When she woke up again, the sun was streaming into the room, her mouth was so dry it bordered on painful, and she was all alone in Greeley’s wide bed.
She sat up, wincing when last night’s tequila reasserted itself, making her head feel scratchy and heavy. An unfortunate counterpoint to the desert currently occupying the better part of her throat.
Terrific. A real hangover plus whatever reaction from Greeley was surely waiting for her now that the night was over and reality had reasserted itself. This morning was going to be awesome.
She tied her hair in a big, fat knot on the back of her head. She fished around until she found her stripper outfit, but there was far too much light shining into the room. There was no way she was prancing around in scanty stripper clothes in the light of day, especially now that there was no golden liquid courage flooding her veins. She just couldn’t do it, no matter how fiercely independent she vaguely remembered she’d claimed she was last night.
There was independence and then there was not being a dumbass when there was a temperamental biker around, making unsettling remarks about his claim on her. Merritt, a little more cautious in the daylight while her head ached, understood they weren’t always the same thing.
After a trip to the bathroom and a long, cold drink of water to make her feel like a human again, she went over to the pile of what looked like clean clothes on Greeley’s dresser and helped herself to one of his T-shirts. The one she picked was dark blue and faded, and soft as she pulled it over her head. It smelled familiar, like the detergent he used if not his skin, and it covered her like a tunic. She didn’t even bother with the death shoes Lanie had made her wear last night. She had a feeling they were the kind of shoes that could only be worn when drunk without risking bodily injury.
The bedroom door was open a crack so she pushed it the rest of the way and moved into the hallway. Greeley’s house looked the way she remembered it. Clean if not exactly neat. Very male, from the lack of much ornamentation on the walls to the living room that was little more than a giant television, bookshelves, and a couch. She could smell coffee as she padded barefoot along his hallway, which was reason enough to celebrate—if quietly, in deference to her head. She followed the scent to the kitchen and stopped in the doorway.
Greeley was there. And more overwhelming with all the morning light cascading over him, making him as golden as he was beautiful. His cut was hanging over the back of one of the chairs at the table and he was standing at his kitchen sink, his hands braced on the counter and his attention somewhere out his window, where she knew the bayou whispered its secrets as it lapped right up against his porch.
“I went and got your shit from Petit Joe’s,” he told her without turning around, and she blinked. She’d been certain she hadn’t made any noise. “I didn’t want you to freak out if you woke up without your crap and also, I wanted to make it real clear to Okie that you’re not allowed on the premises ever again unless you’re with me.”
“What time is it?” Her voice sounded as scratchy as she felt, and no matter that she’d chugged two glasses of water already. “It seems a little early for you to be this much of a dick.”
He turned then and she stiffened, because he was looking at her in that hard, lethal way that reminded her who he was again. Not the Greeley she’d rediscovered last night. Maybe that had been tequila and too much sex, making her remember long lost emotions and pretend they were new. Because the man before her now was every hard inch the sergeant at arms of the Devil’s Keepers. This was Greeley the outlaw. He looked fierce and brooding at once.
And not at all happy.
“You got anything to tell me?” he asked in a conversational way that made her blood chill.
She stood a little straighter. “No.”
“You want to maybe think about your answer for more than two seconds?”
One. Two. Three, to make a point. Then Merritt shrugged. “No.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything, but she could feel his temper crackle and burn and fill the whole damned house. It pressed against her, black and fierce, and it took everything she had not to turn around and haul ass out the door. She knew he kept his keys in his truck—because who would be suicidal enough to steal from Greeley Shaw? In a fantasy world where she could outrun him or he wouldn’t chase her, she could jump in his truck and drive her ass home, where she would obviously immediately do what she should have done yesterday morning and get the hell out of Lagrange.
She looked around and saw her bag on the table. All she’d have to do was grab it. And then outwit or outmaneuver the large, obviously furious outlaw biker who was standing too still and watching her too closely. When she looked back at Greeley to size him up—as if she could really hope to do anything here he didn’t allow—he was holding something in his hand.
It took her much too long to realize it was a phone. And longer still to understand that it was hers.
Merritt’s stomach lurched and for a moment she thought she really might throw up. Her head spun sickeningly and she reached out to grab the side of the doorway nearest her before she crumpled to the floor.
“No,” she whispered.
She didn’t mean to speak. She didn’t know she had until she felt her mouth move.
“Your phone kept buzzing,” Greeley told her, dark and grim, with an intent gleam in that flat and level gray gaze. “I thought it was an emergency.”
“You had no right to look at my phone,” she snapped at him.
Panic coursed through her, kicking her adrenaline into gear, and that was a hell of a lot better than crumpling into doorways and feeling like she might puke. Much, much better. She forced herself out of her paralysis and crossed to him, her bare feet slapping against the linoleum floor. She snatched her phone from his hand and managed to do it without really touching him much—because she wasn’t as stupid as she acted.
Then she tilted up her chin like she wasn’t standing around in nothing but his T-shirt over the stripper version of a bikini. Like she had nothing to fear from this man or the darkly incredulous expression he was training on her while she stood there in basically nothing, defying him.
