Chapter 4
FOUR
ANGEL
The kiss was still on my mouth three days later.
I couldn't burn it off. Couldn't sweat it out in the workshop, couldn't drown it in coffee, couldn't bury it even when Rook brought me information.
Every time I sat down with the intel, every time I focused on the dirty cop's name and the web of connections spreading out from him like cracks in glass, my brain would hold for ten minutes, maybe twenty, and then she'd move through my peripheral vision and all of it would scatter.
The way she tucked her legs under her on the couch.
The curve of her neck when she bent over a book she'd found on the shelf.
Her laugh, sudden and startled, when Duke said something stupid at the table while she ate breakfast. The way her hips moved when she walked and didn't know I was watching.
The fullness of her, all that softness I'd been trying not to see since the moment she sat down in my lodge, and now I couldn't stop.
I kept catching myself. That was the worst part. The tactical brain would be mapping routes and timelines and then I'd realize I'd been staring at the shape of her thighs in her jeans for ten seconds and the disgust would hit so hard it made my teeth ache.
She was twenty-eight and she was Ryan's sister. She'd kissed me in the kitchen three nights ago and I'd kissed her back like a man with no restraint, no honor, no sense, and the taste of her mouth was still right there every time I breathed in.
I found Ghost on the porch that afternoon. He was sitting with his boots on the railing, a cup of coffee balanced on his knee, watching the nothing in particular.
I sat down next to him. Didn't say anything for a while. Ghost never minded silence. He was the kind of man who could sit with you for an hour and say nothing and you'd still feel like you'd had a conversation.
"Ryan would've been forty-three this year," I said.
Ghost didn't move. Didn't look at me. Just nodded, slow, the way he did when he was letting you get where you were going.
"I gave the order," I said. "I put him in the field that day. I've lived with that for six years. Made my peace with it, or close enough. And now his sister is in our compound and kissed me three nights ago. I kissed her back, and I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."
Ghost took a sip of his coffee. Let the silence sit for a long beat.
"You asking me a question?" he said.
"I'm telling you I'm a piece of shit."
"No, you're not." He said. “And for the record, I was there too, you were doing your job.” Flat, factual, no room for debate. "Ryan loved you. If he knew she was safe with you, in every way, he'd be glad. You know that."
"I sent him out and he didn't come back."
"Yeah. And you've been paying for that every day since.
You think wanting his sister is the worst thing you've done?
" He looked at me then, those pale eyes that saw everything and forgave most of it.
"The worst thing you did was survive him and spend six years punishing yourself for it.
Let something good happen, Angel. Christ."
I didn't answer. Ghost went back to watching the treeline.
He made it sound simple. It wasn't simple.
Ryan had trusted me with his life and I'd gotten him killed, and now I was falling for the one person in the world Ryan had trusted me to protect.
Every time I looked at Callie I saw both of them, her and her brother, and the guilt was so tangled with the wanting that I couldn't pull them apart.
It felt like I was betraying a dead man.
She broke that evening.
I didn't see the trigger. Something small, something ordinary.
She was in the kitchen, helping clean up after dinner even though I'd told her she didn't have to, and one of the brothers said something I didn't catch.
She laughed, but the laugh came out wrong, too high, too thin, and then her face just..
. changed. Like a switch flipping. One second she was standing and the next she was sliding down the kitchen wall with her hands over her mouth and her whole body shaking.
The brothers cleared out. They knew. Men who'd been through combat, through nightmares and flashbacks and the long ugly aftermath of things nobody should have to see, they recognized a breakdown when it happened and they gave her the room to have it.
Doc caught my eye on his way out and something passed between us that didn't need words. She's yours. Go.
I went to her. I sat down on the kitchen floor next to her, put my back against the wall, and gathered her into me.
She came apart.
Not quietly, not gracefully. The way people really break when they've been holding on too long and there's nothing left to hold on with.
