Tank’s Temptation (Kingdom Come MC #3)

TESSA

The motel Wi-Fi drops for the fourth time in twelve minutes.

I stare at the frozen upload bar, then close the laptop before I throw it through the stained window. The room smells like old smoke buried beneath lemon cleaner, and the air conditioner rattles hard enough to shake the plastic cups beside the sink.

Outside, tires hiss along the wet highway. Every set of headlights that slides across the curtains sends my pulse into my throat.

I tell myself I’m safe for the next five minutes.

It’s the same lie I’ve been telling myself since I climbed through a broken kitchen window at the Rivermark Hotel, hit the muddy riverbank on both knees, and ran until my lungs burned.

Dirt has dried stiff across my jeans. My left wrist is swollen where one of Harlan’s men caught me on the service stairs, and my phone lies in three useless pieces inside the trash can.

I can still hear the gunshot. Not the dramatic crack movies use, but a flat, vicious sound inside an empty ballroom, followed by Daniel Morrow dropping out of my frame.

My camera had been set to continuous shooting.

One press of my finger left the shutter snapping through the sudden silence, catching Harlan looking up, his face turning toward the gallery, and then the footsteps pounding for the stairs.

I open the laptop again. The cloud folder appears, disappears, then loads three gray squares with no previews. Something made it through before I lost the hotel connection. I just don’t know whether it’s enough.

The lock turns behind me.

I’m on my feet before the door opens, dragging the camera bag up with one hand and grabbing the folded tripod with the other.

The man who steps inside doesn’t rush. He closes the door behind him and slips the motel key into the pocket of his black leather cut.

Very short dark hair. Light stubble over a hard jaw.

Tattooed arms thick with muscle, though he isn’t built like some swollen gym freak.

Everything about him looks compressed and controlled, as if all that strength has been packed into one purpose.

The patches tell me the rest: KINGDOM COME MC. ENFORCER. TANK.

Harlan sent a biker to clean up his mess.

“Stay back.” I raise the tripod across my body. My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “I’ll use this.”

Tank’s gaze moves from the tripod to my face, then down to the camera bag.

He doesn’t smile or tell me I won’t. He simply takes one step farther into the room.

I swing, but his hand closes around the tripod before it reaches his head.

One sharp twist takes it from me without wrenching my shoulder, and he lays it on the dresser rather than using it against me.

That restraint is almost worse than violence. It tells me he never considered me a threat.

“Clay Harlan wants his property returned,” he says.

“That camera is mine.”

“The files from it aren’t.”

“They’re evidence. Harlan murdered a man.”

Nothing changes in his expression, but he heard me. I can tell by the brief tightening around his eyes.

“Harlan says you and Morrow stole records from him,” Tank says. “He says the murder story is part of the squeeze and this is all part of your story.”

“I didn’t know Daniel Morrow. I was hired to photograph the hotel, and Harlan shot him in the ballroom.”

“You can show us, then, can’t you?”

“No. I can show the police, assuming Harlan hasn’t bought them too.”

Tank glances at the broken phone in the trash, my dirty jeans, and the bruise darkening around my wrist. He notices everything without asking about any of it.

Then his attention returns to the laptop, but I move first.

The door is only three confident strides away. I duck past his left side, catch the handle, and get it halfway down before an arm locks around my waist and my back hits his chest.

Heat and solid muscle close around me, one tattooed forearm braced beneath my ribs while his other hand catches mine before I can claw at him. He smells like wet leather and something darkly clean. The awareness hits low and hot, so wrong that fury burns through the fear.

A man has been murdered. I’m being taken by a criminal in a leather cut, and now, of all times, my body notices how strong and muscular he is. Getting turned on by a dangerous biker is very bad timing.

“Let me go.”

“Stop fighting me then.”

“Get your hands off me and I will.”

His breath touches the side of my neck. My skin tightens everywhere. For one terrible second, neither of us moves. His body is hard along the full length of mine, his hold absolute without being painful. I hate the security of it. I hate the answering heat between my thighs more.

When I stop struggling, Tank releases me immediately and steps back, putting cold air where his body was. His face remains stern, but his hand flexes once at his side.

“You’re coming with me,” he says.

“I’m not.”

He picks up my laptop, closes it, and slides it into the padded section of my camera bag. He checks the zipper as if handling expensive equipment matters while abducting its owner.

I grab the motel phone. The cord jerks taut before I can dial. Tank takes the receiver from my hand and replaces it.

“Harlan has your name, your car, and your apartment address. This room wasn’t hard to find.”

“And you think going with you improves my chances of getting away from any of this?”

“I think you’re going either way.”

The cold certainty in his voice finally cracks something inside me. I shove him, aiming both hands at the center of his chest. He barely rocks back.

“Go to hell.”

Tank catches me around the hips and lifts me.

There’s no struggle, no show of effort. One moment my boots are on the ugly carpet, the next I’m against him with my camera bag trapped safely between us. I hit his shoulder and demand he put me down, but he carries me through the door and along the outside walkway as if I weigh nothing.

A television blares behind the next room’s curtains. Somewhere below us, a couple argues beside the ice machine. Nobody opens a door or even notices or cares that I’m being abducted by a biker.

Tank sets me on my feet beside a black motorcycle parked beneath the buzzing motel sign.

Rain beads across the fuel tank. The bike looks heavy, polished, and brutally real.

