MARRIED TO MY MASTER: A Bad Boy Hitman Romance

by Fox, Nicole

  “Already, boss?” A younger boy—one I recognized from the night before when I was still working at the bar—poked his head out. He looked really young—hardly even eighteen, I had to guess. He still had the crust of sleep in his eyes, and his hair was all over the place, as if he had just crawled out of the bed.

  “You know the drill. We have a lot of riding to do, and I don’t feel like getting back home tomorrow when we could be back today. Don’t be difficult. I don’t have a problem leaving any of you slackers behind.”

  The boy pouted, but there was a playful little glint in his eyes.

  “Awe, come on Boss. You wouldn’t leave me behind. I’m your favorite!”

  “Kid, if anyone’s my favorite, it certainly ain’t you.”

  “Hey—!”

  Grizzly laughed as we continued on down the hall, leaving the boy—Kid, I assumed was his name—down there pouting.

  “He’s cute,” I said. “You know, like in a little puppy kind of way.”

  “Yeah ... that’s Kid for you,” Grizzly said. “He’s a good boy with a good heart, but you know how those young ones are sometimes. Downright damn stupid. I try to keep him in line, though. His older brother had been a Prospect before ... everything. He kinda looks up to what we’ve built here, and I try to keep him in line so that the same shit doesn’t happen again, you know?”

  I smiled a little.

  “Yeah ... Yeah, I can see that.”

  I found it ironic that such an MC known as the Butchers had such ... a family feel to it, when they were all together and when Grizzly talked about his boys—about Kid, in particular. While we waited outside by his bike for everyone to come on out, he told me about them. Grizzly was never very animated. He didn’t gesture with his arms and hands and he didn’t get loud or excited either. He had this ... calm, knowledgeable kind of vibe about him. It always made talking to him in the past relaxing and fun.

  “ ...then there’s Scooter. I don’t recommend you try his moonshine. Put me out of commission for almost a week.”

  “That good?” I asked with a wry grin.

  “That bad. The shit was horrible. I thought I was going to die.”

  I laughed at that.

  “Ironic. I remember you were always sneaking lil tankard’s of Cleveland’s shine out of the bar any chance you got—”

  “No, no.” He shook his head, looking sage as he did, though there was an amused twitch to his lips. “I only ever was the lookout for Rodent, remember? I always told him it was a bad idea, because Cleveland always knew when there was some missing, and Rodent always had that guilty look on his face when he did something that he wasn’t supposed to do.

  “It never stopped you from getting Rodent to share with me, though.”

  “Nah ... nah it didn’t ...” He stared at me, his gaze suddenly intense for a moment. “You ever think about—”

  “Hey, boss!” We both looked up, seeing Kid bounding over. The others were starting to pile out, too. Whatever sleepy appearance Kid had had before, it was gone now. Something must have woken him up. “Boss! We’re almost ready. I think Cutter is taking the longest. He’s bent over the porcelain hurling up some nasty shit—”

  “Lovely,” Grizzly interrupted. “He got water?”

  “Yeah, I got him a couple glasses, but he was still hurling when I left.”

  Grizzly sighed.

  “We’ll wait until he’s not dying anymore. Tell him he knows better than to go that hard. He doesn’t know how to hold his liquor and he never will.” He shook his head and looked back at me. “Now, where were we?”

  “You were about to ask me something? Uhm. You left off at, ‘you ever think about?’ Think about what?”

  “Right.” He reached out and brushed some hair out of my face. “What I meant. You ever think about ... What would have happened? If you had stayed?”

  Ah. So that’s where we were in the conversation.

  “Sometimes ... I did. I don’t really. Not anymore.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “I do,” he admitted. “Almost every day—what it would have been like had you stayed.”

  “I couldn’t, Grizzly,” I said. “I—”

  “No, no ... I think I understand. A little. I’m just saying. I was wondering if you ever thought about it. It was never really the same after you left, you know. I always thought that you would have ended up brightening things up like you used to, you know.”

  I smiled a little at him, patting him.

  “Like I said ... things change. I’m sure something would have changed ... At some point. But it’s okay. Let’s—let’s not talk about this, all right?”

  “All right.”

  We waited for the rest of the Butchers after that, and I was glad for the silence. I didn’t want to have that conversation—the ‘what if’ conversation. The ‘oh how things would have been different’ conversation. The ‘I wish you had never left’ conversation. All this closeness with Grizzly was already getting to my head, I thought. It was getting a little too dangerously close for comfort.

  Remember your rule, Ana , I reminded myself in my head, even as I sat on the back of Grizzly’s bike, comfortably pressed against him while we waited. Remember what you made yourself promise. Never again. You’d never make yourself lose something so precious to you ever again.

