“But we aren’t talking about rats,” I stated softly.
His eyes glittered again as he shot me a sly smile. “No, Louise, I don’t believe we are.”
A shiver rattled the backs of my teeth as it worked down my spine. I looked over at Lionel with wide eyes, letting my fear seep into them slightly. He had no reason to know that I was afraid because those “rats” Javier spoke so eloquently about included people I cared for, a person I loved more than anything else. He probably thought I was just some scared, naïve pampered little girl frightened by a man talking about rat killing at the dinner table. Still, his eyes were sympathetic as he inclined his head at me then shook it slightly.
He wouldn’t let it happen, I knew, seeing that. Lionel Danner wanted The Fallen MC put away just as much as the rest of the police force, maybe even more as long as he could claim the glory over it, but he was a good man, one of those throw-back policemen you saw in old Westerns. He had a moral code and everything, which meant he wouldn’t let The Fallen be smoked out and shot like rats, not if he could help it.
It didn’t bring me much comfort though, because I very much doubted he could.
I looked back to Javier and found him watching me with those crow’s eyes, black as bad omens. “You’ll see, zorra, within the year The Fallen will be wiped clean from Entrance.”
Zeus.
I waited a block away like a fuckin’ teenage chump sneakin’ out with his teenage girl after curfew. The fuck of it was, I sure as hell wasn’t a teenager anymore—the grey comin’ in slow at my temples and the crow’s feet ’side my eyes proved that—but my girl was a teenager. It was a reality I had to face ’cause I knew, if I was serious about ’er, which given my plans for the evenin’, I was, it’d be a fact I’d have to face with brutal regularity.
I tried not to sit there in the cold dark of the mid-November night and think about all the ways this thing with Lou could go wrong but there was somethin’ about being drenched in shadows that made a man contemplative and there sure as fuck was somethin’ about knowin’ you were about to take a woman’s cherry that made ya careful.
So, I was thinkin’ about H.R.’s reaction when she found out I was seein’ a woman her age, about King’s face when he realized I was fuckin’ a girl two years younger ’an him, and my brothers rowdy cheers each time there was evidence that I’d taken her to my bed. Grown up not givin’ a shit what people thought but I’d also spent most of my grown life bein’ a father to two kids I’d give my life for a hundred times over so the idea of them not likin’ the woman I chose sat so wrong in my chest it felt like a cancerous lump.
I thought about it, hated it and moved on from it ’cause I didn’t have the willpower to start my Harley and drive away like I shoulda and I sure as fuck wouldn’t have it tomorrow when I woke up beside Lou, her gold hair spread over my pillow like a fuckin’ halo, her virgin’s blood gone dry on my cock.
This was happenin’. Me and Lou. If I was bein’ honest, it had been happenin’ since I saw that pretty girl with her velvet bows and Mary Janes running at me from across a parking lot rainin’ bullets like I was Jesus come to save ’er. I knew in some freakish place deep inside the gut a me that Lou was made for me.
She was it.
My ex-wife had been a mistake, every other woman a blip and Louise Lafayette, the forbidden girl, the worst option, was the only one for me.
So, I leaned against the side of my bike smokin’ my one cigarette a day as I waited for her, tryin’ not to get too worried or too fuckin’ turned on about my plans for the evenin’ when finally I spotted the glow of her moonlight coloured hair in the moonlit night.
She ran at me.
Hair flying, arms pumping, smile spread clean across her prettier-than-all-else face, Loulou ran at me like she’d done when she was seven and she would, I knew, until she could run no more.
And, like I’d done when she was seven and like I would, I knew, until I could stand straight no more, I caught her in my arms and hefted her tight against me.
She buried her head in that place she liked under my right ear, her nose pressed to my throat, her lips to my pulse point and her forehead in my hair.
And fuck, it felt like home to have her there.
“Zeus,” she said, and I got the feeling she said it just to say it, just ’cause she knew she could and knew now that she had a claim to that name. To me.
And just ’cause I knew I could, I titled her head back by that lush white-blond mane and claimed that pouty mouth as my own. As soon as my tongue swept through her lips, she groaned softly into my mouth and opened for me. I angled her head to get deep, explorin’ that hot mouth like it was my job and I had all the time in the world to do it right.
It settled me deep that I did. Nothin’ would stand in the way of me and this girl; not her fuckface father or her age or even my own kids.
She was mine.
“Mine,” I tore away from her, leaving her lips open, moist and swollen.
Couldn’t help myself and licked at the sweet red bottom lip while she breathed, “Yes, always.”
Before I took things too far and fucked ’er on my bike—keepin’ in mind to save that for another day—I walked her over and dropped her carefully onto the bitch seat. As soon as I settled my bulk over the bike, she was plastered against my back with her clever little fuckin’ hands divin’ down to my lower stomach, rubbin’ at the hard abs she found and the ever-hard cock stretchin’ at the front of my jeans.
“You want me to crash this bike?” I rumbled, prying her hand from me.
She giggled in my ear but happily slid her hands up my tee and black hoodie so that they rested palm down on the skin of my lower chest. It’d be cold, my belly exposed to the winter winds rippin’ past the bike, but I couldn’t’a given less of a fuck.
“Ready,” she told me huskily and I felt it in my dick.
I shook my head at her, which gifted me another laugh, and then I shot us forward into the dark. She whooped loudly as soon as we merged onto the Sea to Sky Highway, liftin’ her hands in the air until they were blocks of ice before slidin’ them up under my clothes again. She felt my growl of complaint against her fingers and laughed louder than the wind in my ears.
It was an hour drive across the rollercoaster ups, downs and curves of the mountainside highway. A lot for a girl’s first serious time on a bike and she didn’t have a leather jacket, just a little pink denim one that made her look all’a fourteen years old. But she didn’t complain and somehow I could feel ’er enthusiasm radiating against my back. A coupla times, she swirled her fingers over the ridges of the bullet wound in my chest and it felt like a direct line to my heart. A coupla more times than that, she trailed cool fingers down my abdominals, skiing ’em like moguls and it felt like a direct line to my hard-as-steel cock.
So, when we finally reached the wood cabin I’d built into the treed mountainside, I was off the bike in less than a second and had Loulou squealing in my arms the next.
She laughed but wrapped her arms and legs tight around me, Koala-style as she’d called it, and played her fingers in the ends of my hair as I carried her to the house, unlocked the door and kicked it shut.