He takes a spare helmet from the rear storage compartment and holds it toward me. “Put it on.”

“You’re kidnapping me and worried about road safety?”

“I’m not riding with you unprotected.”

The words land differently than he means them to. His eyes darken slightly, as though he hears it too, but his arm remains extended.

I take the helmet because refusing only gives him another reason to touch me. While I fasten it, Tank puts my camera bag in the storage with careful, efficient movements, checking it twice before he swings onto the bike.

“Get on.”

I consider running. The highway is fifty feet away, wet and nearly empty, and he already proved how easily he can catch me. Tank waits without looking back, apparently certain I’ll reach the same conclusion.

I climb on behind him, leaving as much space as the seat allows.

“Arms around me.”

“I can hold the rail.”

“No.”

Of course not. That might give me the illusion I’m doing any part of this willingly.

I place my hands against the sides of his cut instead. Tank starts the engine, and the vibration rises through the bike into my body. When he pulls away from the motel, the sudden force slides me forward. My arms lock around his waist on instinct.

His stomach tightens beneath my hands.

The knowledge that he feels me too does nothing useful.

We turn away from the highway and take a narrow road through wet woods. Tank rides fast but not carelessly. He slows before every blind curve, keeps the bike steady over slick patches, and shifts his body to shield mine when a truck throws spray across our lane.

He is careful with me while carrying me somewhere I don’t want to go. The contradiction makes anger sit like acid in my stomach.

Ransom appears in pieces through the rain. Dark storefronts, a gas station, old brick buildings facing the river. We pass through town without stopping, then turn onto a road that climbs between thick trees.

A high metal fence emerges ahead. Cameras sit above the gate, and a man in a black cut watches from beneath a covered guard post with a rifle hanging easily at his side.

The gate rolls open, revealing motorcycles lining the wall of a long garage.

Light pours through the open bays onto wet concrete where men in Kingdom Come colors work around stripped engines and tool chests.

More brothers stand outside the clubhouse, some armed openly, all turning to watch Tank bring me inside.

The gates close behind us with a mechanical screeching clang.

Whatever chance I had of walking away disappears with them.

Tank parks near the clubhouse and removes my camera bag before he lets me off the bike. My legs shake when my boots hit the ground, from adrenaline rather than the ride, and he notices that too. His hand comes toward my elbow, then stops before touching me.

A dark-haired man waits beneath the clubhouse awning with another broad man beside him. The first wears PRESIDENT over his chest and KANE on the opposite side. He isn’t as heavily built as Tank, but the compound seems to arrange itself around his stillness.

Tank carries my bag to him. “Found her at the Starlight.”

“Harlan killed Daniel Morrow,” I say before either man can discuss me like freight. “I photographed it.”

Kane studies me, then the bag.

“Do you know Harlan?”

“I know he did business with this club before I took over the club.”

“And that’s enough to have me dragged out of a motel against my will?”

His jaw hardens, though his voice stays level. “It’s enough to verify what happened before anybody gets your files or puts a hand on you. I know what I’ve been told, that’s all.”

“Your enforcer already put his hands on me.”

Kane’s gaze shifts to Tank. Something passes between them too quickly for me to read.

“Secure her until morning,” Kane says. “Harlan gets nothing until Cash verifies his story.”

The man beside him, Judge, according to his patch, looks at my bruised wrist, then at Tank. He doesn’t question Kane’s order or offer empty reassurance. He only steps aside when Tank motions me toward the clubhouse.

Inside, music plays low behind a crowded bar. The room smells of beer, engine oil, and damp leather. Men stop talking as I pass. A huge Kingdom Come emblem covers one wall, surrounded by photographs of brothers beside bikes, graves, and one another.

This isn’t a gang meeting in somebody’s back room. It’s a whole world with its own gates, rules, and weapons.

Tank takes me down a hallway and opens a plain door near the end.

His room is cleaner than I expect and almost aggressively simple.

A made bed, one chair, a dresser with a locked metal box on top, and boots lined beneath the window.

The only personal things are a framed photograph of several younger men in cuts and a silver chain hanging from the corner of the mirror.

He sets my camera bag beside the bed but keeps himself between me and it.

“There’s a bathroom through there,” he says. “You take the bed.”

“How generous.”

His expression doesn’t change. “I’ll be by the door.”

“Guarding me.”

“Yes.”

At least he doesn’t insult me by calling it protection.

I cross to the window. Reinforced screen, narrow opening, two stories above concrete. When I turn back, Tank has removed a handgun from beneath his cut and locked it inside the metal box along with a knife. He keeps the key in his pocket and sits in the chair beside the only exit.

I catalog the room because observation is the only weapon he hasn’t taken from me.

The door opens inward, its hinges exposed on this side but too solid to pull without tools.

The lamp has a heavy ceramic base. The bathroom window might be wide enough if the screen gives, though the drop would probably break an ankle.

Tank follows my inspection without turning his head, as if he already knows every route I’m measuring and how quickly he could close each one.

I lower myself onto the edge of the bed without taking my eyes off him. “You need to understand something. If Harlan reaches me, I’m dead.”

Tank holds my gaze for a long moment, all stern face, tattooed arms, and frightening certainty.

“Harlan isn’t coming through that door tonight, whatever your story might be.”

He reaches back and turns the lock. The click is small, almost ordinary. Tank thinks tonight is the danger; he still doesn’t understand that tomorrow is when they plan to give me back.