“Jesus Christ, enough.”
Holly thought she was imagining that voice, because it was the one she wanted to hear most. She refused to look up for a breath, then another, because she was too afraid that there would be nothing but the rain against the roof and the same three men arguing in a knot next to her father’s still form.
But when she dared look, Uptown was there. It was really, truly him.
Her heart flipped over in her chest, and she felt it then. All the emotions she’d been holding at bay, trying to pretend she wasn’t feeling them or anything. All the terror and disorientation. Her head spun. It was as if she’d thrown up a wall the moment she’d woken up here, but Uptown’s appearance knocked it down flat. Because she knew that whatever else happened here, she’d be safe.
He’d keep her safe.
“Whine, whine, whine,” Uptown was saying as he walked across the floor, his hard gaze on Whale. “It seems like that’s all you ever do. No one would have voted for you, asshole. Wake up.”
He slid a look to Holly, searing and hot, and she felt it move through her long after he looked back to Whale.
“No one voted for you, either,” Whale threw at him.
Uptown laughed. “My name wasn’t in the ring. Neither was yours. No one cares who your daddy is.”
“But let’s talk about your daddy,” Roscoe suggested. “He’s up to some bad shit. It can’t end well. Are you sure you want to back him?”
Whale laughed. “You have no idea how stupid you sound.”
“I’m over this,” Uptown said, sounding impatient. “I want my woman and guess what, asshole? I’m taking this to the table.”
“A whore is fair game,” Whale scoffed. “I have as much right to her as you do.”
Holly decided it was not the time to assert her belief that she got to decide her fate, not them.
“Did you touch her?” And though Uptown’s voice got quieter, it was far scarier. “Will I find a single mark on her body from your hand?”
“You think you can claim anything you want, with that pretty-boy face and that dumb smile,” Whale ranted at him.
“I think you’re a little obsessed with me,” Uptown retorted.
Whale only scoffed. “You were supposed to handle the Benny situation and you couldn’t do it. You were supposed to use her to get to him and you didn’t do that, either. I’m doing it. The bitch isn’t yours. The minute she walked into Dumb Gator’s she was easy pickings and you know it.”
“The minute she walked into Dumb Gator’s,” Uptown growled, a ferocity in his voice Holly had never heard before, “she was mine. You touch my property again and I’ll take your fucking head off.”
Holly knew she should muster up some outrage at that stark declaration of ownership, but she couldn’t. She liked it too much. So much it felt like she could suddenly breathe again.
Uptown and Whale were in each other’s faces. The man who’d walked out of the shadows with Uptown, all dark beard and a darker glare, caught her gaze and lifted his chin. Holly took the hint. Slowly, she eased herself up onto her feet. She wished she had shoes, but she didn’t. So she carefully started inching her way around the fire, ignoring the things that poked into her bare feet as she moved. Whale’s back was to her and he was facing off with the other men. If she could get around him, that would end this conversation. Or it should.
“This isn’t your club anymore, dickhead,” Whale said, low and furious. “It’s mine. And I don’t need your permission to handle any bitch the way I want.”
And then everything slowed down.
Whale turned, and his face twisted when he saw Holly standing. His hand shot up, so he was pointing that gun of his right at her.
And Holly froze. She didn’t run. She didn’t dive for cover. She wasn’t sure she even breathed. If asked, she would have confidently asserted that she could handle herself in a crisis. But here she was. A gun trained on her and she might as well have been made of stone.
Luckily, the bikers had no such problems. They moved—and fast.
Roscoe punched Whale in the arm, so hard Holly thought she could feel the impact from a few feet away. But Whale dropped the gun.
“Don’t do it—” Chaser was growling at him.
Uptown didn’t speak. He looked absolutely lethal, carved in denim and leather like some kind of avenging angel. His dark eyes were cold and trained on Whale. It took Holly a panicked beat to realize his gun was, too.
For a moment there was nothing but the rain on the roof, drumming down from above and drowning everything else out.
Then Whale moved.
He threw himself at Holly—and the fire.
She heard a crack and a whizzing sound and then she was hitting the hard ground with a bone-jolting wallop and Whale on top of her.
And all she could think was: fight.
She bucked and twisted, tearing herself out from under him, and she was panting or sobbing, she couldn’t tell which, when familiar hands pulled her up. Then straight off her feet and into his arms.
“Tell me you’re okay,” Uptown said, intense and hard against her mouth.
Holly couldn’t speak. She wrapped herself around him. She didn’t care if there was an audience, she crossed her legs around his waist and she clung to his neck and she wondered if she’d ever breathe normally again.
“Princess, focus,” he ordered her, still so dark and in her ear, while his hands moved restlessly over every part of her he could reach. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” she whispered. “I’m perfectly fine.”
And she felt a kind of current go through him, this tough man she would have said feared nothing. She felt him let out a breath, long and low.
He shifted her then, so he could hold her in his arms like some kind of Scarlett O’Hara. Holly slid her arm around his neck and then, only then, did she look around.
Whale was still on the floor. Still not moving. Her father was sitting up, but he was uncharacteristically quiet.
