by Warren, Rie
“Shut up.” I stopped her right there, pulling her hard against my body, melding her to me from thigh to chest whether she liked it or not. Next I’d kiss the holy hell out of her until she forgot about nabbing some random dude to be her fuck buddy the night. “First of all, you shouldn't even have been at a place like The GQ.”
I thought I could see steam shooting out of her ears, but I barreled on.
“Second of all, you weren't complaining too much when I gave you the lap dance.”
“Neither were you. Your cock was hard,” she hissed, struggling against my arms.
Hell, the cock in question throbbed right now, and for some insane reason I wanted to thrash her on the ass with the flat of my palm then fuck her until she screamed my name. My name alone.
“Or does that happen with everyone?” she asked, eyes bright blue slits of anger.
“No.” My voice dropped. My eyes lowered to her lips. How had I never noticed they were full and plump and utterly kissable? “That’s never happened before.”
Her lips opened. I watched in complete fascination as the tip of her pink tongue wet her red bottom lip from one side to the other. She didn’t say another word, and the silence between us became thick with arousal.
Hunger.
Want.
Now.
Leaning closer to each other, led by our lips, ready to kiss . . . Sadie pulled away with a bitter laugh.
“I always knew you were a player. I just didn’t think you would be with me. Stay away from me tonight, Kinky Kaid.” She pronounced my stage name with a sneer in her voice.
She left me scowling at her retreating back. I wasn’t about to make any promises. If another nightlong prospect for sex ambled her way in the form of an overeager biker dude, I’d gut him gullet to stomach with my knife and think nothing of it.
Fucking hell.
This was insane. My usual protective impulse toward her had combined with some serious boyfriend urges and . . . what? Mating wolves’ possessive tendencies?
“Looks like you could use a drink or a dozen.” Cole cut through the drunk, bumbling, ready for NYE lift-off crowd. “You hooked some serious live bait with Sadie.”
“She hates me now.” I thankfully accepted the glass of bourbon. It’s harsh burn down my throat mellowed in my stomach.
“What’d you do?” Cole peered at me, his short dark brown hair shaggy on his head.
“Fucked up. Big time.” I took another large swallow of the burning alcohol.
“She’s yours though, right?” he asked.
“We’ve never been together like that.”
“You sure as fuck act like you have.”
“Like I said. Suddenly all fucked up.” I placed the empty glass on a nearby table.
Maybe I should’ve stayed home with Grampa tonight. I’d be less of a danger to myself and others. But every time I spotted a flash of Sadie’s red top or heard her husky laughter or watched her dancing, my homing instincts kicked in, and I couldn’t stop staring at her. Every bone in my body screamed with awareness of her—I should be the guy by her side just like I always had been, but maybe something different now.
I found her alone at a quarter to midnight, on the eve of a new year. She warily watched me approach. She didn’t run away but her shoulders slumped, and her eyes were damp when I stopped in front of her.
“C’mere, Sadie.” I pulled her into my hug.
“Kinkaid.” Her hands lifted to my arms, and she curled against my chest. “I missed you this week.”
Every emotion stuck in my throat. All the right things to say to her, this woman, this girl I’d known half my life, got caught up in the lies I’d told and the truth she now knew.
“What do we do now? Where do we go from here?” Her voice trembled against my neck.
I smoothed my hands up and down her back. “I don’t know, darlin’.”
“You ruined everything, Kinkaid. What if we can’t be friends again?” Sad eyes lifted to mine.
I clasped her hands between mine, holding her for one last moment because it felt like she was leaving me and I’d rather cut my heart out. “What if there’s more between us?”
“You can’t have everything.” She ripped her hands from mine, flicking back her hair. The red shirt glowed, baring one of her shoulders—heaven and hell combined.
“I don’t want everything.” I wanted her.
She moved away but I clamped my hand around hers. Towing her to the bar, I reached behind it and retrieved a present I’d stashed there.
“And I want to give you this.” I placed the gift in her hands.
