Bad Ride (Men of Valor MC)

He takes a step back, drapes his arm around my waist, then I gasp when he gives my ass a tap.

“I’ll take you someplace better.”

Outside again, he centers my helmet back on my head as I take in the wildness in his nearly black eyes and watch the sinuous muscle move under the skin of his biceps.

“Just take me home. I appreciate the offer for dinner, but maybe tonight is not the night. I told you earlier, I’m not even hungry.”

“Get on. I am hungry. I’ll be eating and I guarantee it will be way more delicious than anything they could serve here.” He sniffs, looking down at my skirt on a half-smile that has my insides twisting and wondering if he’s talking about food.

Because from the size of the third leg I see in his pants, I think maybe I’m what’s on the menu.

Chapter 4

Chewy

It’s dark by the time we pull up in front of the garage and the whole drive back I’ve been thinking about all the nights I lay in bed thinking of having her on the back of my bike like this.

I thought of her in other ways, sure, but life taught me a lot about taking a moment to enjoy the simple things when they do come around. A touch that calms you. A whisper that washes away the rage.

Prison taught me more about rage than I knew before I went in. In there, I learned what monsters truly were. How you needed to be smart, to ally yourself just enough with them in order to survive, but not become one of them and watch any possibility of freedom wash away with the blood and the rot you lived with every day inside.

I assumed the dance we’ve done around each other was because of her fear. She’s the picture of simple, but not in a way that neglects the edgy sexiness underneath her almost clerical clothing and flat ballet-sort-of shoes.

But the wrapping she wears only serves to send my wildness into a spin. I’ve seen the curves and womanly shape she hides under her pleated skirts and straight-cut blouses.

We dismount the bike and the brush of her fingers on my arm makes the iron rod hanging down my pants pulse out her name in morse code.

She’s touching me deliberately now, it’s not an error or an awkward mistake, her hand rests on my forearm and the twist of lust and peace the sensation brings me makes me wonder what’s changed. Why, after she looked at me with such indifference for two years, is she giving me the gift of having her so close?

I only hope it’s not a dream, because if I wake up and none of this is real, I’ll be locked in a new sort of prison and the hell of it will make Lennon look like Disneyland.

“This doesn’t look like a restaurant.”

“It’s better.”

“Sure.” She gives me a curious look before finishing. “What was the story with that card? The whole Phillipe thing…”

I shrug, scratching under my eye. “He ripped up his transmission one night out on State Highway 23. I saw him swerve, then he hit the guardrail. I pulled up just as he got out of the car. He’d had a bit more Rothschild or whatever the fuck he was drinking that night. I took him back to his hotel, towed his car to the garage, fixed it up and delivered it back to him. Seemed like a decent guy. Said his wife just served him with divorce papers. Guy had a bad night. I helped out. Wanted to do me a favor in return.”

Her green eyes light up with the reflection of the red neon sign on the front of the building.

“I see my car inside. Is it ready?”

It is, but I’m not going to tell her that. Rodney messaged me not long after he got her Mustang back to the shop that it was just a loose hose to the radiator and an easy fix.

I’m thankful she’s not giving me any protest as I unlock the door and we head inside, because I don’t want this to end. I think of the second time I saw her, when I watched her eating in the diner, sucking on the straw of her iced tea, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to replace that straw with my dick. It was immediate. The spell she unknowingly placed on me has only grown in urgency every minute, every night, every heartbeat for the last two years and I wonder what the fuck I was waiting for.

Then I remember. Her fucking piece-of-shit father, my parole officer and a girl that looked at me like I was a monster.

She’s not looking at me like I’m a monster right now, but my own doubt still lingers even as the rage and mistrust I’ve harbored for so long seeps out of me with each of her gentle touches.