sheets. “Damn. So fucking hot,” I mutter. Why does she do this to me?
After I’d left her last night, I’d gone downstairs, putting as much distance between us as possible. The woman is sex on legs, a temptation I can’t allow myself to get lost in. Instead, I’d lost myself in poker games with the guys and partied with the White Springs brothers for most of the night. Dex and a couple of the guys had offered me pussy, and it pissed me the fuck off that I hadn’t banged one of their club girls. I’d passed out with a bunch of the guys on the couches, waking up to find half of them still drinking themselves into oblivion.
Intending to ride for a while on my own this morning, I’d come back to the bedroom for my sidebags. I needed to think, needed to get my head in the game, and I can’t be around her to do that.
I shouldn’t have looked at her when I’d come in. Shouldn’t have stopped. I should have just left. Instead, I’d sat on the side of the bed, mesmerized by the sight of her.
My heart races as the visions of last night flash through my head. Her muffled cries, her terrified insistence that she had no idea who Adamson is. I’m still not ready to believe what she told me about her past. Her story about His Holy Peace is just so fucking farfetched. And I refuse to believe she isn’t lying about knowing Adamson. Especially not now that I know the fucker who tried to take her from me is connected to him.
Practically until the day my rat bastard father died, he’d browbeaten into my head that women weren’t to be trusted. According to him, they’re all lying and cheating whores who have nothing to give but wet pussy. Give them an inch and all that shit. In theory, Emma is the personification of the image dear old dad envisioned women to be. She’d robbed from the club. She’d lied, tried to get away from me any chance she could. Except…
Except there’s so much of her that doesn’t fit that mold.
In the years I’ve been with the club, I’ve faced down the worst of humanity. Emma has a compassion that I rarely see in my line of work. She’d shown it in the way she’d cared for Cap after he’d been shot. She gives without thought of herself, putting others first. She has a sweetness, an innocence about her that draws me in. But in my experience, that kind of innocence is usually a mask that hides a deeply corrupt nature. I’m a moth to her flame, and I just know that if I get too close, I’ll get burned.
Everyone has an angle. You learn that fast in an MC, in a world that conditions men and women alike to do whatever they have to in order to stay one step ahead. Every time I feel her getting under my skin, I feel like I’m balanced on a knife’s edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Any second, I’ll discover the truth—it was all an act, and she was playing me all along. Off that beautiful, innocent mask will come, revealing something ugly—a creature that will damage my soul and eat my heart.
I reach out and brush a single dark curl from her cheek, careful not to wake her. Her raven hair makes her tanned skin look almost pale in the waning moonlight.
She doesn’t stir. I push through my urge to sit and stare at her while she sleeps on. The club needs me, and the brothers and I have a mystery to unravel. Never thought I would be like Magnum P.I., trying to get to the bottom of the lies that the woman next to me told me.
Pushing to my feet, I take one last look at her before I shut the door behind me.
As I make my way down to the barroom where the guys have gathered chowing down on scrambled eggs and hash browns, Rat finds me before I even had a chance to sit down.
“Spidy, you got a sec?”
“Yeah.” I clap him on the shoulder. This time I’m going to fucking listen to what he has to say despite the scrambled eggs calling my name. Otherwise, I’ll end up having to buy him a whole video store to make up for it. “So what’s up?”
“After I made the connection between the guy who took Emma and that