Page 15 of Blood of Vengeance

I nodded, knowing he could feel it against his shoulder, and tightened my grip. The man revved the engine and took off, heading back to the clubhouse. Ready to start a hunt to find the body of my dead father.

We arrived within minutes, pulling into the lot where ten other bikes and bikers sat ready to go. Flinch rolled up beside Cutter and killed the engine.

“Got anything?” Cutter asked, looking right at me. His gaze one that sent my heart skittering on a journey to tachycardia. The man had a way about him—an air of pure malice that filled the space between us I’d been too tired to notice the night before. But I had Flinch in front of me, and I had a feeling that meant I was safe. At least a little bit.

“I dreamed about his death again,” I said. “One gunshot, wolves howling, in the desert.”

Cutter smirked. “That’s about anywhere out here. Thankfully, Banger called in a favor with some trackers he knows. We’ve got an idea of where to go and can meet up with them later to refine the location if we don’t find anything.” He turned his predator eyes on Flinch. “Females are inside.”

My stomach dropped. They weren’t going to let me go with them, even though it was my dad they were looking for. Even though I was the one who had told them I thought he’d been murdered. I was about to argue, to try to present my case to be included, when Flinch laid a hand on my thigh.

“She rides with me.”

Every man around us turned and stared, the entire crew going silent. I had no idea what Flinch had just done, had no clue why even Cutter seemed to be gobsmacked over those four words, but I didn’t need to know. I rode with Flinch, which meant I got to help find my dad’s body.

Eventually, Cutter nodded. “Understood, though we’ll need to have a discussion later.”

Flinch nodded once, a stiff and almost subtle movement. Then he took his hand away, restarted his bike, and leaned back to murmur only to me.

“Hold on. This is going to be rough.”

Flinch

Riding to the club with a fucking hard-on might have been the worst idea in the history of man or beast, especially after not sleeping. Fucking Locklyn, being all gorgeous and distracting. Pretty sure my dick would fall off from how hard it got just being around the woman. And the fact that she had been sleeping in my bed? Impossible to get over. I’d ended up having to come inside to be closer to her, though I hadn’t invaded her space. She’d shut the bedroom door, and I’d respected that. Even if I had been fucking miserable.

And then she came out in that tiny tee this morning, showing me her goodies. Not that she’d meant to, but I saw them. I motherfucking memorized them. Especially the panties she’d worn under that shirt, the ones that had cupped her ass cheeks and clung to her hips like the straps might break at any moment. Pink fabric hugging all that warm skin. Like the color her pussy lips would be once I got them all plump and juicy with my?—

My dick was going to fall off for real if I didn’t start thinking of baseball or some shit.

The crew rode with us as we headed for the desert, the rumble of motorcycle engines music to my ears. I liked having Locklyn on the back of my bike—liked knowing she was safe and feeling her body against mine. No fucking way would I have left her at the bar with the club pussy. Cutter should have known better than to even suggest such shit.

A tug from Locklyn at a stoplight had me turning my head to give her my attention. She leaned forward, hand on my shoulder, surrounding me in her scent and making my wolf positively salivate.

“Can we swing by my dad’s place? I want to see it.”

Right. Dead father. My wolf and my dick were going to have to wait. I gave her a single head nod and motioned to the brothers that I would be taking the lead. I made a left once the light changed in my favor, heading north instead of east. The team followed behind me, likely knowing where we were headed.

Chiggy had lived in a trailer he’d dropped on a piece of scrubland close to the club. There wasn’t much to see there—the house, a garage he’d built to store and work on his bikes, and a lot of dirt that led up to some mountains. Typical Mesa outskirts. Every Desert Hellion had been to Chiggy’s place at one time or another—whether to help the brother out, for a party, or just to shoot the shit on a Tuesday night. The man had an open-door policy, and we had all taken advantage of his hospitality.

He would be fucking missed.

I pulled to a stop out front of the trailer, already knowing the place sat empty. Sensing the lack of life within. My brothers rolled in behind me but kept their distance. Seemed like they all understood this wasn’t an investigatory visit.

Locklyn swung her leg over and climbed off my bike, standing beside me and staring off at the place her dad had called home for as many years as I’d known him. Which hadn’t been all that long—I’d rolled into Mesa just over a decade before. Long after the woman beside me had been born.

“It’s dirtier than I remember,” she said, her voice small and quiet. Something in my chest burned, the heat creating this weird tightness. Like a pulled muscle or something.

“You lived here as a kid?”

“Yeah. My mom and I. Not for long.” She turned my way, those pain-filled green eyes making the tightness in my chest increase. “He kicked us out right after my sixth birthday.”

If Chiggy hadn’t been dead, I would have killed him with my bare hands for putting that expression on my girl’s face. “He ever give you a reason?”

“To get us away from all of you.” She turned back to look at the house, taking away my access to those eyes. To her emotions. “You can’t trust a shifter.”

The one good thing about such cutting words was they absolutely deflated my poor dick finally. I sat perfectly still on my bike, that tightness in my chest growing hotter and deeper. I had a mate who would never trust me, which meant… Fuck, I didn’t even know what it meant. But it wasn’t good.

“You done here?” The tone of my voice—the harshness—grated at my wolf, but there was no pulling the words back. I nodded toward Locklyn’s seat when she turned my way, completely ignoring the surprise on her pretty face. The wariness. “We can come back so you can go inside, but only once our team gets out here to look for evidence of what happened to him. Just in case. Even though you can’t trust us.”

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