Off Limits (Kings of Mayhem MC 5)

As I drove into the driveway, the sun was hitting the horizon and the stars were already visible. Summer was here and it lingered in the warm night air.

Inside, the little house was hot and stuffy from being locked up all day. I pulled a cold beer from the refrigerator, popped the cap and took a long, cool drink, savoring the quenching hit only the very first mouthful could give you. Taking it outside, I sat on the deck overlooking the pool and let the balmy summer evening engulf me.

I loved it out here. It was the one place I knew I could still my mind from the chaos. Somewhere I could sit in fucking silence and decompress from all the shit I saw and did as the sergeant-at-arms for the Kings of Mayhem.

Some days I sat under the stars for hours. While others—if the day had been particularly brutal— I stripped out of my clothes and dove into the watery depths of my pool, just to find the silence beneath the water and let it surround me. It was something I did a lot lately. Swimming naked, to drown out the noise of my world and the things I had to do to survive in it.

The move to Destiny had been a life-changer for me. A new start after a long and tumultuous time in my home town. I had left New Orleans and patched over for one reason, and one reason only.

Astrid.

For three years our turbulent relationship had spun us in circles, rudderless and wild. It had been a bad relationship, machine-gunned with jealous outbursts and meltdowns because she was possessive and needy, and a special kind of crazy.

We fought like dogs and made up like rabbits.

It was the same old scene every time.

Fight. Makeup. Fuck. Repeat.

Yet, like a fool I kept going back for more because at the end of the day, Astrid was crazy hot and my dick could hands-down out-debate my common sense every single time.

It was a vicious cycle, one that was never going to end well.

The last time we fought she hit me with a fucking baseball bat. Gave me a fucking concussion and broke my thumb. When she visited me in the hospital afterward, she cried and told me she loved me. Begged for my forgiveness. But when she left, I left, too. In the opposite direction. I hopped on my bike and rode to Destiny. I needed for us to be done. And for that to happen, I needed to be gone.

Why? Because when it came to Astrid, I couldn’t help myself.

Case in point: when she turned up on my doorstep six months ago looking so fucking fine and smelling so fucking good, I couldn’t resist it. We fucked all night, right through to dawn. But just like I knew it would, my regret showed up with the rise of the sun the following morning. Sex with Astrid was like devouring a tall glass of milk on a hot day only to find out it was curdled with the last mouthful. I told her to go and to never come back. She agreed and I haven’t heard from her since.

There had been no other women since her. I was done with fucking around. In my youth, I’d surrounded myself in pussy, but it all stopped when I met Astrid, and despite the amount of pussy on offer, I never cheated on her with another woman. It wasn’t my style. I liked fucking. I liked fucking a lot. But I wasn’t a total bastard.

Not that there was much happening in that department.

Since moving to Destiny, I was pretty much living like a monk. I wasn’t into club girl pussy and I’d been so busy with club business lately, there really wasn’t much opportunity to meet anyone.

Plus, I wasn’t the type of guy who was looking for anything long term.

Despite being with Astrid for three years, I was never in love with her. My faith in love and the happy ever after was rattled by the divorce of my parents when I was just ten years old, and by the string of failed romances my mom paraded in front of me and my sister in the years that followed.

Then I completely lost my faith in it when my sister Wendy found her once-in-a-lifetime love in Bull, only to die in a car wreck three months after her wedding.

Bull didn’t often show his pain about losing the love of his life. But when he did, it was usually only to me. And every single time, I was grateful I’d never been in love just so I would never know the soul-crushing agony of losing it.

Yeah, yeah, some people would call that cowardly. You know, the whole it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all bullshit. But the simple truth? I was thirty-eight, almost thirty-nine, and my heart was intact and scar free.