Chapter 2
CENTURY
The next night, The Burnout was packed wall to wall with the kind of energy that came after a clean race and a Redline win. The big screens above the far wall replayed clips from the night’s run—a rough recording taken by one of our brothers since the race hadn’t been a legal one.
I’d had a damn good night. The custom bike I’d tuned earlier in the week had run exactly the way I knew she would, smooth through the turns and violent on the straightaway. It had carried me past the finish line with enough distance that nobody could pretend the win had been luck.
There were plenty of things a man could fake in this world, but speed wasn’t one of them. A machine either had it or it didn’t, and the man riding it either knew how to use it or he didn’t. Tonight, everything had lined up exactly the way I built it to.
Speed was the place where the world made the most sense to me.
Where noise narrowed, instincts sharpened, and every twitch of the machine beneath me felt like an extension of myself.
I kept pushing until the road blurred and every man watching understood I wasn’t built with the same sense of caution as most people.
Too many years ago, I broke a speed record in a race that should’ve rattled me, but all it did was settle something in my bones.
Kane had approached me not long after about racing for Redline Velocity—one of his pro teams. Since I raced for the speed and not the rules, I hadn’t taken him up on the offer.
I did, however, accept his suggestion that I prospect for the Kings because I’d known from the moment he told me about the club that it was where I belonged.
As a King, I found out that I also knew exactly how far to push a man before he broke.
But the club wasn’t just about motorcycles and fights. The place was filled with family. Not the kind you were born to, the one you chose. Men you would give your life for because the only thing more important than the patch on our cuts was our women and children.
Our president was in one of the back booths with his old lady, Savannah, tucked close.
To most men, the tiny sleeping baby against Kane’s chest would have ruined some of the intimidation, but he’d built his reputation so definitively that his name became synonymous with fear and respect.
It was the reason he didn’t have a separate road name.
People already knew who the hell he was and exactly how fucking lethal it would be to fuck with him or anyone he cared about.
His brother, and our VP, stood nearby with one arm around his wife, Callie. He looked relaxed in the way that meant at least three different knives were still within reach.
They chatted with Raze and Shifter. Gauge was cozied up with Riley, the woman he’d recently claimed, who gave me a run for my money when it came to talent with a racing machine.
And Nitro and his wife, Jana, who was a seriously talented driver, were arguing over lap times near the pool tables, which meant they’d either end up betting on something stupid or disappearing somewhere private before the night was over.
More patches hung around, along with some locals and a face or two I didn’t recognize. As I made my way through the crowd toward the bar, I accepted chin lifts, shoulder bumps, and a couple of dry comments from brothers who were as sentimental as one of us got over a win.
I was halfway to the bar when I saw her.
At first, all I caught was the profile and the fall of dark hair.
My good mood disappeared so fast it left a clean burn behind.
The drunk, pushy pain in my ass from the night before had apparently decided getting escorted out once wasn’t enough embarrassment.
She had some nerve coming back into The Burnout after the stunt she’d pulled.
She sat alone at the far end, angled slightly away from the room, one hand resting near a glass of something clear.
Probably vodka that she hoped would masquerade as water.
My jaw locked as I changed direction.
The crowd thinned in front of me, or people had enough sense to move when they saw my face.
Fury wasn’t behind the counter tonight, which explained how she’d made it inside without getting turned away at the door.
He had business elsewhere, and Rea was handling the bar with two prospects floating near the back, which meant nobody had recognized the problem before it sat down and got comfortable.
I stalked up beside her, already deciding this time I’d handle the problem myself.
“You again?” I demanded, my voice hard enough that Rea’s head snapped up. “Did getting thrown out last night not make the message clear?”
She turned her head, and attraction punched through my chest, dropping straight into my cock before I had time to stop it. My body reacted like it had been waiting for her, going hard in a violent rush that made my hands fist at my sides.
What the fuck?
Her face looked the same, but somehow sweeter.
Her hazel-green eyes were clear and sober.
Soft as they caught the bar light with a depth that hadn’t been there last night.
Her posture wasn’t sloppy or desperate. She looked up at me like she had every right to take up space, and every cell in my body decided that space should be against me.
Fuck.
My gaze dragged over her before I could stop it. She wore clothes over sexy curves that weren’t trying as hard and somehow hit ten times harder.
I’d been fucking repelled by this face less than twenty-four hours ago, and now my body was reacting like I’d found the one woman in the room worth burning the place down for. The contradiction pissed me the fuck off.
My cock pressed hard against my jeans, and I hated that too.
I didn’t understand how she could suddenly look like temptation wrapped in sweetness.
My pulse beat heavier at the base of my throat as my gaze snagged on the curve of her plump lips and the faint flicker of surprise in her pretty, hazel-green eyes.
For one dangerous second, my mind supplied an image of wrapping my hand around the back of her neck, dragging that mouth under mine, and finding out if she tasted as sweet as she looked.
The thought came hot and unwanted, and I shoved it down with the same discipline I used when a machine tried to buck under me at a dangerous speed.
