Page 18 of Ruined (The Knights of Ruin)

I blinked, my heart leaping inside my chest. ‘Seriously?’

‘I’m always serious, kitten.’ He didn’t smile, and there was an intense look on his face. ‘Especially when it comes to you two and your safety.’

I let the kitten go, sagging against the bar in relief. ‘How? What did you do?’

He still didn’t smile, which maybe should have clued me in to the fact that what he was going to say next wasn’t going to make my life any easier.

‘You’re not going to like it.’

The relief ebbed, my muscles tensing. ‘What exactly am I not going to like?’

‘It involves the Knights.’

Smoke was always like this when he was telling me stuff I didn’t want to hear. Calm. Direct. Straight-up. Laying out the unpleasant facts so I knew exactly where I stood.

‘It involves you and Annie being under their protection.’

My first instinct was no fucking way inhell. I hated the MC and didn’t want to have anything to do with them—and I especially didn’t want any child of mine anywhere near them.

‘I told you I didn’t want to involve—’

‘I know what you told me. But hear me out, okay?’

I bit down on my protest. I didn’t want to hear him out, but if he’d gone to the trouble of figuring out a way to help Annie, then the least I could do was listen.

‘Fine. So how are Annie and me going to be under their protection? We’re not part of the club.’

He shifted on his feet, and if I hadn’t known any better, I would have said he looked uncertain. Which was strange, because Smoke was never uncertain.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s the hard part. To be under their protection you have to be a club member.’

‘How? Unless they’re suddenly recruiting women?’ I put a little sarcasm into that last part, because obviously no outlaw MC would allow women to be full members.

Smoke ignored that, gazing at me in a very focused, very intent way. It made that electric current stronger, lifting all the hairs along the back of my neck and my forearms, making me short of breath.

‘There’s one way,’ he murmured. ‘If you’re my old lady, you’ll have the full protection of the club and so would Annie.’

Shock held me still. I had no idea what to say—no idea what to even think.

First there was the whole issue of the club. Then there was being his old lady... He couldn’t be serious.

But he wasn’t smiling. And the look in his eyes... Shit, I knew that look. He always had it when he meant to do something and he was going to do it whether I liked it or not. He’d always been a guy who liked his own way, and he got it enough that it made him unhappy when he didn’t.

‘You’re not serious, right?’ I tried to sound normal and not like a shaky little girl.

‘Yeah, I’m serious.’

Of course he was. He was never anything but.

‘You and me will be together as long as it takes for Grant to get off your back, but it won’t be real or anything.’ He stopped all of a sudden, as if he’d meant to say something else and held himself back at the last minute. ‘We only have to make it look believable to the club.’

Make it look believable.

What the hell did that mean?

You know what it means, idiot.

Heat shot through me—a flare like a lighted match held against my skin. I tried like hell to ignore it. To concentrate on the facts instead.

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