She got it now.
And sure, she was rationalizing her own heroin use. She understood that. But the part of her that had been so horrified by her own tendency to romanticize terrible men that she’d spent all that time in therapy trying to beat it out of herself was oddly quiet tonight. Maybe because she didn’t think she was romanticizing Chaser at all. She knew who he was. She knew what he did. And still, he was the only man she’d wanted in years, much less with this insane fervor. The only one who could touch her and make her heart sing while the whole dirty, dangerous world fell away.
Because if she knew one thing it was this: her body would never respond the way it did if her heart wasn’t involved. Her body might have been there first. But then he’d held her close in the dark of her apartment and told her the story of how hard he’d searched for his kidnapped child, and who could withstand that? Not Lara.
Was it bikers and biker clubs in general she hated? She’d always thought so. But tonight she’d stood next to a man who’d protected her from the sort of mess she should have seen coming the minute she’d crossed the Lagrange town line. Sooner or later, someone would have seen her tattoo or figured out who she visited every weekend. Sooner or later she would have been in the same situation, and maybe not with a big, tough enforcer right there at her back. Not only that, Chaser had saved her from her own worst impulses, if she was being perfectly honest, and her own big mouth while he was at it. Meanwhile her uncle, the man who’d done nothing but try to hurt her all her life, had indicated that he still would, given the chance. They were both bikers, sure. But did they have anything else in common?
Maybe it wasn’t bikers she hated. Maybe it was her uncle Ray.
Chaser was holding on to her with a tight grip she didn’t think a bomb could loosen, which was a good thing, because she felt as if that last revelation had splintered her into a million little shards. Lara didn’t know how to process that, or put herself back together, or even really breathe through it. But that was the beauty of the man beside her. She didn’t have to. She didn’t have to figure out her responsibility or acknowledge her complicity. She didn’t have to account for herself or the emotions sweeping through her, one after the next, as contradictory as they were complex. She didn’t have to do anything but let him steer her through the chaos of the great room. She didn’t have to worry or stress or try to work anything out. She could let someone else be strong for a change. She could rely on Chaser to take care of her.
It felt like a revolution.
And then Chaser was propelling her outside, back out into the thick bayou night that still hovered there on the edge of a summer storm.
She’s mine, he’d said, and she knew better than to let that go unchallenged. She knew she needed to ask him what he’d meant. In detail, so there could be no misunderstandings. She knew she couldn’t let that kind of claim lie there between them, like a noose that only grew tighter every second she didn’t assert herself and refuse him. Not that he’d asked whether or not she wanted to be his. Still, Lara knew how men like Chaser operated, didn’t she? Whatever they could take, they took.
But out in the rich, grumbling dark, everything felt like a dream, too thick and too rich. The bayou chorus threaded through with meaning and portent. Her own feet unsteady beneath her and the sense that all of this had already happened. That Chaser was inevitable and this night had always been a foregone conclusion, and some part of her had been his from the very first moment he’d stepped inside her classroom.
And Lara didn’t want to fight about it. There would be time to fling herself into a new battle later, surely. If life had taught her anything it was that there was always a new battle. There would be time to find out what the word “mine” meant to Chaser. And she was sure that once that time came, she’d find it in her to bristle and rebel, to talk about boundaries and all the other things she knew she ought to do to keep him from swallowing her whole.
But not here. Not now.
Who would know if she allowed herself a little breather before she launched herself off the next rocky cliff toward yet another scuffle? Who would care if she just…pretended for a minute that she didn’t have to fight at all? That she really could let this man claim her? That she could even revel in it if she wanted to?
That despite how far she’d run to get away from her uncle and his club, she could let herself fall into a man far more dangerous than Uncle Ray had ever been—and like it?
Lara didn’t say a word, not even when Chaser’s hard, steady gaze searched her face. She could see he was waiting for her to start in on him, to argue at the very least, maybe say something cutting and dry, but she didn’t. She only gazed back at him, lips shut tight.
His mouth curved slightly, very slightly. That was all. But it was enough.
In the close, warm dark, her uncle’s voice still echoing a little too loudly inside her head like an endless sneer, it felt like everything.
She stood back as he started up his bike and then Lara climbed up behind him without a single qualm or question, and it was even easier to slide into place behind him this time. It didn’t feel new, it felt familiar. Right. She wrapped her arms around his hard abdomen and she tucked her face against his wide shoulder, and as he took off with a leap and a roar she closed her eyes and imagined they were flying.
And that they could fly forever, tucked up together, exactly like this.
She wanted him to haul ass down these country roads until there was no telling where the bike ended and the bayou began. She wanted them to drive on straight into the storm until they became a part of it. Until there was nothing but speed and sound and wind in her face, like a kiss.
She wanted to feel this way—free and soaring, as much a part of the soft night around her and the hard man in front of her—as long as she could.
But all too soon he turned off the road and rolled a ways until he stopped. Lara wasn’t ready to let go of him but she forced herself to do it anyway, on the off chance he wouldn’t guess how little she wanted to. Then she sat back, reluctantly opening her eyes again and blinking as she took in the world around her that she’d enjoyed escaping a little too much.
