Damn cute. If they’d been anywhere else, any other time, he would have flirted with her, started the slow dance that would eventually lead to the bedroom where he would strip her down and make her moan. He suspected she hid her true emotions, and once he cracked those inhibitions he would find deep passion beneath the orderly facade.
“Ally, Doug and I were talking about where I should go.” She sipped her wine, the red staining her lips. He wanted to lick it off, kiss her lips until they were plump and pink, just like he’d imagined when she kissed him before the needle hit home.
“You don’t need to go anywhere.” He stood, poured another whiskey, leaned against the counter. “Once I kill Viper, you’ll be safe. You can get back to your normal life.” He sipped the whiskey, slowly this time, letting the liquid burn and warm his tongue.
“Yeah.” Naiya toyed with the salad on her plate. “I’ll find a good job, save up some money to buy a little house, maybe I’ll meet a nice guy with a good job—”
“What about Maurice? You gonna dump him because he didn’t show?”
With a sigh, she stood and carried her plate to the sink. “He dumped me. Doug caught him with another woman, and he asked Doug to tell me it was over.”
Holt thudded his glass on the counter. “He’s a fucking piece of shit, and he’ll come crawling back ’cause you’re a real class act, and he’s gonna realize what a mistake he made.”
Her eyes warmed, and a smile spread across her face. “That’s the nicest thing anyone ever said to me.”
“It’s the truth, although I gotta admit I hope he doesn’t come back ’cause you deserve better than a man who isn’t there when you need him.”
She put her plate in the sink and turned on the water. “There weren’t a lot of good men around when I was growing up, which is why I was so desperate to get out of the club. I wasn’t safe.”
“So you’re not with the Jacks?”
She gave him a horrified look. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t want to wind up like my mom. Most of the women at the club are drug addicts or sweet butts or both. That’s not a life. I might have had it rough as a teenager, but when I lived with my grandmother, she encouraged me to work hard so I could have a future outside the MC. She never minded that I never really fit in.”
He pointed to the tattoo on her shoulder, bared by the short-sleeved tee. He’d missed it before, but in the evening light it stood out, a black stain on her otherwise perfect skin. “You got the Black Jacks mark.”
Naiya yanked on her sleeve, and her face crumpled. “Not by choice.”
He barely caught the words she whispered, but when he did the food stuck in his throat. Jesus H Christ. She’d been inked against her will?
“Viper?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Viper.”
Holt felt a strange tightening in his gut. Viper had claimed her, not just for the club, but also as his own. No wonder he’d sent the Jacks to hunt her down. And yet he’d never met anyone so ill-suited to club life. Why did Viper want her so bad when he had a club full of women willing to satisfy his every whim? Maybe for the same reason Holt found her interesting. She was different, smart, ambitious, and beautiful. And yet, just like all bikers, she didn’t fit in.
A fierce wave of protectiveness crashed over him, the likes of which he hadn’t felt since Lucy was alive. He wanted to gather her into his arms, hold her close, and promise her no one would ever hurt her again. He wanted to grab his gun, drive until he got to the Black Jack clubhouse, and shoot until every Jack was dead and he’d blown so many holes in Viper’s body there would be nothing left to bury. And then he wanted to take her away. Keep her. Claim her as his own.
Just as Viper had done.
*
“Lie still.”
Naiya patted antiseptic over the wounds on Holt’s back. Getting him into the bedroom so she could check his dressings had been no easy task. After they finished eating and washed the dishes, he prowled around the cabin, checking out every window, door, nook and cranny. Then he’d walked the grounds, charting out the property in slow, halting steps before returning to the kitchen to polish off the rest of the food. Only the promise of chocolate-chip cookies—albeit made from a mix—had lured him to the bedroom. Even then, he had grumbled as he stripped off his T-shirt, telling her he didn’t need any more “fixing.”
“What the fuck is that stuff?” He tensed when she ran the cotton ball over the freshest of the stripes across his back, pushed himself up, twisting his head to look over his shoulder.
“Keeps the germs out.” She pushed on his shoulder, biting back a smile. “Lie down. You’re worse than a kid.”
“You don’t need to put it everywhere.” He twisted his head again and Naiya stroked a soothing hand through his thick, soft hair.