So he didn’t flip out. He lifted one hand and pointed at the name stamped right there on his leather cut, on his chest and at her eye level, given he was sitting down.
“Uptown,” she read dutifully. She blinked, and then that megawatt smile of hers flared bright and dangerous, distracting him and filling up the whole goddamned bar, like this really was funny and more—like she was in on the joke. What the hell? “Did I violate the sacred biker code or something?”
“Just thought maybe they taught you to read up at that college of yours.”
“They tried.” Still with that smile, and this time it didn’t falter at all. “But I held out to the bitter end. I’m stubborn like that.”
“Why are you here?” He focused on the ridiculousness of this frilly creature in a place like this. She’d done something to her hair to make it impervious to the Louisiana bayou, sleek and smooth when it should have been frizzy and wild like everyone else’s. Her lips were glossy and made him want to lick them to see why and more, how all that sleek shine would taste on his tongue. She was wearing jeans and a tank top like every other girl in the place who wasn’t advertising her bad intentions outright, but Holly’s fit different. Less skank, more socialite. He doubted she could impersonate a biker bitch if her life depended on it. She had “Daddy’s little rich girl” written all over her, right down to the delicate gold chain around her neck that made him want to test her collarbone with his palm. Or his mouth. “There’s a reason sorority girls come into Dumb Gator’s, babe, and it isn’t the ambience. You up for that kind of party?”
She straightened her shoulders in a manner that was about as far from tough as it was possible to get. Uptown had seen tougher bunny rabbits. Still, Holly Chambless made even pure futility look good.
“Who knows?” she asked, but her gaze was a little too dark for the carefree tone she used. Uptown found that maybe too interesting for his own good. Or hers. “It’s summer. Anything could happen.”
“Really. Anything?” She was so full of shit. He nodded toward Odette Prejean, one of the usual club groupies, up to her usual nighttime activities with Target, another one of Uptown’s DKMC brothers. Odette was currently playing pool with most of her tits hanging out of a tiny little crop top while she rocked her barely covered ass—there was a jean skirt there, just—against Target’s crotch. “Sometimes I like to fuck Odette while a new piece of ass sits on my face. You up for that?”
—
Of course Killian Chenier—Uptown, Holly reminded herself, because she’d forgotten how prickly big, tough bikers were about the silly pet names they had for each other—was exactly as beautiful and as confrontational as she remembered him.
The only difference was that this time around, when she found herself entirely too close to him—so close that she once again had no choice but to notice the fact that his eyes were the exact color of her favorite dark chocolate, just this side of bittersweet, and his mouth was impossibly full and much too tempting for all the filthy things that came out of it—she knew that her reaction to him was not disgust.
At sixteen, back behind the church in the quiet aboveground cemetery where Holly had often gone because she liked to spend a little time with no living eyes on her for a change, she’d had no frame of reference. At first she hadn’t understood what was happening, what she was witnessing right there on the Delacroix family tomb. Then she had, and that had floored her. He had made that worse. He’d had no apparent shame. He’d been so…hard and gorgeous and terrifying, and she’d been entirely too aware that he was trying to scare her off. She’d let him—and then she’d told herself she was appalled and disgusted and that she’d pray for his battered soul while she’d entertained X-rated dreams about him every night. For years.
Or what she’d thought was X-rated, anyway. Not like she’d know.
But these days Holly had a brand-new appreciation of what real disgust felt like. That would be the feeling, thick and oily and consuming, that had pretty much swamped her since her father had been splashed all over the news—in handcuffs.
Her father had been a veritable saint, as he’d been the first to remind her. That was how he’d portrayed himself to her for the past twenty-two years of her life. He’d been the moral stalwart of this town and its crusading conscience, according to him. Holly had lived her whole life so far under the assumption that even if that wasn’t true—as the laundry list of charges against him and a whole lot of things that hadn’t quite added up over the years suggested—everyone was participating in the same genteel game of pretend. For example, she pretended she was nothing but the shiny, clueless, pretty, and dutiful creature her father wanted her to be, with nary a thought in her head but a good marriage with her daddy’s approval and volunteering somewhere until the kids were born. In return, her father was supposed to be as close to the saint he claimed he was as possible. In public, anyway.
Holly didn’t much like finding out that, actually, she was the only one who’d been doing her part.
Being condescended to by a gorgeous, troublemaking biker with a silly name wasn’t much better.
“Bless your heart,” she said sweetly to Uptown, acting as if he’d asked her to an ill-timed cotillion rather than what sounded like uncomfortable gymnastics with a girl she hadn’t cared much for when they were all kids. “I sure do appreciate the invitation. But I’m here for a job interview, not to sit around exploring the local color.”
“Maybe you don’t get what sitting on my face is all about,” Uptown said, as if he hadn’t heard her sweet-enough-to-kill sorority voice. “I’d be the one doing the exploring. That’s the point. And I already know you have a certain appreciation of the things I can do with my—”
“Church?” she supplied, and smiled pointedly at him when he stopped. Just enough to get her meaning across.
“That’s a reasonable conclusion to draw, given the number of times the bitch called out for the Lord, if I’m remembering it right.”