“Deal with Benny,” Uptown bit out.
It took Holly a minute to realize he was talking to his brothers.
“That’s your shit,” Chaser said. “Your payback.”
“I don’t care about him anymore.” Uptown shrugged. He looked down at Holly. “Do you?”
And it was tempting to bury her head in his shoulder. To pretend she didn’t know what was happening here, or what Uptown was asking her. She knew who he was. She knew what he did. She’d grown up right here in Lagrange, fully cognizant of the club and its activities whether she’d admitted that to herself or not. And Uptown had shot a man right here, right in front of her, and she couldn’t bring herself to regret that.
She looked at her father. Mayor Benny Chambless. He didn’t beg, of course. His face was red, but he looked haughty. As if he expected nothing at all from the daughter he’d written off as a whore.
Holly had given that man twenty-two years of her life. All her good behavior. And if she let this happen, she’d be giving him the rest of her life. He’d sit on her conscience forever, squat and horrible. Holly refused to let that happen. She refused to let her father take one more thing from her.
“Don’t,” she said, loud enough to carry.
She looked away from her father then, to the pitiless men standing over him who she knew, somehow, would do as she asked. Then she finally met the gaze of the beautiful man who held her. Who she thought could hold her forever, if she needed it.
“Make him pay, Killian,” she whispered. “He should sit in jail and pay.”
And when Uptown carried her out into the rain, she didn’t look back.
Holly clung to him as he strode through the dark, not caring that she was soaked in an instant. She leaned her face into his neck and thought she could happily stay there forever. She shut her eyes and let him carry her.
And when he finally made it to his truck and tore open the door to seat her carefully, so carefully, on the passenger seat, she tilted back her head
to look him in the eyes again.
“I love you,” she said.
It went through him like another blast. The rain was all over him, plastering his hair to his face and his cut and T-shirt to his chest. His gaze went dark and something like troubled, and even though he reached in and took her face in his hands, his mouth stayed in that hard line that made her a little too giddy.
“I know how to make you come,” he said gruffly. “It’s not the same thing.”
But Holly only smiled. “For me it is.”
Uptown’s breath left him again, and his grip tightened just enough that she was aware of the tension in the rest of his body.
“You’re a princess,” he said. “You deserve better than this life.”
“You love the life.”
“I’m a dirtbag, baby. Born and raised.” The smile didn’t reach his eyes. “This is the life that fits me.”
Holly shifted forward so she could get close to him, not caring that the rain was falling all over them, sliding down their skin and pooling in the seat with her. She sat in the wedge of the open door and she wrapped her hands around his wrists.
“My entire life was a lie,” she said fiercely. “Until you.”
“Listen to me,” he said, gruff and ruthless, with that intense gleam in his eyes that made her…raw. And wet. Needy and worried and a little bit desperate. “The kind of man I am, I don’t take commitments lightly. You get that, right? And you’re young. Just out of college and your daddy was hard on you. You might change your mind.” He leaned a little closer to her. “Baby, you need to understand that I would not take that well.”
She pushed forward when he didn’t, and got her mouth on his. And she knew what to do now. How to taste him and toy with him a little. How to tempt him.
“I think I imprinted on you when I was sixteen,” she whispered when they were both breathing heavy. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t run away that day?”
He laughed, a dark sound in all that wet, and still it danced in her like fire.
“All the time,” he told her roughly. “All the damn time.”
And she didn’t know who kissed who then. It was a fever and a wild, drumming need, brighter and hotter than the rain that fell all around them. He shifted her back on the truck’s bench seat while he angled his jaw for a hotter, slicker fit. Then his hands were moving, sleek and demanding down her body until he found the waistband of her jeans.
Two tugs and he’d opened her fly, and he was stroking his way into her pussy even as she was wriggling her hips to get her jeans down, and then she was coming in sharp, hot, insane jolts all over his hand.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said against her neck. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever touched.”
And when she stopped shuddering and bucking, she still wanted him. He’d tugged her jeans and panties off one leg and was working on his fly. She reached down and pulled out his cock and they both groaned.
Then he was there, pushing into her, as big and hard and perfect as she remembered, skin to skin this time the way she’d wanted, and he slid all the way home in that first, delirious thrust.
“I thought he was going to kill me,” Holly whispered.
“Like hell,” Uptown muttered.
But here, in the dark, she called him by that other name. As if it was hers. And he let her.
And when he had her strung out on him again, shaking and begging with each deep thrust of his demanding cock, he got down close. Holly thought his eyes were the whole world. They were her whole world.
“Make me your future,” he said, and it sounded like another one of his orders, fierce and sure. “Make me your life, princess. You won’t regret it.”
She already didn’t regret it. She didn’t regret a thing.
“I can do that,” she whispered.
And then she locked her ankles in the small of his back, gloried in the rain that fell down on them like some kind of bayou baptism, and let him throw them both straight into forever.
Chapter 12
Two years later, Uptown waited for Benny Chambless to meet him in a prison waiting room a few hours away from Lagrange.
