by Kiki Leach
"It can't concern me?"
He took a seat on the other couch and leaned forward. "No."
"So if you happen to come home with a black eye the next time or God forbid something worse that you'll need to be taken to the hospital for, I won't be allowed to ask about any of that either?"
"Not when the shit pertains to the club. Like I told you before, club business is club business."
"Yeah well, when you start bringing the 'business' aspect of it home with you, that kind of shit doesn't work out too damn well for me," I told him.
"Well, it's gonna have to."
"It won't." I stood up from the couch and started making my way to the bedroom, but was stopped when he jumped up, rushed across the room and wrapped his hand around my arm, gently pulling me back and whirling me around to face him. "Don't." I tried shoving him away as I could feel myself already succumbing to his touch. I hated it but needed it all at the same time. "Roman." He wrapped his other hand around my other arm and pulled me to his chest. I closed my eyes and lowered my head to keep from staring him in the face, to keep from looking into his eyes. I was already on the edge of just giving into my desire for him again, giving him every bit of myself despite how I felt, and this closeness, how he held me, how he touched me, was in no way helping at all.
"I need you to understand the rules of the club," he said. I felt him staring at me even though I couldn't see him. I tried pulling myself together and gradually inhaled, then exhaled. "Shit like this, I can't talk about with you."
"If you could, would you?" I asked him, lifting my head and forcing myself to look into his eyes without falling even deeper, even harder in love with him. When he didn't respond, I turned my head and sighed. "Would you tell me if I was in danger?" I asked him.
He made a face and knit his brows. "In danger of what?"
"I don't know. When I was talking to the girls at Perla's--"
"What kinda shit were they filling your head with out there?"
"Nothing," I said. "But one of them said that if there were things I felt I needed to know, then I needed to step up and ask."
"Which one of them said that shit to you? Vetta?"
"It doesn't matter," I told him. "I know that I'll be safe with you, Roman, that's not something that I'll ever fear. But your brother built a relationship with me that was stacked with lies. Our foundation was rocky for too long before finally toppling over because of it, and I don't want that for us, ever."
"There's no way in hell we're repeating any of that," he said. "What you got from him is not something that you'll ever get with me. I need you need to know that shit."
"Then tell me what happened to your hand. And if there's ever something that I need to know about your club, even if you're not supposed to tell me about it, that for my safety, you will." I gulped. His face, beautiful and filled with so much passion, hovered over mine. And as much as I just wanted him to just kiss me instead of answer, as much as I wanted to know the taste of his tongue all over again, I stuck to my guns and held my ground. "I want to stay married to you for the rest of my life," I told him. "I want to be the mother of your children. But I won't bring them into a life that I can't trust. And we can't move any further than we have already if you don't start letting me in on certain things that should matter to the both of us, not just to you. You're not in this alone anymore, Roman, and that's what I need you to know and understand."
Silence enveloped the room and slowly, his hands loosened from around my arms. "I punched a motherfucker at the club today," he finally told me.
I jerked my head back and shoved my brows together, confused. "Why?"
He sighed and dropped his hands completely, then sat down on the couch. He rested his arms on his knees and balled his bruised fist, pressing it into the palm of his other hand. "Did you know anything about Jeremiah working the books for some casino's out in Vegas?" he asked me.
"What?" I questioned. "You mean actually working and not spending 90% of his time at the tables or playing the slots?" He nodded. "No." I took a seat beside him and peered. "When the hell did he start doing that?"
"According to Riggs, it'd been a few months between his shifts at the infirmary," he said. "I guess the weekends he made it out there were meant for screwing around on the slots while during the week he was trying to get paid in other ways." He brought his elbows up to his knees and folded his hand over the other. "But there was somebody in particular that he worked for that he ended up stealing some money from right before taking off." He looked over at me. "The shit that went down at your place that night before you came out to the club to chew my head off about it, with him and Cherry?" I nodded. "Jeremiah set that shit up for you to see it."
I leaned away from him and shook my head. "I knew it... None of it seemed to add up, even for him. Why the hell would he do it?"
"I'm guessin' because he didn't want you to try coming after him when he finally decided to take off. Boning Cherry in your house and bed was a surefire way to make that shit happen."
"How do you know all of this?" I asked him.
"The other night, Cherry showed up to the club. I asked her about what happened and she told me that Jeremiah paid her to go back to your place with him."
"What?"
He nodded. "Everything she did for him was because he waved some green in her face to make it happen."
"Oh my God." I dropped my face in my hands and rattled my head. I couldn't believe what the hell I was hearing. What's worse is that part of me was a little relieved in hearing some of it because it justified my reasons for damn near everything. "So Jeremiah paid her to sleep with him to force me away from him? All because of some money that he had stolen from the person that he was working for?" When I looked into his eyes, I could tell that he was studying my face, trying to figure out something that I wasn't too sure of, then he nodded his head again. "Who the hell is this person?"
He swallowed hard before muttering, "Lorenzo Bourne."
My heart plummeted to the pool of acid sitting inside in my stomach. My blood ran cold. "Lorenzo... Bourne," I said.
"Yeah, darlin'," he replied. "Same asshole that showed up to your school today bringing his kid."
