Niner: Motorcycle Club Romance (Savage Saints MC Book 11)

by Hazel Parker

  “Shh, Carrie,” I said.

  We pulled back and shared a gentle, sweet kiss. It was a comforting kiss—a kiss that let her know that I would protect her forever. It was a kiss that told her that even after she moved to Georgia, I would do whatever I needed to protect her.

  “It’s over,” I said. “You can go back to Georgia in peace now. Damon is dead.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Good, I guess.”

  She rubbed her head.

  “Can you just take me back to your place for now?” she said. “I want to lie down someplace safe. And you seem like the best bet.”

  “You sure?” I said. “We can get you to the airport—”

  “I already missed my flight,” she said with a slight smile, her first since she woke up. “Might as well hang out for a little bit.”

  Might as well, indeed.

  “OK,” I said, kissing her on her forehead. “Come on. Let me take you back.”

  Chapter 22: Carrie

  My first goal when Lane helped me to his place and I sat on the couch was to relax my mind as best as I could.

  Lane was kind enough to get me a glass of red wine, which helped calm me down a little bit, but it didn’t totally relax me. After all, the person who was making my mind run the most wasn’t dead. He was right in front of me.

  “I checked the flights just now,” Lane said as he sat on the other end of the couch, careful to give me space to breathe while also being close enough to hold me. “It looks like you can get on something tomorrow for pretty cheap. And I’m pretty sure if you can explain what happened to the airlines, maybe you can get the ticket rolled up. I know airlines are notorious for not being super friendly, but—”

  “Lane,” I said with a weak but grateful smile. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Oh, I know, I know you’re capable of that, but—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said.

  It was starting to come together. I’d actually had the thought in the time between when Lane had left on Sunday and when everything had happened this morning, but it hadn’t felt legitimate. It had felt like the thought of a desperate woman trying to hold on to a relationship that just needed to fade.

  But the past few hours had told me that maybe they weren’t thoughts of desperation. Maybe they were thoughts of the heart that I had effectively buried and prevented from reaching the surface before.

  “You know, there’s the practical reason that I wanted to go back to Georgia, which was that the restaurant failed and I had no income. I’ll need to take outside investment to get a new restaurant going, but a practical problem can have a practical solution.”

  I decided I didn’t need to ask right now if Lane would help go in on such a restaurant. As it was, I hadn’t even yet decided to stay behind—but I hadn’t decided to go yet, either. What was once a clear-cut decision had developed some much-needed confusion.

  “But any time someone uses a practical problem to make a dramatic life choice, it’s usually done to hide an emotional one as well,” I said. “And I think a large part of me has missed the feeling of being home. Or, perhaps more precisely said, the actual feeling of being home, not being home itself. My partner at Southern Comfort was a party girl that I knew through connections. My employees are all teenagers. Everyone is wonderful, but no one knows what it’s like to grow up in the South and to be a Southern lady. No one, well, except…you.”

  Lane was trying to fight a smile from forming on his face. Maybe he feared if he let himself fall into the smile, he’d let himself get hurt again when I supposedly decided to leave.

  So, to make him feel comfortable, I just smiled back at him. It seemed to do the trick.

  “Like I said, I have some practical problems I have to figure out, chief among them money,” I said. “And that’s not insignificant.”

  “But it can be taken care of,” Lane said with unshakable confidence.

  “Exactly. And I would never expect you to solve my emotional problems; that’s unfair to you. But…”

  I beckoned him over. He did as commanded, and I fell against his shoulder as he put his arm around me.

  “Your actions today made me realize that no one back home is going to care for me like you do,” I said. “If home is where the heart is, then I’m home right now. People say there’s no place they’d rather be than where they are, but in my case, I can say it sincerely. You make me happy, Lane. You get me. I get you. I’m sorry I won’t be able to provide you barbeque anymore, but hopefully I can provide a Southern comfort of a different kind.”

  Finally, I got Lane to really laugh. Like, the kind of laughter that only a couple could have over an inside joke told for the first time in ages. The kind of laughter that told me he had finally let go of the fear that I was going to abandon him and surprise him with a flight home to Georgia.

