Sinner's Steel

by Sarah Castille

  Evie spread her knees wider, inviting. This was how it should be. In the forest, the way they had first come together. But rough instead of gentle; hard instead of sweet. They weren’t the same people anymore, no longer innocent in any sense of the word. She wanted Zane the way he truly was; she wanted the side he had kept in the shadows, the way he was now. All man. All biker. All beast.

  “Ah, sweetheart,” his breath whispered over her skin, sent a shiver down her spine. “You do that, and I can’t get you ready for me.”

  “I am ready for you.” If she were any wetter she’d be dripping on the grass. “Touch me.”

  He palmed her cleft, sliding his fingers through her folds. With a groan, he pushed one finger inside and her body clenched around him.

  “So hot. So wet.”

  She heard the rattle of the chain on his belt, the soft slide of leather and the harsh rasp of a zipper. Unable to hold back, she looked over her shoulder and watched as he released his shaft, huge and heavy, the tip gleaming wet in the moonlight. She wanted to take him in her mouth, as far he could go, wrap her hand around his straining length, and suck him until he lost control.

  “Evie…” His warning growl sent a bolt of lust straight to her clit. God, she wanted to tease him, torment him, make him punish her again like he had with that slap. Her pussy clenched and she wiggled her ass. How could she make him slap her again?

  “You wanna be spanked, sweetheart?” He dug a condom from his pocket, tore it open, and sheathed himself. “You want me to punish you for running away?” He smacked her cheek so hard she caught her breath. The burn spread across her skin turning into pure, delicious sensation by the time it reached her clit, and she bit back a low groan.

  “Yes, she does,” he murmured to himself. “She’s a fucking naughty girl, but that’s all she’s gonna get.” He thrust a thick thigh between her legs, opening her for him. Evie ground her sex against the delicious friction of his denim.

  In her entire life she’d never felt as wanton as she did now, uninhibited, free. After Mark, she’d resigned herself to casual relationships, keeping her encounters brief and focused on only one thing. No risk of relying on a man to look after her. No risk of staying too long when she needed to walk away. But it was different with Zane. She’d been down that road with him before, knew where it led. There was a comfort in inevitability, and if she had doubts along the way, if occasionally he broke through the walls around her heart, she could shore them up with the memories of the nights she’d sat up waiting for him to come back, and the sunrises that crushed her hopes for yet another day.

  “Gonna fuck you, sweet Evie.” His voice dropped to a husky rasp. “Gonna bury myself so deep you’re gonna feel empty every time I pull away. I wanna hear you scream. I want you to come for me.”

  “Lotta talking,” she said, her voice thick with desire. “Not a lot of doing.”

  His hands tightened on her ass and he entered her with one hard powerful thrust. She could feel his body shaking all around her. He was trying to hold back, and although she didn’t know if she could take any more, with his huge, hot cock throbbing inside her, she pushed back against him, taking him deeper.

  “You feel so good,” she whispered. “So hard. So thick.”

  “Evie.” He groaned and hammered into her. Evie’s hands dug into the soft grass as she tried to keep up with the frantic rhythm of his thrusts. This was nothing like the first time, when they’d been shy and uncertain, their hands shaking, bodies trembling. This was wild, free, born of unrequited passion and burning need. Their bodies slammed together, the sound of flesh slapping against flesh as erotic as soft music and candlelight. Zane unleashed. Just as she’d wanted him. And he was everything she’d expected, and more.

  Her orgasm built quickly, heating her body, coiling her muscles inside and out. Zane slipped one hand between them and brushed his thumb up and around her clit. Once. Twice. And then he pinched, sending her spiraling out of control.

  He stretched over her back, twining the fingers of one hand with hers in the grass, his teeth piercing the sensitive skin of her nape, setting off another ripple of shock waves that sparked along every nerve of her body. Zane pounded into her and then stiffened and groaned, his shaft throbbing as he pumped deep inside her. With a last shudder, he collapsed over her sweat-slick back, pressing soft kisses to her shoulder until they both came down from the ride.

