What he was not was responsible for this bullshit. No way in hell.
“I fucking doubt that.” Greeley followed Chaser’s glare to Whale’s bony ass as the little shit argued with Fulton. Clearly drunk and belligerent and worse than that, stupid. Always so fucking stupid.
“I had to get the fuck away from him or I was going to end him. I took maybe ten minutes with a cute little waitress and when I came back, he’d taken off. Then he refused to pull over when I caught him.” Chaser shifted his glare to Greeley. “I was considering just fucking shooting him myself when Fulton pulled him over.”
Greeley shrugged. “It’s not on you that he’s a little bitch who can’t hold his liquor or remember to slow the fuck down coming through here like everyone else.”
Chaser shook his head, his jaw hard. “It’s on me if this comes back on the club because I couldn’t babysit him right.”
On a normal night, Greeley might have assured his brother that there would be no blowback. But who knew these days? Digger wasn’t unaware that his son was a pain in the ass—but he still expected all the other brothers to clean up after him. Brothers didn’t have to be best friends with each other. They didn’t have to get along, though most did. They had to be family, and Whale was everyone’s least favorite cousin.
“I got your back on this if it comes to the table,” Greeley said instead. “He’s a grown man and a brother. Only so much you can do if he wants to fuck around and get his ass in trouble.”
Chaser muttered his appreciation, and then they both stood there in the dark and watched Roscoe work his magic.
It took five minutes, tops. Officer Fulton went from pulling his gun on Roscoe when he sauntered up—while Roscoe only grinned at him and lifted his arms into the air like doing so was his idea and maybe he was stretching instead of surrendering—to yelling about respect and criminal collusion and blah blah blah, to a grim sort of silence when Roscoe started talking, soft and easy, never dropping that friendly grin. Then the parish’s shiniest new do-gooder asshole stalked back to his police cruiser, the back of his neck looking red and furious in Greeley’s headlights, and took off with his lights still blazing.
“Fucking douchebag!” Whale yelled after him, into the quiet of the highway this late at night, as if he’d been the one to run the cop off. “Doesn’t he know who pays his—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Roscoe wasn’t smiling any longer.
Whale lurched around to blink at him, weaving on his feet. “I don’t have to listen to you, you piece of shit. Your time is come and gone and you don’t even know it.”
Greeley was already moving, Chaser at his side. They covered the ground between Chaser’s bike and Whale’s, and Greeley put himself between the other two before Roscoe kicked the younger man’s ass back to Lafayette.
Because it was his job to settle shit like that between brothers while they were exposed on the side of a public road, not because he, personally, wouldn’t have enjoyed watching Roscoe kick Whale’s punk bitch ass.
“Not worth it, brother,” he muttered to his VP. “Too much fallout.”
And then it didn’t matter either way, because Chaser dealt with the flailing, sputtering Whale by coldcocking him. They all stood there as Whale crumpled to the ground. No one bothered to catch his bony ass.
“I’m already going to catch shit on this.” Chaser shrugged. “What’s a little more?”
Roscoe laughed. Greeley shook his head.
“What the hell did you say to Fulton?” he asked. “I thought he’d arrest all of us, just to be a dick.”
Roscoe nudged Whale with his foot. “I reminded him he had a sister. It turns out that Officer Fulton isn’t real into the idea of me sniffing around her.”
“She hot?” Chaser asked, because hot pussy was hot pussy, even with a law enforcement connection complicating things.
Roscoe grinned. “Not really the point, brother. But Fulton tore out of here so fast, I might just have to look her up and find out.”
They were all laughing at that as they picked Whale up from the side of the road, dragged him, then tossed him into the back of Greeley’s truck.
Roscoe swung onto Whale’s bike. Chaser fell in beside him when he took off, and Greeley followed behind.
But all he could think about was what Whale had said. Maybe it was drunken bullshit—and God knew Whale spewed a crapload of it. But that same old itch on the back of his neck told him otherwise.
Your time is come and gone and you don’t even know it, Whale had said, right in Roscoe’s face.
There wasn’t a single part of that Greeley liked. It set off too many alarms inside of him. It made him wonder how that connected to the shit he knew Digger was doing. If there was some father-son thing happening right under his fucking nose.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t good for the club or it wouldn’t be a secret.
When they got back to the clubhouse, the sorority girls were gone and only a few of the die-hard groupies were left. Uptown and Waco were watching something on one of the couches when Greeley and Chaser dragged Whale in, the little bitch still unconscious.
“What did he do now?” Waco demanded, scowling. His shaved head was tattooed and he had a few tats on his face, too, marking him the scary fuck he was. When he scowled it was impressive.
“Like it matters,” Uptown muttered disapprovingly from the armchair beside him. He was younger like Whale and the kind of pretty that made bitches cream themselves any time they caught a glimpse of him. He was also tough as hell and dependable as fuck, bless him. “It’s always some bullshit.”
They dumped Whale on one of the couches. Chaser stalked over to the bar. He snagged a bottle of Jack in one hand. Then he grabbed one of the groupies, picking her up from where she was lounging next to Waco and tossing her over his shoulder as he headed for the private rooms.
