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“Liar,” he said, shaking his head at me.
“Alright. They’re a little achy. But that in no way means I don’t want to do that again. And again. And again,” I told him, watching as he gave me a soft smile.
“Maybe just not as rough,” he said, shrugging a shoulder. “For a while anyway.”
For a while.
Which I took to mean he wanted to keep doing this for a while.
It wasn’t him asking me to be his girlfriend. Because, really, no one actually ever did that. But it seemed like the closest I was going to get to that.
It was better than I’d really ever gotten from someone before.
It didn’t escape me, either, that I’d never gotten offered something like this with a man even half as good as Voss.
Junior wasn’t wrong when he said I dated shitheads.
It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t run toward red flags. I think it was more that I got caught by a pretty face, then stuck in situationships that really shouldn’t have ever happened. But, you know, you get lonely sometimes. And shit was easier when you already knew someone. Sure, the more I knew those men, the more I was apt to become annoyed or resentful. Enough that, eventually, I had to end things just to be able to look myself in the mirror again.
This was nothing like all those past flings and something-mores in my past.
Because, objectively, Voss was a good man.
Yeah, he was an outlaw biker and yada yada yada.
That didn’t change anything.
This was a man who felt guilt for my attack. One who stood with a complete stranger in a hospital. Who got my car fixed. Who went to my work and talked to my boss. Who took me in. Who was paying to have my stalker found. Then, yes, the man who would likely kill or severely maim him when he did track him down.
Maybe I should have had some more moral objections to that last part.
But, well, I wasn’t a pacifist by nature.
I didn’t believe that violence was never the answer.
I didn’t buy into the idea that a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking didn’t solve anything.
Sometimes it did.
There were people who had it coming.
In my humble opinion, anyone who would break in and jerk-off in your bed had that coming. That wasn’t even factoring in attacking a defenseless woman who was just trying to go home after work.
And, no, I wasn’t naive.
I understood that pretty much every man I had come across in this biker clubhouse had taken lives. Maybe even many lives.
So, yeah, Voss was a killer.
He would likely kill again.
Maybe even the man who’d attacked me.
I probably should have had reservations about that. But as someone who’d encountered a lot of men the world would be better off without, I kind of… understood.
I was also able to understand that because of the nature of their business, violence and bloodshed wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.
I was just… okay with it, I guess.
Maybe that said something horrible about me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
Especially later that night as I curled back up on Voss’s chest as Nitro slowly crept up from the foot of the bed until he was partially between us, laying on top of our legs, making them numb, but neither of us had the heart to move them, and therefore him.
I couldn’t seem to care, either, when Voss woke me up sometime around three in the morning, grabbing my hand, and pressing a finger to his lips.
I felt like we were a couple of teenagers, creeping around under the noses of our parents—or, in this case, Brooks and the rest of his brothers—as he led me into the basement.
“You’re not going to kill me down here, are you?” I joked as I looked around, seeing sets of bunk beds, bulk packs of things the club likely went through a lot of—paper towels, toilet paper, hand soap, dishwasher detergent—as well as what seemed to be a mild, well, prepper supply. MREs, canned goods, water, first aid kits, blankets, and clothes.
“The club keeps this place for emergencies,” he told me.
“Emergencies like… hurricanes? Or emergencies like someone coming in to try to kill you all?” I asked.
“Both. Either,” he said, shrugging.
“There’s not enough beds.”
“Not for everyone, no,” he agreed. “But the women and kids, they go up to Hailstorm if there is some sort of lockdown. More room there. More people to protect them. And if we were having a lockdown here, we’d be doing shifts sleeping.”
“Makes sense,” I decided as he continued to pull me through the basement, then to a… ladder?”
“Up.”
“For the record, this is shady as fuck,” I told him as I grabbed the rungs.
“Yeah? Then why you doing it?” he asked, giving me a little smirk.
It felt too cheesy to say because I trusted him, because I was pretty sure I’d follow this man through hell if he asked it of me.
