It was damn surprising how quick everything fell into a rhythm. From the day they moved all her stuff into his place she had settled into what she had called a guestroom. Kellan didn’t agree. It was just a room. If pushed, he called it a den. It was more of a spare room with a foldout couch, and some boxes he had never unpacked, but she hadn’t complained.
“Freshman year there were six of us stuffed into bunks so close that if I reached out, I’d smack someone in the face. Trust me, it is so much better than that,” she had promised as she hauled her boxes in. “I can make it homey.”
Homey. That word alone had sent cold chills into him. She wasn’t supposed to be making this homey. She was supposed to be closing ranks on her life and keeping her head down so she didn’t make herself a target. Gabriel had made it very clear that he’d love to keep her in his line of sight, and Kellan didn’t much like the look in Michael’s eyes either.
A few days later he’d seen her things all over the room. Her books stacked as neatly as she could without a bookshelf. She’d tacked a bunch of pictures up. Most of them were of people he didn’t know, but a few were of her doing things around a green campus, surrounded by the kinds of people who went to college. There was a set of her on some trip to some exotic place with lots of mountains in the background. His favorite, though, was one of her with her hair tied back, brows all knitted together, trying to feed a kitten with some kind of syringe.
What could he do about it? Basically nothing.
“Hey,” she’d said a few days later, her hand slapping a cabinet shut. “I know my life is in danger, but can I go to the grocery store, or the mall?”
“What for?” He’d taken a long drink of a cold beer. “We got stuff.”
“Well,” she’d said, opening the fridge. Her brows were drawn together, just like the picture. “You might be able to live on frozen dinners and beer, but I do appreciate a good home cooked meal from time to time.”
“I don’t cook.”
“Yes, you do. I saw you cook for my dad, remember?” When her arms crossed over her chest and she fixed him with a level gaze he felt an unexpected thrill. There was some sick part of him that liked the way her cheeks went all pink when she got frustrated, especially when she was wearing pajamas with little ducks on them.
He waved his free hand and flashed her a smile. “Fine, I don’t cook often. Your dad needed good meals, so…you know.”
“Yeah, I do know.” The entire statement had sounded loaded with meaning.
He had raised his brows at her. “Bull. You doctor animals. You don’t cook them.”
She snorted. “I am not getting into the ethical nature of different diets with you. What I will point out is that my mom did leave when I was a kid, and since you stayed with my dad you know his food habits as well as I do. Or lack of them.”
“Point.”
“And I am stuck here for the most part, and stressed. I wanna bake and cook.”
“You bake when you stress?”
“It’s normal enough. There are some doctors who say—”
He held up his hands and shook his head. “I don’t need the science stuff. Just tell me what you need, I’ll make sure someone picks it up.”
“Someone? I can’t go?”
It was Kellan’s turn to narrow his eyes at here. “Is cake mix a good enough reason to get shot?”
She looked disgusted. “Cake mix? Heathen.”
He laughed. “You wanna make a cake from scratch?”
“Cake, lasagna, cheese.”
“You can make your own cheese?”
She’d raised her brow at him. “Let me go to the grocery store, and you’ll find out.”
“No go. Write a list, I’ll see someone gets what’s on it.”
“Not you?”
“I gotta run the auto shop. You want me to pick up milk on the way home like a good hubby, all you gotta do is ask.”
“Cute.” She threw up her hands, her eyes rolling back. “Fine, fine. But it’s gotta be someone who knows what they are doing.”
A day later the fridge had been full of all kinds of things. His beer had been organized to a single shelf on the door. There were three different kinds of flour in the pantry. Kellan hadn’t known that there was more than one kind of flour, or that he had a pantry.
She had also stocked the bathroom with girly frippery. Lotions that seemed to be organized in some order of importance, several soaps, and two shampoos that weren’t his. Who needed two shampoos? He had assumed, as a lady of science, that she understood there was no logic in stock piling this kind of crap.
When he had brought it up she had just blinked at him coolly and said, “Shows what you know.”
He wasn’t particularly great with women on a personal level, but he knew well enough when arguing was pointless. The girl could cut a person down with words the way other people cut people down with guns.
Still, none of that was as bad as the day she’d walked out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.
