Apollo hated working weekends at the station. Usually, Delaney had the prospects on shift, but every now and then, when things were quiet, he gave them the weekend off, and patches filled the schedule.

They didn’t do service work on Sundays, just pumped gas. It was dull as fuck. On this Sunday, when he was opening the station with Gunner, Apollo was especially grumpy. He’d left a sleek, naked Jacinda sleeping in his bed to be here before what-the-fuck a.m.

Sleeping in his bed. After he’d spent years keeping his home his own private place, guarding it like some kind of Shangri-La, Jacinda now spent almost as much time in his bed as he did in hers. He’d had no qualms at all about leaving her alone in his house.

Okay, he had locked his office door. Just in case her snoopy little PI nose got itchy again. There wasn’t anything incriminating in there, unless she’d actively try to fuck him up, but it was his most private area, and he liked it that way.

But otherwise, waking up with her was totally worth the loss of privacy, and getting out of bed with a raging hard-on, while her wonderful ass had been right there—that sucked.

And it was raining.

Since he was already crabby, his brain had been happy to latch onto something to fret about, and he’d driven in to work not long past dawn thinking about the end of the day, when he’d be sitting in the Durham’s fancy house having Sunday dinner with them. More than six weeks since he’d met them, and since they’d laid eyes on each other.

They hated him. They believed him to be all the things he actually was, and they hated him for it. But he loved their girl, and she loved them, so he had to try to get right with her family. The pressure was ridiculous.

He parked his Charger in the clubhouse lot and headed in there first to get himself a decent cup of coffee. They had a maker at the station, but the coffee it made came with a bonus hit of gasoline flavor.

The potent aroma of hot cinnamon rolls and brewed coffee that hugged his nose when he came into the clubhouse went a fair way toward lightening his mood. One of the women had made breakfast. Excellent. He hoped it was Mo—though why she’d be at the clubhouse before seven on a Sunday morning, he couldn’t guess. Probably not Mo, then.

It had been a quiet weekend, so the party room was almost empty and not in bad shape. Gunner was already there, sitting at the bar with a steaming mug. Apollo was surprised to see Maverick there, too, standing behind the bar.

He was pouring himself a cup and added one for Apollo. Apollo sat beside Gunner.

“Thanks, man. You working today? I thought it was just me and Gun.”

“I’m just here for a couple hours, finishing up a job I didn’t get done on Friday.”

Apollo nodded and took a slug of his coffee. “Smells good around here. Who’s cooking?”

Gunner grinned. “Leah. She’s gonna hang with us today.”

“At the station?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Normally, Apollo would serve Gunner out a ration of crap for being so sappily in love, but these days, he was beginning to understand. In fact, he wished he’d thought of it. Jacinda didn’t have plans today except errands and the gym. If she’d come with him, his shift would have flown by.

He was contemplating calling her and asking her over as Leah came out of the kitchen with a platter of frosted cinnamon rolls. She looked adorable, in little denim cutoffs and a flowered blouse that showed her belly. Her long, blonde hair was in pigtails. She and Gunner had been together for years, and they’d gotten married that spring, in a dual ceremony with Simon and Gunner’s sister, Deb, but this morning, Leah could pass for a teenager. She was fucking wholesome.

As Gunner’s sweet old lady set out her offering of sweets, a pair of high heels clomped down the center staircase from the upstairs crash pads.

It wasn’t unusual at all for a sweetbutt or random bimbo to be tottering downstairs on her mile-high shoes in the pale early morning after a party, but, maybe because the vibe in the clubhouse had been so quiet and family-oriented this morning, with chitchat about old ladies amidst the rich scent of baked goods, and with Leah standing there looking so utterly innocent, the sound of a chick taking the walk turned everybody’s head.

The stairs led down almost straight for the front door, so from the bar, they only had a rear view of the chick in question. She had a nice shape, and long, fiery red hair. She wore what was basically a sweetbutt uniform: a tight, stretchy dress, this one black, with a lace-up back showing that she was braless. The dress had the haphazard look all the Bulls knew—it had been yanked on in a dark room, picked up from a wad on the floor. Her shoes were five or six inches high, sparkly ankle-strap things. No wonder she’d made so much noise coming down the stairs.

