Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(22)

His last two were nearly shouted.

“Snapper,” I whispered.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded to know.

“You need to step back,” I told him.

“Oh no,” he drawled ominously, actually moving forward so his hips were pressed to my belly, his chest brushing my breasts and his frosty eyes filling my vision. “Oh no, baby. Ol’ Snap’s done with givin’ his woman some space.”

“I’m not…your woman,” I said hesitantly, like I didn’t believe my own words.

“How old am I?” he asked.

“Thirty-three,” I answered immediately and uncomprehendingly, bemused by his question in the midst of what was happening.

“My favorite color?” he pressed.

“Red.”

“How do I take my coffee?”

I’d learned that early, when he’d come into Colombo’s and have some cannoli and a cup of joe, before my informant status heated up.

“Lotsa cream, one sugar.”

“My favorite book?”

“Shutter Island.”

“You’re twenty-eight. Your favorite color is green. You take your coffee with just creamer, vanilla if it’s handy. Your favorite book is Harry Potter, the Azkaban one, and you flirted for a good long while with convincing yourself you could get away with naming your first girl Hermione.”

I shook my head, baffled where this was going. “I don’t—”

“You want two kids, because you wished you had a sister or brother, at least, and you want to start as soon as you can, because your dad was older than your mom and she wasn’t young when she had you and you lost him way too early for both of you, even though he was in his seventies.”

“I—”

“You’ve lived everywhere bikers are welcome on this side of the Mississippi but your favorite was always Denver, the three times your daddy moved you and your mom here. It was his favorite too, because he loved to ride the Rockies. And that was the only thing that gave you and your mom any relief when he passed, that you could take him up to the mountains when his time had come and he went somewhere he loved being.”

“Snap,” I said softly.

“You’re done with comic hero movies. You think Dwayne Johnson would kill in a romantic comedy. You like to vacation at beaches. Your favorite cookie is a snickerdoodle. Your favorite restaurant is Carmine’s. You’re uncertain about the death penalty seeing as you’re a conservative liberal, but in deference to your father, you’ve convinced yourself you’re a liberal conservative. And your favorite place in the whole world is riding on the back of a bike.”

Boy, I’d talked a lot during our phone conversations.

And Snap had listened closely.

He wasn’t quite finished with me.

“Only thing you don’t know about me that means anything is the way my cock feels buried inside you and only thing I don’t know about you is how sweet you’ll feel, closed tight around me.”

Oh man.

That sweet he’d feel started for me to feel tingly.

“Snapper,” I whispered.

“And you’re not my woman?”

“I—”

“You been my woman for months and I don’t give a shit that happened when you were with another man.”

It was me shutting my mouth during this conversation.

“And you just visited that man in jail, a man that delivered a beat down that put you in the goddamned hospital,” he stated infuriatedly.

“I was warning him off me,” I explained.

He dipped the half an inch he needed for the tip of his nose to brush mine (something it did).

“Rosalie, I’ll repeat, that motherfucker is not gonna touch you. Not ever a-fuckin’-gain.”

“You good, hoss?”

Snap’s head jerked around. I looked past his shoulder. And there stood two uniformed officers who weren’t real thrilled a man in a motorcycle cut with his colors stitched to the back had a woman pinned to the railing outside a police station.

“Snapper. Chaos. This is Rosalie. The woman Bounty beat to shit. She just visited Throttle to warn him off. She’s mine. I didn’t know she was up to that shit. And we’re havin’ a discussion about how that doesn’t make me happy.”

Masculine understanding dawned in both officers’ eyes. One gave Snapper a chin lift and moved toward the front door. The other gave him a look of beleaguered male camaraderie and then he moved toward the front door.

I tracked them, losing both between Snapper’s broad shoulders, getting them back only to lose them again when the men and the coffees they were carrying disappeared inside the police station.

Did that just happen?

“Rosie,” Snapper growled.

My eyes drifted back to him.

“We need to talk,” he declared, again.

“I’m not ready for that.”

“I’m sorry, baby, but I no longer give a shit.”

Now it was me who was getting angry.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“Rosalie, you just visited fuckin’ Throttle in jail.”

“Yes, to tell him to leave me and Mom alone!” I snapped.

“Right, let me explain this to you thoroughly,” he bit back. “Communication between you and any member of Bounty, especially Throttle, is done. Over. Not fucking happening. There’s a message to deliver, Chaos delivers it. If they already haven’t learned that you’ve ceased to exist, we’ll share that with them as many times as we got to until they get it. You have nothing to fear from them because every brother who’s earned the Chaos patch will go down before they hurt you again. You don’t have to do dick to make that happen, the brotherhood will bleed themselves dry for you to make you safe. Now, are you getting me?”