Framed for Keeps (The Kings of Darkness MC #6)

Chapter 1

The brown gift box in my hands makes me frown.

Everything else about this run adds up. A drop by the river. Once I’m there I should find a car driven by a woman I’ve never met and won’t meet again.

In my years with the MC, I’ve done a hundred of these and I never once asked a question. The club has a system and it works.

But the box is wrong.

It’s brown with some kind of girly design. Looks like the green stuff that grows on a fence, but it’s brown too. There’s a goddamn ribbon.

My club brother’s expression is weirdly blank.

“A ribbon,” I mutter.

Skull replies, “Yep.”

“Why?”

He scratches his chin, as he mutters, “Cover.”

That I can understand. A man carrying a duffel looks like a man carrying a duffel. A man carrying a gift box looks like somebody’s cousin going to a birthday party.

It’s not the worst idea he’s ever had. It’s not the best one either. But I don’t get paid to like the plan.

“Riverside Overlook,” he rumbles, clearing his throat. “Not the park. The little pull-off up on the bluff. Picnic table, the good view, the postcard-looking place.”

“I know it.”

“Your contact will be in a gray Honda. She won’t know what it is. Don’t explain it to her.”

I look at him.

He looks at the sky.

“Fine,” I grumble. It’s not my job to know the rest of the details.

Behind Skull, Katie his wife is coming across the gravel with a coffee cup in each hand. She stops dead when she sees what I’m holding. Her mouth drops open.

“Sunshine,” Skull says, in a voice that makes her snap her gaze to him.

She shuts her mouth. But she’s standing there with a look on her face like a woman watching a car roll toward a cliff with the parking brake off. I see it, and I log it, and I get on my bike anyway.

The river road runs out of town with the water on the left and nothing on the right but scrub and a guardrail. The barrier is dented and broken. Somebody’s put a truck through twice in the last five years.

I stretch my shoulders and suck in a breath of that sweet, clean river air. It’s a good road. The kind that empties your head out when the rest of the world is too cluttered.

The sun’s already going long and gold through the trees, laying stripes across the blacktop, and every one of them hits me in the face like a slap.

Today my mind won’t empty. The box in my saddlebag may as well be a bee buzzing around my head.

Fifty grand in a gift box with a ribbon on it. That’s my guess based on the weight. I’ve handled a lot of cash. There’s a small, cold voice at the back of my skull that’s kept me breathing for thirty-eight years and it’s saying the thing it always says when there’s trouble.

This is not what you think it is.

I tell it to fuck off. Skull’s my brother. He’s not sending me into anything.

I take the turn into the overlook faster than I should and let the Harley grumble down to a stop in the gravel.

Three vehicles sit in the lot. A minivan with stick figures on the glass. A pickup that hasn’t moved recently if the flat tire is any indication. And a gray Honda sedan, parked dead center between the lines, so clean it looks like it rolled off a lot this morning.

That’s her. Whoever she is.

I kick the stand down, swing off, and take the lot in the way I always do. All at once, looking for threats. Nobody in the minivan. Not a single person in the trees.

There’s a picnic table under a little pavilion, and a low stone wall along the bluff, and past that the whole valley just opens up and drops away.

It’s a hell of a view. Postcard, like Skull said. It’s the prettiest place in the county and I’ve never stopped to enjoy it, because I only come up here to do bad things.

Just like today.

I get the box out of my saddlebag and start walking.

The driver’s door of the Honda opens.

A woman’s shoe emerges first. Followed by a pale, curvy leg. Then she stands up.

And keeps standing up.

Alright. She’s tall.

Not tall for a woman. Tall.

That’s not all she is. The woman’s got more deadly curves than the river road.

I’m not supposed to be looking. But, fuck. I am.

Get your shit together, I growl inside my head.

I’m here on club business and this woman is a stranger and I’ve got a drop in my hands.

But fuck me, I can’t do anything about the fact that she’s got a serious goddamn rack on her. And there’s a pair of thighs under that green dress that I can see the shape of when the wind comes over the bluff. My mouth goes dry as a gravel pit.

I like curves. And not just on my bike.

There is a whole lot of woman standing in front of that car. Every inch of her is put together. She was built with the purpose of ruining a man’s focus.

Swallowing tightly, I stare. I could put my hands anywhere on her.

That’s the thought that makes me clear my throat. It’s not a nice thought. Nothing polite about it. A bolt of lust goes through my chest like a nail shot from a gun.

I shift my overly large mass, the kind that ruled as a linebacker in high school. I am a big man. Every woman I have ever put my hands on has been a little bird of a thing I had to hold like a fistful of eggs.

Twenty years of being careful. Holding back.

And here’s a woman I could get both hands on and hold, and I wouldn’t have to be careful for one single second, and my body knows it before my brain does.

I go hard as a two-by-four in a public parking lot like a goddamned teenager at homecoming.

Jesus Christ.

I should get on the bike and leave.

But this woman’s got her chin up. Hair done, lipstick on and I want to wreck them both.

The sun’s coming across the bluff and lighting up the whole side of her face. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

When I try to take a step, my legs don’t want to work, which is a serious fucking first. I have walked into a warehouse full of men who wanted me dead and never broke stride, and now my legs decide to run on their own program.

The woman in green looks over. Right at me. There’s a spark in her dark-brown gaze. A challenge.

Something about her mouth is arresting too. Like she’s got something smart loaded and the safety is off.

We stare at each other. There’s a noise in my ears like a truck idling.

I didn’t understand what happened to Skull in that park where he took one look at Katie and knew she was THE ONE.

I thought he’d gone soft in the head and I told him so to his face. Now I’m standing in the gravel parking lot with a box in my hands, and I understand. I get every bit of it.

“Fucking hell,” I curse under my breath. I’m here to hand this woman a package and ride away and never see her again.