She didn’t turn around; she seemed really tense, like she was doing a perp walk more than a walk of shame.

Maverick walked out from the bar and took a few steps toward her. Just as she reached out for the door, he called out, “Cecily?”

She froze, but she didn’t turn around.

Oh shit. No way.

At Apollo’s side, Gunner stood up, too. Maverick went forward. “Cissy, what the fuck are you doing here?”

He spoke to her rigid back; the girl would not turn around. But when Maverick got to her and took her arm, she spun and yanked away from him—and yes. It was Cecily. Raccoon-eyed and lipstick-smudged.

Cecily Nielsen, oldest daughter of Dane Nielsen, the first and late VP of the Brazen Bulls. Looking like she’d been used up and cast aside. She was of age, in her early twenties somewhere, but still, it wasn’t right to see a club daughter doing the walk. No patch would ever do something like that.

But what other explanation could there be?

Last summer, just more than a year earlier, Cecily’s father had lain dead on this very floor, in the heart of the clubhouse, his head caved in during a scuffle with another Bull, Griffin. Griff’s girl, Patrice, had been lying dead on the same floor. Griff had nearly killed Rad, too. By the time the chaos had settled that day, three Bulls were down, two of them dead, and another innocent’s blood was all over the Bulls’ hands.

Patrice had been innocent, though the club hadn’t trusted her. They’d turned her away, right into the hands of their enemies. All of that horror had led directly from the burning of the school in the Greenwood District. A target Apollo himself had identified.

The waves from that decision, and what the club had done with it, rolled over them still, tossing the club every which way—and not just the club, but the innocents around them. Like Cecily, it seemed.

Apollo didn’t think he’d seen her since her father’s funeral. He’d seen Joanna, Dane’s old lady and Cecily’s mother, a few times, when she’d needed help of some kind or another, but never at the clubhouse. Mo and the other old ladies kept in touch, and Apollo had heard through the grapevine that things with the Nielsen women—Joanna, Cecily, and Clara—were tough. He’d heard that Cecily in particular had been on some kind of rampage, one of the defining features of which was a loathing for the Bulls.

So what the fuck she doing was here was an excellent question.

“Back off, Mav,” she snarled. “Let me go home.”

“What are you doing here?” he asked again.

“What does it look like?”

“Who were you with?”

“Fuck off.”

He looked over his shoulder. “Somebody go up and see who she was with.”

Gunner got moving at once and trotted for the stairs. Apollo stood up and stepped in front of Leah. He had the strangest sense that she needed to be shielded from this. It was those damn pigtails.

“No!” Cecily lunged, but Gunner evaded her, and Maverick grabbed her arm again.

“Easy, honey. Come on. Come get a cup of coffee. Talk to me.”

“Fuck you, Maverick. Just fuck off. I don’t want your fucking coffee, and you can’t make me stay.” She shoved him with her free hand, and he let her move him. He stepped back and let go of her arm, and she ripped the door open.

She obviously hadn’t expected the rain, and the downpour pulled her up short for a second, but then she charged out into it, not trying to protect herself at all.

Maverick stood in the empty doorway and watched. When he turned around, his face was red with fury—more fury than Apollo understood. It was way past fucked up to disrespect a club daughter, but she was of age, and Maverick was acting like he was her father.

“Who the fuck did her like that?” He stomped to the staircase.

Before he could step up, a commotion from the top drew his attention. Gunner came down, shoving an entirely naked Caleb before him.

Caleb was a prospect. And Gunner was his sponsor. Oh, that kid was very fucked.

As he landed at the bottom of the stairs, barely keeping his feet against Gunner’s shove, Maverick grabbed him by his long hair and delivered three hard jabs to his face—one, two, three, like a piston—and the kid crumpled to the floor. He hadn’t said a word; he’d barely made a sound.

Maverick heaved him up and dragged him into the party room. Obviously, Caleb’s punishment wouldn’t end with those three punches.

Gunner turned to Apollo. “You mind opening up on your own?”

“No problem. You sure you don’t need a third here?” Between Maverick’s obvious rage and Gunner’s legendary lack of impulse control, they could kill the kid.

“No, we’re good. Take Leah with you, will ya?”

