by London Casey
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” I said.
Duke turned and stepped toward me. “Engaged ain’t married. If I wanted a taste, I’d damn well take it. Trent owes me one anyway. So keep fucking with me.”
I froze up and felt my blood ready to freeze up next. “So what do you want?”
“I want to hear it from you,” Duke said. “What happened that night.”
“What night?”
“The night you were going to murder me.”
Duke was big and very unstable. His eyes kept changing as he spoke. One second he was smiling, the next he looked ready to pounce.
“Rocco and Gunner wanted to get back at you,” I said. “I don’t know why. Gunner took me into their meeting room and showed me all your pictures. He stopped at your picture and said he wanted you dead. I was put on the spot to do it. They gave me a small bottle of poison and I poured it into your drink. That’s when Trent showed up.”
“And that’s right about when I lost my mind,” Duke said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Then those other guys showed up with machine guns.”
“So you were really going to serve that drink to me?” Duke asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was stuck in that moment, okay? Grabbing the drink, wondering if I could actually do it. Hand it to you and walk away. Try to be casual as you began to die. I tried to play it in my mind over and over and convince myself it was okay to do.” The emotion caught up in my throat. I coughed and turned my head. “They were going to destroy me if I didn’t do it. Daxton had already been pushing me around. Swinging at me. It was a moment where I would lose no matter what.” I paused and collected myself so I could look at Duke again. “It wasn’t about killing you, Duke. It was about buying myself time.”
Duke stepped toward me again. I thought about screaming but I had no breath to do it. My energy was spent trying not to break down and cry. When he reached for me, I feared the worst. He was a tough and smart biker. A military guy. He could probably choke me out or break my neck in a second.
Duke squeezed my arm. “Look at me, Harlee. I want you to listen carefully. When I was across the ocean, chasing down what felt like an invisible enemy, I had that feeling too. It was all about chasing time. Not winning a war. Watching guys I had been in basic training with getting blown up like they were nothing. And then it was my job to track down and blow up those guys. This never ending cycle of death. The only thing I clung to was a sense of time. The brotherhood I had with so many was left over there. Fuck, it’s probably still blowing around in the dust. I came back in one piece, physically, and knew the only way I could survive was to ride that feeling until death. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’m really sorry, Duke. For everything.”
“I respect your honesty. I respect whatever it is Trent sees in you. I hope you realize for all the years I’ve known him, nobody got this close.”
“What about the woman in the picture?” I blurted out. “Who was that?”
“That’s a story I can’t tell.” Duke reached up and touched my face. “Don’t ever try to kill me again, Harlee. Because if you do and you fuck it up, I will have to kill you.”
“Deal,” I said.
The bedroom door opened again and I turned my head to see Trent standing there.
“What the fuck is this?”
**
I put my hand out and knew there was no stopping Trent - or Duke.
The two outlaws collided together and ended up against a wall. I let out a scream and then watched as they started to hit each other! Trent punched Duke in the stomach and Duke punched Trent in the mouth. Trent grabbed Duke by his leather cut and swung, throwing him across the room.
“There’s nothing wrong!” I yelled. “We were talking!”
Trent ran at Duke and rammed his shoulder into Duke’s gut, lifting him and slamming him against another wall. Trent got a right punch to Duke’s jaw and then Duke backhanded Trent in the face. They were then separated by a few feet and then froze.
The only sound I heard was my heart pounding inside my chest.
Duke wiped the corner of his mouth. “You done, brother?”
“Stay away from her,” Trent warned. “It’s over, Duke. The entire situation. It was all bullshit and we’re fixing it.”
“I know that,” Duke said. “Doesn’t make it right, Trent. I came to hear it from her mouth. To hear the truth. She gave it. I’m done with this.”
“Good,” Trent said. “Now stay the fuck away from my woman and stay the fuck away from my room.”
Duke flexed his jaw. “I’m leaving then. And just for the record, Trent, she was asking about Allie. You might want to clear that up before you walk down the aisle.”
I gasped, realizing what Duke had just done. Allie must have been the woman in the picture. Duke collected up his gun off the bed and left the room without a care in the world and I was left with the angriest version of Trent I’d ever seen. This was the monster I had been hearing about. The way he stood, somehow looking two feet taller and twice as big with muscle.
“What did you do?” he asked me.
“Nothing,” I said. “He came and cornered me. I talked. That was it.”
“You were looking around my room while I was gone.”
“I’m curious, Trent. Okay? You gave me a diamond ring that you already had…”
Trent’s right hand grabbed my waist. He pulled me close. “We’re leaving.”
“What?”
“We’re going back to my apartment.”
“Why? Why can’t we stay here? I thought you said…”
“Harlee, I need you to do one thing for me.”
“What?”
“Trust me. When I say we need to leave, we leave. End of discussion. Understand?”
I nodded. “Trent, I didn’t mean to find anything.”
“Yes you did. That’s why you were looking.”
My face burned. “I do trust you. I want to know more about you. I know the engagement thing is fake but that doesn't mean everything has to be fake.”
