Which meant I couldn’t save the club of my heart from the club of my present. Which meant, if Dad or King ever found out, they’d never forgive me for putting brother’s lives in danger when I could have saved them.
My good intentions were quickly drowning in a riptide, waterlogged with impossible questions, choking on moral ambiguity as difficult to digest as ocean waves.
There was no clean way out of the situation. No matter what happened in the end, my family wouldn’t trust me and my life might still be very much in danger.
I breathed deeply, filled my eyes to the brim with sincerity and told Reaper the truth, “I won’t fuck up.”
Danner
It was ironic that I’d only ever become involved in the biker life because it was my mission to dismantle it. There wasn’t even a reason for my hatred of biker gangs, just something written in the code of my DNA, passed to me by my father and his father’s father all the way back to the founding of the mother Fallen chapter in 1960. There had to be some twisted connection between one of my ancestors and the Garros, some illicit romance gone awry, a metal and chrome Romeo & Juliet killed in a hail of rival gunfire, the Mercutio equivalent downed by a blade and a man in the wrong leather cut. It was a romantic way to think about what I grew up believing to be my destiny, but I’d yet to see spilled blood for what it really was, just blood, just death smeared over pavement, guts trailing, brains splotched like ink blotches. There was nothing romantic in death, and nothing beautiful about my automatic hatred of an entire group of human beings.
But I didn’t learn that until later.
Until Harleigh Rose showed up in a record store wearing a kid-sized AC/DC shirt and listening to Johnny Cash as if he spoke directly to her through the record player. It wasn’t until I saw her plight, saw how unromantic the reality of their situation with their drug addict mother was, and how deeply wonderful she and her brother were as people that I began to reconsider how my system was programmed.
That I began to hack my Danner influenced mind and started to go from my traditional idea of good to one that was bad.
Therein lay the irony, because the more ‘corrupt’ I was in my father’s own contemptible eyes, the stronger I felt, coated in titanium conviction and brassy with confidence in my own grey shaded principles.
Who would have ever guessed that a cop playing a biker to take down an MC would become seduced by the very lifestyle he was supposed to condemn?
I loved the freedom of the oceanside wind against my chest as I soared over the road straddling a metal beast that felt like one of my mustang horses, feeling the wildness of her in the vibration beneath my ass, in the weight of her power under my gloved hands.
Riding a bike never failed to make me hard as steel because it reminded me of the way Harleigh Rose would feel when I finally fucked her. All that power and untamed beauty required skilled hands and a firm touch to keep under control. I was Dominant, so both were exactly the kind of challenge I relished.
I focused on the road again when Wrath dropped his speed to slide into formation beside me where I rode gunner in our six man convoy up the Sea to Sky Highway. I looked over at him at the same time my phone rang in my leather cut.
“Yeah?” I answered over the Bluetooth in my helmet.
“You stick with me and keep your trap shut as in don’t repeat a fuckin’ word of what’s goin’ to go down tonight. You get me?” Wrath’s low rumble sounded over the speaker.
Curveball.
Interesting.
I’d been trying to evaluate whether or not Wrath Marsden could be turned into a confidential informant two out of the three years I’d been working undercover for the MC.
He’d never given me any indication he could be turned away from Reaper and Grease. Ever.
Until now.
I wondered how much that had to do with his new relationship with Harleigh Rose and rage burned in my gut like one too many shots of whiskey. It was hypocritical as shit, considering I was technically dating two women, one as a cop and one as a biker.
It was only Harleigh Rose I wanted with every multifaceted part of me. As a man elementally, powerfully could want a woman, to cherish her, guard her and plant his babies in her.
She hadn’t mentioned Laken or Diana Casey with me though and I had the feeling that they didn’t matter to her. She was just that sure of herself, of the effect she had on me, and she wasn’t wrong.