“A mistake often begins with a heavy case of lust…” - Luxe

 

When a thief met a tracker.

 

 

“How long are you sticking around for this time?” Luxe heard, but hardly paid any attention to the man she’d had a handful of dates with over the last few months, taking long pulls from his beer bottle. She was too busy watching the colossal mountain man striding in through the double doors with a pack of other bikers. He barely fit those shoulders, Dear god.  Walking like they owned the place. Leather and denim and absurd masculinity.

Only the one in the black beanie hat seized her attention.

He was magnetic. A direct line to her pleasure zone down south.

Wide in the shoulders, slim down to his tapered waist, denim and leather encased that body perfectly, his arms were fucking herculean, solid muscle, he probably bench-pressed a small planet.

But it was the way he had thrown his head back belting out a laugh at something someone had said to him that grabbed lust from down deep in her shoes, showcasing brilliant white teeth sheathed in a black beard thick enough to draw fingers through. The bar was too noisy to hear the sound he made, yet she felt it in the pit of her belly. Dios.

She stared slyly while they all rounded a table and sat as a group.

Feeling like a stalker, it was impossible to tear her gaze away, it was locked on the guy’s face, every expression that crossed his eyes Luxe took note of.

Who was he?

“The Souls are in the house.” Muttered Amos through clenched teeth.

For once in her thieving life, she wasn’t cataloging what she could lift from people. Not that she sunk so low as to pickpocket anymore, she was no artful dodger, she liked bigger and better, things that made more money than a pawnbroker could give her.

Cars.

Art.

Jewelry.

Money.

She was a big dreamer when it came to making money, minimal effort for a large pay-out, with less risk was her motto, but it never stopped her mentally robbing people, seeing how easy it would be to swipe their latest smartphone while they chatted, or to slip a set of car keys from a tight jeans pocket.

She could do it all, but having some ethics left, she never took that step into personal thieving.

“Hm, what?” tuning back in, she dragged her eyeballs back from the beard, looked across the table to find Jamie’s gaze on her, the bottle to his wet mouth.

A mouth she’d kissed.

“Not long at all. Mimi has some crazy idea she wants to go on a singles cruise. I told her those are full of desperado senior citizens who want to fleece her out of her life savings.”

Jamie’s VP laughed and twitched the ball cap he wore.

“And what did she say to that?” Asked Jamie, having heard stories about her abuela many times, who for a woman in her sixties had a better social life than Luxe did. At the last count, she was dating three gentlemen friends. Her grandmother was the original player.

“She told me she has no life savings and she was going on a cruise to get laid.”

Both men laughed.

In an alternate reality universe that cool Luxe would laugh, too, and say go, Mimi, get it, sadly Luxe was here and inwardly cringing to know her grandmother had a better sex life than she did, like in what world was that fair? Dios. Mimi was trying to kill Luxe with over-share. Wasn’t it bad enough she had to witness the old guys that came to pick her grandmother up for dates with horny smiles on their craggy faces, probably with a pocket full of Viagra as well.

Dios.

Dios.

“So, you’re rushing back home to stop the old girl from marrying at sea?”

“She sounds like a nympho-raver.” Amos chimed in. Before she knew what she was doing, Luxe reached across the table and thumped the cap right off his head. “Shut your goddamn mouth when you’re talking about my Mimi,” even if it was sorta-kinda true.

Amos growled, glaring, looking like he was about to knock her off her chair. The idiota could try. “Cool it.” Jamie told him.

“Yeah, listen to your master, good dog.”

Amos had always rubbed her the wrong way. Maybe because he was so loyal to Jamie and wouldn’t spit on anyone if they were on fire. Something about the man just didn’t add up. Besides which, he’d never gone out of his way to be friendly to her, either.

“Would you two knock it the fuck off, it’s like having kids.” Jamie rose. As tall and big as he was, with the shocking blue eyes and black hair, he just didn’t do it for Luxe, not in the way a lover needed to. It would be so easy if she could fall in love with him since they were friends, they’d been there and It hadn’t worked. “I should go play nice with the locals.” He indicated to the other MC table.

Thankfully Jamie’s lapdog AKA Amos followed and she watched the exchange with a guy wearing a top-knot who looked to be in charge, they met in the middle, slapped bro-hands and got into a talk.

She hadn’t realized until her eyes slid across their table that someone was watching her.

Oh, wow.

Beard guy staring directly at her.

Flutters began low in her belly, her boobs ache.

That sensation was what she’d been missing with Jamie. She’d tried to find it, hoped it would arrive after their failed dates and not a thing. One look from that beard and her body was feeling it all.

A tidal wave of lust hit Luxe so hard she could barely pull in a breath as the guy in the beanie hat winked over at her.  

