Page 14 of Dark Biker Protector

Chapter Seven – Chuck

With the takeout in one hand, I awkwardly pressed the buzzer to her apartment door. A moment later, her voice came down the line.

"Chuck?"

"Hey, Abbey, it’s me."

A moment later, the door buzzed open, and I headed to her door where she was already standing, grinning as she eyed the food in my arms.

"Damn, that smells good," she murmured, reaching to take the Thai food I’d picked up on the way.

"How much do I owe you?" she asked as she headed in to the kitchen to unpack it.

"We can figure it out later," I replied, stooping down to greet her little cat, Cinnamon. Truth be told, I wasn’t that bothered about getting my money back. We had gotten into a routine lately: I would come by to check up on her after I was finished with everything at the club, and usually sleep over, crashing on her couch to make sure she was feeling comfortable with the way everything was going.

Ever since she had called me up to ask for my help the other night, I hadn’t wanted to leave her alone. There was a part of me that knew nothing had actually happened yet, but if her gut instincts were telling her there was something up, there was no way I was going to go arguing with that. If I could help, I would. And if help meant coming to her place with takeout, shit, I could swing that.

"How was your day?” she called to me, as she began unpacking the food in the kitchen. I sank down into her couch, on the same spot I always did. Her apartment was tiny, but somehow, it never seemed to feel cramped.

"It was good," I called back. I didn’t go into the details with her – she didn’t need to know the shit I was dealing with at the Dogs, the way Lombardi was pushing in our territory. He’d been skirting around the edges for a while now, but his sex trafficking business was more than I was willing to turn a blind eye to. I could put up with a lot of shit from my competitors, but that? That was a step too far. I knew how many guys like Liam, that fucking bastard, would sell their women into that shit to make some quick cash. I was planning an attack on Lombardi soon enough, but we had to bide our time and make it stick when the time came. We couldn’t risk anything going wrong.

But these evenings with Abbey had been a welcome reprieve from that, a chance for me to unwind and focus on something other than the Dogs for a change. I told myself I was there to keep her safe, settle her mind about everything, but the truth was, I benefited from it as much as she did.

"I’ve been trying to get my computer working in here all day," she explained, as she stuck her head through from the kitchen. "But the internet has been going in and out all evening. Do you mind we eat in the bedroom? I don’t want the movie cutting in and out all night..."

I hesitated for a moment. We had been watching movies together every night – a chance for her to switch off, she told me, and we had been picking one apiece on alternating evenings. But being alone with her like that, lying in bed with her, felt like a little more than what we had been up to before. And I wasn’t sure if I could handle it without getting a little...distracted.

But then, I didn’t want to give away how attracted to her I happened to be. I knew there was no way in hell that she looked at me the way I looked at her, not with the age gap between us – she was in her twenties, for God’s sake, there wasn’t a chance she would look twice at a guy like me. I had lived a whole fifteen years more than she had. She was a writer, a journalist, and I was the head of a biker gang. We couldn’t have been more different if we tried.

"Sure," I replied. I didn’t want to kick us out of the routine we had gotten ourselves into just because I was developing feelings for her. I knew they would pass soon enough, and when they did, I wouldn’t even think about that. We were just friends. Nothing more than that.

"Great, can you take these through, and I’ll get us set up?" she asked, handing me a couple of plates, steaming with the food I had brought with me.

"Sure..."

Cinnamon led the way to her room – fuck, her bed was small enough that I knew we would have no choice but to get up-close and personal. Did she realize that, too? Did she want that...?

She came through with the laptop, hair pulled back into a ponytail that bounced at the back of her head as she leaned over to plug in the laptop. I caught sight of her curvy ass beneath her jeans and quickly averted my eyes. Fuck, man. I needed to pull myself together. I didn’t normally look at women like this. I must have been hard-up if just her ass through her clothes was enough to send a jolt of want through my system.

Or maybe it was just something about her that had me feeling some kind of way.

She slid on to the bed next to me and leaned forward to tap play on the movie. It was her pick tonight, and she’d chosen some Argentinian arthouse movie about a headless woman or something. I wasn’t sure she’d entirely explained it to me, but she didn’t need to. As long as I got to chill with her for an evening, I didn’t care what we were watching.

We dug into our food, and the movie played out in front of us – well, I was pretty sure it did. All I could focus on was how close she was to me. Her arm was only a few inches from mine, and I knew I should have shifted to the edge of the bed to put some space between us, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually do it. Selfish? Maybe. But, as Cinnamon crawled up on to the bed and curled up at her feet, I could feel the heat burning off her skin. Like my body was a radar attuned to her frequency, picking up every detail of it.

When she finished her food, she yawned and put her plate to the side, laying her head down on the pillow next to me. I snuck a look at her out of the corner of her eye. We were in bed together. In bed together. It couldn’t have been lost on her what this meant, the significance of it – but she wasn’t letting it show on her face, her eyes fixed on the movie, idly petting Cinnamon as she watched it play out in front of her. I could hardly keep up with the plot. I couldn’t focus on anything other than her.

"God, I’m so sorry, I can hardly keep my eyes open," she apologized, with a yawn. "You want to watch the rest of this tomorrow?"

"Sure, if you want," I replied. She reached over for the remote and, just as I went to swing my legs out of bed, she caught my arm.

"You don’t have to go," she told me, suddenly. I froze.

"What do you-"

"Not if you don’t want to," she blurted, gazing up at me, but I couldn’t read the look on her face.

"You want me to lie here with you?" I asked softly. I knew how it could get, those bad dreams that threw you for a loop and left you gasping to find the ground underneath you. She nodded just once, as though she was ashamed to admit it.

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