Devil's Sins

by Naomi West

  A while later, we stop crying and we start laughing. The laughter lasts much longer.

  The laughter is like a song.

  25

  Cage

  I wait at the altar with a big-ass grin on my face. I can’t get rid of it. Even if I wanted to, I don’t reckon I could. It’s plastered to my face like it’s trying to tear my cheeks apart. Jax stands off to the side in the best-man spot. He nods at me with a grin of his own. Several months have passed since the mess with Hatter and now everything’s smooth. Smooth and easy and sweet as life can be.

  It gets a hell of a lot sweeter when Scarlett appears in the doorway. Her belly is bulging a little now, but it doesn’t make her look any less beautiful. If anything, it makes her look more beautiful. She’s wearing a tiara and everything. She looks like a princess. For a second, I just stare at her, hardly able to believe that she’s mine. That the bump is mine as well. That this life is mine. It’s hard to take in. It’s hard to convince myself that it’s true.

  But it is. Goddamn, what a lucky bastard I am.

  We hold hands as we speak our vows. Scarlett’s mom is crying on her boyfriend’s arm from her side of the aisle. The bikers are grinning from theirs. I block them all out and focus on Scarlett as I speak the words. I speak them sincerely, meaning every single one.

  “You’re never getting rid of me!” I roar as I throw my arms around her at the end. I hug her close and kiss her harder than is probably appropriate what with all the people looking. She latches onto me.

  Eventually, we pry apart. “You better not leave me,” she whispers, keeping her face close. “Or I’ll hunt you down and make you pay.” She grabs a hold of my arm. I know what that means. I grin as I kiss her again.

  “Let’s get you outta here, eh?”

  We walk down the aisle together and folks chuck confetti all over us. We’re heading to the hotel first, and then the reception. There’s no damn way I’m waiting through a whole reception to consummate this marriage. But I’ve got a little surprise for her, too.

  She climbs into the passenger seat looking fresh and angelic and incredible.

  “Goddamn, I’m a lucky bastard.”

  “I think you’ve said that about ten times.”

  “And I’ll say it ten more!” I tickle her in the side. “Unless you wanna make a thing of it?”

  She giggles, batting my hand away. “Wait for the room, you animal. Do you think it’s rude, Cage, leaving like that?”

  I smile sideways at her. “Do we care? Last I checked, this is our day. Our life. I ain’t letting goddamn, what would you call it—”

  “Convention.”

  “Yeah, I ain’t letting convention stop us!”

  “You’re just a horny animal.” Her pale blue eyes are almost wild.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing …

  “Wait, Cage, I think you missed the turning.” She glances back at the road. The hotel is on the left, at the end of the street.

  I drive on toward the forest. “Did we?” I glance at her in confusion. “I’m pretty sure this is the right way.”

  “What are you planning?” She looks closely at me. It’s funny to think it used to make me uncomfortable when she looked at me like that. As though she was looking right into me, seeing through all my bullshit. The thing is, that’s the truth. She is seeing through all my bullshit. But now I love it. “Cage … don’t make me discipline you.”

  “Quiet, woman!” I growl, both of us laughing at the familiar back-and-forth.

  She slaps me on the leg, folding her arms in mock anger. “I’m not talking to you for the rest of the day now! There, our first day of marriage and you’ve already made your wife unhappy! Didn’t you ever hear ‘happy wife, happy life’?”

  “No, but I’ve heard: ‘Bend over and do what your husband tells you.’”

  “I haven’t,” she says, shaking her head. “That doesn’t sound familiar at all.”

  The laughter stops when I pull into the driveway of a five-bedroom house set right in the middle of the forest. It’s two stories, with a big attic section and a skylight. I just stop, lean back, and wait.

  She clasps her hands together, looking at the house like it might disappear.

  “Cage, what is this?” She doesn’t want to get hopeful, I can tell.

