by Evie Monroe
I pushed off the counter, fists clenched. “A fucking truce? Don’t tell me you’re going with the truce thing again, Cullen. I want their blood.”
“We’ve gotten enough blood from them. We got Slade,” he replied, not looking at me as he stuck his cigarette between his lips.
“I haven’t,” I muttered, thinking of what those assholes had done to Nora’s face. “They need to pay.”
Nix shot me one of his looks to get me to calm down, but as I finished my beer and tossed it in the trash, I wasn’t calm. I wouldn’t be. Not until those men who’d fucked with Nora had paid for what they’d done.
Chapter Seventeen
Nora
I stepped out of the shower, dried off, and finger-combed my hair as I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. I looked at my body. The awful bruise from the Fury stretched purple and angry from the corner of my eye back to my ear.
I had other bruises, too. Especially on my heart. And the dark marks on my breasts and nipples where Jet sucked them so hard. The bite mark on my shoulder. Somehow, I felt those so much more. And the absence of him.
I didn’t regret it. Couldn’t regret it—he’d taken me to levels of pleasure I never knew possible. But I did regret falling so deep and hard, knowing that he and I could never be together. That had been stupid of me.
Of course, thinking about him and how we met, it was inevitable. He was such a beautiful man. I couldn’t have resisted, no matter how hard I tried. And he did help me see that the life I lived with Michael wasn’t right for me. Now, I could decide what kind of life I wanted for myself without worrying about pleasing or disappointing anyone.
So, Jet was a good thing. Very good.
But why did it hurt so bad? He’d left hours ago. Why did it feel like the hole inside of me was growing larger every minute I spent away from him?
I opened my suitcase, still where I’d left it on the floor of the bedroom, and quickly changed into a pair of boxers and a t-shirt. Turning out the lights, I stretched out on the mattress and tried to go to sleep.
It didn’t work. I had too much on my mind. Actually, I had just a whole lot of one thing on my mind.
My sexy-as-hell motorcycle man.
No. Not mine. He could never be mine. And I didn’t want him. I’d thrown him out.
He sure as hell didn’t seem to care when I’d done that. Of course, he didn’t. He probably had a line of other women stretching around the block, waiting for him.
But I cared. And I hated all of the women who’d come after me. I despised them because they’d feel his hands, his kisses, his cock. They’d experience the giddy excitement of hearing their names murmured in his sexy voice. They’d be the object of his heavy, lust-filled gaze. They’d use his hard body as a pillow while they slept, feel his muscular arms keeping them safe.
And I never would again.
I nearly moaned out loud from the loss of it all. It was my stupid fault, too. I never yelled at people. I shouldn’t have yelled at him. He didn’t deserve it. And now I missed him so much I wanted to punch myself for making him leave.
I had to stop thinking such thoughts.
Too wide awake to sleep, I decided I needed to take my mind off him. I flipped on a light and sat on the edge of the mattress. It was obvious what needed doing. I pulled a box toward me, opened it up, and got to work.
I’d barely gotten a third of it unpacked when I threw myself back on the mattress and stared at the ceiling.
It was late at night, and I was practically useless.
I wanted to talk to Jet.
To apologize.
I picked up my phone and, taking a deep breath, typed in: I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.
A moment later, he came back with: All good.
Naturally, he’d come back with a reply like that. Where I couldn’t get him out of my head, he probably hadn’t been thinking of me at all. He didn’t strike me as the type to let his love life worry him. It made me feel foolish for spending these past few hours, moping and carrying on like my world was about to end.
I waited, hoping he’d say something else, but my phone screen went dark. I touched the display to make it come to life and out of desperation typed in: You’re okay?
Those three dots showed me he was typing: Yeah. At church now. Busy. Talk later.
My heart plummeted. So dismissive. I guessed I deserved that.
I wanted more. But it looked like I wouldn’t get it from him. Maybe he’d already moved on to the next woman in line. Maybe he wasn’t at church. Maybe he’d already taken her to bed.
I tapped my finger to my chin, thinking. He’d mentioned before that his clubhouse was in a warehouse on the docks. Being new to Aveline Bay, I wasn’t sure where that was, but it was worth a try.
I threw on cut-off shorts, pulled my damp hair into a bun, then ran outside to my car. When I turned the key in the ignition, it sputtered to life. I quickly pulled out from the curb and headed west, toward the ocean.
After a little bit of driving, I found a pier with broken-down, one-story warehouses. Michael had said most of Aveline Bay was nice, but this didn’t appear to be one of the better neighborhoods. Garbage littered the streets, the neon sign of a bar glowed in brash electric colors across the street, and various shady-looking people skulked around in the darkness. This had to be it. I pulled down into the street heading out toward the massive docked container ships, looking for some sign of Jet.
I braked when I noticed a line of motorcycles parked outside one of the warehouses. The door was closed, and all the window shades were drawn, but lights on the inside peeked through the slats.
I turned around and parked across from the warehouse, then ran over to the door. I probably needed some secret knock to get the guard to let me in, but I decided to take a chance. Taking a deep breath, I tried the handle.
