I could feel his eyes on me instantly, the hot, hard weight of them like one of his big, scarred hands pressing into my chest. He was bracketed by Berserkers Sergeant at Arms, Grease Montgomery, and the Prez of the entire MC, Reaper Holt. They were two of the scariest men I’d ever laid eyes on and definitely two of the most terrifying men I’d ever met, which was saying something given my upbringing. Despite the attention they demanded, I only had eyes for the man at their center.
Wrath was the kind of biker who’d been adopted into it. Raised by two alcoholic parents, mum a stripper and dad the bouncer at a nightclub, he came from rough and learned early that the easiest way out of poverty was to channel his sheer size—six foot six at the age of sixteen and fully grown—as a tool to lend to the gangs that ruled the streets. He started as a lowly enforcer for the Triad, the Chinese crime syndicate, and then quickly discovered the appeal of a Harley between his thighs, prospecting for Berserkers at the age of eighteen and now, twelve years later, he was VP. This was no little thing given his youth and it was directly correlated to the amount of blood he’d shed with those hammer-like fists and the amount of blood he’d saved from being let within their own ranks thanks to his above-the-average-biker IQ.
As if this wasn’t terrifying enough, Wrath was good looking. You think there isn’t something threatening about beauty, you haven’t seen it, not really. There is so much power in a pretty thing, in its capacity to rule your thoughts and puppeteer your actions. It’s a shiny thing and we’re all just crows, helpless against its appeal.
Wrath was one of the shiniest things I’d ever seen, so beautiful it was terrifying and so terrifying it was, to someone who appreciated such things, beautiful. I’d never seen a bigger man, not even my goliath dad was as tall and carved from granite muscle, but all that hardness was softened by a thick, lustrous fall of golden-brown hair and large eyes so clear and pale a blue they looked like the placid surface of a lake. His mouth was lush, a thick curve above and below that cut up the darkness of his beard and amplified its ridiculous prettiness.
Over the years, I’d made a study of Wrath Marsden but not because he was pretty.
No, I’d made a study of the Berserkers VP and ruthless killer because he had made a study of me.
I had the feeling that if his cousin hadn’t met me first, he would have had me in his bed in a heartbeat.
He watched me then, his jaw tight but his face otherwise impassive. There was a threat there somewhere, I could read it in the absence of his expression.
He didn’t buy the story of his cousin’s death.
More than that, he didn’t believe I hadn’t had a hand in it.
Fuck.
“Harleigh, baby,” Reaper said, his voice as smoldering as the plume of smoke billowing out from his cigarette plugged mouth. He opened his short, stocky arms to me. “Come to Reaper.”
I went without hesitation even though the thought of being touched still sent violent chills through my body.
Reaper Holt wasn’t someone you disobeyed.
He wrapped me in a tight hug, his nose burrowed into the crook of my neck because we were the same height with me in my tall boots. I tried not to shudder as he took a deep whiff of my scent, and his fleshy hand fell down my back to curl over my ass, giving it a pat before he released me.
“Lookin’ good, baby,” he told me, his bloodshot brown eyes twinkling.
He was somewhere in his fifties, but he had the libido of a teenager. He’d never been married but as far as it was known, he had twelve kids, all by different women, and those were only the ones who’d had the balls to come forward to get money for child support. I didn’t understand the appeal but then, you didn’t have to find Reaper appealing to bang him. I’d spent my entire life watching women drawn into the biker gang fold, entranced by the thrill of rebellion, of taming a bad boy, of revealing in sin.
Sleeping with an outlaw was like sleeping with a wild animal. Only the very stupid or very courageous braved the risk that that animal would turn, tear out your eyes and eat out your throat before you could blink. I knew women who’d chosen well, the brave ones, like my step-mum/best friend Loulou Garro and my brother’s woman, Cressida Irons. They hadn’t tamed the mustangs they’d found, they’d just learned to ride ’em well, over the uneven terrain of their biker lives and through the wilds of their often-violent realities.