Chapter Twelve
THERE ISN’T ONE of these men I haven’t been attracted to since the first moment I met them. Wyatt is no exception. Even though he’s twenty-five years older than me.
He’s strong, handsome, sexy in that way that comes with being confident and self-assured.
He’s kind, wise, and compassionate. Those weren’t slow discoveries, they were flashing-neon from the start.
But when I first arrived on Ryder’s doorstep, he was the one who took me under his wing, who looked out for me, and it just never seemed like anything more than friendship was in the cards for us.
Until that strange, confusing night I found him in the O.D. clubhouse in his screaming skull cut. At first he was relief, then he was confusion—what the hell was he doing there? Was he really O.D.?—and then finally together, on our own, love blossomed.
Or rather, it ignited. The sparks were already there.
I don’t love him more than the others. But I don’t love him less. And right now, with Ryder’s dare hanging between us, his dark eyes on me expectantly, it’s more than just permission. It’s an order.
No backing down is the rule.
I have to.
My gaze skips from Ryder to Jake and Damian before landing on Wyatt. I’m searching for a release valve, some sign that the rule doesn’t apply when Ryder blows the game up like this. Some out.
But that’s not what I get. No one protests. No one says, no, Max, you don’t have to do that. They just look back at me, level, waiting to see what I’ll do.
There’s a hundred expressions flickering across Wyatt’s face, too quickly to name. Worry. Care. And…a flash of wanting.
“That’s your dare?” I ask Ryder. One last failsafe. Double-checking.
He nods once, with utter resolve.
“Okay.”
I turn on my side toward Wyatt, hesitating, checking him again, and then slowly lift a hand to his hair.
The feel of him is so familiar, so beloved, an ache travels from my fingertips straight to my heart. I scrape my nails gently over his scalp and lean toward him, toward the familiar heat of him, and he leans in too. Our mouths meet—Wyatt’s kiss, the one I’ve missed so much.
It’s tender at first, a slow reacquainting, but it’s not quick.
It’s not a peck. We both know that’s not what this dare is.
His arm comes around my back, pulling me closer, and when he parts my lips with his, my whole body lights up with longing.
God, Wyatt. I want to throw myself into his lap, climb into him, but he’s still healing, still fragile, and the dare has to have some kind of edge, some limit.
When he finally pulls back, I’m left looking at him like an idiot. There’s a gentle smile tugging at his mouth. His arm is still around me, broad hand spread warm against my back.
“Fuuuck,” Jake murmurs.
I look over. He’s covering his exposed dick with both hands, knees pressed together and chin tilted upward, like he’s trying to look away.
“What?” he says with a laugh, in response to Damian’s scowl.
“Jesus.” Damian gets up and walks over to the bathroom and throws a towel at Jake. “Cover up, for Christ’s sake.”
Jake indicates his naked body with his hand. “This was your fault, by the way.”
It’s funny, in the way everything’s been funny tonight, but no one laughs. The air is so charged it feels thick.
I look back at Ryder to gauge his reaction and can’t begin to guess what’s happening in his head. He stares at me, eyes so dark he could be anything from furious to wrecked to turned on. Maybe all three.
“Well?” I say finally.
It was his idea. I’ve done what he asked.
“Well,” he repeats. He drags in a breath like it’s the first one in minutes. Blinks once. Exhales. “That’s that.”
I don’t know what that means. From the silence, I don’t think anyone knows what to make of this twist. There’s a second where no one speaks. Then Damian says, “Your spin, Max.”
I blink my eyes, and bend forward to spin the bottle. Wyatt’s hand slips from my back as I do. I miss his warmth the second it’s gone.
The bottle turns slowly a couple of times, wobbling over the ugly carpet, and then the neck settles, pointing straight at Ryder.
“Ho ho,” Damian says under his breath, delighted.
I lift my eyes to Ryder.
What can I possibly throw at him that equals what he just asked of me? Something that doesn’t humiliate him, but still levels the field. Something that tells me where he is with all this.
And then I know.
“Okay, Ryder,” I say, squaring my shoulders. “I dare you…to kiss me.”
Charged silence throttles the room again, like everyone’s holding the same breath.
Ryder’s chin tips up the slightest bit. His gaze doesn’t leave mine.
Then he nods once.
Crooks one finger.
Come here.