To my surprise, it opened to a thick cloud of smoke.
It wasn’t the action of the door opening that made everyone gathered around the table turn and glare at me. It was my choking. I got it under control but my eyes still watered. Through the haze, I saw some very big, very intimidating men in leather and denim staring at me like I’d just stolen their lunch money.
I recognized a couple of Jet’s visitors from the hospital.
Then I caught sight of Jet and let out a sigh of relief. “Jet?” I said, my voice cracking and embarrassing me.
“Nora?” Shit. Did his voice crack, too?
I didn’t figure him for the type who surprised easily, but I was wrong. His eyes widened like spotlights. He walked up to me, frowning, his voice low as he touched my elbow and led me away from the table. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . just wanted to see you. Is that okay?”
He didn’t answer. He just looked back at the other men, those sets of angry eyes staring at him. No one looked happy. I got the feeling my showing up was most definitely not okay.
“I needed to explain. What happened back there, you see–”
Jet nudged me back into a corner of the warehouse, as far away from the others as he could get me. His voice was a whisper. “Look. You don’t got to. I know. Your dad. I get it. You didn’t have to come here to tell me that. I told you. All good.”
I stared at him, feeling silly. So he knew. He knew everything. And maybe I’d always known he understood. Perhaps I hadn’t come here to explain myself. Perhaps I just wanted to be with him. Some stupid part of me, the same part of me that would always love my father even though he left me, that piece of my heart just wanted to be near him, no matter what.
“Look. You need to go. You ain’t safe here. You need to forget about me. Okay?”
I tried to bring myself to nod, but I couldn’t. Was that what he really wanted? Could he do that? Could he just walk away and forget me?
I guessed he could. He was the infamous Jetson Nash, who had a reputation with every woman in town.
“All right,” I said, my voice barely a breath. “If y
ou want me to.”
He started to reach out to touch me, but I knew if he did anything like that, even just wiping the hair from my face, I’d crumble. I flinched and turned from him, reaching for the doorknob.
Suddenly the glass from the door exploded in on me, sending me hurtling back into Jet’s broad chest. Before I could react, he wrapped his arms around me and yanked me around, shielding me as something slammed against the floor and skidded to my feet.
I shrieked.
“What the fuck?” someone shouted as Jet took me by the shoulders, eyeing me carefully.
He touched my bruised eye. “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said, my heart pounding.
Jet rushed to the door with the others, yanking it open as the sound of motorcycles roared into the distance.
“Fucking Fury,” one of them said, returning to the center of the room.
“No shit,” Jet said, running an eye over me as he walked through broken glass toward the object the Fury had hurled through the window.
It was a brick. Jet knelt in front of it and lifted a piece of paper from under an elastic band. He unfolded it and read it to the group: “Foothills. Bring Slade.”
I hugged myself as the guys around me broke into chaos. “What does that mean? Who’s Slade?” I asked. That was the man my Fury attackers had asked about in the hospital.
Jet ignored my question. “Jesus, they think we kidnapped Slade? What the fuck do we do now?”
Another man shrugged. “What else would they think? He’s been missing for five days and the last they saw we’d burned their clubhouse to the ground.”
“Slade had a lot of enemies. What we gotta do is make them think we had nothin’ to do with it,” another man said.
They started talking about how they were going to fix things to make it look like Slade had been killed somewhere else. They mentioned something about an oil drum, and how they could take a car and bring it to a field off Route 11, where they could make it seem like someone named Roxanne had shot him and run off.
I stared at them, slowly growing more and more freaked out.
This man, Slade, who must’ve been valuable to the Fury, was dead.
And Jet’s motorcycle club had killed him.
Probably in the same shootout that had put Jet in the hospital.
And . . . I couldn’t be positive . . . but I was pretty sure they were keeping his dead body in an oil drum until they could figure out what to do with it.
They were sitting around, making plans as calmly as anything. They were talking about a man, a human life, like he was a bit of toxic waste that needed disposing.
“Jet . . .” I said softly, as they continued to argue about who would be the one to drive the car with the dead body in the back.
They ignored me.
I said it louder. “Jet!”
Nothing. They just kept talking. Like there was absolutely nothing wrong with this picture at all. But all the while something was feeling more and more wrong. A nausea was growing deep inside me, bubbling up in my gut.
I took a deep breath, and shouted, “JET!”
They all turned to me and the room fell silent.
“Is this man—is this Slade—dead?” I asked.
They stared at me for a good ten seconds, silence. Then one of them said, “Geez. I thought you said Jet’s girl was smart,” and rolled his eyes dismissively.
Oh, my God. They were getting rid of a dead body.
I know, I was being dumb. After all, I’d met Jetson after he’d been wounded in a gunfight, and people died in gunfights. People like my father. My father had probably done a lot worse, as much as he’d tried to shield me from it, and as much as I willed myself to believe it wasn’t true.
I needed to get out of there. I whirled to leave just as Jet grabbed me by the shoulders. “Look,” he said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Yes. I know. I’m leaving,” I said, as I felt a tear fall from my chin. I was crying. When had that started?
