Chapter Three #2
He had amazing eyelashes.
He stared into mine.
“I loved you once,” I whispered.
Those eyelashes swept down.
Yeah.
Amazing.
“You terrify me now,” I told him.
Those eyelashes swept up to reveal tortured eyes.
I knew it then.
He’d been ordered to deliver me to Bounty.
He might also have been ordered to start the proceedings.
But it wasn’t until right then that I realized that he’d
done what he’d done in the beginning, and at the end, but in the middle, it was
his brothers that brought down their version of justice on me.
He’d given them their show and he didn’t come back for more
because he’d done as ordered and that was all he had in him when it came to me.
The parting shots were probably because he was pissed at me,
worked up from watching his brothers lay me out, thinking I was hung up on Shy,
possibly all of that.
Or still toeing the line.
There were leaders and there were followers.
But even if you were a follower, it was your job to find the
right thing to follow and not to follow blindly.
Beck had failed at both.
“The only reason I can be here is because there’s a cop
right there and a wall between us,” I shared, jerking my head toward the
officer that stood by the door into the visitation room. “If you ever cared
about me, keep them away from me.”
“I love you, baby, still, no matter what, you gotta know that,” he said into the phone quietly.
“Weirdly, someone chokes me, hits me, spits on me, and kicks
me, that is something I do not know.”
“Drop the charges and we’ll get through this.”
We’ll get through this?
Was he crazy?
“Leave me alone, get your brothers to leave me alone, and I
might not hate you until the day I die,” I countered.
“Rosie—”
“We’re done.”
“Rosie, baby—”
“You’re one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen,” I
whispered the God’s awful truth.
He clamped his mouth shut again.
“And you made me happy, so unbelievably happy.”
His brown eyes lit and warmed.
“And then you didn’t.”
Despair flickered in his gaze before he dropped his head.
“Do you know one of the reasons why my father never joined a
club?” I asked.
He lifted his head but said nothing.
“He wasn’t a man to be tied down, but that wasn’t all there
was to it,” I shared something I’d told him before, but at this juncture, a
reminder was deserved. “Most clubs expect you to put club before everything
else, including your family, your old lady. And he just was not a man who could
do that.”
“I’m not your daddy, Rosie,” he said gently.
“I know,” I replied, put the phone on the hook decisively
and watched his face falter.
That was the last I gave him.
I got up, dragged the silver chain of my purse over my
shoulder, and walked out.
The minute I went through the door, I stutter-stepped
because there was a tall, exceptionally good-looking man built like a
linebacker leaning against the wall of the hall outside. He had a badge on his
belt and his whisky-brown eyes turned to me the minute I exited.
I’d never seen him in my life but I still sensed his gaze
was apologetic.
The door swung closed and those whisky eyes shifted across
the hall, taking mine with them, and that was when I stopped altogether.
Snap was there, hidden by the door but now revealed.
“Thanks, Nightingale,” he muttered half a second before he
latched onto my hand and dragged me down the hall, turned and hauled me down
another one, through reception and out the front doors.
He wasn’t done lugging me around because he then rounded on
me and started forward, forcing me to walk backward, until my hips hit the
railing at the side of the steps up to the station.
He then bent his neck so his face was an inch from mine and
I saw his snow-blue eyes could be chilly.
Wintry cold with icy fury.
“Have you…lost…your mind?”
The first words were controlled, but barely.
His last two were nearly shouted.
“Snapper,” I whispered.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded to know.
“You need to step back,” I told him.
“Oh no,” he drawled ominously, actually moving forward so
his hips were pressed to my belly, his chest brushing my breasts and his frosty
eyes filling my vision. “Oh no, baby. Ol’ Snap’s done with givin’
his woman some space.”
“I’m not…your woman,” I said hesitantly, like I didn’t
believe my own words.
“How old am I?” he asked.
“Thirty-three,” I answered immediately and
uncomprehendingly, bemused by his question in the midst of what was happening.
“My favorite color?” he pressed.
“Red.”
“How do I take my coffee?”
I’d learned that early, when he’d come into Colombo’s and
have some cannoli and a cup of joe, before my informant status heated up.
“Lotsa cream, one sugar.”
“My favorite book?”
“Shutter Island.”
“You’re twenty-eight. Your favorite color is green. You take
your coffee with just creamer, vanilla if it’s handy. Your favorite book is Harry
Potter, the Azkaban one, and you flirted for a good long while with
convincing yourself you could get away with naming your first girl Hermione.”
