Chapter 6

Ellie

At six thirty in the morning, Cade dragged his tongue up the side of my face. The smell of dog kibble and general doggy breath was overpowering. I wiped the slobber away and sat up in a state of still being half-asleep.

Cade leaped off the bed and whined. He needed to go outside.

I rolled off the mattress and followed Cade down the hall to the sliding glass doors. I let him out into the backyard, where he ran a few frantic laps before doing his business. As he frolicked, I filled his water and food dish.

After letting him back inside, I got ready for the day. I was heading back to Axel’s shop, and he had told me he wanted to get an early start. I wasn’t an early riser. I needed coffee, and lots of it, before I was able to concentrate on my work.

So, I brewed a pot of coffee and sipped on it while I got dressed and washed my face. I had a few minutes to spare before I had to leave the house, so I spent them with Cade on the sofa. I scratched his ears and patted his belly when he rolled on to his back.

“I gotta go, buddy,” I said as I got to my feet and made for the front door. Cade followed me, his claws clicking on the hardwood. “I’ll be back tonight, though. Don’t worry. We’ll watch a movie, and we’ll go for a you-know-what.” Saying the word “walk” around Cade was bad news. He would get too excited for his own good, and I would feel too guilty not taking him out. So I didn’t say the word, and I mentally promised him I would take him for a walk later that night.

“Bye, and be good,” I called through the crack in the door before closing it and locking up behind me.

On the way to Axel’s house, I stopped to grab us coffee and breakfast. I knew what he liked. I’d been picking up food in the mornings for us for years. I didn’t do it all the time, maybe once a week, but I knew Axel always appreciated it. He was the sort of man who never seemed to notice when he was hungry. If he had a lot on his plate, I hated to think how long he would go without taking care of himself.

I had worked an overtime shift with him one time where he didn’t stop to take a single break over the course of eighteen hours. When I asked how long he’d been working, he blew me off. I waited another hour or so before asking again. That time, I noticed the purple bags under his eyes. I had accused him of pushing himself too hard. We argued about it. I didn’t back down.

Johnny had been there and thought it was hilarious. He had found it especially humorous when I won the battle and sent Axel home to sleep and eat. He had returned the next morning and given me a sullen thank you. After that, we never brought it up again. That was one thing I really liked about Axel. He was a proud man, but he wasn’t ever too proud to thank me or tell me he was wrong.

Axel was at the gate when I pulled into his driveway. He let me in and waved as I parked in my usual spot. I got out of the car and passed him a cup of piping hot black coffee. Then, I grabbed the fast food bag full of hash browns and breakfast sandwiches.

“Do we have time for a quick bite first?” I asked.

Axel snatched the bag out of my hand and peered into it. “Fuck yeah, we do.”

We dug into the sandwiches and hash browns and ate standing up. It didn’t matter to either of us.

When we were done eating and had been working for a half an hour or so, Axel tugged a rag in his back pocket and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Forgot to mention, I talked with a guy last night who’s selling a shop. It has everything we need. I’m buying it. Then, I won’t have to worry about people coming to my house. You and I will go in on Monday and get everything in order.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding as I digested what he’d said. “So, no more need to come here to work?”

“Nope,” he said.

For some reason, my heart sank. I was enjoying working with Axel at his home. I liked having time with just us. It had been easy for us to talk and laugh without the constant distraction of other MC members or the endless stream of customers. I would miss this.

After working a little while longer in silence, I began wondering how Axel could even afford any of this in the first place. His house and his property were massive. The shop itself was worth more than my apartment doubled, maybe even tripled. This was not the sort of income I had been led to believe an MC member had. Mind you, I knew a lot of things they let me believe were probably lies.

It was for my own good, of course, but they were lies nonetheless.

“Hey,” I asked as I crouched in front of one of the bikes. “How can you afford a place like this? I just, I don’t know, I never thought this was the kind of place you came home to at night.”

I knew my question was forward. It was really forward. But Axel never seemed to be bothered by how direct I was.

“I made some good investments over the years. I didn’t mess around with money when I was young. Never had any debt. I got lucky, I guess.”

