“No more lockdown?” Angel had just gotten Susie to sleep and she found Dax sitting on the couch drinking a beer. She had heard him on the phone a short time before, letting the front gate know they could ease up on the security, at least on who was leaving the ranch. He looked exhausted. His eyes were bloodshot and a deep line creased his forehead. As far as Angel knew, he hadn’t slept at all the night before. She wasn’t sure what he had done, and she wasn’t sure that she wanted to know.

“Trayvon Lee, the leader of Street Chaos, agreed to a truce. We’ll ease out of the lockdown to be sure, but things should get back to normal around here soon.”

She sat down next to him and said, “Do I want to know how you managed that?”

Dax grinned. “Not likely.” Angel shook her head, but she smiled too. The smile fell when she thought about her talk with David earlier in the day.

“What?”

“I was just thinking about something David said earlier, and I guess…wondering if I’ve been too hard on Kat.”

Dax raised an eyebrow and said, “If David got you to believe that, he and I are going to have to get together. I need some tips…” She socked him in the arm.

“I’m not that hard to deal with.”

Dax laughed. “Not at all, baby. But…when it comes to your family…”

“I know. He just made me remember how hard everyone was on me when I fell in love with you.”

“Well, of course that was different. There was no way you could be expected to resist me.”

She laughed. “You think so, huh?”

Dax slid his arm around her shoulders and settled back into the couch. Angel curled into his side. He sighed and Angel wanted to ask him what was wrong…but again, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer. She felt his lips brush against her forehead, and she closed her eyes and for a few seconds the rest of the world disappeared. Dax had the ability to do that, and that was one of the reasons she loved him the most. “We might be off lockdown, baby, but we have a bigger problem.”

Damn it! She was afraid of that. “Okay, lay it on me.”

“We dealt with Chaos with as little bloodshed as possible. We didn’t lose any guys and nobody ended up on Doc’s table. Their guys are mostly in one piece…”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It wasn’t, but when I was laying out the details of our ‘truce,’ Trayvon Lee, their shot-caller, pulled out an ace he had in the hole. He agreed to a cease-fire, but he won’t agree to move out of our territory and if I force the issue…”

“You’re scaring me, babe.” Angel sat up and looked at Dax. It wasn’t like him to hesitate or beat around the bush. “What’s this…ace in the hole?”

“They found something in one of the cars they jacked. It’s what made them so bold. Trayvon said that the car belonged to a private investigator, and he had a locked box in the trunk. It was full of photographs, some of them over a decade old.”

“What are the photos of?”

“Me, doing things that could send me away, and for a long time, according to him. He only showed me one, but he said there are dozens just like it.”

“You?” Angel thought back to her days as a cop…the days when she was one of the people that wanted so badly to bring Dax and the Skulls down. She would have paid good money for compromising photos of him back then, and now, she’d kill the man that would use them against him. It’s funny how things change.

“What does he want in exchange?” She was afraid of that answer, but she had to know.

“He wants to continue operating in our territory…but not just the cars. He wants his drug territory back and he wants us to stay out of his business with his prostitutes…” Dax and the Skulls had cleaned up the Southside. Once Dax got rid of the competition and stopped the wars over territory, they’d been good for the stressed blue-collar community. Angel wouldn’t have thought that possible if anyone had told it was Dax’s goal when she was a cop, but she knew him now and she knew that although he didn’t always do things on the up and up, his heart was always in the right place. He’d stopped the distribution of hard drugs in the neighborhood and he’d sent the pimps packing. If the women wanted to go with them, he didn’t stop them, but if they wanted to stay and needed a place to go, Dax had offered them a safe place at the ranch. Everything he did these days was in the best interest of his family, his club, and his community, in that order. She honestly believed he was paying for the sins of his past by helping so many people in the present, and there was no way he deserved to go to prison.

“Then let him,” she said, hardly believing she was saying that herself.

“Baby, you don’t mean that. You don’t want Susie or any of the other kids here growing up in the place I grew up. The Southside used to have the highest crime rate in the state, along with being the murder capital of Massachusetts. You know that. It’s how we met. You came all the way home from Boston to take on an assignment to clean it up. You and Kyle and your dad…that task force is as responsible for cleaning it up as this club is. I’d be letting everyone down if I agreed to that in order to save my own ass.”

“Then kill him.”

“Angel!”

She stood up off the couch. “I’m not letting you go to prison. I’ll kill him myself.”

Dax stood up and put his hands on her arms. “No, baby, we’re not going to kill him. We’ll figure something else out. Besides, I’m sure he’s provided for that possibility…and then there’s the guy who owns the car.”

“And who is that?”

He sighed again. “I don’t know. Trayvon wouldn’t give me that information. It’s probably safe to assume those weren’t the only photos that exist, though.”

Fuck! Angel suddenly felt like danger was lurking everywhere…more so than when they were on lockdown. Her world felt like it was crumbling around her. They couldn’t take Dax from her and Susie. They needed him.

“I still have friends, connections in the department. We can have Lee arrested…”

“And he’ll take me down with him.”

“Fuck! We can at least get a list of cars jacked in that area…” Angel felt the hot tears burn her eyes. He pulled her into his chest and let her cry while he ran his hand through her hair. The wheels in her head were turning so fast that she could hardly keep track of her thoughts. There had to be a way out of this.

“That’s a good idea. It’s a good place to start,” he said, soothingly. “It’s gonna be okay, baby. I’ll make it okay.”

“You better,” she said with a shuddering sob into his chest. “I can’t live without you.”

“You won’t have to. I’ll come up with something, but I’m too tired to think about it tonight.”

