Chapter One ABBIE #2
I give a happy sigh as I walk over to Wings, his arms opening to draw me close.
My nose finds the groove between his ear and shoulder and, as always, my bones turn liquid as I breathe in his scent.
After the antiseptic stink of the hospital, it’s a delicious balm, a mixture of leather, road grit, and his own sunshine fragrance that I can never get enough of.
If I could bottle it, I swear I could fix half the ailments in the clinic with a single dose.
“It was a hard one tonight,” I tell him, pulling back to feather my thumbs over his cheeks. “Old ghosts stirred up.”
His gray eyes darken, flashing like quicksilver. “Dead ghosts, I hope.”
“Long gone.” I smile to ease the worry in his eyes. “But I’d really like it if you made me forget about everything but you right now.”
“I’ll do my best.” He palms my thigh as I climb on the back of his bike, wrapping my arms around his waist and scooting close.
Bikes are in my blood, and I have an Indian Scout Sixty v-twin cruiser I ride most days, but if I have any say in it, I’ll always hit the road wrapped around Wings.
There’s something about the adrenaline of the ride mixed with the comfort of his nearness that makes me purr like a fine-tuned engine.
I chose my apartment for both its security features and the undercover garage, since neither of us like leaving our bikes to the mercy of the elements.
I blow my Indian queen a kiss as we head inside, but when Wings backs me into the corner of the elevator, I forget everything but the taste of his lips.
His hands slide under my jacket, and I arch into his touch, desperate to feel his skin on mine.
It’s been three days since we were last together, and I’ve just about hit my limit as he walks me backwards through my apartment door.
I don’t even turn on the lights, happy to have him guide me to my bedroom from memory alone.
Wings still officially lives at the clubhouse, but he’s spent enough time here that it feels like his second home.
We shed our clothes as we make it into my bedroom, the pressures of my shift fading with each layer we strip away.
His body is a work of art. Not as big as some of the alphas at the club, but still tightly muscled, his six-foot frame looming over mine.
It’s not often that I like to feel small and vulnerable, but when Wings stares down at me with a predatory hunger in his eyes, I’m tempted to stick a cottontail on my ass and scamper around the apartment, just so he’ll hunt me down.
“Why are you smiling?” he asks as his mouth nibbles at the corner of mine.
He’s got me down to my bra and panties, and he leans back to admire the view.
It’s nothing special – just a cotton set that gets me through a long shift – but I refuse to apologize for choosing comfort over beauty.
And it’s not like Wings doesn’t own every inch of my skin, anyway.
“Just picturing you chasing me around the apartment like a wolf who missed dinner.” I brush my hands over his sculpted chest, my thumbs circling the flat discs of his nipples.
He’s got his military unit tattoo on his right pec, but the left is devoted to a pair of butterflies in flight, and I lean forward to kiss the ink.
“But maybe I’m projecting, because I look at your body and I’m suddenly drooling for a taste. ”
He makes a happy rumbling sound as he leaps on me, unsnapping my bra before we even hit the bed.
I laugh, squeezing him tight with my thighs and flipping him onto his back.
His eyes light up, his dimples popping as we wrestle across the mattress.
I might be training for my shodan exam, or black belt ranking, but Wings is no slouch, either.
He flips me again, using his extra thirty pounds of muscle to pin me to the bed.
Not that I’m fighting all that hard to get away.
“It was too long, Abbie,” he groans against my collarbone as he kisses his way around my throat. “I want this to be permanent, not just something we squeeze around the rest of our lives.”
I tap my butterfly tattoo, my pulse thudding against my fingertip. “You know you already have all of me.”
“But I want more.”
I study his face, wondering what he’s trying to tell me.
Since Wings is what’s known as a latent alpha, I’m always careful to keep my more primal omega urges under wraps.
I take a mild blocker for work, just enough to dull my pheromones so they don’t trigger my patients, but in my apartment I’m suppressant free, and sometimes I wonder if that’s a little overwhelming for him.
We grew up in the kind of world where dominance and aggression are badges of honor, and you literally can’t get a seat at the table unless you’re an alpha.
Have I been sending him some mixed signals without even realizing it?
Or has something happened at the club that’s making him doubt the kind of connection we have between us?
“You know I don’t care about knots and bites.”
While Wings emits alpha pheromones, they’re fainter and sweeter than traditional musk.
He also doesn’t form a knot when he’s inside me, no matter how out of our heads we are with pleasure.
Any biting we do is strictly for fun, which is one of the reasons I got him to tattoo the butterfly on my scent gland.
It hurt like hell, but I wanted him to know that I don’t need his bite to prove how much we mean to each other.
