Exquisite Danger (27 page)

I went to him and knelt before his chair, aware of Khan watching us, and rested my hands on his knees. “Please, I have to do this. I’ll be safe, I swear.”

Lifting his gaze to mine, my heart pounded when I saw the absolute agony in his dark eyes. “Please, don’t do this.”

I wanted to give in to him, to soothe him, but I just couldn’t. “I have to.”

Khan cleared his throat, but Smoke and I didn’t look away from each other. “We’ll constantly have our eyes on her, brother. She’ll never be without one of us looking out for her. Swan’s your old lady. You know we’ll protect her ’cause she’s one of our own.”

Smoke closed his eyes and desperation etched his features. “Doesn’t fuckin’ matter what I say, does it? You’re gonna do whatever you want.”

Trying for patience, I gave his knee a squeeze. “I’m not going to get hurt.”

His phone rang, and he grabbed it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. I knew Smoke well enough at this point to easily read his sudden tension. He abruptly stood, and walked away from me. Before he left the room, he looked over his shoulder and said, “Do whatever the fuck you want, Swan. I’ve got shit to take care of.”

With that, he went out the door and slammed it behind him while talking on his phone, leaving me still on my knees and slightly stunned. I knew what was going on between us wasn’t normal, and I couldn’t help but wonder if my life with Smoke would always be like this. Would he always try to make the decisions for me? Could I spend the rest of my life living with a man who could be so tender one moment and such a colossal asshole the next?

Khan cleared his throat. “You okay, girl?”

I stood and turned my back for a moment, hoping they didn’t see me rub away a tear. “Yeah, I’m good. So what’s the game plan?”

Six hours later, I sat on the edge of the bed in our small bedroom, and watched Smoke pace in front of me. He was looking hot as sin tonight in his dark jeans, his vest, and a very tight t-shirt that hugged all his yummy muscles. And I wasn’t looking so bad myself. Alisha had come over and helped me slut-up biker style. Turns out Alisha had spent some time as a sweet butt before she settled down with her old man, Donkey. The way she described it, you could tell it hadn’t been easy for her to make the transition to old lady, but now that she’d been with her old man for seven years, she was starting to feel at home.

Alisha had dressed me in a pair of butter-soft leather pants that laced up the sides with black lace through bright steel rings and rivets. They were sexy, kick ass, and I loved them. They were also super easy to move in, and the leather was high quality which meant it would protect my skin. The shirt I wore was an empire waist black top that dipped low enough to give me some major cleavage, but was loose enough at my middle so I could wear a holster. The long-sleeved shirt looked sedate from the front, but the top half of the back was almost totally exposed beneath a thin layer of black lace. That see-through back wouldn’t look good with a bra, which meant my breasts trembled with each breath and my major cleavage became positively obscene despite the decent amount of chest support the top provided.

While Alisha was wearing a pair of comfy slippers, I was forced into some far from comfortable boots that would be a pain in the ass to stand in for any period of time. My arm still ached, but Smoke had given me some more pills and the pain was already fading. Hopefully, it would also help me endure my footwear.

I was being careful not to cry as Smoke continued to ignore me because Alisha had laid the makeup on thick. When I looked in the mirror, I swore my sister was looking back at me with her pouty pink lips and expertly done smoky eye shadow. Sarah would rock this outfit with her strong self-confidence without a second thought and look like a model strutting on a runway. I was just hoping that no one was around when I had to take the stairs—slowly—while holding my tits.

With a rough sigh, Smoke stopped pacing, but he didn’t look at me. “You ready?”

He’d spent the last fifteen minutes pleading with me not to go tonight, and I was rather surprised by his abrupt change of attitude.

“Yeah,” I said in a low voice, waiting for the argument to begin anew.

His gaze raked over me and his nostrils flared as he lingered over my exposed cleavage with a look that was positively possessive. “Who put the sparkles on your tits?”

“Alisha, but she never touched me. It was just with the brush which was okay.”

