He had every intention of keeping that to himself. And going back for more. He was determined to get his fill of her—or die trying, which would be an excellent way to go and a whole lot less violent than the way he’d always imagined death would take him.
Chaser reached down and eased her foot back into her panties and her jeans, then he pulled them both up over her hips. He turned her around to face him, a little too pleased at the blissed-out look on her face.
“Not so smart-mouthed after I make you come that hard, are you?”
She only smiled up at him, satisfied and soft, and he was hard again that easily. So hard it almost hurt.
“Give me a minute,” she murmured through that smile, like this was a lazy, private moment between them. Like they were wrapped up tight in her bed again and the world was a far-off suggestion on the other side of her windows. “I’ll get there.”
Chaser studied her for a moment as he buttoned her up, liking her flushed like this and a little goofy with it. Then he grabbed the hem of her oversized T-shirt and pulled it up and over her head. It said something about the state she was in that she didn’t protest. She only lifted her arms and let him strip it from her torso, leaving her in a black tank top that hugged her tight little body, drawing attention to her lush little tits and the nipples that pressed against the fabric. He’d noticed she was wearing it when he’d tried to get his hands on her skin before. He hadn’t realized she wasn’t wearing a bra, or he probably would have fucked her differently so he could get his mouth on those tits of hers.
Hindsight was 20/20.
“You need to look like a biker bitch,” he told her in a stern voice that was aimed more at his dick and its antics than her. “And like I just fucked the shit out of you.”
He almost regretted it when her blue gaze sharpened at that, bringing the real Lara back to him. The too clever and too mouthy Lara, not the soft, blissed-out version who clung to him and made him doubt his entire life. She didn’t have to say a word for him to read the series of wiseass thoughts that flitted across her face—but of course, silent wasn’t her style.
“You just did. In public,” she said primly, as if she hadn’t been involved in it herself. “So I doubt you need to advertise it. I’m sure at least forty of your closest friends saw your every thrust, as you biker bros seem to like so much.”
“They saw me banging some available pussy,” he agreed, and he watched her cheeks heat at that, with what he was sure was temper this time. Not that he cared. He liked her a little red and unsteady and he didn’t mind how they got there. “But that’s the point. They’re not gonna focus on your face. I don’t want them to.”
“How enterprising,” she said drily. “I get to masquerade as club ass. Will you be passing me around to your brothers to really sell that? Lucky me.”
“Some girls like being passed around,” he threw back at her, his own temper kicking in, though he couldn’t have said why. Well. He could have. He just refused to entertain his own bullshit jealousy at the very idea of passing her out like one more party favor, the way he would have done with any other female. Without a second thought. “You’ve seen it with your own eyes.”
Lara, of course, only raised her brows at him in obvious challenge, because she was as bullheaded as she was pretty. “So that’s a yes, then? You were just warming me up to pull a train or two tonight? Without any advance warning? That seems a little presumptuous. A lady likes to prepare herself for a battalion.”
Her hands were on her hips, which pushed her little tits out more. It made his mouth water. It made him want to haul her back to one of the bedrooms and barricade them both inside, so he could really work on getting her out of his system. But who was he kidding? Every time he touched her, he made it worse.
“Sorry to crap all over your ambitions, babe,” he gritted out. “But I’m not ready to share that ass of yours just yet. You’ll have to settle for trying to please me. Just me. Not a conga line of brothers. I’m real sorry if that feels like a downgrade.”
“How does all this sharing even work?” Lara demanded, as if she hadn’t heard him—or more as if she was pissed at him, which was more remarkable still. Chaser assumed people were pissed at him all the time. That was the way of things, especially given the life he led. But very few were this comfortable showing him that. People tended to be a lot more concerned about how he might react to that kind of thing. “Do you just invite another brother into bed with you one day? Or do you toss me naked into a writhing pit of bikers to fuck my way out? You’ll have to make sure I know the rules going in, since I’ve never done it before. My uncle was a club president, so no one treated me like an interchangeable pussy. Just, you know, like an idiot.”
“Is that why you left? Because it seems pretty clear to me that you like putting on a show. What happened? They wouldn’t let you?”
“It’s hard to really get your dirty whore on when your blood relatives are in the same room, I find,” she threw right back at him, without even a blink of an eye to show him she understood the danger she was in. Why did he find that so intriguing? And so hot? “Which I tried to point out to you when we were discussing Kaylee. Oddly, you didn’t want to hear it.”
Chaser blew out a breath, and it took every bit of self-control he had not to toss her back over that couch and see exactly how much dirty whore she could get on when pressed. He thought he deserved a fucking medal for simply standing there and not doing it. He was no saint. It didn’t sit well on him that he had to pretend otherwise, for any reason.
“You better get this crap out of your system now,” he warned her darkly. “Because if you talk like this to Digger? He might smack you upside your head. And believe me, babe, you don’t want that to happen.”
For a variety of reasons. But mostly because Chaser knew, down deep in his gut, that he would not take it well. He wouldn’t stand idly by and watch his president backhand this woman, no matter what insane thing came out of her mouth. He didn’t think he’d like it much if she shook hands and Digger—or anyone else—lingered too long, to be entirely honest. And he really didn’t want to think about the shit show that would follow his reaction to someone hurting Lara in front of him.
