THE OUTLAW’S BRIDE Read online

  “Looking for something.”

  She lifted her eyes hesitantly, not wanting to make eye contact. She’d just been caught trying to peep on him! And she knew immediately that there was no way she could use the excuse of being afraid of something. He might go check – that was his thing; he seemed to have a thing for generic masculinity and all those other male standards that Victoria hated, but that made her weak in the knees. But he’d find nothing, and then the jig would be up.

  She could probably make up for it if she said something clever right away.

  “Hey.”

  Yeah. Nailed it, Victoria. That was the best she had.

  She was used to being in control of herself, but it looked like a couple days of being locked up in a house with this asshole was making her lose touch with everything about herself. She hated it, but, at the same time, she loved it. What did that even say about her?

  Whatever. Now that he knew she was completely creeping on him, she might as well take the chance to admire him. There was no reason to just be embarrassed and do nothing with it. She lifted her eyes from the floor slowly, dragging them across the lines of the tile – trying to be slow about this was the most aggravating part – before resting them at his feet.

  Her eyes went from his feet up to his legs. There was no sense in dragging it out any more than she had. She closed her eyes again for a brief moment, and then looked all the way up. She tried to skim over the area between his legs – his cock; why was she being so shy about it all of a sudden? That wasn't like her. But her gaze was drawn there immediately. She saw the head of it first, big and thick, and...

  Her eyes moved away from it, but in trying to avoid gazing at the tip her view dragged up his shaft. He was long, and white, and, and...

  Most definitely getting hard.

  Splotches of red danced up to her cheeks at the same time as she drew in a hissing breath. How could he be hard? Maybe he wasn't even turned on. He probably wasn't. She went to look at him again, but she couldn’t bring herself to openly gawk, and her gaze slid back up to his eyes.

  Well, his face, and then his eyes.

  He was smirking: a huge grin that started on either side of his face and stretched wide, holding itself up so neatly at the corners as it folded open. He raised an eyebrow at her as she looked, and that just made her blush some more.

  She was resolved not to let him get the best of her, though. There was only so much she could do here, and falling around at his feet wasn't going to do her any favors. Lord knows the man probably already had some kind of ego complex, especially over his well-sized manhood.

  She shook her head. The steam in the room was completely gone now, the only evidence of it ever having been there the hot mist on the mirror above the sink. She looked to it, trying to look at herself, to see how bad her blush was. Anything to avoid looking at him.

  “Like what you see?”

  She turned her head as he spoke, knowing that he’d say something but not knowing where this was going. His tone was light, playful; if she didn’t know any better, she'd say that he liked just about everything that was going on here.

  What could she say, though? They hadn’t even had to deal with each other that long, and she was already starting to give into the idea of sleeping with him. There was no way she was going to do that, in any situation. But the idea was still somewhat tempting.

  She made eye contact. This blushing bride crap wasn't like her at all, and she wasn't going to let some lust change that about her.

  “You should put a towel on,” she suggested.

  He raised his eyebrow at her again.

  “And why exactly should I do that?” He grabbed a towel off of the rack beside him.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment. There was only so much sass you could throw at one man. But if she stayed silent, he might think that she was dumbfounded, shell-shocked, or something like that, and that wasn't the impression she wanted to leave on a man like Darren Saylor. She was able to handle him, and he had to know it. If he didn’t already, that is.

  “To dry yourself off.” She rolled her eyes. She knew it was a weak retort.

  But it was hard to even get that much out. Her eyes roamed over his body again. How hadn’t she noticed this physique when he’d first touched her? Brought her to this house? They hadn’t had that much physical contact, unfortunately, but they had kissed. She should've been able to feel the hard lines of his body before then and make guesses about what he’d look like without his shirt. Not that she hadn’t seen him shirtless before; she had. That did nothing to prepare her for the hard line of his cock, though, the firm shape of his thighs, and the deep V that was made by the outline of his hips.

  “Is that what you really want me to do?”

  She had to get out of there.

  This was going in exactly the direction she didn’t want it to. She was standing there gawking like a schoolgirl and that wasn't going to get him to view her as anything more than some slutty bartender. She was so much more than that, even though she hadn’t put much effort into finding something better in life.

  “I think,” she finally said, trying to make it seem like she hadn’t just put a few moments of agonizing thought into these few short sentences, “that you should put some clothes on, and then we'll do something.”

  And then she left.

  Chapter Eleven

  Victoria

  The walk back to the living room was more difficult than it should have been. Victoria’s mind was full of visuals of Darren naked. She hadn’t looked at him all that long, but the thought of his body was still burned into her mind. And he’d caught her looking. Great. He was going to tease her for this, in all the ways he possibly could.