  When Evie shivered, Zane drew her up, leaning back on his knees, one arm wrapped around her waist. They breathed together, their hearts pounding in unison. Finally, he pressed a soft kiss to the stinging bite on her neck and gently lowered her to the grass.

  * * *

  “Lie with me.” He didn’t wait for her response. Instead, he straightened his clothing and lay on the grass, beckoning to her with his outstretched arm. Evie pulled down her dress and joined him, curled into his warmth, her head on his shoulder, looking up at the stars, brilliant in the dark sky.

  “We never did our stargazing anywhere normal,” she said quietly. “Rooftops, treetops, forests, the roof of your car … Except then we talked about deep things like extra-terrestrial beings, and war, and music, and how chemistry teachers always manage to accidentally blow things up.”

  Zane chuckled. “That was a useful lesson. We needed a quick explosive one night and I told the brothers how Mr. Cooper cut into that stick of phosphorus and blew up the class. We broke into a school and stole some. Flattened one of the Jacks’ money laundering facilities, a pool hall just outside Devil’s Hills.”

  “I guess you didn’t run in with a fire extinguisher and save the day like you did in school.” She leaned up and pressed a kiss to the pulse at the base of his throat.

  He curled his arm around her, tucking her into his body. “I threw more phosphorus onto the fire. Watched the building burn to the ground. Thought about you sitting at the campfire on the beach on your graduation night, how beautiful you looked in the firelight, how much I wanted you.”

  “All you had to do was cross the fire pit.”

  Zane felt yet another stab of regret. So many opportunities wasted. How different would things have been if he’d crossed the fire pit that night, or the playground the day he’d seen her with Mark and Ty? “I didn’t want to get burned.”

  He felt her chest rise and fall with laughter. “What about all the nights we lay together under the stars and talked about the future? You wanted to be a firefighter after you put out that fire in the chemistry classroom. I was going to go to college and get my Fine Arts degree. We were going to come back to Stanton so we could see each other every day and meet up for stargazing at night.”

  A wave of nostalgia hit him hard, and with it the ache of longing he’d felt every time he was with her. “I got a confession to make. I was never looking at the stars. I was looking at you looking at the stars, wishing I could be inside you. Not easy being a teenager and having the woman of your dreams lying beside you, all sexy and sweet, and not being able to touch her.”

  “I was the woman of your dreams?” She tilted her head back, rubbing her cheek over the soft bristles on his jaw.

  “Every one.” He’d dreamed about her even after he left, saw her on street corners, heard her voice in restaurants and bars. For years, he couldn’t be with a woman without thinking about her, wondering if another man was touching her the way he touched the strangers he took to his bed, keeping her safe and happy, loving her.

  “It must have been hard…” Her voice hitched in sympathy. “When you came back and saw me with Mark and Ty.”

  Zane’s body stiffened. That kind of pain wasn’t meant to be dredged up, relived, wielded to torture him again. “It fucking killed me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You had Ty to think about.” Forgiving, but not forgetting. He would have waited for her forever. In some ways, he was still waiting now.

  A heavy silence thickened the air and it took him a moment to realize she was waiting for him to say something else, to ap
ologize. But the words wouldn’t come. If he hadn’t left, he would be in jail, locked away, forgotten. He wouldn’t have trained as a firefighter, or saved Jagger’s life; he wouldn’t have joined the Sinners and found brothers who accepted him despite his darkness. And although he was sorry he had hurt her, staying would have hurt her more because he would have been forced to tell the truth he had hidden from her all these years; he would’ve shattered the illusion she had of her father as a good, kind, loving, honorable man.

  “I thought you weren’t coming back,” she said. “After three years of waiting, alone with Ty, I gave up hope.”

  He knew the moment she gave up waiting now—gave up hope—from the way her body tightened, unmolding itself from him, separating, until a chasm formed between them all the deeper because it couldn’t be seen.

  “I guess we’d better go.” She sat up as he knew she would, pushed herself to her feet. With her hair tangled, her dress rumpled and her feet bare, she looked like a forest creature, ethereally beautiful, wild.

