Blade (The Alpha Elite #11)

Chapter Fifty-Four

Juniper

H is anger landed like the day of reckoning. “She fucking said stop.”

“Check yourself, brother.” The biker snorted out a laugh. “This fucking bitch asked for it rough. Didn’t you, whore?”

Wind sailed past my face.

Nasty cigarette and alcohol stench disappeared, the heat left my back, and the nauseating smack of flesh hitting flesh sounded.

“Who the fuck are—”

Prez’s question was cut off by another impact of flesh on flesh.

I opened my eyes and looked.

A head taller, his shoulders twice as wide, his back to me, his arm sailed forward with impossible speed.

His punch hit the biker dead center in the face, a crack echoed, blood spurted, and Prez’s head violently whipped to the side as his whole body spun.

He hit the pavement with a sickening thud.

Blade started to turn around.

I turned my face to the concrete wall and slammed my eyes shut.

His anger exploded faster than his punch. “What the fuck?”

Oh God .

A gunshot sounded from the street end of the alley, and it was instant. His heat covered my back with the blunt-force trauma of a semi as huge arms came up around my head like a shield.

But the impact was nothing compared to his scent.

Metal and musk and woodsy soap and danger, it filled my lungs like the missing pieces of every shitty year of my life had suddenly stitched together with wholeness.

I inhaled for all my worth.

Then his angry voice cut against my cheek. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t open my eyes.

Every cell in my body lit on fire with recognition.

Impossible recognition .

“That,” I rasped.

Oh. Dear. God.

It was him.

My him .

My SEAL, my obsession, my every craving I’d forced down for two years .

His scent, his voice—harder and angrier but so distinctive that I couldn’t deny it anymore, and his height and strength against my back.

Oh my God, his body against mine.

I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t look up at him. I didn’t want to be wrong, and I didn’t want to be right. My soul wept, my skin crawled with hypersensitive nerve endings, and the overwhelming urge to touch him was so strong, I couldn’t stop myself.

I reached back.

“ That? ” he repeated, incredulous, as thick fingers immediately circled my wrist with the perfect bite of forcefulness. “Getting fucking raped in an alley behind a goddamn biker bar?” He slammed my hand against the rough stucco of the building. “You’re gonna call your bullshit a that ?”

I deserved this.

I deserved the anger and the reprimand, and I should’ve been as appalled as him, but my mouth opened and self-sabotage came out. “I was going to call it fucking.” Oh God, please push against me harder . “But—”

“He was fucking forcing himself on you!” He didn’t yell the words, his growl was controlled, but it may as well have been a battle cry with the amount of force he put behind it because it vibrated. Across my neck, along my shoulders, down my back, skimming my hips, then sinking between my legs as if a SEAL had touched me.

I licked my lips. “Yes.”

“What the fucking fuck ?”

The tone, the anger, the demand that I answer a question not asked, it was all so intensely commanding, my throat hummed. “Hmm?”

As if he were a current and had complete control of all the energy he was radiating, all the mind-stealing dominant anger he was coating me in, he suddenly shut it off, and every vibrating cell in his body slammed to a halt.

Oh God . “No.” No, no, no. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Stop.”

He dropped my wrist, and his voice became so void of emotion, it turned lethal. “Is that what you want, woman?”

“No.” I just wanted him, but I didn’t deserve him, and it’d been two years, and none of this made sense except for one thing. I was who I was, and I would never endanger him.

“Turn around,” he ordered.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “I can’t.”

“You hurt?”

Oh God . “No.”

“He fucking touch you? More than I saw?”

I wanted to die. “No.”

“Then turn.”

My skin started crawling with a wholly different kind of nerves. Not desire, not the fear-for-my-life nerves, not even anxiety, but deep, despondent dread, and I was suddenly soaking in it. “I-I can’t.” I couldn’t face him.

“Fucking look at me, woman.”

His voice, his body, his scent, his strength, his anger, his dominance—I wanted all of it. No, I needed it. But seeing him? Making this real? Seeing what was coursing through my veins from his perspective? The judgment I knew would be in his eyes? I couldn’t handle that. “No.”

“Why, goddamn it?”

Because my entire world was crumbling to nothing. Because I would lose him. Because I wasn’t ready. Because the forty-eight hours were up. Because the past had slammed into the present, and I couldn’t do this. “Not like this.”

“Like this,” he echoed, but in a way that made it sound dirty and wrong.

Oh God , please don’t ask me to explain. Please don’t ask me . “You don’t understand.”

“You think I don’t fucking understand control?”

“This—” I sucked in a breath, but all I got was him. “This isn’t that.”

“The fuck it isn’t. You want control.”

I wanted the opposite of control. “No, I don’t.” But he did. “But you do.” That was why he was here. That was why my body was betraying me. That was why he had found me, someway, somehow.

“We’re not talking about me.”

I didn’t know what we were talking about anymore. “Please, just leave.”

“Hey,” another man’s voice slurred from the entrance to the alley. “He bothering you?”

“You want control?” The low growl, the question, a burst of movement from his arm—they all happened so fast.

One second, he was pinning me to the wall with his heat covering my entire back. Then he shifted, his gun was in my hand, and he was pressing my finger against the trigger, pushing three times in terrifyingly rapid succession.

The shots exploded from the gun.

Echoing around us like bombs going off, the sound waves shook my body as the man fled.

“There’s your fucking control.” He yanked the gun away from me, and his voice came hard and lethal. “Handle your shit, woman.”

Instant and humiliating, the tears came.

Because he was right. Because he was here. Because he wasn’t just a voice on the phone anymore. Because he was the only good part of my past, and a part of me wanted to deny all of it. But most of all, I wanted him to have never seen me this way.

The heat left my back. “Let’s go.”

I dared to look away from him and glance to my right.

Face down on the ground, blood pooling under his head, the biker lay motionless.

Oh God . “Is he dead?”

“Not yet.”

A fresh wave of panic set in. “Is he going to die?” People had seen me with him.

“Not unless he fucking touches you again.”

The side door from the bar started to open. “Prez, you out here? I thought I heard—”

A huge booted foot landed against the metal, slamming it shut. “Move, woman, now . Out the alley, southeast corner of the parking lot. Black Range Rover.” He rattled off a plate number like there would be multiple Range Rovers at a biker bar. “Get in the passenger side and fucking wait for me. We’re not done talking.”

I didn’t have time to think about the Black Range Rovers I saw in South Beach going in and out of that high-rise, or the one I had walked right past on my way into Del Cielo’s this morning. “Where will you be?” There were thirty bikers inside, all wearing the same kind of cut.

“On your six.”

Someone pounded on the door from the inside.

“ Go ,” he ordered.

I didn’t look at him. I didn’t thank him. I didn’t beg for forgiveness.

I went.

But I didn’t listen to him.

Walking as fast as I could, I left the alley.

Then I ran to my Jeep.