Devil's Honor, Page 3

  The sense of loss left her hollow. And shocked that she felt anything at all, much less that.

  But she didn’t want to stand around out here, fighting with herself and old ghosts she hadn’t seen coming. Because she might not have fooled Antony at all, and the last place she wanted to deal with him was in a deserted house in the middle of nowhere. She wanted to hole up inside where she could lock all the doors, bar the windows, grieve her father if that was what the unwieldy weight in her chest meant, and really get her mope on, if she wanted.

  She slammed her car door shut, then moved toward the trunk to get her bag and the groceries, suddenly famished and dying for something to—

  Merritt froze when she heard the sound of a Harley, roaring down the road out in front and cutting the night in half. She stopped moving. She stopped breathing.

  He’d warned her, five years ago.

  He’d been very clear.

  Don’t walk away from me and think you can come back here, he’d told her.

  He’d been big and rough and in her face, pressing her entire naked body back against the wall of his bedroom in that way that simultaneously thrilled her and scared her, not seeming to give a crap that she’d started crying. His hard, rough hand had curled around her jaw in that way that made her want to cry harder and come the way she only did with him, and then lose herself in him all over again. He’d made her feel shitfaced when she was perfectly sober. He’d always made her feel shitfaced.

  Even thinking about him was like downing a bottle of the hard stuff.

  You want to go, you fucking stay gone.

  Greeley…she’d whispered, but the sound of his name had only pissed him off more. His fingers at her jaw had tightened. His other hand was a fist against the wall, right there beside her head. Threat and longing. That was Greeley. She’d felt him like her own pulse. In her temples, her throat. A mad, wet ache in her pussy.

  The sad truth was, she still did.

  Next time I see you, baby, I’m either going to keep you or kill you. No in between. Then he’d gotten in close, so she could see all that intensity and brooding fury in his dark gray gaze. She could still feel it all these years later, like a brand he’d pressed deep inside of her that still flared red and damaging anytime she let herself remember. Tell me you understand me.

  Merritt had understood him. Fully.

  She’d lied to herself about it in the interim, of course. She’d had all of law school to study herself into a nonchalant place about the threats an old boyfriend—which was not what a woman should call a man like Greeley, she knew very well, because he was far too elemental for that kind of crap—had made the night she’d left him. She’d kept herself in that same place, happily minimizing all things Greeley after she’d passed the bar exam, mostly because it had never crossed her mind that she’d ever return to Louisiana. Why would she commit that kind of suicide? She’d gotten everything she’d wanted, everything she’d worked for. She’d been a criminal defense attorney in a well-known New York City law firm. She’d crawled up out of the swamp the way most people she’d grown up with never would and she was never, ever going back.

  But here she was. And standing out in the thick, rich dark with the sound of a Harley like a deep-throated warning right out there on the road on the other side of the house, she wasn’t anything fucking close to nonchalant.

  She stood stock-still while all the things she’d been minimizing poured back through her. The memory of Greeley, so rough and so hard and so dangerously, breathtakingly seductive despite that—or because of it. And then, behind that, all the rest of the things she’d left here in the swamp. All the lies she’d told herself so she wouldn’t come back home the way she’d wanted to do, and more than once, especially that lonely first year of law school when every time she’d read or seen something she’d thought Greeley would like she’d had to bite her own fingers to keep from calling him.

  Panic. Fear. Longing. Home.

  The panic drowned out the rest of it, especially when she thought she heard the motorcycle circling back. It made her heart kick at her in sheer terror—and something nothing at all like terror, she was forced to acknowledge, as it pooled hot and sharp between her legs.

  She ignored the evidence that her body was as dumb as it had ever been, standing right where she was until the sound of the motor faded into the distance, headed farther out into the country.

  Merritt assured herself she was safe. That it had been five long years and Greeley had very likely forgotten both her and any not-so-thinly veiled threats he’d made at the end of a very long and sweaty and intense summer.

