I hear a noise. Curling into the closet, I attempt to make myself appear as small as I possibly can. It isn’t easy with my belly being as big as it is. I don’t know where Jack is, although it’s not like I really want him to save me anyway. However, better the devil you know at this point in my life.

I’m a survivor. I don’t live life, I survive it. At seventeen years old I’ve seen and been through shit that would make grown men cry. I refuse to break though. I’m not weak, at least not mentally. Physically I’m like a newborn baby, just as weak as the life growing in my stomach.

The noise gets louder, boots. I know what they sound like on the floor, I could probably even guess the type—motorcycle.

The closet door is wrenched open and I look up. The man staring down at me is wearing a familiar cut, Notorious Devils, and he wears a grizzly expression beneath his beard and long greasy hair. His dark eyes narrow on me, then travel down to where my hands are shielding my belly.

“Fuck,” he curses. “Where’s your man?”

I shake my head, my auburn hair flying around my shoulders. “Not my man,” I mutter.

Jack isn’t my man, even if he thinks he is. He most definitely is not. He’s a fucking monster. But like I said, better the devil you know. He was better to me than the monster before him, even if only marginally.

“You’re someone’s Old Lady then?” he asks.

The question is thick and heavy, as he waits for my answer. If I tell him yes, then he’ll take me back, and that’s one hell I refuse to go back to. I’d personally rather stay with Jack then go back to Montana. The man in front of me loses his patience. I watch in horror as his giant hand reaches down, wraps around my bicep and he tugs me to my feet in one swift move.

His black eyes roam my face, closer this time, and I shiver. It’s as if he can see into my soul. I hate it. Nobody needs to know that much about another person, and I want to close myself off, but his gaze is too intense.

I hear voices, but I can’t look away from him. He dips his chin. “Nothin’ bad’s gonna happen to you, darlin’. Not anymore,” he rasps.

“Don’t take me back to Montana,” I whimper.

He nods once more. “Got no plans to head to Montana anytime soon. You’re with me until this little one makes it into the world.”

“Why?” I breathe.

He smirks, and I notice that he’s not scary at all, he looks almost kind. “I was a medic in the Army. Then, was an EMT for a while when I got out. I’m going to bring this baby safely into the world. Figure if I had a kid, I’d want someone to do that kindness for her. Then, I’ll get you to safety.”

“You find one?” a gruff voice calls out.

The man in front of me grunts before turning his head. “She’s a kid, about to pop this fuckin’ baby out. We need to get her somewhere comfortable. Help her out,” he murmurs.

A low whistle sounds and the new man in the room chuckles. “Savior of the world. There are some cabin rentals I saw near the clubhouse. She can lie low there until you’re ready to drop her off.”

“You’re safe with us,” the man in front of me says.

I doubt I’m safe with him. I doubt I’ll ever be safe. I wasn’t born safe and I’ll die the same way. However, he says he’s a medic, and I know that this baby is going to come soon.

Jack was going to take me to some compound right before I delivered, and I knew if he did, I would never have a chance of getting out. At least now, I have a chance at surviving, and hopefully, my baby doing the same.

Lifting my chin, I take a step forward. The man places his hand on the small of my back and leads me out of the small bedroom into the living room where there are five other bikers standing around. They all look at me in surprise, but none say a word. We leave the little hellhole of a house, and I climb onto the back of his bike, holding on tightly as he takes me away.

I pull out my guitar and strum a few chords. I like to play in the quiet of my room, sometimes if the weather is nice, I’ll go out into the woods and play too. It’s how I got my road name, Crooner. I play and sing, and once it was the only thing I lived for. I wanted to be famous. I had the drive and ambition, but that’s all done and over with now.

Closing my eyes, I think about my mom. When she died, that drive inside of me just left. Most men here have been fucked over by life one way or another, most of them since they were kids. Not me, not until I was an adult.

My parents were good growing up. I was an okay student, not in trouble much, and didn’t do drugs. My father was a strict religious man. He taught me certain things in life when it came to the future, to dating, and marriage. Sex was for one thing, and one thing only—procreation.

Married couples could partake in the sins of the flesh, but unmarried people couldn’t, not in a way that could reproduce in any way, whatsoever. When I turned sixteen, he told me about a loophole to his teachings. I never questioned it.

What my father said was fact, it was law, and it’s stuck with me right, wrong, or indifferent. Even though I know that it was completely fucked up. It’s like part of me cannot get it out of my subconscious.

When I was eighteen, I took off for Nashville with my parents’ blessing. Then, my mom got sick. I came back home and helped my dad take care of her.

She had a stroke, and they said she was stable, then she had another. She went into the hospital but never came back out. A month of waiting by her side, just me and my dad, watching and waiting for something to happen. Then she finally took her last breath, my dad and I finally went home. It was empty, a shell of a house without my mom’s presence.