She brandished her phone at him and watched his eyebrows go up, like he was fighting back the urge to slap it out of her hand. Or slap her hand off, more like. “Are you kidding? I can’t imagine how much you’d lose your shit if I dared take a peek at your phone.”
“There were forty-five texts and fifteen voicemails. When I checked the first time. There are more now.”
Merritt felt herself moving back at that, putting distance between them, while all the blood drained from her face. So much for her attempt at an offense. She could feel herself go entirely pale, even while her stomach turned.
She felt dirty. Humiliated and stained. How could she explain this to Greeley? She didn’t want him to know about Antony. She didn’t want him to ever know how dumb she really was or how stupid she’d been or that she’d let that creep touch her. She didn’t want to see his face change forever when he realized how easily she’d been snowed by a pedigree and a fancy apartment, proving she really was the snobby princess he accused her of being. She hated herself enough for that already.
But she couldn’t seem to make herself say the things she needed to say to make this situation better. Or mitigate it somehow. Her mouth was even drier than it had been when she’d woken up and she knew it had nothing to do with her hangover.
It was pure fear. And self-loathing.
It was all fused together in her mouth like glue. She couldn’t say a word.
“Merritt.” His voice was so dark. So relentless. And the look in his eyes was so much worse. “Who the fuck is Antony?”
Merritt stopped moving only because she hit the table. Greeley was still standing there at his kitchen sink, framed by the window and the cypress trees thick and impenetrable outside. But then, he didn’t have to come after her. Not when he could take up all the air in the world simply by looking a
t her that way.
“Nobody,” she managed to say, though her lips were numb and that glue was in her voice, so obvious she was sure he could hear it, too. “He’s nobody.”
Greeley moved then. It took him two steps and he was looming over her, trapping her against the kitchen table. He folded his arms over his chest and it was all tattoos and lean, hard strength, and she’d have no choice but to touch him if she wanted to get away from him. She was sure he knew how little she wanted to do that.
She shuddered, and his gaze went even darker. There was an expression she didn’t recognize on his face, stamped deep and something like ferocious, but it made her feel hollow all the way through. Scraped raw.
Merritt couldn’t stop that damned shuddering.
“You’re afraid,” Greeley said after a moment, and there was something in his voice then, a fierce kind of outrage, that made her feel…primitive.
“I have to go,” she whispered.
“This asshole is the thing you think is scarier than me,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her.
“He’s nobody,” Merritt insisted.
But Greeley was closer then, and he reached out as if she was fragile though that expression on his face was a terrible steel, and he wrapped his hands around her upper arms.
She shouldn’t have found that soothing. Not when he looked this furious.
“This is why you came home,” he said, and it wasn’t a question. He knew.
And he was so far beyond pissed it was like he was someone else—though it wasn’t aimed at her. Merritt had no idea how she knew that, only that it was true.
Greeley’s fingers tightened and he got his face in hers. His eyes were serious. His mouth was grim.
“You were bringing this shit to me,” he gritted out, and he sounded lethal. He looked it. It should have scared her as much as all those calls and texts from Antony, but it didn’t. If anything, she felt strangely calm for the first time since she’d started getting the feeling that Antony was off. “And that might be the only smart thing you’ve done in the past five years, baby. Because you’re goddamned right. I’m going to fucking handle it.”
Chapter 8
“There’s nothing to handle,” Merritt insisted. “Antony is just a work thing. New York lawyers can get a little wound up about stuff, that’s all.”
But she was lying. Greeley knew she was lying. She was so pale that all sixteen of her freckles stood out against her cheekbones. She was freaked. This was jacked and Greeley was fucking fed up with jacked. He wanted to tear shit down with his hands. He wanted to find this asshole she was afraid of and teach the little bitch a couple of things about fear.
He was good at that shit. It happened to be one of the many talents that made him indispensable to the club.
“Tell me about this guy,” he invited her. “This ‘work thing.’ ”
Merritt was trapped between him and his table and he liked her there. She was wearing one of his T-shirts and he liked that, too. He liked how it clung to her in interesting ways and he wanted, badly, to get his hands beneath it. Greeley had entertained a lot of thoughts about how this morning was going to go—so many that he’d decided he’d let her sleep in and rest up so she could enjoy it all as much as he would—and none of them had involved some asshole trying to mess with her head.
That was his job.
But he was past lying to himself where Merritt was concerned. He’d gotten over that shit right about the time he’d hauled her ass out of Petit Joe’s last night. Or maybe, if he was totally honest, when he’d hauled his own ass out of the clubhouse to go after her. She could dance around what was happening here between them—and always had been, since the minute they’d clapped eyes on each other five years ago—as much as she wanted. Greeley was done. She was his woman. That was the beginning and the end of everything.
And if he had to deal with some big city asshole named Antony as part of that, bring it on. He’d enjoy teaching a New York City douchebag with a pansy name some manners and a few hard lessons.
“I’m not telling you anything because there’s nothing to tell,” Merritt shot at him, a liar to the bitter end. He almost admired her commitment.
