Charlotte

“There’s one rule here,” Ben said, after he’d parked down the street from the Lake of Fire club house. “Follow my lead. Don’t question, get it? Just follow.”

I looked around. We were parked by the curb on a street in the ass end of Oakland. It was mostly warehouses around here, dark and empty at this time of night. But we were parked here because we couldn’t get near the club house due to the crowd of motorcycles parked down the driveway and all down the street. All kinds of them, all shapes and sizes, some souped-up and some not, the metal gleaming in the dark. From the club house itself emitted a loud echo of music, a grind of rock ‘n roll I didn’t recognize.

It was, I had to admit, a little intimidating. All those big machines. What had I gotten myself into? And why the hell had I thought I could come here alone?

“Okay,” I told Ben.

He was watching me, his gray-blue eyes missing nothing in the dark. “Don’t worry,” he said, reading my mind. “No one will bother you if you’re with me.”

“Because you’re so badass?” I asked. I actually meant it, but it came out with an edge of snark to it.

“No,” Ben said, ignoring my tone. “Because most of the guys in there owe me for getting their ass out of some kind of legal trouble or another over the years. And bikers have long memories.” He put his hand on the door handle. “I know so much dirt about this club it isn’t even funny. It makes me immune to their bullshit.” He opened the door and got out.

I did the same and followed him down the cracked sidewalk. The club house itself was an ugly concrete slab that looked like it had been built by a blind man in 1970. “Is this what MC club houses usually look like?” I asked, too nervous to be quiet.

“It was built as a recording studio originally,” Ben said, leading me up to the front door. “The guys took it over. They find the soundproofing useful.” He didn’t elaborate, and left me to ponder that statement as he pushed open the door.

I blinked as a waft of smell came out—sweat, booze, a thick cloud of smoke. There were only a couple of lamps to light the place, and I couldn’t see much. The first thing I saw was a man—a huge, muscled man, with a leather vest, a bald head, and a gray beard, standing at the door. He eyed both of us from small, dark eyes. The tattoos on his biceps looked old and blurred and hand-drawn.

“Charlie,” Ben said.

Charlie blinked at Ben and gave him a chin tip. “Ben,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while. Go on in.”

We passed Charlie the bouncer and moved into the dim light. The room was lined with sofas, with a bar along one wall. There were men everywhere—huge men. Sitting around, talking, drinking. There were women, too, wearing a lot fewer clothes than I was. No one made a fuss, but a lot of pairs of eyes watched us cross the room. I was suddenly glad of the clothes I’d chosen, and wished I’d added a parka for good measure.

Ben led me across the room to the bar. The man behind it looked about forty, weathered, with salt-and-pepper hair and tattoos on his arms that made them look nearly black in the dark. He, too, gave Ben a chin nod, ignoring me completely. It seemed Ben had a free pass in this place. The bartender pulled two bottles of beer from a fridge and slid them across the bar to us. I followed Ben’s lead and took my bottle without complaint.

Ben twisted the caps off our bottles and leaned against the bar, angled toward me. A casual tension, a sort of readiness, radiated from his lean, muscled body. The music switched to AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” and I couldn’t help but think how perfectly the song suited him, like a Ben Hanratty soundtrack. I took a sip of my beer and licked a drop off my lip.

Ben watched me, then his eyes came back to mine. “We’re waiting for someone,” he explained.

“Who?” I asked over the music.

“The old lady of the club president,” he said. “The president runs the club, but she runs the club house, and the parties. Unofficially. We don’t get anywhere until she says so.”

I coughed in shock. “Old lady? Come on. Is that serious?”

Ben rolled his eyes. “Follow my lead, remember?”

I looked around. “Does this old lady know we’re here?”

“Trust me,” Ben said, “someone told her the second we walked in.”

As if on cue, a woman came out of a side door and beelined across the room toward us. She was about thirty, with blond hair and dark roots, styled in a messy knot on top of her head with tendrils trailing down. She was dressed in a tight sleeveless top and a painted-on pair of jeans. She had a face that was good-looking in a high-cheekboned, regal sort of way, and her eyes were hard. Bikers twice her size parted before her like she owned the place.

“Estelle,” Ben greeted her, his voice polite.

“Ben,” she said when she got close, looking him up and down without pretense. “It’s been a while. Honey, I don’t know how you do it, but you get hotter every year.”

“Sure,” Ben said. “Magic. At this rate, by the time I’m eighty I’ll look like Paul Newman.”

“That happens, you come see me,” she said.