  Free.

  Free to leave him. Free to walk away.

  She took a step back when he stood, retreating. “I think you were right. There’s too much between us. Too much hurt. Too much pain. Even when we’re close I feel I can’t touch you, like you’re holding back, and I can’t stop thinking that means you’re going to leave. I don’t think sex is enough to build a bridge high enough to get over that pain or long enough to cover the distance between who we were and who we are.”

  “I told you I wouldn’t turn my back on my responsibilities.”

  She regarded him with a measure of resignation. “Yes, you did mention your responsibilities.”

  Zane let out a growl of frustration. What more did she want? He’d told her twice now that he wouldn’t shirk his responsibility as a father. He would make sure they were safe and provided for, and tonight he’d shared with her more than he’d shared with anyone in his life. He’d let her see into his soul.

  Evie turned and picked her way across the grass, her bare feet pale in the moonlight. No longer flying, laughing, as she had when he chased her, she weighed each step, as if she was afraid of getting hurt. For some reason her caution annoyed him more than her speech. Didn’t she understand she had nothing to fear when he was with her?

  Maybe it was because he wasn’t good with words. He had never been an eloquent man.

  Zane closed the distance between them in three easy strides. Without speaking, he lifted her in his arms, cradling against her body. Then he carried her back to the party under the twinkling stars.

  * * *

  Since guns and swearing had been banned, Zane wasn’t sure what to talk about with Ty. He’d never hung out with a kid. He stayed away from the Sinner parties where kids were invited, never dated a woman with children, and didn’t frequent locations where kids might be found. So when Evie left him alone with Ty in the safe house kitchen the morning after the party, he found himself disconcertingly unprepared.

  “Where’s mom?” Ty stared at Zane from across the white plastic table. Who the hell had done the decorating? The safe house looked like something out of a catalogue, all white and shiny with blue accents. Cold. Austere. Certainly not welcoming. Not that he usually cared about such things, but he wanted Evie and Ty to be comfortable.

  “In the shower.” He pushed the eggs and bacon Evie had cooked around his plate. Whether it was the alcohol or the fact he had to sleep alone on the couch with his guilt and frustration, he’d had the worst night of his life. Why the heck had he taken her so roughly in the forest, let her see that side of him? This was Evie, soft and sweet, not one of the women who came to his apartment wanting exactly what he needed to dish out to soothe the darkness in his soul. No wonder she’d tried to push him away. Or maybe it was like Dax said. She could sense he wasn’t fully committed, that he was still half in and half out the door.

  “What are we doing today?” Ty’s voice pulled Zane out of yet another round of self-flagellation. “Mom says we can’t go outside.”

  “We’re all gonna go to the clubhouse. I got some work to do and the brothers are gonna be too busy to keep watch over here.”

  “Are there other kids there?” Ty stirred his cereal. He hadn’t eaten anything since they sat down. What was up with that?

  “No. It’s not a place for kids except once a year when they have a summer barbeqcue, or there’s a special reason for a get-together, and kids can come.”

  “Am I a biker kid?” He put down the spoon and pushed the cereal bowl away.

  “I guess you are.” Zane pointed to the bowl. “You gonna eat something? Boys need food.”

  “You didn’t eat anything.”

  Fuck. Zane stared at his plate, unable to even contemplate putting anything in his mouth. Except for the conversation about coming to the clubhouse, Evie had barely spoken a word to him this morning and the idea that he had hurt her made him ache inside. “It’s different when you’re a grown-up.”

  “Mom will be mad at us,” Ty said. “She doesn’t like food to be wasted, although it’s better now. When we lived with Mark, we had to be very careful of our money and if I didn’t eat my breakfast, she made me eat it for lunch.”

  Mark. The man who had raised his son. The man who had slept with Evie. Zane hated him, and not just because he had been there when Zane hadn’t, but because he’d hurt his girl.

