Unbeautifully (Undeniable, #2)(29)

He felt the walls of his world start to shake and the bricks began to fall…one by one until it was a free-for-all and suddenly he could breathe again when he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath. Breath he’d been holding for the last five years.

Free from the ropes, cupping his right eye socket, Ripper staggered to his feet. Blurrily he looked around the empty warehouse until he locked on a door. Limping, his right leg dragging, he hobbled as fast as he could across the dirty floor and collapsed against the door. Trembling, he tried the handle and nearly fell over when the door pushed open. Looking around, he had no idea where he was. The last thing he remembered, he’d been overseeing a drop-off in Vegas when Frankie nabbed him, coldcocked him, and he’d woken up here.

Cursing, he dragged himself outside onto the gravel driveway.

A creak sounded from inside the warehouse and, gripping his right thigh, he tried to walk faster.

“Frankie!” a voice bellowed. “Horseman’s on the loose!”

Fuck, f*ck, f*ck! He limped faster.

Footsteps pounded behind him, growing closer.

A road. He could see a road. Crying out, he amped up his speed, bit straight through his lip trying to stave off the pain.

He’d just breached the tree line, could see a pair of headlights off in the distance, when he felt the barrel of a gun jammed into the back of his skull.

“Where you think you’re goin’?” Frankie laughed. “Date ain’t over yet. Haven’t even gotten to the best part. Where you’re beggin’ me not to end you.”

The headlights grew closer, the rumbling engine of the truck louder.

He’d never beg for anything. Not a motherf*cking thing. Not even for his life.

“Turn around slow,” Frankie said. “And—”

Ripper, with the last of his quickly waning strength and pure determination to die on his own terms, leaped into the road, directly in the front of the truck and impact was immediate. As his body flew through the air, he closed his eyes and thought, Fuck you, Frankie.

He was jumping in front of that truck again, only this time he wasn’t trying to die on his own terms.

He was trying to start living again. So he dug his fingertips even deeper into her skin, kissed her harder than he’d ever kissed, f*cked her with a determination he didn’t wholly understand and…

…and something inside of him began to ache. It was painful, yeah, but it was painfully…good.

He wanted more.

More and more until there was nothing left of his old world until everything felt as good as she felt and fit as perfectly as she fit him, and so he closed his eyes and thought, Fuck you, Frankie.

That’s when it happened.

He lost control for the first time during sex and finished hard, still inside of her.

What the repercussions of that were going to be, he surprisingly didn’t care. He was too busy staring at the beautiful girl sitting astride him, feeling clearer and freer than he’d felt in a very long time.

Danny’s eyes blinked slowly open and, Jesus Christ, she was covered in sweat, had tears streaming down her cheeks, her makeup smeared and her face flushed from sex, and she was smiling, the sweetest dimpled smile he’d ever seen.

She was strikingly beautiful and sexy as shit and…good; she was a good, good girl. She was everything a man like him didn’t deserve to be inside of.

“I like you, Ripper,” she whispered, sliding her arms over his shoulders, threading her fingers through the hair at his nape, causing a ripple of tiny, pleasant tingles across his skin and a warmth inside of him, the likes of which he’d never felt before.

“Yeah, beautiful girl,” he whispered. “I’m feelin’ you too.”

He meant it too. He was over his head into her and he knew it. He didn’t just want to f*ck her, he didn’t just want her in his bed…

He wanted her on the back of his bike.

Yeah, he wanted to lay claim to Danielle West, ink his name on her body and slap an old lady patch on her ass. And worse, he wanted the world to know it.

It was at that precise moment that Ripper knew his world had shattered for a third time, had crumbled and turned to dust at his feet.

Nothing from here on out would ever again be the same.

CHAPTER TWELVE
I hated lockdown. Every single one had always completely sucked.

Brothers, their old ladies, their kids, young and old, all piled inside the club, filling up every nook and cranny. There was no seat unoccupied, no bed not taken, and in a warehouse roughly the size of a department store, most of which was used for locked storage, there wasn’t a whole lot of room.

But this time…

It was day four of prison by Hell’s Horsemen association and there wasn’t anywhere else on earth that I wanted to be other than right there, locked up in a crowded, overheated building…with Ripper.

Seated at the U-shaped bar, my elbows on the counter, chin propped in my hands, I was watching Ripper move across the room. He was shirtless, barefoot, wearing only his half-buttoned leathers and his cut. His blond hair was pulled back mid-skull in a messy ponytail and a cigarette dangled from his lips. My gaze traveled down his big body, lingering on the trail of blond hair that disappeared inside his pants, and my heart started beating faster.

I’d never been so intensely attracted to a man before, never felt so aroused in all of my life, and it wasn’t just when he was touching me, it was all the time. All I had to do was think about being with him, and I was crossing my legs and squeezing my thighs together.