“Here’s how this works,” Uptown said, very calmly, but being this close to him again made her a little bit dizzy. She could see the way his dark chocolate eyes gleamed. It did not exactly make her think of candy. “You’re under my protection. That’s what you tell anyone who comes at you or tries to cop a feel, okay?”

Holly bristled. “I don’t need to be protected.”

“Baby, please. They’ll eat you alive.”

“Well, so what if they do?” she demanded, glaring at him, that odd thing in her stomach that shouldn’t have been shame—because what did it matter what a biker thought of her—pulling into a taut, hard knot. “What do you care? And besides, Katelyn seems perfectly happy being consumed by the biker world.”

“You don’t want to be Katelyn.”

“I love Katelyn,” Holly snapped, because weirdness between them didn’t mean Holly should be disloyal. “She’s been my best friend since we shared a coloring book in kindergarten.”

“This isn’t fucking kindergarten, babe. Christ.”

“I’m sure that whatever makes Katelyn happy is good enough for me.” She might have been talking from between her teeth, but she meant it.

“You know how your girl got her job here?” Uptown reached over then and took the end of her ponytail in his fist, tugging gently on it. It should have been annoying, like a mosquito buzzing around her. It wasn’t. Instead, she could feel that faint pulling sensation… everywhere. “She blew Bart, right here in this office. That was her warm up, but you know, nothing new for her since she’d been hanging around the clubhouse for a while. Then she banged a couple of brothers on the couch to show her appreciation for being considered. But we doubted her commitment because she always seemed more about the party than getting any work done, so the next night she came back and blew a line of brothers, then let Bart fuck her in the ass over the desk while anyone who wanted to watch hung out. She started later that night. Big tips all around.” His head tilted to one side and she couldn’t have described that gleam in his gaze if her life had depended on it. But she could feel it like a punch to her belly. “That about what you had in mind tonight? Because I should tell you, we already knew and liked Katelyn. That was why we kept it mellow. Some of the other girls who work here had a lot more to prove when they came in.”

Holly thought it was lucky that she couldn’t really process a single thing he’d said. Because it was too much. She remembered hunching over that coloring book with Katelyn when they were little, sharing their crayons even though they’d both wanted the green. She remembered all their sleepovers over the years, lying huddled up in the same bed whispering secrets and dreams into the dark. She didn’t want to think about her friend dispensing blow jobs or anything else. Because if she did, she might have to pay attention to the things her body was doing, as if it was imagining her in all the positions Uptown had described so nonchalantly. She felt… weird. But she couldn’t let herself think about that.

“I thought Katelyn belonged to the club,” she said instead.

“Sure,” Uptown agreed, lazily. Or maybe he was just amused at how little Holly knew about his world and Katelyn’s place in it, despite how close she’d claimed she and Katelyn were. Worse, she was sure he could see exactly how red her cheeks were. She could feel the crisp heat in them and had to force herself not to put her hands there and make it worse. “She takes care of us, we take care of her.”

“And I notice that you left yourself out of that story.” She ignored the flare of heat in her cheeks, particularly when his gaze seemed to sharpen. “Is that a sudden fit of modesty?”

He tugged on the end of her ponytail, making her chin rise against her will. But when he eased off the pressure, she didn’t lower it.

“Nothing modest about me. You want to hear who I fuck and how? I’m not shy, princess. But I think you are.”

End of excerpt