Something was different.
A thread of instinct refusing to be ignored kept cutting through the heat and anger.
The face might have been the same, but the energy wasn’t.
Last night had been all noise and sloppy aggression.
Now she looked startled, then annoyed, her body going still in a way that suggested I’d just insulted her rather than caught her doing something she already knew she deserved to answer for.
My anger should’ve held steady. Instead, it tangled with the attraction so fast I couldn’t separate one from the other. I stood there, glowering down at her, trying to reconcile the woman from last night with the one in front of me while my blood kept heading in one inconvenient direction.
I’d handled speed records, dangerous builds, bad wrecks, armed enemies, and men who thought threatening the Redline Kings was a survivable hobby. None of that had ever left me feeling like my own body had betrayed me quite as thoroughly as this woman turning her head and looking up.
I searched her face for some sign of the drunken disaster from the night before, but she just sat there, sober and stiff-backed, staring at me like I was the one who’d lost my damn mind. And maybe I had, since I was hard over a woman I’d been ready to throw out thirty seconds ago.
Her brows pulled together, and that little crease between them did something ridiculous to my blood pressure because my body was still choosing to be a fucking traitor.
“Excuse me?” she finally snapped. “I don’t know you.”
The tone should’ve irritated me more. Instead, it tightened the heat already running low in my gut because not one trace of the glossy desperation she’d had the night before existed.
She looked offended, confused, and fully prepared to put me in my place despite the cut on my back and the fact that half the men in this room would think twice before using that tone with me.
The little flash of temper in her eyes made me wonder what she’d look like if that fire was aimed at me for better reasons.
I scoffed, partly because I didn’t trust my reaction, but also because annoyance was easier to handle than the sudden urge to put my hands on her. “Seriously? How fucking drunk were you last night?”
Her spine went straight, and her chin lifted. “I don’t drink.”
The words rang with truth, which made no damn sense. She obviously saw the disbelief on my face because her mouth tightened, and I thought she was about to rip me a new asshole. Then something shifted.
Suspicion clouded her eyes, her head tilting slightly as she studied me with a sharper kind of focus.
“Wait. You were hit on by a drunk woman last night, and you think…” Her eyes narrowed, and she asked, “What exactly did she look like?”
I gestured at her, my patience razor thin. “You. Do you have split personalities or something?”
Her eyes widened for half a beat, then she snorted, the sound soft but loaded with enough exasperation that my mouth almost curved upward.
“Only if my split personality lives outside my body and is pure evil.” When I didn’t immediately answer, mostly because my brain was busy catching up to the obvious, she huffed and shook her head like I’d disappointed her.
“Uh, duh. I have an evil twin. Do you not read?”
My lips twitched before I could stop them.
Then I was nearly bowled over with shock when I realized I believed her.
I had no damn reason to, not one practical piece of proof beyond instinct and the fact that everything about her sat differently beneath the identical face, but the truth settled in my gut before logic got a vote.
The woman in front of me wasn’t Sutton. She wasn’t the drunk problem from last night. And every nerve in my body had recognized the difference before my head caught on.
“You’re not Sutton?”
“Nope.”
My voice had lost most of the harshness when I asked, “Then what’s your name?”
She clearly noticed my change in tone, and her gaze drifted over my face, wary now in a way that made me want to curse myself for how I’d come at her. But she wasn’t melting just because I’d adjusted my tone, and damn if that didn’t make the heat in my blood kick harder.
She pushed off the stool, and I got a better look at her body.
She was about a foot shorter than my six-foot-four stature, with perky tits, wide hips, and legs that seemed too long for someone of average height.
She wasn’t dressed to bait attention but drew mine anyway until my fingers flexed with the urge to test the curve of her waist.
“None of your business,” she clipped, grabbing her purse from the bar.
She turned away from me, muttering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like “arrogant jerk,” and for the first time in a long damn while, I stood still when I should’ve moved.
The realization that she was Sutton’s identical twin hit me so hard that it took a few seconds for my body to respond to the fact that she was walking away.
The relief was nearly as strong as the attraction. It slid through me with a brutal kind of clarity, explaining why the woman from last night had done nothing for me, but this one had my body ready to break every rule of public decency in a bar full of my brothers.
She was fucking mine.
When whatever stunned hold had locked my boots to the floor finally cleared, she was already halfway to the door.
She was moving fast enough that her dark hair swung over one shoulder and the hem of her top lifted just enough to show a flash of skin above her jeans.
Heat slammed through me again, filling my head with images of her back arching, her sharp little tongue finally too busy making softer sounds to cut me with words.
My cock throbbed hard enough to make me grit my teeth, but the hunger didn’t scatter my focus. She was getting away, and that wasn’t going to fucking happen.
I’d watched enough brothers get taken out at the knees by one reckless little slip of fate to know exactly what it meant when certainty landed in a man’s chest like a brand. This woman belonged to me, and she had no idea this would be the last time she tried to walk away from me.