“Don’t kill him. That’ll be a mess.” Apollo turned around. Leah stood there, pale and wide-eyed. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s go.”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

“What can I get ya?” Bill Durham walked over plush, creamy wall-to-wall carpeting to a little contraption on wheels, like a cart for booze, that stood beside the fireplace in the Durham living room. Out of reflex, Apollo turned in the direction Jacinda and her mother had just walked, toward the kitchen. He couldn’t help but feel like he’d been thrown in the deep end, but it wasn’t her fault. Her mother had nearly pulled her off her feet, asking for help getting dinner ready.

“Don’t worry about them. Jacinda and her mom have been cooking together since Jacinda could stand on a chair at the counter and help.” Bill lifted an empty glass. “What’ll it be?”

The inside of the house was every bit as fancy as Apollo had expected—carpeting at least three times as thick as that in his own house; glossy, pristine wood floors in the entry and hallway so much nicer than the scuffed, gouged, cracking floors under the timeworn area rugs in his parents’ house; furniture that matched; paintings that looked real.

And Jacinda’s father fit right in, wearing a pink Oxford cloth shirt tucked into sharply creased, pleated khakis, and loafers. Fucking loafers.

Feeling unbearably awkward and stressed, wondering whether he should have tucked his white button-down shirt in, or polished his boots, or something, Apollo shoved his hands in his pockets. “Uh, what you’re having is great.”

“Scotch it is, then. How d’you take it?”

“Straight. Thanks.”

Bill nodded. He used little silver tongs to take clear ice cubes from a leather-clad ice bucket, dropped a couple into a glass with a dignified tink, and poured scotch into that glass and an empty one.

Apollo took the glass Bill offered. “Thanks.” He wanted to shoot the works down his throat, but he controlled himself and took a normal swallow. “That’s good.”

“It is. I have a few things I splurge on. Scotch is one of them.”

As far as Apollo could see, the man splurged on everything.

He himself made good money and had a solid hunk of dough saved up. He had some things he splurged on, too—but his idea of splurging was obviously different from the Durhams’. Maybe it was being raised up like he was, where Christmas and his birthday meant new clothes for the only times of the year, and maybe, if the yield had been good, a new Timex or more than one new toy under the tree, but splurging, to him, had nothing to do with decades-old booze, or art on the walls. For him, splurging meant buying a sofa he liked, new and comfortable, from a store, rather than one he could tolerate, used, from the want ads.

He liked his money where it was. Waiting for when everything went to shit.

Bill sat in a leather wingback chair and indicated that Apollo should sit, too. When he did, Bill asked, “So, how’s your weekend been?”

“Okay. Worked today, but Saturday was good.” He and Jacinda had spent Saturday morning doing usually boring domestic errands together, made an early supper, and spent the afternoon and evening in bed. Great damn day.

Sunday had been okay, overall. Not for Caleb, of course. That boy would be eating through a straw for six weeks or so.

“You...worked?” Bill was obviously wondering if it was club work or regular work.

“At the station, yeah. It’s open seven to three on Sundays. It was pretty quiet, what with the rain all day.” The weather was still wet, almost twelve hours later, though the downpour had let up to sprinkles and occasional cloudbursts.

Bill nodded, and the conversation died a strangling death. They sat there for a few minutes while Apollo tried to revive it. He was good at small talk; he could talk to just about anyone. And not all his contacts were female. Most, yeah, but sometimes he needed something he couldn’t get out from a woman, and he knew how to make friends. It wasn’t all that different from flirting. Find their interest and get them to talk about it.

But the stakes felt really fucking high right now. All he knew about Bill Durham was that he had a nice house and he was a PI. That last wasn’t necessarily the topic he wanted to make small talk about. He’d already complimented the house, though.

He saw him cast a long glance at a big armoire across from the sofa and realized that that hulking piece of furniture probably held a television. The Cardinals were playing the Cubs in Chicago that night. Maybe Bill was a baseball fan? In Tulsa, it was either the Cardinals, the Royals, or sometimes the Rangers that people followed. Most of the Bulls were Cards fans.

“You follow the Cards?”

That perked her father up. “Yeah, I do. You?”

“Yes, sir. They’re in Chicago tonight. Game starts in a few minutes.”

