Suddenly, he grinned.
It transformed his face from angled and hewn and gorgeous, to playful and almost boyish.
And gorgeous.
His grin disappeared.
“Well, Reb was a tough nut. And she wasn’t a big fan of having a body dumped behind her bar. She’d never been a big fan of Chew’s. You know Chew?”
It seemed I didn’t know anything.
And he knew it.
Which blew.
But whatever. I couldn’t hide something he already knew so I didn’t try.
“Chew?” I asked.
“Chew. Biker name for Arthur Lannigan because the man has a thing for tarantulas.”
Tarantulas?
Oh God.
“Now Reb, she never liked Chew. There were tarantulas in that body bag with Natalie. Reb got it in her head that Chew tossed that body behind her bar, rather than Valenzuela doing it that way to frame Chew, and Reb ran her mouth to the police. Coupla months ago, takin’ out her trash, on her back walk in her own backyard, she lost that mouth when she took a bullet to the face. Now that,” he leaned into me again, “that was all Chew.”
I stared at him, feeling my heart accelerating.
I knew nothing about any of this.
“Women are dying, Rebel,” he stated. “Now I’ll be even clearer about what I’m tryin’ to get you to understand. There’s another club messed up in this shit, and a woman was informing to us on what was happening with them. She was ours. She had our protection. And we fell down on that job and she was left on a cement floor, beat to shit by an entire club of bikers, having to be hospitalized, broken bones, left with scars. Another woman, another one of our own, was kidnapped. She wasn’t hurt but she witnessed Valenzuela order the murder of two of his own men, she also witnessed their deaths. She’s okay now, but only after a lot of lookin’ after and some serious counseling. Do you see a pattern here?”
Oh, I saw a pattern.
I didn’t confirm that.
I continued staring at him.
“That’s all pussy, baby,” he said quietly. “Not one dick in that mix. Now you can take all of that as a warning to our Club, which is how we’ve taken it, and I can promise you, we’ve also taken steps to look after our women. You can also take it as what it definitely is. There are those who are expendable. And pardon me bein’ coarse about this, I’m doin’ it to make a point, but the expendables got snatch.”
“Are we done?” I asked.
It was his turn to stare at me.
Then he glowered at me.
Finally, he sat back and sighed.
“We’re done,” I announced and stood up.
I’d taken one step to the side of his chair when he spoke.
“You can’t bring her back.”
I looked down at him.
He was gazing up at me.
“Honey, you can’t bring her back,” he whispered.
I stood still, looking deep in his crystal-blue eyes.
They were concerned too.
It was sweet.
I didn’t have time for sweet.
Or hot.
Or my nipples tightening, my clit tingling or men who could soothe hurts by cooing in beautiful voices and looking at me with sweet in their eyes.
“My goal is not to bring her back,” I educated him.
“It says a lot about you. You got grit. That’s commendable. And it’ll be commendable, until you end up dead,” he went on.
Now that pissed me off.
“Don’t patronize me.”
It took some effort, but I stood still as he straightened from his chair, getting on his motorcycle-booted feet, now very much in my space.
He tipped his chin down to keep a lock on my eyes.
“That’s not patronizing.” His voice was deteriorating, sharing he was losing patience. “That’s askin’ you to be smart, which infers I think you’re bein’ dumb. And Rebel, I’ll not infer dick with that. I’ll say it straight. You’re not bein’ dumb. You’re bein’ really, fuckin’ stupid. So like I said, that’s not patronizing.”
All right.
Great.
So he was sensitive, insightful, honest and hella smart.
But even if he thought I was stupid, I knew better.
“Are you and your brothers doing something about this?”
“Yeah, Rebel, and that’s a promise.”
I nodded tersely, once.
“And you’re all . . . what? Former law enforcement? Veterans? Trained commandos?” I asked.
His mouth grew tight.
“That’s what I thought,” I snapped, rolled slightly up on my toes and bit, “Patronizing.”
“You know about those women bein’ dead?” he asked.
“You know I didn’t.”
“So you don’t know what you’re dealin’ with. We do. We got history. We got time on the streets. Not havin’ either of those, you can’t know what they mean, but trust me, they mean a lot more than some videographer getting her panties in a bunch and goin’ undercover in the dealings of one of the most disturbed criminals Denver has ever seen.”
I ignored the “panties in a bunch” comment, as well as the “videographer” comment since I was a goddamned filmmaker, both so I could prevent my head from exploding, and instead suggested, “Then help me out, take my back, and we’ll work together to get this done.”
More growling. “That is not gonna happen.”
“Why? Because I have snatch?”
“Well . . . yeah.”
“Sexist,” I spat.
“Realist,” he shot back.
I looked around, feigning like I’d forgotten the train of conversation. “Didn’t I say we were done?”
“Rebel—” he rumbled.
I looked back at Rush Allen.
