by Anne Malcom
No, one who radiated danger and chaos.
Everything I kept my well-ordered life away from.
Yet there I stood, turned the frick on. Finding it hard to speak, to breathe around the man grasping my chin in a borderline brutal grip.
His hand jerked, making my throbbing head move somewhat painfully in whatever dim illumination the moon offered.
I thought for a second—was actually certain—that he’d exposed my neck in order to slit it. Or was preparing to do that movie move where the hero—or the villain—cracked an enemy’s neck in one swift jerk.
And yet I didn’t resist his grip. Scream. Fight.
I didn’t move.
Maybe I was holding onto the old advice that when you found yourself standing in front of a lion, you held your ground, stared it down.
Or maybe I didn’t want out of his grip, even if it meant death.
But this was insane.
And after brushing off the spiky scales of insanity almost a decade ago, I’ve kept away from anything resembling it at all costs.
It soon became apparent he wasn’t jerking my head to kill me in any number of ways I knew he was proficient in. No, he was doing it to inspect the gash on my head.
“Not likely to need stitches,” he grunted, still holding my chin. “Might have a concussion.” A pause. “You’ll live.”
There was no overarching concern in his voice. Nothing to betray the fact that he was overly worried about me bleeding from the head. He’d obviously seen worse. The casual way he handled my bloodied face told me that.
But I also knew my injuries weren’t serious. They hurt, but like this dark man said, I’d live. I wasn’t one to go for dramatics over a little blood. I was all about taking practical measures, keeping calm, and solving problems logically. It was logic that had me walking down the road in the middle of the night—however crazy it sounded—but all logic, and even God himself, abandoned me in the presence of this man.
Then again, God had abandoned me long ago.
When the man let me go, the absence of his grip almost hurt more than the throbbing of my head.
Almost.
But he stepped back from me, snapping me out of whatever kind of sorcery he had control over in the darkness. And my head started throbbing more than the need for him to touch me. My entire body ached, reminding me of why exactly I was there in the first place.
The blisters on my tender feet burned with the evidence of how far I’d walked.
Grabbing hold of my pain meant I got to grab hold of my logic, just before I could topple into the abyss that had nothing to do the inky blackness surrounding us and everything to do with the man in front of me.
“I don’t think I have a concussion. Well, I don’t have any signs of it, at least,” I said, voice scratchy. “Symptoms include headache, confusion, lack of coordination, memory loss, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, ringing in the ear, and excessive fatigue, to name a few.”
“You a doctor?” he demanded.
“No. I just…” I paused. How did I explain that I had no life, so in order to supplement the gaping hole that most people filled with friends and adventures, I read? Anything and everything. I also researched anything and everything regarding injuries and statistics. Sometimes it was fact-checking for a story, but most of the time it was to feed my logical brain.
Because I tried to keep my brain busy, full to the brim with as much asinine information as I could find so I didn’t have time for it to wander. I structured my life so it was lived within the lower parameters of calculated risk.
I ate only organic, because pesticides had been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and ADHD, to name a few.
I didn’t talk while charging my cell phone, because if the charger was faulty, it could burst in my ear.
I took aspirin daily for stroke and heart attack prevention, as well as reducing the risk of cancer and Alzheimer’s. This was despite the fact that I had just turned thirty-one and it wasn’t recommended to start doing that until you were sixty-five.
I wore SPF 50 sunscreen all year round. My skin was delicate and pale, and skin cancer killed more than people knew.
I did all these things and more because I made it my business to know what the numbers were on death, pain, and danger. And how to prevent it.
You didn’t tell someone that in normal circumstances.
This was not normal circumstances.
So I didn’t say anything else.
“So you’re not a doctor, and you’re not in a position to be diagnosing yourself, considerin’ you’re bleeding on the side of the road,” the man clipped, saving me from having to explain why the heck I knew the signs and symptoms of a concussion. “Instead of you wastin’ my time spoutin’ bullshit, how about you get on the fuckin’ bike so I can drop you off at the hospital and then go about my night?”
The words were harsh, hitting me harder than the steering wheel of my car when my airbags had malfunctioned.
I made a mental note to draft a strongly worded complaint to the car manufacturer. Then again, airbags could injure people in car accidents worse than the impact of the crash itself, so maybe I was lucky.
Or, depending on what happened in the coming moments, decidedly unlucky.
Then I digested his words.
“Get on the bike,” I repeated, looking beyond him to the dark shape, silver glinting in the moonlight.
Or was it chrome on motorcycles?
That was one piece of information I didn’t know.
His impatience radiated in what little I could see of his face. “Yeah, Will, for a rocket scientist, you don’t seem to understand that I’m not hidin’ my ambulance under my cut. Bike’s the only option.” He spoke slowly, deliberately, as if he was explaining something to a child.
I stiffened, not just at the tone but at the words. “Just because I know a couple of basic things about safety doesn’t make me a rocket scientist. I’m a sensible adult,” I snapped. “And a sensible adult does not get on the back of a motorcycle with a man she doesn’t know. A man who is a member of a motorcycle gang. That’s not rocket science. That’s just common sense.” I surprised myself with the clear bite to my voice that had never been there… well, ever.
