Holly turned all of that over in her head. “I don’t get why she talked to me if she doesn’t talk to you.”
Katelyn’s mouth looked a little more fragile for a second, but then she pressed her lips together again. Her eyes glittered. Hard.
“Because you haven’t fucked her husband about a million times,” she said matter-of-factly. Then she smirked when Holly flinched, something brittle and expectant in her expression. “Yet. Digger likes to sample the new girls before they get too jaded on all that biker cock. Just FYI.”
And it was a long while after that, with Katelyn’s words crashing around in her head in a way that might have been painful if she’d let herself think about it too hard, that Holly looked over to Pony’s usual seat and found Uptown there instead.
Her heart did not leap in her chest. Her stomach did not perform backflips in her belly and then try to slam itself into the floor. She did not come a little too close to tripping over her own feet. That would all be crazy, so it couldn’t possibly have happened. She told herself it didn’t. She didn’t even like him.
But when Uptown crooked a single finger at her, that knowing gleam in his eyes and a small curve in the corner of his problematic mouth, she went over to him. At once.
Because I’m a bartender and this is a bar, she told herself piously. And he is a customer, that’s all.
She walked over and leaned against the bar the way she’d been doing all night with everyone who ordered something, but it was different with Uptown. She was conscious of her body in a completely new way. She could feel her breasts beneath her tank top, as if they were suddenly real, ample breasts rather than the usual A-cup disappointments. She was aware of the faint sheen on her skin from running around behind the bar, and how it only intensified when she stood still in front of Uptown. Her lip gloss had worn off, which she knew because she started to bite her lower lip before she stopped herself. His gaze had already dropped to her mouth and gone hot and narrow. She didn’t need a whole lot of experience to understand he’d likely find her biting on her lip…provocative.
Uptown took his sweet time raising his gaze to hers. Holly decided she was fine with that. It allowed her to study him without him watching her do it. He looked the way he always looked. Hot. Weathered in that way of his, as if the battered jeans and faded T-shirt were simply what happened to anything so close to all his impossible male beauty that shone so bright it was like a beacon in the middle of a dimly lit bar, and only the leather cut held its own. Because really, he was just plain beautiful. It was unfair. His dirty blond hair was never entirely tamed, as if countless fingers had been in it, leaving it messy and tempting. His eyes were big and soulful and ridiculous. He didn’t wear a big beard like so many of his biker brothers, likely because he was well aware that his wide mouth made him almost too pretty but that strong, tough jaw made him…Uptown. As dangerous as he was beautiful. Or all the more dangerous because he was beautiful.
“Miss me?” he asked.
Holly treated him to her best sorority smile, perfected over the course of a thousand charity events and mixers, as empty as it was sweet. “Oh, I’m afraid not. Was I supposed to?”
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“Where’s Pony?” she asked. “Did you kick him out of his seat? That’s not very nice.”
“He’s a prospect. If I told him to get on the ground and lick the road off my boots, he’d fucking do it and love every second of it.”
She cocked her head to one side as she considered that. “I don’t know which one of you that makes me feel sorrier for.”
He laughed. “My brothers tell me you didn’t ask them a damn thing all week. You didn’t wonder what was going on for even a second. Where I was, for example.”
“I didn’t.”
“Princess, princess.” That damned mouth of his was connected to her pulse, apparently. It made her feel…jittery. “I had no idea you were so stubborn.”
“A lady is occasionally forthright and always self-possessed, thank you. Never stubborn.”
Uptown’s dark eyes lit with delight, and she didn’t feel that in her pulse. Or not only in that rapid fluttering through her limbs, but also like a thick throb between her legs. God help her.
He leaned against the bar. “Aren’t you going to ask me where I was?”
“I would ask a thousand questions, obviously, if only to be polite,” she assured him in that same smooth, empty tone that made his smile go edgy, “but it worries me that you answering them might take away from your whole mysterious thing, and then what do you have?”
“My ‘mysterious thing’?” But he sounded indulgent. “What the hell is that?”
“You know. Your whole mystique.” She leaned her elbows on the bar, aware that the great heavy weight of it standing there between them was giving her maybe a little too much false courage. She ran with it. “You always swagger around this town like you’re something special. Like if someone happens to get a glimpse of you mid-swagger, that’s a gift you’re bestowing upon them.”
His smile widened. “Baby. It is.”
“What if I asked you where you went and it was, like, Poughkeepsie? For some kind of tedious conference where you had to walk around in khakis and a polo shirt with your name in a plastic lanyard around your neck?”
Uptown let out a laugh and Holly was aware that outside the little bubble they had somehow fallen into, where it was only the two of them and what seemed like far more bright light than should have been possible inside a dank old bar, people noticed. Turned. Watched. But she couldn’t tear herself away from the bubble she hadn’t meant to enter, but now didn’t want to leave. Or care.
“The last time I was in khakis and a polo shirt was never,” he told her, all that laughter making his low voice feel like honey as it washed over her, thick and sweet. “The next time? Will also be never. And I don’t even know where the fuck Poughkeepsie is.”