“No, I don’t mean that.” He smooths away the worry lines on my brow with a kiss.
“I’m talking about our future outside your apartment.
Ark is turning the club around and is even rewriting the club charter.
If you came back, you’d have the same rights as everyone else in the club. Ark guarantees it.”
The MC President’s name sends a hollow thud through me.
His dad, Booker, has only been dead a couple of months, but Wings insists Ark is the new broom that’s going to sweep away all the legacy bullshit.
Five years too late for me – or at least that’s what I thought until Wings started talking about bringing me back into the fold.
I thread my fingers through his short, silky hair and tilt his head back. “You haven’t told Ark about us, have you?”
It was my only rule when Wings stepped back into my life nearly three years ago.
That we left club business at my doorstep, and he kept our relationship a secret from the other members.
Not just out of spite because they kicked me out, but because under Booker, the club was still as paranoid about unbonded omegas as they were when I was seventeen.
I wouldn’t have put it past the old president to send one of his goons to frighten me back into my hole.
“Of course not. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t keeping some kind of tabs on you. You know how bad he feels about what happened…”
I wiggle out from under Wings and sit up, dragging my fingers through my tangled hair. “Not bad enough to do anything about it when it mattered.”
Wings sighs and props himself on an elbow, kissing my tense spine.
He’s careful not to brush the lattice of scars on my back, but I can feel his sorrow leaking into my skin.
“We all fucked up,” he murmurs. “The only thing I can say is that Booker was even more brutal after you left. I really don’t think Ark had much choice until now. ”
I push myself to the edge of the bed, reaching for the glass of water on my nightstand.
It seems like the drooling-for-a-taste part of the evening is over, and it’s hard to swallow my regret as I drain the glass and turn back to him.
“As far as I’m concerned, you and I are bonded in every way that counts, but that doesn’t mean the club will agree.
And Ark might talk about change, but he’s still one guy among many.
His dad’s cronies aren’t going to bend easily, and I don’t plan on getting caught in the crossfire. ”
“Don’t worry about those assholes,” Wings scowls, his scent sharpening with anger. “The dead weight is the first stuff Ark is tossing out.”
I look at him skeptically. Motorcycle clubs, after all, are one of the most patriarchal, old-school organizations out there, and until the Iron Flyers start protecting their omegas, I’m going to keep giving them a hard pass.
“I’m glad he’s making things better for you at the club,” I say quietly, holding his gaze so he can see the sincerity in my eyes, “but that life is over for me. My family is gone, and whatever loyalty I felt to the Iron Flyers died a long time ago.”
I turn to kiss his lips, but they’re frowning under mine, his scent muted with disappointment.
I feel a sting of guilt at dashing his dreams, but there’s some annoyance mixed in there, too.
Wings only reconnected with me after I’d already been out of the club for a couple of years.
I was both older and harder by that time, and finally living on my own terms. He doesn’t know the shit I went through at seventeen, or the full story of the scars I carry on my back, but he knows they’re there.
He knows they happened because I had no one in my corner.
How can he expect me to just take a leap of faith with the club, when their loyalty has already proven to extend only so far, and never in my direction?
“I’m really tired,” I tell him as I reach for the sleep shirt I keep under my pillow. I pull it on quickly, turning to give him a small smile. “Can we catch up tomorrow? I’m off until three.”
He stares at me, crestfallen. “You’re kicking me out?”
“Like I said, it was a hard shift.” I shrug as I stand and start grabbing my work clothes, tossing them in the hamper in the corner. “I don’t think I’m going to be much fun tonight, anyway.”
Wings rolls off the bed, striding towards me with a shake of his head. “Fuck fun.” He wraps his arms around me from behind, nuzzling into the back of my neck. “I’m sorry I dumped all that on you tonight. And you know I just want to be with you, butterfly.”
I nod, even though there’s a niggling worry in the back of my mind. Wings is a born-and-bred Iron Flyer, and unlike me, he’s always going to want a connection to the club. I thought I could keep our two worlds separate, but am I being selfish for making him split his loyalties between us?
He presses a soft kiss on my scent gland, and I’m not sure if he’s admiring my scent or his talent with his tattoo gun. “Why don’t you grab a shower, and I'll make you a grilled cheese?”
I melt back against him, sighing at how good it feels to be in his arms. I’d almost bend a knee to Ark if it meant that Wings could be mine, without the shadow of the club hanging over us all the time. “You know all my guilty pleasures.”
He gives a rueful chuckle. “As long as my big mouth is one of them.”
I turn in his arms, everything else fading away as I focus on his lips. Like always, I’m completely under their spell, and I lean into him, wrapping my arms around his neck. “How about you put that big mouth back on my neck and we see how things go from there?”