“And common sense dictates you continue walking down the road, bleeding, hurt, still five miles from Amber?” he asked dryly. Unlike my own, his voice did not hold a bite. It was flat. “Fine.” I almost heard him shrug, his disregard for me clear. “Don’t confuse independence with stupidity, darlin’, because one of them gets you killed. They’ll both get you killed, eventually, as life has a tendency to be fatal. But suit yourself. I’m not a hero, so I’m not gonna lose a wink of sleep over leavin’ you here. Mostly because I don’t plan on sleepin’ tonight.”
I didn’t see his wink like I had his shrug, but like the shrug, I heard it. There was something distinctly sexual to the words. Something that hit me low in my stomach, the place that warmed when I indulged in my fantasies in the dead of night.
But this wasn’t a fantasy.
This was reality.
And the two never mixed.
After his words had tattooed the air, gravel crunched underneath his motorcycle boots as he turned, striding away to mount his bike. I chewed my lip, watching him, anxiety gnawing at me. And also panic at the thought of him roaring into the night, leaving me. Not just alone and hurt on the side of the road. No, just leaving me. Because then the visceral fear he roused in me would disappear too.
And that visceral fear had me feeling more alive than I had in a decade.
The roar of the engine replaced the debate I was having with myself over my options. Before I rightly knew what was going on, gravel was crunching underneath my sneakers and I was rushing over to the bike.
I stopped at the side.
He didn’t speak.
Neither did I.
Nor did I make a move.
I expected him to roar off while I stood frozen, actually considering mounting a
motorcycle, with a stranger, without a helmet.
But he didn’t.
He just waited.
As if he had all the time in the world.
Almost as if he could sense that I needed a second because I wasn’t a girl who made split-second decisions. I was a woman who made lists. A lot of them. And did research. A lot of it.
But I didn’t have the luxury of lists or research right then.
I only had the handful of moments this man was going to give to me before he took off into the night, leaving me in silence and, presumably, safety.
Because there was only a short amount of time a man like him would wait. It was a miracle he hadn’t left in the first place.
Or was it a curse?
Before I could decide what would save me or damn me, my leg was up and I straddled the motorcycle.
No sooner had I situated my butt in the leather seat did he roar off. No warning, no asking me if I was okay, no telling me to hold on. No, he just took off.
Instinctively, so I didn’t fall off the back of the bike and onto the road, my arms fastened themselves over the middle of his body, wrapping around his torso. The second I realized what I was doing, the second my body pressed into his warm and muscled back, my palms grazing over his rock-hard abs, my body reacted.
Almost violently.
It was such a shock, I jerked my hands backward, momentarily forgetting that such a movement would send me toppling off the back of the bike and eating the asphalt. But I didn’t. Eat asphalt. Because a firm grip atop of my hands stopped me from moving them.
The man with the muscled back and the rock-hard abs—as if it could be anyone else—was driving the motorcycle one-handed, the other working as a restraint to stop me flinching out of his grip.
Once I gained control of myself, I figured keeping my hands where they were was my best bet at surviving the ride—physically, at least.
But his hand didn’t move from mine.
The whole ride.
Two
Gage
He walked into the clubhouse early the next morning, though he hadn’t expected to be doing so. No, he’d planned on coming to Amber, picking up some shit, tying up some loose ends, and disappearing into the night for as long as it took to get himself figured out.
Or as figured out as he could ever get.
But everything changed with the woman.
The woman who spouted statistics about fucking skull caps, who listed every symptom of concussion in an orderly manner while standing on the side of the road, in front of him, bleeding from the fucking head.
So yeah, everything changed with the woman.
With the fucking damsel.
He didn’t fuck her.
No, he saved her.
Last night, at least.
He’d clutched her warm and soft body to him as he roared into town. First, he’d done it because he’d felt exactly what she had the second she’d fastened her small arms around him. He’d felt it right in his fucking cock. And not because she was a woman pressed against him. That was in part true, but not all of it.
Because even in the dim light he could tell she wasn’t his kind of woman. For starters, his type of women wore a fuck of a lot less than she did. And a fuck of a lot more makeup, enough so it would’ve been visible even in the dim light of the moon. Fuck, it would’ve been visible from space.
And the women he chose didn’t argue with him.
Ever.
Nor did they smell like fucking lilacs and vanilla.
And they sure as shit didn’t have brains in their heads. Not brains that could spout statistics and did so with a sophisticated curl to the words like she did.
Nor did they radiate a kind of innocence that men like him sensed from a mile away.
Horses smelled fear. Monsters smelled innocence.
Gage was the worst monster of them all, and her innocence sang to him like a siren’s song.
So no, she was not his kind of woman.
But still, he had fastened his fucking hand over hers the entire ride into Amber, all the way to the hospital. He’d found himself wishing the trip was longer, despite the fact that she was bleeding, injured, and obviously in need of medical attention.