Coming home early was a rare and precious gift, and Kellan wanted to make the most of it. The shop business was covered and business at the clubhouse was in a lull because everyone was battening down the hatches after the show of force from Gabriel’s men. With nothing to do he had decided to head home, have a beer, maybe go for a walk with Rocco. Maybe figure out a way to keep Emma from going crazy while on house arrest.
Then he heard the shower. It was too easy to picture pretty blonde Emma all wet and naked. He had made a promise not to touch her, but the nerdy blonde bombshell had a bad habit of walking around in tiny shorts and tank tops. A guy could only take so much.
Rocco was sitting patiently outside the bathroom door. His stubby tail wagging while he waited for his new favorite person to come out of the bathroom.
“Hey, traitor,” he said, kneeling down to scratch behind his ear. “She’s gonna be in there for forever, how about a walk?”
At his second favorite word Rocco bounced up and did a quick spin, his ears flopping around his square face while Kellan opened the door to his bedroom. There was a pile of clean laundry on his bed, folded. Kellan didn’t know whether to be annoyed that she was being a wife or amused that she’d folded his underwear.
He went with both.
She was doing a lot of wifely things, he realized. Cleaning up, sending him texts to ask what he wanted for dinner, they had even started watching television shows together. He’d have to find a way to stop that. Nice as it was to bitch about imaginary characters making stupid decisions, it wouldn’t do to have her getting attached.
He was coming out of his room with the leash in one hand when she had been stepping out of the bathroom in a steam of mist.
They had nearly crashed into one another and his brain went from focusing on a walk to focusing on Emma. It wasn’t fair. She looked good in jeans and a t-shirt. In a towel, dripping wet and smelling like one of the bottles of soap she had, she looked down right edible.
“You’re home early,” she said, adjusting the terrycloth over her breasts. It hadn’t helped. All it made them do is push against the fabric.
“Slow day.”
“Okay, that’s fine. I’m gonna make dinner. Does chicken sound good?”
There was a bead of water moving down her neck, it dipped over the swell of her breasts and into the line of her cleavage. She could have offered him cardboard dipped in grease and he would have said, “Yeah, that’s good.”
“Hey, Kellan. My eyes are up here.”
“Shit.”
She was sauntering back down the hall and towards her room when he finally got the blood going back to his brain.
Rocco leaned against him in hopeful expectation.
“Yeah, buddy. A walk sounds like a good idea.”
He had hoped the walk would get his mind off of how naked Emma was. It didn’t. His mind went from imagining ripping off the towel to the kiss they had shared at the altar. It had been a damn good kiss. Not just good, there was some fire burning inside that little blonde and he wanted to roll in it.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted a woman before. He wasn’t a damn priest. He had wanted, and enjoyed, plenty of chicks before. When he was younger, and the patch had been brand new, there had been a lot of women. Biker bunnies who had been eager and willing, a few outside the club who had been more sedate but no less visceral. Then there had been Nina.
Nina who’d looked on him with blatant disgust, and packed up her bags the minute they had gotten home. She hadn’t heard anything he said. She hadn’t been willing to listen. All that remained of her was an empty spot in the bed and junk mail with her name on the address label.
There hadn’t been as many women after that.
Now there was one, with long legs and big blue eyes, sashaying around his place in yellow terrycloth. What was a guy to do?
“What do you think, buddy?”
Rocco looked at him, his mouth open, tongue hanging out. He lifted his leg and marked a bush.
“Yeah,” Kellan snorted. “That’s great.”
He didn’t immediately go inside when he got home. He opened the garage and got out his tools. His mind worked better when he could work on something. An old bike, a decade past needing a tune up, sat on top of a flattened box. A splotch of oil marked the cardboard.
It wasn’t just that she was hot, though she was definitely that. It was that she stood her ground when she had something to say, and she didn’t back down when someone tried to intimidate her. Twenty-five-year-old Emma was a far cry from the scrawny teenage girl who had packed up and split over half a decade ago. That little nerd hadn’t been able to string together two sentences without stumbling over everything.
She was strong, she was confident, she was smart. A triple threat of personality that made a girl into more than a hot roll in bed. That was the kind of girl that could get under the skin and make a man want to be the best he could be.
“Shit.”
His thoughts were muddled and moving too quick to hold onto. He tugged off his shirt and wiped the dust and the grime from his face, neck, and shoulders. The scent of fried chicken and some kind of potato dish wafted from inside, cutting through the scent of oil and metal.
