by Zoey Parker
I turned to Luke. He saw the nervousness on my face.
“You’ll be fine, Olivia, I promise. Just a few weeks. It’ll be gone in a flash,” he said to me.
“You better be right, Luke,” I told him. “Or else I’m gonna kick your ass.”
He grinned. “There’s the fighter I know.” He playfully pressed a fist against my chin. “You don’t have to love this bastard, or even like him. Hell, I don’t care if you ever see him again after today. But just keep things lookin’ nice and proper and I’ll see you on the other end. I’ll be the one waiting for you with all the money.”
I forced a smile through my anxiety.
“You look beautiful, baby sister,” was the last thing he said to me before the music started playing and it was my time to walk down the aisle.
I gulped as Luke took my arm and we turned to face the rest of the congregation. Bikers littered the pews, with more leather and tattoos than this church—or, for that matter, any church, most likely—had ever seen in one place. Cigarette smoke hung over the room like a veil of its own.
Like a veil—how appropriate. Keeping people guessing as to what was going on underneath.
The music boomed through the rafters. Inked Angels from Austin sat on the left half of the church, while the Houston Inked Angels stayed on the right. No one dared cross over to the other side.
Luke and I started walking, one careful step at a time, so as not to trip over the hem of my dress. It hugged my hips tightly, then flared out in a wide, silky arc. My arms and shoulders were bare, and the thick edge of the corset was hardly tall enough to cover my breasts, so that my curves spilled forward and caught the light streaming through stained glass windows.
Inked Angels on both sides whistled as I passed them, hooting and hollering at me.
“Damn, girl!”
“What a beaut!”
“That’s a fine piece of ass, brothers.”
Biker weddings—was there anything else like them?
The music reached a crescendo as I passed the last pew, then descended into a hush as I reached the bottom of the stairs that led up to the altar. The whole time I was walking, I had kept my head down, making sure I didn’t bust my ass in front of a hundred men who would have killed me with their laughter. My heart was pounding a frenetic beat against my chest as I looked up slowly, and saw the face of the man I was to marry.
The world stopped.
I wanted to choke, to scream, to do anything that would let the shock of what I was seeing out of me, because there was no way that one single person could handle all of this emotion at once.
Blaze.
I hadn’t seen him since the night he was assaulted and kicked out of the Austin charter by the very man who now held my arm and escorted me down the aisle.
Blaze.
I hadn’t seen him since he kissed me in my driveway and sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole of desire that no one had ever shown me before.
Blaze.
What was the world conspiring to do to me?
I looked to my left and saw Luke’s face turning a thousand different shades of red. His eyes bulged, the veins in his neck stood out like railroad tracks, and his mouth babbled like a fish, jaw swinging up and down in a futile effort to find words that captured his rage.
“You, you son of a…you motherfucking…you cocksucking, traitorous piece of…” he stuttered. Spit flew from his mouth. His hands tightened into white-knuckled fists. Luke whirled around, trying to find someone to hit or something to smash, anything to let loose the maelstrom brewing inside of him.
Finding nothing, he reached into his boot and snatched out the blade he always kept there. It reflected the beautiful oranges and blues of the stained glass above. For a weird moment, I thought it looked almost beautiful.
Then he shifted, and the blade moved into a beam of blood red light.
Luke sprang towards Blaze, who had not moved an inch from his stance on the altar. His knife hand drew back with murderous intent, ready to stab seven inches of vicious steel into the son of a bitch who had first laid lips on his sister.
He didn’t get far enough, though, before a man with Houston spelled out in big block letters on his bottom rocker stepped in between Luke and the altar and pointed a gun square between Luke’s eyes.
Luke froze. The man’s pistol pressed into the flesh of his forehead.
“Easy now, brother,” said the man. “My name is Steezy. And I’m here to make sure that this whole contrived freak show goes according to plan, you understand?” His voice was calm and measured, but there was undeniable violence backing it up. “And let me tell ya, stabbing the groom is not on the menu for today.”
The Houston crew chuckled, a low, grating noise that sounded like rocks in a grinder.
Another man from Houston emerged from the first pew. He had gray eyes that looked like they had seen just about everything there was to see. He walked with a wince, one foot slightly cocked out, no doubt the victim of lingering pain from some ancient injury. The way all the men hushed each other and turned to face him, I knew that he had power.
“Gentlemen,” he said to everyone. He had his hands raised, almost in a gesture of peace. “This is not how a wedding should be. Before we proceed, why don’t we all put the weapons down. Eh?” He pointed at the knife in Luke’s hand.
Still boiling red, Luke lowered the blade and shoved it back into his boot. Steezy watched with narrowed eyes until he was confident the weapon was stowed. Then he, too, holstered his gun. The bated breath in the room eased some, but the tension was far from dissipated.
