Chapter 24 #2
Halfway across the floor she looked back, caught me watching and blew me a kiss.
Fewin caught the whole sorry picture from a couple of feet away and laughed at me.
“She’s coming back, brother.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “And if she doesn’t — you know fucking her senseless works. Every damn time.”
And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, that’s exactly when Steph found me.
I hadn’t seen Steph in three years. Good-time girl, moved to Phoenix with some guy, no trouble to anybody — we’d had a couple of nights a long time ago. She came out of the crowd in a way I used to live for and put her hand flat on my chest.
“Handful! Look at you. SAA. I’m back in town, I heard you were the man of the hour—” Her hand slid an inch. “And I distinctly remember being very good at helping you celebrate.”
A year ago I wouldn’t have heard the end of that sentence. I’d have been halfway to a private room.
My only worry was Austen — whether she’d stepped out of that hallway and seen a strange woman’s hand on my chest, and what she’d make of it if she had.
Not a flicker of doubt about me. I was hers down to the ink and I knew it.
But I’d watched her decide about me once already, and I was never handing her another reason.
I had Steph’s hand off me before she finished talking — friendly, done.
“Steph. Good to see you. I’m spoken for. ”
“You.” Her eyebrows shot up. “You’re spoken for.”
“All the way. Hopelessly. It’s embarrassing, honestly, ask anyone here.”
“It’s true!” a prospect yelled, backing me up, and I made a note to hand the kid the good jobs for a month.
Steph looked at me a second longer, then she grinned. “Well, damn. She must be an absolute force of nature to take you off the board.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She is. She’s everything.”
Steph laughed, delighted. “Good for you, Handful. Honestly.” And she was gone, easy as she came, the whole thing over in maybe thirty seconds.
I was already looking for Austen.
She was halfway back across the floor — and she wasn’t storming over, wasn’t wearing the look that would’ve gutted me a year ago. She was laughing at me. She crossed the last of it, took my hand, and arched an eyebrow up at me.
“And who was that?”
“That was—”
“Steph. I know.” She gave me a look, smug as anything. “I asked Indira the second a gorgeous woman walked up and put her hand on you. Got the whole rundown.”
“You’re not mad?”
“At what?” That slow look, the one that used to terrify me.
“I was too far off to catch a word of it. Didn’t need the words.
I’m guessing I just watched a beautiful woman offer you a night you’d have taken without breaking stride a year ago—” she tilted her head “—and I watched you take her hand off you and laugh.”
“I—”
“Relax.” She was fighting a smile now, losing it. “I know you weren’t tempted.” Her fist closed in my shirt.
“I’m yours. Every part. There’s no version of me that walks off with — or touches — another woman, not tonight, not ever. You’re the whole list, Austen.” I covered her hand with mine and pressed it flat to the ink over my heart. “Had your name put there so you’d know.”
?
I got her out onto the porch a while later, away from the worst of the noise, because I had one thing I wanted to say and I didn’t want to yell it over a jukebox.
“I’m going to tell you something dumb,” I said. “And you’re going to let me, because we’re being honest now.”
“Oh, this should be good.”
“The night you left. The birthday. Before I even knew you’d gone — I was in the hallway and some girl walked past and I said to Target, legs for days on that one.
Just said it. Reflex.” I made myself hold her eyes.
“I’m telling you because I’m always going to be a man who might say something that stupid.
I’m under construction, Austen, not finished.
I can’t promise you my brain will never—”
“Tyler.” She put one finger on my lips. “Stop talking.”
I grabbed her hand and kissed it.
“Let me tell you a story.” She let me keep her hand.
“You know what Indira did. The old ladies still talk about it when they’re intel sharing.
When she walked in on Dutch and a club girl going at it on his desk, and the absolute moron told her it was just stress relief.
” Austen’s grin was pure trouble now. “She looked him dead in the eye and told him if that’s all it was, she’d go find one of his brothers to fuck for a little stress relief of her own.
Holden, she figured. He’d always been friendly. ”
I choked on my beer. I knew this story — or I knew Dutch’s version. “She did not. Dutch did not tell us that part.”
“Dead calm, apparently.” She was loving this.
“And the President of the Venom Riders — the man who’d just sworn that club girl meant nothing — went off like a bomb.
Like hell you are. You’re my woman. Couldn’t stand the thought of her so much as looking at another man.
” She jabbed a finger into my chest. “The point, you beautiful idiot, is that the women in this club are not made of glass. You’ve got eyes — look.
Have a stupid thought in a hallway. Say legs for days to Target till you’re ninety. I’m not leaving you over your eyes.”
“No?”
“No.” Her hand pressed. “Because I know exactly where they come home to. And these hands. And this mouth.” She went up on her toes, dropped her voice to a whisper.
“And that tongue, which I have extensive knowledge of. They’re mine.
They come home to me. I’m the only one who gets to play with any of them.
Before, some woman putting her hands on you would’ve ruined my whole night — I’d have spent it wondering where yours were going to end up.
Not anymore. Now I know. So it costs me nothing. ”
Her hand fisted in my shirt and all the play went out of her.
“But understand me, Tyler. If you ever do anything as stupid as Dutch did — if you so much as put your hands on another woman the way you put them on me tonight — I won’t throw you out and cry about it.
I’ll end you myself. Slowly. And then I’ll end her. ”
Every drop of blood in my body headed due south.
She felt it. Pressed up against me like that, there was no way she didn’t. Her eyebrows shot up, and then she laughed, delighted and scandalized at once. “You liked that. I just threatened to kill you, Tyler, and you liked it. That was supposed to scare you, not turn you on.”
“Everything that comes out of your mouth turns me on, Austen. The threats most of all.” I got both hands on her hips and pulled her in so she’d feel exactly what she’d done to me.
She huffed. “Oh, and any woman who puts her hands on you the way that one did tonight? I’ll end her too. Nothing personal. Housekeeping.”
“Say it again,” I said. “The mine part.”
“Greedy.”
“Starving, actually. Say it.”
She laughed, and she said it again, slower, against my mouth this time — mine — and that was it for me. I grabbed her and kissed her on the porch of the clubhouse with the whole party roaring behind us.
Behind us somebody put on something fast and Colt bellowed my name followed by the unmistakable sound of Smoke being told to get off the table.
“They’re going to come looking for you,” Austen said against my lips. “It’s your party.”
“Let ‘em look.” I kissed her again. “I’m a little busy being the luckiest man alive.”
“You’re really not going to play this cool at all, are you?”
“Not even a little.” I pulled back just enough to look at her, this woman who’d thrown me out and ruined me and come back and claimed me on a porch like she’d thought of it first. “I’ve got the patch and I’ve got the girl.
I am going to be insufferable about both for the rest of my life.
You should’ve thought about that before you told me to come. ”
“God,” she said, taking my hand, towing me back inside the clubhouse. “What have I done?”
Plenty, I thought, following her in. Austen Wicker was the best thing that ever happened to me.