The days turned into weeks and my father became ill himself. The doctors couldn’t explain it, but I knew it was from a broken heart. My mother was his everything, married at sixteen, they hadn’t been separated for even a night. It was ridiculous, and it was beautiful all at the same time.

When my father followed behind her in death, I was left alone. I became depressed and started drinking a lot. Then one day, I hopped on my bike and I rode. I found myself at the Canadian border. I passed through with the intention of only visiting. It’s been ten years. I’m sure if the American or Canadian government found out about me, I’d be thrown in the slammer.

But I found my home here. My family. I walked into the Cash Bar to drink my worries away, and that’s when I ran into Snake and Free. They were just getting their new club off the ground and we hit it off. It didn’t take long for me to decide that I wanted in on their new group. Bikes, bitches, and booze. It was a winning combination for the new man that I’d become.

“You need some company?” a soft voice asks from the doorway.

I don’t stop strumming but glance up at the woman. She’s only wearing a G-string and a cut-off tank top. “C’mon in, babe.” I don’t know her name, but I fuck her the most out of all the whores here at the clubhouse. She also likes to sing, so sometimes we jam together.

Setting my guitar to the side of my bed in its stand, I watch as she walks further into my room. She tugs her tank top off, slipping out of her thong as she makes her way toward me.

I’m already shirtless, so I make quick work of shedding my pants, leaving them in a pile on the floor. I reach over to my nightstand and grab a condom from my drawer. I quickly sheath my cock as she climbs on top of me.

“You know what I want,” I say.

She frowns, looking back behind her at the open door, and then to me, she slips off of my lap and crawls onto the bed. Slowly, she positions herself on her knees with her chest on the mattress. Reaching for the lube in my nightstand, I put some on my fingers and coat my cock with it.

Grabbing ahold of her ass, I spread her wide, positioning myself against her back entrance and I slowly sink inside of her. Once I’m completely buried inside, she lets out a groan. Sliding my hand up her spine, I fist her straw-like hair in my hand and pull her neck back.

I fuck her, watching her ass shake each time my cock slams back inside of it. Everything around me is white noise, I can’t hear her, or what she’s saying as I fuck her. My only focus is my cock, sliding in and out of her asshole. Nothing else matters right now. I’m lost to it, lost in the action and the feeling of pleasure. I own her fucking body right now, I control it.

When her ass squeezes my cock, I know she coming. I quickly pull out of her and then rip off the condom before I jack off onto her still pulsing ass. When I come, the white noise slowly disappears and all I can hear is our mixed breathing and panting in the room.

“Shit, you can be rough, Crooner,” she hisses.

I grunt, sliding off of the bed and find my jeans. I pull them up my hips and zip them, leaving the top button undone. “You seemed sad today, but apparently you’re not,” she snorts as she uses the towel next to my bed to wipe her ass off.

Silently, I take it from her and throw it into my hamper across the room. It misses but lands in the general vicinity, so I consider it a success. “Most of the other guys want blow jobs, or something, not you,” she rambles.

“You got a problem with what I want, and the way I fuck?” I ask, arching a brow.

Her lips snap closed, and she shakes her head once before she speaks. “It would be nice if you fucked my pussy, Crooner. You’ve never once been inside of me like that,” she whimpers, slowly walking toward me.

I shake my head, lifting my hand to her hair and fisting it. “You know my rules,” I growl.

“Don’t you miss pussy?” she asks.

My cock aches at the thought. I do miss pussy. I fucking love pussy, but I have hang-ups and one of them is I don’t fuck pussy unless I’m in a committed relationship. It’s the only way I can justify my father’s insistence about sex being for procreating.

Just another fucked up thing that has my brain all screwy and ass-backward. My father’s loophole was anal. You can’t make a baby if you’re fucking some chick’s ass, so since I’m still all kinds of fucked up, that’s how I get off with whores.

“We could be together, exclusively you know,” she offers with a pout.

I smirk down at her. “Sorry, babe.”

She rolls her eyes before she speaks again. “You want to sing?”

“Sure.”

I walk over to my guitar while she settles onto my bed, still naked, and we spend the next couple hours singing country songs together. If there was a whore I would consider making mine, it might be her. She’s easygoing, nice enough, and lets me fuck her ass without reservation.

However, a clubwhore is not the kind of woman I want to settle down with. I don’t know what kind of woman I want to make my own, but not someone all of my brothers have fucked, that’s for sure.

Crooner slowly walks into the bedroom, and I fight the urge to rush over to him. It’s been several weeks since he was shot, since he almost died in my arms, but he’s recovering quickly. He’s walking around unassisted now, and he even has color in his face again, or at least what I can see of his face since his brown beard hides most of him.

