In a good way, though.
Innocence was something that got publicity, prized in our society.
Or their society.
I hadn’t been part of that since kindergarten.
Innocence was a lie.
Guilt was too.
These men, this club, lay somewhere in between.
Rosie laughed again. “Seriously? Jagger looks like he wants to have you for dinner. And breakfast.” She waggled her brows, and I rolled my eyes.
“Yeah, well I’m not on the menu. At least not here.”
It was time for her to roll her eyes. “Are we ever going to conquer this? The bee in your bonnet about screwing the club?”
“The club is my family. You don’t screw family,” I argued.
She scoffed. “Well you don’t.”
I grinned at her. “Neither do you.”
She glared at her brother, who was arriving with Gwen, his wife. He was cradling his baby daughter in one of his arms, Gwen tucked into the other. Despite having some decidedly nonfraternal feelings towards him when I was going through puberty—and all through my twenties—I considered him my brother too. Which was why I grinned at the rough man clutching his adorable baby and not letting his beautiful and polar opposite wife out of his sight. He either had one or the other of those two in his hands at all times.
Both was his preference.
You couldn’t blame him. Not when she’d almost died, been kidnapped, beaten and then shot a guy while nine months pregnant. Not to mention gave birth in this very clubhouse with Lucky and Bull as nurses and Cade as midwife.
But that was a story for another day.
And a story that I was distracted from the moment I saw who was entering behind Cade and Gwen, chatting easily with Amy, Gwen’s insane and insanely beautiful best friend.
“It isn’t by choice, my celibacy from the club,” Rosie hissed. “It’s because my brother has threatened death and dismemberment to any man wearing a Son’s cut who touches me.” She shook her head rapidly so her chocolate curls tumbled out of her messy bun. “You’d think for big bad biker men who prize their ironclad balls they’d have a little more courage. But….” Her eyes widened, glancing behind Cade. She caught what I’d been looking at, drooling at since the moment she started talking. “But he isn’t wearing a cut, and he looks like he has a little bit of courage and would brave death and dismemberment,” she breathed.
I barely heard her, too busy battling with my melting panties. The man walking through the crowd with Cade, Gwen and Amy was nothing short of… droolworthy.
I didn’t say, or even think, the word “droolworthy.” And I was surrounded by the cast of Magic Mike in leather cuts.
This man was not wearing a cut.
Something in his favor.
But I think I would have been drooling even if he had been.
I would have burned my carefully crafted and treasured rulebook right there and then if he had been a new patch.
His tanned skin hinted at exotic origin, a milky chocolate that rippled over his sinewy forearms, exposed by his white tee. His left hand had a black tribal tattoo spanning from the top of his palm up his muscled flesh and disappearing under his sleeve. He was wearing plain denim jeans that I would have bronzed for the sheer fact that they had encased his powerful thighs. My gaze moved upward and instantly locked with his chocolate eyes.
Something seemed to shift in me that made me unable to look away from those eyes. Made me want to drown in them.
“Yeah, I think he would brave that. Death and dismemberment for the right woman,” Rosie said confidently. I felt her gaze on me, yet I found myself unable to rip myself away from a pair of chocolate eyes. “Just not for me,” she muttered. “Figures.”
Since then, my life was carefully sectioned into two slices.
Before Keltan and after Keltan.
The split between “before” and “after” may have been clean. But the “after” wasn’t. It was anything but. It was the most complicated, winding and chaotic “after” that I couldn’t have even imagined.
And I knew chaos.
Or at least thought I did.
Turns out I had no fucking clue about chaos.
I didn’t know that was his name until later in the night. Much later.
I had been a coward, hiding from that gaze once I finally found the necessary strength to tear myself away and find my scattered senses littered alongside cigarette butts, motorcycle boots and discarded beer bottles.
Good thing there were a lot of wide, muscled men in black cuts to do that behind.
“You’re hiding,” Lucky observed with a grin, taking a pull of his beer.
I glared at him, all the while positioning myself so the bulk of my body was obscured by his.
Not hard considering he dwarfed me with his muscles and height.
I was tall, especially in black strappy Guccis—vintage and fabulous—but these guys were straight from the radioactive spider plant or something.