Or at all.
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Lara was telling him with all her usual bravado, but he didn’t like that darker note in her voice then. Much less the way she lifted that chin like she expected to get popped. It dawned on him that she probably did. That when she’d looked up and seen a biker in her classroom she’d reacted the way a person did when they expected to get hurt. Something inside him turned over, hard and bitter. Dark and furious. “It’s a risk I’ve always taken. I understand the consequences.”
He couldn’t control himself then—or maybe he stopped trying. Either way, Chaser reached over and smoothed his hand over her silky hair, dark and laced through with all that unexpected red. He hardly knew himself in that moment. He didn’t treat women tenderly. He didn’t offer that kind of solace. He only knew it existed in him at all because he’d found himself soothing his daughter when she was younger and hurt in some way. It had been a surprise, to say the least.
But it had never extended to a woman he’d fucked. And wanted to fuck again. A lot.
Still, he didn’t leap away from her as that hard little truth occurred to him. He didn’t put any space between them at all. He slid his hand around to cup the nape of her neck and he read that particular wariness in her gaze all too easily. She expected to get hit. And yet she still mouthed off. He didn’t know whether to admire her for her courage or lock her up somewhere so she couldn’t put herself in danger like that.
But all he did was keep his hand where it was, wrapped around the back of her neck. “I’m getting the impression I’m not going to like your uncle much.”
Lara swallowed as if her throat was dry. “I don’t think anyone really does. He operates in a lie-down-with-dogs-and-find-yourself-covered-in-fleas kind of leadership style, with a s
ide helping of bullying and mild abuse when that fails to do the trick.” Her smile looked forced and possibly a little painful. “Of course, the full patch members of the Brothers of Goliath are also his drinking buddies and friends, not just his loyal minions. I’m told he’s a lot of fun under the right circumstances. It’s just that those circumstances require having a penis and a BGMC patch.”
Chaser felt the heat of her skin beneath his palm. The soft, silken weight and warmth of her hair. And he wanted her, yes. He’d wanted her from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her in that high school classroom. But right here, right now, and despite how insane it was to even entertain such bizarre urges, he wanted her to trust him. He wanted her to look at him without those shadows in her gaze, because he hated them. And for other reasons he didn’t want to look at too closely in the middle of a raucous party in the clubhouse.
And he could only think of one way to get there.
“My father was the same kind of asshole,” Chaser told her, and then it was said. He couldn’t unsay it, much less question what the hell he was doing, sharing his deepest personal stuff with this woman. Again. “The best day of my life was when I got big enough to knock his ass down instead of taking the usual hit. He didn’t swing at me again.”
“The best day of mine was when I left that town,” Lara shot back, her voice low and fierce, but a kind of dawning recognition in her gaze that Chaser felt inside his own chest. “After that, he yelled a lot when I came home from college, but he didn’t put another finger on me. It was like he knew I’d seen too much of the world to tolerate it. Or he was worried I might call a real cop, not the ones he had in his pocket.” She shrugged, though it was a jerky sort of motion, and he gripped her a little bit tighter in response. “Anyway, it wasn’t great, but it was a little better. And then I graduated and moved to San Diego and never went back.”
But he thought she looked guilty at that. And he hated that this wasn’t the time or the place to find out why.
“Digger’s not going to hurt you,” he told her gruffly, and it came out like a vow. He told himself he hadn’t meant it like that. Not quite like that—but that was how it sounded. And he kept going. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
But that wasn’t the life they’d chosen, and he suspected she knew it as well as he did. He’d patched into the Devil’s Keepers without a single second thought. He’d earned this life and he believed in it, especially when things went to shit. And Lara had left her uncle’s club—but she’d turned up here in Lagrange and settled in, when she must have recognized what sort of place this was within three seconds of crossing the town’s borders. She wasn’t much more innocent than he was.
And somehow, that only made him want to protect her more.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice a rough sort of whisper and her eyes dark and a little too glassy on his. “I appreciate that more than you know. But you can’t promise that. You know you can’t.”
“I can,” Chaser heard himself say. And worse, he knew he meant it, despite the vows he’d made to this club. The ones he wore on his body. Despite his entire life. But her skin was soft and warm beneath his palm and her gaze was clear, and he kept right on going. “Because if he lays a hand on you—if anyone does—I’ll kill them myself.”
—
“Tell me why I should care about a biker whore to some bargain basement club out in the middle of I-don’t-give-a-fuck-where,” the barrel-chested old man in the center of the comfortable couch in the back office asked Lara, though it wasn’t really a question.
He was disconcertingly large, with huge arms and a weathered, unfriendly face. The two bimbos on either side of him sniggered. They were both blond, each wearing a selection of string things that wrapped around their bodies and left all their junk exposed, and at least fifteen years younger than the man they were pawing. If they added their ages together, that was.
The look he was giving Lara was as shrewd as it was cold. “No matter what she has tattooed on her ass.”
