Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

A moment later, she laughed delightedly and clapped her hands. “¡Qué huevos! You are very brave, Lila. This I admire.”

“Then maybe you’ll admire the fact that I won’t do pornography. Some people obviously get off on it, but I’m a private girl. You want me to have some skin in the game, I’ll do it, but I’ll do it as a camgirl.”

I could live with taking off my clothes for strangers. It was basically the same as stripping, and I didn’t have any prudish hang-ups about that. Obviously, some girls would play with themselves or toys or…whatever, but I was sure I could get away with a certain degree of privacy as long as I milked my sensuality for all it was worth.

Irina’s eyes sparkled. “Ah, I was hoping for this.”

She snapped her fingers like some kind of Bond villain, and I felt someone step up behind me, a huge someone if the shadow he cast in the bright stage lights was anything to go by.

“My lovely bruto will show you where to ready yourself.” She waved a hand in the direction of the corridor lined with changing rooms behind me then twisted forward again, already forgetting me. “Richard! Richard, really, if you’re about to come I want to see it spray all over their faces. You get one drop on the floor, and I will make you clean it up with your tongue, mmm?”

I slipped out of my chair onto the heels of my fringed boots and turned to look at the man waiting for me.

My fierce inhale of shock choked me, and I doubled over, coughing so hard tears came to my eyes.

A huge hand went thumping down on my back to help me even as Irina shouted at us to be quiet.

“Gotcha,” Irina’s bruto muttered in his deep rumble as he started to escort me to the back.

By the time we hit the doors and moved through to the soundproof hallway, I was recovered enough to pull away from his grip and point at him like some witch casting a curse.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I accused.

Lysander Garrison blinked at me, completely nonplussed by my freak out. The only commonality he shared with his sister, Cressida, was their colouring, their rich brown hair, thick and long, and their large, long lashed, brown eyes. Otherwise, Lysander was much as Irina had called him, a brute, an ex-con, and it showed. He was huge across the shoulders and tall, too, every inch of him covered in dense muscle, scars, and tattoos.

Yet there was something soft in his face, something that spoke to the fact he’d once been classically handsome before prison and living hard carved out lines in his tanned skin and hardened those deep, warm eyes.

He had a complicated relationship with his sister just as he did with the club. Having once helped the Nightstalkers MC, a rival club who’d abducted and tortured Cress, he’d also saved Loulou, Loulou’s sister Bea, and Harleigh Rose from the same club who’d tried to set their house on fire.

He was a tangle of contrast I had no hope or desire to untangle, especially not now while we were in the den of the viper herself, a place I never would have expected to find him.

“What are you doing here?” I repeated, this time softer.

He shrugged those big shoulders, so rounded with muscle they stretched his grey tee out of shape. “What I’m doin’ is nothin’ compared to what the fuck you’re doin’ here. This place is a hellhole, no place for a woman like you.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I countered.

“No,” he snapped, stepping forward to growl low in my face, a whispering roar because we didn’t know who might be listening. “But I know my sister’s got love for a girl named Lila with flowers on her skin, and I know you’re with The Fallen. You getting’ tied up in this shit is only gonna lead to bad fuckin’ news, and I’m not gonna be the one to deliver more’a that to the club.”

“This isn’t on you, so don’t worry your big, thick head about it,” I suggested with a sweet smile and a condescending pat on his corded forearm.

He hesitated, eyeing me like an attack dog ready to launch at the first command. “You worried ’bout what’s goin’ down here with the girls… don’t be. I got it.”

“You got it?” I asked derisively. “You clearly don’t, because women are still getting sucked into this black hole.”

“I got it as in I’m workin’ on it,” he gritted through his teeth. “Nothin’ more for you to do here now you know it’s covered.”

“I don’t know shit,” I whispered harshly, rounding up to my toes to get in his face. “I don’t know you, but what I do know is sketchy as hell. I get Cress loves you and you guys had some reconciliation, but I also know you did the club and your sister a serious wrong back in the day. You can’t expect me to trust you now. I’ve got no reason to, and I see no motive for you working with Staff Sergeant Danner and the Venturas other than serving your own agenda.”