  He inhaled deeply to calm himself, and the scent of bacon made his stomach turn. Maybe he shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night, but the thought of coming back to the apartment last night after he’d scared Evie away was almost too much to bear. Alcohol had numbed the pain, but when the buzz wore off, he felt worse than before. “Musta been tough.”

  Ty shrugged. “It was okay until he started yelling all the time. They thought I couldn’t hear, but I could. It was always about money and where they were going to sleep. Sometimes Mark slept in another lady’s house and Mom didn’t like that. Once Mom said she was going to sleep somewhere else, too, but she never did. Big Bill wanted her to come and work in Conundrum because he liked how she painted people’s motorcycles and she wanted to go. That’s when Mark pushed her down the stairs. I saw him do it.” He looked up, his eyes haunted. “Are you going to do that, too?”

  Zane let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. That bastard, Mark, wouldn’t be able to walk after Zane got through with him. “No.”

  Ty’s gaze flicked to the kitchen door and then back to Zane. “I cried when Mom fell down the stairs. I thought she was going to be dead and there would be no one to look after me except Mark, and he didn’t like me. I wished I was strong enough to fight him, but I wasn’t.”

  Zane thought he’d fucking cry, too at what Evie and his son had to go through. “I cried when my dad died.”

  Ty looked up, his eyes wide. “Really?”

  “Really. It doesn’t make you less of a man.”

  “Will you teach me how to fight? Just in case I need to help Mom when you’re gone.”

  Christ. Even his kid thought he was going to abandon them. Well, that made three of them. “Who says I won’t be around?”

  “Mom says you’re busy with the club and maybe you’ll see me on weekends, or you might go away and not come back for a long time. My friend Mason only sees his dad on weekends ’cause his parents are divorced. They get to go to restaurants all the time and football games, and he gets to sleep on his dad’s couch, like you do.”

  “Yeah, I’ll teach you to fight. But you gotta eat something. Can’t fight if you have no energy.”

  Ty slid off his seat and reached into one of the grocery bags Arianne had brought to the safe house this morning. He pulled out a box of cookies and carefully pulled it open, his eyes never leaving Zane’s face. Now there was a challenge if he ever saw one—and that he understood.

  “Your mom usually let you eat cookies for breakfast?”

  “Yeah. All the time.” Ty bit into a cookie, watching, his body tense.
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  Zane bit back a smile and stretched out on his chair. “You know … even outlaw bikers got rules. We live by a code: honesty, integrity, brotherhood and loyalty. You want to be a biker, you gotta live by the code. You got to be able to trust your brothers just as they got to trust you, because the world we live in is not forgiving of mistakes. We had one brother, Axle, he did lotsa bad shit and betrayed his brothers. He lied, stole… In short, he was dishonest. In the end, he died alone.”

  Ty’s eyes widened and he stopped chewing. “He died?”

  “Yeah. You get involved in bad shit, it always comes back on you.” He leaned across the table, made his son a promise. “What Mark did to your mom … that’s gonna come back on him. Big time.”

  Ty placed the box and the unfinished cookie on the table. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “Didn’t think you would be.” Zane gave himself a mental high five. Maybe parenting wasn’t so hard after all.

  They cleaned up the breakfast dishes together and put the groceries away. Ty talked about his friends, the games he played, and movies he had seen with his mother. Except for that one outburst about Mark, he never talked about Stanton, and Zane wondered if he didn’t remember much, or he didn’t want to remember. He was an easy kid to be around, curious about Zane’s life as a biker, enthusiastic about his friends, and passionate about superheroes.

  “Batman. He’s the only true superhero,” Zane said as they put the last of the food away. “He’d win a fight against any of the others hands down ’cause he’s got that streak of dark in him, makes him able to cross the line that pansies like Captain America can’t cross. He doesn’t take shit from anyone.”

  “Duh.” Ty rolled his eyes and pointed to his Batman pajamas. “I know that.”

  Nobody had ever said “duh” to Zane since … well, ever. The kids at school had been afraid of him and the junior patch and prospects knew to stay out of his way. “You allowed to say ‘duh’ to a grown-up?”