Devil’s Honor is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2016 Loveswept Ebook Original
Copyright © 2016 by Megan Crane
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Ebook ISBN 9781101968185
Cover design: Derek Walls
Cover photograph: © FX Quadro/Shutterstock
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Megan Crane
About the Author
Prologue
FIVE YEARS AGO…
He’d already made her come twice and he wasn’t anywhere near done.
Not tonight.
She was riding him in that lazy ass way of hers that drove him insane, a slick, hot slide of her pussy against him, then that slow, endless lift like she had all night to play with him. Greeley had his hands on her ass, filling his palms with her and watching as she took her sweet time on top of him.
“You got about four seconds, baby,” he growled at her.
Merritt smiled down at him, all blue eyes and that hint of a dimple in her cheek. That smile rocked through him, making his chest tight in the way it always did. He couldn’t say he was used to it yet, this power she had over him. He wasn’t sure he liked it at all, in fact. But he felt it all the same.
“I already came two times, crazy man,” she told him, her breath catching every time she rocked him in deep. And there was that flush on her cheeks that told him exactly how good she was feeling in case he couldn’t tell, wet and soft and slippery all over his cock. “I’m just hanging out, waiting for you.”
Greeley had started the night right because he knew how he wanted it to end—Merritt in his bed for good. To that end, when she’d showed up at his door with a frown on her face and too many words he didn’t want to hear in her mouth, he’d decided he didn’t need to take her out to eat like some pussy-whipped insurance salesman who didn’t know what the fuck to do with a woman. Particularly a woman with some bullshit on her mind he’d like her to forget about. He’d thrown her down on the floor right there on his porch overlooking the bayou and he’d eaten her until she’d moaned and bucked and come all over his face, making enough noise to drown out the sounds of the rich, mysterious swamp on a steamy August night.
It was the sweetest fucking thing he’d ever heard.
When he was done, she’d gone soft and dreamy for a little while in that way most girls always were around him, but this one was only rarely. He was obsessed with keeping her exactly like that. She’d clung to him the way he would have let no other woman touch him because it hinted at shit he didn’t want to give, but this was Merritt. Everything was different with her. He’d tugged her behind him when he’d gone inside, and it was like every step woke her up. By the time they’d hit the kitchen she’d been frowning again, pulling her hand from his, and Greeley didn’t like that shit at all.
“You distracted me,” she’d said, that line showing up between her pretty eyes and driving him crazy the way it always did.
“Only because you’re paying attention to the wrong things.”
He’d sunk his hands in the thick fall of her dark brown hair, his already rock hard cock practically clawing its way out of his jeans when he’d taken her mouth, deep and wet and hot. He loved her mouth. It was shaped sulky and tasted sweet and he fucking craved it like an addict jonesed for a fistful of Percocet. He liked her taste. He liked the way her tongue met his, bold in all the ways he’d taught her he liked best this whole long, sweaty summer he’d spent obsessing over her and only her. He liked the way she smelled, like some flowery shit and the hint of something sweeter and warmer, and beneath all that the hot, insistent tang of how wet she was for him. Always.
He’d stripped her tank top off her to get his hands on her tits, sweet and small and shaped to fit perfectly in his palms. Once that happened, he’d had to lay her out on his kitchen table so he could tug her little jean skirt off. He’d had no choice but to help himself to her then. All of her.
Until she screamed out his name, just the way he liked it.
Greeley had been making a point. And he’d always been real careful to make sure that when he went to the trouble of making a point, he was fully understood.
When he’d brought her off again—fucking her with his hand while his mouth went a little nuts on her tits, her nails dug deep in his back, and his name echoed off the walls again—he’d figured she’d gotten the message.
He’d been sure of it when they’d staggered down the hall to his bedroom together, her hot, sweet mouth all over him as they’d both fought to get his T-shirt off and his jeans undone at last, and then he’d tossed her on his big ass bed and followed her down.
Slamming into her wasn’t enough. Watching her arch up against him the way she always did and writhe while she rubbed that hot pussy all over his cock wasn’t enough. He’d been waiting for this shit to wear off. Ever since he’d seen her in May, about as uptight and out of place as it was possible to get in the local strip joint, he’d been waiting for this thing that gripped him to let go.
Greeley didn’t have much of an attention span, generally. Pussy was pussy. Talented pussy might get a few rounds with him, sure, because everybody liked an overachiever in bed, but it was still just pussy.
Merritt was the hottest fuck he’d ever had in his life, and the crazy thing was, she got hotter every time.
He’d been so hard by the time he’d gotten her in his bed tonight he’d had to count shit in his head to keep from busting his nut after a single thrust.