She looked up at him. She hated the worry line between his eyebrows. She really would commit murder to make that go away…if she had to. “Okay,” she whispered, “Let’s go to bed.” Dax didn’t move his feet. Instead, he ran his fingertips down the length of her arms, caressing her skin and sending sparks running down her spine. She leaned back into him and let him run his fingers down to the hem of her t-shirt and up her sides underneath. She’d already pulled off her bra and put on her nightshirt and shorts, and when his fingers reached the sides of her breasts, she had to suck in a hard, shaky breath. She looked up at his face. Was this what he needed, now? The look of need and lust in his eyes answered her question. He let his hands travel back down until he reached hers and he locked their fingers together. Neither of them spoke and he didn’t break eye contact with her as he walked her slowly, backwards, down the hallway toward their bedroom.

She stepped back over the threshold when they got to the room and he leaned down toward her mouth. Angel reached up and put her hands around his neck, pulling him down until their lips met. Even more than two years together hadn’t dampened the passion that crackled in the air between them when they kissed. His tongue possessed her mouth and hers danced with his like it was part of a perfectly choreographed performance. Angel never believed in soulmates until the first time Dax kissed her. It was a cliché, she knew, but he was the piece of her puzzle that had been missing and as soon as she found him she was finally complete.

Dax kept up the hot tempo of the kiss until they both had to come up for breath, but even as he pulled his mouth off hers, his hands didn’t still. He let them run up under her shirt again, rubbing and massaging her skin and causing her body to convulse with pleasure. She put her own hands on his lower back and pushed up his shirt as she ran her palms over the hard, sinewy muscles there. Once she got the shit up to his armpits, he took a small step back and pulled it over his head; she did the same with hers. His hands went immediately to her breasts and Angel gasped as he began caressing them and letting his palms press into her hard nipples. He had goosebumps racing down both her arms and her spine before taking a nipple between his fingers and twisting it. His mouth lowered down to the other one and he sucked it in between his lips. Angel’s hands were in his long hair, twisting and pulling on it, and she was gasping out his name while he licked and sucked. His hands went to her shorts and he pushed them down roughly without taking his mouth off her, and suddenly his fingers were dipping in the hot moisture that had gathered there and Angel’s legs were shaking so hard that it was like trying to stand up on two wet noodles. Dax felt, or sensed, that she was about to collapse and so he cupped her naked ass in his hands and walked her back to the bed. Once he laid her back, he finished stripping off her shorts and underpants and then he stripped off his own, before lying down next to her.

He brought his hand up and softly caressed her face before leaning in and brushing his lips against hers. He let the hand that was on her face slide slowly down to her neck and he played with the skin there underneath her hair and just behind her ear, causing her to shudder violently. His hand kept moving, down across her chest, lightly brushing fingertips to nipples before doing a sexy dance down across her stomach and to the top of her mound. Angel moaned out his name and Dax’s lips twitched in a smile. She wanted to make him feel better, but she knew this was what he needed. Dax liked to be in control, but he never failed to treat her like a queen in the process. When his fingers reached her pussy once again, he slid open her lips and played in the wetness along her slit until he found her hot opening and slipped two fingers up inside of her. He leaned down simultaneously and caught her gasp in his mouth as he covered hers with his once more. He moved his fingers in and out of her, slowly, lazily, so fucking sexy, while his lips began to trail down her body, following the path that his fingers had taken only moments before. He kissed and suckled her skin and her breasts until he reached her soaking-wet, hot pussy. His tongue replaced his fingers almost magically and before Angel knew what was happening, he was using his tongue and his lips and his teeth to make love to her, pushing her closer to the brink by the second. When he took her clit between his lips and sucked it into his mouth and against his tongue, Angel cried out his name again as her orgasm hit like a tsunami. She rode wave after wave of it while Dax gently manipulated her clit until she had come so hard that she was actually dizzy.

When she collapsed into an almost comatose state, Dax kissed and licked each one of her thighs and then let his lips travel back up her body until they arrived at her lips. Angel brought her tongue out and licked his, tasting herself on him. It made her feel special because she knew that her taste would be the only one on his sexy lips, forever. He climbed up on top of her, straddling her hips and deepening the kiss. Once again he kissed her until she could barely remember what oxygen tasted like and then he pulled back so that he could lock his sexy blue eyes into hers as he entered her. Angel wrapped her arms around his neck and as he moved, she moved with him. It was like everything they did together; they were in sync. When Dax was inside of her, sometimes she thought that she could really feel their souls reach out and touch each other.

He moved slowly at first, increasing his pace mostly thanks to her urging. She had her legs wrapped around him and she was using her calf muscles to press in on him with every stroke. Dax was soon pumping in and out of her quickly, sliding a hand underneath her butt as he did, to hold her up at an angle where he could strike deeper and harder. Angel was biting down on her lip, whimpering and moaning, trying not to scream. If Susie hadn’t been asleep down the hall, she would have screamed. As it was, she was digging her fingers into the skin on his shoulders and saying his name repeatedly in a rush of heated breath. Dax didn’t miss a stroke as he sped up, getting closer to his own release. Angel held onto him tighter when she felt his body tense. His already thick cock swelled up inside of her, filling every available space. Angel had to let go of him and reach for the pillow behind her head. She covered her face in it and bit down on the pillowcase, screaming and gasping into it as quietly as she could. Her excitement fed his and it was only minutes later that he grunted out loudly, whispered her name through gritted teeth, and filled her up. Every time he came inside of her, Angel said a prayer. The doctor told them it was unlikely that they’d ever get her pregnant…but he hadn’t said “Impossible.” Angel knew just the fact that they were together proved that anything was possible, and it was easier to think about a new beginning than it was the cloud of impending doom that hung precariously over both their heads.