"How do you know about that?"
"Because he came to see me at the club this afternoon." He paused and took in a breath. "A few weeks ago, Jeremiah got Riggs hooked up with Bourne. Our business is not doing all that well and Riggs was looking for outside sources to help us out."
"I thought the garage was doing fine?" I said, dumbly.
He lifted the corner of his mouth and shook his head. "Not that one, darlin'. The D&C."
"Oh." Their local strip joint. I swallowed back the sickness I felt building up from that and cleared my throat. "So Lorenzo was brought in as someone meant to help you out with... that."
"Yep. We've known him for years off and on, but never once thought to do business with him. At least most of us weren't."
"How much was Jeremiah able to steal from him?"
"At least 500K."
"Wow."
"Yeah. Problem is that now since he's MIA, we're the ones expected to pay that shit back. On top of the fact that he now owns a larger portion of the D&C than he was supposed to."
"How the hell did that happen?" He wagged his head and I realized that was something I truly didn't need to know. "Okay, then, when is he expecting for you to have it paid back?"
"By next week."
"Does the club even have that kind of money?"
"Nope. We could all put our funds together but the shit still wouldn't amount to what he needs by then."
"So what happens now?"
He shifted his entire body in my direction and exhaled. "Now I wanna start sending a prospect with you to work as a form of protection, at least for a little while."
"Protection from what?"
"Lorenzo's the motherfucker I clocked today," he told me. "Son of a bitch started running his mouth about having seen you up there at the school,
then started saying stuff that pissed me off and I decked him so hard, he went flying across the lot like a goddamn bird." I didn't want to admit it to myself but hearing what he had done to him turned me all the way on.
I moved closer to him. "What did he say to you?"
"Doesn't matter. The shit was inapporpriate," he answered, his tone clipped. "I told him to stay the fuck away from you from here on because of it, but I can't trust that he will because I don't trust him. Especially since I lost my shit." He stared down at his hand again. I took it in the both of mine, then bent forward and kissed the back of his bruised knuckles. I brushed my thumb across them and as I held him close to me, I remembered how both of his hands felt wrapped around every part of my body, how large they were, how strong while at the same time gentle.
To know that he could be so careful with me one moment with these same hands and then the next, use them to smash someone's face into the ground was almost something that I couldn't even imagine. It was like night and day with this man, as if he were two different people living inside one body. One was the man that I couldn't get enough of, his kisses were insatiable, his touches were electric and erotic. The other was a straight up biker thug who could easily beat someone that pissed him off to a complete pulp. Call me pathetic, but dear God, I so desperately wanted them both.
"There's something else," he said.
"What is it?"
He went dead silent before responding to me again. "When we were out there in Vegas, at certain points during that night, you'd call me Jeremiah."
I ripped my attention away from his hand and stared directly into his face. "What?"
"We were in that bar and about to go at it... when you kept telling me to touch you, you called me out by Jeremiah."
Mortified, I released his hand completely and sat back. "Did I ever correct myself?"
"No."
I guffawed, feeling even worse. "Obviously, I was drunk as hell--"
"That's not all," he interrupted.
"What the hell else is there?" I wanted to crawl into the nearest shell and hide myself from everything and everyone for the rest of my entire damn life.
How the hell could I even think he was his brother?
Granted, they favored in being related but the fact that Roman was so much older in age (thirty-six to be exact, as well as the fact that he was practically a giant in comparison) should've told me better no matter how the hell drunk I was.
"I proposed to you despite that shit," he said.
I blinked up at him and frowned in confusion. "What?"
"I knew that you were calling me Jeremiah. That in your head with all the liquor you were throwing back that you genuinely thought I was my brother for a bit. When you kept asking me the next morning what happened, I couldn't force myself tell you the truth about it because the shit--"
"Sounds absolutely crazy?" I said. He bobbed his head. "So I said yes to you in thinking that you were Jeremiah...." I shrugged. "But Jeremiah isn't who I married. Jeremiah isn't you, thank God."
"Babe--"
"No," I told him. "I don't want your brother, Roman. Whatever the hell I said, I was out of my mind."
"They say the truth can come out during times like that," he told me, his voice low, his tone cautious and unsure. "Alcohol can be a truth serum or something like it."
"It wasn't for me. Us being out there together right after I found him in bed with Cherry -- He was obviously on my mind because of what he had done and how angry I was, but that was the extent of it."
He arched his brow. "You're sure?"
"Of course."
He dropped back against the couch and sighed. He rested his hands in his lap and shifted his eyes across the room. "I know there's no way you'd ever go back to him," he said, though he didn't exactly sound as sure as I think he had hoped to. "But there's still history there, maybe old feelings and wounds that haven't healed up just yet. When Cherry told me about him paying her, I'd convinced myself that he had done that shit for you."
I raised my brows and looked aside. "That... he... had... sex? with her for me?" I asked him.
He grinned at my response. "I know it doesn't sound like it, darlin', but my initial thought was that he was doing it to keep you safe," he replied. "If Lorenzo came around and started asking you about him, you'd have no idea where the hell he had gone."
"You think even if I told him that I didn't know, he would've believed me?"
