Chapter 4
FOUR
DOC
I lasted two days after the kiss before I stopped pretending I had any control left.
Two days of avoiding the kitchen when I knew she’d be there, of finding reasons to be in the workshop or the office or anywhere that wasn’t within arm’s reach of her.
Two days of sitting at the bar during her shift and not meeting her eyes, which was a special kind of torture because she kept looking at me with that expression.
The one that said she knew exactly what I was doing and she thought it was bullshit.
She was right. It was bullshit.
Meanwhile, the club had problems I couldn’t ignore. Angel called church on a Tuesday morning, the table full, coffee instead of whiskey because it was early and the mood was business.
“Second inspection in two weeks,” Angel said. “Licensing board wants a full review of the premises. Someone’s leaning on the county.”
“Who?” Razor.
“Don’t know yet. But two random inspections in two weeks isn’t random.”
Rook pulled up something on his phone. “The first complaint was filed anonymously. No name, no return address. The licensing review was flagged by someone in the county assessor’s office.”
“Someone with reach,” Ghost said from his usual spot at the table. He rarely spoke in church. When he did, people listened.
“Someone with money,” I said.
Angel looked at me. Held my gaze for a beat that told me he was already thinking what I was thinking, but neither of us said it out loud. Not yet. Not until we had something solid.
Church broke up. The brothers scattered. I went through to the bar to check the inventory because it was a job that needed doing and because Evie’s shift didn’t start for another hour and I could be in and out before she came through and the place opened.
I was wrong about the hour.
She was already there. Behind the bar, early, restocking glasses from the dishwasher. Wearing the red flannel she’d bought in town, sleeves rolled to her elbows, her hair pulled back, and I stood in the doorway and watched her for three seconds before she turned around and caught me.
“Hey,” she said.
“You’re early.”
“Couldn’t sleep.” She set down a glass. Looked at me. Her eyes held mine, a challenge in them that hadn’t been there two weeks ago. “You’ve been avoiding me.”
“Yeah. I have.”
“Is that going to keep happening?”
The honest answer was no. The responsible answer was yes. The answer that came out of my mouth was neither.
“Come here.”
She came. Around the bar, toward me, and every step she took made the distance between us feel like something I’d been wasting.
She stopped a foot away, close enough that I could see the slight unevenness of her breathing, the way her hands hung loose at her sides even though the rest of her was vibrating with the same tension that had been eating me alive for two days.
I put my hand on her face. Her face fit my palm perfectly, her skin warm, her eyes lifting to mine with an expression that took the last piece of my resolve and set it on fire.
“I’m too old for you. I shouldn’t do this,” I said. One more time. Because I owed it to whatever was left of my conscience.
“I don’t care.”
“I know you don’t. That’s what scares me.”
I kissed her. Slower than the first time, deliberate, my thumb tracing the edge of her jaw while my mouth learned the shape of hers.
She made a soft sound against my lips and her hands came up to my chest, her fingers curling into my shirt, and the softness of that sound went through me like a detonation.
I walked her backward. Through the staff door, down the corridor, through the lodge. She came with me willingly, her hand in mine, her fingers tight around my fingers, and I didn’t let myself think about anything except the next door, the next hallway, the room at the end.
I wanted her in my room. Not hers. Mine.
I shut the door behind us, turned the lock and she was on me before I’d finished.
Her arms around my neck, her mouth on mine, kissing me with urgency.
My back hit the door, her body pressed full against mine, and she was warm, so fucking warm, every soft curve of her fitting against me until my brain went white.
“Slow down,” I said against her mouth. “We’ve got time.”
“I don’t want to slow down.”
“I know. But I want to do this right.” I pulled back far enough to see her face. Flushed, her lips swollen, her eyes dark with want. She looked undone already and I’d barely touched her. “How long has it been?”
She swallowed. “A while. College. It wasn’t... it wasn’t like this.”
Years. Years since anyone had touched her. The thought of it did something to me, a possessive, protective heat that climbed through my chest and settled in my hands where they held her. I was going to take my time. I was going to make sure every second of this was hers.
