slightly in my hold. ‘No,’ he managed to get out, but I gave him a cuff over the face all the same, because he was an asshole and needed to learn a lesson.
I took my hand away and left him to drop in a heap on the floor, then I turned around to see how Summer was doing.
She was sitting on the bed, giving me big eyes and fear and not saying a fucking word.
‘Want to tell me what you’re doing here, baby?’ I asked her.
Crash croaked something from the floor, but I stuck my boot in his gut as a warning. ‘Didn’t ask you, dumbass.’ This time he must have found some brains from somewhere because he closed his mouth again pretty quickly.
Summer still didn’t say a word, hunching over and looking down at her hands like they were the most fascinating things she’d ever seen her life.
Fuck. Looked like my evening of beer, a smoke and a couple of relaxing blow jobs was toast.
‘Summer,’ I said, keeping things mild because it was clear she was shit-scared, ‘let’s start again from the top. What the fuck are you doing here?’
At that point there came a loud burst of noise from the corridor outside and I glanced towards the doorway, catching a glimpse of some shrieking girls and a couple of the brothers laughing as they all came in from the living area, obviously in search of some bedrooms.
Mercy, hanging around by the broken door, gave me a pointed look.
Christ. I needed to lock this shit down before someone going past got a look at Summer and recognised her, and started wondering what the hell the police chief’s daughter was doing hanging around the clubhouse.
‘Sorry, Merc.’ I gestured to the girl on the bed, who was hunching her shoulders and generally trying to make herself invisible. A bit of an impossibility when she was wearing a miniskirt that barely covered her pussy and left a pair of long slender legs very, very bare. ‘Got a situation I have to handle. Maybe we’ll have some fun later.’
And I did have to handle it. If Summer decided to make a complaint about Crash to her dad, things could go badly for the Knights. We’d already had some drama with the chief’s son and we did not need any more with his daughter.
Mercy made a pouty face, but she was a good girl who knew when to back off. ‘Yeah, okay, but I’m holding you to that.’
I didn’t look after her as she disappeared back down the corridor. Instead, I took a step over to where Summer was sitting with her head bowed. Crash made another sound, but I didn’t want to hear it, especially not from him. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ I warned him, not even bothering to look at him. ‘You try forcing a girl again and I won’t just punch you in the face. I’ll cut off your cock and make you suck it. Understand?’
He didn’t say anything, which was just as well since my evening was starting to look less like blow jobs and beer and more like complicated bullshit.
Annoyed, I kicked aside the clothing lying across the floor and came over to the bed where Summer was sitting. ‘Baby,’ I said again, ‘talk to me.’
But she just shook her head and hunched her shoulders even more.
It made me remember when I used to bodyguard for her. She’d been a little scaredy-cat even then, perpetually treating me like I’d frighten her to death if I even looked at her funny.
What was she doing here? And what had Crash done to her to scare her like this?
I crouched in front of her and reached out to grab one of her hands. Her fingers were icy in mine. ‘Hey.’ I tried to keep my voice gentle, which was difficult since I wasn’t a gentle guy by any stretch of the imagination. ‘You okay?’
A brother’s voice sounded from close to the doorway. Big Red, the VP, from the sounds of things.
Jesus, I really needed to get her out of here.
I rose to my feet and carefully pulled Summer off the bed so she was standing in front of me, her hand still cold in mine.
Her chin came up, her eyes blinking in shock, her hoodie falling back a little, giving me a better look at her face. Yeah, I remembered her all right. Couldn’t forget eyes that blue, or that huge and dark. They seemed black beneath her fair, almost colourless brows, and then there was that determined, pointed chin. I remembered trying to tease her out of her constant terrified silence a couple of times, a tactic that had never worked. But that chin of hers used to jut in a way that made me wonder if she wasn’t as scared as she seemed, more like pissed instead. And then there was her luscious mouth, all soft and pink and pouty...
Something punched me hard, right in the gut, and since it was pretty much the last thing I expected to feel when looking at Summer Grant, it took me a second to realise that my cock, the impatient motherfucker, was very, very interested in that mouth.
Fuck. This was all I needed. Getting inexplicably hard for Campbell Grant’s daughter, which was so not happening. Jesus Christ, I’d be lucky if Keep didn’t kick my ass from here to fucking Florida if he ever found out.
Not that I’d do anything about it. I hadn’t been into jailbait back when she’d been seventeen and I wasn’t into it now. Though I guessed she wasn’t seventeen any more. More like...twenty-two maybe? Except she didn’t look it, not with those big, frightened eyes. She looked like a kid who’d just woken up from a really bad nightmare.
I didn’t mind a bit of fear to get a chick turned on, as long as she was into it. But if she wasn’t, then neither was I, and as for outright terror... Yeah, that wasn’t hot as far as I was concerned and it pretty much killed the burgeoning hard-on in my jeans. Good fucking job.
‘Come on,’ I told her, impatient now to get this mess sorted out. ‘Party’s over.’
I began to move back to the doorway, pulling her with me, but she’d gone rigid, freezing like a block of wood, staring at me like I was some kind of serial killer.
Christ. Please don’t tell me I was going to have to haul a terrified girl through the clubhouse in the middle of a party. Knowing my fucking luck, she’d start screaming and then the shit would hit the fan. Especially if Keep spotted me and got the wrong idea.
Yeah, that wasn’t happening. Except the problem was that I didn’t have time to calm her down now, not with a whole lot of brothers out in the corridor. I needed to get her somewhere private, then maybe get her to quit being so scared and tell me what the hell she was doing here. If it was to take a walk on the wild side with some bikers—which a lot of girls did—then I needed to point out what a stupid fucking idea that was. And then I’d tell her exactly what it meant for the club to have the chief of police’s daughter found screaming in a brother’s bedroom.
If she didn’t want to bang a whole bunch of bikers—and quite frankly, given the look on her face right now, I guessed she probably didn’t—then I needed to find out what the hell else had brought her there, then take it to Keep for the same reason.
Protecting the club. That was my job and I took it very, very seriously indeed.
‘You gonna come with me?’ I asked, giving her a chance to move under her own steam.
But she just stared at me, her face completely white, trembling like a leaf.