Oblivion in sex. Oblivion on the back of a bike. She’d transformed into a full-on biker bitch in less than a week, making all of the worst nightmares of her youth come true. Lara should have been horrified by that—but she wasn’t.
She expected to see the bakery there before her. Lagrange’s Main Street and the alley that led to her door, tucked up beneath the metal fire escape. But instead she was staring at the side of a tidy little two-story house, surrounded by an indifferently tended lawn with a tangle of cypress trees at the back of the property. Lara wondered what the hell was going on. Chaser shot a look over his shoulder in a silent command to dismount, so Lara climbed off the back of the bike and frowned around her, trying to figure out where they were. There was a separate garage farther out back with a motion light that was blazing all over the grass, and lights on inside the house itself that spilled out of the windows. That was all oddly domestic and disconcerting enough, but beyond the house laid a perfectly nice suburban street and what looked like a well-tended, lived-in neighborhood like any other dotted around the parish.
A place where normal civilians lived, in other words. Not slightly terrifying biker club enforcers.
Lara thought she might have been less surprised to find herself standing on the surface of the moon.
“Where are we?” she asked when he turned the growly engine off.
Chaser took his sweet time answering her. He hung his helmet on the bike’s handlebar, then raked his hands through his hair. Only then did he swing his leg over to dismount, so he was standing there over her, clearly not in the least afraid to loom above her in the dark.
Who was she kidding? If he was afraid of anything, ever, he kept it hidden well.
His face was hard as he looked down at her. Or maybe that was the shadows and the night, she couldn’t tell. And it didn’t matt
er. She longed for him all the same.
“This is my house.”
That didn’t compute. At all.
“What do you mean, your house?”
“My house, Lara.” His mouth tightened, though she thought he was less growly than he was pretending to be. It was almost as if she could read him now, a notion that gave her entirely too much pleasure. “Where did you think I lived? In a strip club? A jail cell?”
“I can’t say I gave the matter any thought,” she said a little more carefully than she might have because there was a gleam in his gaze that made her pulse pick up. In warning or delight, she couldn’t quite tell. It was Chaser. It could be both. “But if I had, I probably would have assumed you lived out in that clubhouse.”
“With my teenage daughter? In the middle of all those skanks and perverts—and believe me, I’m talking about my brothers when I say that?” He shook his head. “Hell no. I might not win Parent of the Year, but I’m not a complete scumbag.”
He stepped around her and started for the side door, clearly expecting her to follow him. But her legs didn’t seem to work. Which was a good thing, because like hell could she go with him into that house. For a number of reasons, all of which scrolled wildly through her head as she watched him. Because it suggested a level of domesticity and something like commitment that disturbed her, down deep. Because Lara had managed to forget that this man had a daughter that she taught, making everything she’d done with him more than a little problematic and making her presence here—likely still smelling of him—inappropriate and impossible.
And mostly because she didn’t understand what was happening.
“What are we doing here?” she asked, her throat suddenly dry. As if she was halfway into a panic attack, which sounded about right, given everything that had happened tonight. “Are you picking something up?”
“I’m dropping something off.” Chaser wheeled around to face her again. “You, babe. I want you here, not in some unprotected apartment in the middle of town where any scumbag can get to you. You didn’t even see me when you pulled up last night. I could have been anyone.”
“I’m not used to examining the shadows for lurking ne’er-do-wells,” Lara retorted, which wasn’t actually true but hell, who cared about that at a time like this, “but I’ll be sure to up my game. Take me home.”
“This is Lagrange,” he replied, without the slightest bit of give in either his voice or his expression. “It’s not a game. And no. You’re staying here.”
“That’s impossible for at least nine hundred reasons, but let’s start with the fact that I don’t want to stay here.”
She might as well have saved her breath, because Chaser gave her no indication that he’d heard her.
“I’m going to put a prospect on watch to make sure no one comes at you,” he told her instead. “After I take care of a few things tonight, I’ll be here, too. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but I have a weird feeling. And I don’t ignore that feeling when it comes. It’s kept me alive and kicking this long.”
“I can’t stay here.” And Lara wasn’t faking the appalled note in her voice. “I can’t…Why would you even want that? Because you have a feeling?”
“Because I do. The end.”
That was not a satisfactory response. “I don’t need to stay here and no one needs to watch me. What the hell is going on?”
“You don’t need to know,” he told her, his voice hard and flat, which meant it had something to do with the club. She couldn’t tell if that sharp, pointed thing she felt then was nostalgia, regret that she was in this situation again and of her own volition this time, or simply an age-old familiarity. She only knew it felt like a puncture. “You just have to do it. And, Lara, let me be real clear. This isn’t a negotiation. You’re staying here. If you try to take off, you won’t like what happens when I hunt you down. And you’re still gonna end up staying here, you just might do it chained to my bed. It’s going to work for me either way, but you might not love it when I’m pissed.”
“You make it sound like I’d be safer wandering the streets with a target pinned to my back.”