  The only way to do that was to have nothing close enough to you that would be precious enough to break you, should it be ripped from you before your very eyes.

  # # #

  Eventually, we got back out on the road. Apparently, Cutter’s problem was a case of alcohol meeting food poisoning (reasons you should never get gas station sushi. You think that a grown man would know this, but clearly not.) It meant another motel stay, but I felt less apprehensive about it. There was something about being on the back of a bike again that had me soothed. It was either that or the fact that it had been easier than I thought to let some of my walls down again around Grizzly. I hated to admit it, but he’d always had that effect on me.

  When we pulled in to the second motel for the night, we were apparently about thirty miles out from town, then another thirty-five-to-forty from where the Butchers were based out of now. The boys were planning on going to the bar that was beside the motel, but I was feeling a night not cooped up in a bar. Especially since that’s all I’d been doing lately—working bars.

  “You sure you don’t want to go?” Grizzly asked me. We were in his room. I think he was planning on going.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It’ll give me some time to wind down, you know?”

  “Yeah.” He stood there, his head tilted. He smiled. “Can I stay with you, then? I was only going to go to buy you a drink or two and maybe treat you to dinner.”

  I bit my lip. Why was that ... so oddly romantic?

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Well, no, now I don’t. We can order pizza in instead and watch movies.”

  This room had two beds in it this time. I didn’t know if he had done that on purpose—if he thought that I wasn’t comfortable with sleeping with him—but as he plopped onto the bed that he chose and dialed for pizza, I took a little leap of bravery and sat myself at the edge of the bed. As he named off an order (extra-large, thin crust, with pepperoni and mushroom—my favorite) he raised a brow at me. I smiled at him.

  “What?” I asked, when he finally got off the phone.

  “I figured you’d take the other bed.”

  “You don’t want me in yours, then?”

  “I never said that.”

  He kept his eyes on me. They held that deep, intense stare that he always seemed to have. They pulled me in—and then he pulled me in. He kissed me.

  Like our previous kiss, it lit fire in me. He felt and tasted like pure masculine energy, his scent a subtle cologne that I hadn’t even realized he had put on. His hands came to my hips, drawing me close, into his lap. I could feel him under me. Hard. Wanting. His grip on me tightened and he
ground against me.

  I wanted him.

  But this—it was too much. I couldn’t. Especially not after our talk. There was something there ... Something that I had never fully acknowledged, but it was now so abundantly clear to me. How silly I had been not to see the extent of it.

  “Grizzly—wait.”

  He groaned, pulling away as my hands came to his chest.

  “Why wait?” he asked, genuinely confused. “ Ana . Things have changed, but you can’t tell me—”

  “Grizzly. Please. I’m—”

  “What? What? It’s been five years, Ana. It’s been so long. I missed you—”

  “I missed you too, Grizzly, but this is wrong. Please ...”

  He sat there under me for a while, just looking at me. His eyes bore into me, and I was so tempted to ignore my own protests and just give in to him, let him kiss me, let him touch me, then let him fuck me. What I wouldn’t give to feel something like real, genuine feeling and pleasure for the first time in such a long time.

  But ... not from him. Never from him. It would make me too willing to stay, and I knew that.

  I thought about trying to say something to make him feel better, but he beat me to the punch.

  “I’m gonna go to the bar.”

  The shift in demeanor was so sudden, a stark contratst to his earlier willingness to go at my pace. I crawled off him as he shifted me away almost forcibly.

  There was a bit of anger that flared in me alongside everything else that was going through me, but I bit it down and kept it inside, where it all belonged. Still, my thoughts raged. He had no right getting mad at me for not wanting to move fast! Wasn’t he the one who kept saying things had changed? I had agreed to come with him, back with his Butchers, and back to that old life ... that didn’t mean—

  I sighed. He shrugged on his kutte and stomped away like a petulant child—and honestly? That wasn’t something that I felt like dealing with right now. It wasn’t my job to console him!

  The door snapped closed before I could try to get him to come back and talk like normal human beings. I decided to let it go, passively. And then I started thinking.

  Why was I doing this to myself?

  Hadn’t I started falling for him before Rodent died?

  Hadn’t I dreamed about having his hands on me?

  Why—

  Well. I knew why.

  If I let him have me and then lost him like I had lost Rodent, would I really be able to keep going on the way I had after Rodent? When he was so much more to me than Rodent had been?

  Chapter Five Grizzly

  I stomped out of the motel room, my hands shoved into my pockets. I was annoyed and confused. My brain was in a hundred different places at once, and they all had to do with Ana and why this had to be complex when it was honestly just as easy as finding each other again and letting what had started in the past come to life in the present. It was borderline infuriating.