Heat flares in my core. I push myself off the mattress, stepping across the short space between the beds, and climb onto his lap, one knee on either side of his thighs.
His body is solid under me. Strong, hot, all muscle and coiled restraint.
His eyes don’t leave mine, not for a second, but his hands slide up my waist, big palms bracing my sides.
The first press of his mouth knocks the air out of me.
This kiss is nothing like Wyatt’s. There’s no careful reacquainting.
Ryder sweeps his tongue between my lips, one hand coming up into my hair, tightening enough to make my pulse jump.
I feel the heat of his touch all the way through me, from my mouth to my knees.
He pulls me harder against him, and then lets go.
My lungs are burning. I’m breathing hard. Every place our bodies touch is on fire.
“Better?” I ask, dazed. His hair is knotted back, but a loose strand has fallen forward, brushing his cheek. I reach up and tuck it behind his ear without thinking.
“Yes.” His eyes flick to my mouth, then back up.
I ease off his lap and return to my spot on the bed, legs unsteady. The whole room feels tilted.
“Well, holy shit,” Damian whistles. “I’m probably going to have to tell Jake to get dressed again if it’s gonna keep going like this.”
“Or leave me as I am,” Jake shoots back, “and let me have my turn with Max.”
I can’t help it—I look straight at Ryder, waiting for the explosion, for a jealous crack, for anything.
But he barely reacts. His nostrils flare once, but he looks at me instead, eyebrows lifted just a fraction, like he’s handing the question to me: What do you want?
“Who’s next?” Wyatt asks quietly, cutting through the tension.
Jake exhales a shaky laugh. “I mean…are we still playing the same game? ’Cause it kinda feels like we switched to something else.”
Damian snorts. “Keep your towel on, soldier. We’re still playing. Ryder, your spin.”
Ryder bends down, but he picks up the bottle, unscrews the lid, and pours what’s left of the whiskey into four cups. I can’t believe we’ve somehow gone through a whole bottle. My head is spinning, true—luckily I’ve had a lot less than the others, especially Jake and Ryder.
When the bottle is empty, he recaps it and places it on the bedside table, then he hoists himself up on the mattress and leans back against the headboard.
“You know, it’s been a strange year,” he says.
“With Max coming to us, and then losing her and Wyatt, and everything that’s happened along the way.
And now being here, in…” he waves his hand around, “wherever the fuck we are, and having our little Hellbent Night celebration in the motel that time forgot. Nothing is the way it usually is. Maybe Hellbent Night’s not the same now either.
Maybe the game is over, because it’s going in a direction I don’t think we saw coming. ”
“Aw, man,” says Jake, joking. “Fucking party killer.”
“No, I’m not.” Ryder leans back against the headboard and looks at the ceiling.
“I’ve been trying to hold on to Max tight, I think, because that’s all I know.
But I’ve been thinking a lot since yesterday.
This isn’t a normal situation. But there isn’t a person in this room I don’t hold above every single other person outside of it.
I don’t want to be the fucking buzzkill, I don’t want to be the chain around Max’s neck.
” He laces his fingers behind his head, elbows wide.
“Maybe we don’t do the dares anymore. Maybe there’s just one big dare hanging over us that we can’t escape or ignore.
Maybe we just let things be the way they are and we don’t fight it. ”
A beat of silence.
“I’m going to need you to spell that out,” Damian says, because of course he does. “What are you saying here? That it’s open season on Max?”
Ryder scowls. “I would never put it that way.” He turns his head to me.
“I’m saying…Max, if there are things you want to do, feelings you have, I’m not gonna stand in your way.
If you want to kiss me, or Wyatt, or anyone else, that’s your call.
I’m not going to sit here and sulk and make you pay for it.
” He pauses, jaw working. “Doesn’t mean it won’t fuck with my head sometimes.
It just means I’m not taking it out on you. ”
He straightens a little, scrubs a hand through his hair, pulling the loose strands off his face. “I just ask that it’s us, you know? That what we have stays between us. That it’s…ours. Sacred, or whatever word you want.”
“Of course,” I say, too fast. “Because it is. Whatever this is.” I gesture weakly between them. “I have feelings that don’t fit into one neat box, and I don’t know how to label any of it, but I can’t pretend it isn’t there either.”
