Cutter's Hope (7 page)

I swiped my bangs across my forehead and tucked them behind my ear before throwing on my sunglasses and locking up. I tossed my keys in the top of my bag and went out front. Stopping short at the smiling Kraken President on the back of a glossy orange and white Indian. He smiled broadly at me.

“You got health insurance with you?” he asked. I frowned.

“What?”

“Health insurance,” he repeated.

“Yeah, why?” I asked.

“Florida helmet laws, Sweetheart, you gotta be at least 21 years of age and have at least ten thousand dollars in health insurance coverage to operate or ride on a bike without a helmet.”

“No shit?” I asked. That sounded totally stupid but at the same time, kind of awesome.

“No shit.”

I shrugged and got on behind him without missing a beat and he started her up. It was definitely a different sound than my baby gave off.

“Done this before, huh?” he called out over the growl of the engine.

“A time or two,” I said, unwilling to admit that I wasn’t used to being a passenger.

“Well hang on, Sweetheart,” he said grinning and I wrapped my arms around him and he put us in motion.

There was seriously something different about riding with no helmet. The wind in my hair, the feeling akin to falling knowing there was no safety net… it was exhilarating. He was showing off a little but that was fine. I would too if I had a machine like his. I made sure to stay snug up against him, partially because he felt good and partially because short skirts traveling into the wind with no panties was a recipe for disaster. I hugged my arm in close to my body, crushing my purse to me, the hard outline of the gun digging in reassuringly.

We got on the highway and the air whipped past, rushing along my skin, filling me up and blowing out the back, taking all the stress and frustration and hopelessness with it. Cutter was warm, and solid and though I couldn’t see his eyes from the wraparound sunglasses he was sporting, I could see his face in the side view mirror and the little smile that tinged his lips. I couldn’t help but feel the little caress of one of my own on my lips which immediately took me back to the sensation of his mouth on mine. Of his trim beard burning my cheek, his strong jaw beneath my fingertips.

If I were less of a badass I would have swooned again, instead I leaned forward and called out, “Well your chances of getting in my pants are improving!”

Cutter laughed, “Is that so?” he yelled back over his shoulder.

“It could happen,” I yelled over the cacophony of wind and traffic. Cutter’s smile turned into a grin and he took the next exit. We’d been travelling maybe fifteen or twenty minutes by now.

We didn’t have to go far off the highway to reach the bowling alley. Like so many of them this place looked as dilapidated as they got and there were several bikes and a Jeep or two parked out front. A man in one of the Kraken leather vests took a cigarette out of his mouth and exhaled. He was blond, like light blond, almost white and his hair stood stiff but at the same time soft looking off his scalp in an almost-fro. Like dandelion fluff.

“Captain’s here!” he shouted into the dark, cave like atmosphere of the bowling alley behind him. Cheers and applause drifted out of the darkened door way. Cutter put down the kickstand to his bike and shut it off. I climbed off carefully and managed to preserve my modesty… you know… if I had any.

Inside was dark and hot, like it didn’t have any air conditioning hot. I blinked and realized what light there was came from those camp lanterns, their hiss loud in the dark, the white hot light glowing from them like captive stars.

“Are we trespassing?” I asked with a laugh.

“We do what we want, Princess,” the blonde woman from earlier called out. I glanced at Cutter and realized by his guarded look, that this was some kind of a test.

“It’s hot as fuck in here, anybody have a cold beer?” I asked, raising a brow. I was rewarded by a secret smile from Cutter and a cheer or two from some of the guys and a couple of girls.

A cold bottle was thrust into my hand and a younger guy wearing a vest that had no emblem on the back, the bottom rocker reading ‘prospect’ went jogging down the lane to set up empty bottles for pins. He stayed down the lane and off to the side and Cutter came up behind me, his breath almost cooler on my shoulder than the ambient air, which was saying something.

“Ladies first,” he murmured and pressed his lips against the back of my shoulder, just to the side of my dress strap. I shivered and it had nothing to do with the temperature in the room, which really was just this side of Hades’ balls.