I pulled her flannel off slowly. The t-shirt underneath. She stood in front of me in her bra, her arms at her sides, and I watched the uncertainty flicker across her face.
“Eyes on me,” I said. “Right here.”
She looked at me. I unhooked her bra, slid the straps down her arms, let it drop. Her breasts were full, perfect, her nipples already tight, and I lowered my mouth to one and heard her gasp, felt her hand come up to the back of my head and grip.
I took my time with her. Learned what made her breath catch, what made her fingers tighten.
The spot below her ear. The curve of her ribs.
The way she arched into me when I scraped my teeth across her nipple.
I undressed her the rest of the way, jeans, underwear, peeling the layers off like I was unwrapping something I’d been waiting for my whole life, and when she was naked in front of me I looked at her and the want was so sharp it bordered on pain.
I picked her up. Her legs wrapped around my waist and I carried her to the bed, laid her back against the sheets. She watched me pull my shirt over my head. My hands went to my belt, her eyes tracking every movement with a focus that made my cock harder than it already was.
I came down over her. Kissed her mouth, her jaw, her throat.
Worked my way down her body with my hands and my mouth, learning the geography of her, the sounds she made, the places that made her shake.
When I settled between her thighs and put my mouth on her she made a noise that I felt in my spine.
I licked through her, slow, thorough, feeling her thighs tense against my shoulders. She was wet, swollen, and every stroke of my tongue made her hips roll against my face. I pushed two fingers inside her and she cried out, her hand fisting in the sheets, her back arching off the bed.
“Oh god. Doc, I can’t...”
“Yeah, you can.” I curled my fingers, found the spot that made her whole body jerk, and worked it while my tongue circled her clit. “Let go. I’ve got you.”
She came apart. Hard, her thighs clamping against my head, her body shaking, a sound torn out of her that was half my name and half something she couldn’t hold back. I didn’t stop until she was twitching, oversensitive, her hand pushing weakly at my shoulder.
I kissed the inside of her thigh. She was flushed from her chest to her hairline, her eyes glazed, her lips parted. She looked at me like I’d taken her apart and she couldn’t figure out how to put herself back together.
“Good girl,” I said. The words out before I could think about them, thick with something I hadn’t meant to show.
Her whole body responded. A full-body shudder, her eyes going dark, her hips lifting toward mine. The words landed in a place I could see but couldn’t reach, somewhere private, somewhere deep, and whatever they triggered in her was immediate, visceral, and had nothing to do with obedience.
“Say it again,” she whispered.
I pushed inside her. Slow, inch by inch, feeling her stretch around me, feeling her nails dig into my shoulders. She was tight, slick, burning hot, and the sound that came out of me was wrecked and desperate and completely beyond my control.
“Good girl,” I said against her throat. “Taking me so well. Fuck, Evie.”
She moaned. Her legs wrapped around my hips and pulled me deeper and I bottomed out inside her and had to hold still for a second because the feel of her was threatening to end this before it started.
I fucked her slow at first. Long, deep strokes that let her feel every inch of me, that let me watch her face change with each thrust. Her mouth open, her eyes half-closed, her hands on my arms, gripping hard.
She was tight enough that every stroke was a fight not to lose control, and the wet sound of me moving inside her was obscene in the quiet room.
“Harder,” she said. Her voice shaking. “Please.”
I gave her harder. Hiked her thigh up against my ribs, changed the angle, drove into her with a force that made the headboard knock against the wall.
She cried out, her back arching, her nails raking down my back, and the sting of it mixed with the heat of being inside her and I stopped being patient.
I fucked her like I’d been thinking about it for two weeks straight.
Because I had. Every night in my room down the hall, knowing she was fifty feet away, replaying the sound she’d made when I kissed her, going out of my mind.
Now she was underneath me, matching every thrust, her hips rolling up to meet mine, her body answering mine with a greed that shattered every assumption I’d had about her inexperience.
She was close. I could feel it in the way she tightened around me, in the pitch of her breathing, in the desperate grip of her hands.
“Come for me,” I said. “Let me feel it.”
