Oaks
I don’t trust quiet.
Not at camp. Not after somebody put a hole in my boat. Not after we saw blood in a stranger’s tin fishing rig and drag marks in the mud like the lake was spitting warnings at our feet.
So when we step back inside Holler’s cabin, I don’t go straight to her. I don’t let myself move like this is normal. Like I haven’t already crossed lines that don’t uncross.
I scan first.
Windows. Porch rail. The thin strip of treeline visible through glass. I watch for a shadow that holds its shape too long, for a shimmer that doesn’t match wind, for the wrong stillness that means somebody is holding their breath out there.
Nothing.
Still, I shut the door. I lock it. Then I pull the curtains closed one by one, slow and deliberate, like I’m sealing a wound before it bleeds out.
Behind me, Brittany shifts on the edge of the bed. I hear the rustle of cotton. My shirt hanging off her, bare legs tucked under her like she is trying to decide if she is allowed to take up space.
“Paranoid?” she asks softly.
“Alive,” I answer.
When I turn back to her, everything’s changed. Outside was impulse, bark and adrenaline. Her mouth on mine like she was tired of being polite about wanting me.
In here, it’s deliberate.
In here, the consequences have four walls.
I cross the room slowly. She does not step back. Does not flinch. She tilts her chin up instead, daring me to be what everyone already thinks I am.
“You check under the bed too?” she teases, like she is trying to keep it light so it won’t shake apart.
I don’t smile. I grab her hips and lift her onto the mattress like she weighs nothing. Like the world ain’t going to watch my hands on her later and decide what it means.
Her breath hitches.
“I should stop,” I tell her, because I ain’t stupid and I ain’t a teenager with no patch and no responsibilities.
“Then why ain’t you?” she asks, and there ain’t no joke in her voice now.
Because I can’t.
Because I already lost this fight somewhere between dragging her out of dark water and watching her walk around with another man, trying to be good like good has ever protected anyone in Hell.
Because every time I try to put space between us, the world finds a way to shove us back together and make it feel like fate, when it’s really just danger with good timing.
I slide my hands up her thighs, slow this time. Controlled. I want her to feel the difference. I want her to understand that I’m choosing restraint on purpose, not because I don’t want her.
“Do you even know what you're doing to me?” I murmur.
She reaches for the hem of my shirt, the ones she’s wearing. I’ve not even seen her naked yet.
“You’re the one who locked the door,” she says.
Fair.
I strip my shirt off her and toss it aside. The cabin is warm, but her skin is colder than it should be, goosing up, like the lake followed her in. My eyes land on her two pink peaks, hard and her perfect breasts, soft. Rounder than I imagined them on her small frame.
Magnificent.
Then my gaze drops to her sticky abdomen where I just shot my wad and to her hairless sex where I just buried my cock.
Her eyes flick over my bare chest, over the scar at my collarbone, over the muscles in my stomach that tighten when she looks like that.
I lose my jeans.
Brittany’s mouth curves when she takes in all of me.
Other women look hungry.
Brittany looks invested.
That’s worse.
She rises up and takes charge, pushes me back onto the mattress. Then she climbs over me, straddling me like she is testing whether she’s allowed to want what she wants without apologizing for it.
She wants my cock. Again.
My hands clamp around her waist automatically.
“Careful,” I warn.
“Of what?” Her voice is low, breathy, brave.
“Of making promises you don’t understand.”
She leans down, hair falling forward, brushing my chest, and my whole damn body goes tight.
“Then explain them,” she whispers.
That invitation is a knife.
But I take it anyway, because she’s looking at me like she already knows the answer.
My hands slide up her bare back, fingers tracing soft skin I have already memorized by accident and by hunger.
“If you’re mine,” I say slowly, watching her face. “It won’t be a secret.”
Her breath catches. Her hips shift, and it is a slow grind her pussy wet against my cock, that makes my jaw lock.
“In this club, we don’t just date. We don’t just sleep with a woman and pretend it don’t mean nothing unless it doesn’t mean anything.”
She presses her palms to my chest, like she is trying to feel my heart and decide if she trusts it.
“If you wore my patch,” I continue, voice rougher now. “Every man in town would know exactly who you belonged to.”
Her eyes darken, but she does not look away.
“Belong?” she challenges.
“Yeah,” I growl. “Mine.”
The word hits. I see it in the way her throat moves when she swallows, in the way her lashes flutter like she’s trying not to show how much it does to her.
“You’d back me up,” I say. “You’d ride behind me on my Harley. You’d walk into the Lockup and nobody would wonder if they could touch you, talk to you, corner you. They couldn’t.”
“And what would you do?” she whispers. “If they did?”
I roll us, so she is under me now, and her gasp is pure sex. I brace my hands beside her shoulders, and the look on her face is the exact opposite of fear.
“I’d protect what’s mine,” I say.
My hand reaches down between us. My thumb brushes her clit. My voice drops lower.
“Anybody talked sideways to you, they’d answer for it.”
“Bethany?” she presses, and the name is poison on her lips.
That is the part that wants violence, not sex.
“If you were mine, Bethany wouldn’t matter anymore,” I say, and the truth of it tastes like blood.
Her fingers slide up my arms, nails grazing skin, and my restraint starts to fray.
“Girls wear property patches for a reason,” I continue, my hand comes up. My thumb drags slow along her throat. “Sometimes inked into their skin. It ain’t about control. It’s about protection. It’s about claim.”
“And if I didn’t want a tattoo?” she asks.
My mouth finds her throat, and I kiss her there like I’m stamping my name into her skin without leaving a bruise. Yet.
“With me you won’t get that choice. I want it. And you’d be mine,” I mutter against her. “You get the ink, because I want it, because I say.”