“I know. Barbara will skin me alive if I turn on the television while we’ve got company. She’s never had patience for sports.” He smiled. “Jaci does, though. She grew up sitting side by side with me, watching every game we could. You follow the Rams, too?”

Jacinda watched with Apollo, too, and she knew as much as he did—more, even. He found that sexy as hell. “Yes, sir. Looks like they might finally have something coming up this year. That Trent Green could be the real deal.”

“And Marshall Faulk, too. Yeah, the team looks good this year.” He chuckled. “‘Course, I’ve said that before.”

“Yeah, so have I.”

“Hey, guys.” Jacinda stepped into the room and turned a worried smile on him. He gave her a subtle thumbs up back. “Dinner’s on the table. Dad, Mom wants you to open a bottle of white. Your pick.”

“You got it.” Bill stood up, set his glass on the little rolling cart and held out his hand for Apollo’s. Apollo drank the rest down and handed it over, and Bill headed to the kitchen.

When they were alone in the room, Jacinda hooked her arm around his waist. “That go okay?”

“I think so, yeah. We talked sports.”

“Good, good. Look—I’m sorry about what’s about to happen.”

She’d already told him to expect a cross-examination from her mother. He was prepared for that. He hoped. “I got my answers all memorized. It’ll be okay.”

“There’s something else—she made a meal that’s meant to make you look like a caveman.”

He cocked his eyebrow at her. “What—like raw mammoth?”

“Cornish game hens. Do you know what they are?”

“Some kind of bird, I assume.”

“Yeah, but they’re served whole on the plate, and they’re not easy to eat with utensils.”

Well, he hadn’t expected her to make it easy on him, and he wasn’t a gorilla. He could manage a knife and fork. “It’ll be fine, baby. I’m onto her psycho-warfare tricks.”

“I’m so sorry. I don’t know why she’s being so shitty.”

“Yes, you do, and so do I. It’ll be okay.” He kissed her forehead. “Let’s go eat the caveman chickens.”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

“So tell me about the Brazen Bulls, Apollo. Or is it Neil? I’m not sure which you I should call you.” Barbara Durham handed him a platter with some strange dish made out of flaccid tomato slices, parmesan cheese, and some deeply unsettling beige vegetable that smelled like licorice. Honestly, he was afraid of that thing, but he forked a few floppy tomatoes onto his plate and passed the platter to Bill. The roasted mini-chicken on his plate he could deal with, but whatever that slimy stuff under the tomatoes was, he meant to avoid.

“Either name works, ma’am. I answer to both. My folks call me Neil. Pretty much everybody else calls me Apollo.”

“Apollo, then. And the Bulls?”

He shrugged. “Not much to tell, ma’am. It’s a club. We all ride Harleys. We get together in the clubhouse and hang out, and we go on rides. We do a lot of charity stuff together, too.” He threw that in there because it was true, and because it sounded better than ‘we hang out and go on rides.’

“Charity. Of course.” Wow. That woman could write a whole book of disgusted disbelief with nothing more than the tone of her voice.

“Mother, down.” Jacinda muttered. “Be nice.”

“I am being nice, sweetheart. I’m just getting to know your ‘boyfriend.’ What kind of ‘charity’ do the Bulls do?” Contemptuous quotation marks all over the place.

“We ride in with a couple of national rides most years. There’s one for abused kids we try to put patches on every year. For Tulsa, we do a toy drive at Christmas, for the kids in local hospitals, and we always sponsor about ten or so families at Christmas, too—you know, fill up their pantries, make sure they get a good Christmas dinner, make sure there’s presents under the tree for everybody, make sure there’s a tree if they want it, that kind of thing. We sponsor a couple of blood drives during the year, too. And, well, we all throw in whenever there’s a fundraiser in town.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, ma’am. Part of our mission is to be good citizens in Tulsa and help where we can.”

“Did you and your club ‘throw in’ for the fundraiser for the Jacob Prescott family last year?”

Jacinda flinched, but Apollo had this. If Barbara was trying to hang him up, she was going to have to bring more to the game than that. “Yes ma’am, we did.”

“You know who he is, then. The poor man who was killed when the Alice Dunbar School was burned down. Left behind a wife and four children.”

“Yes ma’am. I know. Like I said, we help out where we can.”

