by Ava Ashley
Chapter Four
Cooper
I can tell Savannah has been struggling. That’s not to suggest that it was a huge fall, since it isn’t like she was rolling in dough when she lived with me. But even though the transition from her motorcycle club princess life to her runaway life was probably a more dramatic shift than the one from her first runaway life to her second, this is the one where she slipped under the minimum requirement of what you need to more or less comfortably survive. Her apartment was a total dump in the ghetto, much worse than the one we shared, and her cheeks look a little thin, like she hadn’t been eating right.
But now she’s with me and she won’t have any more worries. I have money, both saved up from my days of earning a Navy SEAL’s elite salary and my earnings as a top-ranked fighter since then, some above board and some from bets on me winning. When I was in the SEALs, I didn’t have anything to spend it on because I was away in war zones and dangerous enemy territory. Besides, I was saving up to be able to provide Sarah with the life she was accustomed to. Then that blew up and I was too depressed and pissed off, in turns, to spend my money. Since then, I’ve just been focused on fighting and saw no need for moving to a nicer place or buying a nicer car or anything like that, when most of my time and energy was spent on and at the gym. I never had the urge to get a nicer place to impress the girls who would have readily had sex with me in a public restroom, if I had asked for it, nor did I ever have the desire to spoil them with nice gifts of fancy dinners. They didn’t mean anything to me.
But Savannah does. Savannah means the world to me, just looking at this wonderful woman’s beautiful face makes me want to give her everything. I can tell there is a lot going on in her head and seeing me all banged up, obviously from an unfair encounter with the thugs that are chasing her down, didn’t help. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it takes, I am going to prove to Savannah that she is the girl for me and I don’t give a damn about what anyone else has to say about it.
But first, we need to take care of the basics.
I get her out of her dingy digs and catch a cab to the New Yorker Hotel in midtown. I booked an executive king suite on a high floor, so Savannah can finally see New York the way she deserves to. There are three huge flat screens in the suite, but Savannah ignores them and the nice couches to flop down on the bed. The poor thing is exhausted. Between her crazy shifts and not eating right, it’s no wonder.
That brings me to the next thing. I need to get some decent food into her. Who knows when the last time she had a decent meal, not instant ramen or the crap from the diner she told me about working at, was? We briefly consider going up to the Sky Lounge for a nice meal, but one look at her tells me she’s completely wiped. I would rather just be with her, anyway, just the two of us, so we settle on room service. I have to goad her to order more and pricier food. For a girl who grew up rich, she is sure hesitant about spending money. Even though it’s a little frustrating, because I want to spend money on her, it’s also incredibly endearing. Sarah would always jump on expensive gifts and point out pricey jewelry and clothes that she wanted when we went out. If we went out to eat, she wouldn’t blink an eye at ordering the caviar and vintage wines. She expected to be pampered all her life and she just expected to never have to work for it. Savannah isn’t like that.
“So, now what?” Savannah asks. I startle a little—I was away in my thoughts. But I’m glad to be called back into the room that way, because I want to spend every moment with Savannah. She has propped herself up on her elbows on the bed and I know that it’s not just my pent-up sex drive that’s making me interpret that smile as flirty. She raises an eyebrow in a come-and-get-me way, so I do.
I pounce onto the bed and she does that adorable giggle-shriek that cute girls do as I roll her over on top. She’s laughing and giggling and shrieking as I give her a thousand kisses all over her neck and shoulders, but then I kiss my way up to just beside her mouth and she stops laughing. She takes my face gently in her soft, little hands and looks me straight in the eyes.
“Thank you for coming for me,” she whispers softly. “I missed you with all my heart.”
“I missed you, too, Savannah,” I say. “More than anything.” Then I kiss her, long and deep, and like the only thing I need in life is her and her kiss.