Without showing her shock, she arched an eyebrow, daring him to make a move.

He smirked and maybe he would have until someone at his side caught his attention and their eye-fucking was broken.

Shrugging, Luxe chose the next best option and walked over to the bar to buy something to eat. The woman serving smiled and tossed a mass of curls back away from her face. “What can I get you?”

“Tell her how good the fire wings are, Ruby.” Offered a deep rich baritone voice belonging to none other than the beard himself.

Recovering quickly from the two punches of heat from his masculine scent and the way his leather vest fit over his wide shoulders, Luxe addressed the bartender. “Just a bitter lemon Martini, please.”

“Not a fan of spice?” he asked.

“Vegetarian, not a fan of dead flesh.”

His laugh was equally arousing. Luxe almost licked his face.

They exchanged names. I could do with some company. She’d told him flirtatiously.

It moved quickly after that

They seduced outrageously.

Luxe didn’t plan to find a quiet corner booth and crawl all over him.

She didn’t plan to let him pull her shirt down and suck on a nipple until she thought she might come right there in a busy bar in Colorado.

Nothing she did in that first hour with Grinder was part of her normal pattern.

Nor was the way she slid her hand into his jacket, intent on shoving it off his shoulders, until her fingers felt the cool links of a chain in the inside pocket.

It was instinct, even as his tongue swirled hotly in her mouth.

She’d never felt this hot before, this needy.

The beard tasted like nothing before, his tongue made her do things she’d never done in private let alone public before.

Her head spinning, dry humping his thigh as he palmed between her legs.

“I want you.” The words came unbidden causing him to growl against her lips.

A noise so appealing she’d sucked on his lip like he was made of rich chocolate.

“You’re so fucking sexy.” He growled streaking his mouth along her jaw, biting her earlobe. His hands everywhere turning her into velvet hotness and his willing slave ready to fuck over the table if necessary. “Let me have you. Let me give you the best fuck of your life,” he commanded. “I need to fuck all this heat, Luxe.”

Oh, god. Making her excuse to use the bathroom, he growled for her to come back to him, and just the way he said it like that sent flashes of pleasure everywhere.

Come back to him.

She was outside before she could justify a reason, gulping in fresh air like it was about to be turned off.

Her body had never felt so alive, so why was she standing on the sidewalk?

Why was she hurrying towards her car?

Why was she driving ten miles over the speed limit just to get away from all that sensation in her body?

Only when she came to a stop sign did Luxe unfurl her fist and found that gold chain in her palm.

Oh, fuck. What had her thieving fingers done?

The small piece of gold looked at her accusingly and she shoved it in the glove compartment.

There was no going back now.

Not when she’d stolen from the beard.

 

 

Present Day

 

 

Luxe had always seen her life in a series of mishaps that narrowly she’d scraped through. For a lot of years, she’d danced on the edge, sometimes balancing perilously close to going to jail, or worse if her mark caught her stealing from them. She’d stolen from some very dangerous people who wouldn’t think twice about ending her life.

She told herself she liked the rush, the adrenalin her drug. But that wasn’t entirely true.

She was good, extremely good at taking things that didn’t belong to her and making them hers, it didn’t mean she didn’t have a brain, that she couldn’t do a normal every day job if she wanted to, join the ranks of every other American and the 9-5 society.

But the rush she once experienced in her earlier days, those random highs she chased from one reckless job to the next, was long gone.

Monotonous repetitive, it was all the same noise now.  

This one last big job, it could set her up for a good while.

Whereas once she would take foolish risks and somehow walk away unscathed, these days her planning took much longer, she weighed pros against cons and drew up a strategy long before she even attempted to put her hands on something that didn’t belong to her.

Maybe she could be called a business woman now.

She did rather fancy having people working for her instead of doing all the dirty work herself.

Maybe the kidnapper would help her in more ways than one.

Especially now as she’d recalled just how she’d stolen from him and the reason she hadn’t returned to the bar that night and finished what they’d started between them. It all made sense now, and she could understand a slither of his anger.

Luxe met Grinder on the corner of Westmeadow drive. An uninteresting suburbia street where kids played in the street and where absolutely no Russian Mafia would be hanging around to see her meet with him.

It was all very cloak and dagger and gave her a tiny thrill of old.

His bike pulled up beside her Lincoln. The way he slung his leg over the seat and stood to his full height caused a riot inside her underwear, she shamelessly watched him pull off his helmet, hooking it on the handlebars, it was the first time she’d fully seen him without the black beanie hat in daylight and wow... How much more handsome he became, his hair going in all directions, he simply used his long-tapered fingers to tame it before he slid into her passenger seat, closing them in together.

The car instantly became too small.