“I assumed she was having a religious conversion, of course. You must be proud that you’re such a uniquely talented missionary, Ki—Uptown.”
Uptown’s grin made her head spin more than the alcohol she knew better than to touch tonight when it made her so silly under the best of circumstances. Which her presence here tonight in dark and sticky Dumb Gator’s, one of Lagrange’s foremost dens of iniquity, was not.
“My mouth is even better.” There was a dark promise in his voice and too much male knowledge and certainty in that gaze he kept trained on her. “You don’t have to make up crazy shit like a job interview. You can just slide on the back of my bike and let me do the thinking.”
The old Holly—the one who had graduated from Ole Miss two weeks ago and had been dutifully pretending she was certain of who she was and her place in the world, the way she had been since she was a kid—would have ignored that wild, tugging thing deep inside of her that wanted nothing more than every last bit of trouble this man radiated like heat. That Holly wouldn’t have been in Dumb Gator’s in the first place. Because she was a Chambless and she had to worry about her reputation above all things, lest her behavior reflect poorly on her father. If that Holly had run into Uptown anywhere, she would have walked away as quickly as possible. She knew what he was. A Devil’s Keeper like so many of the men in town. She knew that nothing good, according to her father’s very strict rules and preferences governing her conduct—not to mention her own two eyes—could ever come of getting too close to any one of them.
But the old Holly had died the day her father was carted off in the back of a police cruiser, in about the most hideously public manner imaginable. So here she was, brand-new Holly Chambless on a mission to change her life—and there was probably no better way to do that than on an outlaw biker’s Harley, finally throwing herself headfirst into all the things she knew perfectly well he could do to her.
It wasn’t as if she wasn’t tempted.
However, Holly had grown up in Lagrange. She might not have bee
n particularly well-versed in all the things that happened in the dark and out in the secretive bayous where mysteries were swallowed whole and good girls inexorably turned into strippers and pregnant biker mamas, but she knew enough to identify a gator when she saw one staring right back at her. Even when he was dressed in jeans and a leather cut and grinning like sex and god were the same damned thing. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out that Uptown was not a starter kit to a brand-new life as something other than the mayor’s vestal virgin daughter. Killian Chenier was the last stop on a runaway train straight to hell, and Holly wasn’t headed there.
Not yet.
“I really am here for a job,” she said brightly, ignoring his invitation entirely. She nodded down the length of the bar. “Katelyn said they were hiring.”
“Katelyn.”
“The blonde? With all that hair and the tattoo across her cleavage?”
“I know who Katelyn is.”
Holly opted not to really dig into the way he said that. The way it suggested a history that she really, really didn’t want to know any more about. The same way she really, really didn’t want to think too much about the obvious changes that had occurred in her high school best friend’s life these past four years, or the weird way Katelyn had looked her up and down and then smirked before suggesting Holly come out here tonight to see about this job.
Her father had just been arrested. Her mother, never exactly strong unless you meant her tolerance for pills, alcohol, and self-pity, had disappeared into her bedroom and hadn’t emerged in a week. Holly could have been imagining the tension that gripped every place she’d walked into since then, no matter if it was the church or the post office. Then again, maybe it really wasn’t her business what other people thought of her, the way that stupid meme on Facebook lectured her daily.
It definitely wasn’t her business what happened between two consenting adults like Katelyn and Uptown, no matter the little knotted thing deep in her gut that seemed to flare up at that visual.
“She told me there was an opening for a new female bartender,” Holly said instead. She made herself look away from Uptown, smiling brightly when Katelyn finally stopped trying to press her vividly tattooed cleavage over the bar toward yet another biker and turned to take in the rest of the bar. Including Holly who, it was hard not to notice, Katelyn didn’t look exactly psyched to see. Holly would have classified her friend’s expression as something a bit darker than that, if she hadn’t been working overtime to ignore it. “And I happen to be both female and in the market for a job, so here I am.”
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous.”
Holly couldn’t ignore that low voice. It was too compelling. And rude.
“Maybe you haven’t heard,” she said, smiling sweetly. “My future is a little uncertain all of a sudden. I need some steady employment.”
She didn’t. Not really. But her father was a liar and everyone knew it now, even Holly. Her life was made out of nothing but bullshit. So why not go on out and get one of the few jobs in Lagrange that would announce that fact to the entire parish? Saint Benny Chambless’s good-girl daughter would have died rather than set foot in a biker bar. But disgraced-criminal Benny’s daughter might as well settle in and enjoy the atmosphere and, hell yeah, get herself a job while she was at it.
That all of those things were very public and would likely horrify her father was just icing on the cake, of course.
“You don’t want a job, babe.” Uptown’s lips quirked and she liked that way more than was healthy or wise. “You want a rebellious phase. I think you’re about ten years overdue.”
“Two birds, one stone,” Holly replied with a careless wave of her hand. She ignored the way he tracked the gesture, as if astonished, just as she ignored the way her pulse seemed to trip over itself when he did. She was good at ignoring things. “And on top of that, bartending is a skill I can take anywhere. I used to do a bit of it in college.”