“I’m off duty until tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder as the groupie giggled. “Don’t bother me unless the Black Dogs come rolling up on the clubhouse and we’re at war.”
Roscoe was on his phone again, muttering something that sounded distinctly unhappy as he moved toward the offices.
And Greeley was just pissed. Too much shit in the air, nothing he could put his finger on, and Merritt back in town to mess with his head. She was the last thing he needed.
Yet here he was thinking about her in the middle of club shit. Again.
“I’m out,” he grunted.
Waco got up and prowled over to join the other two groupies smoking weed in the corner, but Uptown’s eyes were narrowed and he was focused on Greeley.
“What the fuck?” he asked quietly.
And Greeley knew he didn’t just mean Whale and his bullshit. Uptown was smart. He picked up on shit. Not like some of their brothers who let any piece of ass distract them, or any excuse to raise some hell keep them focused on the joy of ass-kicking instead of the practicalities of business. Which was a valid way to live the life, but not necessarily helpful in troubled times.
“I don’t know, brother,” he muttered.
And he left before he could get into it, because what would shooting his mouth off do except rile up Uptown and possibly make a bad situation worse? A club with factions was a club fractured. And that was no fucking good.
But out in his truck, headed through town, he sat at the stoplight on Main Street and had to force himself not to turn toward Merritt instead of heading straight on home.
He was hard again. Still. It would be easy as hell to deal with it. He could be crawling between her soft thighs in about ten minutes and god knew, he could think of about a thousand things he needed to do once he got there.
But she was a ghost. His ghost, maybe, but still a ghost.
If he started treating her like his woman—like his own, personal demon who rode his back and left him pussy whipped and jonesing for more—he’d be right back where he’d been five years ago. And that shit wasn’t happening.
Hell, no.
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She’d done him a favor when she’d scraped him off. She’d showed him, once and for all, that he needed to get his fucking head on straight. He had his club and his bike. He had all the tail he could possibly want. He didn’t need an old lady. And he definitely didn’t need the headache that went along with having his own woman. Merritt had somehow had all that power over him and he’d hated it. He’d hated it even more once she’d left.
He was never handing a piece of ass that kind of power over him again. And especially not if it was Merritt, the one piece of ass he’d asked to be something more—and the only piece of ass who’d walked away from him.
That wasn’t happening again.
He was okay with wanting her. But she packed that damned punch—which meant he had to be careful how he handled her. And that meant that there was no crawling into her bed and fucking his way through all the shitty undercurrents tonight had left swirling around him. There was no losing himself in her, not even briefly, because he already knew where that led.
If he didn’t want her to get to him, there was a simple solution—he needed to treat her like every other piece of ass in his rotation. And he was Greeley Shaw. He didn’t go prowling around for pussy after dark and he didn’t go begging for another taste. Pussy found him, usually on their knees. He told himself pussy was pussy. And he’d have Merritt on her knees like everyone else, or not at all.
The good news was that Merritt was fucked by this thing between them, too. He could still feel the way she’d bucked and writhed against his hand. He could still feel her, scalding hot and slippery soft. She wasn’t getting out of this unscathed.
He’d make sure of that, if nothing else.
Greeley slammed on the gas when the light finally changed and drove his ass home.
But all his good intentions didn’t make his dick less hard.
It took his hand and a cold shower, and even then, he thought of her while he was falling asleep.
Chapter 5
Merritt wasn’t prepared for the reality of waking up in her childhood bedroom much later than usual the next morning.
Not that anyone could ever really be prepared for such an assault.
She woke up the way she had a thousand times before, with the late morning light streaming all over her face from the window beside her bed the same way it always had back in the day. And it could have been any year, she realized once her eyes were open and she was staring at the same old wallpaper that had hung there as long as she could remember, pink and white because at some point in her childhood she’d claimed she liked candy canes. Or so her aunts had told her one Thanksgiving when she’d been a surly fifteen-year-old, furious that the pink of her bedroom was being inflicted upon her by her uncaring father.
You told your mama your heart would break into a thousand pieces if you didn’t get that pink and white, Tante Martha had tutted at her. So pink and white it was.
Now the wallpaper was peeling in places and the pink had gone pale with age. And Merritt was too old to be sleeping in her ancient, narrow twin bed under a mountain of frilly white bed linens with approximately nine trillion useless throw pillows, all of which had seemed to avalanche over her throughout the night, making her dream of suffocation. But then, she’d felt too old for this room since she’d hit puberty. The first thing she’d done when she was out of school housing was get a bigger bed she could sprawl across as she pleased.
All of this meant it really could have been any year at all as she laid there, the sheets in a tangle around her feet, her arm dangling off one edge, and the Louisiana spring morning already heating up the room. Merritt felt as if time had folded in on her. Or maybe crashed down on top of her along with all the throw pillows, if that flattened feeling was anything to go by.