  That didn’t mean she couldn’t keep him from doing anything about it, though. Sure, he could say things, but it was how she chose to respond that would determine the outcome of this situation. And if she filled her time with other things, there probably wasn't that much of a big deal to be made out of it, right?

  The only problem was that there was still nothing to do here. There hadn’t been before she'd seen him naked, and there still wasn't now. Her mind whispered dirty things to her that she couldn’t consider. He was absolutely not an option. But he was so damned attractive.

  It was awful.

  It was really, truly awful.

  She bit her lip, trying to think of anything at all aside from him. There were books here. She could think about books. She could try to cook something, except there was barely any food here. She still hadn’t gotten him to go to the store for her. But maybe they could play a game. There were plenty of games they could play that didn’t rely solely on a board or something like that, and it didn’t even have to involve their bodies.

  Why did her mind just go there?

  Maybe there were cards. Yeah.

  She finally made her way out of the hallway and back towards those treacherous shelves of books she'd seen earlier. She didn’t even pretend that she was going to flip through the books this time, though. Earlier, when she was making her way through the books, she'd seen a small tin box. It looked more like a lunchbox than anything else, really, but that it could have something interesting in it, right?

  Unless there was nothing in it at all. But after just a few minutes of searching the bookshelves, she found that there was not one but a couple of lunchboxes tucked neatly in beside the bunch of novels.

  She gathered the boxes under her arm and moved to the couch. She could probably put the boxes on the table in front of the couch to make things easier for her when as she scoured through them, but then Darren might sit next to her and ask her what she was doing.

  There were five boxes in all. She scooted a little further to the right, and put two boxes on the couch next to her, so he couldn’t sit there. Then she spread out the other three to the left of her, making sure there was well and truly no room for Darren to plop down if he decided to come out immediately.

  Not that he wou
ld. She didn’t know how Darren operated, but she was under the impression that he didn’t often get the chance to dawdle in the shower. She didn’t even know how long he’d taken this time around. It took her a while to go looking for him. But he probably wanted to be in there for a while. Maybe he was even touching himself.

  She shook her head. As bad as her past relationships had been – she'd been burned by a guy more than once or twice in her life so far – she'd never been with a guy like Darren. She hadn’t even tried to flirt with one, actually. That was why she wasn't so happy about working at that shitty bar. She could do so much better, and she hadn’t.

  She couldn’t flirt with him. She hadn’t been flirting with anybody. She hadn’t been with anyone in a long time. What would it mean if she broke that streak by trying to get with Darren? It probably wouldn’t mean anything good for her. Yeah, she needed to keep doing what she was doing, minus the whole bathroom fiasco.

  She opened each box. She didn’t really look in them, she just undid the metal latches that kept the secrets of the tins guarded. She didn’t know what she was looking for, and she didn’t know what she was expecting, or what she was supposed to be expecting, but she didn’t really care.

  It was weird to her that these boxes were here in the first place. Why hadn’t she bothered opening them earlier? Maybe she’d been nervous about what she’d find inside. She was at a club safe house, after all. Could it be drugs? Hit lists? Severed fingers? She rolled her eyes at herself. There weren’t going to be severed fingers in these boxes. Why had she even thought that? Probably stress.

  Once all the boxes were unlatched, she threw the lids open as fast as she could, half excited, half dreading what she’d find inside.

  A bunch of paper.

  A dull pencil. She tried scratching it across a piece of paper to see if she could use it to write anything, but it didn’t work. The word came out dull and faded, and she could barely see it even when she moved the thin scrap of paper so it fell further into the light. So that wasn't going to be good for anything, it seemed. She didn’t see a sharpener. She put the pencil down and went back through the next box.

  More paper. There was a post-it note in there, too. A whole thing of them. She brought them out and tried to read the imprint of whatever the last note there had been, but she couldn’t see any indents. Even if she had a pencil that was in working order, she wasn't exactly going to be getting any secrets out of that thing soon.

  She sighed.

  That box was no good. She made her way to the next one, and its contents were just as disappointing: some rubber bands that looked to be in such poor shape that she almost mistook them for twine; a pen, but it didn’t have its cap and the ink had long since dried out; another mass of paper; and some coins.

  The rest of the boxes were similar, until she got to the last one. That seemed cliché, as if there was something she was looking for that she couldn’t get until she'd exhausted all her other options. That wasn't it. She didn’t even know what she wanted; all she knew was that she needed some sort of distraction.

  The last box was full of cards. There were three separate decks in there, but they all looked like they were just the type of cards you'd play at a bar or a casino or some crap like that. She liked cards, though, and she was pretty good at them from the times she'd spent playing them with co-workers at bars past. And she'd been pretty good at them as a kid, too, playing them at school and outside of it with the few friends she'd managed to have.

