CLAIMED BY THE BAD BOY: A Dark Bad Boy Romance (Bloody Saints MC)

by Zoey Parker

  But even as I tried to calm myself with these unlikely possibilities, I could tell by the features on Kade’s face that I wasn’t so lucky. I watched as his eyebrows went low, forming a thick line over each eye. The line of his mouth grew hard and grim. His eyes were sharp, like daggers looking for a target. And his hand gripped the phone so hard that I thought it might break from the force. I silently prayed that it would.

  A moment later, with forced calmness, Kade put the phone back in its charger. Then he turned his dark eyes to me. I flinched at the look shining in them.

  “What the hell was that?” he demanded in a low voice, and I could see that Brody off to the side looked a little panicked, too, his eyes wide and scared.

  I tried to be calm, forcing a smile to my face, glancing between the two larger men. “What did they say?” I asked, hoping that it was all a misunderstanding, even though I was far past the point of believing that anymore.

  “‘Stay out of it.’ Any idea what that might mean?”

  I shuddered. Had my stalker known that Kade would pick up? No, don’t be ridiculous! Kade barely got to the phone before me! I admonished silently. But it didn’t do anything to ease the feeling inside of me. Kade wasn’t the only person to have ever picked up the phone and gotten my stalker. But he was the only one my stalker had actually spoken to.

  I didn’t think that was a good thing.

  The stinging in my eyes began, though I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to be weak right now—hadn’t I don’t that enough lately? And especially in front of Kade. But I couldn’t help it. I kept calm even when the tears started to roll down my cheeks and my voice was level as I finally came out with the truth.

  “I don’t know for sure,” I began in a detached voice. “But I think he’s the same one who wrote the letters.”

  Kade let out a vicious curse, then grabbed my phone up off its cradle again. Kade easily chucked my phone to Brody, who scrambled to catch it, surprised by…well, everything, I was pretty sure. The poor guy didn’t look like he had any idea what to do. He hot potatoed the damn thing for a full thirty seconds before getting a good hold of it.

  “Get it to Caleb. See if they can trace the last incoming call.” When Brody just stared at him a little dumbfounded, still a little scared, Kade snapped, “Now!”

  “Right!”

  Brody turned and hurried out the door, leaving it open as he raced to his motorcycle—which he’d forgotten was parked underground, so he actually had to come back in and hurry downstairs to get to it because he didn’t know how to open the garage on his own.

  I would have laughed under normal circumstances, but right then I was too scared—of my stalker and of how mad Kade was.

  When we heard the rumbling of Brody’s motorcycle, Kade stalked over to me in two strides, stopping barely a hairsbreadth away from me. “What the fuck, Abby?”

  In a voice that I cursed for being so small, I said simply, “I’m sorry.”

  “Goddamn it, how long has this been going on?” He ran his hands through his thick, dark hair, but spoke again before I could find my voice to answer. “You need to tell me everything, Abby! Everything. How the hell am I supposed to protect you when I don’t even know what the hell I’m trying to protect you from? Jesus, Abby!”

  I bit my lower lip, worrying my teeth along it. Kade hadn’t stepped away yet and we were close enough that all I had to do was lean ever so slightly forward and we would be touching. Electricity sprang between us—at least, I could feel it—and I didn’t want to talk about the bad things anymore. I wanted to talk about how I thought I might be falling for him, hard. I wanted to taste his lips on mine and be grateful that he was here to swallow up my fear.

  So when I felt my neck elongate, trying to get my mouth closer to his, I thought it might happen, that kiss I was so desperately craving. “You know everything now,” I found myself whispering, staring at those lips. “I trust you.”

  He looked down at me fiercely, and it didn’t look like anger anymore. Instead, he looked like he was thinking the same things I was. Like he wanted to close that last little space between us and cover my mouth with his.

  Finally.

  But he never did. Instead, he sucked in a heavy breath and said in a barely audible whisper, “I…I should call Caleb. Give him a heads-up.”

  As he turned away, disappointment washed through me. I couldn’t figure out what the wild, incongruous signals meant, but I hoped still that they might eventually line up with mine.

  Chapter Twelve

  Kade

  We didn’t go out again that day. She stayed holed up in what was her office, which I thought was a strange room to have given her profession. But she assured me that an office was important because there was a lot of paperwork involved, if only for contracts and negotiations. I was surprised that she was handling so much of that herself, though she explained that after she went over everything, her agent did most of the negotiating and she had a lawyer on retainer to look over her contracts before she signed, just to make sure she wasn’t shooting herself in the foot.

  “Learned that one the hard way,” she assured me, and I didn’t doubt it.

  As for me, I spent my time as far from her as I could get. I made use of her personal gym, which was better than the gym in the apartment complex where I lived and the one that I went to regularly with the guys combined. It said a lot about how much money she had on hand.