I’d wrapped it in a patchwork of leftover Christmas paper from years past—all we’d had on hand—and taped it haphazardly. It looked exactly like what it was. A poor man’s offering.
Sadie looked at the Charlie Brown package, her eyes softening for a moment. Then she whirled on me in an absolute fury. “You unbelievable jackass!” She prodded me in the chest with one pointed finger. “Lying to me for years. Telling me I’m your best friend but keeping secrets from me. You made sure I never got any whenever you were around, but you think it’s absolutely fine to go gallivanting around on a fucking stage almost buck-ass naked! And now you want to give me a Christmas present?”
She threw the box at me, and it dropped on the floor between us, along with my heart.
“You can take your present and shove it up that ass you like to shake so much, darlin’.” She pivoted around and stalked off in the opposite direction.
“So I take it I’m not gonna get a New Year’s Eve countdown kiss?” I yelled out after her. I obviously didn’t know when to stop.
She stomped out of the clubhouse with a middle finger flipped up behind her.
Last thing I heard was the banshee shriek of her bee-sting yellow Suzuki rocketing out of the parking lot before the commentary from the MC brothers kicked in.
“Dude. You jacked her shit up.” Cole picked up my badly wrapped gift and shoved it into my hands
JB came at me with claws bared. Hunter stopped the woman before she slashed me forehead to chin.
Brodie Steele, the Veep, slapped me on the shoulder. “Damn. You are so in the doghouse, might as well put one of Cole’s collars on you.”
Boomer loomed over me next. “Don’t know what the motherfuck you did, hoss, but probably a good time to figure out how to make it right.”
He moved on, and the countdown to the year 2015 began. Joy to the fucking world and all that.
TEN!
I’m a dickhead.
NINE!
Douchebag.
EIGHT-SEVEN-SIX!
A stupid-ass hick stripper.
FIVE-FOUR!
Cole grabbed my arm, hauling me along with him into the current of people rushing outside to watch the midnight fireworks. The loud man-made thunder ka-boomed as sparkles and diamonds and sheets of red, violet, orange, yellow, and white festooned the dark dome of the sky.
THREE. TWO. ONE!
There was only one. And she wasn’t here. I cheered with the rest of them as the New Year clicked over and cannons on the Charleston Battery boomed in time to the showy night sky fireworks all around from Patriots Point to the Battery, from Boone Hall Plantation to the old naval base in Park Circle.
As soon as I had the chance, I ducked back inside the club. I had nothing to celebrate tonight.
The place was empty, eerily echoing my footsteps until another pair sounded behind me.
Tuck, Tucker, Friar Tuck, rolled up to me. No really, he did roll. He was round as a wagon wheel. Just plop him on his side and roll him out the door, and he’d be on his merry way . . . after bourbon, tequila, vodka, beer.
“Saw what happened before.” The older dude, the treasurer of Retribution, pulled down on his long, wiry handlebar ’stache. “That ain’t no way to treat your girlfriend.”
“Not my girlfriend.” My jaw pulsed in time to my heartbeat. “My best friend.”
“That right now? Even wor
se then, I’d say.” He reached up and smacked me upside the head. “What you playin’ at with her?”
My ears ringing, I looked down at Tuck. “No business of yours.”
“You let a fine woman like that roar off into the night on New Year’s Eve, lookin’ like your heart just broke in two, sure is somebody’s damn business.” He rubbed both hands over his big belly. “You want a go at that gal?”
“Not like that.”
“Oh, so you got big plans, huh? That include pissing her off?”
“Fuck.” I ran my hands over my face. “No.”
“How long you been friends?”
“What the fuck is this? Dr. Phil hour? I don’t need relationship counseling.” I spun away, but Tuck grabbed my arm, and his cool and easy vibe went out the window as he got in my grill.
“A lady like that wants to know a man needs her, wants her, wants to take of her. Now how long you been friends?”
“Ten years.”
“Ahhh.”
“What the hell does that mean?” My eyebrow twitched up.
“You don’t know how to make a move on her or if she even wants you to.”
He was so right on, I nodded dumbly.