“Why do I find that hard to believe?” Uptown shook his head, though he looked as amused as he did intent. “The mayor’s squeaky clean little princess in some dive bar, flirting with drunken assholes for tips?”
Holly hadn’t expected him to be perceptive. Or really anything but hot and dirty. “Okay, maybe I didn’t work in a bar so much as bartend at some of my sorority events, for free, but it’s the same skill set.”
Uptown’s grin was a lethal curve of that mouth of his, and Holly wasn’t prepared for it. Who could be prepared? It was too much. It was everything.
“No,” he said, low but not exactly soft, like he was imparting some wisdom she really ought to heed. “It’s not.”
It was only her profound inexperience, Holly told herself, that made her feel those words like some kind of caress. The kind that left her dazed and a little bit breathless besides.
“The prom queen in Dumb Gator’s. I never thought I’d see the day.”
Katelyn’s voice was not friendly, the same way her expression hadn’t been friendly, and Holly had no idea how to process that. But she had to look away from Uptown then, or she wouldn’t. When she turned to the bar, her old friend was frowning—at Uptown, who wasn’t looking back at her. He was still studying Holly, as if Katelyn didn’t exist.
In fact, if Holly paused to really examine the undercurrents here, they were all incredibly weird and made her deeply uncomfortable. So she didn’t. She was good at that, too.
She smiled so big and so wide at Katelyn that she was surprised it didn’t knock her friend back a few steps. But it didn’t. All it seemed to do was make Katelyn’s scowl more pronounced.
“You told me to come in tonight and here I am,” Holly said happily, as if there was no weirdness.
“I didn’t think you’d actually come.”
“You told her to come in here?” Uptown’s attention shifted to Katelyn then, but the way he was studying her was a whole lot cooler than the way he’d been looking at Holly. Harder. “What, you wanted these animals to eat her alive?”
“She’s tougher than she looks,” Katelyn retorted, with an impatience that Holly opted not to pull apart and look at too closely. “She’s not made out of glass the way everyone seems to think.”
“Thank you,” Holly interjected before Uptown could say whatever thing was making his bittersweet chocolate eyes look so dark. “I really am resilient, you know. My grandmother said we all have it in our bones whether we like it or not. Pure Louisiana grit. It makes me the perfect choice to work in a place like this.”
“Jesus Christ, Holly.” Katelyn didn’t sound unfriendly anymore. She sounded almost apologetic. But again—she wasn’t looking at Holly, she was still looking at Uptown. Gazing at him, in fact. “You wouldn’t make it a single night in this place. You’re about as gritty as marshmallow fluff.”
Uptown grinned at that, but his attention was on Holly again. He reached over and took the end of Holly’s ponytail in his hand, wrapping her hair around his palm. He made it impossible not to look at all the tattoos stamped deep into his skin, crawling up his arms and spreading over his knuckles. He made it equally impossible to breathe.
When he spoke his voice was all sex, dark and rich, his gaze on Holly like she was a feast laid out before him.
God help her, she wanted to be.
“That works,” Uptown drawled, like he was tasting each word. And her. “Turns out I got a sweet tooth.”
Chapter 2
“I don’t understand why you’re mad at me,” Holly said, not for the first time, as she followed Katelyn’s stiff and clearly irritated form down the hallway that led from the main bar area to the bathrooms, storerooms, and manager’s office.
Take her into the back, Uptown had growled at Katelyn while Holly had still been rocked all the way through by his hand tangled in her ponytail and that sweet-tooth comment. Me and Bart will be back in a minute.
Katelyn had clearly not liked that order.
But what had fascinated Holly was that she’d obeyed it. Instantly.
There was argument all over her face, but Katelyn—who Holly had always known as particularly outspoken and never afraid to make her opinions known, not even if it would get her into trouble—didn’t voice it.
Come on, she’d bit out at Holly instead.
Holly had dutifully followed her, as much to get away from that nerve-wracking stare of Uptown’s as because she wasn’t at all excited about bartending in a biker bar. A biker bar she’d deliberately avoided for her entire life, before tonight. A biker bar filled with frightening, dangerous men dressed in swathes of leather and denim, tattoos and scowls, and bedecked by the sorts of women who clearly didn’t find any of that intimidating, if their lack of clothes and excess of leaning and outright writhing were any guide.
“I’m not mad,” Katelyn said over the wailing of the jukebox, but she said it in the clipped way girls did when they were furious. Holly knew, since she was also a girl and had furthermore heard that tone from her friend before.
Katelyn opened one of the doors along the back hallway, past the bathrooms but right before the propped-open steel door that let in the sound of the bayou lapping right up against the bar’s foundations, like one rowdy evening too many might sink the place.
Not that being safe was the point of this. And besides, this was Dumb Gator’s. Every night was a rowdy night and it was still standing. Sometimes it flooded, sure, when a big storm came through and the bayous overflowed, but that didn’t seem to bother the proprietor or the clientele overmuch. Her father had always muttered about how they just mopped it up and carried on because they liked the place dank and dirty, as much a part of the swamp as the bell-bottomed cypress trees that grew there.
Mission achieved, Holly thought, wishing she’d brought some hand sanitizer with her. Preferably a vat of the stuff.