“Do you? Well, that’s good, then. We all should help out, and do all that we can not to do harm, too. That fire was a terrible thing. Tore the heart of out the Greenwood community.”

“They rebuilt, though. Opening in a couple of weeks for the new school year.” Apollo speared one of those crazy tomatoes and put it in his mouth. Ugh. That was not how a tomato should taste. When he swallowed, he washed it down with the water he’d requested instead of wine.

“Jacob Prescott’s family can’t be rebuilt, of course. Whoever destroyed that building did irreparable damage to them.”

“Mother, please.”

Apollo had had about enough, actually. She wanted to skirmish, so he was going to meet her on the front line. He set his fork on his plate. “Mrs. Durham, with all due respect, I appreciate this lawyering you’re doing, but I see it for what it is. You don’t like me, and you want to find something wrong with me and catch me up. I imagine you spent some time planning all the ways you were going to make me uncomfortable and try to get me to squirm. And you know what? I am uncomfortable. You want my story? Here it is: I come from people with nothing more than a little bit of dirt to scratch a life out of. I’ve never had little birds like this for supper, or whatever you got with the tomatoes—”

“Fennel,” she cut in.

“Fennel. Never had that before, and I don’t much like it, no offense to your cooking. I come from simple people and don’t know from expensive food or booze or art. But I’m not an idiot. I got a tested IQ of 137, and my dad—I don’t know what his IQ is, but he makes me look like a drooling fool. We didn’t have money for education or anything much else. When I blew off classes in high school because I liked girls better than books, and didn’t qualify for scholarships, I broke my father’s heart. But he forgave me. He told me to find something better than that farm, to get out in the world. I came to Tulsa, but without an education, there wasn’t much I could do. I got trained as a mechanic, started working, and found the Bulls. With them, I’ve been able to make a better life than my folks have, and I’ve been able to make their life better, too.”

“That’s a touching story, Apollo. Did you break your father’s heart again when you joined a biker gang?”

“Barbara, that’s enough.” Bill said from the other end of the table. His voice was calm, but steely.

Barbara didn’t even twitch. She kept her eyes glued to Apollo’s.

He didn’t twitch, either. “Ask the question you want to ask, Mrs. Durham.”

“Did you start the fire that destroyed the Alice Dunbar School and killed Jacob Prescott?”

Apollo answered truthfully. “No, ma’am, I did not.”

He hadn’t been on that job; Simon was their explosives and fire guy. But Apollo had picked the target: Booker Howard’s crown jewel. It should have been empty, but that didn’t mitigate the club’s guilt. An innocent man had been in that school in the middle of the night. And then, the Bulls had abandoned the man’s niece, Patrice, and let her get killed, too.

Maybe the worst part of the whole damn thing was why they’d assumed Patrice couldn’t be trusted, and that her uncle might have been connected to their enemies: because of where they came from. Because of the color of their skin. They’d all just fucking assumed that because Patrice and her uncle were black, and because her uncle lived and worked in Street Hounds territory, Patrice might have been dangerous to the club. That her loyalties weren’t solid, and they couldn’t extend to her their trust or protection.

There was more to it than that, and it was there that the Bulls focused their attention when they spoke of last summer. Griffin had never marked Patrice, and their relationship had been more tempestuous than the club had realized. If Patrice had kept his flame, the club wouldn’t have questioned her loyalty. Without that shield of ink, though, they’d been far too quick to wonder, and she was dead because of it.

Apollo tried hard not to think of this shit; he’d had to find a place to lock up his guilt where it couldn’t eat him whole. If he let himself think about the mess of last summer, his personal culpability grew more clear with every piece of the puzzle. He hadn’t started the fire, but he’d picked that target, and suggested that they destroy it. It hadn’t been his call to use fire, but if he’d done a little more research, he might have discovered a very good reason not to burn a Greenwood school down. If he’d looked back at the history of Tulsa and remembered about the 1921 race riot, when white Tulsans had sacked Greenwood, killing hundreds and burning most of it to the ground, he’d have realized how the almost entirely white Bulls burning anything in Greenwood, much less a fucking school, would harken back to the worst thing in that community’s history and elicit an extreme response.

As it had. If he’d done enough research, he’d have made another plan. He was their research guy. It was his job to know that shit, and he’d fucked up badly.