  “It’s not a trick,” I say. “It’s yours, well—ours. It’s our home, Scarlett. Paid off in full. We don’t owe the bank a damn dime. What’d you reckon, eh? Think this will be a good place to raise our son?”

  She leaps on me. I catch her. Her dress rises to around her thighs as she splits her legs over me. I hug her close, grinding my cock against her panties. That’s the thing about suit pants compared to jeans. I can feel her now, really feel her. My cock gets so hard, I reckon it might blow up. I grab her ass, and then kiss her for a damn long time.

  “Why don’t we skip the hotel?” she gasps. “We can go into our house and … And then after we can go back to the reception, put our time in there. But then we can come back! We can sleep here tonight!”

  “That sounds pretty damn perfect to me.”

  She squeals when I lift her up, gripping onto my neck. I carry her toward the front door.

  “What are you doing?” she giggles.

  “Come on now. Wouldn’t be much of a marriage if I didn’t carry you over the threshold, eh?”

  Epilogue

  Scarlett

  I poke my head around the doorway and watch Cage put Isaac to sleep. He was right in the end. It was a boy. When I said that we should name him Isaac, he seemed unsure at first. It was as though he didn’t want to act like we were trying to bring him back. I left the decision up to him. A few hours later, he just looked at me and nodded, a slight smile on his face.

  One of my favorite things to do is watch Cage and Isaac when they don’t know I’m here.

  “You’re a little beast, eh?” Cage cradles Isaac gently. It’s amazing watching those massive, strong hands handle him like he’s made of glass. He used to joke that he’d never put him to bed or change him, but that quickly fell aside. Still, I do most of the changing!

  Isaac paws at his face. Cage grins, letting him hook his nose. “You tryin’ to play dirty, little man? You’re gonna be a monster. I reckon I should just put you down now to save the world the trouble.” He laughs, causing Isaac to make the sweetest baby-laugh sound I’ve ever heard. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m only messing. Forgive me, all right? You wanna know something?” He lowers his voice to a whisper.

  I lean even closer, risking my position.

  “Your mom sometimes forgets that I’ve spent a whole lot of time listening out for folks sneaking up on me. She thinks she’s got the drop on me. What’d you reckon, little man?”

  I walk into the bedroom. “How’d you know?” I laugh.

  Cage puts Isaac down in the crib and adjusts everything, making sure it’s safe. “I know ’cause I know.” He nudges me with his shoulder. “What’re you creeping around for, eh?”

  “Eh?” I nudge him right back. “Now that the little man’s taken care of, you’ve got some more business.”

  “I have?” He tilts his head at me. “How’s that?”

  I just look at him. His face changes. He knows. I can tell that right away. I smile at him.

  “You better’ve stopped taking that damn pill.”

  “What?” I pause in the hallway, turning to him. “Are you serious? Don’t say that if you’re not serious.”

  “Am I serious?” He grabs me and tosses me over his head. I squeal as quietly as I can as the world turns upside-down. He runs with me into the bedroom and tosses me on the bed. The skylight shows the full moon and the glittering stars.

  I climb onto my knees, catching his hands when he grabs at me. “Cage, are you serious?” I ask.

  He looks at me intensely. “I’m serious,” he says. “What’s the use with all these rooms if we don’t fill them up?”

  We find each other’s lips at the same time
. The taste of him sends me into a wild passion almost at once. And the passion explodes as his words swim around my head. He’s right. I shouldn’t take my pill anymore. It was a mistake to start taking it in the first place. Soon there’ll be another baby, another room to decorate, another chapter of our life to begin.

  But right now, all I care about is my husband’s body. I fall back. He collapses on top of me. We kiss like we’re trying to break each other’s lips. I run my hand down his hand, over the familiar muscles, the familiar surface. I don’t scratch him this time, though. I just touch him, feel him. He peels off my clothes slowly, taking his time to tease me. My body feels just as light as my head. Everything is light, like we could just float away.