Lara disliked all three of them on sight. But that could have been her nerves talking. Only a far greater idiot than she was would have managed not to be a little anxious about being hauled into the presence of a mean-looking biker club president, no matter what the reason. That was Survival 101.
A tall, shaggy-haired man with melting blue eyes was leaning against the wide steel desk to one side with an ease Lara found instantly suspicious because he was too big to be that seemingly careless. He did not snigger. His gaze moved over her with a thoroughness that made her feel a little too exposed, as if her actions over the past hour were visible on her flesh. Something like shame danced over the same flesh, making her cheeks heat. He didn’t say anything. He only looked past her to Chaser and lifted a brow.
Beside her, close enough to touch her if he wanted, though she was hyperaware of the fact he didn’t, Chaser merely shrugged.
The shaggy-haired man—with t’roscoe stamped on his cut and a vice president patch beneath it—shook his head.
“I’m not a biker whore,” Lara heard herself say, because she was a lunatic and because it was the only way she could turn that hint of shame at her behavior into something far more palatable, like temper. She kept her focus on the big man on the couch, who was looking at her like she was trash. “I think you have me confused with the—ah—professionals on either side of you.”
The blonde on the left gasped as if mortally offended, which made a few of her strings pull tighter beneath her too-big, too-perky breasts. The even-more-platinum blonde on the right only smirked.
“You’re damn right I get paid,” Platinum murmured. “Maybe ask yourself why you don’t.”
“Get out,” the old man ordered them, clearly not up for a discussion about the merits of sex work, and then they all stood around in an awkward silence as the mostly naked women filed out.
Lara almost convinced herself this was a quiet, friendly little chat.
But then the door closed behind the blondes and Lara was trapped in this dangerous office again. With a biker club president who had already called her a whore, the scary-ass biker she kept having sex and who-knew-what-else with without really meaning to, and a random biker club officer who emanated the sort of power no wise woman ignored. It was hard to imagine how she was going to survive the meeting, much less emerge intact.
“Tell me something,” said the old man, who she would have known was the president even if she hadn’t been able to read the patch on his cut that announced it. It had something to do with the way he threw down his words like he thought this conversation was a waste of his time. And more, the way that everything about him from his beard to the women he’d tossed out of the office reminded her way too much of her uncle. “What relationship do you have to those pissant Brothers of Goliath assholes? And what the fuck do you think you’re doing in my town if you have ties to another club?”
Lara fought not to tense up—visibly, anyway. She sucked in a breath and opened her mouth, ready to come out blazing the only guns she had and to hell with the consequences, but Chaser shifted beside her.
“You don’t need to talk,” he told her, and in case she didn’t get that message, he reached around, hauled her back against him with one arm, and slapped his hand over her mouth.
Lara was so shocked that she thought for a second she might be paralyzed. But then her hands went up to Chaser’s thick wrist of their own accord. She pushed at him, but he didn’t budge. He didn’t appear to notice she was trying to dislodge him.
“Her uncle is their president,” Chaser was saying in a relaxed, easy sort of way, as if he wasn’t holding her against him with his hand over her mouth. As if he was kicked back somewhere with a beer, telling the usual male lies about sporting and/or hunting achievements. Or worse, as if she was nothing more than an afterthought. An adornment to this conversation among men. “Not sure they’re close, but it’s an in.”
Digger’s gaze swept over her, dismissing her without even
bothering to register any disdain. As if she wasn’t really there. Lara realized she’d never experienced that before—literally being beneath contempt. It made her feel oddly hollow. But as she took a breath through her nose to do something, her gaze snagged on T’Roscoe’s instead. His eyes were so blue. So terribly blue it took her a moment to realize he was studying her, the way she might watch a student wind up to throw a fit in class. She recognized that particular look of resignation. It had please don’t be so stupid, though I bet you will all over it.
That lanced through her, making her pause. Making her think before she shot off her mouth or bit Chaser’s hand en route to shooting off her mouth or anything along those lines.
She had no voice here. This was the Devil’s Keepers president in the Devil’s Keepers’ clubhouse, the very center of its power base in a town they owned and ran without apology or any apparent interference. Lara would have had no voice in the exact same position in her uncle’s club, either, of course, but at least the blood tie to him had given her some level of protection from everyone but him. She had less than no standing here. The only thing she had going for her in this room full of men who didn’t care about her at all—but would treat her like an enemy in a heartbeat if she gave them reason—was Chaser.
And in the next breath, she comprehended that in muffling her the way he had, he’d saved her.
What she couldn’t understand was why.
But she wasn’t sure she had to understand it. He was a wall behind her and his arm encircled her, blocking her and protecting her as he kept her safe and silent. And for once in her life, Lara didn’t have to do a damned thing. She didn’t have to figure out the best course of action. She didn’t have to lead with her mouth and hope it would confound the men around her enough to save her from the next terrible thing they might do. She didn’t have to sacrifice herself or defend herself. She didn’t have to come up with a good lie or circumvent the truth without seeming to do anything of the kind. She didn’t have to do anything except trust Chaser not to hurt her.