“That’s a relief,” she heard herself say, in the kind of low, laugh-infused voice she’d always imagined herself using as a worldly, sophisticated sort of woman. Though not with him. Liar, something in her hissed. “Just think of all the implications.”
His smile faded from his mouth, but she could still see it in his gaze, making that bittersweet chocolate gleam. Making everything inside of her seem to reflect that gleam and intensify it.
“I was up in Shreveport,” he told her. “Is that better than Poughkeepsie?”
Holly didn’t know when she’d started smiling. “Barely.”
He leaned forward then and ran his hand down the length of her ponytail, letting his fingers tangle a little in the ends. She didn’t know why he kept doing that. She didn’t know why she didn’t hate it the way she should.
“Come with me,” he said after a moment, and he was too close when he should have been safely on the other side of the bar. But there was nothing safe about Uptown, especially when she could feel his breath against her face. And she was sure he could feel her shiver, then try to hide it. It was something a little too close to painful to be so very near that mouth of his and the way it curved. “Your shift’s over.”
She blinked. This was Louisiana, where there were no state laws about closing times, which meant the night shift really could go all night if there were still people in here buying drinks.
“No, it isn’t. Bart says we work until he tells us we’re done. So far that’s been anywhere between two and four.”
“I bet he’ll give you a pass.”
Holly frowned at him. “Maybe I don’t want a pass.”
Uptown only smiled.
“I’m reintroducing myself to the community,” she told him, a little loftily. “Not as the mayor’s daughter, given his disgrace, but as any old random girl who works here. I can’t just run off with some biker.”
“This is a biker bar. That’s pretty much the whole point.”
“So far,” she said, furiously trying to fight back the blush that was threatening to heat up her
cheeks again, like she was a kid, “I haven’t noticed that anyone feels the need to run off anywhere. They just…” She couldn’t say it when he was looking at her like he found her on the edible side of fascinating, so maybe she really was as much of a child as she felt shuffling around her father’s house, spoiling for a fight. “Right here. On the pool tables, against the walls. Wherever.”
“Welcome to Dumb Gator’s, princess. What did you think happened here?”
“I thought it would be scary,” she told him, perhaps unwisely. “Violent. Not just…you know. Unsanitary.”
He belted out another laugh at that, then inclined his head in the general direction of the door.
“Come on,” he said. “I promise to keep it sanitary.”
And she knew better. Of course she knew better. He might as well have invited her straight to hell. That was where he’d take her, she had no doubt. He was temptation made real and she’d never understood, until right this minute, how very, very little interest she’d had in the boys she’d known at Ole Miss. Relatively speaking. Oh, she’d had crushes and moments and she’d thought she was really into a couple of guys at various points. But it was like the difference between preschool discussions about feelings, maybe involving toys in bright primary colors, and a college-level psych course complete with exams.
She’d never felt anything like this in her life. Like she was physically incapable of resisting him.
He tugged harder on her ponytail and drew her closer to him, as if the wide bar between them was no barrier at all. Holly almost forgot it was there when he was on the other side of it.
“Have you ever ridden on a motorcycle?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered. “They’re very dangerous.”
This close, she could see the way his eyes crinkled in the corners, suggesting he really did laugh a lot. Heat washed through her, making her skin feel oversensitive, as if the air around her was an abrasion. As if he was, and yet the only thing she wanted him to do was touch her.
Everywhere.
“That’s the point, princess,” he said, as if he already knew where this would end. As if it had already happened, hot and wild and insane, like that dark, delicious promise in his gaze. “But don’t worry about the danger. You won’t care once I teach you how to fly.”
—
Outside, Uptown had to get ahold of himself before he threw her over the hood of the nearest car and sank into her here and now. His cock didn’t really get why that wasn’t an option. Not yet, anyway.
He’d had a week up in Shreveport to think about the best strategy to take with sweet little Holly Chambless and her cute little walk on what she imagined was the wild side. Like she had any idea what wild really was.
If he was honest, he hadn’t thought about a whole lot else.
It had been a long fucking stretch of the usual bullshit up in the Shreveport charter of the DKMC, where the club president there, General, could always be depended upon to make even the most simple thing in the world a giant pain in the fucking ass. The paranoid dick. Uptown and Roscoe had been sent up to simultaneously kiss a little ass and convince Shreveport to feel the love from Lagrange, because the last thing anyone needed—and what the mother charter up in North Dakota was adamant needed to be nipped in the bud before it caused any actual issues—was bad blood between two charters in the same state.
Uptown had been pissed about it the whole time he was up there, doing his job like a good solider when he had other things to tend to back home. Still, he’d handled the inevitable dick-measuring contests with a big-ass grin on his face, because that was what was needed. He’d nodded sagely through all the ranting about respect and loyalty and brotherhood when really, General was mad that his club was in a city filled with Black Dogs he couldn’t seem to wipe out or even see coming half the time. Meanwhile, Lagrange stayed sweet and safe and protected, because Digger and the other original members had set that shit up decades back. Left to his own devices too long—meaning a month or so without a pilgrimage from the Lagrange charter to kiss his ring and soothe his ego—General started thinking his own club’s lack of foresight years ago was the same as Lagrange outright disrespecting Shreveport now.
