Less than a foot separated us, but it might as well have been a county.
Her movements turned jerky.
“What do you want from us?” I asked the question slowly. Her response to it mattered as much as the answer.
She stilled with both arms in the shirt, the material bunched in the middle of pulling it over her head.
Her fingers twitched. “I’d like to not be a problem. I’m something you want but not something you can keep.”
“You’re not a problem.” I almost reached for her, but every other woman I’d ever been with had moved away from me once we left the bed. They might like my hands during sex, but they wanted nothing to do with me after. I wouldn’t put myself in line to face that rejection again.
“You can’t have it both ways.” She yanked the shirt over her head, clasped her bra, and tucked the shirt into the front of her pants. “Either being with me breaks the rules, or it doesn’t.”
“It does if we all want to be with you.” I thought she’d understood this, but maybe I hadn’t explained it well enough.
Wouldn’t be the first time I screwed up an important conversation. And people wondered why I rarely spoke.
This was why.
With a flick of her wrist, she unlocked the door. “Don’t worry about it.”
And with nothing more than a backward glance, she left the office, crossed the bay, and swung onto her bike. The engine revved and she drove away.
9
COLT
SEVEN YEARS AGO…
I’d been back at the club three days before Hawk pulled me aside for the pressure run.
He’d gotten word that the Hellhounds were leaning on one of our distributors and he needed me to back him and a few others up.
Good.
I needed the adrenaline.
A week away from Callie hadn’t done much for my personality or my sanity.
All I’d done was dream about her and talk myself out of going home because I wasn’t ready to face her in the light of day.
She deserved better than me.
Better than all of us.
Hell, I loved Hawk and Diesel more than my own life, but we were no good for anyone.
I rode alongside Hawk down the dark street.
Our headlights burned bright on the black asphalt, the yellow line streaking past when I gunned the engine and roared ahead of him.
No one called me back.
They all knew better.
This was my job, the only fucking thing I had going right in my life.
I’d seen how Hawk looked at me when I came back yesterday.
