Up In Flames (Club Chrome 3)

His gaze was stark. “You deserve better.”

“I know,” she said, smiling. “That’s why I know it has to be you. You are better than I could ever hope to have. You are worth everything I’ve been through. But here’s the thing…if you’re in — you’re all in. No half-ass. I want 100 percent from you. Can you do it? Don’t commit if you can’t hold up your end of the bargain. I’ve spent half my life chasing after men who weren’t worth a damn and now, it’s time I stop.”

Pyro answered by pulling her close and sealing his mouth to hers. They kissed long and deep and something shifted so powerfully between them that they were both breathless with wonder. “I’ll spend my life working at being worthy for you and Mila,” he told her with stark honesty that brought tears to her eyes. “You’re everything I don’t deserve but I’m grateful to have it and I’m sure as hell not letting go now. You’re stuck with me, sweetheart.”

Her heart sang and she climbed on top of him, stripping her pajama top as she went. She grinned as his eyeballs bugged and his hands immediately went to cup her breasts. “It’s about time you came to your senses,” she purred, grinding on his rock-hard cock. “What say you we break in this new bed?”

He rolled her to her back in a shockingly quick movement and his answering feral grin sent riots of pleasure tripping up and down her skin. “Baby, we might do more than that — by the end of tonight…we might need a whole new bed all together!”

She was game for that.

Anything as long as it was with Pyro.

-Epilogue-

Six months later…

Pyro rushed to help Angel but she batted him away with a glare and Dee just laughed, saying, “You’re going to get it if you keep hovering like that. No pregnant woman likes to feel as if she’s helpless, even if she is.”

“I’m not helpless, just irritated. This baby has a thing for sticking its foot in my ribs whenever it gets the chance,” Angel groused, rubbing at her distended belly with a groan. “I’m sure it’s a boy. Ornery as hell already. My pregnancy with Mila was a cake walk compared to this one.”

Pyro grinned from ear to ear even as Angel tossed a crouton from her salad at him. He caught it with his mouth and munched happily. “I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s healthy.”

Mila ran in from her bedroom and jumped into his lap as Jazzy, their adopted daughter followed, giggling. They were both wearing crazy lipstick and looked like miniature Jokers. “See Daddy? I pretty!”

“You sure are,” Pyro agreed, laughing as he hoisted Jazzy on his lap as well.

“You’re almost out of room,” Dee said as Bronx grabbed another beer from the fridge. “What are you going to do when you run out of lap room?”

“I figure something out because my babies are never going to feel as if Dad can’t make room for them.”

Suddenly Angel started sniffling and Pyro looked to his very pregnant newlywed wife and she covered her face with a napkin as she groaned. “I can’t stop crying over the silliest things.” She sent him a fake reproachful look. “You did that on purpose.”

Dee laughed and the girls started talking about girl-stuff and baby prep while Bronx and Pyro took themselves off to watch the baseball game. It was so damn normal and suburban that Pyro didn’t even recognize his life from before. And that was okay with him.

The fact was, even though he’d remained club president, he was busy trying to change the public perception of the club, which meant no more illegal stuff. It was hard turning a new leaf and not everyone was happy about it but so far things were starting to happen, and he was happy about it. He’d managed to open his own business — totally on the up and up — working with people who needed second chances. He worked with the probation department finding suitable jobs for those who truly wanted to clean up their act and get a life. It was far more rewarding than he would’ve imagined and he wasn’t about to go back to the way things had been before.

“How’s Jazzy doing?” Bronx asked once they were out of earshot. “She adjusting okay?”

At the mention of his adopted daughter, he sobered. “She’s doing great. The resources you guys hooked us up with through Gage’s Watch are really helping. She’s not having nightmares anymore and she’s stopped wetting the bed. All steps in the right direction, her therapist says.”

Jazzy was found along with five other children ranging in age from three to eight years old, huddled in a dirty apartment bedroom after Crawford had sung like a bird when IA started putting his feet to the fire. The District Attorney hammered him and his fellow dirty cops as an example and they were all facing hefty prison sentences. Frankly, Pyro would’ve preferred to put a bullet in their heads but he was giving the legal channels a chance to do their job.

And he never would’ve imagined it but being a dad…yeah, he got it now. He understood why Bronx wanted a passel of kids. Being a dad was the best thing in the world.

Next to making the babies, that was.

“To new beginnings,” Bronx said, tipping his beer in salute.

Pyro smiled, truly happy for the first time in his life. “To new beginnings, bro.”

For some reason he thought of Ashley and his smile turned more reflective. Maybe he was getting sappy but he hoped Ashley was smiling down on his little family and gracing them with her blessing.

Something told him…she was.

***

-EXCERPT-

Kings of Asphalt

The roadside bar reeked of cheap whiskey, spilled beer and bad judgment but Zoe Delacourte wasn’t about to turn tail and run even though her knees were practically knocking together like two castanets in the hands of a Spanish dancer. This was her chance, her big break, her opportunity to show her editor that she could deliver the real deal, a solid story the readers wanted to read about. Maybe even a Pulitzer. Okay, maybe not a Pulitzer but this was some serious journalism and she had chops to prove.

Okay, so technically, no one knew she was doing this but all the more reason to make it count. Fortune favored the bold, or so they say. Time to put that saying to the test.

She’d been blessed — or cursed, depending on how you look at it — with a nose twitchy for information. Her mom called it downright nosiness but whatever, that quality was exactly what was required in the newsroom and when she happened to run across a small blurb about an execution style murder on the west end of the city that sent her nose to tingling, she couldn’t ignore the urge to scratch further. A little inquiry here, a little digging there, and she’d found quite a few tantalizing leads that she couldn’t help but try and chase down for the bigger story. The problem? No one wanted to touch it. Not that she blamed them. Not even the cop reporter wanted to dig into a possible retaliation hit between the two most notorious motorcycle clubs, The Kings and the Road Dogs, for fear of ending up on the wrong end of a bullet but where others saw a one-way ticket to the morgue, she saw a golden opportunity to finally make her mark.

From her furtive digging she managed to dig up two names: Jax Traeger and Hunter Ericksen. Bad boys to the core, Jax and Hunter seemed to be running The Kings, while she wasn’t sure who was calling the shots for the Road Dogs, possibly a guy named Bronx, no last name that she could find. The guy who ended up dead was a member of the The Kings, which meant she wanted to get to Jax and Hunter and see what she could get out of them by way of intel. But it wasn’t as if they were just going to spill their guts. She had to be crafty, real sly-like to get the goods, which brought her to the current reason why she was wobbling on too-high heels into The King’s known clubhouse, Bad Whiskey, squeezed into a skirt too tight with her breasts pushed nearly to her chin, and risking everything by going deep under cover for the story. That’s what real journalists did — not like the paper-pushing wimps currently occupying space in the newsroom. What happened to the golden age of investigative journalism? What happened to digging down to the bone of a story to suck out the marrow? What happened—