Chapter Forty-Three
King
She was trying to run.
I held her in my arms. My hands rubbed the back of her legs. I wanted to continue under her shirt and up over her plump ass. I wanted to lift my shirt over her head and take my fill of her naked body.
But I couldn’t.
She wasn’t ready. She might never be ready. My dick was hard as steel behind my zipper. I groaned inwardly when she ran her fingers through my hair. Then she tilted my head back.
And I saw it.
The fear.
Not of me. Fear of herself.
“I’m just like her, King. I didn’t see it before. I didn’t know what it was. But there was something wrong with her. Something wrong with me.”
“With whom, baby? What are you talking about?”
“My mother. She used to tell me men leave. But I think she pushed them away. I think she knew there was something dark in her that she couldn’t control. She was different when we left Arkansas. Sullen, but not.”
She was rambling, and I was torn between stopping her and letting her continue. She didn’t talk much about her mother. I knew she loved her. I knew she’d had a good mom. One who loved her unconditionally. But everything she told me was surface shit.
“Grace, I want to talk to you about all of this. I want to hear all about your mom, about your life before I met you. But first we need to talk about us.”
“There can’t be an us, King.” She tried to step back, but I held her legs.
I knew I shouldn’t do it, but I pulled her in closer, until she had no choice but to straddle me.
I waited for her to fight me. Waited for her to slap me the way she did that day downstairs when I kissed her for the first time in front of my brothers.
If she did, I would have let her go. But instead, she settled against me.
Her arms around my neck and her face buried against my throat.
“This feels an awful lot like us, baby.”
She shook her head and groaned. When she lifted her head and looked into my eyes, my heart broke. I saw her shut down a second before she spoke.
“We can’t be together. I’m not good for you. Everything I’ve done since the moment I came here has hurt you.”
“That’s bullshit, Grace, and you fucking know it.”
“I tried—”
“Shut the fuck up and let me speak,” I growled.
If I was going to lose her, she was going to hear it all.
“I forgave you for that shit the minute you told me what you planned. I didn’t fucking care, and if you hadn’t been drinking, I would have crawled between your legs and fucking moved in.
You were never the reason I stayed away from you.
I don’t know how many fucking ways to say it. ”
“You don’t know who she was. Who I am.” She sighed.
“I don’t know who the fuck I am. What if the man who is my father is worse than Steele?
What if the darkness in her is also in him?
I can feel it, King. I wasn’t mad at you for fucking me.
I was mad at me, and I wanted to hurt you.
So I left the clubhouse after you told me not to, and I dragged Karlyn with me.
It’s my fault she was hurt. Johnny and Indigo.
Jackson. If I had just stayed put, he never would have been shot. ”
“Jackson was shot to shit when he fucking walked in the clubhouse, baby. This life has risks. We all knew it when we signed up. We all accept it.”
“But if I hadn’t done—”
I leaned forward and pressed my lips against hers. I felt her stiffen and pulled back, but just before my lips left hers, she relaxed against me and kissed me back. My hands roamed over her back, doing my best to tamp down the raging desire I had for this woman.
Her arms tightened around my neck as she pressed her body against me. She was so fucking sexy, and all I wanted was to sink my dick inside her. But I couldn’t. Not until she dealt with the shit that happened to her. She needed to talk to Haizley.
She needed to talk to me.
I pulled away, and she followed me, biting at my lips.
“Grace, baby, we have to stop.”
“Why?” she asked, her hands fisting in my hair, preventing me from letting her go. “I want you, King. I want you to make me forget.”
I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back. “Grace, we can’t. Not yet. It’s only been a few days. You need to talk to someone. You still haven’t talked to Patch.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk to him. I don’t want to talk about it at all. I just want to forget it ever happened.”
“It doesn’t work that way, baby. You have to be checked out.
Make sure you’re okay. If you won’t talk to Patch, then how about Bane?
” She shook her head again, and I offered, “Kytten? She’s an EMT—did you know that?
” I grasped her chin between my thumb and index finger.
“I need you to be okay, Grace. You haven’t talked about anything.
You haven’t been looked at. They hurt you, baby. I need you to be okay.”
“I can’t. If I talk about it, then it happened.”
“It happened, Grace. We can’t change that, no matter how much I fucking wish that I could. I never should have left you that morning after the shower. I was so pissed at Jackson that I walked out of here without a word, and I will live with that guilt forever, baby. But that’s on me.”
“It’s on me,” she whispered. “Jackson will blame me. I can’t be a wedge between you and your brother. You just found him.”
“I will walk away from him for you, Grace.”
“No!” she gasped. “I don’t want that.”