That was why he’d flipped her over and set her on top of him, letting her ride him lazily while he tried to control himself so this would last a little while. So he didn’t embarrass himself by coming in three seconds.
Because it was all a little too big and too fucking out there for him, this thing between them. He needed to come, but then he needed to lock this situation down before it messed with his head even more than it already had. Before he really did turn into some pussy-whipped insurance salesman—which was, as far as Greeley was concerned, a fate worse than death. He wasn’t a biker by accident and he hadn’t pledged himself to the Devil’s Keepers Motorcycle Club on a whim. He’d busted his ass to get where he was. To find a life where he could live free, entirely on his own terms. He was an outlaw brother to his soul, loyal to his club and his way of life, and he fucking liked it that way.
He hadn’t seen Merritt coming. He’d never seen himself falling for a woman, any woman. But she was here now and he was pretty much laid out flat, and he was honest enough with himself to know that shit wasn’t going to change no matter how little he’d planned on something like this happening to him.
And he needed her to stay.
“You’re still playing,” he warned her now as she worked herself over him, way too slow to get either of them off, and he knew she was fully aware of that. He shifted his hands to her hips, grip
ping her. Controlling the way she slid and rocked over him and taking it a little deeper. “You about ready to get serious?”
She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. It felt like she was the only girl he could see any longer. He wanted her tattooed all over his body so he had her with him on the hopefully rare occasions she wasn’t right there in front of him, which was where he wanted her. And she was never more beautiful than when she was naked, her sweet blue eyes were dark with passion, and his cock was buried deep inside her. When she was rolling those surprisingly wicked hips and making him fucking cross-eyed with lust and need and that crazy longing that felt bigger than him. Bigger than sex. Bigger than the whole goddamned world.
Merritt did that thing with her hips again and grinned at him, full of herself and that power only she had ever had over him and only she ever would, and just like that, Greeley was done.
He flipped her over, pulling her beneath him and grabbing her wrists in one hand, stretching them high above her head while he pounded into her at last.
Her head rolled back against the pillows and she laughed, wild and free. She made that same sound on the back of his bike. It lodged inside of him, wrecking him, knocking down the man he’d been so sure he was, all these years, and making him into something new. Something different. Something that would have alarmed the fuck out of him if this wasn’t so right. If she didn’t feel so good. Not just the tight, hot wonder of her pussy, though that was a factor he planned to spend a lot of time exploring and celebrating in the days to come, but all of her.
Who could have predicted that the doctor’s little brainiac daughter would be the one to set Greeley on fucking fire? She made him laugh. She never told him he thought too much, like every other person he’d ever met. She didn’t question why a man who forcefully claimed to want nothing from life but his club, his bike, and his brothers spent so much of his private time on shit that didn’t make sense, like those college books he liked to read for fun that he’d never shown anyone but her. She was smart and a smartass, and gave him shit about being a tough guy—like she thought it was cute instead of his life and his code—but she never gave him a hard time about the things that he treated like state secrets and had shared only with her.
And there was no fucking way she was leaving him tomorrow. No way in hell.
He shifted slightly as he fucked her, so he could get his fingers on her clit and feel the way she bucked against him. He loved the sounds she made, greedy and loud, like she didn’t give a shit if every last nosey person in this small bayou town knew exactly who a good girl like her was fucking tonight. Like she wanted everybody to know. It made his dick feel like steel.
It made him that much more determined.
“Holy shit,” she whispered as he worked her clit, still hammering into her, and he knew he had her.
The way he had from the moment they’d met.
She came again, her mouth wide open and no sound coming out while her neck went taut. Greeley let go of her hands, dropping down on top of her to really let himself go, pounding into her until he came with his own roar.
Loud enough to wake the neighbors if he’d had any close enough to hear, this far out in the bayou.
It took a while to come down. She was still wrapped around him, taking his weight, letting him press her down into the bed. And when he could breathe again, and hear something over the racket his heart was making, he shifted up to his elbows and took her face in his hands.
This was Louisiana in August. He had AC and fans to cut the swelter, but it didn’t matter. And he liked her all sweaty and gleaming with him. He liked their bodies slick and hot and pressed together. He liked it way too much. He smoothed her dark hair back from her forehead and pressed a kiss there, then waited for her pretty blue eyes, dazed from all that coming and coming again, to meet his.
“I want you to stay,” he told her, straight up.
She blinked, some of that dazed look going away. She moved her hands in a sweet little pattern, up and down his back, absently tracing over the club tattoo he wore there, marking him who he was in indelible black ink that stretched from his shoulders to his hips.
He liked her touching him there, as if she was as much a part of him as the club. He wanted to make that shit official.
