Midnight Desire: A Midnight Riders Motorcycle Club Romance Part 1 (8 page)

…which would lead to something else.

A chain reaction of smaller events that would culminate in an avalanche.

The only way I could see to avoid it was to not get on the bike in the first place.

“You sure are quiet,” Jack said as he grabbed his helmet off the seat.

“I need to tell you something,” I said, my breath tight in my chest.

“Uh oh,” he joked. “Is this where you tell me you’ve got a psychopathic ex?”

I’m pretty sure you could handle him if I did,
I thought.

What do I say?

…how about the truth?

“I lost somebody back when I was in LA,” I said.

He put the helmet gently down on the seat, but never broke eye contact with me. “Lost somebody… like a boyfriend?”

“A cousin. We were really close.”

“Lost, as in…?”

“She died.”

He nodded slowly. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I, uh… I moved here to get away from all those memories.”

It was a lie, but a convenient one for my purposes.

“I can understand that,” Jack said.

“So, I’m… I’m just starting over again. In a way.”

“I can understand that, too.”

“So… this is going really fast for me.”

He walked around the bike and stood directly in front of me.

My heart was hammering a thousand miles an hour as his eyes looked deep into mine.

“This cousin… what do you think she would say to you if she could come back and tell you just one thing?”

The name of the man who killed her.

But I couldn’t say that.

“I don’t know,” I murmured.

“Well… I don’t know either,” he said with a gentle smile. “But I’ve lost a lot of people over the years, too. Guys I’ve looked up to… guys who were like brothers to me. I don’t know what they’d say to
me,
exactly, but I learned something from losing
them.
If I checked out and I got the chance to come back – just for a minute – you know what I’d say to the people I loved most?”

I felt hypnotized. Mesmerized.

“…what?”

His voice lowered to just above a whisper. “I’d say, ‘This is it. This is all you’ve got. Today. This minute. Nothing else matters. Live your life and love every second of it, and don’t worry about me. Don’t look back. Live life to the fullest, ‘cause when it’s all over, the only regrets you’ll have are the ones where you didn’t take every single shot at happiness you could.’”

My breath caught in my throat. I couldn’t tear myself away from his eyes.

And then he stepped forward and kissed me.

It was electric. Like a power greater than me swept me up in its wake. His lips on mine… soft yet forceful, sweet but aggressive. My head was lighter than air; I could feel my body on fire, and the only thing that could quench it was his tongue. I kissed him back, hard, and opened my mouth to him – felt him slip inside me as his arms encircled me, crushing me against his rock-hard body –

And then, like a subliminal frame in the movie of my mind, a single image of Ali, seven years old. Young and sweet and alive.

I broke away and lowered my head against Jack’s chest.

“I can’t,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

He spoke to me, and I
felt
the rumble of his words more than heard them – felt them reverberating from his chest into my body. “You’re here. She’s not. I’m sorry she’s not, but do you really think she’d begrudge you the chance to go on living? To be happy?”

But I’m not here to go on living or be happy.

I’m here to find the man who took that away from her.

I didn’t answer.

After a full minute of silence, he finally kissed the top of my head and took his arms away from me.

I immediately felt cold and alone, even though the air was warm.

He walked over to his bike and got on.

“When you change your mind… I’ll be around,” he said gently.

Then he started up the engine.

Seconds later, he was gone.

Back in my motel room, I opened the photo album, my hands shaking.

I wasn’t crying, exactly, but it was taking everything I had in me
not
to.

I looked at her photographs. Back when we were infants and our mothers held us next to each other for the camera. We were smiling at each other even then.

There we were at five, in pigtails and pink overalls, best friends for life.

Another photo when we were thirteen. I remembered the first time I had alcohol; it was a bottle of Boone’s Farm she’d gotten from an older boy she was seeing.

My first kiss, at fourteen, was with a guy she’d introduced me to. It was a good first kiss, too. One I still remembered.

There she was at fifteen, tattooed and pierced, already a wild child, already starting down a path of self-destruction.

I looked at her and cried. Wanted to reach out to her, reach back through time, and pull her away from the edge of the abyss.

But you know what?

I realized that, even if I could have gone back in time, she would have ignored my warnings.

She was one of those souls that flies too close to the sun.

A moth to the flame, no matter how hot it burned.

Too busy living to worry about dying.

It didn’t end well for her…

…but that didn’t mean that stopping myself from living would end well for me, either.

What would she say if she could come back to me, just for a moment?

I knew exactly what she’d say.

She’d say,
Go for it.

So I did.

It took me forever to find the house. Or at least it seemed that way as I crawled down back streets in the hills, trying to find landmarks in the dark.

It gave me time to justify in my head what I was doing, though.

This is actually good, because he’s the head of the Midnight Riders.

If I get close to him, I can get better access.

I can find out more information by being
with
him than by staying away from him.

I can use this to find out who killed her.

I realize that sounds really skanky – telling myself to sleep with a guy so I could uncover more clues about Ali’s death.

But understand that I was basically just rationalizing something that I really, deeply, passionately wanted to do.

I just couldn’t admit that to myself.

Not yet.

I finally found his house. Knew it was his from the Ford truck and the Harley out front.

I parked my car, walked up to the front door, and tried the doorbell. I couldn’t hear it inside, so I knocked on the door. Loud.

There wasn’t an answer at first. I thought about turning around… then decided,
Fuck it, I’ve come this far,
and knocked again even harder.

Finally the porch light turned on, the door opened, and there he stood, squinting at me sleepily.

He was wearing black boxers – and nothing else.

His muscles were incredible. His pecs and abs looked like they were carved out of oak; they actually cast shadows from the porch light across his bronzed skin.

His biceps were huge, his forearms massive; his shoulders were broad and powerful.