“Gotta get over your own ego, and that dumbstick between your legs, then.”
Cole had warned me about Tuck’s wax-on, wax-off philosophies, but the man knew the truth. Not that I was gonna admit it.
“Lookie here, kid. You’ve been eye-fucking her since Day One here. Her? Same deal. You did something to piss her off to high heaven then just repeated it twice by all I just saw. Grow up. Be a man. Stop being a fuck-up. You might-could get your woman and a Retribution patch too. Because we don’t pledge pussies too afraid to take a chance on love.”
Chapter Four
I HUFFED AND PUFFED and blew vapor out through my nose. In the old shed behind my grampa’s house, I lifted my clapped-together barbell to my chest from the sawhorse stand I’d rigged. I’d filled two-gallon milk jugs with cement and attached them to a long metal shaft before they’d dried. Presto magic, instant barbell. I wasn’t about to waste any spare change on weightlifting gear when I could knock my own together for the price of sweat and tears.
I was working out. Working it off. Forgetting aaaalll about Sadie several days after the NYE nightmare.
Yessireee.
Problem was she was mixed into all my best memories. She’d been part of every holiday and milestone in my life, and I hers. Christmases, Thanksgivings, drunken Halloween parties when we’d been underage and likely to catch hell for it. Graduations, detentions, and school dances, too.
Homecoming. Senior year. I’d been crowned king. As if I gave a good goddamn. On stage, the Homecoming Queen—Mandy Byrne—accepted her sash and crown, grabbing onto my forearm in a possessive move I’d wanted to shake off while Sadie stood below, against the wall, trying to disappear from sight.
I pulled Mandy’s hand off me and tossed the dumbass tinfoil crown the Homecoming committee had placed on my head to the stage. I’d never liked Mandy. Number one cheerleader, she was the least cheerful person I’d ever met. A mean blonde bitch-machine who gossiped about anyone who glanced at her the wrong way.
I’d been accepted into the popular crowd because of the quarterback thing. I’d only played football because I liked it. Grampa Dean did his best, raising me the way a boy oughtta be with wise words and sometimes a willow-switching when I got too big for my britches. We’d never had oodles of money, though, not like new Mt. Pleasant people did. My classmates showed up in the Wando High parking lot driving shiny new Beemers or ugly new Hummers fresh from the dealership. I’d saved and squirreled away my part-time job money until I could buy my Harley Road King.
I didn’t give half a shit what anyone thought about me, and a seat at the head table in the cafeteria meant nothing.
The only person I really cared about at Wando High was Sadie.
She never tried to fit in with the cool kids. She had her own crowd. The drama students, the arty kids, the punk crew.
But she was my people, and I hers.
Leaving Mean-Girl Mandy gaping at me, I jumped off the stage and strolled up to Sadie.
She blinked her unreal blue eyes at me.
“May I have this dance?” I bowed, stretching the rented black tux to the max at the shoulder seams.
Sadie didn’t do flouncy skirts or piled-high hair. No pink lace or peach ruffles for her. She stood before me in vintage tailored men’s tux pants, a V-neck T-shirt, and maroon suspenders to go with her maroon Doc Martens.
I thought she was pretty as hell.
She accepted my hand, and I swept her into my arms with a flourish as Paramore’s “The Only Exception” started wafting across the gymnasium.
“You’re gonna ruin yourself for me one of these days, Kinkaid.”
Sadie was more than capable of handling matters herself, as she’d proved the other night at Retribution. And she had no problem whatsoever putting me in my place, it turned out.
None of that mattered because the compulsion to take care of her ran through me like the blood in my veins.
I eased up from the padded bench I’d constructed out of salvaged materials. It was January and blustery cold outside, but I didn’t feel it in the unheated woodshed.
I grabbed a towel, rubbing it over my face. Sucking back the bottle of water, I eyed the big timber crosstie I’d dragged here from the abandoned train tracks a mile away. Only took me an entire day to wrestle that bitchin’ piece of wood up from the rail yard into the shed. Grampa Dean had stood out on the back porch, its slant marked by the way he’d braced his feet on the boards below. The porch was like a sloping ship’s deck.