Rocco groaned and pawed at the door.
“Yeah,” Kellan muttered. “Yeah, I smell it, too, buddy. Come on, let’s wash up and head inside.”
He used the garage sink to scrub off the worst of it and splashed enough at the dog that he wouldn’t track in metallic dust. Emma had put some kind of order to his house, he didn’t want her hard work to go unappreciated.
She was standing over the stove when he came in. Golden brown pieces of chicken where floating in a skillet. She wasn’t wearing a t-shirt and jeans this time. She was wearing a sundress. The fabric was pale pink and thin enough that he could see through it where the light caught it just right. The curve of her backside was particularly prevalent.
“You look good.”
“Was going to go see my dad after dinner, take him some food and see how Joe is taking care of him.”
“Okay, I’ll drive you over.”
“Thanks.”
She pulled the chicken out of the grease with tongs and set it on a pile of paper towels. When she looked up she stopped. For a moment he didn’t get it, but when her eyes focused on his chest, rather than his face, he got it. He might not have been wearing a towel, but his shirt was off, and he had courteously rinsed himself off.
Turnabout, it seemed, was fair play.
“Hey, Emma, my eyes are up here.” He tossed her words back at her with a grin on his lips.
She blinked in confusion, and then dragged those big blue eyes of hers up his body and to his face. They rested there and filled with an emotion he didn’t know, but would have called deep. Her lips parted, and her tongue darted out over them in silent invitation. “Yeah,” she managed. “They are.”
He didn’t know who moved first, wasn’t entirely sure that it mattered. She went up to her toes and he dipped his head. Kellan fastened his mouth over her plump lips and she made a little sound. That sound hit him like a drug, and he wanted more. His arms wrapped around her back, hands fisting in that scrap of fabric he couldn’t call a dress.
“Yes,” she whispered when his mouth went from her lips down her neck. He didn’t know if he was kissing or licking or both. All he wanted was to taste her skin. “Oh yes.”
He palmed her pert ass and hauled her up. He set her on a clean square of counter and her long legs wrapped around him.
God, she had so much fire in her, so much passion. Her body arched to him, beckoning his touch. He granted it. Her skin was so soft beneath his fingers as he pushed her skirt up, revealing long inches of creamy thigh. She wore white cotton beneath—it shouldn’t have driven him as wild as it did. All he wanted to do was drag it off with his teeth.
“Emma, goddamn.”
“More, please, don’t stop now.”
She grabbed his face and brought his lips back to hers. Her pink tongue dove into his mouth, retreated, and dove again. She coiled around him like a living flame and he sank into it. His fingers laced into the neckline and he tore it. It shredded like paper. She crooned her approval.
She was laid out like a buffet of ivory skin and white cotton. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, framing her face and breasts like gold. She reached out to him, called to him.
“Damn.”
He dove forward and licked the line of skin where it met the cup of her bra. She shivered. Her hands dove into his hair and pulled him closer.
“More,” she begged. “Oh, please, Kellan, give me more.”
Her desire was making him crazed. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to drag her to the bedroom, the floor, or some spot in between. He was fumbling for the straps of her bra when his phone went off. He was willing to ignore it until her phone went off a moment later.
That couldn’t be good.
He made a sound and fumbled in his pocket for his phone.
“What?”
He had been right, it wasn’t good.
# # #
Hospitals all smelled the same. The smell of sickness and death carefully masked with disinfectant. While it might have lacked the smell of dog and cat Emma was used to, it wasn’t all that different when she walked through the sliding doors. Her hands were shaking and her mind was racing when she approached the nurse’s station.
“My name is Emma Ketch…Emma Mathers. My father was brought in a little while ago. Mac Ketchum.”
The nurse, with a round face and a two-dollar haircut, looked from Emma, who had managed to pull on clothes that hadn’t been torn off her body, to Kellan, who looked every inch the biker boy. The nurse’s lips formed into a line so tight the lips went pale beneath her professional lipstick. “Are you family?”
“Didn’t she just say that she was his daughter?” Kellan demanded.
“And you are?”
“Her husband,” he snapped. “Is there some kind of problem?” Kellan seemed to grow a foot taller, or at least take up more space. His broad hands splayed on the flat surface of the nurse’s station. He leaned over, just enough to show off his impressive height.