  Bikers didn’t hold on to shit like that. Women were like the southern Louisiana humidity to them. Always there, hanging all over them, unremarkable and interchangeable. No one could grow up in a place like Lagrange without understanding that fact on a fundamental level. If Greeley wasn’t dead already or in prison—both highly probable given the life he’d chosen and had so happily defended as righteous in its way—Merritt was sure he’d forgotten all about her.

  “He forgot your name the moment he rolled onto someone new,” she snapped at herself, but her voice was softer than it should have been, as if the bayou was already taking things from her. The way it always did. “Which was probably four seconds after you walked away, before you even left town.”

  That was almost certainly true. But Merritt didn’t take a real, deep breath again until she’d unloaded her bags, hauled them into the dark, stuffy house, and then locked herself inside her old, familiar prison, just to be sure.

  Chapter 2

  Joseph “Greeley” Shaw kicked back against the clubhouse sofa and sank his hands deep into the hair of the blonde on her knees before him with his cock down her throat. She was some drunk sorority bitch who had rolled in from Baton Rouge with a bunch of her slumming LSU girlfriends, looking for the kind of party they could tell war stories about back in the dorm between boring formals with dumbass frat boys. Greeley was happy to help her out.

  He just wished someone had taught her not to use her fucking teeth.

  She scraped him for the tenth time and he sighed, then held her head still so he could fuck her face a little and finish, down the back of her throat so there’d be no spitting him out. He hated fucking spitting and sorority girls could always be trusted not only to spit, but to whine about it before and after.

  When he was done, he pulled his cock free before she left tooth marks. His sorority girl plopped herself back on her heels and looked up at him expectantly. Smugly, even.

  Like Daddy’s entitled little princess expected a trophy, if he had to guess. It was almost cute.

  “Let me guess how this usually goes,” Greeley said lazily, still sprawled out on the couch with his legs spread on either side of her. “Your garden variety frat boy fuck, who probably spent months trying to get his cock in your mouth while you held that shit for ransom, would be falling all over himself right about now. Kissing your ass, telling you how great you are. Even if you spit. That ring a bell?”

  His sorority girl flushed, that smug look fading into uncertainty.

  Greeley didn’t need more of an answer than that. “Two things, darlin’. One, this isn’t a frat. It doesn’t take me months to get my dick wet. It takes me having a dick, which you already know firsthand, since you were down on your knees before you heard my name. And two, since I’m not some frat boy asshole who wants to make sure he gets in there for another round, I’m not gonna lie. You suck at it.”

  There wasn’t any trace of that smugness on her face now. She looked bewildered. Greeley had no doubt she’d never heard anything but compliments before in her entire pampered life. What could he say? He was a pussy connoisseur. He had fucking standards.

  “What?” she breathed.

  “No one wants his cock treated like a chew toy, babe,” he told her. Patiently, he thought. He wasn’t a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t a relentless asshole like some of his other brothe
rs, either, God bless those twisted bastards.

  Good deed done, Greeley zipped himself up. He patted her on the cheek as he got up, then promptly forgot all about her.

  It was any other Thursday night in the Devil’s Keepers’ clubhouse, a huge ass warehouse way out in the bayous that had been sacred club property since the first Louisiana DKMC members had broken off from the mother charter up in North Dakota in the 1970s. The main room was a mess of comfortable couches, pool tables, sweet flat screens, and all kinds of biker memorabilia tacked up on the walls in case anybody forgot where the fuck they were. There was a hall that led back into the more private areas of the clubhouse, the room they called “church,” where the brothers sat around the table and voted on club law and policy, a few offices for the business shit that kept them out of jail, a few other rooms that no one talked about outside of church, and a small industrial kitchen where they cooked for some of the friendlier club parties they threw sometimes that were more about community than sex. Upstairs there were rooms for brothers to live in or sleep in or just fuck in if they felt like it. Greeley had a house way out in the bayou on the other side of town where he kept his shit, but the clubhouse was as much his home as his other place ever had been. More, some years.

