by Tijan
Cruz shook his head in amusement.
“What?”
He pointed down the hall to the back section of Manny’s. “I saw the whole thing, and you didn’t pause for one second.” As he walked away, he added under his breath, “Legend, Heather. Legend.”
It took a second before it clicked.
I saw it all, stepped in, and handled the customer most likely to cause a problem for Manny’s later. And I did it without thinking.
It was second nature for me.
I was protecting my home, like protecting my family. And almost like it was cosmic timing—or the fact that it’d been two days since I last saw him—Channing walked in the front door.
Family. Channing was it, whether I wanted him or not.
His gaze met mine, and like almost every time I saw him, my body began to react.
Sometimes I felt hatred. Sometimes pain. Sometimes relief. Not this time. This time I wanted him. It might’ve been only two days, but I hungered for him, and knowing Cruz would handle things for me, I headed straight for Channing.
He was standing by the side door.
Seeing the look in my eyes, he began grinning that damn half-smirk, which showed his dimple. Cruz glanced toward me. He’d been speaking to Channing, but Channing wasn’t paying attention.
It was him and me. No one else.
The world had ceased to exist, and the world knew it.
Cruz nodded as I approached and said, “I’ll close tonight.”
I didn’t respond.
Channing kicked open the side door and moved over to let me pass. As I walked by, his hand went to the small of my back and he said for me, “Appreciate it, Cruz.”
Then we were outside.
His hand fell away.
We didn’t speak. We walked past the teenagers lounging in the chairs I’d once used for my smoke breaks. We ignored the people enjoying the picnic tables in the back. I led the way up the porch and into the front of my house.
Channing spoke once we were inside. “Pack a bag.”
I stopped on my stairs. “What?”
He was watching out the door, his lips pressed tight. “Let’s go to my place.” His head swung toward me, his eyes darkened with intent. “I don’t want to hold back. Not tonight.” He didn’t move, but I felt the room shrink. The air left, and he added, “I want to fuck you hard.”
Lust exploded in me.
It’d been a small ember, but his words struck the match. Now it was a bonfire, warming me instantly, and I nodded, swallowing on a dry mouth. “A bag it is.”
As we left the house, I knew he’d wait for me as I locked the door. I knew he’d wait for me to lead the way down the stairs. I knew he’d touch my back, a small touch of support even though both of us knew I didn’t need it.
There was so much I knew he would do, and it was that feeling, knowing another like the back of my hand, that I relished.
I was in sync with him.
When we got to his truck, I got in on the passenger side. He went to the driver’s side and without a word, the engine started. The windows rolled down, because he knew I liked the wind versus air conditioning. And because he knew I liked a certain way, he drove that route out of Fallen Crest.
When he pulled into his driveway, he circled to the back of his house. The front was littered with motorcycles—his and his friends’—but as we went inside, I was glad to hear no one was there. We were alone.
Channing pulled the door closed behind me and went to the kitchen.
I followed after him. “Bren’s not here?”
He snorted, filling a glass of water from the fridge. “She either sneaks in or she’s with her crew. You know how it is.”
That right there.
To crew or not to crew. This was our fight—one of the constants that’d been with us forever. And I knew what I was starting, but I decided to start it anyway. The words were out almost before I realized I was going to say them.
“No, Channing.” I spoke low and quiet. “I don’t know.”
Yes, we were going into the emotional stuff we usually avoided. I had to, but I didn’t know why. It felt right. At that moment, it felt not right to go straight to the sex, though I still hungered for him.
His eyes found mine over the rim of his glass. He lowered it slowly. His throat moved as he swallowed, and I moved to the kitchen island to have something to lean against.
“Come on, Heather.” His statement was a rasp.
I shook my head. “I wasn’t in a crew in high school.”
“Neither was I.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes because there was so much history in the room with us. All the old anger, resentment—it was all rolling around in my stomach, and I struggled to keep it contained. It was right there alongside everything I loved about him too.
I glanced to the floor. “Moose and Congo became your best friends in fifth grade. Your crew started then, and don’t lie to me. You know it as much as I do.” I waited. Tense.
He didn’t say anything, slowly putting his water glass back into the fridge, and then he turned and leaned his back against it. His eyes were smoldering again. His arms crossed over his chest a moment before they fell and slid into his pockets. The movement drew his jeans down an inch, and I could see the muscles there, the ones I knew like the back of my hand.
God.
He was gorgeous.
His eyes were fierce, his cheekbones partially shadowed. His shirt fit perfectly to his chest, showcasing what years of training and fighting had given him. But he wasn’t just looks. And he wasn’t just rakish charm.
He cared for and protected the oldest crew in Roussou, the one he’d formed to help my friend. He did it for me. He didn’t give two shits about them. They were outsiders. They weren’t Roussou, and that’s how it was in Roussou, but he’d given a shit about me. He did it for me.
He formed the first crew, and the crew system was born. It’d been like that ever since.
I understood the reasoning behind them.
Roussou was hard. You had to be tough to survive, but there was another bit I didn’t understand. That was the part of me that wasn’t Roussou, where I was Fallen Crest. The part of me that loved Channing, but wasn’t in his crew. I could never bring myself to join.
