“Let’s celebrate,” he said.

Finally finding her voice, Steph said, “But I haven’t given you an answer yet.”

His snort had her chuckling. “Like you could say no to all this.” He leaned down next to her ear as he started to thrust. “Not when I fuck you so good.”

Well, he had a point there.

“Even though I know the answer, I still wanna hear you say it,” he said as he powered into her, no longer gentle, but a possessive animal claiming its mate.

As his cock stroked over her g-spot, Stephanie’s back arched off the couch. “Yes!” she cried out. “Yes, Maverick, yes!”

“Damn straight, baby.”

Best Christmas ever, and the holiday was still days away.

“Hey, how’d your meeting with the girls go?”

Just like that, Stephanie’s soaring mood plummeted. Shit, now she had to ruin their day with club drama.

CHAPTER FIVE

COPPER

Copper stared at the slip of paper with ten digits scrawled across it. The note had been forced upon his woman, scaring her and his daughter while in a place they’d always felt safe. He clenched his fists and ground his jaw. The risks to his club never seemed to fucking end.

In the month since he’d married Shell, he’d really been feeling his age. Not that forty was old by any adult’s standards. Maybe it wasn’t his age he was feeling, but Shell’s. The sixteen-year age difference had never been more apparent than it was today.

He was tired. Both his brain and his body.

And Shell never ran out of steam. She always seemed to have boundless energy for him, the child he’d claimed as his own, and the rest of their friends and family.

He loved that woman with every fiber of his being and wanted her beside him at all times. That hadn’t changed and never would, not even after he took his last breath, but at times he felt selfish. Like he’d cheated her out the life she could have, and maybe should have, if she’d married a man her own age.

Instead, she’d tied herself to a crusty biker who spent his life on the wrong side of the law, putting out fires and battling enemy threats. The events of the past year had been weighing heavily on his mind over the last few weeks. As he watched Jigsaw and Izzy come to the end of her pregnancy, the idea of adding to their family had been at the forefront of his mind as well. And not necessarily in a way that would make his wife happy. In fact, the more he considered it, the more he became uncertain about the idea of more children.

And then today, it was as though all the worries in his mind materialized. His fears had been driven home when he got the call from Stephanie about the incident at the diner.

Without having any information about or contact with this new club, Copper knew in his gut they were going to fuck shit up for the Handlers. What if the worst happened and they took him out? How could he look at himself in the mirror knowing he’d be leaving Shell to survive on her own with a baby and a small child? He couldn’t.

Fuck, that wasn’t even the worst. The worst would be something happening to Shell or Beth. Or any other child they might bring into the world. His thinking wasn’t melodrama. Toni, Stephanie, Chloe, even Izzy had been reached by the club’s enemies. Chloe suffered the worst fate, requiring a long healing period and receiving both physical and mental scars that would never fully heal. The same could happen to Shell. Or their children. The notion horrified him to such an extent, he knew he had to do anything and everything to prevent those possibilities from coming to life.

Though he feared he might break his wife’s heart in the process.

Before he could delve into that issue, he needed to find out what the fuck was going on with the men who’d visited the diner. The Chrome Disciples Motorcycle Club. Not one he’d heard of, so he’d had Mav do a little digging. Nothing the security expert found eased the knot of tension in Copper’s gut. In fact, it’d had only coiled the ropes tighter.

The president of the CDMC went by the handle Blade for obvious reasons. The man served ten years for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. A switchblade, if Mav’s research was accurate. Most of the club’s ranking officers had served time for various crimes, manslaughter, arms trafficking…rape. That last one had the hairs on the back of Copper’s neck standing at attention for the past few hours. He was no fucking boy scout. Hell, he could have been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon or manslaughter. Fuck it, he could have been arrested for murder one if he’d been caught eliminating some of the club’s enemies. He was of a firm mind that his club had done the world favors by ridding it of the scum it had, but rape? There was no fucking justification for that shit.

Tags: Lilly Atlas Hell's Handlers MC Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net