She makes a sound, small and conflicted, and it kicks something in me that I don’t like because it feels too close to true affection.
I kiss her deeper. Slower. Not wild. Not rushed.
Intentional.
I want to make her feel chosen. I want to make her feel like I ain’t taking from her, even while I’m taking my fill of her mouth and her breath. Taking the way she melts under me like she was made to fit there.
“You don’t get to halfway this,” I tell her, voice low. “You don’t get to date church boys and come crawl into my bed when it’s convenient.”
“I’m not crawling,” she whispers, eyes bright. “I’m choosing you.”
That word hits harder than the rest.
Choosing.
My body reacts like it believes her. Like it has been waiting for permission to stop pretending I’m in control.
I slide my hands down her sides, and her skin is hot under my palms. She arches into it, and it is so damn responsive it makes my teeth grit.
“You think you could handle it?” I murmur. “Handle being the Vice President’s woman?”
“Try me,” she says, breathless and defiant.
I laugh once under my breath, but it comes out darker than amusement.
“You’d have rules.”
“Such as?” She swallows like she already knows.
“You don’t disappear without telling me,” I say. “You don’t let some Pearly Gates bastard get close enough to touch you. You don’t go near the water without looking back. You don’t put yourself in a place where I gotta choose between the club and you.”
Her eyes widen at that last one.
“Would you?” she whispers.
I lean down until my mouth is at her ear. My voice is a growl.
“I already did. Don’t make me do it again.”
Her breath stutters. Her hands slide up my back, holding on like she is anchoring herself.
“You’d really mark me?” she asks, and the question ain’t cute. It’s hungry “As yours?”
My hand slides into her hair, grips, pulls her neck sideways.
She gasps.
“Yeah,” I say. “And you’d let me?” I add, because I need to hear it. I need the choice to be hers, not something I take because I can.
She nods, and it is a small movement, because I’m holding her by the hair. But it hits me like a gunshot.
And then the heat stops being talk.
Then it is bodies.
I spread her thighs, and she widens, impatient, breath coming fast. I kiss her hard enough to steal any protest, and she gives it to me anyway in a moan that goes straight under my skin. My hands slide down her thighs. I settle between her thighs.
She reaches for me, nails digging into my shoulders, pulling me closer like she is done being careful.
“Tell me,” I mutter, mouth at her throat again, teeth grazing.
“I want you,” she says, voice shaking. “I want all of it.”
That is enough.
I move with intention, not gentleness. I make her feel every inch of my dick, every shift of my hips, every hard stroke of friction that builds the kind of fuck that leaves no room for doubt about what we’re doing.
The bed creaks under us. The cabin feels too small for the sound of her moans, for the way her body reacts, for the way she grips me like she is trying to keep me from disappearing.
She makes a sound and bites her lip like she is embarrassed by how horny she is.
I hook my fingers under her chin and force her to look at me.
“Don’t hide from me,” I tell her.
Her eyes are glassy. Her cheeks are flushed. Her mouth is swollen from kissing. Her pussy lips are too.
“I’m not hiding,” she whispers, and then she wraps her legs tighter around my hips like she is claiming something back.
That does it.
My control slips another inch.
“You’re mine tonight,” I growl against her mouth, and the words are filthy and possessive, honest in a way I don’t deserve.
Her body shudders.
“Say it,” I demand, not because I need dominance, but because I need the choice spoken out loud.
“I’m yours,” she gasps.
“Fuck,” I swear under my breath and thrust harder.
She cracks, a sound ripping out of her that makes my whole body tense like it is going to snap. Her nails rake my back. Her hips lift to meet me. She ain’t pretending this is sweet.
Good.
I don’t want polite. I want real.
I want her messy. Open and chosen.
When she comes, she does it hard, shaking, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut like she can’t hold it in. She says my name like it hurts her.
And that’s what kills me.
Because I have been with women. Dozens of dozens. Easy. Forgettable. Bodies with no consequences.
This is consequences.
This is the kind of sex that rearranges the shape of a man’s life and makes him lie to himself afterward about how it does not mean anything.
Pulling out, I follow her over the edge with a harsh groan, forehead pressed to her shoulder, breathing like I just ran from a fire. I stay over her for a long second, shaking, forcing myself not to crush her with the weight of what I just did as I cum on her belly instead of in her eyes.
Then I roll to my back and stare at the ceiling like it can give me answers.
She curls into my side like it is instinct. Not calculated. Not claimed. Just natural.
That’s worse than everything else.
I rest my hand on her back, feeling the rise and fall of her breath under my palm, and I try to convince myself this is temporary.
Just a man blowing off steam before he rides back to Hell and handles real problems.
But my chest feels tight in a way it never did with Kara. Or any of the others.
Brittany traces a lazy line across my ribs like she’s mapping me.
“What happens tomorrow?” she asks softly.
Reality. That’s what.
“The club keeps searching,” I say. “Pearly Gates keeps circling. Bethany keeps scheming.”
“And us?” she asks.
There it is.
The question I can’t outrun. The one that turns this from a night to a choice.
I stare at the ceiling a second longer.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
That’s the most honest thing I have said in my life.
She lifts her head to look at me, eyes sharp even through softness.
“You didn’t sound like a man who doesn’t know.”
I huff a quiet laugh, but it dies fast.
“I’m trying to fuck you out of my system,” I say.
Her brows lift.
“And?” she asks, like she already knows the answer too.
I meet her eyes.
“And it ain’t working.”
She smiles slowly, satisfied and terrified at the same time.
And that right there is the moment I realize I’m in real trouble.
Because as much as these feelings scare me, I don’t want to get rid of her.