My thoughts start to tangle, to rush ahead of me. I take a breath. “I don’t have a clean explanation,” I finish. “But I’m not taking any of you lightly. That’s the only thing I’m sure of.”
His hand reaches across the gap between the beds, warm fingers settling just above my knee.
“I get it,” he says. “Somehow. I do.”
“So what now?” asks Damian.
“Well, I don’t know,” says Ryder. He looks at me. “I think that’s up to Max.”
For a second nobody moves. I feel every gaze on me.
“Cool,” I say weakly. “No pressure or anything.”
Jake huffs out a laugh and my eyes go to him like they’re on a track I can’t pull them off of.
There was a time when Jake was the only one of these men I was with—a brief stretch where it was just the two of us.
When he’d sneak into my bedroom at Leathernecks after Wyatt had gone to bed.
After all the years I’d been with Billy…
I didn’t know pleasure like that existed before Jake.
He was my sexual awakening. The first of many with these men.
When I look at him now it’s so much like looking at him then. Green eyes gone dark in the low light, pupils blown, his focus pinned entirely on me. No trace of the anger we had to work through at the cottage. Right now it’s nothing but heat and need.
And so help me, I want him. I want him as badly as I ever did before it all went to shit.
I swallow, turn back to Ryder one more time. “Okay,” I say quietly. “Then I know what I want to do.”
I push myself to my feet and, before I go anywhere else, I bend and kiss him gently on the mouth, a soft brush of gratitude and warning all at once.
“Sure?” I murmur against his lips.
He nods, so I move away from him and over to Jake near his knee.
I wonder if I’m going too far. Maybe it’s all the whiskey coursing through my veins.
But I straddle Jake just the way I had straddled Ryder, one knee on either side of his thighs, arms around his neck, and he looks up at me completely awestruck, half gone, the smile on his lips almost dopey.
Sitting on Jake’s lap is much different than sitting on Ryder’s lap because he’s completely naked—save the towel draped loosely over his groin.
But when I settle in against him, my knee presses one end into the mattress, shifting it aside so that I can feel the full length of his erection jerk against me.
My reaction is pure liquid heat, starting in my center and radiating outwards.
I close my arms tighter around him and kiss him hungrily.
He groans, wraps his arms around my back and moves his hips as he kisses me back, his cock rubbing against me, the friction immediately igniting.
My breath hitches and I rock my hips back in response.
It feels so good. After kissing three of them my nerves are already on fire.
He pulls me in tight, kissing me like he’s making up for all the lost time, and moving against me—oh God.
Stroke after stroke after stroke of his hard cock rubbing through the thin cotton of my clothing, right where I need him.
I could actually come like this. The thought startles me. I almost break the kiss, but he pulls me in tighter, moving against me like he senses that I’m losing control. I can hardly breathe, but now I can’t stop moving, grinding against that hard ridge that feels so good, chasing what I need.
“Well, holy shit,” I hear Damian say. But I can’t stop. I don’t stop. I let myself get lost in Jake’s mouth and the feel of his body. I don’t try to put a limit on it or stop it. I just enjoy it.
He groans into my mouth, moves his hands down to my ass so that he can hold me in place, and grinds harder, his cock solid, stroking against my clit through the fabric of my pants.
My heart is beating too fast, my cheeks hot, I can’t get enough oxygen.
I have to break away, tilt my head up, gasping for air now.
I’m so close, and I don’t think I can fight it anymore.
“That’s right, baby,” Ryder says, reaching for my hair and curling a lock of it around his fingers. “Let go.”
Fuck. He’s right there. They all are. Watching me—
And then it happens. My center pulls together and then explodes outwards.
“Oh God, yes,” Jake rasps as my whole body shudders, my knees pressing tight against him. “Fuck, that’s hot.”
His breathing sounds strained, rough, on the edge. Ryder’s hand is still in my hair, moving up to cradle my head.
“That’s so good, baby girl,” he murmurs, his voice hot and dark. “That’s so good.” His fingers twist into the roots of my hair, and he pulls—gently, but enough to draw my head back. “Now do you know what I want you to do?”
I shake my head, leaning into his palm, half-smiling.
It’s funny, actually. This was supposed to be about what I wanted.
But I want everything, so maybe it makes more sense if the person with limits is in charge.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask him.
“I want you to suck him,” he orders, low and rough.