“Kellan—”
“Yes, I think I remember,” the nurse said.
She turned to her computer and was looking stuff up when Joe walked up, flanked by the ever silent Phantom and Rudy, who looked haggard around the edges. All three of them hugged both Emma and Kellan. Joe was warm, Rudy was brotherly, Phantom was cold. She wasn’t sure which offered the most comfort.
“He’s on the third floor, critical,” Joe explained.
“Already?” Emma asked. It usually took hours to get from emergency to critical, unless they truly thought you weren’t going to make it. Emma felt her stomach sink down to her toes, the leaden weight of it turning her legs weak. She must have made some noise or movement, as Kellan took her arm and kept her standing.
“He is not doing so well, Emma,” Joe explained. “If you will follow me, I’ll take you to him.”
Emma followed Joe’s broad back to the elevator and down the maze of halls lit with the hum of fluorescent bulbs. The sound of her feet on off-white flooring was too loud in her ears. This wasn’t happening, this couldn’t be happening.
There was a piece of blue paper hanging on her father’s door, she didn’t know the words on it, she couldn’t read them, but she didn’t think it was a good thing. The rest of the club was spilling out of her father’s room, a small army of men wearing the biker uniform. When she approached they all stopped chatting. They moved aside, letting her pass. Her stomach surged from the ground and into her throat.
One look at her father lying in bed and she knew it was even worse than she had imagined.
He wasn’t just pale anymore. The sheet beneath him was white, he wasn’t. His skin had taken on the particular gray sheen, constantly shinning with sweat, of someone who was spiraling. The age spots on his brow stood out like brown stars. His eyes were hazy and sunken.
He barely turned his head when she walked in. She could tell the movement hurt.
“Dad,” she whispered. “Oh no.”
“Hey, little girl.” He coughed hard enough to make the bed beneath him shake. He brought a cloth she hadn’t noticed to his mouth, when it came away there was a blotch of dark blood on it.
“Oh god.”
“Come here.” He lifted one hand; there wasn’t even an IV in it. The hospital wasn’t wasting it on him.
The protective railing had been lowered, making it easy for her to ease her hip next to him. His body was so wasted that there was plenty of space. He wrapped an arm around her. She bent and laid her head on his chest. His lips, waxy yet rough, pressed to her brow.
Joe was talking; she could hear his practiced voice passing on information. She was only half listening; she didn’t need to hear the science to know her father was going to die. It wouldn’t comfort her. That thought brought tears to her eyes. Science had always brought her comfort.
“You can’t,” she whispered, unable to bring herself to say the word die, but it hung in the air anyway. “I just got back.”
He kissed her forehead again. “You did. At least this way we can’t screw it up again.”
Sad tears, she realized, were cold. Drops of ice and wet that filled the corner of her vision. They dripped out of her eyes to roll down her nose and puddle on the thin hospital gown he wore.
“But I wanna be able to screw it up again. I want to yell at you and tell you you’re wrong. I just want you here. I feel like we just met.”
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. His arm wrapped tighter around her. “I’m going to disappoint you.”
A shadow fell across the bed. She knew it was Kellan before she looked up. His presence had a certain weight that she had grown attuned to. Their gazes met over the span of her father’s form. His hazel eyes were red with unshed tears.
Silently, Mac reached out. He took one of Kellan’s strong hands in his gnarled one and pulled him closer. Kellan didn’t resist.
“The club will make you president. You’ve earned it.”
Murmurs of agreement rippled through the gathered crowd. She had almost forgotten they were there. Kellan just nodded, his cheeks went red.
“You promise me you’ll take care of her. No matter what. Just take care of her. Keep her safe for me.”
“Yeah.” Kellan’s voice cracked. “I promise.”
Mac took one of their hands in either one of his and pushed them together. “I know neither one of you wanted this, that it isn’t how you two would have gone about it. But thank you. Thank you for doing it, and thank you for letting me walk her down the aisle.”
His voice was weak, and getting weaker.
“You don’t need to talk, Dad.”
“If not now, when?”
She had nothing to say to that. She just curled closer, hearing the heartbeat beneath her ear. It wasn’t steady. He was struggling to breathe. She couldn’t find any words. She couldn’t say anything.
“No,” she whispered. “Please, no.”
He kissed her brow, and his heartbeat grew softer.
“Daddy,” she whispered. “No.”