“I can’t stay here tonight. My daddy would freak. He thinks I’m out with Lanie and he knows perfectly well there’s no room at Lanie’s for me to sleep over. I may be twenty-two years old, but you know he still treats me like a dim-witted ten-year-old.”
“I don’t mean tonight.” He was still inside her. “I mean for good.”
It took him a minute to realize she’d gone very, very still.
“What?”
“I thought about it.” He stroked her face, memorizing each freckle that kissed her cheekbones. There were sixteen, seven on one side and nine on the other, and he’d tasted every one of them. “If you really want to be a lawyer, you can go to school down here. There must be law schools in Baton Rouge. Hell, drive down to New Orleans if you want. Just so long as you’re in my bed every night, I don’t give a shit.”
She was silent, her blue eyes big and fixed to his. Not exactly the unbridled joy he’d been going for, but not a go to hell, either.
Greeley kept going. “You know I love my club. Until you, I thought it was the only thing I couldn’t live without.”
Then he told her the thing he’d never told another woman. He’d never thought he would say that shit to anyone, for any reason. On some level it ripped him open in a thousand ways to let her in like this, to give her that kind of weapon to use against him, but this was Merritt. He couldn’t lose her, especially not to something as stupid as the fourteen hundred miles from here to New York City and her fancy-ass law school up there. That shit made no sense. Not when they fit together like this.
Because this was everything. He had no doubts.
“I love you, Merritt,” he told her. “Stay here. With me.”
Greeley had never been as sure of anything as he was of her, not even the club.
But that was when her beautiful eyes filled with trouble.
And everything went to shit.
Chapter 1
The Louisiana bayou town of Lagrange was nothing more than a pocket of forbidding, humid, deeply depressing swampland slapped down on a dead flat road somewhere between Baton Rouge and reality.
Merritt Broussard might have had the distinct misfortune of having been both born and raised in the low, brown swamps that cut in and around the town, but she’d had the foresight to get the hell out eighteen years later. She’d only fallen off the wagon once, five years ago, for a single, stifling bayou summer.
And having sworn up and down that she’d never make a terrible mistake like that again, she wasn’t all that thrilled about her forced homecoming now.
The deep foreboding that she’d tried to ignore since her plane had landed in New Orleans this evening shifted into a thicker, deeper kind of dread when she crossed the Mississippi River west of Baton Rouge. She had the windows rolled up tight and she kept the AC blasting in the rental car, but it didn’t help. Merritt was sure she could feel the swamp creeping in anyway, the way it always did, wrapping around her and weighing her down like the air itself was choked with Spanish moss.
And that was before she saw the one small sign for Lagrange out there in the middle of nowhere, hanging cockeyed and riddled with bullet holes—likely the work of another native with similar feelings, if she had to guess.
“I hate this place,” she muttered to herself as she took the same old exit she knew like it was a part of her own body, like that might make it better.
It didn’t.
Lagrange loomed there before her the way it did in her nightmares, from the truck stop casino that crouched like a grubby welcome sign out beside the highway to the squat rectangles of prefab houses that hunkered down near the thick sugarcane fields all the way into town. Her first glimpse of the hometown she’d vowed she’d
never set foot in again was a straight shot down a dark, empty, vaguely forbidding road into the greedy wetland fist of a forgotten and wholly uncelebrated slice of pure Cajun country.
“Horror movies start exactly like this,” Merritt told herself, though that wasn’t exactly helpful. The urge to turn the car around and head somewhere—anywhere—else was so strong then that her arms shook with the effort of not spinning the wheel in a circle and stamping on the gas to escape. But she didn’t. She’d thought this through from every angle. She’d been thinking about nothing else for at least the last few months. Maybe longer. And she kept coming back to the same conclusion: this was her best option to escape the mess she’d made in New York.
This was also her only option, pretty much.
Tourists never came down this desolate country road that looked as if it led nowhere, not even to one of the ugly refineries or land rigs that dotted the Louisiana landscape—which meant that anyone who might have decided to follow her wouldn’t, either. She hoped. Most people stayed out on the interstate that had bypassed the town decades back, cutting it off from incidental traffic and the influence of the outside world. A certain kind of tourist, most truckers, and various other transient lowlifes stopped at the so-called casino or threw some cash around in the eternally seedy local strip club, Petit Joe’s, the inside of which Merritt had seen exactly once, on a dare—not that she wanted to think about that particular night and all the disastrous places it had led. Otherwise, most people were lucky enough to blow past Lagrange altogether. They pushed east to Baton Rouge. Or they were too busy heading west to Lafayette to eat crawfish and pretend they liked zydeco as much as native Louisianans did. Or they skipped Cajun country altogether and kept right on going until they got the hell out of backwater Louisiana and made it safely into Texas.
And that was just how the locals liked it.