Estelle turned her gaze to me. I felt myself freeze, like a mouse in front of a cat. Her eyes were brown, her lashes heavily mascaraed, and her unreadable gaze took me apart piece by piece.

Though she was staring at me, Estelle’s words were directed at Ben. “You brought a woman,” she said. She didn’t sound entirely approving.

“This is Charlotte,” Ben said. His arm came around my waist and he pulled me gently to him so we were hip to hip. “She’s with me.”

For a second I was so surprised I couldn’t speak. Ben’s hand was casual on my waist, his body warm against mine. We fit together pretty easily, in fact, a thought I barely had time to register before I remembered Estelle was giving us both her laser gaze.

“Yeah?” she said. “Business or pleasure?” It sounded like a test.

“A little bit of both,” Ben said.

Follow his lead. Right. I let my body lean into Ben’s, my thigh against his.

“Huh,” Estelle said, not quite believing it. She looked at me again, then back at Ben. “Does this mean you’re finally over that bitch Jackie?”

I felt Ben’s body tighten against mine, but he didn’t show the flinch in his expression. “Her name was Janice,” he said calmly, “and the divorce was ten years ago.”

“Ten years? That long?” Estelle shook her head. “That’s a long time to be a raging cunt.”

I felt my jaw drop open in shock.

“Yeah, well,” Ben said, his arm still crooked around me, “it’s over and done. I don’t even know where she lives anymore.”

“I fucking hope not,” she said, still to him. She still hadn’t spoken to me. She was testing me to see how I would take it, if it would piss me off, if I would have to make myself known. I responded by leaning my weight against Ben’s hip, putting an arm around his waist beneath his jacket, and blinking at her politely.

Estelle looked me in the eye, and we understood each other.

“Okay,” she said, turning to Ben again. “What brings Mr. Hottie, lawyer to the billionaires, to my club on a Friday night?”

“I need to see White Castle,” he said. “He around?”

Estelle narrowed her eyes. “What’d he do this time?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

“Then why are you here?”

She was like molten steel, this woman. After meeting her for thirty seconds, she scared me as much as any of the huge guys in the room, but Ben wasn’t even sweating. I knew because I was so close to him. Since we’d moved from the topic of his ex-wife—something I was unbearably curious about, all of a sudden—his body had relaxed again, all smooth sinew against me. Despite the situation, I was very pleasantly aware of him, since I’d never had my hands—literally—on a man this hot before.

“What we have right now,” he explained to Estelle like she was a client in his office instead of a terrifying old lady of the Lake of Fire, “is a possible situation. Not a full-blown one, you understand. What I’d like to do with White Castle is resolve things before they escalate any further. Come to a resolution—to everyone’s mutual satisfaction, of course.”

Estelle rolled her eyes. “God, I love it when you talk dirty. He’s upstairs playing pool. Go ahead.”

Ben dropped his arm from my waist, and I reluctantly dropped mine from his. He turned to lead me away, and I turned to follow.

“Charlotte,” Estelle said.

I turned back and looked at her, surprised.

Her gaze flicked to Ben, past my shoulder. “Forget the business,” she said to me. “Take the pleasure. I would.”

I said nothing and turned to follow Ben again.

* * *

“Holy shit,” I said to him when we were in a stairwell, heading up a flight of stairs. “Why do I feel like I just escaped the Gestapo?”

“She liked you,” Ben said.

“How could you tell?”

“Because she didn’t kick you out.” He reached a landing, waited for me to come level to him, then motioned me ahead. “Ladies first.”

I started up the stairs ahead of him, my curiosity out of control. “Who is Jackie?” I asked. “And why is she a raging cunt?”

“Janice,” Ben corrected me, “is my ex-wife and the herpes of my life to date.”

I shot him a look. “You have herpes?”

“I do not,” he said calmly, not rising to the bait. “Believe me, I got checked after I moved out. But I’d trade Janice for herpes any day and call it a win.”

“Wow,” I said. “And how many wives have you had since then?”

“None,” Ben said. “And no girlfriends either. Pure survival instinct.”

That was interesting, but we’d reached the door to the second floor. Jeremy. I had to remember this was supposed to be about my brother. I looked at Ben’s handsome profile in the dim light of the stairwell. “Is White Castle worse than Estelle?” I asked him.

Something dark flitted behind his eyes. “Yeah, he’s worse,” he said. “Just pretend we’re together and you won’t get hassled. Bikers have a thing about property.”

“Seriously, that’s medieval,” I said. “Do they know what year it is?”

“You can go home anytime.”

I pressed my lips together. “Fine, boss. Whatever you say.”