I shook my head, baffled where this was going. “I don’t—”
“You want two kids, because you wished you had a sister or
brother, at least, and you want to start as soon as you can, because your dad
was older than your mom and she wasn’t young when she had you and you lost him
way too early for both of you, even though he was in his seventies.”
“I—”
“You’ve lived everywhere bikers are welcome on this side of
the Mississippi but your favorite was always Denver, the three times your daddy
moved you and your mom here. It was his favorite too, because he loved to ride
the Rockies. And that was the only thing that gave you and your mom any relief
when he passed, that you could take him up to the mountains when his time had
come and he went somewhere he loved being.”
“Snap,” I said softly.
“You’re done with comic hero movies. You think Dwayne
Johnson would kill in a romantic comedy. You like to vacation at beaches. Your
favorite cookie is a snickerdoodle. Your favorite restaurant is Carmine’s.
You’re uncertain about the death penalty seeing as you’re a conservative
liberal, but in deference to your father, you’ve convinced yourself you’re a
liberal conservative. And your favorite place in the whole world is riding on
the back of a bike.”
Boy, I’d talked a lot during our phone conversations.
And Snap had listened closely.
He wasn’t quite finished with me.
“Only thing you don’t know about me that means anything is
the way my cock feels buried inside you and only thing I don’t know about you
is how sweet you’ll feel, closed tight around me.”
Oh man.
That sweet he’d feel started for me to feel tingly.
“Snapper,” I whispered.
“And you’re not my woman?”
“I—”
“You been my woman for months and I don’t give a shit that
happened when you were with another man.”
It was me shutting my mouth during this conversation.
“And you just visited that man in jail, a man that delivered
a beat down that put you in the goddamned hospital,” he stated infuriatedly.
“I was warning him off me,” I explained.
He dipped the half an inch he needed for the tip of his nose
to brush mine (something it did).
“Rosalie, I’ll repeat, that motherfucker is not gonna touch you. Not ever a-fuckin’-gain.”
“You good, hoss?”
Snap’s head jerked around. I looked past his shoulder. And
there stood two uniformed officers who weren’t real thrilled a man in a
motorcycle cut with his colors stitched to the back had a woman pinned to the
railing outside a police station.
“Snapper. Chaos. This is Rosalie. The woman Bounty beat to
shit. She just visited Throttle to warn him off. She’s mine. I didn’t know she
was up to that shit. And we’re havin’ a discussion
about how that doesn’t make me happy.”
Masculine understanding dawned in both officers’ eyes. One
gave Snapper a chin lift and moved toward the front door. The other gave him a
look of beleaguered male camaraderie and then he moved toward the front door.
I tracked them, losing both between Snapper’s broad
shoulders, getting them back only to lose them again when the men and the
coffees they were carrying disappeared inside the police station.
Did that just happen?
“Rosie,” Snapper growled.
My eyes drifted back to him.
“We need to talk,” he declared, again.
“I’m not ready for that.”
“I’m sorry, baby, but I no longer give a shit.”
Now it was me who was getting angry.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Rosalie, you just visited fuckin’ Throttle in
jail.”
“Yes, to tell him to leave me and Mom alone!” I snapped.
“Right, let me explain this to you thoroughly,” he bit back.
“Communication between you and any member of Bounty, especially
Throttle, is done. Over. Not fucking happening. There’s a message to deliver,
Chaos delivers it. If they already haven’t learned that you’ve ceased to exist,
we’ll share that with them as many times as we got to until they get it.
You have nothing to fear from them because every brother who’s earned the Chaos
patch will go down before they hurt you again. You don’t have to do dick to make
that happen, the brotherhood will bleed themselves dry for you to make you
safe. Now, are you getting me?”
“I—”
He cut me off before I could say more.
“Before you get worked up any of that shit will happen, Tack
has gotten word to Web that we know they got a beef, they can’t be under any
impression other than the fact we feel after what they did to you that we got a
beef, but how that’s gonna work out is however it
works out between brothers. Women are off limits, you’ve been claimed
by Chaos, and if dick happens to you, or your mom, it isn’t gonna
make it a bigger beef. It’s gonna be Chaos declaring
war and they’re vulnerable, so they got this shot bein’
incarcerated to get their shit together or we’ll dismantle their charter. Now
you getting me?”
“Whoa,” I whispered.
“You’re getting me,” he muttered.
“How would you even do that?” I asked curiously.
“With surgical precision, considering Tack’s already reached