Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(24)

“Unh-unh, coffee’s off the table,” he declared. “You’re settled in, we’re havin’ dinner.”

I then shook my head. “I’m not going out to dinner with my face like this.”

“I didn’t say we were goin’ out.”

Uh-oh.

“Snap—”

“Go home.”

“Snap!”

He bent in, pressing his lips to mine.

I felt those lips and the whiskers of his beard whispering against my skin and I smelled him and I had to clench my hands not to reach out and grab him like a child reaching to grasp hold of a candy bar that was not good for them but they had to have.

It was our first kiss.

Well, kind-of kiss, it wasn’t gung ho.

Still, it was a kiss and even not gung ho, stupid, stupid Rosalie, I wanted more.

And because he was wonderful, awesome Snapper, not pushing it outside the press that ended in a soft brush of lips and whiskers, he pulled away and whispered, “Go home to your mom, Rosie.”

I nodded because that was a really good idea.

“Talk to you later,” he said.

“Right,” I replied and nearly cleared my throat but the damage was done, it had come out husky.

He grinned, swept my jaw with his thumb the other way, then stepped back.

I started to sprint to my car but stopped myself before I got in that first rush because I didn’t want him to see me doing it.

Once I made it to the bottom of the steps, though, I should have stopped myself from looking back because badass Snapper had come to the fore. He was standing at the top of the steps with his arms crossed on his chest and his eyes on my ass.

Me being with Beck, he’d been holding back.

Now that the floodgates had been opened, he wasn’t going to do that anymore.

I thought I had problems but I had a feeling I’d been tossed out of the frying pan only to land in the fire.

I should have sprinted.

I decided to skip trot like I was semi in a hurry but hoping he thought it was because I wanted to get back to Mom before she worried.

There were two good parts to me doing that. One, it got me to my car faster and two, it didn’t hurt my ribs too much so I had indication I’d be good to go soon with carting around trays full of food and beverage.

I’d hit my car, had the key in the ignition and was about to turn it on when my phone chimed with a text.

Thinking it was Mom, home to find me gone, and worried about me, I grabbed it.

It was a number I didn’t have programmed in, local, and I didn’t have to wonder who it was because the text said, You’re so fucking cute.

Snapper and I didn’t have each other’s real phone numbers.

Now, we did.

I felt instantly that life was right again after months, no…years of feeling it was all wrong.

Yes, I had problems.

Because I’d fallen in love with a biker who’d dumped me.

Then I fell in love with a biker who went outlaw and then laid the smackdown on me.

And now I was in love with a biker who knew where another club did their wet work, was threatening war against that club, but was already at war with a baddie that set his Club to breaking the biker code and working with cops in order to use another club to take that baddie out.

I might be out of one set of crosshairs (maybe).

But everybody remotely involved with Chaos was in the other.

And that scared the hell out of me.





Chapter Four



Paint



Rosalie




“This place is so cute,” Mom practically squealed.

I stood in the living room of the house Snap and Chaos moved me into.

She was not wrong.

It was cute.

Clean, cozy, cute.

And gorgeous.

It also smelled faintly of paint.

Which meant they’d painted it between Snapper’s renters moving out and them moving me in so that they could move me into a pad that was fresh and felt new.

I touched my couch, which had its back to the door and was facing a freestanding fireplace, allowing my head to move slowly around to take in the space.

Beck and I had lived in a nice apartment complex in Aurora. It had some personality but it was a modern complex, built within the last ten years. Not exactly an architectural masterpiece or having had the time to be quaint or historically appealing or having so much of its style demolished around it that it was now unusual.

This place of Snapper’s was obviously an old carriage house that sometime along the way had the mansion it had been attached to disappear.

It also had been added on to.

Giving it a sense of privacy and serenity, it was set far back from the curb, much farther back than the other houses on the block, seeing as it once sat behind the house it had served.

It now, amusingly, since it used to be the same thing, had a large two-car garage with the doors of the garage facing the side of the property so the garage looked like an extension of the little house, not a monstrosity of what was essentially storage space almost as big as the living space it had been tacked onto.

The garage was accessed through the kitchen.

We’d walked in the front door.

And the front door led to a living room that was relatively spacious, but definitely well lit with an abundance of beautiful, old-fashioned, multi-paned windows at the front and side of the house.