  When I’d pushed myself until I was sweaty and finally tired, I took a shower. A long shower. A cold shower. Because it was hard not to think of Abby and the way she seemed to give me those fuck me eyes all the time. It was hard to not notice her tempting dresses and her plunging cleavage and the way her silky blonde hair liked to curl a little bit at the ends all on its own, trying to wrap around her pale flesh.

  I was frustrated to the point where it was starting to hurt a little bit and jerking myself to orgasm only helped so much, though I’d done plenty of that in my scant time alone.

  When I was dressed again—Brody had been kind enough to drop off some of my own things—I went back downstairs to see if Abby was around. I heard her voice coming in through the office and knew that she was still doing whatever work it was that young starlets did. Which I’d been pretty sure until this moment was not a whole hell of a lot.

  I went to the kitchen and made myself food. I asked if Abby wanted anything, but she said she’d grabbed a quick lunch while I’d been in the shower. I didn’t know if that was true or if she was just trying to avoid me.

  After our near kiss in the middle of the living room after Brody left, she’d seemed…off. Disappointed or hurt even. I didn’t quite know what to do with that, so I decided to leave it alone. Better to stay out of the whole thing in the long run. It wasn’t like I could have anything permanent with her anyway. So I just let her work through whatever she was feeling on her own and tried to push away the lingering memories I had of the way she felt.

  In my arms, pressed to my chest, crawling into my lap to straddle me and seal her lips to mine. The way her hips felt beneath my hands and her thighs lingered on either side of me, her core poised just perfectly over my rising cock.

  It wasn’t going so well, but I worked at it anyway.

  By the time dinner rolled around, Abby proclaimed that she wasn’t hungry and that she was going to bed. I was welcome to whatever I could find and if I decided to order in, there was a list of numbers for takeout places in the top drawer by the fridge, please remember to buzz them in.

  All of this she said briskly, as though I was a business partner or coworker, not as though we’d been encountering heated passion springing up without warning between us.

  What did you expect? I thought to myself. You just turned her down—a bunch of different times!

  And while I didn’t want to think of it like that exactly, I knew it was true. I had turned her down. Every time she stretched her body toward mine, every time she slid her hand along my thigh, every time she looked
at me with those hooded eyes that begged me to tear off her clothes and do ungodly things to her. Each and every one of those had been a rejection, even if I hadn’t meant them to be.

  I just couldn’t accept her offers—no matter how much I wanted to.

  I stayed up for a long time after she went to bed. Part of that was so that I could stroke myself as I thought of the curve of her breasts and the flare of her hips, the way her waist looked so tiny that I could fit both my hands around it. I slid my hand up and down my shaft as I imagined what she would look like on top of me, naked and unbridled, words of need spilling from her full lips. I pictured the way sweat might slide between her breasts, her skin shiny with it, her hair damp as she bounced on top of me, driving herself to her own climax.

  I pumped until I found my release, but it did little to sate my lust for her. I still wanted Abby and it was killing me to know that she was just across the hall behind that closed door, tucked into bed.

  Them’s the breaks, I thought to myself, my release at the very least pushing forth exhaustion. Maybe I’d sleep at least tonight.

  ***

  The next day was an actual work day. I had been hoping that maybe Abby would be okay with just staying in, but she wasn’t.

  “I have an audition,” she told me over my cup of coffee. She was sipping at tea, despite my offer of fresh coffee. “It’s been on the schedule for months and it’s a very big deal. Not going could seriously hurt my career.”

  I wanted to yell at her that this was her life and she was busy worrying about her career, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In the end, I kind of admired her bravery. Despite all that had been happening to her, she was still ready to go and face the rest of the world.

  It made me like her more.

  “Fine. Where is this audition?” I grumbled, folding my arms across my chest. She was standing on the opposite side of the kitchen, leaning casually against the counter. It was the first time she’d been the one to try and put some distance between us, and I was both relieved and disappointed by that fact.

  “It’s at the Rudyard Center at two this afternoon. I can’t afford to be late.”

  I knew the Rudyard Center. It was part business center and part art center. On the lower floors, all kinds of classes were held from painting to dance to acting. I’d only ever been there once when I was dating a young woman who was sure she would one day be a world class dancer. I didn’t think she’d ever reached that goal as I’d seen her waiting tables nearly a year after we broke up, but she’d been excellent in bed when we’d been together. I didn’t know how talented she was as a dancer, but she was flexible enough that I had definitely enjoyed bending her in some rather unusual positions as I’d fucked her senseless. She’d never complained either.

  “Yeah, I know where it is.” I frowned. I also knew that it was a logistical nightmare as far as protecting someone. The lower levels were really open, wide rooms where anyone was allowed. As far as I knew, the upper levels—where I thought maybe she’d have the actual audition—were set up like business cubicles and rooms. There would probably be more security there at least, so I wouldn’t have to worry about as much. But then I also didn’t really know who I was looking for, so it meant I did have to keep an eye on the security guards, too.