So yeah, actually, the whole thing was his fault. Apollo might as well have started that fire. And every death that followed from it—Jacob Prescott, Patrice, Dane, Griffin, Gunner’s father, the random guy who’d just happened to be at the Wesson farm when the Hounds went for Gunner’s family—he wore the stains of their blood. All of them.

Reeling in that guilt, scrambling to get it locked safely away, Apollo barely managed to keep his external calm. Barbara Durham wasn’t finished with her third-degree, and from now on any answer he would give would likely be a lie. He prepared himself to make them convincing.

But Jacinda dropped her fork and knife to her plate with a loud clatter and took everyone’s attention. “That’s enough, Mom. Drop it now, or I swear, we’re leaving, and Sunday dinners are over.”

Barbara glanced at her daughter, then back to Apollo. They stared each other down again for a few more seconds. Then she blinked. “If you hurt her, or get her hurt, there will be nowhere on this planet you’ll be able to hide from us. Do you understand?”

That, thank God, he could answer with honor and honesty. “Yes, ma’am, I do. For the record, I love her. I mean to keep her safe.”

Jacinda’s mother laughed, and there was a tiny spark of true humor in it. “Well, good luck. She seems bound and determined to put herself in danger.”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

Later that night, Apollo stood under the shower in Jacinda’s bathroom. Outside the sliding door, Zoë yowled with concern. “I’m okay, little lady. I’m not being tortured, I promise.”

Jacinda had told him that he’d made her cat’s extremely short list of acceptable people the first time she’d sat on the bath mat and worried about him being sprayed with water.

At least her cat liked him. That Sunday dinner had been most of a disaster, from what he could tell. He hadn’t won her parents over; the force of Jacinda’s will had shut them down.

He wasn’t used to people not liking him. It made him feel insecure and in need of a shower.

Because he understood their concerns, and, at the heart of it, he agreed with them. In fact, after spending a few hours in the hot light of their suspicion and condemnation, he agreed with them more than he ever had. Everything they thought about him was true. He was an outlaw. He had killed people. He’d been involved in a street war that had gotten innocent bystanders killed.

Jacinda was a monumentally better person than he was.

Those dismal thoughts turned to vapor when she slid the door open and stepped into the tub behind him. Her arms snaked around his waist, and she took hold of his cock, which had begun to fill out the second her skin touched his. “You’ve been in here forever. You’re going to turn into a prune.” She pumped her hand around him until he stood at full attention. “Except this part. This part is solid and smooth.”

While she soaped up her hands with the coconut gel she used, he closed his eyes and locked his knees, reaching back to get hold of her ass as she pumped him with both hands, slow and firm, drawing every nerve to full attention, pulling electric need from every point in his body.

His head fell back, and water sprayed into his face, and he almost couldn’t care.

“You’ve never said that to me,” she whispered, just loud enough to be heard over the hiss of the water and the roar of his heart in his ears.

“What?” He could barely grunt the word.

“You’ve never said ‘I love you.’ You told my mom before you told me.”

Was that true? With her hands on him—ah God, caressing his balls now, too—he couldn’t think enough to recall. “Sorry.” Another grunt.

“Is it true?”

He nodded. It was true. He’d loved her for a while. Had he really not said it?

“Tell me.”

She deserved more than the words groaned out in the middle of a hand job, no matter how mind-blowing that hand job might be. Pulling his brain back together, he grabbed her hands and took them off of him, then turned around and enclosed her in his arms. “I love you. You are amazing. And the way look at me, I see the man I want to be.”

Her eyelashes sparkling with drops of water, she gazed up at him, hiding nothing. God, he could fall into those dark eyes and never want to leave. “I love you,” he said again, because he wanted to.

“I love you.” He couldn’t hear her, the words were spoken on a breath, but he saw the shape of them on her lips. He bent down and covered that perfect mouth with his.

Suddenly, caught on a powerful wave of newly declared connection, they were in a frenzy. Jacinda clung to him, her lithe, strong arms clutching his head, her mouth and tongue vying with his for control. Unable to rein in his mind and turn it to anything but her, his feeling for her, her feeling for him, the heat and steam around them seeming to come from them more than the water, Apollo lifted up her slick body and pushed her against the wall of the shower.

