Chapter 5
FIVE
EVIE
The bruises on my arm were the shape of that guys fingers.
I sat at the long table in the lodge with Doc on one side and Angel at the head, and the brothers filled the rest of the chairs, and I told them everything.
They needed to hear the truth, who I was and why I left.
It was the least I owed them since I was bring trouble to their door.
I told them my family were the Carringtons of Cherry Hills.
I even told them about the slate of suitors, the moment I walked out, the cards cut off, the cash drying up.
My full name. My family’s name. The kind of money and reach that could lean on a county inspector without breaking a sweat.
I said it all flat. No tears, no drama. Just the facts laid out clean on the table like playing cards, face up, nothing hidden.
The silence when I finished was the loudest sound I’d ever heard.
Angel spoke first. “The inspections.”
“My family,” I said. “It has to be. The timing fits. The first one showed up the week after I started working here. They found me, and instead of coming themselves, they squeezed from the outside.”
“The licensing review,” Rook said. He had his phone out, scrolling through something. “The county assessor who flagged it, Patricia Nolan. Her husband is a partner at a firm that does business with Carrington Holdings. It’s right there if you dig for thirty seconds.”
“So they’re choking the bar to push her out,” Razor said. “Rich-people bullshit.”
“And when paper didn’t work fast enough, they sent muscle.” Doc’s voice was even. Controlled. His hand was on the table, close to mine, not touching. “The fixer. Licensed PI, private security firm out of Denver. They sent someone to physically remove her.”
The room was quiet. Seven men, leather and ink and the stillness of people deciding what to do about a problem. I’d seen it before, the night Doc found me in my car, the morning after. The club processing, calculating, reaching a verdict through instinct I didn’t fully understand.
I understood the part that mattered. This was my fault.
“Everything was fine before me,” I said. “The bar, the inspections, all of it. That’s my family doing that. My mess. And if I stay, it gets worse. They don’t stop. They have lawyers, money, connections. They’ll keep squeezing until something breaks.”
I looked at Angel. Held his gaze, because if I was going to say this, I was going to say it to the man who’d ultimately agreed to putting a roof over my head. He’s the president and this was his ship I was sinking.
“I should go. If I leave, they follow me, and your bar gets left alone. Your business. Your club. I won’t be the thing that costs you any of it.”
The table went quiet. Not patience. Something harder.
“No,” Angel said.
One word. Flat, final, a no that didn’t come with a discussion attached.
“You don’t understand. My family will...”
“I understand fine.” Angel’s eyes were level, dark, the weight of every decision he’d ever made sitting behind them. “You’re under this roof. You’re one of ours. That doesn’t change because someone with money decides it should.”
“The bar...”
“Is a building,” Doc said beside me. Quiet, certain. “Buildings survive. That’s not what matters.”
“We protect our people.” Said Razor, leaning back in his chair, arms folded, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “End of conversation.”
I looked around the table. Priest, silent, gave me a nod. Rook was already typing something on his phone, working the problem. Ghost, at the far end, watched me with those pale eyes that saw everything and gave nothing back, and even he tipped his chin a fraction of an inch.
They weren’t negotiating. They weren’t weighing the cost. They’d decided, the way they decided everything, collectively, immediately, with a certainty that left no room for argument.
I’d spent my entire life being owned by people who saw me as nothing more than convenient.
These men were claiming me too. But the difference, the vast, wrenching, impossible difference, was that they were doing it because they wanted to. Not because I was useful, not because I was profitable, but because I worked for the bar and the considered me one of them.
I didn’t cry. But it was close.
The meeting broke up. The brothers scattered into their evening, their routines, the easy rhythm of men who’d handled worse than one rich family with a grudge. Angel was making calls. The machine was moving.
I found Doc in his room.
He was standing by the window, looking out at the treeline, a glass of something amber on the dresser beside him.
He turned when I came in and I watched his eyes move over my face, reading me the way he always did, fast, thorough, missing nothing.
He saw the remnants of the emotion I hadn’t let out at the table.
The gratitude and the fury and the fierce, burning need to prove to myself that I was here because I chose it.
I shut the door. Locked it. Walked straight to him and kissed him.
I grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands, hauled him down to my mouth, and kissed him with everything I had.
No hesitation, no uncertainty. Hard, open, my tongue against his, my body pressed full against him, and the sound he made, low, involuntary, vibrating through his chest into mine, sent heat flooding through me so fast my knees nearly gave out.
“Evie...”
“Don’t talk.” I pulled his shirt over his head.
Put my hands on his chest, his stomach, the hard planes of muscle underneath warm skin.
I’d been careful with him last time. Letting him lead, letting him set the pace, grateful and overwhelmed and too new to this to do anything but follow.
Not tonight. Tonight I knew exactly what I wanted and I was going to take it.
I undid his belt. His breath caught. I pulled him free and dropped it on the floor, then undid the button of his jeans, slid the zipper down, and wrapped my hand around him through his boxers.
He was already hard, thick, straining against the fabric, and the groan that came out of him when I squeezed was rough enough to make my thighs clench.
“Fuck, Evie.”
“I want you,” I said. Looking up at him, my hand moving, slow, deliberate. “Not because you rescued me. Not because I’m grateful. Because I want you. Because you’re the first thing I’ve ever chosen for myself that felt like this.”
Something broke in his face. The restraint, the control, the distance he kept between what he wanted and what he allowed himself to have. It cracked wide open and what was underneath was raw and hungry and completely, devastatingly mine.
He kissed me. Harder than I’d kissed him, his hands in my hair, his mouth demanding.
He stripped me out of my clothes with an efficiency that made the first time look leisurely, his hands pulling my shirt over my head, unclasping my bra, shoving my jeans and underwear down in one motion while his mouth never left my skin.
He kissed my throat, my collarbone, bit down on the curve of my shoulder and the sharp sting of it made me gasp and arch into him.
He turned me around.
His hand on my hip, firm, guiding, spinning me so my back was against his chest. His mouth found the side of my neck, hot, open, teeth and tongue, and his hands came around to my breasts, palming them, rolling my nipples between his fingers until I was pressing my ass back against him, feeling how hard he was against me, needing more.
“Hands on the dresser,” he said against my ear. A command, quiet and certain, that went through me like electricity.
I put my hands on the dresser. The wood was cool under my palms, the mirror above it showing me my own face, flushed, wrecked, and behind me, Doc, shirtless, his jeans open, his eyes fixed on my body with an intensity that made my breath stall in my chest.
I felt him line up behind me, one hand on my hip, the other sliding between my thighs to find me already soaking wet. His fingers stroked through me once, twice, his thumb circling my clit until my arms were shaking and I was pushing back against his hand, chasing it.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“You. Inside me. Now.”
He pushed into me in one slow, devastating stroke.
I cried out. My fingers curled against the dresser, my head dropping forward, my body stretching to take him.
The angle was different from last time, deeper, fuller, and every nerve ending I had lit up at once.
He held still for a second, buried to the hilt, both hands gripping my hips, his breathing ragged against the back of my neck.
Then he moved.
Long, deep thrusts that rocked me forward on my hands, that made the dresser knock against the wall, that filled the room with the wet, obscene sound of him fucking me.
I watched us in the mirror, his jaw tight, his eyes dark, the muscles in his arms flexing every time he drove into me.
My own face, mouth open, eyes glazed, a woman I barely recognized but was starting to know.
“Harder,” I said. Because I could say it now. Because my voice worked here, my wants counted, my body was mine to use however I wanted.
He gave me harder. His hips snapped against mine, the sound of skin on skin sharp in the quiet room, and I braced my arms and took it and wanted more.
The pressure was building, coiling tight, every thrust pushing me closer.
His hand slid from my hip to between my legs, his fingers finding my clit, rubbing in tight circles while he fucked me deep, and the combination of his cock, his hand and the sight of us in the mirror was going to break me apart.
“Tell me,” I gasped. Barely a voice. Barely a breath. “Tell me I’m yours.”
His rhythm faltered. Just for a second, a hitch in his breathing, a tightening of his grip on my hip that told me the words had hit him the same way they’d hit me.
“You’re mine,” he said. Raw, wrecked, his mouth against my shoulder. “My good girl. Mine. You hear me?”
