Damon:A Bad Boy MC Romance Novel(4)

Tradition gives you solace, peace, connection, he thought. Tradition gives you a home.

And yet, more and more, Damon had found himself feeling homeless on his own soil.





3





Tricia looked over her desk at the library. Pencil holder, framed photo,  knick-knacks gathered over the course of months. Papers she was done  with. Papers someone else would need when they came. A computer, now  wiped clean of her log-in information and e-mails and files. She didn't  take anything.

Tricia looked over her apartment. All the clothes she cared about, all  the things she cared about, fit into a duffel bag at her feet. There  were books on the shelves, still. Flowers in a vase on the little desk  next to the bay window. DVDs haphazardly arranged in a pile beside the  TV in the living room. Pots and pans and plates and glasses and all the  detritus of a human's need to eat in the kitchen. The comforter still on  the bed. She looked for anything else she might take. She didn't take  anything.

Tricia looked over the Main Street of Duvall, Massachusetts. Tiny and  bucolic, and not entirely unlike the town she was returning to. Now, in  the first true blush of a Northern summer, potted flowers hung from the  streetlamps and stores left their doors open to give passers-by a  reprieve from the heat, a brief blast of air. There was no litter on the  sidewalks. There were people walking to and fro, looking happy or  unhappy; either way, it was no business of Tricia's. She hadn't made  many friends. She didn't take anything from Duvall.

All she had to take  –  all she could claim as new  –  was the feeling that  she was better off than she was when she came. That she spent most of  her days functioning perfectly normally. So perfectly normally that if  you were to sit her down at a bar and swap stories over drinks, you'd be  aghast and struck with disbelief when the truth came out.         

     



 

Tricia thought that might be the reason she hadn't managed to make more  friends in the little town. Her coworkers at the library were pleasant  and unscathed, all with decent marriages and simple stories. When she'd  finally opened up about what had brought her there, they were  sympathetic to a fault. And they never really treated her the same. They  treated her like she was an orphan, or something too tender to touch.  They meant well. They meant exceptionally well. She didn't blame them  for making things worse.

She loaded her duffel bag into the trunk of her car and sat behind the  steering wheel. In a movie, she might have paused before starting the  car and driving off  –  a long and poignant moment where she gathered her  courage and everything else inside her into a tight bundle, prepared  herself to propel into the past and the future at the same time. But she  didn't, just turned the key and pressed down on the pedal and left the  town behind.

It had all started the previous autumn, when a motorcycle club, the  Steel Dragons, came to the Volanis brothers looking to take over the  marijuana business in Kingdom  –  they wanted to start introducing some  more heavy-duty drugs to the small town, and didn't want any competition  from the gypsies. When the brothers refused, the Steel Dragons fought  back, and they fought dirty.

Tricia's involvement in the affair was pure, unfiltered bad luck. That  bad luck had a name, incidentally; its name was Paul Tiding.

Paul was Tricia's boyfriend that season. And he liked to show his  affection with his fists. Tricia never thought of herself as the sort of  girl to fall in with a man who'd abuse her, but there she was, being  choked by her boyfriend outside the local bar. Cristov Volanis acted as  her savior, running Paul off and bringing Tricia back to his trailer to  spend the night in safety. The next morning, as she was leaving the  trailer, someone saw her and made an assumption  –  an assumption that  would change her life forever.

The bikers had confused Tricia for Ricky, thinking that it was Tricia  who Cristov loved; they kidnapped her, intending to hold her hostage  until the gypsies promised to leave town for good. For one awful night,  she was at their mercy, tied up and bound. When she struggled and  screamed, they punished her by putting her out in the frigid cold.  Tricia had truly believed they would kill her. But they never got the  chance.

Because Damon Volanis killed one of them first.

And, in doing so, Damon made sure that she would never forget him. He'd  been the one to wrap his arms around her, offer her the first bit of  warmth in that cold hell. Released her from her ties. Carried her to  safety. When she thought of him, though, those weren't the things that  she thought of.

Instead, she thought of a joke he told her when they first met, before  the kidnapping, when Cristov brought her back to the trailer he shared  with his brothers. It had been a rough night for her, though nowhere as  rough as the nights to come. Damon offered her the first thing that made  her feel better. As it happened, it was also the last thing that made  her feel better.

"Why was the nihilist dating service such a success?"

That's what she remembered. That, and the way just being around him had  seemed to make things calmer. The way his eyes held hers like a steel  trap, and told her that it was going to be okay. The things he said  without saying them. And the way she felt sure that she would meet him  again. That something was going to happen between them. That something  was meant to happen.

Of course, she could never have predicted the circumstances that led to  their meeting again, when he saved her with a bullet on a cold November  dusk. And, compared to the kidnapping, her abusive boyfriend seemed like  a walk in the park, making Damon's ability to comfort her afterwards  far less significant. But still … when she thought of home, now, she  thought of him.

It had been just over six months, and outside of some trips to Delaware  to testify against the men who'd hurt her, Tricia had been living in  Massachusetts, where there was an outpatient clinic for crime victims  and the safety of distance between her and the remaining members of the  Steel Dragons who might want to silence her before she could bear  witness. Living in a strange town, with a temporary name, a temporary  address, a temporary job, a temporary everything had taken almost as  much a toll on her as the actions that had made such precautions  necessary. She missed her friends and her family. She wanted to come  home.

But as she watched the landscape slip backwards on the interstate, her  knuckles tight on the steering wheel and her jaw aching from tightness,  she wondered if she shouldn't take some wise words to heart.

You can never go home again, she thought.         

     



 





4





She was naked on his bed, honey-colored hair draped across the pillow,  eyes like melted gold looking up at him. Her lips, full and pink, pouted  slightly. Moving down her body, her breasts generous, round as peaches  and just as soft; her sides tapering down and then out again over the  curve of her stomach; her hips wide and luxurious; thighs strong; calves  quivering.

His hands at her neck were all fingers tracing her collarbone, the place  where her ribs met. His mouth on her breast, then on her lips again,  then playful, dipping into her bellybutton. Her thighs parted to meet  him, and when he entered her it was with the sort of wild satisfaction  that drew all existence to a single point. She was endless, and he had  everything to give.

It seemed he would never stop finding places to bury himself inside her,  that this first thrust would last forever. He bit down on the flesh of  her shoulder, wincing as the smooth and warm walls of her accepted every  inch of him and begged for more …

Damon woke up with his mouth dry, his heart pounding, and his cock hard  as stone. He groaned, closed his eyes, wanting to keep dreaming that  dream. But daylight was pouring over him, across his eyes, filtering in  between his eyelids. And the dream was gone; all that remained of it was  the throbbing between his legs, the insistent and annoying need.

Damon hadn't masturbated since he was a teenager. It was a matter of  principle, willpower. He felt that it would cheapen the real thing. Just  because he could come whenever he wanted to didn't mean he should. But  mornings like this made that self-deprivation especially hard to keep  up.

There was nothing for it but to wait for it to go down on its own.  Luckily, he was alone in the trailer. That was the case more often than  not these days, with Kennick and Kim living in the trailer that used to  be the greenhouse and Cristov spending most nights at Ricky's. He rose,  trying to think of anything that would quicken the slow fade of his  erection. Coffee. His morning run. A prayer. The fight that was rapidly  approaching. Anything but the fact that Tricia was coming back to  Kingdom.

His cock didn't soften when he made coffee. It didn't soften when he ate  a bowl of granola. It didn't soften when he stepped into the shower,  even in the cold water. Normally, he would have waited until after his  morning run to shower, but the idea of trying to keep pace with an  advertisement for Viagra in his shorts was painful to even think about.