“Suspicious maybe, but at least you’d be out of sight, out of fucking mind, Harleigh Rose. You think that club isn’t thrilled to have you in their fold? They got a Garro on their side of things and I think they proved today that they’ll do anything to keep you there.”
“It’s a good thing I want to stay there then, isn’t it?” I threw back at him, digging my gun into his chest so hard he winced.
“Why the fuck would you want to stay with those bastards?”
“Same reason you’re undercover with ’em,” I hissed, rising up on my tip toes so I was right in his face. “To take them down.”
I took satisfaction from his startled blink and resulting frown. “Are you fucking with me?”
“Nope.”
“Let me rephrase,” he growled, easily disarming me, popping the safety back on and dropping the gun in my purse. “You want to be fucking with me. Even you aren’t crazy enough to volunteer as a snitch for the cops.”
I tossed my hair over my shoulder, watched his eyes dance over the glorious length of it, and smirked. “Never underestimate a woman, Danner.”
“Like you’re the average woman,” he muttered.
“No, which is exactly why I want to do this. They’re not like The Fallen, you think I don’t got a line in the sand between good and evil just because I was born with a different code of honor? Berserkers are not good men and they definitely don’t do good things, one of those things being allowing, no, encouraging Cricket to beat me into submission. So, yeah, I’m crazy enough to want to snitch on the most dangerous and disgusting MC in the nation, and I’m also crazy enough to pull it off.”
Danner ran a hand roughly over the almost lethal edge of his stubbled jaw in frustration. “Can’t believe you’re saying this shit when I nearly came to blows with my senior officer to keep you out of this shit.”
My heart pulsed. We weren’t romantic people, Danner and I. We didn’t exchange poems, or letters or any of that crap.
We exchanged barbs and coded taunts that seemed cruel but were really pieces of our heart offered up on a bloody platter, an offering of vulnerability that no one else would understand the significance of. Coming to blows with someone over me was basically the equivalent of handing me a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates.
So, my heart warmed and bloomed even as I threw up thorns to hide it.
“Don’t need you speaking for me, I’m not sixteen anymore,” I reminded him then deliberately ran my fingers down the exposed expanse of my chest, right between my pushed-up tits.
His eyes followed the movement even though a muscle ticked in his jaw. I loved frustrating him, proving his basic goodness wrong with temptation. I hadn’t seen Lionel Danner in three years, but it was as if no time had passed at all. We were still playing the same games we had before, and somehow, they hadn’t gone stale with time.
“You needed me speaking for you when you were sixteen because you’d get yourself in impossible situations and the only way out of them for you was through me standing up for you. Surprise surprise, haven’t seen you in three years, first time I do, you’re needing me to speak up for you a-fucking-gain.”
I tried to grit my teeth against the urge to flinch but the pain those words sent radiating through me was too great. He’d never, not once since I’d met him at six years old, not once in the hundred times I called on him to be my champion, had he made me feel weak or exploitative.
He read the look in my eyes before I could hide it, cursing under his breath as he stepped closer so his big belt buckle was pressed to my belly. “Rosie, you’re too easy.”
“Too easy?” I seethed.
His eyes were soft even as his lips curled cruelly. “Too easy to rile up. How is it possible, when all it takes is insinuation to set you on fire, that you’ve got so much dead in your eyes?”
I swallowed painfully as his big, coarse hand pressed flat to my chest then slid up to wrap, finger by finger, around my throat, up against my pulse. Slowly, deliberately, he squeezed.
“Tell me, rebel, how I should react when my beautiful, dilapidated rose wants to put herself in another dangerous situation when she stills wears the mark on her skin of the last one?”
“I can take care of myself,” I told him thickly, irritatingly moved by his words, by the sound of his voice calling me ‘rebel” again when I hadn’t heard it for so long.
He leaned closer, his minty breath fanning over my parted lips. “Know it. Also know, you’re not alone, not ever with the kinda family you got. Don’t know when you stopped countin’ me as one of them, but I’m also gonna take care of you too, Rosie.”