“God yes!” Jacinda gasped and found his mouth again. She flailed her legs out, kicking the door as she circled them around his hips, and Zoë yowled and fled the room, still yowling.

He found the core of her and sank deep, groaning as he filled her, the sound echoed in her moan. She raked her nails over his back; the shower spray set their trails on fire.

“Fuck me hard, fuck me hard,” she whispered against his mouth.

Apollo obliged, digging his feet into the rubber mat at the bottom of her tub, driving his hips with all the force he could, the strong clench of her soft pussy around him making him senseless with need, pulling him up, up, up to the tipping point of his own release, and then he couldn’t hold it off, and oh thank God, she began to spasm and grunt, and they came together, shouting against each other’s shoulders.

He stood where he was, holding her relaxing body up, kissing all the parts of her he could reach, over and over again. The hot water had run out at some point, and cool splashed over his back. It soothed him after the volcanic heat he’d just felt.

“We should get out,” he finally muttered.

She nodded against his neck. “You came inside me, Apollo.”

His heart skidded to a stop. “Shit. Shit.” Jesus, the thought had not crossed his mind. Or hers, apparently.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Let’s dry off and talk.”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

“I’m probably not pregnant. I mean, what are the odds?”

“Your period was...what, two weeks ago?”

“Yeah.”

Apollo sighed. Fuck and more fuck. “Then, if I remember high school biology, the odds are pretty good.”

“Yeah. Shit.”

“I’m sorry, baby. I should’ve thought.”

“Hey, I was there, too. It’s not your fault.” She lifted her head from his chest and met his eyes. “What should we do if I am?”

He’d never wanted kids. He liked other people’s offspring just fine, but as far as he was concerned, kids complicated everything, turned lives upside down and inside out. He’d considered it his sister’s job to produce grandchildren. In his life, he’d been shot at more than once—and had, in fact, been shot. People died in his world. Dane had left two daughters behind. Apollo had always believed that he shouldn’t have a family; he didn’t want to have children only to orphan them someday.

But right now, lying in bed with Jacinda, contemplating the possibility that he had thoughtlessly made her pregnant—he wasn’t panicking. More than that, the idea had some appeal. It curled around the grooves of his brain and left a warm feeling, soothing the raw ache from the guilt that had risen up during dinner.

What would it be like to be a father? To share a child with a woman like Jacinda? Could he be good enough for them?

Maybe he’d been wrong to think he shouldn’t have a family because he was a Bull. He had it backward. Maybe, because he was a Bull, he needed a family more than most. He needed that grounding, that normalcy in his life. Something good and solid, to counteract the relentless pull into the dark. He was a good guy still, despite his guilt. He truly believed that. He’d made mistakes, but they’d been mistakes, not conscious choices to do that kind of harm. He regretted them; he was capable of regret. He was still a decent person. But he wouldn’t be for long if his whole life was running guns and fighting turf wars.

Jacinda had asked him a question, and he was shocked that he didn’t know his own preference. But he wasn’t the most important person in this particular situation, anyway, and the answer lay there. “I don’t think that’s my call. I’ll back yours. What do you want to do?”

She blinked at him, her eyes growing round. “I love you. Oh my God, I love you.”

“I love you, too.” He tucked a strand of damp hair behind her ear and played with the little diamond stud in that lobe. “What do you want to do?”

“I don’t...I don’t know. Obviously, having a baby wasn’t on my agenda.”

“Ever?”

“Well, sometime, yeah. I’d like to have kids. But my life...I didn’t have anybody to have them with.”

“Maybe you do now.”

She tilted her head and gave him a piercing look. “Do you want kids?”

“Sure.” His heart took an extra beat as he understood that he’d answered truthfully.

“But we’re so new. It seems like a bad idea to get locked together already.”

“Would you want to have an abortion, then? That’s okay with me if you do.”

She rolled to her back with a loud sigh. “I don’t know! I’m thirty. I guess I’m supposed to have a kid soon, if not already. At my ten-year reunion a couple of years ago, I swear, everybody had kids. They were all married with kids and a mortgage, or they were divorced with kids and alimony. Except Ryan, who’s gay. And me, who’s...me.”

