Crash (Brazen Bulls MC #1)(29)

Jesus Christ.

He stopped at a red light, and Willa put her hand on the door handle, charged with the idea that she should get away now. But what—did she think she could hop out onto her bum leg and limp home? Did she think he’d just drive on and leave her to do it?

“Rad…” she said, without knowing the words that would follow.

He turned and smiled. Reaching across the bench seat, he picked up her hand. His smile sagged, and his brow creased. “You’re shakin’, baby.”

“I’m scared.” The baldness of the truth she’d spoken stunned her.

The light switched to green, and Rad drove on, but he kept hold of her hand. He turned into an empty parking lot and stopped under a sodium arc light, reaching across the steering wheel with his left hand to throw the shifter into park. With his right hand around hers, he turned on the seat and faced her.

“Talk to me.” As he spoke, his eyes shifted a fraction, and his frown deepened—he’d seen her hand clutched around the door handle. “You afraid of me?”

She let go of the handle. “I’m afraid of this. Everything that’s happened since yesterday. I feel like I got knocked out of my own life when I dropped my bike. I’ve done so much work to protect myself and be smart and safe, but here I am. I feel so deep in with you, and I just met you. You weren’t anywhere near me on the highway, but you crashed right into me anyway. I’m freaking out.”

It seemed an impossibility to be anything but open with him. He was impervious to her self-guards.

He studied her quietly. The eerie whitewash of the parking lot light drew his face against stark shadows.

“You want me to take you back home?”

Willa tried to read something in his expression, in his tone, but she couldn’t. He was, again, inscrutable. She had opened wide to this stranger, yet he remained a stranger.

She didn’t want him to take her home. That was the scariest thing of all, the thought that she might want this man to slam into her life and take it over.

No. No. That wasn’t it. No.

“I don’t want to give myself up again.”

Rad shifted toward her on the seat. He leaned in close and caught her chin between his thumb and the loose curl of his fist. “I’m not lookin’ to take you over. I don’t know what’s goin’ on here, either, but I ain’t afraid of it. Seems like it might be a great ride, you and me. Don’t ya think?”

She did. Since she’d ridden home from the wreck on the back of his bike, her body and mind had hummed with a steady charge of excitement. Whatever was going on between them, something physical and instinctual in her craved it.

She didn’t want to fight it. Rad made her feel safe, even as she fretted. Jesse had never made her feel safe. Maybe she was still the stupid girl she’d been. Maybe she wasn’t.

Maybe, maybe. But for sure she was lonely. Trying to make sure she was strong and ready if Jesse found her again, she’d walled herself up alone with her dog. Rad was tearing all that down.

And she wanted him to.

When she gave her answer with a nod, he slid his hand from her chin and around her face, into her hair. He kissed her—mouth closed, touch light, but he lingered there, and when he finally moved away, he turned his head so that his beard swept over her lips. A shaky breath left her chest, and she couldn’t stop her hand from coming up and following the same path.

He saw and smiled. “Which way, baby? Backward or forward?”

“Forward.”

With a wink, he slid back to the wheel and continued on to the clubhouse.



oOo



As Rad pulled up to the clubhouse, somebody ran out of the shadows and drew the chain-link gate open. He sent the guy—balding and skinny, not wearing a kutte—a nod as he drove through and parked.

When he came around to help her out of the truck, his kutte was on. He’d taken it off when he’d gotten into the cab in front of her house, and he’d put it back on as he’d climbed down.

He lifted her and set her carefully on the gravel lot, then took her hand. She must have been shaking a bit yet, because he squeezed. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Okay.”

He led her into a side door of the brick block of a building. The door opened onto two short sets of steps, one leading up and the other down. They went up.

At the top of those few steps, they were in a kitchen. Not a fancy or commercial kitchen. Just a kitchen, one that hadn’t been updated in twenty or thirty years. The one thing that separated it from any other kitchen in a working-class house was the second refrigerator standing next to the expected one.

Two young women, scantily clad in short shorts, high heels, and tight tops, were doing dishes at the sink. They gave Willa a bored once-over and both smiled at Rad like they’d been waiting all day to see him.

Rad nodded back and pulled Willa on through. He took her through a hallway into a big room that seemed to take up most of the floor they were on.

This room was full of people—men in kuttes, women dressed to impress the men in kuttes, and a couple of older women who seemed in charge in some way.

In a tattered leather recliner rested a man who’d obviously taken a terrible beating. Another man lay on a pool table that had been covered with a blue tarp. He was shirtless, and his belly was wrapped in bloody gauze.