And needed to be as far away from his attention as possible.
Which was why he’d dropped her off at the hospital, gunning it as soon as her feet hit the pavement, before he could do anything stupid.
Before he could do what every fiber in his being told him to do.
Claim her.
Especially when the bright lights of the hospital illuminated her face and it punched him right in the fucking chest.
Blood stained half of her small and pale face, some glistening and wet, some dried and flaky. The gash on her forehead had bled like a bitch, as head wounds tended to do, but it wasn’t life-threatening.
Gage knew life-threatening, and it wasn’t.
To her.
To him, the cut fucking was. Because seeing blood staining her beautiful face made him flinch, his own blood boil beyond anything he’d experienced.
This wasn’t going to kill her, but it had marked her. Hurt her.
And from what he could see from her peaches-and-cream skin, her large hazel eyes framed by thick and somehow sexy-as-fuck glasses, her full and quivering lips, she didn’t need hurt. No way did she deserve to feel pain.
Which was why he’d roared off into the night before he could get off his bike and be the one to cause it.
First he’d taken a detour back where he’d come from, the road he’d found her on. Then he’d driven to his house—Rosie’s house, if you wanted to get technical, but now that she was married to the fucking cop, it was his—and found comfort in the bottom of a bottle.
Usually his comfort came between the legs of a club girl, but the mere thought of polluting the scent of vanilla and lilac against his skin sickened him.
So he sat in the dark and drank whisky till the sun came up, snatched a few hours of sleep and then went to the clubhouse. Mainly so he wouldn’t go to the hospital and see if she was still there. And take her home with him. Fuck her brutally and roughly, regardless of whatever injuries she’d sustained while crashing her car.
She didn’t tell him that.
About the crash.
Granted, he didn’t even fucking ask what had her out on the road in the middle of the night, bleeding. A good guy would’ve asked. Would’ve demanded an inventory of her injuries, would’ve made sure he’d catalogued them all. But Gage was not a good guy, so he hadn’t asked. It hadn’t mattered how she’d gotten there—it had just mattered that she was there.
But after speaking to her, smelling her, feeling her hot little body pressed against him, he’d needed to know what happened to her. Needed to find out if it was the work of another monster. And then he’d needed to kill them if that was the case.
It turned out it was no monster. Just a machine.
He’d driven out past where he’d found her to discover the car in a ditch, the front of the vehicle crushed against the curve in the land. Hence the whisky. Because she was lucky as fuck. She could’ve flipped at that angle if she’d been going faster—he knew she likely drove at or under the speed limit based on her tirade against him—and no way in fuck would he have found her walking down the side of the road with a minor head wound if she’d done that.
He’d likely have pulled her from the wreckage with not-so-minor injuries if she was lucky, or with a fuck of a lot of injuries and no heartbeat if she wasn’t.
The mere thought of that grated against Gage’s insides as he strolled through the doors of the clubhouse he hadn’t planned on having on the bottom of his cut for much longer. He was only there to go Nomad for as long as it took to get his head right. Which was obviously never. His head wasn’t ever going to be right.
She’d changed it.
Wiped out all the reasons why he was going Nomad in the first place. Scraped everything that had happened in LA from his m
ind like it didn’t matter.
And around her, no other bitches mattered. Not even crazy, homicidal ones.
He didn’t even know her fucking name.
But you didn’t need to know the name of the woman who was going to destroy you. You just had to fucking brace. Destroy her first.
For her own good.
But if he’d left town like he’d planned on, he wouldn’t have had to do that. But he didn’t think about that. Because he was a fucking coward. Because he was making excuses for staying in town, trying to convince himself that she had nothing to do with it. And he was trying, and failing, to keep her out of his mind when he damn near collided with a bald-headed, tattooed, smiling asshole.
He wasn’t really an asshole. He was actually one of his best friends—or as close to a friend as someone like Gage could get—but everyone who had the fucking audacity to be happy around his misery was automatically an asshole right then.
“Gage!” Lucky said, yanking him in for a rough hug before holding him at arm’s length. “Oh, you’ve gotten so big since the last time I saw you.” He put his hand on his heart like the theatrical bastard he was. “They grow up so fast.”
“Go fuck yourself, Lucky,” Gage grunted.
Lucky grinned. “I don’t need to.” He held up his tattooed hand, showing off the black ring on his fourth finger. “I’ve got someone who is legally obliged to fuck me from now until the end of time.”
“You say that again, you’ll be having blue balls for the end of time,” Bex cut in, her eyes narrowed at her husband before giving Gage a quick arm squeeze.
She wasn’t affectionate like her husband. Her demons gave Gage’s a run for their money.
They shared that.
Demons so dark, they both sought not to fight them but drown out their screams with a needle. With a high.
The problem with highs was you came down eventually.
And the difference between Bex and Gage was Bex had managed not to come down all the way. Not into the grave. She’d always fight the low that came with the itch underneath her skin known as addiction, but she’d found new highs.