He rolled to his side and turned her head to his. “Hey—you are perfect, just as you are. If you’re pregnant and you want to keep it, then we’ll keep it and raise it together. If you want to have an abortion, I will be with you every step of the way. If we’re not going to have a baby now, we’ll keep moving forward like we are, and maybe we’ll have one together later.”

“You are fucking amazing,” she whispered.

“Then we’re a good match.” He kissed her.

Before he could roll on top of her, she held him off, and he was surprised at the sudden seriousness of her expression. “Apollo, I have to tell you something.”

One small alarm bell began to jangle at the farthest reaches of his mind. There was something guilty in her eyes. “What?” When she took a deep breath, another alarm bell joined the first, and he pushed up onto his elbow. “J, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing is wrong. But something happened at work. I’ve been trying to figure out how and when to tell you.”

“Did you get hurt again?” She still had the bruise from that asshole earlier in the week. She covered it with makeup, but when her face was washed clean, like now, its lines were soft but clearly visible.

“No, nothing like that. We had a meeting with a prospective client. She wanted us to look into the death of her daughter and her daughter’s uncle last year.” Jacinda stopped and peered into his eyes.

That whole awful situation had been on his mind tonight more than he usually allowed, so it took him only a second to know what she meant, but he wasn’t going to say anything until she said more. His stomach turned into a lump of hot coal.

“Her name is Michelle Thompson. Her daughter was Patrice Thompson. The official report is that her boyfriend killed her. Her boyfriend, Griffin Hayes, a Brazen Bull, who was also killed. Her uncle was Jacob Prescott. Ms. Thompson thinks all the deaths are related, and she wanted us to look into it.”

Apollo rolled to his back and stared up at the ceiling fan as nausea rolled through him. “You’re telling me that you’re investigating the club?” Fucking hell, she was throwing this at him after everything they’d said to each other in the past half hour?

She turned and sat up. “No! No! I talked my dad out of taking the case. I swear, Apollo, we will never take a case that has anything to do with the club. I won’t let it happen. But she might take this to another agency. So you should be on the lookout for that.”

“When did this happen?”

“Wednesday.”

“And you waited until now to tell me?”

“I didn’t...I was scared. I didn’t know how to say it.”

“Waiting four days is not the way. What if she’s already found someone to take the case?”

“Have you done anything or said anything to be worried about since Wednesday?”

He thought of the beating Maverick and Gunner had laid on Caleb just that morning. If the clubhouse was bugged...but no. He needed to cool down and think. He was in charge of that shit. He scanned the whole building once a week, every Friday morning, and this week’s scan had been clean. Unless someone had gotten into the clubhouse over the weekend, which would be nearly impossible, since they hadn’t thrown a party, they were okay. Except when they had a party, strangers didn’t just walk into the clubhouse off the street unannounced. No harm, no foul.

He filled his lungs and blew the tension out. “We’re okay. But baby, you tell me the minute something like that goes down on your side. Please. Keeping things from me, that’s going to make trouble.”

“I will. I’m sorry. I honestly meant to tell you that night, but we got distracted, and then you left for work early, and my head started to conjure up ways that this would make me suspicious with the Bulls, and I let it get hooked in there.” She picked up his hand. “Will the Bulls understand?”

He didn’t know. A possible club enemy had gone to Durham & Associates looking for dirt on the Bulls. Jacinda was a friend, but her father was not. Reminding the club that she and her father were PIs might be dicey business. They were only just warming to her. After his birthday party, they even liked her.

Bringing Jacinda into his club family was proving to be a challenge. The tense circumstances of her first meeting with Delaney and the others—them perceiving her as a threat, and being an actual threat to her in turn—had chilled what was usually a warm welcome for club women. The bullshit with Patrice last year hadn’t helped any, either. And here Jacinda was, right in the middle of that as well. Fuck.

He didn’t necessarily have to tell them, did he? He was in charge of technology for the club. He could run a second sweep every week, and nose around his contacts to see if anyone was asking questions. The club made a habit of being surveillance-proof on the road. He could keep them safe and not bring Jacinda’s name into it.

Still, secrets were like an infection, swelling until they burst.

Something was wrong with the club, their trust in each other was all out of whack, and Apollo didn’t know how to fix it. Whatever it was, he could not let Jacinda get caught up.

He’d figure it out. He had to.