  Well, at some point, I did want him to come with me to Georgia. I didn’t expect him to retrace the dark steps of his past one by one, but I certainly wanted to get out of the state for a bit.

  But I also knew I wasn’t going to get out for good. Why would I get out of the place that was making me the happiest?

  “So if I’m understanding you right,” Lane said nervously. “You’re not going to move away?”

  I sat up, put my hands on his thigh, and looked him right in the eyes.

  “It wouldn’t be too much to ask if you could help me get a new store open, would it?”

  Lane smiled and put his hand on the back of my head.

  “It’s about damn time that you weren’t too proud to ask for help.”

  I barely had time to muster a smile before he pulled me in, and the two of us were kissing like we had on the night of the best date of my life.

  Yes, it was about damn time that I wasn’t too proud to ask for help. It was about damn time that I had finally found a home for me. It was about damn time that Lane and I didn’t have any more questions, any more stalkers, and any more danger around us.

  We could just explore our relationship, each other, and our futures together.

  As it turned out, it was what I’d wanted all along—I had just used practical excuses to cover up for emotional ones. But no more.

  Our kissing quickly turned erotic as Lane lifted me off the couch and carried me to the bedroom. In the long term, yes, I had what I wanted. But before I could think any further about that, I had some short-term needs that Lane was more than willing to take care of.

  Once we stumbled onto the bed, I helped him get my clothes off. Our movement was not slow, but it was not exactly done at breakneck, clothes-torn speed; it was a more methodical pace, the kind where every sliver of my body was explored, but not at a snail’s pace. When he removed my shirt and bra, he made sure to suckle on my breasts and fondle them, but when he got there, he wasn’t too gentle.

  He removed my jeans and underwear next, and the same thing played out. When he kissed my leg en route to my sex, he moved quickly, but not until drawing an appropriate reaction of excitement.

  “Promise you’re not moving back to Georgia?” he said just before his lips pressed down on me.

  “Oh, you’re evil,” I said, feeling so wet and teased that I almost just pushed his head down. “You know the answer to that. Yes, yes!”

  Lane smirked, kept his eyes locked on me, and started eating me out. His hands pressed down on my hip bones, preventing me from squirming out of place—which just made it that much better.

  I tried to sit up and look into his eyes, but the pleasure was like a crushing tidal wave coming in and obliterating my attempts to control my actions. With Lane’s tongue serving as the driver for said wave, there was no escaping the blitz of pleasure that filled me from head to toe.

  Whether because of the near-death experience, the sheer physical work he was doing, or just how I felt about him, it took seemingly no time for Lane to get me to orgasm. When I did, I screamed his name in pleasure. It was a surprisingly emotional orgasm—I had to turn away from
him for a few moments in the immediate aftermath so I wouldn’t look like a blubbering mess.

  Why wouldn’t I? I had never understood before today why Lane treated me like an angel. I knew I’d helped him as a child with some bullies, but I had never understood just how much that impacted him.

  But today, he had finally returned the favor in a way that I now understood. I could see what I’d done for him and just how much that had changed his life. While childhood changes had a longer-lasting impact, him saving me had already changed me in one unexpected way.

  I wasn’t going to become a Georgia resident, after all.

  “Carrie?”

  I took a deep breath, turned over, and smiled.

  “Come here, love,” I said.

  “Love,” he said, repeating the word as he crawled over to me naked. “I like that.”

  “I love it,” I said as I took his face in my hands. “Just as I love you.”

  Lane smiled and kissed me on the lips. He stayed there for what felt like a full minute. The world around us stopped. What had started as an erotic fulfillment of the day had become one of the most romantic moments of my life.

  And I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  “And I love you too,” he said.

  He inserted himself into me, but it felt wrong to describe what happened in the next ten minutes as fucking or having sex. I felt like, for the first time in my life, I knew what it meant to make love.

  The sex was just a means to making love; this moment went so much deeper than him thrusting or me pulsating around him. It was like we were becoming one entity, one unit that could survive anything. If I had survived the absolute worst that life had thrown me in the span of a week and a half through Lane’s help, we could get through anything.

