by Zoey Parker
I never asked Luke if he had anything to do with it, and I didn’t care. Any pity I had for Art Dayton died the day he barged into my home with threats of rape and death.
Russ is the reason I’m alive, even if his man, Keith Raymond, teamed up with Art to torment me. I owe Russ and his new sidekick, Ian, sales representative at Hanley Auto, for my life. Ian had been keeping surveillance on Luke inside the shop, and, now I’m Luke’s woman, I have eyes watching over me as well.
I quit work in the last month of my pregnancy, and I’m glad I did. Noah is a handful and being a first-time mother is a learning curve that requires my full attention. Luke is more than happy to have me at home with Noah.
Our life together is wonderful, a fairy tale come true.
Sure, I wouldn’t care if Luke never proposed and we continued living happily as we do now, and have been for nearly a year, but I’d be kidding myself.
I want Luke to propose.
I want him to make this really official.
I’d love to be Mrs. Luke Hanley.
So why do I get the feeling he doesn’t want me to be his wife?
Epilogue II
Luke
I can see Lily overthinking us.
Leaving Noah with his grandfather and step-grandmother, I grab Lily and drag her from the festivities.
I need to speak to her privately. I need to figure out how much damage she’s imagining of us up in that pretty head of hers.
She gasps a little when I press her around the staircase, out of the immediate sight of passersby. My body traps hers to the brick wall behind her, caging her in. I can’t control my mouth from seeking hers, lovingly sucking her bottom lip.
A quickie is not what I have planned, but we haven’t had sex in two months. I’ve been patient, and I’ll be patient if Lily stops me right here and now and isn’t ready for this. Lifting my head away, I study her.
When I rub my raging hard-on against her belly, she instinctively wraps her arms around my neck, arching off the brick wall to join us closer, harder.
“I missed you,” I whisper, and I don’t mean just her body. I see a spark of light in her eyes I haven’t seen with the anxiety of motherhood falling over her. I know what she’s like around Noah; it’s a wonder I managed to pull her away from our little boy.
“Luke, ahh,” she pants when I get some friction going.
So it’s going to be a dry hump
I figure penetration can wait a couple more weeks. She rubs herself on me, and I imagine her clit working away in her underwear. That sore little pink button begging for my fingers, her snatch hugging air—it’s too much, I have to get in there.
“Luke!” Lily’s cry prompts me to crash my mouth over hers. I won’t let anyone rip me from her now. I need this, she needs this, and I damn well am going to give it to us.
I lift the flowing skirt of her lavender bridesmaid’s dress up, crushing the material between our chests, and my fingers find their purchase as they crawl over her soft belly, no longer taut with Noah, to the top elastic of her panties. I drag my hands lower, shifting the underwear aside to assail her clit and cunt.
In and out, I pump fast with two fingers, my thumb flicking her hard button.
Lily’s mouth is hot and wet, and her moans are soft and smothered by my relentless lips and tongue.
When she short wires from her orgasm, I have to hold her back to the wall. Lily jerks with her pulses, her snatch slurping my fingers up. I keep fingering her until she’s spent, listless and happy, in my arms.
“Oh, Luke,” she whispers against my mouth, her lips puffy from my punishing kisses.
Making her appropriate, I smooth her skirt and peck her mouth, a grin pulling my own. Very slowly I raise my fingers coated with her juices to my mouth. I drag her scent under my nose and then suck my digits dry. Popping them out, I kiss her again, let her have a taste of herself.
I’m still hard, but I’m prepared to let her take us home and then once Noah’s asleep, she can allow me to stroke myself to the sight of her naked glory spread out on our sheets.
What I don’t expect is Lily’s eagerness to return the favor so soon.
“Sweetheart,” I start, ready to tell her I’ve got it handled, but she makes quick work of my zipper and draws my steely erection out to the open.
In her crouch in front of me, Lily licks the tip of my cock, sucks my raging red glans in and releases me with a pop before her tongue drags over my slit and she takes me in deep. She slurps me in, her mouth a vacuum, her hands goading my taut balls.
It’s not long before I bathe her mouth with my seed, and Lily swallows, sucking me dry, squeezing my balls until she’s sure I’m satisfied for now. Releasing my half-hard cock from her mouth, she stands and wipes the back of her hand over her glistening lips.
She’s come a long way from the girl who sputtered out my semen after we learned she was pregnant ten months back.
We kiss again, and now that we can both think straight, I jump into the reason I lured her out her. But I go down on one knee to do it.
Realization slowly flowers on Lily’s face. She clamps both hands over her mouth, watching as I draw a ring box from my pocket. The princess-cut pink diamond with its white gold band is raised for her taking, but she waits until I pluck it out and I hold her hand, angling the ring onto its new, pale and slim throne.