“Merritt,” he started, trying to keep his voice something like calm when he wanted to shout the roof down.
But her phone started buzzing then. And she gave herself away all over again by jumping at the sound, then going pale when she looked at it, and yeah. Fuck that.
He took the phone from her hand, ignoring her attempts to wrestle it back from him like she was a slightly annoying mosquito. He swiped the screen to take the call, still keeping it above her head, then clapped it to his ear.
“Yeah.” His voice was the kind of mean that made the prospects fall all over themselves to do his bidding, and the Devil’s Keepers prospects were used to much, much scarier brothers than Greeley.
Merritt’s hands were fists in his shirt and he felt her go stiff and scared. It pissed him off even more. Calling his reaction pissed, in fact, didn’t even come close to covering his feelings on the subject.
There was silence on the other end. No surprise. This was the kind of dickhead who would call a woman’s cellphone that many times and leave the kind of texts that, when he’d read them, had sent Greeley into a rage spiral that he wasn’t out of yet. That kind of asshole never knew what to do when someone their own size—and probably a whole lot bigger—came along. Their entire lives were about crushing people who couldn’t fight back.
“Who the fuck is this?” Greeley asked, making no attempt to modify his tone or his temper. “You got the wrong number, buddy.”
He heard something, like a breath or maybe the dipshit was clenching his phone too hard.
“I’m looking for Merritt Broussard.”
All Yankee superiority and a hint of New York, like the only possible explanation for another man picking up the phone was that he was some kind of answering service. Fuck this guy.
“I know who you’re looking for and I’m telling you, you got the wrong number.” Greeley grinned, imagining the kind of bloody terror he’d like to rain down on the guy who’d called Merritt all those filthy fucking names. “Call her again, asshole, or send one more text, and I might come explain shit to you in person. You don’t want that.”
Greeley didn’t wait for an answer. He hung up and tossed the phone in the direction of her bag on the kitchen table.
“Problem solved,” he told her as it skidded across the surface of the table and only stopped when it hit the bag.
Though the way she was looking at him, her blue eyes too big and too dark and still too laced with fear, told him otherwise.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” Her voice was entirely too solemn. As if her concern was that the asshole might come after him now, too.
Greeley had a lot of things he wanted to say to that. But he was still too furious and she looked fragile and he hated that most of all. He wrapped his hand around her shoulder and tugged her closer to him. He bent down, getting in her face and making sure there was nothing for her to see except him.
Not some fucking guy in New York. Not whatever was happening that had sent her running back to Lagrange. Just him, right here in front of her.
“There’s a lot of shit you and I need to get straight,” he told her, and he didn’t miss the panicked look that flashed across her face before she blinked it away. But that was a problem for a different day. “But first, you need to know that there’s no way in hell I’m letting some dipshit harass you.”
“He’s not a dipshit, Greeley. That’s the problem.”
“I don’t give a fuck who he is. You wanted my protection. Now you have it. If I were you, I’d decide to get on board now, because it’s going to go how I want it to either way. It’s up to you if you want that to happen kicking and screaming.”
He waited then. Willing her not to be a pain in his ass about this.
But this was Merritt. She pressed her lips together, appar
ently always prepared to be as big a pain in his ass as humanly possible. “I never said I wanted your protection.”
That he didn’t go ballistic at that was, he felt, a sign that he’d grown in the past five years. He moved his hands so he was tilting her head back, his gaze serious as fuck on hers.
“You came home.”
She frowned. “I came back to the town of Lagrange. To the house I grew up in. To my father’s house a few months after his death to deal with all the stuff he left behind, as many people do in similar circumstances.”
“Baby, give it up.” He waited for her gaze to meet his. To hold. “You came home.”
And he knew he had her when she let out a breath, slow and ragged. She didn’t exactly melt against him, but she didn’t get all stiff and scowly the way she would have done if she was going to fight him on this.
Christ, but she got him hard.
He had some thoughts about how to celebrate this new understanding between them, right there on the table, but his phone started buzzing in his pocket. He muttered a curse and let go of her, stepping back so he could pull it out and glare at it. And he would have ignored the call altogether, let the club take care of itself for the next hour, but it was Roscoe.
“Yeah,” he muttered when he put it to his ear. Not that much nicer than the way he’d answered Merritt’s phone a few minutes earlier.
“The clubhouse in twenty,” his VP ordered him without preamble, clearly unfazed by his tone. “Digger’s here and he wants a sit-down.”
“At the table?”
“Nothing that formal. He wants to switch some shit up on the next few runs and wants input from you, me. That’s about it.”
Roscoe didn’t elaborate. Greeley didn’t push. He could think of all kinds of shitty reasons Digger could be switching things around. Truly shitty reasons—the kind of bad crap that made him feel like he was betraying his club by thinking it at all, because it meant Digger was a liar and a traitor and he did not want to believe that was possible. The problem was, he could also think of a bunch of perfectly rational reasons for Digger to mix stuff up, given the kind of bullshit the Black Dogs had been throwing at them lately. With no proof either way, he had to suck it up and say nothing.