Duke (The Henchmen MC 5)

The night before, yeah.

So shit happened.

I swore I wouldn't let it. I knew it was a mistake. I didn't want to drag her into my lifestyle. She deserved to settle down with some banker or IT guy. Boring? Sure. But safe. Good.

I wasn't a bad man per say. But I wasn't good. And I damn sure wasn't safe.

But all that being said, there was no turning back.

I, both literally and figuratively, got a taste. And I wanted more.

We had headed back upstairs and Penny had run off to my room only to emerge half an hour later when the pizza showed up, obviously trying to hide away. Literally. She had gone back in my room and put on a pair of sweatpants that were at least two sizes too big, one of her hoodies whose pink hood was hanging out of one of my black hoodies that was a good four sizes too big for her body and was not only baggy, but almost hung down to her knees.

Again, ridiculous.

And again, too fucking cute to do anything but smile at.

Cash fought back a smile, being a former epic ladies man, he had her card. "Cold, sweetheart?" he asked, handing her a plate.

"Yeah," she said, ducking her gaze and reaching for a slice of pizza, moving to lower herself down on the floor beside the table because all the seats were taken. Bikers, as a general rule, didn't have the most chivalrous manners.

"I think not," I said, tagging her at the waist and pulling her backward, balancing my beer on the arm of the chair so I could lower her down without jostling her ribs too much. She wasn't favoring them too much, leaving me to hope that maybe they were just bruised to the bone and not broken like we had thought. Her back I hadn't seen. I figured she would finally be able to take a shower the next morning and I would make her let me take a look then.

"Duke," she hissed as I settled her on my leg to the chorus of some of the guys laughing.

"You're not sitting on the floor like a fucking dog, Penny."

She turned her head to me, giving me a saucy smile. "Well, you could give me the chair."

"Then I'd have to sit on the floor," I said grabbing my beer and bringing it up. "This way, everybody wins."

Conscious of the fact that we had an audience, she swallowed any further arguments and settled in, picking at her pizza.

"Are you guys really watching Friends?" she asked a couple minutes later, her face scrunched up like that made no sense.

"What'd you expect, horror or things blowing up?" Cash asked.

"Ah, well... duh," she said with a laugh. "What's next? Some Scandal? Perhaps a little Sex and the City?"

"I'm such a Samantha," Cash quipped, making Penny choke on the beer I had offered her.

Sometime later, pizza gone, a fair bit more beer consumed, I learned that Penny was two things: a lightweight and a sleepy drunk. Everyone was their own kind of drunk: slutty, silly, mean, philosophical, stupid. But as we sat there and watched reruns, waiting for the rounds to change, Penny let out a long sigh and leaned into me, her head under my chin. It was maybe a total of three minutes later that I felt her body go lax.

"So is this something?" Cash asked, nodding his head toward Penny. "I know there's something. She looks at you like you're the fucking last piece of candy on Halloween, both awestruck and hungry. But is it gonna be more than that?"

"Dunno," I said honestly, catching the fact that I was tracing my fingers up and down her thigh. "She's not like us. She's clean."

Cash snorted, shaking his head. "Clean, huh? She's sweet, I'll give you that."

"Not what I meant," I said, shaking my head.

"Look, Duke. I get it. You come from a shit situation and you got guilt about it, but come on, man. That's the past. You've been out of that for a long time now. And you never believed in it in the first place. You're not as filthy as you seem to think you are."

"Think any decent woman would see the shit I came from and still want to be with me?" I asked, shaking my head.

I wasn't stupid. It would come out eventually. And that would be the end.

"I think any decent woman who got to know you would know that fucked up past isn't who you are. It's what you came from. There's a difference."

"That's a little optimistic, I think," I said, scooting forward on the chair, putting my arms under Penny's knees and shoulders and holding her to my chest as I walked her back to the bedroom so I could go take my turn on the roof.