There were tattoos across his upper body – a Midnight Riders insignia with the skull, guns, and Bowie knife most prominent among them.

There were scars there, too, lighter colored against his skin. Several long, thin lines, presumably from knives – and a couple that were round and slightly raised, with depressions in the center. Bullet wounds, long since healed.

I got a good look at his lower body, too.

His calves were massive and powerful; his thighs strained against the material of his boxers.

Something else strained against the material, too. Something that hung thick and long off to one side of the center seam.

I hurriedly raised my eyes, blushing.

He was too sleepy to notice. He frowned – though in a curious way, not in anger. “What… what’s up?”

“Round Three,” I said, and walked straight into his arms.

I took him by surprise as I stood on my tiptoes, circled my arms around his neck, and pressed my lips to his.

Didn’t take him too long to recover, though.

His powerful arms closed around me and his mouth pressed feverishly against mine. I opened my mouth and let his tongue slide against mine, possessive and insistent.

He shut the door behind me, then slammed me against the wall and kissed me deeper.

A flood of adrenaline and pleasure shot through me when he did.

His bare skin was hot against my exposed arms as he wrapped himself around me. I felt his muscles move and swell, and I couldn’t get enough of his chiseled hardness against my softer curves.

Something else was moving and swelling, too. I could feel it pressing against my belly, with almost nothing between it and me. At first it was just a solid, heavy pressure, then it slowly began growing, getting thicker.

Jesus I wanted to see it.

I wanted to see it before it was all the way hard.

I broke off his kiss and sank down to my knees.

He looked down at me, confused, as though to say
What?

I looked up at him, bit my lip with a smile, and began to tug at the bottom of his boxers.

You know when a guy’s lean and ripped, and he has that curve of muscle where his abs go all the way down to the base of his cock?

Jack had that.

And God it was beautiful.

I watched the cloth slide down his flat, hard stomach and held my breath as the boxers pulled slowly away, like I was unwrapping the best Christmas present ever.

The outside slope of his abs… the dark thatch of hair against his bronze skin… and finally the base of his cock.

Jesus it was thick. Very wide.

And he wasn’t even halfway hard yet.

I kept pulling, and the shaft of his cock began to appear.

It was beautiful, with bulging veins beneath the perfect skin.

And though it wasn’t quite as thick as the base, the rest of it was plenty big.

I kept pulling on the boxers, down, down, down.

And his cock kept going, and going, and going.

Oh my God.

I’d seen a few male members in my life. This was the biggest
by far.

Finally, when the boxers were almost halfway down his thighs, the head slipped free of the waistband and sprang up. It was big and round and bulbous, blunt and pink and swollen.

He
still
wasn’t fully erect, but he was getting there quickly with every heartbeat.

My mouth was watering as I watched it slowly expand, raising upward, getting straighter and longer and harder.

Suddenly I was seized with the desire to taste it. To feel it in my mouth before he was hard all the way.

I circled him with my right hand and felt him firm and massive in my grasp. Hot as blood beneath my fingers, the skin soft as satin, but everything beneath getter harder by the second.

At my touch, his cock suddenly spasmed – a surge of blood that made his shaft slightly bigger. Then it deflated for a second, only to go back to slowly growing.

I could smell him, smell the clean musk of his body, the warm saltiness of his skin, the animal scent that drove me wild when he’d held me earlier.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I opened my mouth and took his head between my lips until he was nestled firmly in my mouth.

I felt another surge in his cock, and his head expanded, even bigger against my tongue.

My eyes rolled back in my head with the pleasure of feeling him swell inside my mouth.

“Unnnnh,” he groaned, and I felt his fingers touch my ears, brush my hair.

I began to suck, to move my mouth back and forth, wetting him down with my tongue. His taste filled my mouth – that elemental maleness, that musk, that clean taste of skin. I slowly moved my right hand up and down his cock, softly, feeling the bulge of veins beneath my touch, feeling his girth swell even thicker under my fingers. With my left hand I cupped his balls, feeling them big and weighty in the palm of my hand, cooler than the scorching skin of his shaft.

“Jesus,” he whispered, and within seconds he was fully hard, totally erect. He completely filled my mouth with just his head and an inch or two below that. I stayed like that, one hand caressing his shaft, the other playing with his balls – and then he took hold of my arms and forced me back to my feet. My mouth
popped
wetly off his cock, leaving him slick and beautifully huge.

I stood there wondering what I’d done wrong. Hadn’t he liked it?

Turned out he’d liked it a lot.

He wrapped his arms around me and crushed me against him, his mouth overpowering mine in a breathtaking kiss – and then his hands were roughly cupping my breasts, clutching at my ass, tearing at my clothing. He couldn’t get me naked fast enough. He was like a man possessed, only taking long enough to cup my boobs for a second before he went back to pulling off my top.

I helped him out, raising my arms, kicking off my boots, unbuckling my belt, shimmying out of my jeans and soaked thong. I laughed and giggled and nearly fell over. Within thirty seconds I was buck naked beside him, feeling his hard, wet cock brushing hot against my belly as he kissed me deep and long.

And then he reached down, cupped my ass, and hoisted me into the air.

Jesus he was strong, handling me as easily as I might have handled a pile of laundry.

I laughed in surprise, but wrapped my legs around him as he pressed me against his hips.

Oh my God.

His cock was right up against my drenched pussy, rubbing hard between my lips, his shaft sliding wet and slick against my clit.

I whimpered into his mouth as he walked us back to his bedroom. He never stopped kissing me the whole time. With every step he took, I could feel his stiff, round shaft moving between my lips, caressing my clit, bringing me closer and closer to orgasm – and he hadn’t even really done anything to me yet.

He was about to, though.