  She flipped through the cards. All but one of the packs didn’t have a box or any kind of container for them to rest in, so it was difficult to determine which card belonged to which deck, even though the designs on the outsides of them were somewhat different. Eventually, though, she came to the conclusion that neither of the first two decks she’d flipped through were complete. Damn.

  But one pack in the tin had never been opened. The plastic seal was still on it, and that made her feel just a little bit better. This one had to be a full deck, unless something terrible had happened to it. Well, it wouldn’t so much be terrible, at least, not in comparison to other things, as it just would be disappointing. Maybe Victoria had bad enough luck that this deck would have some kind of factory defect and be missing some cards, or have duplicates. If that was the case, Victoria felt like the entire world was stacked up against her.

  And maybe it was, but probably not to the extent that a simple deck of cards would be a dud. She cut through the plastic with her fingernails after some struggle, and pulled the cards out. She flipped them in her hands, running her fingers over the thickness of them, and found that the deck did appear to be a full one.

  She sighed with relief, running her hand through her hair. She needed to relax. She put the old cards back in the box, setting the full deck on the coffee table in front of her.

  Once the deck of cards was safely there, she returned her attention to the boxes. Stuffing everything back where it came from, without really paying attention to what went in which box, she turned her attention back to the deck of cards.

  It was tempting to just throw the boxes beneath the coffee table, but that'd probably piss off Darren. Besides, it looked like everything within the safe house was placed there for a reason. It was clean, tidy, minimalist. He, and anyone else who ended up going here, because there was no way she was staying here for long, probably wouldn’t appreciate her making a mess of it.

  And though she didn’t want to care what Darren thought about her, she didn’t want to resort to being the type of asshole he was. She sighed again, less happily this time. Then she stood up, taking all the tins in one arm, and moved to the bookshelves, placing each back where it belonged. Well, maybe not exactly where it belonged, but close enough to where the tins had originally come from that she felt no pangs of guilt.

  Then she finally made her way back to the couch, pulling open the box again and spreading the cards out on the table.

  She just had to take her mind off of the here and now and think about other things. Grabbing a couple cards and trying to put them in order from Ace to King, she stretched and thought about lost, carefree days of playing solitaire.

  # # #

  Darren

  He was still in the bathroom.

  He grabbed his jaw, rubbing it thoughtfully. Not that he liked to put that much thought into things. Well, he did, but he didn’t like having people think he was that kind of guy. It'd absolutely ruin his rep. Still, he stood there, just outside the shower.

  He’d quit reaching for the towel a long time ago. Victoria had already left and he didn’t need to get dry just yet, so there was no reason for a show of modesty. Besides, there was no modesty to be had; Victoria had seen his cock as it was already.

  He wondered how she felt about it. She clearly wanted him, but she wasn't trying to get him right now. And he didn’t want to freak her out in the middle of something as major as this, so he was waiting for her to go to him. Because that was exactly the issue: the only reason they were in the position they were right now was because someone was trying to kill her.

  And it wasn't like he should be focusing on the fact that she was attractive, and the fact that she was obviously attracted to him. He should be working on finding her killer. But he couldn’t just leave her here, and there wasn't anyone he could leave her with. Either way, there was definitely no way he was going to leave her in this place by herself.

  His mind went through the amount of people who knew where this safe house was. Not many. He could easily trust another member of the Bloody Saints to stay here and look after her if need be, but he really wanted to be the one to make sure she was safe. It wouldn’t be right if someone else did it. Why? He didn’t know why. He didn’t really give a fuck either way, though. Looking too far into it might make him seem overemotional. And if there was something he wasn't, overemotional definitely was it.

  He put a hand out and placed it against the wall by the shower. He wasn't so much leaning to support his weight
as he was just leaning for the sake of doing it. It wasn't helping him at all, though.

  He walked over to the sink so he could look in the mirror that hung above it. His hand went back to his jaw, and he stroked the hairs there. Maybe he should shave. He didn’t. There was no point in doing it. Maybe Victoria liked the rugged look, and what did it matter if she didn’t, anyway? He didn’t feel like it and didn’t even have a razor in the first place.

  Of course there were no razors here. Sometimes the people at the safe house weren't there willingly. The last thing on their minds was a shave. His jaw tightened as he thought about it, and his hand fell away. That sucked, but it was life. What point was there in complaining about it? It wasn't like they hurt people here. Sometimes a member of the club made a bad choice, though, and they had to be detained here until whatever they'd fucked up could be settled.

  So, no razors. That way a guy – or a girl, but that had never happened before Victoria – couldn’t attack someone, or themselves. It was for the best, really, but just then it was pissing off Darren to no end. What else didn’t they have here? Victoria was still pressing him to go to the store, too.