Uptown didn’t usually like prisons. He visited his brothers behind bars because that was the least he could do for his family, but he never liked it. This, though, was different. This was exactly where a pig like Benny deserved to be.
It gave him enormous pleasure to see the man who’d ruined his mother’s life in here, tricked out in a prison jumpsuit and no threat to anybody. His woman was a smart little thing. He never forgot that she was the one who’d saved Benny’s life, allowing Benny’s corruption trial and subsequent sentence to happen. It was like Christmas every time Uptown thought about it.
Shit hadn’t always been easy, but it was good.
Uptown had spent that first night after the refinery with Holly, but he’d left her early the next morning. He’d wanted to claim her officially, with a property patch and a party at the clubhouse to celebrate his taking an old lady—but he had some music to face first. He’d shot Whale. He’d do it again in a heartbeat, but that didn’t change the fact he’d taken down a brother. And not just any brother—his president’s son.
But when he’d called Roscoe to tell his VP that he was going in to talk to Digger and take what was coming to him at the table, Roscoe had stopped him.
“You heard what he told me,” Roscoe had said. “It’s not our club anymore.”
“I don’t like it any more this morning than I did last night.”
Roscoe had sighed. “If shit goes down, we’re going to need you. You can’t be sidelined or exiled or worse.”
Uptown had understood where his VP was coming from, but it didn’t sit right.
“I don’t regret a thing,” he’d said. “But I can’t sit at that table and look my brothers in the face if I don’t come clean.”
“Are they our brothers?” Roscoe had asked. “Or is our club rotting from the inside out? I don’t want to sacrifice you to find out.”
There was no getting around it. They’d all known it then. The club was splitting. It seemed like war was in the air and there was no getting away from it—and if that was the case, even if it ripped his heart out, Uptown knew who he wanted at his back.
“I’m with you, brother,” he’d told Roscoe, sealing his fate.
In the visiting room, he looked up and smiled as he saw Benny heading for him, the old man’s customary scowl on his face.
Club business was none of Benny’s concern, so Uptown thought about Holly instead. It was so hard to look at this shuffling old asshole, locked up as he deserved, and see his woman anywhere in the man who’d helped make her.
Holly was sunshine. If she’d ever wavered, from that night outside the refinery straight through to now, she’d never showed it. She’d slid right into the life, taken a property patch and worn it proudly. She’d never had a second thought, not even when it seemed that the other old ladies weren’t necessarily welcoming her with open arms.
“They’re not sure they like me,” she’d told Uptown one night at Dumb Gator’s, where she no longer worked. Because the last thing Uptown needed was to fight every asshole who ogled her, which was what would happen if she kept slinging drinks. Hell no. “Because I don’t like their rules.”
“Fuck them,” he’d replied.
But he was still sitting there when Crystal came sauntering over later. He was hanging out on the customer side of the bar while Holly laughed with her friends behind it. If the news—the lie they’d constructed—that Whale had finally turned out to be the punk bitch everyone had known he was and taken off bothered her, a hardened old lady like Crystal didn’t show it. She’d smiled at Holly, while managing to not look at Katelyn in a way that made her thoughts on the blonde perfectly clear.
“You know you can’t keep talking to all that trash,” she’d said very distinctly. She indicated Katelyn and the other girls behind the bar
. “That’s not how shit works in this club.”
Holly had smiled back, as sunny as ever. “I mean no disrespect, Crystal. But I’m going to talk to whoever I want, whenever I want.”
And then she’d slung her arm over her stunned friend’s shoulders, in case she hadn’t been clear enough.
Uptown had only shrugged when Crystal had turned to him.
“I don’t give a fuck who she talks to,” he’d said.
That was the first time he’d ever seen Katelyn get teary.
He was still grinning about that when Benny sat down across from him in prison.
“Just you,” Benny said darkly.
“Just me.”
“I want to see my daughter. And my granddaughter.”
Uptown grinned wider. “That’s not up to you, old man.”
Holly had gotten pregnant fast. While her father went on trial, she’d skipped court to help her mother take her first steps toward sobriety, because family was what was important—not the nasty man who’d torn hers into pieces. It even made Uptown think that maybe, the next time he crossed paths with his own mother, he might try again to help her. And Holly’s commitment to her mother meant a lot of Uptown in the mayor’s fancy house. They went back and forth between town and the bayou, and he found that as long as he had his woman wrapped around him when he went to sleep, and there beside him to wake up in a variety of creative ways, he was good. He was more than good.
The more she loved him, in her huge, uncompromising, matter-of-fact way, the more easy he became with his princess being all messed up with a man like him. Every day he stopped seeing the differences between them, because they just belonged together. It was that simple.
He married her when she was big and round with his kid, so she could always look at those pictures and remember what a bad girl she was at heart, getting pregnant with a biker’s baby and running around with him without a care in the world.
“I should be ashamed,” she’d said in her white dress, her hands on her belly.
But her smile was so big it was impossible to look at the pictures without smiling in return.
And then she took it all one step further, and gave him his daughter.