  There was the usual crew of strippers hanging out with the brothers tonight, warming up before they headed over to take the late shift at Petit Joe’s down by the highway. Strippers plus the typical biker groupies made a nice counterpoint to the sorority girls. He could see his brothers enjoying themselves all over the place. On the couches, on one of the pool tables because Waco had no fucking respect, even down on the floor because why not. He noticed one of the strippers, Bethany, was much too fucked up already, the way she’d been every time he’d seen her lately, and filed that away to discuss with Okie, the brother currently running shit at the strip club. There was badass rock and roll blasting and some of that fucked-up foreign porn Tick loved so much splashed all over one of the TVs. He moved around another sorority girl, this one facing forward while she was splayed open on a brother’s lap, taking him hard with her whole body arched back while she moaned, like she couldn’t get enough of Butler’s cock.

  Easy pussy, easy life, Greeley thought, even if it sometimes came with a sorority girl’s teeth on his junk. That was what they’d all signed up for—that and the brotherhood, a much better family than most of them had experienced growing up. Greeley had never bothered to go back and look up his loser mother and her latest methed-out boyfriend after he’d gotten out of the Army. The eighteen years he’d been trapped in that piece of crap trailer in Tennessee with her before he’d enlisted had been more than enough, he figured. He didn’t care what that bitch did with her life. His brothers were all he needed.

  But shit had been tense lately. Too tense, and it was more than the usual dramatic and contradictory cartel demands or the typical shenanigans of the asshole Black Dogs, another outlaw motorcycle club out of Little Rock who had an eye on expansion into Louisiana and were forever trying to muscle in on the Devil’s Keepers’ shit. Greeley didn’t like that he couldn’t put his finger on what was different these days, and not only because he was the club’s sergeant at arms and it was his responsibility to deal with the sort of shit that cropped up when things got tense.

  He looked around for Digger, the club president, who could usually be depended upon to be knee deep in all the sparkling new pussy at a party like this, but the older man was nowhere to be found. Again. That was the trouble. Greeley somehow doubted Digger had suddenly become interested in upholding his wedding vows to his old lady, Crystal, something he hadn’t given much of a shit about as long as Greeley had been around. Digger was old school. He kept his old lady separate from the club and his dick free to do what it pleased. Which meant his absence tonight probably had more to do with the rest of the shit swirling around beneath everything these days that no one was talking about, and Greeley didn’t fucking like that at all.

  He made his way over to the always-fully-stocked bar that stretched out against the far wall, lifting his chin at the prospect behind it. Drop jumped to get him a beer and a whiskey chaser, and it wasn’t the first time the kid had indicated he was on top of his shit. Paying enough attention to know each full brother’s drink. That kind of automatic attention to detail boded well for his future in the club.

  “Appreciate the hustle,” Greeley told him, and kept his face expressionless while the prospect fought to keep from showing his pleasure at the compliment. Drop was so young and eager and so easy to fuck with, it made him feel about a thousand years old. He tossed back his shot, enjoying the burn of the whiskey as it went down, then turned back to face the room again.

  The Devil’s Keepers MC was a big, healthy, growing club, despite periodic interest from the feds that never amounted to much more than the typical boring harassment with no real teeth. Especially here in Lagrange, where the club controlled all kinds of shit that barreled down the interstate from Texas and the Mexican border, on into buyer-rich environments like Atlanta or St. Louis. That meant that at any given time there were brothers out taking care of club business all over the state of Louisiana and beyond, but Digger wasn’t usually one of them. The president should have been here. It made Greeley’s neck itch that he wasn’t, and one thing he’d learned in his years fighting in the desert and staying out of prison after his discharge was never, ever to ignore that itch.

