VENDETTA: A Bad Boy, Motorcycle Club Romance (13 page)

“Emily,” he groaned when I sucked him between my lips, “you’re killing me.” His hand lightly stroked my hair while I bobbed up and down on his shaft, loving the clean taste of him against my tongue.

“Not yet,” I said against his skin, “but give me time.” I swirled my tongue over his pulsating head before going deep on his cock. Looking up through my eyelashes, I saw the fierce, hungry look in his eyes. He loved what I was doing. Emboldened, I wrapped my hand around the base and started to suck harder.

“God, you’re hard,” I said, marveling at his erection when I popped my mouth off to tongue the head, then draw a line down the shaft with the point of my tongue. His body flexed, so I did it again, following my mouth back up with my hand to stroke him.

“For you,” he said, his words sliding out between deep breaths.

I liked that a little too much.

His hands were light on my head, but I could feel them tense, as if he wanted to push down but was restraining himself. With a deep breath, I pulled him back into my mouth and sucked hard. Creating a rhythm, I moved up and down while playing my tongue over his heated skin.

“Emily,” he roared, his entire body shaking. “You have to stop, I’m going to .” He tried to pull back, but my lips were a tight seal around him. I wanted everything he had to give me.

“Fuck,” he gritted out, then his cock jerked in my mouth and he was coming. I swallowed the warm fluid, lapping at him while he thrust against my lips, still lust-maddened. One of his big hands came down to stroke my breast, cupping it through the shirt until he was calm again.

I stood and smiled at him, wondering how I’d get through my life without doing that with him again.

“You’re amazing,” he said, pulling me down against his chest. I nuzzled his neck and smiled at the deep laugh that rumbled out through his chest. “I really like you.”

“I really like you too,” I said. I kissed him and looked deep into his eyes. They were relaxed, happy. Tomorrow I had a feeling things would be very different. “In another life,” I told him, wanting to leave him with something, “I’d have spent my whole life with you.”

“You’re still young,” he said, misunderstanding. “There’s plenty of life left.”

He tucked me against him, pulling me close enough that there was no space between our bodies, then rolled to the side. I used my foot to snag the sheets that had bunched up at the bottom of the bed and pulled them up and over us. Steeling myself against trembling, which I knew he’d notice, I took a deep breath and curled against him, knowing it would be the last time I’d feel his body under my hands.

Once his breathing was deep and even, I kissed his forehead. “I more than like you,” I said, soft. Tears threatened to fall, but I held them back. There’d be plenty of time for tears when I was away from Flash.

His face was relaxed, smooth and young-looking in a way it never appeared when we were out on the road. My muscles tensed to run a hand over his forehead, to brush back the lock of hair that had fallen near his eyes—but then he’d wake, and if I saw his perfect smile even once more, I didn’t know that I’d have the strength to leave.

Standing up, I put on the cheapest of the clothes he’d bought for me, and then threw on the leather jacket with the note I’d written in the pocket as an afterthought. I tidied up my things and his, puttering around the room with quiet movements, careful not to wake him. Opening the bottle of water I’d carried up, I took a long swallow, then threw it in the trash.

Taking off the expensive jacket, I set it down quietly next to the note. By all rights I should have left the rest of the clothing, too, but getting to Dana Point naked would cause the kind of problems I wasn’t equipped to deal with. The bracelet, too, should be left behind, but I couldn’t bear to cut if off. So I set the key to the room on the table, turned the knob and stepped silently into the damp, cold night.

Police sirens echoed in the distance. I took a deep breath, then headed for the lobby.

Flash

“Word is, he barely runs the operation anymore. Some jackass who tells people where to put it and how to sell it is in charge. Couldn’t get the fucker’s name, though.”

“Why do you care? The street traffic has dried up. Fuck Dale and his jackass. Let’s just let it go.” Piston had a way of digging his teeth into things that pissed me off lately. I didn’t give a fuck about some escaped meth dealers. Let them do their shit as long as it wasn’t close to me.

“No. Fucker defied me and he’s still dealing meth in LA. I don’t care if it’s cut down 90 percent—I’m still seeing that shit on the streets.”

“Fine,” I told him, shrugging. “We’ll kill him then.”
Whatever
.

“The asshole too.”

“I’ll take care of it personally,” I said, hoping that would be enough to soothe him so he would go the fuck away. Killing an idiot isn’t really my style, and you’d have to be an idiot to keep dealing when Piston calls a halt, but it wasn’t like it would take up my whole weekend.

“Make sure you do. We’re still cleaning up the mess you made in Mexico.”
Thanks for the reminder
. Mexico was something I’d been trying to forget for the last six months. Give your heart to a woman and she’ll cut it out and leave without so much as a kiss goodbye. I’d tried to track her and ended up at a dead end every time. Either she had someone waiting to take her away or she vanished into the fucking night.

At least she left a note. If there’d been a chance Emily was dead, I’d still be hunting her down.

“Flash. Brother. You in there?” Piston picked up an Xbox controller and threw it at me. It bounced off my leg and hit the floor with a smash.

“What the fuck?”

“You sure you’re good to do this? I know I said it’s your mess, but what’s yours is ours. I’ll run up and do it for you, if you’re not able.”

“Why wouldn’t I be able?”

“No offense intended, but you haven’t exactly been stable since you got home.”

Couldn’t take offense to the truth. Fact is, losing Emily put me out of my mind for a few months. Finding out that she wasn’t really a student at Cal Tech—or that she’d given me the wrong name—knocked me right over the edge into insane. If Dad and Piston hadn’t pulled me back and given me a few bruises, I might still be out there threatening people and trying to track down one beautiful woman who didn’t want me.