  I needed a goddamn drink.

  They boys hadn’t expected me back at the bar. There had been gaffing and hemming and hawing and what have you at the fact that I had come back so quickly—without Ana. It was an annoyed glare leveled at them all that had them shutting their mouths and leaving me be as I sat at the bar, alone.

  It wasn’t that she had told me no. It was that she had told me no when I knew she wanted to say yes. That didn’t make any sense to me. Was it the past? Was it all the things that had happened to her? I didn’t know.

  I knocked back a drink with a sigh. I wasn’t mad, I was more confused. Maybe frustrated. I could have any woman that I wanted—having the one that I actually wanted out of the dozens who tried to throw themselves at me shouldn’t have been so damn hard, then. But here I was. Alone. And Ana was in my hotel room, instead of here with me or there under me.

  I didn’t do slow. Not anymore. Life was too short for that. Maybe that was the thing. I’d resigned myself to waiting forever for Ana when she was with Rodent, but Rodent was long gone.

  Maybe that was it.

  Maybe she was still in love with him. Maybe she felt guilty because of that. Some weird ... woman thing about falling for a guy’s best friend and going to him after he died or something.

  “You look lonely.”

  I glanced up, seeing a pair of pretty blue eyes. I raised a brow.

  “Do I?”

  The girl giggled and sat herself down beside me.

  “I noticed all your boys except you are having fun, so I figured I’d come over here and cheer you up a little,” she said.

  “Is that all you’re trying to do?”

  She slid a little closer to me, pressing her tits against me. They were huge, but they were still soft against my chest, and I didn’t really have a problem with that. At least this made some damn sense—a woman throwing herself at me—even if I wasn’t feeling it right now. I gave her the courtesy of a smile.

  “I’m surprised a cute thing like you is alone.”

  “Yeah? Well, you see, I’m trying to fix that ...” Her hand wandered over my chest, and then it wandered down. She bit her lip as it slid into my lap, cupping my cock.

  “You wanna—”

  “Grizzly?”

  The sound of her voice alone had me jerking the woman’s hand from my dick. She looked put off and turned in the direction of Ana’s voice. I think the woman might have said something, but upon seeing the expression on Ana’s face, she backed off.

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  “N-no.”

  “Good. Go away.”

  I had to admit, it made my cock twitch. It was like seeing a little flash of Duchess again—take no shit, but give all of it. It was possessive. It was hot.

  And then, of course, she turned her gaze to me. That possessiveness flickered, and I saw something a little different. Was it hurt? Had I hurt her feelings? She was the one who had told me no.

  “I just came to find you to say sorry for that in the motel and tell you there’s too much pizza for me to eat it on my own. I see you’re busy, however. Also—you know, don’t drink yourself into some stupid stupor. We’re supposed to be back tomorrow.” Her tone was clipped, and I had to wonder if that’s actually what she had wanted to say to me. I didn’t get the chance to ask, though.

  I didn’t stop her when she turned around and left. The boys all watched the exchange, though went immediately to whatever the fuck it was they were doing before they decided to stick their nose in my business with Ana.

  Confused? I was very confused. Worse, I felt badly for having apparently upset her.

  What the entire fuck.

  Chapter Six Ana

  Just five minutes ago, music had been blaring. Drinks were being passed around, people were laughing and smiling their asses off. We were all having a good time—even me and Rodent. I thought things might be looking up despite his recent ... issues, despite the fact that I was carrying around a little secret I still had no idea I was going to do about inside me.

  The shots rang out loudly,, like they always did, every time I saw this scene in my head again. Glass shattered all around me and people screamed. There was blood everywhere.

  I was certain that I was going to die here. There was no end to the stream of gun fire, and there was no end to the yelling, yelling, yelling. I couldn’t even tell what other people were saying; it was a cacophony of sound and panic all around.

  Why were they doing this? Why now? Why, when we thought that everything had been settled—

  “Ana!”

  Where was that voice coming from?

  “Ana!”

  It sounded so familiar.

  “Ana!”

  He was going to protect me—

  “Ana, Christ, wake up!”

  I jolted up in a cold sweat, my chest heaving. I hadn’t had that dream in weeks. I knew it was a dream, even though it had felt so real in my sleep—so real in remembering it. It would come back every week or so and had been for the last five years. No matter what I did.
No matter how I tried to shake it.

  “Ana?”

  My eyes snapped to him. My dreams never included him. That would have been too much of a comfort to me, and my dreams only brought me torment of that night that had brought my whole world crashing down around me in one fell swoop. But the end of that scene, I remembered vividly. Grizzly covering my body. Protecting me. Keeping the bullets from hitting me, even as they tore into so many others. Carrying me away. Bringing me home—