“You’re up?” he asks, his voice husky and low.

I shrug. I don’t tell him that I was up the second he left the room, that I knew something was wrong and I was scared. I shouldn’t be scared anymore. My father is dead, Samuel Jones is dead, and nobody else is coming after me ever again. However, I’m still scared, weak and scared.

“Couldn’t sleep,” I lie.

His dark blue eyes find mine, and he watches me for a moment. I can tell he doesn’t believe me, but he doesn’t call me on it either. “C’mon to bed, then,” he murmurs.

He doesn’t go straight to the bed though, instead, he walks over to the playpen where my baby, Easton is fast asleep. He looks down at him and my heart skips a beat when he reaches into the pen to stroke his soft cheek.

Crooner straightens and strips out of his clothes a second later. I shamelessly watch, my heart racing for a different reason now. His stacked muscled chest that continues down to his lean waist where his boxers sit at his hips, make my mouth dry. He runs his fingers through his long hair and my eyes snap up to watch. Another thing that makes my heart skip.

Honestly, everything about him makes me weak in the knees. It shouldn’t. I should never want another man to even look at me again, but there’s something about Crooner, just Crooner, that makes me want more.

I’ve never been attracted to a man before, not until the moment I saw him. His eyes met mine, and I knew there was something special about him. He hasn’t left my side since I arrived here four months ago, and I know if I asked him, he never would. Then, there’s the fact that he completely adores my son. Crooner is the whole package, a package wrapped in leather but complete and perfect, just the same.

“C’mon, babe, it’s late,” he mutters.

I watch as he slips between the sheets and I quickly follow him to do the same. I’m wearing one of his old t-shirts and a pair of his boxer shorts. I’m completely swallowed up by his clothing, but I don’t care, I love the way they feel on me. It feels like he’s always hugging me.

“Taking you two back to the trailer tomorrow,” Crooner announces from beside me.

He’s always careful not to touch me, especially when we’re in bed like this. I’m thankful, but also a bit disappointed as well. I love the way his rough fingers feel against my skin, and I silently beg for more from him, no matter how wrong it is to want it.

“Okay,” I mumble, trying to hide the disappointment in my voice.

He doesn’t say anything else, so I roll onto my side, tucking my hands beneath my cheek. I close my eyes. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know if he’ll still be around me and Easton all of the time, or if his life will continue on the way it was before we came crashing into it. Especially now that I’m no longer being threatened by anyone.

“Hayden?” his deep voice asks in the quiet room.

“Yes?”

His fingers trail down my forearm and I’m unable to hide the shiver that erupts throughout my entire body. I want him to touch me everywhere. I know he won’t, and maybe that’s one of the reasons that I want it so damn bad.

He clears his throat, as he takes his hand away from my skin. “You’re safe now,” he rasps.

“I know,” I nod.

I do know, I know that I’m safe and he and his club have made me that way. They’ll always keep me safe, so I shouldn’t feel the need to have him with me twenty-four seven like I did before. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want him there, because I truly do. I’ve fallen in love with Crooner.

I’ve fallen in love with a man I’ve never even kissed. A man who assuredly doesn’t want some abused child. One who has a baby of her own, one that isn’t his responsibility.

Pinching my eyes closed tightly, I force myself to fall asleep, or at least attempt to. I can’t think about it anymore, about him, about us—about what will never be, and everything that I wish it could be.

I listen to her breathing as she falls asleep next to me. Tomorrow everything changes again. She won’t be in my bed any longer, she’ll be back at the trailer behind the bar. She’ll be back to work, and Easton will be back with Fish’s Old Lady’s daycare during the day. I’m going to miss them, both.

Letting out a breath, I scrub my hand over my face and beard, tugging on it slightly. I can’t keep them here locked up with me just because that’s where I want them. It wouldn’t be right, and I would be no better than the Aryans if I did. She deserves to live a normal life, or as normal of a life as she can. She’s never been on her own, and she needs that freedom.

The last thing I want to do is lock her up in chains and have her hate me for it later down the road. Even if that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to cover Lucifer’s brand on her hip and have my brand put somewhere else on her body. Across her chest, and around her tits maybe, like a henna necklace. Obviously, I’ve spent far too much fucking time thinking about it. But that’s what I want. I also want to fill her with another baby, my baby.

All of these are reasons why I need to stay as far as fucking possible away from her. She’s not even eighteen years old, and here I am wanting to knock her up again, as if she hasn’t already lived through enough hell. Like she needs another kid and my brand of fucked up on her plate as well. I can’t imagine what her reaction would be if I told her I wanted to fuck her ass, too. She’d probably fucking cry. I would hate myself for it.

It’s best if I just leave her alone, let her live her life, and try to do it as normal as possible. Yeah. That’s what’s best.