Are you trying to romance an outlaw right now?
Trent leaned down and placed his lips to mine. An actual kiss. Lips to lips, lasting longer than a second. His lips parted and our tongues touched.
Then Trent pulled away. Both hands at my hips, keeping me away.
“You’re poison,” he said.
“So are you,” I said.
“I know, darling. And if you want to step into this world with me, I’m going to tear you apart… and you’ll never want anything or anyone else for the rest of your life.”
twenty-one.
(trent)
They want you to kill him… they want you to kill your own father.
I had to get out of the clubhouse again. I knew Trev and Jasper had more to say to me but I was done for the moment. The O’Nuall family were leaning on me because they found a weak link to exploit. That was my fault and my shame to carry. I was supposed to be the monster for the club, meaning nothing could break me down. But there I was, with an order to kill my own father and a woman I was engaged to.
Harlee was in the bedroom and I was in the living room.
In the back of my mind I thought about Allie. What the fuck was Harlee doing trying to dig around my past? And fuck Duke for spitting her name at me like that. It was way too much to carry, even for wide shoulders like mine. The past, the present, and the future all smashing together.
See, it wasn’t killing my father that was the problem, it was the notion of bending to the O’Nuall family’s orders. Because if I did that, then what? They’d put the MC in a corner and muscle us again and again and again. That was bullshit. We were supposed to be the muscle. We were supposed to be strong-arming people.
I walked to the kitchen and got two beers.
I found Harlee sitting on the edge of the bed, looking in a notebook.
“Have a drink,” I said.
She shut the not
ebook and took the beer. “Thanks.”
I backed up to the doorway, giving her space. “What’s in the notebook?”
“Just stuff,” Harlee said. “I don’t have any real friends and I don’t have any pictures, so I write stuff down. It’s nice to go back and read it. Or when I think of a memory, I write it down. Just so I don’t forget it again.”
“That’s smart,” I said.
“Yeah.” She looked at me. “You have pictures though.”
“Yeah I do. Lots of them. What the fuck were you doing digging through my drawers?”
“Trying to figure out who you are,” Harlee said. “I’m not ashamed to admit that. You saved me, Trent. You kept saving me. Then you offer me a diamond ring… to save me again. So what’s with this guy saving me over and over? Yet you won’t…” Her face turned red and she shrugged her shoulders.
“I won’t what?”
“You won’t fuck me.”
I was taken back a little bit. “Of all things I never thought I’d hear…”
“What?” she asked. “You come after me and then hesitate. Why? Is it because of Allie?”
“Trust me, darling, don’t say that name,” I warned. “Before we get into anything, tell me how you ended up in this life.”
“What does it matter?” she asked. “I skated around through life trying to find a purpose. Before all that? I went to high school. I hated it. My boyfriend cheated on me. I had nobody to turn to because I had no real parents. My father left when I was a kid and my mother worked herself to death. The second I turned eighteen she took off to do her own thing. I tried to stay with a friend but she got a job offer after college and left. So I just started to survive.”
“You like writing in that notebook?”
“Yeah.”
“So why not write something and sell it?” I asked.
“I’m not a writer, Trent.”
“You put words down. That’s a writer.”
She smiled. “Thanks. But I’m far from it. Plus, when I become your old lady, what happens then? I can’t write about anything. I wouldn’t do that to you and the club.”
“I’m sorry about what happened with Duke. He and I always had tension. He’s unpredictable.”
“Just like you,” Harlee said. “He was there to work things out. I’m kind of glad because I don’t feel so guilty now. We have an understanding.”
“Good,” I said. “Listen, I didn’t force your hand into anything, Harlee. I expected you stay put and think about it. You took the ring and you said what you said to Trev. There’s no turning back. I could help you escape but then you’d have the MC on your ass, too.”
“I know. I freaked out when I saw the ring, Trent. I wanted an answer. I wanted a sense of truth from you.” She held out her hand and stood up from the bed. “Tell me this ring was meant for someone else.”
I felt the anger rolling in my stomach. But there was something about Harlee’s eyes that just threatened to tear me up. Goddammit, that was my fatal flaw. I rarely fell for a woman but when I did I fell hard.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. That ring was meant for someone else.”
Harlee grabbed the ring and slid it off her hand. She put it on the nightstand. Next thing I knew she grabbed her notebook and her bag and started to walk toward the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I asked.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I have no reason to be here. I’m not going to be some whore to you, Trent. If your club wants to chase me down and kill me, fine. Let them do it. I don’t care. I’m not going to rat on anyone else. Bad enough I did to Daxton and his club. I’m done with this life.”
Harlee walked by me, putting her hand to my chest, pushing at me. I moved out of the way and watched as she walked down the hallway. The scene was all too familiar for me. The last time I saw it happen, I did nothing. I did nothing for the safety of the woman I loved and maybe even for the safety for myself.
This time?
Fuck that.
“That’s what she did,” I called out. “Right what you’re doing.”
Harlee stopped walking. She turned and looked at me. “What?”
