Chapter 10
Pyre
“Where are you taking her?”
I glanced up as Torque jumped up on my examination table. I’d have to resanitize it later, but I didn’t say anything. He was a good kid. The only prospect we had in our club at the moment. Torque was twenty-four and curious about everything. I remembered being that damn young.
“How the hell did you even hear about it?” I asked, turning back to the inventory I was doing.
I did one at the end of every day. The way my brothers went through life there were always emergencies to address.
I wasn’t about to be caught with my dick out and no way to help them.
I counted the vials of pain medication. For all I knew Demo would steal one just to go on a bender.
“How do you think?” Cynic said, tone amused as he walked into the room. He was still moving with enough of a limp for me to know the leg was bothering him a week later. It had been a pretty deep laceration, so I wasn’t surprised.
“You assholes gossip like old women. You let it get infected, didn’t you?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. “I should just let your leg rot off.”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s not infected. You told me to come get the stitches out. Remember? Or are you too busy thinking of your girlfriend?” he teased.
Torque grinned at me. “I like Rae. She’s really nice.”
“Glad to hear it,” I told him. I couldn’t imagine Rae being mean to anyone.
She’d even smiled at the cowboy as she’d nearly broken his wrist. Then again, I also couldn’t imagine anyone being a dick to Torque.
He was too damn…smiley. Always in a good mood.
Pretty much the opposite of Scythe. No one would guess the little shit was as deadly as they came.
He’d been invited for the assessment and selection and had been set to go to the qualification course to join Delta Force when Cypher had recruited him.
Instead of joining, he’d finished out his contract with the Army and then joined us.
He worked for Sentry Securities, just like the rest of us, even though he wasn’t a full-fledged member of the MC just yet.
It was only a matter of time. He’d distinguished himself on enough Ops that we wanted to keep him.
I motioned for Torque to get off the table. Running a rag with a cleaning solution over the area, I turned to grab the tools I’d need. “Take a seat. Lose the pants.”
“You going to take me to dinner first, too?” Cynic asked with a wide grin as he unbuckled his belt. “Or do I need to put on a goth dress first?”
“You’re not pretty enough,” I told him. “You don’t deserve dinner. Just a paper bag.”
“Paper bag,” Torque snorted.
Cynic rolled his eyes at his friend. They were the closest in age in the club.
Cynic was twenty-seven, so they’d bonded pretty fast. They were nearly as inseparable as Warrant and Demo.
Or Warrant and Owen. Or Warrant, Demo, and Owen.
That was a weird friendship the three of them had.
Not touching each other inappropriately weird, just odd that they were best friends with a cop.
A cop that knew enough about their antics to lock them away for a long time.
We had no issue with law enforcement. We upheld our own version of the law after all, both with the security firm and the MC. We sort of filled in the gaps that they couldn’t handle. But cops didn’t look so kindly on that, so we stayed out of their way and off their radar.
I got to work on Cynic’s leg while Torque kept up a constant stream of chatter to keep him occupied. I was grateful for it because it kept Cynic from bitching at me. After taking out the stitches, I waited until Cynic was focused on whatever Torque was saying and gave him a shot of pain meds.
“What the hell was that?” he complained, eyes wide.
“For the pain,” I told him.
“I didn’t want that,” he snapped.
“You were limping on that fucking leg. You need to give it a couple days of rest. Stop running around on it like an asshole.”
“So you give me something that takes the pain away?” he asks in an incredulous tone. “That just means I’m going to run around on it more.”
“Not when the pain medication has a sedation effect,” I told him, giving him a smug grin.
His mouth dropped open. “You assschhole.”
The words were slurred.
“You may want to get him upstairs to his apartment,” I warned Torque. “Otherwise he’ll be taking a nap down here, and who knows what the guys will do to him when they find him passed out.”
“Shit,” Cynic mumbled. “Gibe me ah hannnd.”
“Ha ha, maybe I’ll dump you somewhere halfway.”
It was easy to see that Torque was trying not to laugh as he slung Cynic’s arm over his shoulder to help support his friend.
“Youu behtter get me to my rum.”
“Sure. Do you want your pants?”
“Leabe ‘em,” Cynic told him. “This azzhole dosssed meh.”
“Oh.” Torque turned his head as they got to the doorway. “So where you taking her?”
“To a restaurant,” I replied, watching while they both swayed as Cynic lost his balance.
“Sure you wouldn’t have more fun turning boards over, looking for bugs?”
I answered by chucking my tongs at his back. They made a satisfactory thud as they hit their target. He just laughed.
“You should try The Copper Kettle,” Torque suggested more seriously, ignoring Cynic as he cussed him out in barely distinguishable words.
“My parents tried it the last time they visited and they loved it. Mom said it was ‘super cute and romantic’.” He fluttered his eyes as he said it, then grinned. “Have fun tonight, Pyre.”
