Gage knew life-threatening, and it wasn’t.
To her.
To him, the cut fucking was. Because seeing blood staining her beautiful face made him flinch, his own blood boil beyond anything he’d experienced.
This wasn’t going to kill her, but it had marked her. Hurt her.
And from what he could see from her peaches-and-cream skin, her large hazel eyes framed by thick and somehow sexy-as-fuck glasses, her full and quivering lips, she didn’t need hurt. No way did she deserve to feel pain.
Which was why he’d roared off into the night before he could get off his bike and be the one to cause it.
First he’d taken a detour back where he’d come from, the road he’d found her on. Then he’d driven to his house—Rosie’s house, if you wanted to get technical, but now that she was married to the fucking cop, it was his—and found comfort in the bottom of a bottle.
Usually his comfort came between the legs of a club girl, but the mere thought of polluting the scent of vanilla and lilac against his skin sickened him.
So he sat in the dark and drank whisky till the sun came up, snatched a few hours of sleep and then went to the clubhouse. Mainly so he wouldn’t go to the hospital and see if she was still there. And take her home with him. Fuck her brutally and roughly, regardless of whatever injuries she’d sustained while crashing her car.
She didn’t tell him that.
About the crash.
Granted, he didn’t even fucking ask what had her out on the road in the middle of the night, bleeding. A good guy would’ve asked. Would’ve demanded an inventory of her injuries, would’ve made sure he’d catalogued them all. But Gage was not a good guy, so he hadn’t asked. It hadn’t mattered how she’d gotten there—it had just mattered that she was there.
But after speaking to her, smelling her, feeling her hot little body pressed against him, he’d needed to know what happened to her. Needed to find out if it was the work of another monster. And then he’d needed to kill them if that was the case.
It turned out it was no monster. Just a machine.
He’d driven out past where he’d found her to discover the car in a ditch, the front of the vehicle crushed against the curve in the land. Hence the whisky. Because she was lucky as fuck. She could’ve flipped at that angle if she’d been going faster—he knew she likely drove at or under the speed limit based on her tirade against him—and no way in fuck would he have found her walking down the side of the road with a minor head wound if she’d done that.
He’d likely have pulled her from the wreckage with not-so-minor injuries if she was lucky, or with a fuck of a lot of injuries and no heartbeat if she wasn’t.
The mere thought of that grated against Gage’s insides as he strolled through the doors of the clubhouse he hadn’t planned on having on the bottom of his cut for much longer. He was only there to go Nomad for as long as it took to get his head right. Which was obviously never. His head wasn’t ever going to be right.
She’d changed it.
Wiped out all the reasons why he was going Nomad in the first place. Scraped everything that had happened in LA from his mind like it didn’t matter.
And around her, no other bitches mattered. Not even crazy, homicidal ones.
He didn’t even know her fucking name.
But you didn’t need to know the name of the woman who was going to destroy you. You just had to fucking brace. Destroy her first.
For her own good.
But if he’d left town like he’d planned on, he wouldn’t have had to do that. But he didn’t think about that. Because he was a fucking coward. Because he was making excuses for staying in town, trying to convince himself that she had nothing to do with it. And he was trying, and failing, to keep her out of his mind when he damn near collided with a bald-headed, tattooed, smiling asshole.
He wasn’t really an asshole. He was actually one of his best friends—or as close to a friend as someone like Gage could get—but everyone who had the fucking audacity to be happy around his misery was automatically an asshole right then.
“Gage!” Lucky said, yanking him in for a rough hug before holding him at arm’s length. “Oh, you’ve gotten so big since the last time I saw you.” He put his hand on his heart like the theatrical bastard he was. “They grow up so fast.”
“Go fuck yourself, Lucky,” Gage grunted.
Lucky grinned. “I don’t need to.” He held up his tattooed hand, showing off the black ring on his fourth finger. “I’ve got someone who is legally obliged to fuck me from now until the end of time.”