“Right there. Just like that. She grabbed her bag and walked out. Didn’t want to deal with the life anymore. And you know what I did?”
“What did you do?”
“I let her go,” I said. “I figured it was for the better. She couldn’t survive in this world. It would be a constant fight and struggle. I’d live with my eyes on the road and my eyes on her.”
Harlee dropped her bag to the floor. She took a few steps toward me and crossed her arms. “Keep going.”
“There’s nothing to tell, darling. It’s my life. I grew up with my old man running his life into the grave. He loved to gamble, drink, snort shit, and more than that, he loved pussy. All of it he paid for with a debt he could never satisfy. I got into the life to escape another. When I met Allie, it was instant sparks. She was a pretty little woman working at a restaurant to pay off student loan debt waiting to become a lawyer. We hit it off and it was just… damn. I got deeper into the MC and she got a job offer. Now it was an outlaw with a lawyer. That didn’t mix so well with what I did for a living. In the beginning it was wild. You know, the bad guy and the good girl. Probably like those dumb chick flicks you were watching, right?”
Harlee smirked. “I don’t think many of those have a murderer as the love interest.”
“Too bad. Guys like me, darling, understand life. When you take life, you understand life. Am I a bad guy? Fuck yeah, I am. But there’s plenty of bad guys standing on the other side of the law. Trust me. I’ve seen it.”
I watched then as Harlee started to get closer to me. “Tell me more.”
“She took a case that was close to the MC. If it went one way it would help us. If it went another way, it would hurt us. By then, I was patched in, at the table, and I was known as the monster. I got that name because I beat a guy in The Hell Five so bad, he could only see out of one eye and couldn’t talk. When the police questioned him as to what happened, he used a whiteboard and a marker to write down who attacked him. Guess what he wrote down?”
“The monster?” Harlee asked.
“Exactly. I was the muscle. I still am the muscle. The case that Allie took was important for her career. Her bosses knew who I was and knew we were together. There were a hundred reasons why we shouldn’t have been together. Everyone tried to talk me down. Jasper, Max, Austin. Even Cash. It was the temptation. Maybe in my heart somewhere it was the small chance to escape and feel something normal. But this is normal for me. Right now. Right here. This is my life.”
“What happened with the case?”
“She dumped it off to someone else,” I said. “I didn’t want to put her in the middle. Ripper - the President before Trev - insisted I do it. That created some heat in the MC. I thought I was going to lose my cut over it. I might have done that for her. That’s how much I cared. She came up with the idea to dump the case onto someone else. The guy who took it was a friend of the club and he worked it in our favor. Allie got fired from her job. There were probably ten things I could have done to fix it, but the one that stuck was to ask her to marry me. So I grabbed a ring. The ring you left in the bedroom. I thought if I could pull her in and keep her safe, she could understand that the club was family. We’re not just barbarians on motorcycles looking for trouble. We’re brothers.”
I let out a little laugh and leaned against the doorway. I watched as Harlee got even closer to me. She was within reach of me touching her. But she touched me. She ran her finger along the patch on my leather cut.
Enforcer
That’s what the patch said.
In others words - don’t fuck with me or you’ll end up dead or with your jaw wired shut.
“So she left?” Harlee asked.
“She’d been planning for a while. She leveraged herself into a new job in New York. Right outside the city, a decent sized firm,
run by another headstrong woman. This I didn’t find out until later though. She came to the apartment - not this one - and I had the ring in my hand. She breezed right by me and packed a bag. I watched her do it. I thought maybe if I let her get close to going and showed her the ring it would all click. That didn’t happen. I showed the ring and she slapped it out of my hand. She slapped me across the face, kissed my other cheek, and walked out. Truthfully, I could have chased her ass down. I could have dragged her to the clubhouse and had the table vote on what to do with her. But I didn’t. And I made sure nobody in the club bothered her either. She always deserved better.”
Harlee ran her hand up my cut to my neck. Then to my face. Her nails scratching into the scruff on my face.
She shook her head. “She’s stupid.”
I grinned. “No. She was smart. She’s a partner in that law firm now. She’s clearing six figures a year, is married, and even has two kids. A good and simple life. The only memory she has is that set of angel wings on her lower back. Her tramp stamp.”
“I’m sorry, Trent,” Harlee said. “I didn’t know any of that. Is that why you’re so mean?”
“No. I’m mean because I don’t give a fuck about anything. I live in my own world of justice and I know what it means to live outlaw. I’m mean because the MC tries hard to keep everyone safe and nobody gets it. I’m mean…” I grabbed Harlee’s hand and tore it off my face. “… because you broke into this world and I keep saving you.”
Harlee reached forward with her other hand and touched between my legs. My cock had already been swelling up watching her tight ass try and walk away from me. Now her touch made me rock hard.
“I’ll make it up to you,” she whispered.
She moved to her toes and placed her lips to my neck and kissed me.
I then grabbed her ass and lifted her up, turning, and walking into the bedroom.
If she wanted it that bad… she was going to fucking get it…