“Croak, this is a fucking outrage,” Luke snapped to the gray-eyed man. “This was not what we agreed to. I’m not letting my sister marry this fuck I see standing in front of me.”
So this was Croak. I looked him over. Everything about him was smooth and dark. This man had been through war and lived to tell the tale.
“Luke, this is what has to happen,” Croak said, both to Luke and to the whole congregation. “This is the union of two charters that have for too long been at each other’s throats. Is that how brothers should behave?” He scanned his eyes across the crowd. Nothing moved, save for cigarette smoke.
“It isn’t,” he said finally. “We need to fix this.”
“No fucking way,” Luke said. “Double-crossing me by swapping in this piece of shit for the man we agreed upon is no way to start a new kind of peace, you gray-haired son of a bitch.”
Croak merely looked at him. His eyes glinted.
I looked at Blaze on the stage. He had not yet looked at me. I couldn’t read his face or his posture. Like always, I had no way to know what he was thinking. Instead he stood, stoic and still, like a god carved out of marble.
I was still reeling from the sight. I thought back to the night in my driveway, how his hand had cupped against my hip and drew me into his body. How his smell seduced me, how his mouth sucked from me everything that I wanted to give up to him. The same tendrils of longing that had sprung up that night were winding through me again, down every nerve, like a heat wave that intensified with every passing second.
“My brother,” Croak finally said, “this is not a real marriage. No one here is fool enough to believe that these two are bound in love for eternity.” He looked at Blaze and me. I tried to catch Blaze’s eye, but he refused to look back.
What was going on inside that head?
Croak continued, “No, I’m not that dumb, and neither are you, brother. This is a symbol, the closest thing to a handshake that our two charters are gonna be able to consent to right now.”
Luke’s fists tightened further. I could see how badly he wanted that knife to be back in his hand.
“I can’t say for sure what kind of marriage it’ll be, though it sure as hell ain’t a proper one,” said Croak. “Maybe they’ll find something in each other worthwhile, or maybe they’ll hate each other’s guts. Maybe they’ll fuck, maybe not.. My point is that’s not the point. We need to bury
the hatchet so that those rowdy Diablos fuckers to the south don’t look over at our side of the border and see us in disarray.”
The men in the audience nodded. Croak saw their energy and played it like a fiddle, stoking them into more and more of an uproar. Luke watched in silent rage.
“Is that what we want?” he asked, holding his hands high. The men on both sides of the aisle shook their heads angrily.
“Do we want to give up all the territory we’ve worked so hard to control?”
“No!” many yelled.
“Do we want to wake up to a knife in the back from a fucking cartel?”
“No!”
Croak turned back to Luke. “So you see, we’re between a rock and a hard place here, kiddo. The way I see it, we’ve got two choices: stay stubborn and die, or proceed with the affair we’ve got on hand today.” He gestured back and forth between Blaze and me.
It took all the effort in Luke’s entire body to grit out the syllables he spoke next.
“Fine,” he growled. “So be it.”
And then I was standing across from Blaze.
Five years had gone by since I’d last been in this position. Five long years of thinking back on the one brief moment we’d shared that night. Five years of disappointment, as every guy who’d ever tried anything with me failed to live up to the soaring heights that just one kiss from Blaze had taken me.
Five years. A very long time.
But this wasn’t a marriage, wasn’t a reunion, wasn’t anything like that. This was a prison sentence, and I planned to approach it exactly like that. Do my time, keep to myself, and get out. I sure as hell wasn’t trying to get fucked by the man locked in the cell with me.
The bikers assembled in the pews slowly fell to a hush. You could’ve heard a pin drop, it was so quiet. The tension from the fight had simmered down, but you could still tell that there was too much bad blood for everything to be truly nice and relaxed.
I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t real. After all, it wasn’t exactly a fairy tale wedding. I hoped that one day, when I got married for real, to someone I loved, that it would be a vast improvement over the knife-drawing, leather-clad, chain-smoking event that I was currently mired in.
The preacher, Steezy, cleared his throat and began to address the crowd.
“Folks, we’re all gathered here today for, well, for a couple different reasons, and they ain’t exactly the legit kind of reasons that usually accompany somethin’ like this.”
Blaze stared at me. His eyes were inscrutable. It was almost like he wasn’t seeing me at all, or like he was seeing straight through me. I didn’t know what I’d been hoping for. Joy? Excitement? At the very least, it would’ve been nice if the bastard acted like he knew who the hell I was.
Or did he not care? Maybe I was just another notch in his belt, some bitch he’d known once and forgotten about. I’m sure there had been many more after me, and I’m definitely sure he did a hell of a lot more than just kiss most of those girls. A guy like Blaze—tall, good-looking and he knew it, with swagger aplenty—would have more than his fair share of women swooning at his feet. There was a decent chance that I just wasn’t worth remembering to him.