And it was that part that was pushing at him now.
“You’re okay with her running around with those guys?”
“No,” he shot back. “But I understand how it is. I was never home either.”
The heat traveled up, warming the back of my neck. “It’s not normal, Channing. She’s a teenager. She needs structure.”
He scoffed. “You’re starting with me about this? You ran your house because the only place your dad left Manny’s for was the horse track. And you know my history. We didn’t have structure.”
“She’s your sister. She’s hurting.”
“I’m aware.” His eyes darkened, and he pushed off the fridge. He stalked toward me. His voice was low and eerily smooth. “I want to yell at her. I want to scream at her. I want to ground her and lock her in her fucking room, but I can’t. Because she’s just like me. I push, and she’ll go. She won’t come home, and what am I supposed to do then?”
A headache formed behind my temples, because this was how we were. We’d switched roles. If I pushed him to be more of a parent to Bren, he reminded me of the consequences. I would fall back and remember this wasn’t my fight. And even though I was in his house, and I was going to sleep in his bed, we were technically not together. Bren was not my business.
And when I remembered that, I felt all the same emotions I always did.
I shouldn’t be here.
Channing was trying to parent a teenager. I had to step back. If I saw Bren, I needed to be the chill girlfriend I’d always been. She didn’t need my input either, because Lord knows she hadn’t been listening to any from Channing. Why would she listen to me?
I didn’t know Bren that well. I should have. I’d been around all of Cha
nning’s life, but it was his life, not hers. He hadn’t been around her for so long either. He’d left their home around the time their mother was getting sick and not long after that she died. I knew his dad had been an asshole to him. Channing would never tell me the details of that, but it’d been bad. Really bad.
After Channing left, he never moved back.
“Maybe I should just go home.”
He sighed, coming over and putting his hands to my shoulders. “No, Heather. Stay.” His voice gentled, and he pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me, his head burying in my neck.
The spark reignited. The sizzle was refreshed, and just like that, it was Heather and Channing again. The separation was gone.
He rocked me a little, tightening his arms, and his lips brushed against my skin. “We fight, then we go to bed. It’s what we do; I don’t want you to leave. Please don’t leave.”
My heart broke a little. I should’ve moved out of the way, but now that I was in his arms, I knew I wouldn’t do that.
I was weak.
Was it weakness? Was that my problem?
Whatever it was, my arms were up and around his neck. I pushed up on my tiptoes.
I whispered against his chest, “I love you.”
He dropped a kiss to my neck and whispered, “I love you too.”
He picked me up. He carried me to his room.
I don’t want to say we fucked. It’s a hard way to say it, but sometimes I was hard. Sometimes he was too. And tonight, that’s how we were. It wasn’t soft, gentle, or beautiful. It was rough. It was demanding.
Channing claimed me. He answered a primal need inside him. I knew it because I saw it as he was deep in me, and I recognized it because it was in me too.
He was mine. That’s just how it was.
9
Channing
My phone woke me, and I quieted it before even looking at who it was. Heather was still sleeping, her naked back curved away. The sheet had fallen down to her hip, showcasing her spine and hair.
I had to stop and take a breath. This girl was fucking gorgeous.
I wanted to reach over and smooth a hand down her back, knowing she’d roll over and open her legs for me, but I resisted. Barely. I sat up, turned the fan on to cover some of my noise, grabbed my phone and some clothes, and headed for the bathroom.
The hall was dark and, no surprise, so was Bren’s room. Her door was closed, but I knew my sister, pain in the ass that she was. She wasn’t in there. I studied her closed door a moment, knowing I’d have to track her down, then continued into the bathroom.
Switching the light on, I put my phone on speaker and answered. “What’s up?”
“We have a problem.”
I was pulling on my boxer briefs, but I paused. Moose’s voice was serious, the deadly serious tone I didn’t like to hear.
“What’s up?” I repeated.
I could hear yelling in the background as Moose continued. “Chad brought in someone we’re going to have a problem with, and Congo kinda went apeshit.”
Chad was a surprise. He didn’t like to bring problems to the crew, but Congo wasn’t. He tended to explode at any little thing.
“Okay.” I pressed the screen and saw it was a little after four in the morning. “You don’t happen to know where my sister is, do you?”
If my sister wasn’t in her room, she was with her crew. And crews talked.
“I don’t. There was a party out at Belshield Field, but none of us went. She might’ve gone there. You want someone to track her down?”
I frowned. “Nah. Where are you?”
“The warehouse.”
“Okay. I’ll be there in a little bit.”
“Got it, boss.”
I just rolled my eyes. I hated being called that, but it fit.
Moose was laughing as he hung up.
After finishing dressing, I washed and put my phone in my back pocket, heading back into the hallway. I tapped lightly on Bren’s door. “B?”
No answer. I wasn’t expecting anyone, but I opened it and waited to hear any breathing. Nothing. I flicked her light on. Her bed was made, and empty.
I wasn’t going to text her this time. I’d find her another way. I had to get going if I didn’t want to find a dead body when I got to the warehouse.