Actually, she had touched me a couple times and my stomach had clenched harder each time. It wasn’t her fault, makeup involved touching people, but it still made me ill. I’m not one for self-pity, but sometimes I really hated being me. Right now, I especially hated my body for becoming aroused any time Smoke was around. This was ridiculous, I couldn’t continue to function like this or I’d lose my edge. But oh…how I wanted him and the blissful oblivion his affection offered even as I tried to focus on the upcoming mission.

He knelt before me, setting his hands on either side of my waist, pulling me into his seductive warmth. “When we get through this, you and I are gonna have a long, long talk which is going to end with your ass spanked so red you won’t sit down comfortably for a week.”

My libido quickly responded, “Will you fuck me as hard? Make my pussy as sore?”

Smoke blinked at me, then grinned. “I’ll do my best.”

I smacked his chest, not wanting him to think he was off the hook for being a dick. “Smoke, focus.”

“I’m not the one talkin’ dirty,” he muttered before standing. “You are not to leave my side, ever.”

“Isn’t that going to make it a bit hard for me to act as bait? I mean how can anyone approach me with you being my human shield? Come on, I have Hulk, Khan, Frame, and Alisha with her old man Donkey watching over me. Not to mention all the prospects that trail after me like hulking puppy dogs. I’m not sure how whoever is after me can even think they’ll be able to get to me in this fortress. Just trust me to be okay. I…I love you so much, but I can’t take it if you keep trying to swaddle me in cotton and lock me away like I’m made of crystal. Please have faith in me.”

He clenched his hands, and as I saw his anger ramp up, I gathered the courage to try and calm him down. I placed my hand gently over his then uncurled his fingers one by one. Once his hand was loose in mine, I placed it on my cleavage, over my heart. Where speech would fail me my body wouldn’t. It was so much easier for me to express my love physically than with words. I looked up at him, sensing his internal battle and hating that I was at the root of it.

“First, you are brilliant. I would never, ever say otherwise. Second, I have faith in you, it’s the rest of the fuckin’ world I don’t trust.”

“Miguel, I need you right now. Please. I need you to keep me safe
and
let me do what I can to take care of this situation. I’m sick of it, sick of the constant fear, the tension, the never ending emotional roller coaster. While you may know me well, thanks to your disturbing level of stalker behavior, I don’t have the same advantage. You’re still very new to me, and even though I’ve felt like I’ve known you forever, it’s only been a few weeks. I want time to just be with you. To enjoy falling in love without constantly watching our backs, and that won’t happen unless we end this.”

He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, then his features began to slowly go blank. The lines of worry smoothed out, and his lips firmed. Before my very eyes he was making the transformation from Miguel to Smoke, and I found it fascinating. I had studied this man so much, obsessed over his every delicious feature, that I knew his expressions better than my own. When he opened his eyes I found the killer I needed looking back at me. His expression had gone blank, scary, and his entire body seemed to grow and somehow become bigger, more intimidating. He took a half step closer to me, and I once again felt the size difference between us on every level.

Unable to help myself, I sucked in a little gasp as lust and fear combined inside of me. His gaze darkened even more as he placed his hand on my chest and slowly flexed his fingers over my heart. “You keep this alive and well for me, got me? Don’t do anything stupid or dangerous because wherever you go, I’m coming with you. They will have to kill me to get to you, and I would gladly give my life for yours, but I’d rather spend the rest of my hopefully long, long life loving you. I’ll do anything, sacrifice everything, to make that happen.”

My heart slammed against my ribs hard enough that he had to feel it against his palm, and it began to race as panic roared through me at the thought of anything happening to him.

“No, please...please Smoke. Don’t do anything to endanger yourself. I’m begging you.”

He gave me a laugh that wasn’t nice and stroked my cheek. “I’ll tell you the same thing you tell me, Swan. I have to do this.”

I gaped at him, unable to come up with a smart retort, while I wondered if this irrational panic I was experiencing was the same thing he felt. This was an epiphany, an understanding that gave me a small peek into the way he thought. Okay, now I understood a bit what it was like to go insane with fear. It wasn’t a nice feeling.

“I’m sorry.”

He blinked at me, but the predatory look stayed on his face. “For?”

