But she couldn't seem to stop herself.
"You're making this about you," she informed him as if he hadn't threatened her and more, as if she didn't care whether or not he had. "It's not."
"It's about respect," Chaser replied in that gravel and velvet voice of his that held more than a hint of Georgia and rubbed all over her like he was buffing her with his own special chamois. She wanted to lean into it. And it was harder-much harder-than it should have been to keep herself from doing it.
Even with that clear sign of danger, she didn't step away.
Lara didn't back up so much as an inch even though Kaylee's father-a parent like any other parent, she tried to tell herself, no matter that he was wearing a 1%-er patch on his cut that proclaimed his outlaw status loud and clear-made her fingers feel numb and her heart beat six times faster than usual, and that had been when he was all the way across the room. Up close, he was a whole lot worse. Long and tall and muscled everywhere, so roughly gorgeous she had to focus on the end of his nose instead of his actual face or she thought she might actually crumple where she stood.
Get a grip, Ashburn, she snapped at herself. Let a man like this see fear and he'll destroy you.
Though there was a little part of her, deep inside and inching lower and lower in her belly by the second, that suggested the issue here wasn't fear at all.
Lara chose to ignore that part. "You want me to respect you, your club, your fancy patches, whatever. I understand that it's an issue for you."
"Yeah, babe. That would be a great start. Because people who don't respect the Devil's Keepers don't do too well in Lagrange. You should ask around about our former mayor." His hard mouth moved in something far too deadly to be a smile. "You can ask him yourself. He's not in jail or dead. Yet."
She risked glaring straight into his noticeably startling eyes then. They were a dark and smoky whiskey color, much like the drinks he no doubt poured down his throat nightly while choosing between the various anonymous women he'd forget before he sobered up. And the shock of meeting that steadily condemning, highly alcoholic stare of his was intense. More than intense. Lara found she had to lock her knees beneath her to keep herself standing straight and tall. Well. As tall as it was possible to feel next to a man this relentlessly huge, all of it solid muscle, and that height of his that made her belly feel hollow.
"I have an idea," she said coolly. Deliberately. As if she was made of the same steel her desk was. Or that he was. "How about we respect Kaylee for a change and see how that goes?"
Chaser's hundred-proof eyes seemed to flash bright with a kind of terrifying internal lightning that sizzled all over her and through her, too, and no. This really wasn't smart.
In fact, it was pretty much the textbook definition of dumb-which was exactly what she'd sworn to herself she'd avoid. Lara had chosen a biker town deliberately, but she'd had a plan. She'd been so sure that she, with her unique perspective, could help the kids here who couldn't see any life beyond the local club. And she'd promised herself that she'd stay the hell away from the club itself-which shouldn't have been hard, as she'd had her fill of biker clubs, outlaw or otherwise. It was the kids swept up in the destructive wake of these clubs that interested her.
She wanted nothing at all to do with bikers like the one before her, a ruthless threat made flesh like he was more wolf than man. The fine hairs on the back of her neck had been prickling since she'd looked up and found him in her doorway. She didn't need to study his cut to know he was dangerous. It emanated from him like a force field, daring her to keep needling him.
You have to stop poking at him, she snapped at herself.
Lara knew better than to poke sticks, however sharp, at ruinous men. She'd grown up surrounded on all sides by feral creatures exactly like this one. Bloodthirsty and lethal. The bane of many an existence and proud of it. Crafted into a rough kind of cruelty from his head to his feet, with a dark power that seemed to hum around him, changing the air near him. He didn't have to do anything to prove how dangerous he was. It was written on him. Literally. It was in the tattoos that she could see on him, one climbing up to grip his throat in case she missed the whole sleeve down his left arm and the others marking his right forearm and bicep beneath the battered old T-shirt and leather cut he wore so proudly, proclaiming his identity and associations to all and sundry.
Marking him an outlaw at a glance.
Lara knew what all those patches on his black leather cut meant, and they weren't Boy Scout troop merit badges. She could see in them that he took pride in the fact that he lived outside the bounds of normal life, that he'd killed for his club, that he was an enforcer-not a position a soft, easygoing man ever reached in a biker club. Not that soft and easygoing men tended to join outlaw organizations in the first place. She saw the names of the dead he mourned, to be distinguished from those he'd delivered into the afterlife himself, and she'd bet that if she asked him about his work over a few beers he'd wax emotional about the former and be cold and uncaring about the latter because in his world, each man made his own bloody end, one hard choice at a time.