I didn’t want to wake up the neighborhood, so I backed out the truck and waited until I was in the alley and with the lights turned away from the house before turning them on. They would’ve flooded my bedroom and woken Heather.
After taking back roads so no cameras could follow me, I pulled into the long driveway that led to my warehouse. There were so many trucks and bikes there, I couldn’t tell who all was around. Half the vehicles were there for storage or parts.
I kept this warehouse and another for our crew’s private hangout spot. We’d also purchased the twenty acres around it, and while I’d like to say nothing bad happened here, that wasn’t true. There was a reason I wanted privacy.
Point being: I walked inside and a guy was bleeding on the floor.
It didn’t faze me. I only asked, “He dead?”
I didn’t spare Congo, Chad, or Moose a glance as I went to the guy. He was breathing, but they were slow and shallow, wheezing. Blood seeped out of a large cut near his eye.
I turned to study my guys. “Who is he?”
Congo rushed in first, “He was messing with Chad’s mom. You know how she is, being old and shit—”
Moose cut him off, literally stepping in the way so he couldn’t see me. He growled, “Walk. Calm down.”
Moose was next in line after me in our crew. He was my most trusted, and when one of us spoke, Congo had to fall in line. Though he didn’t like it. He had the quickest fuse. When lit, there was always an explosion, and if we hadn’t been in the warehouse, I wouldn’t have let him go. As it was, when he stalked out the door and we started hearing crashing sounds, no one moved an inch.
We’d just wait until the sounds stopped.
Besides the crashing and Congo’s growl, the only other sound we could hear was the guy’s breathing, which was more and more labored. He’d have to go to the hospital. Soon.
Chad sighed. “This is my fault.”
Another crash.
Slam!
Thud!
The guy moaned, raising his head. He tried to open his eyes. “What—who?” He groaned again, his head falling back down. One sudden whoosh of breath, and he was out.
Chad went over, kneeling and pressing two fingers to the guy’s neck. He relaxed a beat later. “There’s a pulse.”
For now.
Chad looked at me, showing the same remorse I saw in Moose’s eyes.
I was still waiting to be told what the fuck had happened, but I was starting to guess. I shook my head. “He scammed your mom?”
Chad nodded, standing and heading over again.
I clipped him in the back of the skull. “Goddamn redhead.”
He ducked out of the way, but there was no edge to my words. This wasn’t the first time Chad’s temper had gotten him in trouble. And Lord knows, I couldn’t say a word. I was like a caged animal, prowling around until I got a good release—whether from sex or a fight, I wasn’t too picky. I liked doing both.
“Tell me what happened and who that guy is,” I ordered.
If Chad was mad, the scam must’ve been bad. He had a temper, but unlike Congo, Chad loathed fighting. Once he started, though, he was like the Hulk. Chaos and destruction followed him.
“His name’s Brett Marsch,” Chad said with a sigh. “He scammed a bunch of the residents at the nursing home.”
Chad’s mom was forty-nine when she’d had him. He was the second youngest of twelve kids—good old Catholic family. It was probably ten years later when she got dementia, and I knew things had gone downhill after that. Chad’s dad had been hitting the bottle harder and harder every day, and somehow checking in with Mama Gold had become Chad’s job, or he felt it was. His older sisters vi
sited their mom regularly too.
“He pretended to volunteer there, and he opened credit cards in a bunch of their names before skipping town.”
I gestured to the guy. “How’d he get here?”
Chad grimaced. “I might’ve told him to get his ass back here or I’d go after his woman. I heard he had someone here.”
Moose swore under his breath.
Fucking hell. There went my good mood. “What do you mean?”
We didn’t threaten women or kids. That was a solid rule for us.
He winced again. “I know. I know. I never meant it.”
We were the New Kings Crew, and we didn’t bluff. Ever. That was our reputation. And it was solid too.
He held his hands up, hissing as he tried to open his fingers all the way. “But I wouldn’t have followed through, or…” His head hung down. “I would’ve figured a way to not make it so bad. But it worked.” He gestured to the guy. “He came back to town. Moral dilemma closed.”
I could’ve… No, I did.
I punched him in the face.
He went down. Thud. It was an abrupt drop.
Moose didn’t react, only raising an eyebrow.
Chad didn’t get up. He rolled to his back, watching me warily.
I pointed to the door. “Get out of here. Get out of town while you’re at it.” I nodded toward the guy. “I doubt your mom and the other residents were the first and only people he’s scammed, and I doubt he’s alone.”
Everyone had a team in Roussou. If you didn’t, you got swallowed up. You get tough, or you get the fuck out.
“Can I come back in?” Congo hollered from outside the door.
He sounded sheepish, but still pissed, and those mixed tones were enough to make us all pause. We shared a grin. Moose was the biggest, towering over us at six feet five inches and generally looking like he could eat boulders for every meal, and Congo was a smaller version of him. Both were bald. Only Congo was the shortest in our crew at five six. That didn’t affect how tough he was.
“Yeah,” I called.
He looked down as he came in. “Sorry. I was worked up.”
Moose began explaining. “Chad brought the guy here and—”
Congo cut in, “He wasn’t answering his questions quick enough, so I…”