Viper’s Desire (Ash Valley Hellborn Kings MC #3)

1. Eden

EDEN

Every supper, my father’s Bible sits beside his plate. He never misses a chance to read from it.

Supper is where he rehearses Sunday’s sermon. And it’s where he finds different verses to tell me what a disappointment I am.

Tonight, he’s already preaching by the time I eat my first bite of mashed potatoes.

“A daughter who can’t account for her evenings,” he says, “has forgotten whose roof she sleeps under.”

This isn’t actually scripture, but he says it like it is. I swallow my potatoes and set my fork down.

“Daddy, I was at the hospital for school.”

“I’m not finished.”

He’s never finished. He seems to have a comment for every single thing that happens in my life.

So I sit. Twenty-two years old in a sundress he’s already told me tonight rides too high at the knee, and I let him tell me what a Godly woman should be. A gentle spirit. A quiet one. A girl who covers herself and keeps her eyes down.

“You don’t need independence, Eden,” my father says. “You need guidance.”

He’s said it enough that I could mouth it along with him.

“Mrs. Pruitt saw your car outside the gas station,” he says. “On a Wednesday. After dark.”

“I was getting gas.”

“For forty-five minutes?”

Of course I wasn’t getting gas for forty-five minutes. It only took five minutes. And the other forty minutes, I sat in the parking lot with a vending machine coffee, avoiding going home.

Mrs. Pruitt should mind her own business. I don’t say this, of course.

If I talk back, he could take away the one thing that brings me joy—nursing school. It’s the one thing that I chose that he actually allowed.

And he only allowed it because the congregation needs a pious woman who will sit with the sick and the dying and look humble doing it.

I didn’t get to choose where I went to school. I got into a program in Tucson and didn’t go because I’d have to live in a dorm. And living in a dorm meant a life he couldn’t control.

While all of this goes through my head, I smile at his words. But I lost track of what he was saying a few minutes ago. He can go on believing I am listening to his every word, trying to be exactly the kind of daughter he wants me to be.

My mother says nothing. My father always teaches that men lead and women submit. I don’t know if she actually believes that, but she does a great job of following his expectations.

I can’t end up like that. I’m so close to freedom.

Two more semesters and I’ll have my license. A license means a job, a job means my own money, and my own money means I never have to ask this man for a thing again.

That’s the deal I’ve made with myself—be the daughter he wants, modest and grateful and quiet, until the day I can afford to stop. I’m close now. Closer than I’ve ever been.

When I’m done eating, I rinse my plate. I tell my parents I’m going for a drive.

My father says a girl my age has no business on the roads after dark, but I’ve already got my keys off the hook by the door. And if I don’t get out of here, I’m worried I’ll say something I’ll regret.

“Eden. I didn’t give you permission to go,” my father calls.

Permission. Is he kidding? As if I’m a child who has to raise her hand to be excused from a man’s table.

If he confronts me later, I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear him. I’m very good at pretending.

The back roads past the county line don’t have streetlights and don’t have anybody on them. And that is exactly what I want, to be alone.

The saguaros stand black against a sky going from orange to nothing. Out here, I don’t have to be gentle. I don’t have to be quiet. I can say every single thing I swallowed at that table, out loud, to no one, at whatever volume I please.

So I do. I’m halfway through screaming that I am twenty-two years old and I do not need anyone’s permission to be a person, when my headlights catch a shape in the road.

My foot is on the brake before I fully process what I’m looking at.

The car stops crooked. Gravel sprays under the tires. My hands are locked at ten and two, and my high beams are pinned on the object. But it’s not an object at all.

It’s a man lying in the middle of the road.

I should drive on. That’s what a girl does out here alone at night. She locks her doors and calls in the authorities. And under no circumstance does a practical girl get out of the car.

I get out of the car.

He’s big. That’s what stops me halfway, the size of him taking up the road. His body is all muscle, and if I had to guess, I would say he’s a couple of inches taller than six feet.