I moved toward the door, but Jet didn’t let me go. “Wait. Come on. Nora. Just . . . are you okay?”
I looked up at him. How could he be asking me that? He was a cold-blooded killer. Like the rest of these men. Like my father had been, too, as much as I hated to face that fact. Of course, he didn’t care if I was okay. They were so hardened to human suffering they could stuff a dead body in an oil drum and talk about it like it was a piece of garbage.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, tearing my arms from his and running for the door.
I’d never sprinted so fast in my life, but it turned out, it wasn’t enough. He caught up with me about halfway to my car, snaking a hand around my waist and whirling me around. “Nora.”
I pulled away from him, but he held me until I couldn’t fight anymore.
“It ain’t safe out here, by yourself. Let me walk you to your car.”
That was right. It wasn’t safe. Because of him. Because of him and this stupid club. I whirled on him and started to pound desperately on his chest. “Why? It’s just not fair.”
He didn’t speak. He just held me, until I got tired of fighting and doing absolutely no damage to him. When I weakened, the tears started to come again.
“What’s not fair, Nora?” he said.
“That I’ve finally found a man who makes me feel something, and he’s a total fucking idiot,” I sobbed. “I can’t go through this again. Not again.”
He let go of me slowly and ran his tongue over his teeth. Then he looked out into the black nothingness of the ocean. “Yeah. I know. But you knew what kind of idiot I was going in. Didn’t you?”
The corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile, which only fed my sorrow. How dare he make a joke when I was falling apart?
But he was right. I had known exactly what he was when I met him. But my heart wanted what it wanted.
And it wanted this idiot with every single beat.
I turned back to my car, got in, started the engine, and drove away as he stood there, watching me, his hands in his pockets. We might have been two peas in a pod. Because my heart was screaming for him, as much as it’d been broken before by a man just like him. So I must’ve been an idiot, too.
Chapter Eighteen
Jetson
After Nora pulled away, I looked out at the ocean for a long time, thinking.
Something about her had been gnawing at me for the longest time. I wasn’t sure what the fuck it was because I’d never experienced it. So I’d just pushed it down, away, out, ignoring it.
But then she’d gone and said it.
She’d told me I was the first man who’d ever made her feel something. And the second she drove away, I knew that was what I’d been denying the whole time.
She wasn’t a habit. Habits? That was what people wanted to break. And I sure as hell didn’t want to break from her.
It was easy to go numb. To shove my head in the sand, moving from girl to girl, going after the sex. But with her, it wasn’t just about sex. I would’ve liked to have taken her somewhere, just the two of us, and—this was a revelation—talk to her. Find out what was in that great big brain of hers. Watch her. Listen to her. Observe her. I didn’t even fucking need to touch her, so much as be with her.
She made me feel something, too. I wasn’t sure what the hell it was, but . . .
Fuck it. I couldn’t find out.
She’d made her decision, and it was to kick me out of her life.
I couldn’t tell her otherwise. If I did, as much as the Cobras would protect her, I couldn’t guarantee she’d be safe. She was better off without me.
The thought put me in the worst mood I’d been in in a long time. It had begun to get colder, the wind whipping off the ocean. Hands in my pockets, I stalked back into the warehouse where the men were already making plans.
Nix looked up. “Bro. You’re coming with me in the Dodge.”
“What are we doing?” I mumbled absently. I’d been so focused lately on ending the Fury
, but now, I couldn’t get Nora out of my head.
“We’re going to dump the body. In that field,” he said, pointing to a map. Nix got up, slid his piece in his waistband, and grabbed his helmet.
I nodded, staring at the ground, thinking of Nora, begging me with her eyes, crying that it wasn’t fair.
I wanted her. Damn it, I didn’t care who knew it. Even if the other Cobras ragged on me from now ‘til kingdom come. It didn’t matter. I wanted her.
If I had any balls at all I would’ve stopped her from leaving.
I blinked as Nix snapped his fingers in my face. “Yo. What’s up with you?”
I scrubbed my face with my hand. “Nothing. Fine. Let’s go.”
He grabbed me by the shoulder. “Don’t give me that. What’s going on? Is it that girl?”
I shook my head. “No.” That felt like a lie, and my older brother always saw through my lies. There was no point in hiding. “Fuck it. I don’t know.”
I followed him outside, to where the guys were loading the oil barrel with Slade’s body into the back of the old Dodge truck Hart had brought over from the Lucky Leaf. He lit a cigarette and looked at me. “Come on, kid. It’s not the end of the world.”
I quirked an eyebrow at him. “What isn’t?”
“Falling in love.”
I shook my head. “Nah. You got it wrong. I ain’t in love.”
Fuck. Lie again. He chuckled, on to me. “Right. I ain’t seen you this whipped since dad was alive. You’ve never let a girl get to you. What the fuck is the world coming to?”
“I ain’t—” I started to insist, but there was no point. He saw through all of my bullshit. “It don’t matter. She don’t want anything to do with me.”
“Yeah? She came here after your sorry ass, didn’t she?”
I exhaled all the air in my lungs as the men finished loading the barrel. Cullen gave Nix a fist bump. “You got the gun?”