  At least it’s in the middle of the day, I thought grimly. It was about my only advantage at this point.

  “Good. Do you want me to hire a driver this time?” she asked pointedly, though I sensed the anger and coolness of her tone had as much to do with her memories of that night at the club as it did with annoyance toward me.

  I considered it, then said, “Yes, I do. That way I can stick closer to you. If the driver’s a problem, I can handle him, but you’re not going to that building without me, so a driver would probably be more convenient.”

  I thought I saw something flicker in her eyes, but she shoved it aside quickly and said, “Fine. I’ll make the call.” A second later, she turned back to me and said, “Speaking of calls, when exactly am I getting my cell phone back?”

  Shrugging, I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back a little, fixing her with a stony stare. “Whenever they’re done with it. Probably would have been sooner if you’d been upfront with this when it first started.”

  Her cheeks burned red and I was pretty sure it was from anger this time, but I couldn’t quite make myself care. I was still a little angry myself after learning that she’d been receiving phone calls in addition to the threatening letters. How far was she going to let this go before she asked someone for help?

  I didn’t know. I was just glad she had finally told someone. Caleb. Me.

  “I need a phone,” she told me through gritted teeth.

  I smiled at her, then tossed something at her. She nearly didn’t catch it, but managed by pressing it to her belly. Frowning, she turned it over in her hand. “What the hell is this?”

  “A burner phone,” I informed her. It was a flip phone, old and cheap, and it didn’t have GPS or anything fancy. No one would be following her with that stupid thing. “Temporary until you can get yours back. Keep it on you at all times.”

  She didn’t look pleased by this, but shoved it into her pocket just the same and promptly headed out of the room.

  Later that afternoon, we left for the audition, leaving early enough to account for traffic and still arrive there several minutes early. I was impressed with how seriously she took her job, even if I still felt that it was kind of a cushy job.

  As we pulled into the underground parking of the Rudyard Center, Abby said her first words to me since my giving her the phone—it must have pissed her off more than I thought. “Have you heard anything about my phone?”

  I hesitated. Honestly, yes, I had heard something. In fact, I’d heard they came up with several different leads and all of them had been dead ends. Either they led to pay phones or to burner phones like the ones that I gave to Abby. None of them had provided anything solid. No name, no address. I was hoping they would have more luck with the stationary I’d found at that apartment, but I hadn’t gotten anything back on that yet.

  “No, not yet. Things take time, you know.” And they did, but I just didn’t think it was wise to tell her we’d been having such dismal luck right before she went for her audition.

  She frowned, but nodded once, then got out of the car as we came to a stop. I did the same, moving quickly so that she wouldn’t get too far ahead of me with her quick pace.

  “You didn’t want to be dropped off at the front?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “No. I want to know where the car is.”

  Smart, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  We made it to the seventh floor of the building and I was surprised to see that the waiting area was huge and full of pretty young blondes who were likely all vying for the same part as Abby. Except none of them stand a chance against her, I thought. Many of them were attractive, of course, and I suspected some of them had talent, but I was starting to think that there was no woman more beautiful than Abby Woodard.

  I just couldn’t ever tell her that.

  “Wait here,” she commanded me as she took off her jacket and placed it along with several items on one of the empty chairs. As soon as it slid from her shoulders, I let my eyes rake over her perfectly formed body. Her breasts were only sort of on display in a v-neck t-shirt that was a soft heather gray color and clung to her body in just the right way. It was pretty thin and if I stared closely enough, I could see the faint outline of her bra beneath it. It looked like it had lacey designs over the cups, and I found myself wanting to lift up her shirt to see if I was right. My cock grew hard as I stared at her, noting the way her tight jeans clung to that perky round ass of hers and down her long, shapely legs. “They’ll see me alone.”

  Ignoring my sudden, raging desire, I raised a single eyebrow at her skeptically, not liking the idea of being shoved outside to wait patiently until she returned. And most of it was actual
ly because I wasn’t sure I could move fast enough to protect her if something happened while she was in that room alone.

  She won’t be alone, I reminded myself. There will be people in there she’s auditioning for. Except that I didn’t know any of those people. I didn’t trust any of those people.

  “I’m not sure that’s—” I began, but she waved me off before I’d even finished.

  “Look, this is how it’s done. Stay out here. I’ll be fine. No one in there wants to hurt me; they want me to make them lots of money.” And with that, she marched away to the room, pausing to tell a young woman with a clipboard her name. Then she disappeared into that room and I was left waiting anxiously for her to get back.

  I fidgeted as she did her audition. The women in the room were mostly going over lines, but a few had glanced up to peer curiously at me. It had to be pretty obvious that I was not here to audition for the same part that they were.