She sobbed so hard her body shook with it, her face pressed into my chest, her fists balled in my shirt, and I held her and didn't say a damn thing because she didn't need words.
She needed a wall between her and the world, and I was it.
She was so soft against me. Her body fit into mine in a way that made something fundamental shift in my chest. The weight of her, the warmth, the way she pressed into me like she was trying to get closer, like if she could just get close enough she'd be safe from everything that was chasing her.
I tightened my arms around her and held on.
I could feel her ribs expanding with each ragged breath.
I could feel her heartbeat, fast and erratic, slowing as the worst of it passed.
I could feel every place where her body touched mine, and I couldn't pretend anymore that what I felt was duty.
It wasn't duty. It wasn't obligation. It wasn't a debt to a dead man.
I was falling for her.
I was falling for Ryan Mercer's little sister, fifteen years younger than me, scared and broken and under my roof.
And the fight was over. I couldn't stop it, couldn't talk myself out of it, couldn't bury it under guilt or duty or the memory of a dead man's face.
I had every reason in the world to walk away from this, and I couldn't find a single one that was strong enough.
The crying slowed. She went quiet against my chest, her breathing evening out, her fingers unclenching from my shirt. She didn't pull away. She turned her face up to look at me, and her eyes were red and swollen and her cheeks were wet and she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"Don't."
"I got your shirt wet."
"I don't care about the shirt."
She almost smiled. Almost. And then her eyes moved over my face, searching, and whatever she found there made her breath catch.
"Angel."
The way she said my name. Soft and raw and open, all the walls she'd been keeping up gone.
I should have stood up. I should have helped her off the floor, walked her to her room, closed the door between us and gone back to being the steady, controlled man who ran this compound and didn't need anyone.
I kissed her instead.
Slow. My hand came up to the side of her face, my thumb tracing the wetness on her cheek, and I kissed her the way I'd wanted to kiss her since the night in the kitchen.
The way I'd stopped myself from kissing her.
Deliberate. Thorough. Every year of the difference between us in how I moved, how I held her, how I took my time because I wasn't a young man in a hurry and I wanted her to feel every second of it.
She made a sound against my mouth. Small, surprised, a breath that stuttered and caught. Her hands came up to my chest, tentative, then spread flat against the muscle there, and I felt her fingers curl into the fabric of my shirt and pull.
"Not here," I said against her lips.
I stood, brought her with me, kept her close the whole way.
Up the stairs, down the hallway, into my room.
I'd never brought anyone into this room.
Hadn't wanted to and it hadn't occurred to me to want to, because somewhere I'd stopped thinking of myself as a man who got to have this.
I was the president of this MC. I was the one who carried everything and I didn't get to put it down.
She was standing in my room, looking up at me, and I could see the want in her face, open and unembarrassed, but underneath it I could see something else.
Uncertainty. The particular kind that lived in the way she held her body, the way her arms drifted toward her stomach, the way she angled herself like she could take up less space if she tried.
I knew what that was. I'd spent four days watching this woman, learning the language of her without meaning to, and I knew exactly what that small, unconscious gesture meant.
I reached for the hem of her shirt. Slow. Giving her time to stop me. She didn't. I pulled it up and over her head and dropped it on the floor, and she stood there in her bra and jeans and the vulnerability in her eyes made something in my throat burn.
She was gorgeous. Full breasts, the swell of her belly, hips that curved wide and soft, thighs that pressed together at the top. She was built for hands like mine, big hands that needed something to hold onto, and every inch of her was warm, real and alive and I wanted to put my mouth on all of it.
She started to cross her arms. I caught her wrists. Gently. Brought them down to her sides and held them there, and I looked at her until she looked back at me.
"Don't hide from me," I said. Low. Quiet. "Not from me."
Her breath shook. I could see goosebumps spreading down her arms, and across her chest. Her nipples were hard under the fabric of her bra, her lips were parted and she was watching me with those wide, fierce eyes that killed me every time.