“I think I understand. Your worry, I mean. When I think about anything happening to you it makes me wild to stop it.” I sighed and stood, smoothing down my top and going over my weapons before checking my hair where I had a couple surprises hidden. “I’m sorry you feel that way ’cause it sucks. How about we promise to keep each other alive, okay? Let’s not fret about who’s going to die for whom. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like melancholy Romeo and Juliet emo drivel to me.”

He gathered me up into his arms so quickly that I didn’t have time to even yelp. One instant I was fixing my upswept hair, held in place by two black lacquer chopsticks, the next my body was pressed tight enough to his that I could feel his heart thundering against my cheek. He buried his nose against my hair and took a deep breath while I hugged him back. We remained like that for a long time, just holding each other while loud voices began to echo up and down the hall.

Finally he pulled back and kissed me softly on the lips. “Ready, baby girl?”

“As I’m ever gonna be.”

I was pretty sure I was gonna puke, and it wasn’t because I’d been drinking.

We’d been wandering around the party for about four hours, and I’d seen just about every sexual act human beings could do to one another. At first it had shocked me, maybe even titillated me a little, but now I was over it. Smoke, bless his heart, was trying to shield me the best he could from the depravity, but about half an hour ago he’d given up, and I’d spent most of my time focusing my gaze on the wall above the action happening down lower. No wonder the old ladies never came to parties like this, it was just so unhygienic. There were people having sex all over the place and none of them were putting down a towel first. For someone with minor germ issues like myself, it was enough to make me cringe.

Guys dropped their condoms on the floor. Right on the fucking floor! No wonder Scarlett, the Iron Horse Secretary’s old lady back in Austin, yelled at Smoke about it. I had no idea whose job it was to clean this place up, but they should be doing it in hazmat gear. And Khan needed to cover all his furniture in thick plastic.

I wished I could go outside where the picnic benches and stuff were, to get away from the crowd, but there was no way Smoke and my self-appointed guards were going to let me out of their sight.

People from all over the state had come to celebrate with Brown as he got patched in, which as far as I could tell, involved a new vest and a lot of drinking, smoking pot, and manly hugs as well as willing women as far as the eye could see. News about the little ambush I faced had been kept on the down-low, and no one asked me about it. I think I was the only old lady still there, other than Alisha who stuck around to help guard me. She was around here somewhere in her blue micro-mini dress hanging out with her husband, Donkey. The rest of the old ladies and serious girlfriends had taken off after the ceremony hours ago, after telling me how glad they were I survived, and thanking me over and over for saving Breaker. The one good spot in this night was when I learned that Breaker would make a full recovery, and that even though he had a mild concussion and blood loss, it could have been much worse.

Cathy called me from the hospital earlier, sobbing, and we had a very uncomfortable conversation where she basically blubbered incoherent shit, and I said a couple ‘you’re welcomes’ before I basically hung up on her. It felt weird to realize that in addition to taking someone’s life, I’d saved someone else’s. I mean, I knew I’d saved his life, but I really hadn’t processed the ramifications yet. The knowledge that I’d saved some little kids’ Dad made my heart ache like someone was squeezing it in a fist.

Shit, I did not have time to get all melodramatic. I was on a mission, which meant I needed to focus. But damn, I was tired of standing around. The noise was overwhelming, and I was starting to feel a little claustrophobic. Smoke had slipped me another pill earlier, and it was making me tired. The room was so packed with people now that my personal space was almost nil.

It had to be nearing midnight, and I was wondering if anyone was even going to make a move. In all my planning for tonight, the one thing I hadn’t counted on was how fucking bored and fatigued I’d be. The fornicating going on around me held absolutely no interest for me, because there was no emotion involved. Just a lot of groping and grunting, then they would get off, and the guy would discard the woman with about as much regard for her as for the used condom. Not arousing for me in the least.

Because of the sexist pig nature of most of these bikers, I was pretty much ignored whenever a new bunch of guys approached Smoke. It was the same every time. Smoke would introduce me as his old lady, the biker would make some kind of comment about how hot I was, and Smoke would growl or tell him to fuck off. The guy would then act surprised, then apologize for real to me, all of them grinning or laughing while congratulating Smoke for landing such a hot old lady. It was macho male bonding at its finest.