I got up, desperate for the distraction I didn’t even ask what it was.
But when I got there, it became obvious why Emily had been radio silent for twelve hours.
She had been on her way here.
“There!” She pointed at me through the fence. “That’s my friend. Caroline.” She scowled at me. “Can you please tell Mr. Scottish Steroid here that I am not some spy sent to infiltrate the club.” She grinned. “That’s you.”
Fuck.
I looked to Elden. “She’s okay.” He didn’t move, nor did his expression. I knew that he was figuring out whether he should trust me or not. Because the men might’ve forgotten that I was a rat when they needed help with vagina stuff, or opinions on aftershave—Claw—or invitations to torture drug dealers—Swiss—but when it came to the safety of the club hinging on my word, I was still a rat.
I waited, interested to see just how far I’d moved from my position, unsure of what I hoped for. Did I still want to be seen as an outsider? Because then that would make me still a journalist. Still kind of what I was before. Or did I want to be accepted by the club I’d become too comfortable with? Did I want to be recognized as part of the family?
I didn’t have time to decide because Elden opened the gate and Emily descended on me.
Well, she didn’t actually come and hug me and fuss over me like a regular girlfriend might when she had the knowledge that her friend had recently been held captive by a biker club and had her dead fiancé come back to life and then kill someone in front of her.
No, she handed her suitcase to Blake like he was a hotel porter, looked me up and down, I’m assuming hating my outfit and then making sure I didn’t have any limbs missing. She met my eyes.
“We need to get fucking drunk.”
“Well,” she said after a tequila shot. Her fifth.
She’d been in the building for as many minutes.
No lemon, no salt. Because she said only ‘pussies’ did that. She was also allowed to be a feminist and call people pussies because she was claiming the word back from the men that thought they owned it. No way they owned it, they didn’t even know their way around it.
Her words, not mine.
And despite ‘technically’—also her word—being a lesbian, she’d done enough research to be able to have that opinion. Mostly because Emily liked all the information to go to battle on any subject. And because Emily liked sex.
And she exuded it.
She was all curves, all hair, all attitude. And she dressed impeccably, always elegant and tasteful with a dash of slutty and tacky—her words again.
Today, to travel five hours across the country and to a biker compound, she was wearing high waisted white pants, tailored to perfection, a silk white blouse with a plunging neckline that showed her ample bosom, fine gold necklaces going down her chest. Her strawberry blonde hair was curled into loose waves down her back.
And she had on six-inch heels.
In other words, the opposite to me.
It was safe to say she made an impression walking in.
I was pretty sure every single jaw dropped when she sauntered in, ordering everyone around. To my immense surprise, Blake had acted exactly like a hotel porter, dutifully taking her designer luggage into the clubhouse for her.
“You.” She pointed at Claw, who was halfway through undressing her with his eyes. “Stop staring at my tits and get me and Caroline tequila.”
“You.” She pointed at Swiss who was sitting at the bar, drinking and likely thinking about depraved things he could to do his next victim. Or sexual partner. “We need those stools, and no dicks within earshot.”
Again, I held my breath at the reaction these men would have to a woman they didn’t know, wearing six-inch heels and class from head to toe ordering them around like servants and not treating them like sex gods like the club girls did.
But I should’ve known better.
They reacted exactly how she wanted them to.
Swiss moved.
Claw put two shot glasses and a bottle of tequila down on the bar.
“I think I’m in love,” Swiss murmured.
“You like eating pussy?” she asked him, sauntering over to take his seat.
His eyes glowed. “Breakfast lunch and dinner, baby.”
She grinned. “Me too.”
“Fuck, now I’m in love,” Claw decided.
I rolled my eyes and moved to sit beside her.
“It took weeks for them to decide they didn’t want to kill me and now you’ve got them declaring love after two minutes,” I said, pouring the tequila.
“We still haven’t decided,” Claw said with a wink. “It depends how favoring your depiction is of me in the story.”
“Movie,” Emily corrected. “Without seeing all of this.” She gestured around the room, her eyes moved to the men, despite being a lesbian she had a healthy appreciation for the male form. “And all of that. It’s definitely a movie.”