“Will you marry me, Lily Erickson? Let me be the father to all your children and the husband of your dreams?”
I have no speech, so I hope my heart will do.
“Yes,” Lily gasps, her response, her attention jumping from her new, very special jewelry to me.
As I stand, she throws herself into my arms and I have to grab her quickly before she takes us to the floor. Not a bad place to be with Lily, but I want to be upright for this moment.
Neither of us can concentrate for the rest of the evening at the reception. Lily and I decide to keep it under wraps for Kerry and Russ. It’s their big day.
Lily says we need a year to prepare, but I could marry her tomorrow. She’s not just an alibi and hasn’t been for a long time now. She’s real and she’s mine.
THE END
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[Bonus #2] STOLEN: Hell’s Overlords MC
He's a ruthless biker with a kingdom to run. She's a talented thief with a nose for trouble.
Things are about to get messy.
Sasha
I knew going in that this would be dangerous. But what choice did I have?
None, that's how much. You don't say "No" to a man like Fang, the mob boss I work for. Not if you want to live to tell the tale.
So I swallowed my fear and I took the mission: stealing drugs from the Hell's Overlords MC.
The first time was smooth. In and out like a flash.
The second time was just as easy.
But the third time…that's when everything went wrong.
Now, I'm trapped in a basement, staring into the stormy eyes of a man who doesn't like being robbed.
Everything I feared is present in those eyes. There's anger, and strength, and brutality.
But there's something else, too.
Something I didn't expect, and it's scaring me more than anything else.
He's hungry.
Hungry for me.
HER BODY ISN'T THE ONLY THING I'M TAKING AS MY OWN.
Cole
The first time I lay eyes on her, it feels like I got struck by lightning.
You've probably heard that before, but trust me – this is different.
This isn't the "struck by lightning" you see in friendly little rom-coms with happy endings.
It doesn't come with warm fuzzies.
It's not cute.
No, the kind of lightning I'm talking about makes me want to do things, things that you might not always like.
It makes me want to bite her lip like a feral dog, to squeeze her hips in my hands and rid her of every scrap of clothing.
The lightning surging through my veins makes me harder than carved marble.
There's only one release: to own her, again and again, until the thirst is quenched.
I don't know how long that will take.
But I'm willing to find out.
Prologue
Sasha
At 3 a.m. the city streets were finally mostly quiet. I stood in the alleyway between the two supposedly vacant warehouse buildings underneath a light that hadn’t worked in decades. I listened to the sound of the occasional car or truck passing by. This was the lull between night and morning, when the people going home were settling in and the people going to work were just getting up.
This was also when the guard stepped away from the door to the room where the stash was kept. It was my chance to climb in through one of the broken windows of the old building and grab my prize. I proceeded carefully, without a sound. I was just another shadow in the darkness.
I was taking from the Hell’s Overlords MC, and I was shocked at the lack of security around their drugs. They kept separate stashes in several old buildings throughout the city, usually behind unlocked doors with one or two guards on duty at all times. The problem with live guards, though, was that they took piss breaks and naps. It wasn’t a problem for me, but I was pretty sure Cole Masterson, the president of the MC, wasn’t too thrilled about how much heroin I’d lifted over the last six months from his essentially unguarded stashes.
There wasn’t much light inside the building. Despite the stories that the Overlords had paid off law enforcement to turn the other cheek, they still maintained almost complete darkness and secrecy around their safe havens. That tactic, however, only drew more attention from those of us sharing the streets with them. I saw the interior clearly in the yellow-orange light spilling in from the streetlamps outside. I took a back stairwell to the third floor, where the drugs were held in a small room, probably once an office.
The heroin sat in densely packed bags taped closed on top of an old metal desk. My pulse quickened at this point in the job, when I was confronted with the stash and had to force myself to take much less than I could have carried. I could have stuffed several bags in my black cargo pants and backpack, but if that big of an amount were missing, it would have been readily noticeable. Instead, I only grabbed two bags, taking them in my gloved hands and stuffing them in my pack before anyone had a chance to notice I was even there. My take wouldn’t be missed until it was time to deliver. Only then would Cole realize he was short, usually leading to the guard taking the fall for the missing drugs.
I faded back into the night and made my way to Fang’s office.
“You asked me to bring it to you directly this time. Is everything okay?” I unzipped my bag and placed the two bags of white powder on the desk in front of him before sitting down.
“Everything’s fine,” he answered in his composed voice. He patted the bags and nodded to the larger gentleman standing by the door to his office.