“Whatcha gonna do with that now?” he’d asked.
“Probably break my back.” I’d huffed, blowing out my cheeks, hauling my latest find toward the outbuilding.
“Sounds about right, son. You want some vittles soon? Or you ’bout to become a woodchuck and gnaw that pole to the marrow of its bone?” He’d squinted at me.
“Vittles sounds good.”
Now I walked across the shack to my enemy, the railroad tie. It was a one hundred pound, seven foot long rectangular piece of evil wood. An iron spike, the head as big as the pad of my thumb, brushed against my fingers as I grasped the timbered pole.
With a heave of my muscles, I tossed the giant crosstie from one arm to the other, my feet braced like Grampa’s had been. I huffed with each throw and grunted with every catch. The fucker weighed a ton, and it jarred my entire frame each time I caught it. Shaking and sweating, I wrestled with the wood, my vision blurring, my muscles burning.
Sweat dripped down my bare chest. Despite the cold January air, it pooled in the hollow of my pelvis making my shorts shift lower on slicked-up skin.
Cutting across the sounds of my ragged breaths and deep chuffs, I heard Sadie’s Suzuki shredding through the gravel outside with a sound like shrapnel exploding. I hoped Grampa would send her on her way. I didn’t know which way was up with her at the moment, and—fucking hell—I really wanted to go down on her all of a sudden. Find out about that juicy peach I’d been imagining since I’d given her the lap dance.
A minute later, she stuck her head in the door. “Grampa Dean said you were out here.”
Shit.
I dropped the railroad tie just as Sadie walked inside. It thumped to the ground bare inches from her feet with an earth-quaking THUD.
“I came to say sorry.” She narrowly eyed the fallen plank. “No need to try to decapitate me. Death by pole, Kinkaid?”
My face was red from exertion, I was sure of it. My muscles ripped from the heavy workout, bulging all across my body.
I grabbed my towel and swiped it over my face, mumbling through the terrycloth, “Uh, hi?”
“Good Lord Almighty,” she whispered.
“Huh?” I tossed the towel aside.
She stared at my body in a way that wasn’t let’s just be friends. Her gaze roamed over the
swells of my pecs, the ripples of my abs. I felt the touch of her Good Lord Almighty look on every part of me.
I spread my hands over my hips, well aware my loose shorts dripped lower on my pelvis.
“You were saying?” I asked.
Her eyes flipped to mine. Then back down.
Damn my life. My cock decided to sit up and say howdy.
“You still work out.”
I turned away, my lats flexing as I grasped the water bottle. I flicked my head around to her. “I still work out. That’s not what you were saying.”
Sadie stepped closer. “You’re hard.” Her fingers connected with the middle of my back. “Hard like steel underneath, but soft as silk on top.”
Her hand coasted up over my shoulder, and I shivered in my overheated skin.
Hard like steel. That was one way of putting it.
Fuuuuck me.
I grabbed her hand that rounded my belly before the danger-danger lights came on, placing it aside.
“Yeah.” Sadie moved away, granting me a nanosecond of reprieve.
I took a deep breath, a grin forming as I pivoted around. “Yeah?” One of my eyebrows hooked up.
Stunning bright blue eyes met mine. “I have no right to be angry. You’re my family, Kinkaid. I was . . . stupid.”
She was part of my family. And therein lay the problem.
We’d been friends so long the sudden sexual undercurrent tickled in my stomach and flicked fiery fingers along my groin.
“What about jealous?” Drumming my fingertips against my thigh, I winked at her.
She huffed away strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “Not.”
I approached her with long strides. “Really?”
“Kinkaid.”
“What?” I smiled, easing up to her, almost brushing against her. My body felt fully alive as the new awareness thundered through me.
Sadie glanced away, her hands clenching on her hips.
I lifted her chin, touching two fingertips to her soft cheek. The caress sparked right through my arm, down my chest, reaching places much lower that reacted with surprising swiftness.