“I don’t want you to run. You’re it, Grace. Without you, nothing else matters.”
“But if my father—”
“Fuck your father, Grace. I don’t care who it is. Not anymore.”
We stared at each other, and I smiled.
“Marry me.”
“What?” She tried to step off my lap, and I held her tight. I pulled her against me, my arms a band around her middle.
“Marry me. Today. We’ll go to the clerk’s office and get the license, and have Matlock marry us. Just you and me.”
“I can’t.” She looked sad. I could see the excuses building inside her.
“Give me one reason why. Just one. What’s the main reason? The one that matters the most.”
Her eyes dropped between us, her hands flat on my belly. She took a deep breath, and I asked, “What’s your biggest fear, Grace? Tell me what it is and we’ll deal with it together.”
For a minute, I didn’t think she’d open up. I took her hand and placed it over my heart. “Let me hold the pieces together, Grace.”
She looked up into my eyes. Hers swam with tears as she confessed, “They didn’t use anything.”
“Fuck, Grace.” I pulled her against me. Her biggest fear was that she’d pass something on to me. “I’ll talk to Kytten. She can do a physical. She’ll run some blood work.”
“It could take up to three months for anything to show up.”
“Then we do one now, and another one in three months. And another one in six months, and as many as you need to feel safe.”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Will you be my old lady, Grace? Will you be my wife?” I held my breath as I waited for her to answer.
“You really still want me?”
“I never stopped wanting you, baby. Not since the moment I saw you behind the bar.”
She chuckled. “The men parted like the Red Sea when you walked up.”
I smiled. “It’s good to be the King. And you’re my fucking queen. Will you be my queen?”
A single tear slipped down her face as she nodded. “Yes, I’ll be your queen.”
I left Grace in our room to get dressed. She promised she would come down. She wanted to do it herself. I felt like we had a breakthrough this morning, but I worried it was too fucking early.
The way she kissed me, the way she ground herself against me. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to toss her on the bed and crawl over her. I needed to talk to Haizley. I didn’t want Grace to move too fast. I didn’t want her to be with me until I was sure she was ready.
I made it down to the main room just as the door flew open. Stocks, Payne, and Eros stormed in, followed by two women and a young girl. She looked about twelve years old.
“Oh fuck!” Jack said.
I turned to look at Jack, and he was staring at the girl. “Jack? You know them?”
“Never met them,” he said, never taking his eyes off the girl.
I walked over to the women just as Kytten called out, “Slyce!”
Slyce had been absent when I’d ordered the Night Nymphs to come to the clubhouse so Kytten could tell them her story. Massacre had seen her at the Death Dogs’ clubhouse, but no one, including Valhalla, her president, had known why she was there.
The other woman shrank back behind Slyce, her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as she watched the room, her eyes wide. I stepped closer and lowered my voice.
“My name is King. I’m the president here. Is this your daughter?”
She nodded but didn’t speak. She pulled her daughter closer as if to shield her from me, and I wondered if she had been through something similar to Grace. I prayed her daughter hadn’t.
“You’re safe here.”
The woman snorted, her eyes glaring at me, and I knew she was wishing death on me and every man in here. I looked over at Stocks and raised an eyebrow.
He shrugged.
“Church. Now.” I walked toward the doors and turned. “Kytten, would you bring your friend? Zeus, you too.”
I held the door open as everyone walked in. Before I followed, I caught Haizley’s eye. “Grace should be down soon.”
“I’ve got her. I’ll tell her where you are.”
“Thank you!”
The doors closed behind me, and I sank into my chair. “What the fuck happened?”
Payne looked at Stocks, and his eyes were wide when the fucker didn’t open his mouth.
He rarely said much. I didn’t expect him to give me a full report, which was why I’d sent Payne and Eros with him.
He could have done it alone, but I needed someone who could tell me what happened when he came back.
Shaking his head, Payne began, “We got out there and wired everything up. Chatty Cathy over here”—he motioned toward Stocks, and I knew he was being sarcastic—“wired up the barn, while Eros and I took the trailers. We were just about to blow them up when Stocks took off running. I guess he’d seen the women and the kid when we hadn’t. ”
That didn’t surprise me. Stocks was observant. He was fucking smart, which was probably why he didn’t talk much.
“He ran after them, and a few guys took off after them too. Stocks took them down and yelled for us to blow it up. There is nothing left. We made sure the guys who went after Stocks were dead and threw their bodies in the fires.”
All in all, it sounded pretty straightforward and with the Death Dogs gone, life should start to settle down. The war couldn’t continue without the opposing side. I looked over to Slyce.
“What about you?”