I’d been so fucking blind. Everything I’d read from her: her smile, her laugh, the way she clutched me tighter in bed, it all said that she wanted to be with me. When I thought we were falling together, I was really being knocked off the Grand Canyon without a rope.

All because I was too fucking stupid to see that the trauma from having to kill a man was clouding her mind and actions.

I’d realized it after months of pining for her by trying to drown myself in whiskey. While my brothers took it on the chin to deal with Manuel’s insane requests, I got drunk and blacked out. Repeatedly. Once I’d gotten rid of the bottle, I saw two things. She never really wanted me and I wasn’t being the kind of brother that mine deserved.

So I’d cleaned my shit up and gotten back to what really mattered: The Fallen.

When I’d shown up at church that Friday without smelling like a distillery, there was relief in the air, like my brothers knew I was back. The books were a tangled mess from being left alone for too many months, so I’d spent another few weeks up to my elbows in numbers, making everything right. That’s when I saw the damage I’d done to the club.

We’d lost 75 percent of our income from the cartel thanks to me. Now my brothers were reduced to doing runs for 25 percent of our original take.

Still didn’t regret it, though.

Her running out on me didn’t make me wish she’d died in the desert. No, my feelings hadn’t changed a bit, even when I’d wised up enough to realize what a sucker I’d been, thinking she could really feel something when she was so traumatized. Now, though, those protective feelings were tinged with acid. She was lucky I hadn’t found her, because I wouldn’t have let her walk out the door again.

“I’m going to do it,” I assured Piston, pushing off the couch. “Tonight. I just want shit to get back to normal.”

“What about the girl?”

“She’s the past.”
Because I couldn’t find her
.

“You sure about that?” I was closer to Piston than anyone else in the club, except for my father. He might be able to see right through me, but that didn’t mean we were about to have a heart to heart about my girl troubles.

“I got it.”

“Alright. You’re in charge, then. Decide who’s going with you and make sure that you bring back the hands of the two ringleaders.”

“What the fuck?”

“I know, man. I hate this cartel bullshit, too. But we can’t exactly switch sides now and it would take all of us down to cross him. Once he gets the hands and confirms the fingerprints, we’re back in the green.”

“Fine.” Distaste washed over me and I headed out to find my father. He’d been close with Rafael, Manuel’s brother, and would be able to give me a better angle on exactly what was going on. Not for the first time, I regretted all the lost months where I only lived to find Emily and make sure she was okay.
I’m so fucking out of the loop
.

“Hey, buddy.” Dad was sitting on my bed, leafing through one of the books I kept in my desk. “I thought I might be hearing from you today.”

“Why’d you think that?”

“The hands. Knew you wouldn’t like it.”
Good call
.

“Why are we doing that shit?”

“Because we need to clear the air. Then maybe we’ll get out.” Dad had voted to shut down relations with the cartel when Rafael had curled up his toes, so this wasn’t news to me. I rocked back on my heels and stared at him. “What?”

“Why now? Why not a year ago?”

“I voted against this then.”

“You barely said a word at the vote. You could have swayed it.”

“Yeah, but that’s not how we do shit.” Dad shook his head and set down the book, leaving it open to the page he’d been reading. “Each brother makes up his own mind. I think Manuel is bad news, but I didn’t have evidence I could share until now.”

“Did you have evidence you couldn’t share?” Dad fixed me with the blank stare he gets when he’s not going to tell me something I want to know. Rage was hot on the heels of disbelief, but I didn’t say anything. No point in wasting my breath. The man was more bull headed than an actual bull.

“Are you going to kill these people tonight?”

“Do you think I shouldn’t? Why did you come up here anyway if you’re just going to stonewall me?”

“To see my son. And these people are meth dealers. Dale is literally the scum of the Earth.”

“You know him?”

“Yeah, I recognized his name. His brother is a good guy, though. I knew him in the Army and you played with his adopted daughter when she was a kid.”

“But you still want me to kill him?”

“Like I said, Dale isn’t the same as his brother. I can live with his death. I can’t live with yours.”

“Is that a possibility?”

“Manuel threw it out there, but Piston knocked it right back down. Pretty much said that we’d be gunning for Manuel if it came to that—and you know all his men aren’t down-to-the-bones loyal to him. He wasn’t sure if he could stand up to the full strength of The Fallen, I think.”

“I figured he’d want me dead.”

“He doesn’t anymore. Seems more important to him that he kills Dale and the poor fucker who’s working for him.”

“Got it,” I told him. I didn’t think I’d ever been so annoyed at being sent out by the club. It wasn’t the first time I’d killed for The Fallen and I doubted it would be the last, but to kill at the behest of a man like Manuel left a bad taste in my mouth.

“Been feeling okay lately?” Dad had taken Mom on an extended vacation to the tropics. They’d come back red, happy and totally out of the loop right as I’d limped home from Mexico.

“I’m fine,” I said, and I meant it.

“Your mother is worried about you. Try to stop by the house if you get a chance, or ask her to lunch or something. I don’t care how old you are. The woman frets over you.”

Dad sure knew how to lay on the guilt. “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“That’s real good, son.”

I rolled my eyes. “Any other words of wisdom you want to impart?”

“Not at this exact moment,” he said.

“Then I’m going to go take a ride.”

“Want company?” I started to refuse, but then I looked at the old man. His pale blue eyes were bright.

“Sure,” I said. “Grab your gear and let’s head up to the diner. I could use some eggs and bacon.”