  True, not every fight would be external. We’d have our own internal struggles, our moments where we fought or where we had doubts in our head. Those moments wouldn’t be perfect.

  But what we had would be perfect in the end. We could transcend those moments with magical ones like these. We were no longer just Lane Bentley and Carrie Griffith; we were something that had no name.

  Of course, as we had sex, I felt great physical pleasure; I came again. I felt him twitch, groan, and start to harden. But these were passing sensations in comparison to the way he was making me feel at the core of my being.

  We collapsed together into the bed, cuddling and being as close as we had been while he was inside of me.

  “Lane,” I said.

  But I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I was so totally immersed in what we had experienced that words failed me.

  Fortunately, they didn’t fail Lane. He knew just what to say.

  “Carrie…I love you. I do. This is love, and this is going to be the only love I have.”

  I still struggled to form words, but my kiss to him and my cuddles told me that I felt the same way.

  There was no reason to go home when I already had it right here.

  Epilogue

  “Is it like you remember it?” Carrie asked.

  I had found myself in Atlanta, Georgia. I somehow had been convinced by Carrie to return to the state that I had sworn never to come back to.

  If that didn’t say that I loved her, then nothing did.

  Really, getting a break from New York City was the ultimate show of how much I loved her. After the rescue, we’d turned about a half-dozen Bloodhounds over to the police. Those Bloodhounds were happy to confess to the plan, but with Damon gone, there was no one who knew of the connection to Kyle Stone.

  But that was fine. That was a fight for another day. That day was coming soon, sure, but it wasn’t something that was necessarily at the front of my mind.

  Instead, what was there was the disbelief that I had followed Carrie down to our home state.

  For vacation, that was.

  Thankfully, Carrie had seen the value of staying in New York City, and we were going to have the best of both worlds. I was going to get to stay in the club, and she was going to get a second chance at opening a store—this time, a steakhouse with better margins.

  “It’s better,” I said as I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “It’s better because I’m spending it with you.”

  “Oh, Lane,” she said with a goofy eye roll. “If your club friends knew that you could be so sappy with me—”

  “Never!” I said with such conviction that Carrie could only laugh at the idea.

  And why shouldn’t she? She’d gotten a second chance at life thanks to a rescue that probably didn’t have much business working out. That wasn’t to say that I was some sort of savior. Rather, it was just an acknowledgment of the truth—life was a lot better when one had tasted death.

  “It’s OK,” she said, slinging her arm around me. “As long as you never change with me, then you can be however you want with the club.”

  “That’s how I intend it to be, my love,” I said, turning toward her. “I’m a sergeant-at-arms with the Saints. And with you, I’m a loving boyfriend.”

  “Aww,” she said as we shared yet another perfect kiss.

  And then, just as things seemed to be settling down, my phone rang. It was Biggie.

  And he was only supposed to call me if things were getting bad.

  “Well, this should be fun,” I said with a sigh as I answered it. “Biggie.”

  “Niner, I know you’re on vacation, and there’s no rush—”

  “Then why did you call?” I said.

  “Because,” Biggie said with a gulp. “Kyle has promised us that he’s going to fight the ‘final’ battle to take us down. It sounds like he’s going to throw everything at us to destroy us. I think we’ve pushed him too far, Niner.”

  For the shortest of moments, I felt a pain in my stomach and a fear of what could happen. If Kyle was serious and was using both legal and illicit means to hurt us, yeah, we were in trouble.

  But it faded when I remembered not everything that we had come from New York City. In fact…

  “If it’s a fight he wants,” I said, “it’s a fight he’ll get.”

  “Niner?”

  “We’ve got our resources,” I said. “I suggest you reach out to Marcel. Have him contact our friends out west. Tell him it’s time to call upon the help we were promised.”

  It’s time to bring all the Savage Saints together.

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  Author Bio

  Hazel Parker is known for her contemporary romance writing and loves her bad boys. From bikers, rugged mountain men, and all sorts of sexy alphas, Hazel will have you turning the pages for more.

  She lives on Vancouver Island with her hubby and three kiddos. Most days you will find her in her office with a hot cup of coffee doing what she loves: Concocting ultra-sexy, juicy romances for her fans.

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