I saw my volley score two points, one in the cruel twists of Farrah’s lips, and the other in the shocked look of pleasure shown by the Prez.
Yeah, two could play at this game, bitch.
“We’re going after The Fallen cargo tonight,” she snapped, her patience gone. “What do you have to say about that?”
I shrugged again and looked at the chipped black nail polish on my fingers. “That’s club business. You’re new around here, but that kinda stuff stays between brothers. It’s not my shit to disturb.”
Reaper chuckled and when Farrah shot him a look he shrugged. “Told you she’d say that, sugar lips. Give the girl a break. Why don’t you go get us some beers so we can celebrate this reunion fuckin’ proper-like.”
Farrah pursed her lips before her entire expression transformed into the perfect doting girlfriend. “Sure thing, Reaper honey.”
As soon as she was out the door, I raised a brow and said, “Really?”
Reaper guffawed, moving around his desk to sit down in his big leather chair. “Sucks better ’an a Hoover and swallows too.”
A full body shiver of violent disgust rocked me and I let out a little gag. “Fuck me for asking, eh?”
He laughed again then sobered. “You know not to screw us tonight, H.R.? You’re the Berserker princess now, not part of them Fallen and I won’t have you tippin’ them off to the ambush off exit 78.”
I stared at him for a long minute, watching as he stroked his mustache and kicked his dirty boots onto the top of his desk. There was absolutely no way, no matter how much he may have liked me, that he would give me the exact location of their heist unless he was testing me.
Which meant I couldn’t save the club of my heart from the club of my present. Which meant, if Dad or King ever found out, they’d never forgive me for putting brother’s lives in danger when I could have saved them.
My good intentions were quickly drowning in a riptide, waterlogged with impossible questions, choking on moral ambiguity as difficult to digest as ocean waves.
There was no clean way out of the situation. No matter what happened in the end, my family wouldn’t trust me and my life might still be very much in danger.
I breathed deeply, filled my eyes to the brim with sincerity and told Reaper the truth, “I won’t fuck up.”
Danner
It was ironic that I’d only ever become involved in the biker life because it was my mission to dismantle it. There wasn’t even a reason for my hatred of biker gangs, just something written in the code of my DNA, passed to me by my father and his father’s father all the way back to the founding of the mother Fallen chapter in 1960. There had to be some twisted connection between one of my ancestors and the Garros, some illicit romance gone awry, a metal and chrome Romeo & Juliet killed in a hail of rival gunfire, the Mercutio equivalent downed by a blade and a man in the wrong leather cut. It was a romantic way to think about what I grew up believing to be my destiny, but I’d yet to see spilled blood for what it really was, just blood, just death smeared over pavement, guts trailing, brains splotched like ink blotches. There was nothing romantic in death, and nothing beautiful about my automatic hatred of an entire group of human beings.
But I didn’t learn that until later.
Until Harleigh Rose showed up in a record store wearing a kid-sized AC/DC shirt and listening to Johnny Cash as if he spoke directly to her through the record player. It wasn’t until I saw her plight, saw how unromantic the reality of their situation with their drug addict mother was, and how deeply wonderful she and her brother were as people that I began to reconsider how my system was programmed.
That I began to hack my Danner influenced mind and started to go from my traditional idea of good to one that was bad.
Therein lay the irony, because the more ‘corrupt’ I was in my father’s own contemptible eyes, the stronger I felt, coated in titanium conviction and brassy with confidence in my own grey shaded principles.
Who would have ever guessed that a cop playing a biker to take down an MC would become seduced by the very lifestyle he was supposed to condemn?
I loved the freedom of the oceanside wind against my chest as I soared over the road straddling a metal beast that felt like one of my mustang horses, feeling the wildness of her in the vibration beneath my ass, in the weight of her power under my gloved hands.
Riding a bike never failed to make me hard as steel because it reminded me of the way Harleigh Rose would feel when I finally fucked her. All that power and untamed beauty required skilled hands and a firm touch to keep under control. I was Dominant, so both were exactly the kind of challenge I relished.
I focused on the road again when Wrath dropped his speed to slide into formation beside me where I rode gunner in our six man convoy up the Sea to Sky Highway. I looked over at him at the same time my phone rang in my leather cut.
“Yeah?” I answered over the Bluetooth in my helmet.
“You stick with me and keep your trap shut as in don’t repeat a fuckin’ word of what’s goin’ to go down tonight. You get me?” Wrath’s low rumble sounded over the speaker.
Curveball.
Interesting.
I’d been trying to evaluate whether or not Wrath Marsden could be turned into a confidential informant two out of the three years I’d been working undercover for the MC.
He’d never given me any indication he could be turned away from Reaper and Grease. Ever.
Until now.
I wondered how much that had to do with his new relationship with Harleigh Rose and rage burned in my gut like one too many shots of whiskey. It was hypocritical as shit, considering I was technically dating two women, one as a cop and one as a biker.
It was only Harleigh Rose I wanted with every multifaceted part of me. As a man elementally, powerfully could want a woman, to cherish her, guard her and plant his babies in her.
She hadn’t mentioned Laken or Diana Casey with me though and I had the feeling that they didn’t matter to her. She was just that sure of herself, of the effect she had on me, and she wasn’t wrong.
I obsessed with dominating every inch of her life. I wanted to bend her with my hands, break her into beautiful pieces with my cock and then glue her back together with my mouth. Cut through the thicket of dangerous thorns surrounding her gorgeous, one-of-a-kind heart, so that I could hold the tender, fragile bud in my hand and watch it grow. Dominate her mind, body and soul until every molecule of her person was imprinted with my name.
I wasn’t sure when it had happened, when I’d tipped over from a familial protector into the more dangerous role of forbidden lover, but it could have been the night she spied on me jacking off when she was sixteen. It was as if a flip switched in my bestial brain, and she was suddenly a woman, ripe with curves and sultry with sexual intent aimed at me.
I’d honed my moral code against the corruption of my father’s greed-driven influence and against the thugs I’d taken down for petty crimes that led to despicable consequences yet it still wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the allure of a teenage Harleigh Rose with all that streaky hair.
I thought of that hair now, as it had looked drying over my pillow, how it felt between my fingers as I combed through it while she slept, and I hoped like hell that she could find it in herself to forgive me for raiding her club’s cargo tonight.