I threw my hair up off my neck into a messy bun using the hair elastic I kept at the ready around my wrist. I set my purse to the side on a dusty chair and took the proffered bowling ball someone had found, from the man offering it. He wasn’t bad to look at either. Tall and slender but not without his own strength, he was blond too, shoulder length and sported a goatee, his blue eyes cynical. The name tag on his vest said ‘Marlin’ and below that Vice President. Interesting.

I handed Marlin my beer, vowed not to drink from it again after I took it back, and tried to keep a watch on him out of the corner of my eye as I lined up. I took my slight running start and let the ball go, it rolled through the grit on the lane and demolished all but two of the bottles. Cheers went up. The prospect cursed and went after the ball and rolled it back to me down the gutter.

Music was started out of an old boom box and we bowled. Cutter sucked at it, and in a total role reversal, I found myself pressed to his back showing him how to do it right. The touches lingered, the glances held weight and we did this careful dance around each other that was equal parts flirtation and trying to get to the bottom of one versus the other. We flirted
hard
and I learned names and listened to stories.

“Hey, Hope! Where you going?” Radar called. We’d been here a couple of hours and I’d had more than one beer. Marlin had started drinking my original without thinking about it so I’d gotten another for myself.

“If they haven’t shut off the water yet, then the bathrooms might still work!” I called back, and purse over my shoulder I went looking for it. As luck would have it, the water hadn’t been shut off and there were still paper towels! Score.

As I came out of the bathroom, he caught me slightly off guard, but not enough to warrant me fighting back. His energy wasn’t malicious, I don’t know how I can explain it but when someone comes at you with mal-intent; it feels different than what this was. As I came out of the bathroom, Cutter was just suddenly there, pressing his body the length of mine, driving me back into the wall. I gasped and his mouth was on mine and my fingers wound into his hair which was falling out of its ponytail.

God damn it! This man could kiss. He devoured me from the mouth down, my blood thrummed with alcohol and lust, no I wasn’t impaired, just pleasantly buzzed. His hands slid over my body through the thin dress and I pushed my hands under his shirt. He groaned into my mouth and I sighed with contentment. He broke the kiss first and leaned back with that debonair grin plastered to his face.

“Been wanting to do that for a couple of days,” he said.

“Why’d you stop?” I asked coquettishly and his grin broadened.

“If I’m going to take you, it sure as hell ain’t going to be in some grungy defunct bowling alley,” he stated and his tone held a finality to it that made me think a little more of him.

“Kiss me again,” I demanded.

Cutter raised his eyebrows, “You like it when I kiss you, Sweetheart?”

“No, not at all, now shut up and do it again.”

I pulled his mouth back down to mine, tugging on his leather vest to do it. Cutter smiled against my lips and flicked his tongue against my bottom one. I opened for him and he kissed me, his mouth warm, his taste overlaid by the crisp hoppy flavor of the beer we’d been drinking. He sank his teeth gently into my lower lip and I groaned. Things much lower in my body began to throb with need and I marveled once more at the attraction.

I had never had such a visceral reaction to a man and it was interesting to me. It was also extremely frustrating knowing that he was deliberately withholding the information I
needed
to find the last woman to see my sister. I pushed back, breathless, and realized that his palm rested warm on the outside of one of my thighs up under my skirt which caused me to shudder. God I was horny but my hormones needed to take a back seat. I stiffened in his hold and he smiled down at me, almost a little sadly.

“Shh, easy girl. Nothin’ ain’t gonna happen that you don’t wanna have happen,” he murmured and the tone and delivery he used just turned me on that much more.

Cutter put my leg down which had been raised up over one of his hips, the scorching length of his erection pressing against me through the denim of his soft, broken in jeans, left my mound feeling almost bruised with the force with which he’d been pressed against me. It was a delicious feeling, I’m not going to lie. For a girl that could most definitely handle her own, it was a rare thing for me to find a man who could man handle me, but I suspected Cutter was up to the job. I liked that. I liked that a lot.

“That’s the problem, I want it to happen but it can’t,” I murmured and met his eyes with steely resolve.

Cutter had both palms pressed flat to the wall to either side of my head, my body bracketed in, trapped. Any other female and it probably would have been intimidating as hell but I wasn’t just any female. I was me, with some of the finest hand to hand combat training the world over locked in my brain, muscles and joints. So no, I wasn’t intimidated or afraid but a big part of that was the way that Cutter looked at me. He searched my face carefully, as if doing so could and would, divine every last little secret my heart held.