And only Uptown and Roscoe were any good at handling shit like this, because they were the best at acting easygoing and friendly no matter what they actually felt about something. Digger would cause a war with his famous temper. Hell, most of the Lagrange brothers would have blown up some shit rather than soothe General’s paranoia and spend all that time catering to the egos of the rest of the Shreveport brothers.
I’m weary of these pissant little fucks, Uptown had muttered on their way out of town.
Unto my very soul, brother, Roscoe had replied.
But brothers were brothers, so they’d done their duty.
It hadn’t helped Uptown’s mood that he’d had to put his own shit on hold to handle another old man’s vanity. He’d had to wait his whole life to finally vent his spleen on Benny Chambless. Waiting another week on top of it because General needed to feel special was unnecessary torture.
He’d been on his way back to the clubhouse to report in when he’d seen Holly’s bright red car parked in front of Dumb Gator’s. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten she was working here. He’d kept eyes on her the whole time he’d been gone, because he knew if he hadn’t, things would have gotten crazy for her, probably a little too fast for her liking. She was fresh meat in a den of giant, perverted wolves, after all, and he’d known perfectly well she wasn’t likely to do what he’d told her to do and tell the assholes who came at her that she was under his protection. He’d made the prospects cycle in and out of her shifts to make sure every scumbag in the place—including his own DKMC brothers after a few too many—remembered that she was his. His problem. His revenge on the man who’d ruined his mother, not theirs to break in on a slow Tuesday. But the minute he’d seen her car, he was done with club business.
Tomorrow, he’d shouted at Roscoe when he’d indicated he was stopping, and his VP had waved his okay.
Then he’d walked inside and seen Holly behind the bar, smiling like she was at some church function instead of neck deep in a dirty bayou bar, and the night got a whole lot brighter.
He could have questioned that. He knew he should have, the same way he should have been deeply weirded out by the fact he’d never quite gotten around to sampling the available pussy up in Shreveport, which wasn’t exactly usual for him. But he didn’t.
And now that he’d gotten Holly Chambless outside and into the dark with him, he could admit to himself that the only reason he hadn’t fucked his way through the Shreveport groupies to deal with his stress and irritation was because his cock had suddenly decided to become discerning, after all these years of being pretty much anything but. It wanted Holly. Only.
Uptown didn’t like that shit at all. But he didn’t care as much as he might have, because what did it matter, in the end? He was going to have her, sooner or later. Maybe his cock was simply all about that revenge. He told himself that was the only reasonable explanation.
She’d followed him out but stopped, standing there in the dirt in those killer high heels of hers. The shitty old neon sign over the darkened window bathed her in blue and did nothing to take away from her fresh, sweet prettiness. She was like walking, talking sunshine. She made Uptown realize exactly how dark and dirty he was—but that would change, of course. He was going to ruin her the way her father had destroyed his mother, fucking up what little childhood Uptown had known in the process. He was going to mess her up until they matched.
“No second thoughts,” he told her, not bothering to keep the gruffness from his voice as he faced her, and not examining where that was coming from, either. It was certainly no strange glimmer of regret on his part about what was going to happen to her. That would be crazy. “Second thoughts are lies, Holly. Don’t backpedal.”
“I’m not sure it counts as backpedaling to rethink leaping on a motorcyc
le with a total stranger.” She folded her arms over her chest, but she didn’t turn and run. “I’m pretty certain that’s just good, old-fashioned common sense.”
Uptown indulged an urge he’d had since she’d walked into this bar a week ago. He reached around and tugged her dark brown hair free of its ponytail. He tossed the elastic aside and then combed his fingers through the mass of it, letting her long and fragrant hair swirl all around, and Jesus Christ, he was so hard it actually hurt.
He expected her to mouth off at him, but she was strangely quiet out here in the thick night, loud with crickets and owls and the rest of the wailing bayou chorus. Her eyes were a little too wide. Her lips were parted and how she managed to keep them so glossy and tempting, he’d never know.
Only the fact that this was the end of a very long game kept him from handling this situation the way he wanted to, which would have involved her facedown on a car and him hard and deep inside her until he took the edge off.
He had to bite back a groan at that visual.
Uptown told himself it had to be the game he was playing that was keeping him from anything so greedy and impetuous, right here and right now. The revenge he’d wanted on her daddy since he’d been a kid. Because it couldn’t be anything else. It couldn’t be that stunned look in her eyes whenever he touched her, even if it was only her hair. It couldn’t be that she was almost certainly a virgin. There were men who would care about stuff like that. Men who would feel bad about the kind of plans he had for an innocent, but Uptown wasn’t one of them.
“I’m not a stranger,” he reminded her. “You’ve known me your whole life.”
He hardly recognized his own voice, but she didn’t stiffen or pull away. He could feel the way she trembled slightly, but not from fear. Because he wasn’t holding her against her will. He had his fingers in her hair, but he wasn’t even gripping it. She could have stepped away from him at any time. She didn’t.