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“You okay? Do you want to take this home instead? Get some pain meds in you?”
“I think I’m okay now,” I told him, making a show of digging into my food even though I wasn’t hungry anymore.
Because, as much as my pride hated to admit it, Jass was right.
Not a minute went by during my breakfast that I wasn’t thinking about him inside of me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Judge
“There’s going to be no shine left on that if you keep it up,” Detroit said, coming out to find me scrubbing at Slash’s bike like I did damn near every day. It was on my revolving list of chores they wanted me to do around the clubhouse.
On a sigh, I tossed the scrubber into the bucket of sudsy water and reached for the hose, washing all the soap off.
“It’s the girl, isn’t it?” Detroit asked, making me turn around to look at him, leaning against the warehouse with a mug of coffee in his hands.
“What girl?” I asked since, yeah, I wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that particular girl.
“Don’t gotta bullshit me,” Detroit said, shooting me a smirk. “Not my business if you get your ass kicked or killed by the Murphys. That’s Slash’s business. And yours. But since you’ve been moping around and slamming shit for the past two days, I figured I’d ask.”
He wasn’t wrong about the timeline.
It had been exactly two days since she’d walked into the diner in that goddamned sundress, looking beautiful and untouchable.
And with another man.
Giving him her time and her smiles and her conversation.
I had no right to be pissed.
Logically, I knew that.
I’d been the one who had put distance between us since the night I climbed through her window.
I couldn’t expect her to hold onto me when I didn’t give her something to grab.
I wasn’t supposed to fucking want her to be hanging on, though.
That was the whole point.
First, because I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to. If I, a grown-ass man, had to sneak in through the window to see a woman, then there was no future in it.
Which led me right to two—I wasn’t even supposed to be entertaining the idea of a future with anyone, let alone Delaney Murphy.
That wasn’t the kind of life I led.
Or the kind of man I was.
But I couldn’t fucking get her out of my mind, even after cutting off contact.
Then seeing her walk into that diner looking like that… with another guy?
Yeah, you could say I didn’t react well.
I hadn’t even paid any mind to the fact that her ribs were probably still screaming as I slammed my cock inside her pussy in that bathroom.
All I could think about was reminding her that she was mine.
Even if she fucking wasn’t.
Hence all the slamming and obsessive cleaning. Anything—fucking anything—to try to keep my mind or body busy, so I stopped obsessing about the one goddamned woman that I couldn’t have.
“Just gotta know,” Detroit said, squinting at me. “Is it just because you can’t touch her that makes you want to so much?”
“No,” I admitted, exhaling hard.
It would have been easier to come to terms with that, to call myself an idiot and move on.
But it wasn’t just that.
I fucking liked the woman.
And I had no idea what to do with that.
I’d enjoyed women before, had shared fun, light conversations with them that may or may not have led to sex.
But that was always the end of it.
Sex was the goal. Conversation was how you got there.
Once the sweat was dry and your pants were back on, there wasn’t really any need to want more of that.
Until Delaney.
I’d gotten more than my fill of the woman. I should have fucked the need out of my system.
If anything, though, the desire for her just grew after each time. A part of me was worried I was never going to be able to stop craving her.
Even if or when I eventually forced myself to move on, to find another woman.
The idea of that held no appeal, though.
I mean, I’d been out with the guys—both in Shady Valley and in bigger towns around us—and I hadn’t even looked twice at another woman.
“So you’re into her,” Detroit guessed.
“Guess you could say that,” I admitted, exhaling hard. “What the fuck is that about?” I asked, throwing a hand out. “What?” I asked when he let out a snort-laugh.
“Just interesting. The life we live. The lifestyle we have. That makes something like interest and commitment sound crazy, but fucking a different woman every night sound normal.”
Detroit, I’d come to realize since joining the club, was a bit old-fashioned.
He wasn’t all about the partying and women.
Sway said he did occasionally take a woman to bed.
No, actually, he’d said he took a woman to bed “Once every third blue moon.”
Which seemed accurate since I’d yet to see him do anything more than talk to a woman. Or make them breakfast in the morning when they climbed out from under one of the other guys.