“Baby, get real.” He didn’t quite smile, so there was no reason she should have felt so fluttery inside. “You already are. My advice? Be smart instead of just smart-mouthed, for a change. Get your ass inside.”
Lara tamped down the urge to throw something back at him, heedless and wild, just to prove she could. That she didn’t have to surrender to anyone. That it didn’t matter how many times he knocked her down, she would get right the hell back up—
Oh.
Maybe, she thought then, her reaction wasn’t actually about him. Since he’d never slapped her to the ground. It was hard to imagine he would ever do something like that. Why would he? He wasn’t a small man, inside or out. She’d never even seen him lose his temper, not even that first night when she’d been deliberately provoking him. Or perhaps that had been him losing his temper. If it was, she certainly enjoyed it a whole lot more than a fat lip.
Maybe it was time to stop expecting that Chaser Frey was her uncle, just because they both liked motorcycles.
Lara pulled in a breath and thought about Chaser’s hand over her mouth in that office. She thought about that undercurrent of a certain kind of fury she’d detected in the way he’d just thrown those words at her now, all those hard commands.
It was as if he was concerned for her, not mad at her.
There was the way her uncle had spoken to her tonight, harsh and pissed and happy to leave her to whatever fate awaited her. I’m not that hand. Not for you. And then there was Chaser, looming over her in the light that spilled out of his kitchen window like he could hold back the world if necessary, ordering her to safety yet again.
“Am I in danger?” she asked him, her voice quiet.
She could tell he’d been ready for a fight in the way he relaxed when she didn’t give him one. She watched that big, powerful body change. Loosen a little. Ease. It was astonishing how much she wanted to have that power, that right to soothe him or calm him when his entire life was nothing but violence and fury, hard choices and tough solutions.
You’re in way over your head, that mean voice that was too much like her aunt’s hissed at her. You’re nothing but a piece of ass to a man like this.
But Lara knew that wasn’t true. She knew it as well as she knew that Chaser wanted to protect her, or he would never have brought her to his home—where his daughter lived. He might have protected a random groupie he liked the taste of, sure, but he’d have left a groupie in the clubhouse.
He didn’t have to spell these things out for her. Lara knew bikers. They were all about compartmentalizing. Family in one box, the club in another. The fact that he’d brought her here tonight said more about the kind of claim he was making than a couple of words in an office.
Her heart felt too big inside of her. She was afraid her eyes were too full. She forgot all the things she’d vowed she didn’t want. She forgot everything but the man standing before her, above her, so big he made the rest of the world feel silly and small. Insignificant.
“I don’t know if you’re in danger,” he told her, and there was a rougher note in his voice than before. It made her breath catch in her throat. “But I don’t want to take any chances.”
Then he held out his hand, standing there at the bottom of the steps that led to his side door, and waited.
Lara understood what it would mean if she took it. She hardly knew Chaser and yet somehow, she felt as if she knew him well. She knew he was about the promises he made. She knew that he could have tossed her into that meeting in the club’s office and let her drown, but he hadn’t. She knew he could have left her in that clubhouse to fend for herself, but he’d brought her here instead.
No one had ever been on her side, or worried about her safety, or really all that bothered about her or her feelings at all. Her uncle had smacked her around. Her brother had lived his own life. Her mother
had given up when she’d surrendered them to Uncle Ray, and she hid her guilt over that deep down beneath about a thousand layers of indifference. No one had chased Lara down after she’d left for good. Mikey had called her every now and again, but none of her other relatives or supposed friends from home had ever even checked in to see if she was okay out there in the world.
If she hadn’t made her own good friends in San Diego, she might have been tempted to think something was wrong with her. Or why else would she matter so little to the people who should have loved her the most?
That was the thing that was tearing its way through her then, as if the storm that was still hunkering down in the distant night sky had finally started and the thunder had made its way inside of her.
And here was Chaser, who wanted to protect her. He kept proving it. He kept doing it. No one else ever had. No one else had tried.
She couldn’t say she moved toward him so much as melted, and then she was slipping her hand into his and tipping her head back to look up at him. Up and up, past the miles of his steel-packed body to that hard face and that gleaming gaze of his that she was starting to think she might need a little more than was healthy.
And also, that she didn’t care if it was wrong. If she was an addict and unhealthy and all the other names she’d called herself so she could feel responsible for what her family had done to her—because if she was responsible, she could control it. And then decide not to feel that way. Tonight, none of that mattered. She just wanted to lose herself in him, because she trusted that one way or another, he’d make sure she made it back. He’d see to it personally. She knew that with a bedrock certainty that had everything to do with the heat in his dark whiskey gaze and the power in the hand wrapped tight around hers.
“You gonna trust me, baby?” Chaser asked, as if he knew exactly what she was wrestling with.
His hand was so hard and sure around hers. Hers fit there perfectly, a key in a lock. As if they were supposed to be connected like that. As if this was some kind of homecoming, this crossing of his threshold as well as too many long-held boundaries to count, and likely a whole lot of lines while she was at it.