I shattered. The orgasm tore through me, my whole body clenching around him, my legs shaking, a cry ripping out of me that I couldn’t have held back if I’d tried.
He followed me over, burying himself deep, his groan muffled against my skin, his hips grinding against mine as he came, both of us braced against the dresser in a tangle of sweat, skin and shaking limbs.
We stood there for a long time. His arms around me, his face in my hair, my hands still flat on the dresser because I wasn’t sure my legs would hold me if I let go.
“You’re shaking,” he murmured.
“So are you.”
He laughed. A real sound, rough, warm, pressed against the back of my neck. He pulled out slowly, then turned me around and pulled me against his chest and just held me. Standing in the middle of his room, both of us spent, his heartbeat hard and fast under my cheek.
I’d asked for what I wanted and I’d taken it.
We were still in his room when the knock came.
Razor, through the door. “You’re going to want to come out front.”
I dressed fast. Doc faster. We went through the corridor, through the bar, out into the lot, and I saw the car before I processed what it meant.
A black Mercedes. Rental plates. Parked in the gravel lot between the row of bikes like a glass ornament on a workbench. The driver’s door was still open. The interior light was on.
My mother got out first. Valentina Carrington, sixty-one, five foot six in heels she shouldn’t have been wearing in a gravel parking lot.
Blonde hair set in a style that hadn’t changed in twenty years.
Pearls at her throat. A cream wool coat that definitely cost more than the bar’s monthly profit.
She looked at the bar and the compound at the back, the way she’d look at something on the bottom of her shoe.
My father was behind her. Richard Carrington. Taller, grayer, the kind of man who wore authority the way other men wore cologne. His face was the careful mask I’d grown up reading, the one that meant he was furious but would never, under any circumstances, show it in public.
“Genevieve.” My mother’s voice. Carrying across the lot like it was designed for an auditorium. “This has gone on long enough.”
The words hit me in a place I thought I’d sealed off.
The sound of my full name in her mouth, the tone she used when she was performing disappointment for an audience.
She wasn’t angry. Anger would have meant I was worth the energy.
She was inconvenienced. Her daughter had caused a scene, and now she’d had to come and clean it up.
I felt Doc’s hand find the small of my back. Warm, steady, there.
“We’ve taken a suite at the Lodge at Big Sky,” my father said.
Measured, reasonable, the voice he used in boardrooms when he wanted someone to feel like they were making a choice while he made it for them.
“Just over an hour from here. We thought we’d give you the evening to get your things together, have a proper think, and we’ll come back in the morning to collect you. ”
Collect me. Like a package. Like I was nothing more than dry cleaning.
My mother’s eyes moved from me to Doc, to the hand on my back, to the bar behind us, to the row of bikes.
I watched her take in every detail with the precision of a woman who had spent her entire life deciding what was acceptable and what wasn’t.
The verdict was visible on her face before she finished looking.
This place, these people, the grease and leather and gravel. Unacceptable. All of it.
“We’ll be back at nine tomorrow morning,” she said. “Sharp. And Genevieve, do think about what you’re doing. Your father and I only want what’s best.”
What’s best. The phrase that had governed my entire childhood. What’s best was the right school, the right friends, the right clothes, the right smile. What’s best was a slate of men chosen for their portfolios and a daughter who said thank you and picked one.
They got back in the car. My mother arranged her coat before she sat down, the way she always did, fabric smoothed flat, nothing creased. The Mercedes reversed out of the lot, slow, careful, tires crunching on gravel that had never seen anything so polished.
The brothers were behind us. I hadn’t heard them come out, but they were there. Razor, Priest, Rook. Angel in the doorway of the bar, his arms folded, watching the road.
I stood in the lot with Doc’s hand on my back and my parents’ words hanging in the air, and I waited for the crumble. The old version of me, the compliant one, the good daughter who’d been trained to fold at the first sign of disapproval.
She didn’t come.
I turned to Doc. “They’ll be back at nine. They mean it.”
“I know.” His eyes were steady. That calm, certain expression I’d learned to read as the one he wore when he already had a plan. “Let them come.”