His bodyguard walked over and picked the bags up off of the desk.
“Go ahead and deliver those,” Fang told him, waving him off with perfectly manicured fingers.
After the big guy left the room, Fang turned to face me in his desk chair. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the desk. He laced his fingers together. I stared into his dark eyes. His black hair was slicked back. His tanned, chiseled face stared intently. His jaw muscles worked as he clenched his mouth shut. I looked at the black suit he wore over a deep red shirt with a black tie. A necklace hung from his neck with a long tooth, a fang, dangling from it.
“Sasha,” he said, and paused to look me over.
“Yes, sir?” I was used to his eyes taking in the sight of me. I wasn’t used to being called to deliver drugs directly to his office. In the five years I’d been working for him, he’d only asked me to deliver anything directly to him the first few times, to make sure I could handle the job ahead of me.
“You came straight here from the warehouse,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “Were you followed?”
“No. No one even saw me. You know that,” I told him.
“I guess I do. I just get paranoid sometimes. You are stealing from the most notorious MC in the city. I’d hate to think what they’d do if they caught you,” he explained.
“Well, they won’t catch me,” I argued defiantly.
“I know,” Fang admitted, taking a sharp breath between his teeth. “That’s why I’m giving you this next job.”
“But we’ve barely put a dent in the Overlords’ supply,” I argued. “What gives?” It wasn’t like Fang to pull me off a job before it was completed. Usually, anyone pulled from work for him wound up in a dumpster or in the river somewhere.
“What gives is we’re about to put a huge dent in their supply. I’ve got intel that they have a massive stash sitting in the basement underneath their HQ. Of course, this stash is heavily guarded, unlike what you’ve told me about the smaller stashes hidden throughout the city,” he explained.
“Wait, you expect me to break into the headquarters of the most notorious MC in the city and sneak down past their state-of-the-art security system to get to their basement and raid their supply? Then, I’m supposed to get out without getting caught, or worse?” I asked for clarification.
Fang nodded with a sly grin on his face.
“Are you crazy?”
“Maybe, but I’m also very confident in your abilities,” he told me.
“Another thing, why do they have all these stashes in satellite locations if they have their main stash at HQ? Why don’t they have it all at HQ?” Something didn’t sound right here.
“The story is they’ve started consolidating since the thefts. Apparently, you’re cutting into their profits and their business. They’ve got to pull it all in to make sure it’s safe,” he explained.
“I don’t know, Fang. It smells fishy to me. If they are moving their drugs into safer places, it seems to me that HQ would be the last place they’d want to put it. That would just lead rivals like us to their location. It would be suicide for everyone,” I argued.
“I mean, if you don’t think you can do it…” he said with a shrug.
“I didn’t say that.” I chuckled. He was just bluffing anyway. I knew he was as likely to hand that job over to someone else as he knew I was to turn it down.
“I agree with you, though,” he said out of the blue. “It seems unlikely that Cole would actually pull his drugs in like that. I could see him shuffling things around into other safe havens, different locations, in an attempt to throw us off track. I don’t see him drawing attention to HQ like that.”
“Unless it’s a trap,” I suggested.
“Yeah, I guess, but the intel comes from reliable sources, which is why I’m inclined to trust it. First, I want you to get in there, find the heroin, and bring back a sample so that we can verify that it’s there before we send folks in. If he’s going to make a bold move like this, I want all of his drugs. Let’s go ahead and take him down instead of fucking with him the way we have been for the last few months.”
I was shocked by the bold change in approach.
“I like the sound of that,” I told him. It meant I didn’t have to deal with Hell’s Overlords anymore.
“I thought you would.” His eyes sparkled while he spoke.
“Is that all?” I asked with a yawn.
“Yeah, that’s it. Good job tonight, Sasha.”
“Thanks.” I started to get up from the chair, but he stopped me.
“In fact, I’m really proud of how far you’ve come,” he said. “I’m impressed with the work you’ve done against the Overlords. The
ir president has a pretty nasty reputation, and a lot of people wouldn’t want to go up against them.”
“I’m not going up against them. I’m sneaking behind their backs,” I said with a grin. “Goodnight, Fang.” I walked through the door to his office and started making my way back to my apartment.
On the way home, as the color of the sky began to lighten, ahead of the sun, I thought about what Fang had said about how far I’d come. He’d found me on the street, barely more than a kid.
I was at the city market, a set of farmer’s market style stands set up just on the outskirts of downtown. It operated daily, with vendors selling fresh fruits and vegetables as well as countless handmade crafts. It had its own crowd, mostly throwbacks to the ’60s and ’70s, young adults born decades late. It was a great place for street kids to buy or work for their own food.