  Finally, we’re both naked. He looks into my eyes as I reach down and guide him inside of me. His cock pushes with agonizing sweetness up to my sensitive spot. I close my legs around him, gasping with the puncturing pleasure of it. We make slow love. He drives into me as though wanting to draw out every moment. I move with him in the same way.

  When my orgasm comes, it comes like the first kiss of spring rain. It patters warmly onto my body, the drops sending ripples that captivate every part of me. We stare into each other the whole time, right down into each other’s souls. It is insane to think I ever felt unsure around this man. Now he is the surest thing in my life. I find his lips as the orgasm sends another cascading ripple through me, starting at my belly and ending nowhere, everywhere. The whole room is just pleasure and love. The whole world.

  He kisses me back harder. The orgasm explodes. I let out a cry, but it’s muffled by his mouth. I grab onto his shoulders as though to a buoy. And that’s what he is, I realize. And what I am to him. We buoy each other through the final moments of lovemaking, floating atop the pleasure.

  Right as my orgasm finishes, he lets out a grunting moan, coming inside of me.

  I lie back with his come cooling between my legs, enjoying the feeling. He wraps his arms around me and together we just stare up at the stars.

  “Congratulations on the story, by the way,” he says for the fifteenth time. At least.

  “Thanks.” I kiss him on the cheek. “Did I tell you I started a novel?”

  “A novel?” He leans up. “No. What about?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Just about a reporter who gets tangled up with a gang of violent killers.”

  Cage laughs savagely. “Does it have a happy ending?”

  I look up at the stars. I switch on the baby monitor so we can listen to Isaac’s sleepy babbling. I roll into Cage so we can hug closer together.

  “Yes,” I tell him. “It has the happiest ending I could dream of.”

  THE END

  Thanks for reading! DEVIL’S SINS will be live soon! Keep an eye on your email inbox for the release announcement.

  Devil’s Vow: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Bloody Wraiths MC)

  Enjoy this free sneak preview of my steamy motorcycle club romance, DEVIL’S VOW!

  An unexpected baby MC romance.

  ISABELLE

  He’s a snarling, overprotective beast.

  There’s no room in his life for manners, decency, or any other normal-person behavior.

  Heck, there’s no room for anything but his motorcycle club and his ride.

  That’s it.

  No exceptions.

  No hope for a future.

  But Logan is going to have to make some room, one way or another.

  Because the savage, rugged biker just got me pregnant—whoops.

  And now his enemies are coming to strike.

  LOGAN

  I shoulda known better.

  But Isabelle was too tempting to leave alone.

  I’d kept away from women like her for a long time.

  Wasn’t saving myself for Mrs. Right.

  Just didn’t want to unleash my darkness and demons on an innocent girl.

  But I couldn’t help myself.

  I had to have her.

  And now that she’s mine…

  I’ll go to war to protect her.

  Oh, and also—

  The baby she’s carrying inside of her.

  Logan

  “Maybe we should just call in the fuckin’ chopper,” Felix mutters.

  He sits on his bike, leaned over his whittling block, busy carving a giant pair of tits out of it. Chips of wood flutter to the ground while he works. He’s a wide, chunky bastard with a barbed wire tattoo on his neck partially hidden by a scraggly ginger beard. “What’d you reckon, boss?”

  “I reckon you call me that again and there’ll be trouble.”

  He grins and I grin back. The rest of the brothers laugh grimly.

  It seems like everything gets grimmer when we’re outside town. Our town, Giant’s Drop, sits in the middle of a Colorado forest, miles and miles of tourist-type shit, and then, when it all breaks, our little town.

  We sit in a small clearing, tooling up. The Hell’s Sons warehouse – our sworn enemies – is two miles through the trees.

  “What’d you think?” Redman comes walking over to me. We call him Redman on account of the red birthmark that covers half his neck. It looks like a bloody handprint or a lightning bolt seared on his skin. He’s in his early twenties, but he’s as serious as an old man. Despite his birthmark he keeps himself clean-shaven and clean-cut. He don’t want to hide behind hair, he once told me. He figured that hiding was weakness.

