HARD KNOX by Jaxson Kidman
I let her slip away from me once – this time, I’ll kill to keep her close… because this time, she’s pregnant with my baby.
*
It was a lifetime ago when I first met Ana as she stepped out of the moving truck. From the second our eyes met, it was instant fire. What came after that was years of wild lust and a romance that seemed impossible to kill. Until I got patched into the Reaper’s Bastards MC and all our lives changed.
Now, the MC is falling apart, my old man is in prison on a life sentence, and the only thing that makes sense is the secret fling I’ve been having with Ana for years. It’s our secret, but I’m tired of that. But there’s a big problem. She’s running with a rival crew who wants to take out me and my club for good. So I make the call to everyone in the MC to put the leather cuts back on and gear up for war. The first strike comes in the form of murder… and that’s when all hell breaks loose for good.
In the mirror, I tell myself to get ready for a different kind of war. A war with love. Because this time, with Ana, it’s all or nothing.
chapter one
(knox)
LATER
I knew it was so f*cking wrong, but she felt just so f*cking right. The windows were shut, the door locked, and it was just us. Finally, just us. The way she sat on the corner of my bed, I could tell she was nervous. There was a virginal look to her in that moment, the light splashing against the left side of her face. Good thing too because if I saw the right side of her face it would piss me the f*ck off again.
No woman deserved that kind of treatment. Or this kind of life.
Shit, Ana didn’t even deserve me.
But you know what?
I was the greater of all f*cking evils and that meant I was the one who could protect her. Shit, maybe even love her. Like that hadn’t happened already though.
I stepped toward the bed to gauge her reaction to me. To finally being alone with me. To finally having the chance to bring all those flirty eye fantasies to f*cking life. Goddammit, if this woman knew how many times I had shot my load thinking about her. Into dirty shirts when I jerked off. Into the shower, watching it go down the drain. Hell, shooting my loads into other women’s mouths, pussies, anywhere I felt like f*cking, there were plenty of times she popped into my mind as my dick shot.
Before I could say a word her hands grabbed at the top of my jeans.
Fuck, she wanted it as bad as I did.
I knew what it was though.
Comfort.
The temptation ran way too f*cking high between us and now there was no stopping us. She wanted me to f*ck her, hold her, make her sweat and scream, all in one wild night so she could pretend her life wasn’t a f*cking mess.
I was fine with being that guy for her. Hell, I had dreamt of it for a long damn time. So many times our paths had crossed during my rise to power on the streets and yet I never plucked her flower and drank her nectar. I let it mature for years, at my own expense.
Now everything was destroyed.
And she was going to comfort me as much as I was going to comfort her.
I touched her jaw, calmly, so I didn’t scare her.
I saw the blood on my ripped up knuckles, reminding me of what I’d done.
Our eyes met and we both knew it…
The second we f*cked, we were signing our own death warrants.
chapter two
(knox)
THEN
It all started when a yellow truck pulled up to the apartment house right next to mine. Looking at the front of my house, you’d never know there were two apartments in it. It was a big house split into two. My grandmother lived on the bottom floor and did nothing but chain smoke while watching game shows, talk shows, the news, and back to game shows. The smell filtered up into our apartment where I crashed with my parents. Ma worked two waitressing jobs at two restaurants across the street from each other. She’d f*cking literally walk across the street and change her shirt to put in another eight hours of small tips, ass grabs, and fighting with another dickhead Italian who thought his little shithole restaurant was the best in the world.
My old man couldn’t keep a job if his hands were lathered in super glue. He’d been up and down every auto shop in town, twice, and was still struggling to keep things going forward. Little did I know there was a good reason for it. Fate would eventually kick in and he’d meet up with some guys at a garage who had a side thing that involved motorcycles. They were big, tough, and they were nothing short of criminals who lived a life so free, it would change my life for forever.
I was the coolest kid not in school.
I stood on the front porch of the house, one of my grandmother’s cigarettes in my hand. I lit the f*cker up and watched the yellow truck. The house right next door had an upstairs and downstairs apartment too. It was pretty obvious though it was an apartment. In the downstairs lived an old man who was a complete *. Me and the boys drove that son of a bitch nuts, so much that he had a f*cking stroke last summer. Noah and Elijah got skittish when it happened and broke away from me and Kingston. Spencer offered to mow the old man’s lawn for the rest of the summer while he recovered.
Me?
I didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t my life. It wasn’t my problem. Fuck, come to talk to me after you watch my mother sit at the small table in the kitchen, laying out crumbled up one dollar bills that stunk like dirty ass cheeseburgers and cry her eyes out when she was short a couple hundred for rent and utilities. Then she’d go downstairs to ask my grandmother to ease up on the rent. You know what would happen then? My grandmother would hit her.