped him down and was pleasantly surprised to realize he was “going commando” under the denim. His cock was hot and heavy in her hand, and so very hard, like steel but covered in velour or something equally soft on the surface.
Experimentally, she ran one delicate nail over its impressive length, and grinned when it jerked.
“Someone’s definitely missed me.”
Derek pulled away from her right nipple just long enough to smirk and add, “You have no idea.” He went back with that same singular focus to his work, his mouth circling her full left nipple. He suckled at it then and her whole body was tingling with need, and her jeans, themselves, were soaked through already.
“Me too,” she admitted, as she wrapped her fingers around his shaft.
She started with a loose, slow-paced stroke, just enough to coax it to even harder than before, like granite or obsidian. She loved the noises he made---the groans, the mewling, even the long drawn out moans---as he sucked her tit. They increased in pitch, got so much louder, once she wrapped her fingers tightly around him and started to pump in earnest.
They stayed there for a while, her enjoying the three alarm fire raging over her, him shuddering beneath her touch, and the chorus of wanting noises they made between them, until Derek suddenly pulled away. Fumbling through his jeans’ pocket, he swallowed down at her.
“Need you more than that.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, hesitating before pulling her hand back. “Was that not good?”
He chuckled and kissed her lips, and she noticed his were a bit swollen from all the careful attention he’d been giving her chest. “Amazing, but I need to be inside of you. Just give me a second.”
She nodded and undid her own jeans and shoved her pants and underwear down. That gave him the time needed to pull out the ubiquitous foil packet and slide the condom on over his member.
Grinning back at him, Tess crooked her pointer finger towards herself. “Then come and get it, Grinder. See if your name is as good as it promises to be.”
He nodded, his expression fierce and wild. Just like him. He picked her up easily in both arms and brought her up against the wall. Then he eased her slowly down on his waiting, engorged cock. It was an easy fit. She was already used to him after all, and she was so wet, so ready. However, it didn’t make the feel of every warm inch of his girth sliding into her any less revelatory, any less scorching and orgasmic.
She was fuller than she’d ever been. He started to rock his hips, and she moved with him. Her eyes stayed focus on the gorgeous ice blue of his as he looked up at her. However, and she wasn’t surprised, his lips and tongue had returned to lavishing attention over her right breast. The rapid tempo of his thrusts increased as he pounded into her. He was so fast, so frantic, that she could even feel his balls slap against her core in his need.
She relished that.
Her clit was pounding, and it felt like her blood was matching that same staccato beat in her veins. There was nothing now but his eyes, his mouth, and now the building waves of pleasure rolling over her body. He found her G-spot eventually, after so much pressure and friction built between them, and she came with an explosion of sparks over her eyes.
“God! Yes, fuck yes!” she screamed, and a part of her hoped the rest of the club heard, that th
ey knew what Derek was doing and that he was hers, that she’d claimed him as surely as he’d become fixated on her.
Her walls spasmed around him, she felt him eventually reach his own release, and a small part of her wished they almost hadn’t used the protection so that she could feel every part of him inside of her, even his seed.
Strong arms set her down on her feet and, then, once he was situated, let her sit and curl up on his lap. Tess curled into his arms and loved the feel of him, this bear of a man, all solid muscle, protecting her.
Being there for her.
Maybe if he was as loyal to her as he was to his brotherhood, well, she could maybe live with that.
Chapter Twenty Six
They cleaned themselves and slipped off once their legs could move and muscles felt like more than just Jell-O. He climbed in to her car, wishing she hadn’t favored a sporty update of the classic Volkswagen Beetle. His legs were going to be pretzels by the time they reached Asheville. He had to give her credit for being smart, for getting Lizzy to help her move the blade to her parents’ home, far from Boone and far from anywhere either club would first assume to look.
Corrupted: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Blacktop Sinners MC) Page 14