“You’ve been knocked down, dragged out, put through the wringer and don’t trust no one as a result,” he said finally and sighed, his tone liberally dosed with regret.

“You say that with some serious conviction,” I put on a musing tone as I said it, more curious to see what he would do. It was kind of unnerving how he managed to pick up on things so easily. Okay, for me, it was
really
unnerving. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

“Look at you, hiding behind your high walls. You’re like a concrete maze, Darlin’. Just when I think I got you figured out, the maze changes and I’m right back to square one,” he leaned in as if doing a push up against the wall and whispered the last against my ear, his breath fanning and sending a pleasurable little rush down the side of my neck, “You trust me a little, I’ll trust you…”

He pushed back and his warm brown eyes searched mine. I let go of his leather vest with my left hand and held the inside of my left wrist in front of his face. His eyes refocused on the writing there and followed the sweeping lines.

“Virtue,” he read, “Gonna have to fill me in, Beautiful. I’m not picking up what you’re putting down.”

I licked my lips which were suddenly very dry and swallowed a couple of times. It was hard to think with him so close, smelling so good; like clean saltwater and ocean breeze.

“I have two sisters, Faith and Charity… One is missing. The girl I am looking for was the last person to see her.” I relented. Cutter stared at my face, hard. The lines of his own collapsing into neutrality.

“Wait here,” he said and kissed me one last time roughly. He pushed back up off the wall, away from me, before stalking around the corner and back into the bowling alley.

“Council!” he barked, “Outside
now!
”

Uh-oh. Looks like I just opened up a can of whoop ass on somebody. I almost felt bad about that. The guys that formed the leadership of the club weren’t half bad, that I could tell. I pushed off the wall and closed my eyes. With a groan, I fell back against it and leaned on it hard. What the fuck did I just do?

Chapter 8

Cutter

The boys were all silent, and like me, none of them were happy. I wanted to tell her, but the ramifications of that would be far reaching for my club, so I had to put it to a vote. The council stood around me at the far end of the lot and mulled over the implications.

“Tiny’s got our nuts in a fucking vice,” Nothing growled.

“Too fucking right. Wish the happy bastard would just fucking retire already,” Radar kicked a rock across the worn out asphalt of the parking lot.

“We can’t tell her anything, not until we know she’s not going to flip out. We need a full club meeting, make sure every damn one of us is on the same page,” Marlin said judiciously.

Pyro huffed a laugh and I looked at my best friend, “Play time is over. I’ll get everyone over to The Plank where we can put it to a vote. I’m sorry, Brother,” he said to me, “I don’t see this going any but one way. She’s connected to the cops. She’ll fucking fry us.”

“You don’t know that,” I said and scowled at my best buddy.

“We don’t know that she won’t, so put your resting bitch face on ice there, Captain,” Atlas said. I sighed.

“Round ‘em up. Have Hossler take Hope back to town. I want this shit settled in house and everyone on the same page.”

My proclamation was met with a bunch of ‘Aye, aye, Captain’s,’ and the boys drifted off in the direction of the bowling alley. It was Marlin who stayed behind. He put his hand on my shoulder and sighed.

“Man, I’m sorry, I know you like her. Haven’t seen you this engaged since L’il Bit went home with her man,” he patted me roughly on the shoulder twice but my gaze was fixed across the lot on Hope who was looking coolly back at me, her deep brown eyes calculating and curious. She knew something was up. I hadn’t exactly bothered to hide it.

“C’mon Honey, Captain wants you to ride with me and I could use some girl power for a minute after hanging around with these assholes,” I heard Hossler tell her. Hope hitched her purse higher on her shoulder and slid her sunglasses on her face.

“I’m down like four flat tires,” she said to Hoss and got up into the passenger seat of Hossler’s old ‘85 Land Rover Defender. The thing was ancient, the paint oxidized and rusted in places but there was no denying its reliability. Didn’t break down often, and when it did, Hoss usually fixed it herself. Hope would be safe enough.