He has black hair, and his beard has gone red down one side from a cut above his eye. His shirt is black, and there’s a long, wet stripe across his ribs. The stripe is growing. He’s bleeding.

Twenty feet behind him, a motorcycle lies on its side in the gravel, one wheel turning lazily in the air.

There’s a snake inked up the side of his neck and script down one forearm I can’t make out, and a leather vest half off his shoulders.

I can’t see the patch, but he’s likely a part of the Hellborn Kings motorcycle club.

This is their territory, and I’ve been warned multiple times by my father to stay out of their way.

But I have to wonder what my father would tell me to do now. Should I be like the Good Samaritan, or look the other way? My father is a hypocrite. I know what he would tell me to do.

But that doesn’t matter. I’m going to be a nurse, and the right thing to do is help this man.

I’m at the trunk of my car in no time, reaching for my first-aid kit. I have what I need—gauze rolls, saline, disinfectant, and a suture kit. I carry the kit over to the man and drop to my knees in the gravel beside him.

His dark eyes open.

“Wrong place,” he rasps. “Get in your car. Go home.”

“I’m going to help stop the bleeding, then I’m going to call 911.”

“No!” he practically yells, and it takes a lot out of him. “No cops.”

“Okay, no cops,” I say calmly. “But I’m still going to stop the bleeding.” I peel up his shirt.

“Girl—”

“Hold still.” I’ve got the saline open, and I’m flushing the cut along his ribs.

He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make a sound, and he keeps those dark eyes on me.

“You’ve got a laceration about four inches long, and it needs to be closed,” I tell him. “The one above your eyebrow can wait. Were you stabbed or did you fall?”

“You always ask so many questions?”

“I only asked you one question.”

He doesn’t respond. The needle is threaded now, and my hands don’t shake. I feel more sure of myself in this moment than I ever do in my father’s house. And that says something, considering I’m out on a desolate road in the dark beside a man twice my size.

“This is going to hurt,” I warn. “I don’t have anything to numb it.”

“Do it.”

So I do. I push the needle through, and he breathes out hard.

I work the stitches even and close, the same as I’ve practiced a hundred times on fake skin in the lab.

My thumb braces against the heat of his skin. Up close, he’s older than me by a good stretch, maybe ten years.

I keep waiting for the part where I’m afraid of him. It doesn’t come.

“Who hurt you?” I ask.

Again, he doesn’t answer, but I don’t expect him to.

Instead, he puts his hand over mine and squeezes. Gently. And then he lets go, never taking his eyes off me.

The spot he touched goes on humming long after his hand is gone.

I tie off the last stitch and sit back on my heels, and that’s when his focus starts to drift, draining out of him while I’m looking right at him.

“Hey. Hey, stay with me. What’s your name?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Okay. No name, then.” I press a folded pad of gauze over the laceration and tape it down.

His head is already tipping toward his shoulder.

Shoot. He doesn’t want me calling 911, but I can’t just leave him here.

“You can’t ride home,” I say. “Do you hear me? That bike isn’t going anywhere, and neither are you, not on your own.”

He doesn’t argue. “Okay. I need a ride.”

That actually surprises me. I had about fifty rebuttals ready.

He gets an arm under himself and pushes. I get my shoulder up into his armpit and put my whole body into the lift, all one hundred and ten pounds of me against all of him, and somehow, between the two of us, he comes up off the asphalt.

We don’t manage it with any grace. He’s massive, and I’m a short girl in a sundress.

The twenty feet is more like controlled falling than walking. But we make it with his arm slung over my shoulders, and my knees buckling under him. I get the passenger door open. I half lift, half pour him into the seat. His head lolls against the headrest, and within seconds, he’s passed out.

I stand in the open door with his blood drying on my forearms.

I shut the door.

Then I get in, and I drive him to the only place a man like him could possibly belong—the Hellborn Kings’ clubhouse.