His eyes lost focus and he cried out.
“Chastity!” My name tore from him with an animalistic cry, and with a jerk and shudder he pulsed into me, his face lost in ecstasy as he filled me.
Slowly the air stilled and our panted breaths filled the space around us as we both came down from our high. I collapsed against him and enjoyed the warmth of his naked chest against my skin and the wild pounding of his heart against my cheek. Filled with love, I melted into him.
The rest of the world be damned.
This man was everything.
RUGER
It was hard to shake my fight with Bull.
For twenty-two years we’d been best friends.
I was fifteen, almost sixteen when my twenty-year-old sister fell in love with him and brought him home. Since then, I’d looked up to him. Admired him. Wanted to be like him. And as I grew up, he became my best friend. The man I stood next to when he finally married my sister. The man I held in my arms as he wept over her sudden death only three months after their wedding. The man I disarmed when he’d taken his gun to Stockade Hill to end the soul-crushing pain of losing his wife. The man I’d sworn to always stand beside no matter how fucking stormy the weather got.
For twenty-two years I’d never failed him, and it gutted me that now we were at odds.
But it wasn’t my involvement with Chastity that burned us. I could and never would regret what we had together. What really twisted the knife in was how Bull didn’t think I was good enough for his niece. Yeah, I got the age difference thing. Yada fucking yada. But to fucking stand there and tear me down in front of her. To reveal what he really thought of me. Yeah, he was pissed at me and we all say shit when things are heated, but fuck, it was obvious he thought I was some kind of douchebag when it came to this woman.
Of course, I had fucked my fair share of women. But I was never an asshole to them. I didn’t lead them on. Didn’t fucking rough them up or hurt them. We fucked. Lost ourselves in each other, physically, so the fuck what? And that all stopped with my three-year relationship with Astrid.
And let’s not fucking forget that since moving to Destiny I’d basically been living like a fucking monk. Despite my one night with Astrid and a couple of go-nowhere dates, I hadn’t been with anyone.
I wanted to have it out with him. Let him get it out of his system. Let him do his worst. Talk to him about it like I should have months ago.
But no matter what, he needed to know I was in love with his niece and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
I braced myself for the showdown at the clubhouse the next day. But when I arrived, Vader told me chapel was canceled because Bull had left town for the day.
“What for?” I asked.
I was sergeant-at-arms. Where my president went, I went. If there were any new developments with club business, I knew about it. I was Bull’s lieutenant. His second set of eyes.
His protection.
Vader shrugged. “Didn’t say. He stormed in here like a fucking tornado, banged around in his office for a bit, then left.”
“Do you know where?”
“No. When Joker asked him what was happening, he told him to fuck off and mind his own business. Since then, no-one has heard from him and no one knows where he is.”
Not no one.
I knew where he was.
Twenty minutes later, I rode through the cemetery gates and parked next to Bull’s Harley in the parking lot. It was a five-minute walk through the massive graveyard to Wendy’s grave where Bull sat in front of her tombstone, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his hands.
I stopped a few yards away from him.
When he spoke, he didn’t turn around. “Come any closer and I’ll fucking kill you.”
I could hear the emotion in his voice.
And the Jack Daniel’s.
One thing I’d learned early in life was the futility of trying to reason with a drunk man. But I had to at least try.
“I love her,” I said matter-of-factly, my voice almost alien in the lonely quiet of the graveyard. “I know you don’t approve, and it kills me that you don’t. But you need to know that it won’t stop me from loving her.”
He said nothing. So I continued. Because he needed to know exactly how it was.
“And if you ask me to choose… I will choose her over my brother.”
Bull slowly pulled himself to his feet and turned around. His glasses were off and his piercing eyes were heavily shadowed from lack of sleep and too much whisky. He came toward me, his steps slow, his body affected by liquor, a darkness sweeping over him.