"There might've been a chance." He paused and leaned his head. "Before I decked the shit outta him." I laughed. "He came up to the club thinking that you two were the ones married. After decking him, I corrected him on that shit." I smiled at him before staring down at the ring on my hand again. "What is it?" he asked me.
I shook my head. "Nothing. It's just... I want to marry you again. Eventually, I mean. When all this stuff with your club dies down, if it ever does. When I was talking to the girls today, they were asking me about the wedding, and I realized that they had no idea that I couldn't remember anything because I was so damn intoxicated from it. It was embarrassing, so I just started making things up and they were swooning over every word. But I want to have that feeling with you for real. I want to be able to remember and treasure everything about the day that I became your wife for the rest of my life."
He looked into my eyes again and when I stared into his, they softened. "Yeah, darlin'." He reached out his hand and wrapped it around the back of my neck, brushing his hand up and down against my skin. "I want that shit too." He grinned. "Making you my wife, as me this time." His grin widened. "There's never been anything else in my entire damn life that's ever measured up to the way I feel about you, babe. And I'm realizing now, not even the club."
Shock crossed my face and I suddenly felt like crying, but I sniffed back any potential tears that could've made their way to the front of my eyes. I knew how much his club meant to him, how much his brothers meant to him. I knew how much that life meant to him and that he would've been damned to ever give it up for anything or anyone for any reason if asked.
At least until now.
"This life is hard, babe," he went on. "Damn hard. Between the things I've done, the things I'll have to do, between who I am as a man for my brothers and the man I'll always wanna be for you... It's hard as fuck sometimes to keep up with all that shit."
"I know," I told him.
"Yeah, I know that you do. You feel that shit, understanding it in a way that I've always known nobody else ever could. You accept all of this and me for who I am, babe."
"I told you that I always would."
"Forever and always, yeah?"
I bit down on my lip and eagerly nodded my head. "Yeah..."
He pulled me to him then, and kissed me so softly, so sensually that I had to catch my breath a few times and pull back from him. "You alright?" he asked, bringing his other hand up to my face and stroking my cheek. I kept my eyes closed and brought my hands up to his chest to keep my balance, then nodded my head. He brushed the hair away from my face and I draped my leg over his thigh. I situated myself right on top of his dick through his pants and immediately felt it rising against my sex.
My eyes peeled open and when I looked down into his face, I saw lust, anger, passion and greed; desire and fire... sex, love, need and want all wrapped up in one beautiful package that was him. I slinked my arms around his neck and pulled him to me. Then as I dug my nails into his back, I started gyrating against him, slowly, pressing my sex as hard as I could against the extreme length of his rock-solid penis. My entire body felt as if it had just caught on fire and though my breathing went from faint to damn near nonexistent, I couldn't stop. Seeing the need in his eyes, tasting it in the air as he parted his lips and exhaled; my body called for his, ached for his in ways that I knew could never ache for anyone else's ever again.
When I swerved my hips, he dropped his hand down to my waist and shoved against me. Our clothes created an intense friction against each other and as the need for hi
m built up between my thighs, burning me up from the outside in, I could feel my chest becoming tight, my mind falling away from me, my breasts swelling, my nipples hardening. He yanked my skirt back up to my stomach again with a sort of vengeance this time, grunting and grinding as his penis became so erect that the zipper of his jeans was beginning to slide down all on its own. He dipped his head forward and sank his teeth into the center of my neck. God, it hurt like hell, but the pain somehow only made me that much more turned on. Whether I was a masochist, crazy or just completely sick in the head for wanting this so badly, I wasn't sure. All I knew was that I did and knowing that he wanted it too made it that much more desirable.
"Oh my God, Roman." As the heat accelerated between us, as his skin became so hot that it was practically burning against me, as the tightness in my chest collapsed, I snaked my fingers through his hair and willed him to take me as his woman, his wife, his everything right then and there. He reached around to unhook my bra, never taking his time in removing it and in fact, tossing it across the room so that it wasn't even sitting between us after. As I arched my back and lifted my breasts, he moved his mouth back and forth between them, sucking and biting my nipples, gradually nibbling the skin around each one as he tugged them into his mouth. This man was such a fantastic lover that in the back of my mind I knew that if I ever even wanted anyone else, I would never find someone who could practically make me come without even being inside me first.
As my breathing heightened, he dipped his hands inside the back of my panties and squeezed my ass. Then he dragged me closer to him before pushing me back, dragged me close, then pushed me back again. And that's when I realized that he wanted to guide me against his cock himself; he wanted to control this, control my need for him and how we moved against each other; control me. This feeling was so electric, the mild domination and soft seduction -- my God, I had never been more aroused.
My panties were soaked against him, completely soaked. I reached down for his pants then, my heart beating at such a rapid speed that by now, my breathing couldn't even keep up. I lifted to my knees and pulled them down along with his briefs, then waited impatiently as he yanked at my panties, so hard that they ripped in half. I laughed but was stopped by his tongue as it practically destroyed my mouth like a boat that had been traveling across rocky waters and washed up ashore in pieces. This kiss was hard and heavy, no longer soft and sensuous but still sexy all the same.