She broke. Her whole body clenched around me, pulsing, squeezing, and the feel of her coming on my cock dragged me over the edge with her.
I buried myself deep and came hard, my hips grinding against hers, a groan ripped out of my chest that I couldn’t have held back if I’d wanted to.
She held onto me through it, her arms tight around my back, her face pressed against my neck, both of us shaking.
I didn’t pull out right away. Stayed there, inside her, my weight on my elbows, my face in her hair. Her heart hammered against my chest. Mine hammered back. The room was quiet except for our breathing, ragged, slowing, falling into rhythm.
“You okay?” I asked.
She laughed. Breathless, still shaking. “I didn’t know it could feel like that.”
I kissed her forehead. “It can feel like that every time.”
She went back through to the bar for the opening shift. I watched her go, wearing my shirt because hers was somewhere behind my dresser, and the sight of her in my clothes walking down the corridor of my compound did something to me that I was going to have to sit with for a long time.
I was at the bar two hours later, nursing a beer I wasn’t tasting, turning the inspection problem over in my head.
Two in two weeks. Someone with money and reach leaning on the county, and I kept coming back to the timing.
The week after Evie started, and the week after someone new showed up in Forsaken.
I was smart enough to know there was more to her story than she’d told me.
I began to wonder if I’d got myself mixed up with something that was going to come back and bite me somehow.
The noise came from the lot before I could follow the thought any further.
A sound that didn’t fit. A car door, sharp. A voice, male, unfamiliar, carrying an authority that hadn’t been earned. Then Evie’s voice, muffled, cut short.
I was moving before I’d processed it. Through the bar, past Bree, who’d heard it too. Out the front door, around the side of the building to the lot.
A man had Evie by the arm. Tall, gray suit, a build that came from a gym membership and a protein shake habit.
He had a black sedan idling behind him, driver still inside.
His hand was wrapped around her upper arm and he was pulling her toward the car, not gently, and she was pulling back, her feet dragging in the gravel, her free hand shoving at his chest.
“Let go of me.”
“Miss Carrington, your family has asked me to escort you home. This doesn’t have to be difficult.”
“I said let go.”
He didn’t.
I was on him in a heartbeat. My hand closed around his wrist, the one gripping her arm, and I squeezed until I felt the bones grind together.
He let go of Evie. His eyes snapped to my face and I watched him recalculate.
I was bigger than him. I was angrier than him.
And the expression on my face was one I’d learned in places where men like him didn’t survive the first day.
“Get your hands off her.”
“Sir, I’m a licensed investigator hired by the Carrington family to...”
I didn’t let him finish. I twisted his arm, spun him, slammed him chest-first into the side of his own car. His face hit the roof and his knees buckled and I held him there, his arm wrenched up behind his back, my body pinning him flat.
“Didn’t ask who hired you,” I said. My voice was calm. The rest of me wasn’t. “You put your hands on her. In my lot. In front of my bar. That’s the part you need to worry about.”
Boots on gravel behind me. Razor, Priest, two prospects.
They’d come from inside, from the workshop, materialising the way they always did when something went wrong on their ground.
Standing loose, ready, a wall of leather and ink and quiet violence that made the driver in the sedan put his hands where everyone could see them.
“Doc.” Evie. Her voice was shaking.
“I’ve got it.” I leaned close to the man’s ear. “You’re going to get in your car. You’re going to drive back to whoever’s paying you. And you’re going to tell them that if anyone puts hands on her again, I won’t be this polite.”
I let him go. He straightened up, his face white, his wrist cradled against his chest. He looked at me, at the brothers behind me, at the row of bikes and the compound stretching out behind the bar, and whatever math he was doing came up with an answer he didn’t like.
He got in the car. The sedan reversed out of the lot, fast, gravel spraying as they went.
I turned to Evie. She was standing three feet away, her arms rigid at her sides, her face pale underneath a mix fury and upset.
“He knew my full name. He called me Miss Carrington.”
I looked at her. The woman I’d been inside an hour ago, wearing my shirt, standing in our lot with finger marks on her arm and a family name she’d run from catching up to her.
“I know,” I said. “We need to talk.”