“Toodles,” I said chirpily.
And with that, not looking at a single member of his silent posse, I bounced out of Jason’s Lodge, booked as fast as I could without running to my Subaru, got in, fired her up and got the hell out of there.
I got lost on my way home.
And I did not meditate when I eventually got there.
Instead, I slammed tequila and fought the urge to call Diesel and Maddox and spill all before I asked them to come up to Denver and take my back.
But they would, in a shot.
Which would put them in danger, which was not okay.
They’d also try to talk me out of doing what I was doing, and they wouldn’t go as gentle (huh) as Rush Allen did.
They might even kidnap me and imprison me in their guestroom, which would mean I’d have to listen to their sexcapades since all three of them (Molly included) were utterly incapable of not going at each other on a more than healthy basis, and I’d already accidentally heard some of that and I barely survived it.
So it was going it alone.
I had Hank (even though he was pissed at me) and Eddie (even though he was livid with me) and Jimmy (even though he wanted to shake some sense into me).
And as an aside, I was now pissed at all of them.
Why hadn’t they told me about Natalie and Camilla and the woman called Reb?
Dammit.
But whatever.
I’d be okay.
I would.
And Diane and Paul and Amy would get what they deserved.
Justice.
The Boy Who Was No Good
Beck
Two months earlier . . .
Beck sat with his “brothers” at their club meeting.
“So it’s official. They’ve yanked our charter. And fuck them,” Web grunted, tossing a letter on the big folding table, which was one of three bunched together that made their club table.
Folding tables.
Total shit.
Okay.
Right.
The mother charter had spoken.
His motorcycle club was no longer Bounty.
They were nothing.
They’d pretty much alway
s been nothing but a bunch of guys who liked to ride and pretend they were badasses.
They could do the first.
They sucked at the last.
“We have to come up with a new club name. And new by-laws. And shit,” Web went on.
The asshole had no idea what he was doing.
Beck studied him and wondered, not for the first time, how he’d let himself get played by these losers.
He liked to ride.
He’d lost his brother in Afghanistan.
He’d loved his brother.
His mother had lost her shit when her favorite boy got dead in the sand and she took that out on Beck.
So he’d done what he’d been doing since he was about two.
Fulfilled her prophecy of That Boy Is No Good, linked his shit to a wannabe one-percenter MC and completely ignored his gut when it fucking screamed at him to cut loose and get free.
Of that fucking club.
Of the grief his brother died way too fucking young, way too far away from people who loved him.
And from his mother.
In his stint with this band of assholes, Beck had learned he understood lemmings.
When everyone around you was going in one direction, running flat-out for that fucker, even if it meant you were going in a dangerous direction, if you didn’t run with them, you got trampled.
He’d run with them.
He still got trampled.
And that was on him.
All on him.
“Throttle, you got any ideas on a name?” Eightball asked him.
Throttle.
His biker name.
He fucking hated that name.
He came into the room and saw all the men’s attention on him.
He’d earned their respect. He was like some elder statesman or something, even if he was one of the younger ones.
And that made the acid in his stomach churn because he’d done this by getting arrested.
Big man.
Badass.
Getting arrested.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He’d also done this by handing Rosalie over to them. His old lady. The woman who’d shared his bed. The beautiful, sweet woman whose love he earned, and he’d pissed it away when he didn’t listen to her concerns about where his club was going, what it was doing to him, to them—him and Rosalie—and then she’d set about doing something about it.
The man in him and the biker in him could not come to terms with the way she’d betrayed him. How she’d used him and informed on his club to another one.
It was not okay.
He understood he’d given her no choice. He hadn’t listened. He hadn’t let her in.
She knew their world though.
So it still was not okay.
Even with that truth, it did not make the bent of his retaliation okay.
He should have told her about his mom. His brother. The shit that fucked with his head.
She would have listened.
She would have been great with all that.
She would have gone all out to help him heal, find the right way to aim his life, and she would have been with him on that ride.
He didn’t give her the shot.
And he hadn’t listened.
Instead, The Boy Who Was No Good handed her over to his club, but he’d been the first to land his blows.
It was no defense, it was stung pride, which was no defense at all, but he’d thought she was in love with another man.
He’d found he was right about that, just wrong about which man.
He’d also found it was him who drove her to that man.
But bottom line, the shit he pulled, the pain he’d landed on her was not right.
Christ, he hadn’t slept in months.
Christ, he could not get the taste of her fear when he’d taken her to them out of his mouth, the sight of his brothers going at her, the feel of his hand wrapped around her neck, the look on her face when she saw the monster in him.
If he kept being a pussy, he could blame that monster on his mother.
If he kept being an asshole, he could blame that monster on his club.
If he kept being a dickhead, he could blame his grief and the knowledge he felt down to his soul that it should have been him who died young, who was wiped from this earth and it wouldn’t be a loss, and not his brother, who was a loss, for bringing out that monster.