  One of the club girls once said that “Redman” is a cruel nickname. Redman told her that he was the one who came up with it.

  “I think we give him two more minutes,” I answer.

  “He knows what he’s doing,” Smoker mutters. He’s cleaning his rifle like a man massaging his lover. The way he’s leaning over it makes his hair look like seaweed. He’s the oldest of us, an ex-military man whose throat is always raspy on account of how much he used to smoke.

  Now that he’s kicked the habit, he chews nicotine gum pretty much all the time. Or packs three of them into his gums, making his lips bulge like he’s got a wad of chewing tobacco plugged in.

  Eventually, Max returns. He’s ex-military, too, but much younger than Smoker. He quit three years ago and since then he’s become the best scout the Bloody Wraiths have ever seen.

  Unlike everybody else, he doesn’t wear his leather when we’re on jobs. He wears fatigues and jungle boots with the club’s emblem sewed into the camo shirt.

  “It’s all good, boss.”

  “I just warned Felix about calling me that.”

  “But you’re gonna be VP soon,” Max says matter-of-factly.

  “What’d you see?” I interrupt. I don’t want to get into some long debate about who’s the boss and who isn’t. Knowing these guys, we’d be here for hours if I let it play out.

  “A couple of rifles posted on the roof. Other than that, it seems pretty casual. I’m guessing there’s about twenty brothers in there, but there could be more. I’d need to watch it for a day to be sure. But if we pick good positions and draw them out, we’ll be fine.”

  “All right, sounds good.”

  I turn to the men and tell them who’s working with who and where everyone will be. It’s basically a case of choosing the best position for the best shooters.

  When everyone has a job assigned, I look them over once more.

  “We ready, fellas?”

  Everyone nods.

  I go over my rifle, setting it against my shoulder to check how it feels.

  “We are going to kill them all,” Redman mutters. It’s hard to tell if he’s happy or sad about that.

  As we stalk through the woods, I wonder if I feel bad about this.

  That thought lasts for about ten seconds, then I think about all the shit the Hell’s Sons have done. The worst being moving in on our town and causing mayhem. Disrupting businesses, fighting in bars, putting civilians in danger, trailing women late at night on their bikes so that folks think it’s us. Beating up a civilian who shouted at one of the bastards wh
o hit on his fourteen-year-old daughter. Bringing hard drugs into town.

  It’s been a fucking mess since they showed up.

  “Nasty business, eh, boss?” Smoker whispers from beside me. He has an uncanny ability to read people. He moves the nicotine gum around his mouth.

  We sneak up on the warehouse. It was abandoned before the Hell’s Sons decided to move in and make it their own. Still, they haven’t felled the trees that have started to lean against it. Some of the windows are smashed where branches have speared into them.

  We all get ready for battle. My heartbeat is steady. It’ll be the same for the other brothers too. Once a man has been in a few gunfights, he realizes that all that fear does is make him more likely to die. Might as well not bother being scared.

  On my signal, it begins.

  The roof sentries drop like bags of sand, with a corresponding burst of blood when the bullets explode their skulls. The forest rings with echoing booms.

  Max shouts “Ooh-rah!” and we light the place up, shredding the walls with the heavy machine guns.

  Pretty soon, they start firing back on us. We pick our shots well, but they’re no civilians either.

  One bullet tears through the woods and clips Redman in the shoulder. He lets out a grunt, spits, and keeps firing.

  Max takes one in the thigh when he’s leaning up to move position.

  But other than that, the raid goes well.

  Soon, the gunfire calms down, then falls silent completely. The sounds of the forest reclaim the air.

  We move down from our positions and go over the warehouse, searching the bodies, shelves, basement. It’s a quick but thorough job.

  When we’ve collected everything we want, we head outside. Time to get rid of this fucking joint.

  Smoker goes around the place, getting it ready for burning.