Page 34 of Jingle Belle's Biker

The world stops.

I can’t breathe because I’m too aware of the beats of our hearts, of the warmth of him, his breath whispering over my lips.

He lowers his head, and my eyes flutter shut.

“Saint,” Gravel calls as the music and noise swell behind us. “Someone’s looking for you.”

Regret flares in Saint’s eyes. “Who?”

“Sin.”

“Fuck,” he mutters. “I’ll take you home.”

And just like that, the moment’s gone.

Forever.

Chapter Eight

Saint

Shit. Fuck. Sin.

Sin.

I rub a hand over my face, everything in my guts churning.

Not because of Sin and how I nearly kissed pretty Red, but because it felt like opportunity slipped through my fingers.

It doesn’t matter if that opportunity was good, bad, or something gray.

She’d have kissed me back.

Belle likes me, it’s why she blushes.

Her thoughts take her to places she can’t stop going, places I want to take her to. The down and dirty and X-rated ones. She blushes because she doesn’t know what to do with it. That’s in her green eyes. A hopeful light wrapped with newness and confusion, like something’s blooming, and she doesn’t know what.

The woman’s expressive, and I want to fucking taste her.

I stare out at the city spread below me, twinkling like fucking lights on a Christmas tree, and lean back against theold, abandoned shack near the road in the Sweetwood Hills that surround it.

Shacks like this were probably once part of a homestead or whatever. I really don’t know. I’m not a city guy, but the country life isn’t for me.

Mine’s the one that the road offers. All the what-ifs and adventures that ring with possibilities I haven’t found.

No woman, no club, has ever given me that. Never will. Not a pretty redhead with green eyes and a buttoned-down sexiness, and not the pure sex on legs that’s Sin, either.

When we rode together, now that was good. It occasionally bordered on perfection. But I honestly couldn’t say if it was because of her, or sex on tap and the open road.

Not that I didn’t love her, but . . .

That was then, and this is now.

We want different things, and the moment she told me she wanted to be my official old lady and to stay with the club we were with for a few months, I can finally admit that my ending it for the road and my own company came with something like relief.

I loved her. But that was not enough.

My phone lights up, and it’s times like this I wish I smoked. I could do with a drag on something or could do with the thrill of riding drunk. The latter isn’t something I’ve done since misspent teen years. Why I sat with the one beer tonight.

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