I looked over my shoulder at him. He had never looked up from his work while he answered me. He was lying. I was used to it by now.

I chewed the inside of my cheek. It shouldn’t matter that he was lying. He didn’t owe me anything. He never had. But for some reason, I wished he would be honest with me. I wished he would come clean about how he and the others of the MC made their money. Like Johnny. It was a strange, wild, vicious way to live, and I wanted to learn everything about their lifestyle that I could. It was the same curiosity I had felt when my dad first introduced me to motorcycles. I had to know how everything worked.

He still had his back to me. He was wearing a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans today. The shirt was rather formfitting, casting aside all imagined thoughts of what might lie beneath the layer of fabric.

I could see the outline of what lay beneath. Abs. Broad shoulders. Muscled biceps. He was powerful. I had always known that. I had seen him dressed similarly before, too, but for some reason, it felt different today.

The muscles of his back were particularly hard to look away from.

His forearms were covered in grease and dark splotches from where he had brushed up against the exhaust. I watched him stand, and the hem of his shirt was rolled up ever so slightly. I could see tanned skin along his midriff, and below his belly button was a dark line of hair that vanished beneath the waistband of his jeans.

I swallowed as my gaze followed that down to the fly of his pants.

There had been a time where Axel’s presence made my panties wet and my mind race. He was a good-looking man. No, more than that, he was hot as hell and always had been. His dark and ever-present smolder had done things to my body that astounded me. I was always ready to go when he was around.

Which sometimes made things awkward.

But after years of rejection, that physical response to his presence had faded away. I thought of it as self-preservation. There was no way I could endure being so aroused by him every single day with no follow-through. There was only so much a girl could do with a vibrator.

Johnny had tried to push us together, but Axel withdrew and became closed off to me for a while. Now, it felt like we were finally back on the same page as friends, and I was more than willing to accept that.

But now, after spending so much time together just the two of us, my body was digressing back to how it used to respond to Axel’s presence.

My lips felt swollen. My mouth was wet. My fingertips were tingling with a fierceness that matched the heat between my legs as I thought about what mystery lay at the end of that trail of dark hair.

The way he moved was almost predatory as he leaned over the bike. The leather of the seat creaked, and his hand gripped the handlebars. I looked at his fingers. Strong, calloused, and probably warm. The compulsion to feel his hands on my bare skin was almost unbearable.

“You all right over there, Ellie?”

Shit, he was looking at me. There was no way in hell he hadn’t seen my checking him out. I was terrified that the rest of my body was giving me away. I could feel my nipples pressing up against the inside of my bra. There wasn’t much fabric between them and the air, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Axel was privy to a good look at them.

“Yeah, sorry, I got a little distracted, I guess.”

If he doubted me, he didn’t show it. Axel simply nodded his head, as if this was something I did often—which it most definitely was not—and scratched the back of his neck. “Isn’t there something else you’d rather be doing, Ellie?”

I blinked at him. What did that mean?

“S-sorry?” I stammered.

“You know. Have you ever given any thought to getting away from the MC? Away from all the bullshit and the life.”

“No.” I shook my head sternly. “No. I haven’t.”

He looked surprised. “Really? You’ve never been tempted to try something else? Or to work at a shop that operates a little differently?”

“You mean operates within the boundaries of the law?” I asked.

Axel nodded.

“I may have thought about it a little, a few years ago. Then the longer I stayed at the shop with you and the others, the more I came to see that working there wasn’t just a job. I always felt like I was amongst family. Everyone in the MC is my friend. You’re my friend. Johnny is my friend.” I wanted to tell him how much I felt like I belonged with them, but the words caught in my throat and I fell silent.

“Well, we like having you around.”

I looked up. Had he just said something kind to me? “You do?”

Axel threw his head back and laughed. I loved how it echoed off the walls in the shop and danced around my ears. “Yeah, we do. You’re all right, Ellie. You fit right in.”

I blushed for the hundredth time since working alone with Axel and dropped my eyes back to the task at hand. But I kept smiling for five minutes straight.