But damn, I remembered him.
“We all know damn well the history that led us here. Lotsa blood spilled between brothers riding under the same patch, which just ain’t right, if you ask me. Time’s come to put all that behind us,” Steezy boomed. “This marriage right here, it ain’t really for these two at all. But we need them to stand up here and say all the things a couple that’s gettin’ hitched is supposed to say, for the good of the club.”
The crowd was still quiet. Blaze had not blinked.
“So, that brings us here. Let’s keep movin’ right along, and get into—”
“I remember that night,” Blaze interrupted. Steezy raised an eyebrow, but he stopped and let Blaze continue.
I wasn’t sure who Blaze was talking to, exactly. Was this for me? For Croak or Luke? For the whole church to hear?
“You know which night I’m talkin’ about. I see how you’re lookin’ at me now, and it’s the same way you was looking at me back then. You’re mine now, and I’m claiming you like I didn’t get a chance to do five years ago. You belong to me. That’s my vow.”
Blaze’s words sent me reeling. He was so hard to read, so dark and swirling all the time, that to hear him claim me as his property like that was like being sucked into his storm. I felt like I was churning within him, like he was swallowing me whole and I had no choice but to submit to it or be broken by it.
His hands tightened on mine. Everything he was saying flowed through me. It was a jolt to feel the intensity of his hunger. I wasn’t sure whether to be terrified or turned on. There was so much man to him. We had never had a chance to see where that kiss would have led.
Steezy spoke again. “Olivia Morris, do you accept Blaze as your husband? As your man, your claimant? Do you agree to love and serve him and his brood? Do you agree that you belong to his patch and to his name?”
He asked one last question.
“Do you agree that you are his?”
I swallowed heavily. The world was losing shape around me. I couldn’t handle everything that was happening all at once. It was too much, too fast. Blaze and Luke and Croak and the guns and the skulls and the motorcycle engines idling like wild animals outside.
There was only one thing left to say.
“I do.”
The second the words left my mouth, before Steezy could say anything else, Blaze tugged me forward. I almost fell into his arms, yanked against his warm body, which hummed with an intoxicating electricity. His mouth pressed against mine ferociously, hungrily, like he was drowning and I was the last air in the world.
His tongue shoved my lips apart and he explored along my teeth. The warmth of our tongues intermingling spread down my throat and stabbed spikes of heat between my legs. It was like that night five years ago and this morning were one and the same, like no time had passed—or like all that time had passed but it didn’t matter.
I felt everything exactly as I’d felt then, but now it was so much more; the longing, amplified by the time we lost, the fiery need.
But no. I couldn’t let myself submit to it. If I fell over the edge of letting this brute claim me, I would be left broken and Luke would lose everything. I knew that if Blaze truly claimed me like he said he would, then I wouldn’t be able to keep anything from him. One look at the scars that coursed over his neck was enough to know that he would stop at nothing if he thought I was lying to him. I had to stay separate; I had to keep the barrier.
So with the strongest mental shove I could muster, I locked it all away. I became cold. I broke the kiss and with a gentle, deceptive hand, guided his ear to my mouth. I whispered to him so no one else could hear, “Listen to me, Blaze, you son of a bitch. I’m not the girl you walked away from five years ago. I’m my own woman, and you do not control me. You will never control me. You will never own me. I don’t care what the marriage papers say. I. Am. Not. Yours.”
I pulled back and stared at his face, waiting for some reaction, any reaction. Would he explode? His hands were so capable of shattering me utterly. The way his pupils reached back forever and ever—there was depth to him, and I knew that in there lay violence.
But what he did next took me completely off guard.
He grinned.
The flash of white teeth was nothing like I’d been expecting. I had just laughed in the face of this whole silly tradition, of his club, of his president. I had basically told him he was nothing to me, and now he was laughing? It didn’t make sense.
With a brutal wrench, he jerked my ear next to his lips, so that this time I would listen to him. I tried to wriggle free, but he was too strong. I wasn’t going anywhere. His breath was heavy on my skin.
“Liv,” he said, “ I’m gonna take you out of this church, whether you like it or not, strap your ass down on my bike,
and we are gonna go somewhere far away so that no one but me can hear you scream my name.”
My eyes were wide open in shock. He leaned back and laughed again. I hoped to God he couldn’t tell how wet I was beneath my wedding dress. My knees felt barely capable of supporting my weight anymore, and my whole body was screaming for me to fall, to fall right onto his cock.
I could see the thick outline of his manhood straining against the suit pants. It was yearning to be inside me, and my soaking wet pussy wanted exactly the same thing. I had no idea what would happen next, but I did know one thing for sure: this marriage was off to one hell of a start.