Before the Bulls, when he needed to fuck, he’d picked up nameless women at bars. Since the Bulls, he fucked sweetbutts at the clubhouse. Nothing more.
The woman in his arms now was nothing like that. He knew her. She was family. She was Maverick’s daughter.
It didn’t matter how much he liked her. He was wrong, and she deserved better.
“Kelsey … I …”
“Dex, if you want to kiss me, just shut up and do it.”
Too weak to resist her while he held her, he shut up and kissed her again.
And, again, she dived in with him at once, pressing her body to his as he closed her in his arms. She found the perfect fit of their bodies together, and when she noticed the hard ridge in his jeans, her hips rolled up, made that point of contact as tight as their mouths. He slid one hand down to clutch a mound of her sweet ass.
God. She was everything he’d imagined and more.
“What thefuck?”
At Maverick’s shout, Dex reared back and spun around. Instinct had him reaching back to push Kelsey behind him as her father charged.
“Daddy! Stop!” Kelsey cried as Mav grabbed Dex by the neck and swung him away from her.
His fist flew out and slammed into Dex’s face. He was wearing his rings, and Dex felt the flesh give under his eye.
The punch was hard enough to take him off his feet. On the way down, he slammed into the table and jostled the glasses they’d set on towels. They fell off the table and crashed on the floor.
Dex wasn’t going to fight Maverick over this. If a beatdown was coming, it was deserved.
But just as Maverick moved to grab him again, Kelsey slid between them, her back to Dex, her arms flung wide, facing her father. “Daddy! I said stop!”
Maverick stopped. He stood there, fists still clenched, huffing and grunting like a bear. Murder beamed from his eyes. Dex had never paid much attention before, but now he saw they were blue, like Kelsey’s.
Mav glanced around the room and then took a long, deep breath and pulled a measure of calm over his anger.
Dex looked around, too. They’d drawn an audience. The people who’d still been around at the end of this wake—Jesus, they were at somebody’swakedoing this—had clustered warily together at the doorways.
“Get the fuck out,” he snarled quietly at Dex. “You and me, we’ll finish our business tomorrow.”
“Daddy, it’s not your call,” Kelsey said, still trying to inject reason into an unreasonable situation.
“The fuck it’s not. Get your shit together, young lady. We’re leaving.”
The sliding glass door opened, and the women who’d gone out back some time ago, including Jenny, came in. Jenny took one look and turned to her husband. “What the hell, Mav?”
“Found this asshole manhandling Kelsey.”
“What?” Jenny turned a lethal look on Dex, who was still sitting on the floor, his face running blood into his shirt and down his chest, soaking into his sweater.
“Kissingme, not manhandling me. And I kissed him first!”
“Get. Your. Shit.” Maverick gritted. He kept his stare fixed on Dex.
Jenny’s look had softened with Kelsey’s assertion. Now she shook her head and sighed. “Maverick. Not here. Let’s go home.”
Kelsey turned around and crouched at Dex’s side. Her father growled when she did. The sound was so feral, so primitive, it could have come from an actual animal.
“You’re hurt.”
“I’m okay.”