“Did we really have to meet out here in the sticks? I feel like you want to give me a code name next...”

“I don’t take risks.”

He mocked. “You did last night sneaking into their building for all and sundry to see, you might as well have announced you were there to steal their gold bars.”

She brushed off the accusation, knowing he was right. It had been sloppy.

For the next thirty minutes, they were all business. Discussing back and forth what she needed from him, what he could do and when. It surprisingly went well, they agreed on most everything. It was a shock they thought alike.

“How do you propose to get huge as fuck paintings out from under their noses?”

“They’re not traditional paintings you’d see in a museum. They’re sketches in a small protective tube about so big.” Luxe held her hands out ten inches apart.

“And you have someone who wants to have these sketches?” his brow curled up mockingly. “People are fucking weird.”

“They’re worth a lot. Therefore, I want them. And the Russian guy stole them first.”

“And you know they have them… because?”

“It pays to know everything in my line of work, Nathan. Who has what. The whys never matter, only how you can extract it from them is what’s important. I heard who had them and followed their trail here from New York.”

“You realize who they are, right? You don’t fuck with the bratva and live to tell the tale at supper time.”

She knew this was the riskiest job she’d ever pull off. But if she did it, her and Mimi would be set, no more risky jobs.

“We all have to die sometime, sí?”

Grinder growled and she felt the noise of his disapproval in her belly. Resisting the urge to squirm or to recall every detail she’d tipsily done last night on his lap, on his mouth, she started up the engine.

Giving him a not so subtle clue it was time for him to go.

So spatially aware of every inch of the man, she focused instead out of the window at four kids playing street hockey, before she did something stupid and forget they were planning a theft together and climbed onto his lap to finish what she started with the kidnapper.

Fingers grasping her chin broke that contact.

It hadn't taken Luxe long to memorize the facet of Grinder's personality that was all sexual gravity and if she gave into that pull even for a second she'd, well ... face first splat. There was no real guard against that kind of charisma except to stay far, far away from it.

And here she was, in close confinement with him in a car. Smart, Luxe.

Unfortunately, when he was this close a humming began right around her lower abdomen.

Gasping, he turned her to face him, kept holding her chin, gray eyes piercing, they were almost nose to nose. The hum intensified temporarily before it morphed into a clutch of intimate muscles. “I’ll do this for you, Luxe, steal your precious sketches, but you don’t talk about dying again, ya dig? And don’t take stupid risks while we’re in there tonight. If we can’t get them then we walk away, shit isn’t worth getting plugged with bullets.” His breath feathered the baby hair near her temple escaping from the bandana she always wore for that very reason of taming them back.

She could only nod. What her brain registered as his ability to always want his own way was the same trait she found gallingly appealing.

It was all wrong and still she was attracted to him.

It didn’t matter his crime, an attraction to this man was natural born, she just bet all women fell victim to that face of his. His voice, the way he dressed and swaggered like he owned the rights to shake any womb in the vicinity, and that scent stuck in her nose were all designed to drive a woman to sexual distraction.

Butterflies in her intestines and she tried her best to act normal.

He eased closer, to speak near her ear. The idiot looked like he was considering kissing her. Would she allow it? Yes. God help her, yes. He eyed her mouth like a predator, or rather, the kidnapper he was.

“And then once I’ve made it up to you, we talk.”

Both eyebrows shot up into her bandana. “Talk about what?”

“Us. You and me being a thing.”

“Us? You and me? Being a thing?” Astonishment colored her voice as it rose and rose.

“Fuck.” He cussed dropping her chin, staying in the same breathing space as her, she watched him haul in a bunch of air all at once, the action inflating his chest wide enough to ping buttons around her car. Dios. “I want to kiss that look off your face so bad, you don’t even fucking know, Luxe. You were in my bed last night, I tucked your sexy body in, avoiding your octopus hands trying to grab my dick.”

She turned beet red and quickly switched it into a scowl.

“The minute we’re square we talk about us and you can get back to grabbing me. Agree with me, Luxe.”

Muttering Spanish to herself, it would have been easier to deny everything he claimed, to even deny the effect his body had on hers, not to mention the taste of him was still in her mouth, but Luxe was not a woman who hid behind denials.

She was attracted to the kidnapper.

Plain and simple pounding, demanding desire.  

“Sí. We’ll talk. Now get out, I have underwear to choose for the mobsters tonight.”

His kiss came out of nowhere, crashing down onto her mouth, he took advantage of her gasp to slide his tongue inside and oh, Dios… a kiss of fire, of lust and mutual need.

“Wear them for me.”

Just as quick as his lips had taken possession of hers he wrenched away, told her to be ready for him to pick her up and slammed out of her car, roaring away on his bike.

He left his ferocious growl behind still ringing in her ears.