“Want me to hook that up?” I asked, taking a long swig of my beer. Jesus fuck if she would just hook up with one of the men, if she would just make it about loyalty, then I could stop fucking picturing her naked, riding me hard and fast, her tits jumping as she did, her head thrown back as she moaned my name...
Lo was giving me a sly smile. “As much as I like the strong and silent type,” she started, taking a few steps forward so that her front was practically plastered against mine and for a horrifyingly hot moment, I thought she was going to kiss me. Then she reached behind me for a fresh beer and stepped back. It was then I realized I had been holding my breath and sucked in some air. “He's not meant for me.”
“Meant for you?” I asked, smiling. “Baby, we ain't talking about forever. We're talking about tonight.”
Unphased, she shrugged. “Not meant for that either. And I'm not your baby.”
“Oh sweetheart,” I said, smirking, getting up in her space until she took a step in retreat, “I can get you to the point where you're begging me to call you baby.”
“Pretty confident in that, huh?” she asked with what I could only describe as a challenge in her eyes.
“Yep,” I agreed with a nod.
She took her step back, making her press her tits into my chest and angle her head up to look me in the eye. “Never gonna fucking happen, Cash.”TwoLoWhen I was eight years old and told my father that I wanted to be in the Marines just like him when I grew up, he told me that women in the military were nothing but a liability or a distraction and that it would be a cold day in hell he let any daughter of his be the reason a platoon of good men lost their lives.
When I was sixteen, I went into a convenience store after school. While I was looking through my junk food options, a man came in with a gun, demanding money. The man behind the counter, in his forties, foreign but in a way I couldn't describe, reached into the register but must have simultaneously reached for a gun. It was half raised in the air when the gunshot went off and I watched in absolute horror as the bullet wedged itself between the store owner's eyes with a spurt of impossibly red blood out the back of the man's head, spraying all over the cigarette stand. His body hovered on his feet for a nauseating few seconds before he collapsed forward over the counter.
The robber, undeterred, reached into the register, stole the money, and took off.
I stood frozen as the wife of the store owner came in from the back having, no doubt, heard the gunshot. She stopped for the barest of seconds in the doorway, looking around until her eyes fell onto her husband. She flew at his body with a scream I could still hear when the night got too quiet, a scream that sounded like with him, a part of her died as well.
The police poured in, my father came, questioning was carried out. I answered in a strange numbness as I watched the wife have to be pried from her husband's dead body, her body shaking so hard from tears that she looked like she was having a seizure.
And I knew, in that moment I knew with a blinding sort of clarity, that I would never in my life ever know a love like that.
They were strange memories to have your mind constantly roll over, especially given that decades had passed. The fact of the matter was, those were two of the five biggest game-changing moments in my life that made me into the woman I had become. They were memories I worked hard to remember in excruciating technicolor detail, fearing that if I lost even a second of them, I would lose an integral part of myself.
They were the thoughts I had on my mind when the door to Reign and Summer's house opened and in walked Cash.
Cash, that was actually his real name, like Reign was his brother's real name. Power and money, they were the only things that mattered to their old man. Reign looked like their father, tall and muscular, dark hair, light green eyes. Fierce. Everything about the leader of The Henchmen MC was fierce, dark, and dangerous.
Cash, much to the detriment of every damn woman who crossed his path from the day his voice dropped, inherited his looks from their mother. He was every bit as tall as his brother, but where Reign's looks ran toward dark, Cash's ran toward light. He had his dirty blonde hair long on one side of his head and shaved to a peach fuzz up the other side. His eyes were a deep shade of green and his lips were almost perpetually turned up at the sides. Then, of course, there were the tattoos. I didn't even want to get into the tattoos. Oh, my god.
See, the problem with Cash was, he was likable. A man like him didn't cross your path and rub you the wrong way. He was laid-back, funny, flirtatious. If he was in the presence of a woman, you could tell he appreciated her and not just if she was hot shit (though he certainly... appreciated those ones all the more). It was almost as if you could just sense that he just genuinely liked women with all their contradictions and complexities. He wasn't the kind of man who bitched and moaned about us being emotional or needy or hard to get (because, to him, they never were). He just took women as they were.
And, fucking hell, it was like catnip.
Let's just say, it was no secret that Cash was a whore. Hell, no one could even blame him what with looking how he looked, walking like he walked (he simply... swaggered), talking like he talked (the silver-tongued devil), and riding around on his bike with his leather cut. Yeah. He could have any woman he wanted. And Cash wanted a lot of different women.