She could have been seventeen years old again, desperate to finish her senior year of high school and get the hell out of Lagrange at last because she was sure somewhere else she’d be less lonely. She could have been twenty-two and torn between the commanding, powerful lover who seemed to take over her head and her heart alike on one side and her plans to go to law school on the other. Then again, maybe she was still the hunted, stressed out twenty-seven-year-old version of herself she’d been yesterday, having humiliated herself the night before in the front hall only to wake up to find her body wanted more of what her head was desperately trying to pretend hadn’t happened. It didn’t matter who the hell she was. The room was exactly the same.
It was freaking her out. More than a little. And the panicked shame spiral brought on by last night’s total lack of control on her part didn’t help.
“Congratulations,” she muttered as she kicked off the sheets that had tried to strangle her in her sleep and swung her feet to the floor. “You proved yourself pretty much the dumbest of the dumb whores. Repeatedly.”
Even her voice sounded embarrassed.
She’d showered for a long, long time last night in a vain attempt to get Greeley off her. It hadn’t worked. But that meant she didn’t bother with it again this morning. She’d slept in her long sleeved T-shirt and she swiped her old cutoffs from the floor as she got up, shimmying them on as she moved toward her bedroom door. Boom. Dressed.
Merritt could already tell this was going to be the kind of day where small things felt like epic victories.
The old house felt stale and silent around her as she made her way downstairs, past the framed pictures of various Louisiana scenes that had lined the wall her whole life. But then, the airless quiet was nothing new, either. Her daddy hadn’t exactly encouraged noise or laughter or really anything that could possibly disturb him in any way when he was relaxing at home. Merritt had learned to steer clear and bite her tongue. Better to avoid his presence than have to defend hers. She’d assured herself that made her delightfully independent.
It was possible she let her bare feet slap down a little harder on the stairs than she would have if he’d still been alive and lurking around somewhere, looking for things to complain about. Thump thump thump, all the way down, in a way that would have gotten her grounded back when.
“Such a fucking rebel,” she muttered as she hit the front hall—and she deliberately did not look at the place where Greeley had held her up against the wall last night and made her sob out her pleasure in complete and total abandon. If she ignored it, maybe all the red hot images that pounded through her head, made her breasts ache, and pooled hot and sweet in her pussy would leave her alone.
Merritt shuffled into the kitchen, pleased that she’d taken the time to program the ancient coffeemaker last night before bed. She fixed herself a huge mug, dumped in some creamer that she’d bought outside of Baton Rouge on the way here, and then took it outside to sit out on the back porch and stare broodingly toward the tangle of old trees that marked the hungry edge of the bayou down at the end of the property.
As shitfaced as she’d felt in Greeley’s presence last night, because that was how she always felt around him, and as hard as he’d made her come—that was how hungover she felt now.
Great. Even the voice in her head was dire. Five years later and he’s still fucking you up without even trying.
But that was Greeley. He was inevitable as the heat and sapped her will to live just the same. Had she really imagined she could come back here and avoid him? Had she truly convinced herself that was possible?
Or had she only wanted to believe that because it was convenient to lie to herself—so she could wake up in the only place she’d ever felt secure?
She flexed her bare feet against the edge of the step below her, letting the roughened, sun-warmed wood press against the arch of each foot the way she always had growing up. Merritt couldn’t have said why she found that so comforting. Only that she did.
Between that and her coffee, which she kept chugging back like it was her last and only hope of salvation, she gradually came to the conclusion that despite everything—including her own behavior—she might just live.
The thick
spring morning didn’t help. It was already too warm and verging on sweaty, insects kicking up a ruckus and the birds getting silly in the trees. And she knew perfectly well that this was nothing. This wasn’t even a decent warm-up to a summer in Cajun country. And still the humidity was reminding her that down here in Louisiana, the hair she kept straight in New York was downright wavy no matter what she tried to do with it.
Louisiana didn’t care who you were or what you wanted. Louisiana made you her bitch.
She lifted a hank of hair and glared at the unmistakable curl in it, then let it drop, limp and frizzy, back down against her chest.
It was the final indignity.
Merritt glared at her rental car as the beige paint glinted in the dappled sunlight beneath the canopy of oak trees. What she should do was leave and she knew it. Right now. The point of coming back here had been to fly under the radar. To hide. Not to end up naked and begging for more in the front hall of her childhood home. She’d wanted to avoid the shit show in New York, not catapult herself face-first into another one. A worse one, if she was honest with herself. She’d barely made it out of this town last time. Once she’d left she’d mourned what she’d left behind for years. Oh, she’d made up all kinds of stories from a distance, but last night had made it clear that pretty much every single thing she’d told herself over the past five years was a big, fat lie.
Her stomach flipped over at that and she blew out a long, slow breath, then threw down some more coffee like that might solve the problem.
What she should do was throw her shit back in the car and just drive in whatever direction until she reached some unheard of place where she knew nobody and even better, no one knew her. She should get lost and stay wherever she happened to find herself. She should get up right now and blow out of Lagrange on the cloud of shame and self-disgust that was threatening to drown her where she sat, and this time, she should stay gone. For good.