But it was him who let that monster free.
So that was all on him.
“Throttle?” Web called.
Wind, Ride, Fire, Free.
Chaos’s motto.
“We gotta have some kind of mission,” he grunted. “We set what we’re about, a name’ll fall outta that.”
“He’s right,” Rainman said.
“Do we need a kinda . . . committee to come up with a mission statement?” Griller asked.
He’d said mission.
Not mission statement.
They weren’t a bank, for fuck’s sake.
Jesus, these guys were lame.
“Throttle, me, Spartan, Eightball, Muzzle on that committee,” Web declared. “Everyone’s got ’til Friday to hand in their ideas.”
Hand in their ideas.
Like it was homework.
Totally lame.
Fuck, if they didn’t know what they were about already, no committee was gonna lay that out for them.
And they didn’t know what they were about.
They had no clue.
With these assholes, this was gonna take a year. They’d bicker about it, end up with some loser name they thought was badass and some statement they thought kicked ass, but didn’t. It’d say nothing, mean less, and they’d all be just as lost as they were when they found the club.
Wind, Ride, Fire, Free.
What did that say?
Everything.
We like to ride.
We like to raise hell.
We are who we are and no one can say dick about it.
We do what we do and no one can stop us.
We stand strong, together, and let no one fuck with us.
Four words.
Back those words up with action, and they said everything.
“We done?” Beck asked.
“Got something to do?” Muzzle asked back.
“Someone,” Pacino snickered.
Beck cut Pacino a look.
Pacino looked away.
Little weasel hadn’t been laid probably in years. Even a shitfaced biker groupie steered clear of that pencil dick.
’Cause the man had a pencil dick and that was known wide (not to mention, he actually looked like a weasel).
He probably laid in bed jacking off to what he made up about Beck getting himself some.
That acid churned deeper in his stomach.
“We’re done, Throttle,” Web said. “Meet on Saturday to discuss the statement?”
Discuss the statement.
He’d wear a suit.
Fuck.
“Yeah,” he grunted.
Web planted his stupid fucking gavel in the table and announced, “Adjourned.”
Beck pushed back, and he was about to get up before his eyes fell on Digger.
Digger was staring at the table like a naked picture of a woman was etched in it.
An ugly one.
Seeing that guy, the way he was and had been for months, Beck’s gut screamed at him.
Something was not right with the man, and it wasn’t about them getting busted doing that transport for Valenzuela. Or getting busted for landing that beatdown on Rosalie. Or half their guys serving time or making deals or court-ordered not to associate with members of Bounty, or whoever the fuck they were.
The guy was a skeeve.
Live and let live. Trying to find his way clear of the expectations of his mother (or her lack of them), that was what Beck had been looking for when he’d searched for what he needed and ended up screwing that pooch and finding Bounty. So
that guy, deep into his fifties, drooling over any biker bunny who looked underage, Beck should just let it go.
But underage was underage, man.
You were fifty-five or twenty-five, you waited until that pussy hit majority.
Then you hit it.
Digger had always given him a shiver.
Rosalie had avoided him.
Beck had learned that Rosalie listened to her heart and her head and her gut.
He had no right to take anything from her, not anymore.
But that lesson he was gonna learn.
And Beck had shit he needed to do with these guys. He wouldn’t be anywhere near the fuckers if he didn’t.
Amends needed to be made.
What he’d done, he’d never scrape off The Boy Who Was No Good.
Rosalie didn’t hate him. He made it so he meant so little to her, she’d just moved on from him and didn’t look back.
But if his brother had lived to know what he’d done, he’d never speak to Beck again.
He had to find a way to be able to look at himself in the mirror, and that was not about coming to terms with the scar brother Hound of the Chaos MC had carved into his face after he’d been the man behind laying Rosalie low.
It was about finding a way to live with himself.
Or at least sleep.
He didn’t have time for whatever fucked-up shit that had a perv like Digger acting even weirder.
But his gut was talking.
And he’d learned what it meant when he didn’t listen.
But mostly, he’d learned that even if everyone around him was running one way, if he stopped, fought against the tide and got trampled, that was all right.
Because it would be his choice.
His.
So Beck was going to listen to his gut.
It’d make a nice change.
Beck sat with his back against the headboard, his knees cocked, legs spread, and watched her go down on him.
She wasn’t real good with her mouth.
But she wanted to be, gave it her all, and her mouth had to get tired with all the effort, but she didn’t give up.
All her blonde hair all over his crotch and her pretty face with her eyes closed in concentration, her mouth full of his dick helped.
She eventually got him there and he slid his hand along her cheek and cupped her jaw to share where he was at.
She didn’t like to swallow.
So she slipped him out, jacked him to finish with a tight fist (she was better at that) and he came all over his stomach.
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