“Thanks, T.” I shook my head as they stumbled out of my exam room. That was going to keep Cynic down for the next twelve hours. And he was lucky I was in a damn good mood today because I gave him the kind where he wouldn’t feel like he’d been hit by a Mack truck when he woke up.
Glancing at my watch, I washed my hands, then went to my room to change.
I’d brought in clothes to wear for tonight, knowing I wouldn’t end up having time to run home first. I pulled on a pair of clean jeans, a clean shirt, and tugged my cut and boots back on.
Hopefully Rae wasn’t the kind of woman who expected a man to wear a suit when he took her out to dinner.
If she was, she wasn’t the woman for me.
Something told me that wouldn’t be an issue for us.
I managed to make it out of the clubhouse without anyone waylaying me. The ride to Rae’s house was quick. I realized as I walked up to her front door, I should have brought her flowers or something. She was the kind of woman you gave flowers to.
She opened the door before I had a chance to knock. “Hi.”
Damn.
She had on tight jeans with high heeled black boots that went up to her knees—the type of boots that after stripping her naked you’d make her put back on—and a tight long-sleeved black shirt. Her dark hair was loose and fell down to her ribs. She looked fucking amazing.
“You look great,” I told her. Idiot. “Beautiful,” I amended.
“Thank you,” she said with one of those brilliant smiles that always managed to knock the wind out of my lungs. “You look nice, too.”
I looked how I always did. How most of my brothers dressed.
But that was a point in her favor. So was the fact that she’d worn clothes that would protect her better on the back of a bike than her usual skirts and flowy tops would.
It hadn’t occurred to me to bring anything other than my bike. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” she said, turning to lock her front door.
I leaned forward a bit and inhaled. I had no idea what kind of perfume she wore, but I liked it. It made me want to bury my face in her neck. Or wherever else she might have squirted some. My eyes dropped down to her tits as she turned to face me again.
Clearing my throat, and averting my gaze, I held my arm out. “You good to ride with me?”
“Really?” she asked, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “I’ve kind of always wanted to ask one of you if I could take a ride.”
I had to swallow back the automatic urge to swear.
The thought of her riding behind one of my brothers, her curves pressed up against them, made me want to kill them and bury them somewhere, more than I usually did.
“Now’s your chance,” I said, being sure to soften my tone so I didn’t bark the words at her.
She didn’t need to know I was jealous of a hypothetical situation. She’d think I was insane.
Rae seemed like a pretty soft, sweet woman, if a little distant.
I planned to get to know her a lot better, and I was betting there was a spine of steel buried beneath all her gentleness.
That didn’t mean that she needed to see the demented side of me right off the bat.
We were all a little crazy. A bit fucked up.
You had to be to do what most of us had done in the military and now for Sentry Securities.
The security firm tended to get worse than the military ever got.
That was kind of the point, to do what the rules didn’t allow.
I didn’t mind that so much, but it would likely be a deterrent for a lot of women.
The kind who were walking red flags threw themselves at us all the time.
Those who were old lady material? I’d gotten the side-eye more than once as they’d tried to figure out what my deal was.
Usually, they moved on. Partly because of their own good sense, and partly because I hadn’t wanted anything serious before now.
Getting on the bike, I started it up, then held out a hand to steady Rae as she climbed on behind me.
She wrapped her arms around my waist and I nodded mentally to myself.
I would have been right to kill any brother who gave her a ride.
She wasn’t a large woman, but she still had curves in all the right places.
And those places were smashed up against my back right now. Against me is where they belonged.
The restaurant wasn’t very far away, so I didn’t bother with giving her my helmet. Though if we went on longer rides, we’d both need one. We both worked in professions where we saw what happened to riders who didn’t wear protective gear. It never ended well for those riders.
I pulled up at the restaurant and helped her off the bike.
She aimed a bright smile my way and I huffed out a breath.
It wasn’t fucking normal to get hard just because this woman was smiling at me like I’d just made her happier than anything had in her life.
I shifted my stance, trying to discreetly adjust my cock before she looked down and realized what she was doing to me.
“That was so much fun!” she gushed, grabbing my forearm and squeezing.
I laughed, enjoying her exuberance. I hadn’t seen her this animated before. I liked that she was feeling comfortable enough with me to show it. “Glad you liked it,” I told her. “We’ll have to go on a longer ride the next time. I’ll pick up an extra helmet for you.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go much further without one.”
She didn’t pick up on the significance of me getting a helmet for her.
I wasn’t surprised. She didn’t strike me as the type who knew much about MC culture.
Some clubs gave cuts to their old ladies, some gave anything that signified something important to the club.
We tended to give helmets and nicknames and that was about all.
But it was our way of claiming our women and it was as important to us as giving them a ring.