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“And you think you’ve found her?” Smokey whispered.
“I think I have,” Ryder said, giving her his eyes and the full weight of his gaze.
“What about Jenna?” Smokey asked.
Ryder rubbed his palms across the denim on his thighs and leaned back in the cushions. “Fair question. Won’t lie, she’ll always be Sweet to me,” Ryder shrugged. “Without what I had with her, I’m not sure I could have recognized this. She’s a friend, and I trust her, but she’s not the direction of my future, and I’m happy for what she’s got with Talon.”
“You don’t wonder what if?” Smokey asked.
“Don’t have to wonder,” Ryder answered. “We would have turned out like my parents, and that’s the last cycle in the world I want to repeat.”
Ryder watched Smokey chew her bottom lip, and while he knew she was coming to a decision, the decision for him had been made the first time he knocked on her door with his brother bleeding out all over a compound pool table.
Ryder shifted his body toward hers and draped an arm over the back of the couch. “Tell me what I have to do,” he murmured, twining one of her curls around his finger.
Smokey cleared her throat, but she didn’t pull away, “I want time to get to know you.”
Ryder nodded, “I can give you that.”
“I want to be able to talk freely, without the whole compound listening,” she went on.
Ryder grinned, “I can give you that too.”
“Okay then,” she whispered.
And Ryder slid his hand to the back of her neck and pulled her ever so slowly toward him. Her eyes flared before they fluttered closed, and Ryder brushed his lips across hers, tempting, before he licked the seam of her lips for a taste of her.
She opened to him, and even though all he wanted to do was haul her into his lap and dive into the essence of her, he gave her what she’d asked for.
Time.
Ryder teased with little nips and kisses, and when he caught her sigh in his mouth, he knew that he might not have won the war for her heart just yet, but he’d won the first battle, and that was enough to celebrate for now.
*************************
Lowe
Harlowe Dane dropped a cigarette to the pavement in the alley behind Smokey’s cottage and ground the ashes with the heel of his boot.
He stuck to the shadows, crossed thick arms over his chest, and blew smoke toward the sky.
He’d never seen a more singularly stupid motorcycle club president in his life. Except maybe Moose, but Moose and Lowe hadn’t crossed paths too much, so he wasn’t sure.
And while he watched from those shadows, catching glimpses of Ryder and what he was doing to Smokey through the gaps in the curtains, the show on the inside of the cottage wasn’t the one he’d come to watch.
Bloody Saints president Axe Woodruff circled the property inside Smokey’s picket fence, clinging to the darkness of the edges of the tree line like the fungus he was.
And he wasveryinterested in the show going on inside the house.
And then he made the move that Lowe had known he’d make sooner or later. In this case, much sooner.
Axe pulled a pistol from the back of his jeans and started to sneak toward the back porch.
Lowe vaulted the fence, landed in a crouch, and had his blade across Axe’s throat before the man could take another step.
Then it was all hauling the body over the fence and into the alley before he bled out in the turf of the backyard.
An F-250 rolled to a stop, tailgate down, bed lined with plastic.