Chapter Five
Savannah
The food is delicious and abundant and served beautifully on silver platters that make me feel like a princess. I eat like I am ravenous, because I am, but I cannot fully enjoy the sumptuous meal. Even as the warmth of the food spreads through my stomach, filling me up, I can sense the tense, cold stone of dread that has been there since the wonderful, and terrible, moment when I first ran into Cooper in my stairway. We are going to have to talk about the murderous, gang-shaped elephant in the room sooner or later. And now that we are done eating, later has come.
He could not possibly know everything about me. And now, to finally level the field and treat him as he deserves, I have to tell him every last thing about me and the nuclear disaster zone that is my life. How could he possibly feel the same way about me after that? How could he possibly not leave me when he realizes that continuing to be with me like this would be signing his own death sentence?
Suddenly, the meal that was so delicious only moments before doesn’t feel like it was such a good idea after all.
“You’re looking a little green, babe,” Cooper jokes. I smile weakly at him.
“I’m just—” I take a deep breath and start over. “We have to talk, Cooper.”
“What are we doing right now?” He is still teasing me, a flirty twinkle in his eye.
“No, Cooper,” I say. “I am serious. We have to talk.” He takes one look at my face and realizes I mean it. He nods, his own face immediately completely serious.
“Shoot,” he says.
I take a deep breath and look down at my hands. They’re shaking in my lap, so I press them down between my thighs to still them. “Cooper,” I say. “I have to tell you everything about me. For real this time, with all the bad and all the ugly.”
“I know everything,” Cooper says. “Savannah, I am an ex-Navy SEAL. I have the skills and the access to find out anything about anyone. And I wouldn’t have gone into your background and looked up things you didn’t want me to know, but when you disappeared on me like that, without a word or a call or even a goddamn fucking note, Savannah—” Cooper looks really upset about that and I can’t blame him. To him, it looked like I just walked out on him for no reason after our wonderful night together.
He takes a breath. “And then Nate and his thugs showed up and I knew you were in danger and I had to find you. So I did a thorough background check. Savannah, I know everything. You are Savannah Santos, daughter of known gang leader Flint Santos of the infamous Santos Motorcycle Club. I know who Nate is and I know who he is to you. I know that you’re his fiancee, but I also know that you can’t possibly love him. Don’t do this, Savannah, don’t be with him.”
I shake my head. “You know everything that’s on the books. But you don’t know the details. You know my mom died, and my little sister, in the middle of a particularly bad bout of gang warfare when I was a little girl. But what you don’t know is that my hand in marriage was my father’s peace offering to the Morenos. The engagement between me and Nate, to be consummated into a marriage on my eighteenth birthday, was what stopped the gang wars. And then—and then I couldn’t do it. I never liked Nate and we couldn’t get along at all growing up, but when I walked in on him with an ex just a few weeks before my eighteenth birthday, and our wedding, it was the final straw. I just couldn’t do it. So I ran away, so that I wouldn’t have to marry him.”
I pause there to collect myself and check how Cooper is taking it so far. His jaw tensed when I talked about how I was supposed to marry Nate, but he comes over closer to me on the couch and takes me in his arms.
“Baby, none of that is your fault,” he murmurs. “Does the thought of y
ou marrying some other guy make me want to punch his fucking lights out? Hell, yeah. But you didn’t do anything wrong and you’re mine now. It’s okay, baby.”
“But you don’t understand,” I say. “When my mom and my sister were killed, my whole world fell apart. I didn’t lose just them, I lost my entire family. My warm, loving daddy suddenly turned into this cold man who wouldn’t play with me anymore, wouldn’t read me bedtime stories, and wouldn’t helicopter me through the air, like he always had. He wouldn’t even look at me anymore. My big brother, Wolf, followed his example. He became cold and hard and grew up overnight into a motorcycle club man with no feelings. He wasn’t the fun, adventurous guy that I had spent my childhood days chasing through the house and getting into trouble with. I was suddenly all by myself, stuck with a series of nannies who did exactly as expected and nothing more. I was miserable and angry at the world. Then I grew up, too, and I realized that the real world is a cold place where feelings only hurt you. If you love someone, it’s inevitable that they will disappear from your life and you’ll be hurt. Or worse, you’ll hurt them. If you stay with me, Daddy’s thugs won’t stop coming after you, ever. They won’t stop until they have me and, once they find out that you and I have been together, they won’t stop until they have killed you. And they will kill you.” This is the nail in my coffin. Coming clean about this will definitely make Cooper hate me. “They will kill you, because you will be held accountable for starting the gang wars up again, just like me.”
