Outlaw's Promise(19)

I was no expert but her hair color looked natural. Did that mean that, under those panties….

My cock slapped against my stomach, achingly hard. My hand moved towards it...and then my hands tightened into fists. Fuck! I was not going to start stroking myself. What was I, a teenager?

I angrily toweled off and pulled on my jockey shorts and jeans, then stomped barefoot and topless into the bedroom, steam curling around me. Annabelle was sitting on the bed and she looked up at me as I walked in. Instantly, the tension was back. The pull was so strong, I had to physically force myself to take a step back or I would have just dived on her, pushed her down on the bed and kissed her hard and deep. Damnit! How the hell am I going to get through ‘till morning?

Just be gruff. Be surly. That’s the answer. Don’t even speak to her. Sure, it felt wrong, but it would keep me from doing something we’d both regret. I’d make myself hard and cold as fucking stone, she wouldn’t even be able to—

“Thank you.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Thank you. For saving me.” She slowly stood up. “I didn’t have a chance to say it before.”

And suddenly, all my cold stone melted into warm Jell-O, like she’d taken a laser to me. “Yeah. Well.” I looked everywhere except her face. “I owed you, didn’t I?”#p#分页标题#e#

“I didn’t know if you’d even remember me.”

I stared at the TV. The remote for the TV. The little dish with the packets of sugar and Sweet n’ Low. I wanted to say that when I’d heard her voice on the message, it had triggered something deep inside me. Without even having seen her, without knowing she’d turned into this beauty, I’d just known I had to save her. But I just grunted, “Yeah. Yeah, I remembered you.” I meant it to sound throwaway, but it didn’t come out like that. I wound up catching her eye at the end, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t look away. Fuck!

“They made you a member,” she said, nodding at where my cut lay, carefully folded on the bed. “What else happened? What have you been doing?”

Scaring people. Hurting people. Sometimes, killing people. “MC stuff,” I muttered at last.

Annabelle walked closer. Even in her heels, she was a little shorter than me: I had to look down into her eyes. “Thank you for getting me out of there.” She was so close now that, when she breathed, her breasts almost brushed my chest.

“It was a fucked up scene,” I muttered. “What happened, anyway? How’d you end up being…” I broke off. I didn’t want to say it.

“Sold.”

Just the sound of the word made me mad. That someone would dare to think they had the right to possess her. “Yeah. Sold.”

She sat down on the bed. That made it a little easier to breathe but, immediately, I missed that closeness. “My step-dad,” she said, staring at the floor. “He was in a lot of debt. I guess the Blood Spiders offered him a way out.” She glanced at the window. “You think we’re safe here?”

“Safe as we can be. I’ll keep watch while you sleep. And tomorrow I’ll get you out of here.” I ran a hand through my hair. What I was about to say went against everything I was used to. “And then you should go to the cops.”

She immediately shook her head, long red hair hanging down to cover her face.

“They can protect you—”

She lifted her head. “Teston’s chief of police was one of the guys trying to buy me.”

I felt my face fall. “Ah, shit.” Most outlaw MCs have some cops on the payroll. We do. But if the chief of police was mixed up in this, if he felt confident enough to be right there at the auction, it probably went even higher. Maybe the state police were in on it. Annabelle was dead as soon as she got in a cop car.

That only left one option. “You could go to the FBI,” I said. I had trouble getting the word FBI out for two reasons. Firstly because the feds—ATF and FBI—are our worst enemies, always circling, waiting for us to screw up just once so they can take us down for good. And secondly because saying FBI took me straight back to that night: a crashed car by the side of the road and the smell of cordite and blood….

The room spun a little. I reached behind me and let one hand rest on the handlebars of my bike: I needed something to keep me grounded.

“It’s not just the auction and the bikers,” Annabelle said, her voice almost a whisper. “The man who was going to buy me, Volos...even they were scared of him. I heard the president of the Blood Spiders talking to my dad: he’s protected.”