The Blood Spider president looked down those enormous barrels and went pale. He made a gentle down motion with both hands and his men stopped moving. “Don’t do this,” he muttered to me. “We can work something out.”#p#分页标题#e#
I shoved the gun right up against his cheek, pressing the metal into his skin. The temptation to shoot the bastard was almost unbearable. “Believe me,” I snarled. “We can’t.”
I walked across the stage, pushing him ahead of me until we were looking down at the two guys in suits holding Annabelle. Professional bodyguards, probably ex-military, from the look of them. Whoever they worked for had serious money...and from the looks of it, he’d bought her. Bought this sweet woman who’d never hurt anyone. The rage was expanding in my chest, swelling to fill every inch of me. “Let her go,” I grated. “Or Blood Spiders MC is going to need a new president.”
The two guys in suits looked at each other uneasily. The tension in the room built and built. I glowered down the barrels at the president and gave a low growl.
“Do it!” snapped the president. “He’s crazy!”
The suits looked at each other again but then released her. Nobody wants the death of an MC’s president on their hands. Annabelle ran to me, grabbed my arm and pressed her body tight to mine.
Damn. For a second, the rest of the room faded out. All I could think about was the way her warm skin felt against my bare forearm and the smell of her hair, like honeysuckle on a warm day. This is Annabelle?! She was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.
I backed towards the door. The two guys in suits glared at me, eyes hard, lips pressed into tight little lines. “You’ve got no fucking idea what you’ve done,” said one. “Volos will kill you for this.”
Who the fuck is Volos? “He can join the fuckin’ queue,” I said.
I kept backing towards the door. Halfway there, I realized my mistake: distracted by the feminine wonder pressed against my left hip, I hadn’t taken the president with me as a hostage. The further I got from him, the less threat I was. I could feel the bikers start to shuffle towards me as they realized the same thing. Shit. Just another ten feet and we’ll be out of here. Five feet. Three feet.
Someone smashed a bottle over my head.
And then everything went to hell.
6
Annabelle
I’d convinced myself that my memory of Carrick was exaggerated. After all, when you’re a kid, everyone seems big. So I wasn’t ready for the size of him. I wasn’t ready for his height, or the way his shoulders stretched the back of his leather cut to its limits: a back you could break a two-by-four across and he wouldn’t even notice. I wasn’t ready for the bulk of his chest under that tight white t-shirt, for the sheer intimidating presence of him as he yelled at the men holding me.
His voice, though...that was the same. Ancient dark rocks grinding together, each rough impact throwing out silver sparks. Except it had a whole different effect on me, now. The low, throaty rasp of it seemed to vibrate through my whole body; the sparks raced down my spine to finish in a silver crackle of heat that blossomed through my groin.
Then the men finally let go of my arms and I ran to him, crushing myself against the big, solid mass of him, like hugging a rock face to shelter from the elements. God, he was even bigger than I remembered and everything was so hard: his tanned forearms, criss-crossed with thick veins, were like warm steel. And the touch of him...it was so familiar, even after twelve years, and yet so new. I felt...right, pressed up against him, even with the hell we were still in. As if I was finally in my proper place.
I looked up at his face and my breath hitched. As a kid, I hadn’t appreciated that he was absolutely freakin’ gorgeous. I thought I’d invented that as a teen, twisted my memories into some idealized Irishman. But no exaggeration was necessary: that hard jaw covered in black stubble; those dark brows that gave him a brooding, are you looking at me? glare; the wide, full lips... He’d lost a little of the boy over the years and gained a whole heap of the man, and the result was the hottest guy I’d ever seen. Hot and mean. Savage and hard-bitten, one of those men who’d been hardened by years of fighting. I saw scars on his neck that didn’t used to be there and the raw, violent menace rolled off him in waves, pushing even the bikers back. I’d never in my life seen anyone do intimidating like Carrick.#p#分页标题#e#
Then I looked closer and frowned. I still remembered his eyes from that night twelve years ago: the blue of a sky just after a storm has cleared. Now they were different, as if the storm wouldn’t let go. I could glimpse the blue but it was struggling to pierce the darkness. The change made my chest ache: what had he been through, to lose that innocence?