Cooper looks a little perplexed, but not angry.
I take a shaky breath and continue. “As you know, I was a virgin when I met you. In order to carry through my part of the peace clause, I had to stay pure until my wedding night. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I can’t marry Nate anymore. I’m not a virgin anymore and I won’t bleed anymore. There are no more take-backs. we have targets on our backs. I’m—I’m sorry.”
There. I said it all. And now I am stuck, paralyzed in the longest moment of my life. I know he will pull away and as I sit there, wrapped in his arms, I try to immortalize every last moment before he pulls away from me.
“Oh, Savannah.” Instead of letting me go, or pushing me away, Cooper holds on to me tighter, squeezing me to his chest. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. I know what I’m risking. I have been shot at, I have walked into situations where we were vastly outnumbered by the enemy forces, and I took on fighters in my early days who I knew by all logic should pummel me into a pit. But falling for you scared me more than any of those things. Caring for people can hurt you, more than any bullet or pack of thugs, but if you don’t take the risk, you’ll miss out on something wonderful. Savannah, we are something wonderful. And you can’t decide for me that I don’t want to be with you, because I do. Savannah, I would die for you.”
“But you don’t get it! You only want to be with me because you haven’t felt the pain, you don’t know how badly I can, and will, hurt you if you stay with me.” He’s still hugging me and I hate it, because I love it. I know I should pull away, but I can’t make myself leave his arms. I am completely out of control, totally under the sway of my emotions and desires. I can’t stand this uneasy feeling of uncertainty. Every cell in my body is begging him to say he doesn’t care, but every bit of my rational self understands that it’s an impossibility.
“Savannah, you are not the only one who has been through some tough shit.” Now Cooper sounds frustrated. “I grew up broke, watching my mom sleep with every low-life in town, sometimes for help with the rent, sometimes for a bag of groceries, and sometimes just for a can of Bud and a few minutes of forgetting that she’s a poor, single mom living in a trailer home with a dead-end job and no hope. I got into all kinds of trouble growing up, and was headed on the same kind of path as all the other losers who grow up in the trailer parks and die in them, too. I didn’t care for authority much, because I wasn’t used to my mom trying to put any rules down and I didn’t have a dad. Then everything changed when I met a girl. A rich girl who probably wouldn’t have given me a second thought if I wasn’t always around with my shirt off, mowing her lawn.” Cooper gives a bitter bark of a laugh. “But that didn’t do anything for her dad. Long story short, he wanted someone for his little princess who could provide the kind of life she was used to. I didn’t have the right pedigree to date his daughter, even though I was turning things around for myself. And for her. Long story short, I rose to the top of my graduating class, joined the military, advanced quickly through the Navy and into the Navy SEALs, and was getting ready to marry this girl.”
I can hear the pain in Cooper’s voice. He’s vulnerable like never before. This time it’s my turn to be the comforting one and I hug him a little harder, giving him a kiss on the chest.
“I was on my last mission before our wedding. Things went wrong, really wrong. I lost one of my men and I had taken an oath to protect every one of my brothers—no man left behind. It tore me up. And then when I wanted to go home to the woman whom I was going to marry, she said that my PTSD, my fucking mild PTSD, was ‘too much’ for her and she didn’t want to ever see me again. She wrote it in a fucking email. But then I found out that the real reason she didn’t want to see me again was because she was pregnant and by another man. She cheated on me.”