  But he shoved that aside and grinned when T’Roscoe rolled up, having detached himself from one of Petit Joe’s choicest pieces of ass, who stared after him as if she was half in love with him. She probably was. Bitches tended to lose their shit over Roscoe. It was those blue eyes of his that made him look like he gave a shit.

  T’Roscoe—the T standing in for “little” in Cajun French—was taller than Greeley, who was pushing six-three, and built tough and solid and mean from his shaggy brown hair to the steel-toed boots he wore and liked to use with abandon. He’d patched into the club while his daddy was still a full, original Lagrange charter member, before arthritis took Big Roscoe’s hands and knees and kept him off his bike. That T’Roscoe had towered over his old man by the time he was sixteen just made the nickname stick harder once he was a prospect.

  These days, Roscoe usually went without the “little,” in any language. He was also the club’s VP. Not Digger’s son—that was Whale, who spent most of his time pissed off and whiny about the fact he’d been passed over for the VP slot. And this run. Or that job. Or whatever the fuck else was up his ass on any given day. When everyone knew he’d never had a shot at anything because Whale was a big ass baby who, lucky for him, was good with computers and therefore useful to the club. Roscoe, meanwhile, ate whiny bitches for breakfast, and he did it with a smile and a twinkle in those bright blue eyes. Which meant Whale was pretty much the only one who didn’t get why Roscoe was the right man for the job.

  Roscoe clapped Greeley on the shoulder now, jerking his head in the direction of the couch, where two brothers were getting into it with a couple of giggling sorority sisters.

  “I like the new talent,” he said, laughing. “Really classing up the place.”

  Greeley had a lot to say about a lot of shit, but he kept his own counsel for the moment. He watched as each of the girls straddled a brother, then leaned toward each other to do that fake ass girl-kissing thing, still giggling while they tongued each other. Not that the fact it was purely for show made it any less hot.

  “You ever notice how blond they always are?” he asked.

  Roscoe gave this question the consideration it deserved. “I’m pretty sure I had a couple of brunette Kappa Somethings once. Then again, they could have been strippers. I get all that easy pussy confused.” He studied the show in front of them. “Though I’m taking it you mean blond in the philosophical sense.”

  Greeley laughed. “I guess every girl deserves a dirty biker memory or two to get her off while she’s banging her country club husband twice a week. Three if it’s
his birthday.”

  They both laughed at that nightmare. The civilian life each one of them would rather die than live through for so much as a day. They weren’t brothers by accident. When a Devil’s Keeper patched in and chose a life free from all that mainstream bullshit, he meant it. He lived it and he was prepared to die defending it. Greeley waited for Roscoe to get his drink and give Drop a little bit of shit before the other man faced the room again, leaning back on the bar.

  “You seen Digger?” Greeley asked. He kept his voice lazy, not that it would matter. He kept his gaze trained on Marla, one of the strippers, who was dancing around in nothing but her hooker heels and her collection of intriguing piercings. Still, he felt it when Roscoe tensed beside him.

  “Not sure I like the question.”

  “It should be a fucking simple one.” Greeley tilted his beer toward the rest of the room. Waco was hammering into the dirtiest of the sorority chicks, who was bent over the pool table and loudly egging him on while two other brothers waiting to use the table for its more traditional purpose offered their own commentary like sportscasters. Butler was still letting that moaning bitch ride him like he was a mechanical bull. The two kissing girls were now bringing a little tit play into the mix, always a crowd pleaser. “When’s the last time Dig missed something like this? He usually tags himself a piece of college girl ass before they even make it to the clubhouse.”

  Roscoe shook his head. “I’m not getting into this shit. Digger’s not my bitch. He doesn’t report his fucking movements to me.”

  “I can’t tell if that means you know where he is or you don’t.”

  Roscoe raked a hand through his shaggy hair, looking like he was fighting not to get pissed. Or show it, anyway. “It means I don’t give a fuck because he didn’t chain his dick to mine tonight.”