“Oh,” I say, quietly. I had no clue how much hurt was hiding under Cooper’s tough front.
“Savannah, I know what being hurt feels like,” Cooper says. “I’ve spent my life around hurt and had my own fair share of pain. But I also know that I spent too long cutting off my emotions and not really living. Until I met you. And then I realized I’d rather have a single day with you, even if it meant years of pain, than have an existence full of nothing. That’s not life, that’s not worth it.”
“But—” I don’t know what else to say. I’m searching for a way to convince him that I’m wrong for him, but he’s already given a more convincing argument than I can even try to counter.
“But we’re going to die?” Cooper asks. “I would die for you without a second thought, Savannah, but the thought of the hurt you could experience, being left alone—I can’t do that to you. And the thought of them getting to you? I wouldn’t do that, either.”
“So...” It’s what I knew was going to happen, but it still hurts so badly. “So that’s it, then.”
“No,” Cooper says, turning my face up to look at him. “No, Savannah! Don’t you see? The safest place for you is with me. It’s the safest place for both of us, because if you’re with me I can focus on guarding us as one. If you leave, my efforts will always be split. Savannah, there’s no way I’m going to let you go out there on your own and have these guys hurt you.”
“But how can you protect us?” I ask, “These guys know what they’re doing and they won’t give up.”
“Savannah, I was at the top of my unit as a fucking Navy SEAL,” Cooper says. “I can cover us, I have the intelligence and access to the tools to create entire new identities for us. We’ll leave the US, or at least the continental US, and we’ll move somewhere else as new people with new identities. Even the government won’t know who we are, since we’ll be our own Witness Protection Program of two. We’ll be the only ones who know. I’ll hack into the government systems and create new identities, just like we always were them. We’ll fake our deaths—I’ll make it convincing and well-publicized. I still have friends in high places who would do anything for me, as thanks for saving their lives overseas—and the motorcycle clubs will have no choice but to give up. You can’t re-kill dead people. Babe, it will be just you and me, and no one will know.”
“But your fighting,” I protest. “You’ll have to give it up.”
“Savannah, you are what I want more than anything in the world. If that means no more fighting, then so be it. You make me happier than fighting ever could and I have enough money saved up to keep us very, very comfortable until my new career kicks off. Savannah, there are no buts. Be with me.”
“I, I...”
I can’t believe it. “Yes. Yes!” We can do it, it can happen. Hope and relief and, more than anything, happiness crash over me like a frighteningly wonderful wave of warmth. Cooper tilts my face up, bringing his lips to inches from my face. My eyes flutter closed, anticipating his sweet kiss. The sweet kiss of the man who will go to the literal ends of the world for me.
The kiss doesn’t come. I open my eyes.
Cooper stopped there, a few millimeters from my lips. “Savannah, my dear, you have to promise me that you will believe me when I say that I will stay with you and I will take whatever comes with that, no matter what. No more running away.”
I look deep into his beautiful blue eyes. “I promise.” And then I kiss him, deeply and passionately and, for the first time ever, completely and entirely lovingly.
Oh, God, I want him. I want him now. I want to have sex with my man. I want him to mount me and fill me and be as close to me as any two humans can be. I fumble with his belt and he’s immediately thinking the same thing, pulling my shirt over my head.
“Oh, baby,” he breathes, kissing a trail down my neck as he smoothly undoes the clasp on my bra with one hand and slides the other down into the waistband of my pants, where my throbbing sex is already soaking wet for him. I feel his member growing in his pants, pushing against my thigh.
“Yes, oh, yes,” I moan, as he strokes the front of my clit.
Then suddenly, there’s a harsh knock on the door. We ignore it. It comes again.
“We’re busy,” Cooper shouts, before going back to playing with my stiff, sensitive nipples.
The knock comes again.
“I know you guys are in there, Savannah—and Cooper! We have to talk.” It’s a man’s voice. A very familiar man’s voice. Cold chills run down my back.