Tricks iron kings mc 6, p.4
TRICKS (Iron Kings MC, #6), page 4
I was lucky that Aaron had headed on outside, instead of staying right outside the door while I’d had my explosion of rage. I couldn’t imagine what he would’ve thought of me, or the questions that would’ve come at me in light of it. I’d been saved by his need for a nicotine fix. Thank goodness, because I didn’t want him to see that side of me. I didn’t want anyone to, but especially not him. Over the last six months, we’d grown so close. More than friends, really. Best friends, perhaps? When I’d found him in the Vista parking lot afterward, he’d calmed down from our weird confrontation earlier, acting like it’d never happened. I was relieved, because it’d had me worried that it could’ve tainted our friendship, a friendship that was very dear to me. It was my only friendship actually. I hadn’t had the option for so many years and any friends I’d had before everything that had happened with my sister were part of a totally different life now, one that I could never return to. Hell, I was a whole different species now anyway, I wouldn’t fit.
I hadn’t thought I would fit anywhere.
Until Aaron.
We’d just clicked.
And we hadn’t stopped.
I wouldn’t let anything mess with that.
I sucked in a steadying breath and offered him a smile, forcing a casual, “What’s up?”
A frown met my greeting. “You all right, darlin’?”
What a question.
“Yeah,” I responded quickly. “All good.”
“It doesn’t seem like it,” he said, his gaze raking over me. There was no uncomfortable heat in it, just pure concern.
“I just had a rough night. I couldn’t sleep.” I gave a shrug in a bid to downplay it even more. “The rush of performing does that to me sometimes. I’ve only been doing it a little while, so I’m still getting used to it all.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. Absolutely.” I shifted my weight. “So, what’s… uh… why are you here? What can I do for you?”
That frown of his deepened, making me tense.
Why? What was he seeing in me? I thought I was hiding it well enough.
“It’s more about what I can do for you.”
“For me?”
“I’m here for your car, Lex. The muffler problem?”
Oh crap. Of course! So much for not throwing up a red flag. “Right, yeah. I’m so sorry. I just… I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“No need to be sorry, darlin’.”
I shoved a hand through my unruly bed hair. “Uh… what time is it?”
“Just after ten.”
“Shit. I’ve wasted an hour out of your day. More than an hour. I know how busy you are… I’m sorry, Aaron.” I shifted my weight uneasily. “What can I do?” I scanned the hallway, and saw my keys were where I’d thought they were, hanging beside one of the coat hooks. I snatched them off the hook and held them out to him. “Here. Forget about doing it today, or even in the near future. Whenever or wherever. It’s the least I can do for screwing up your day and—”
He eased the keys back into my hand. “Chill,” he told me, smiling, looking highly amused.
“You’re not mad?”
“Nah, it’s all good. Everybody sleeps in once in a while. There’s no point beating yourself up about it, or it’s going to encroach on this brand-new day now.”
At thirty, he was only two years older than me, but some of the things he said often had him coming across as somebody a whole lot older. He was an old soul, really.
Of course, there was a flip side to all of that. That was his party-going, shameless, manwhore persona. But that was all that it was. A persona. It wasn’t the real him. Everyone just thought it was and he worked hard to keep it that way.
Except with me.
It probably had a lot to do with the fact that I wore a mask just like he did, so we were able to recognize that in each other, to see beyond it, where others couldn’t.
His understanding response had a lot of the tension and worry leaving me, and I couldn’t help cracking a smile. “You’re just being extra sweet because of my pitiful, messy state right now.”
“You look pretty damn good for somebody who just rolled out of bed.”
“I’m sure a mirror would tell me different.”
“Nah, Lex. It’s all good.”
“How can I make it up to you for messing up your day?”
“You didn’t mess it up. I’m off today, so I’ve got a lot of time on my hands.”
“Okay, great! Come on in. I’ll make you breakfast and we’ll also do the whole coffee thing that we rain checked yesterday.”
I watched him hesitate for some reason. He always jumped at the chance to taste my food. My stomach sank as it occurred to me that our confrontation last night at Vista could be the source.
Well, I didn’t want that. I couldn’t let one thing like that come between us and impact our friendship. So, I sweetened the deal, telling him, “Strawberry pancakes. Going once… going twice.”
He chuckled. “Damn, pulling out the big guns. How can I resist, darlin’? I’m in.”
He stepped across the threshold and locked the door behind him.
I hung my car keys back on the hook.
My breath caught in my throat when he inadvertently brushed against me as he shook off his gray leather jacket and hung it on the one remaining hook beside the keys.
God. A lack of sleep was really messing with my head.
All that glorious ink came into view, covering the entire length of both his arms, all the way up to his neck, visible in the black muscle t-shirt he had on beneath. He wasn’t all bulk like a few of his club brothers. He was just under six-foot-tall, lean but incredibly toned, all major definition and impressively sculpted muscle. His body was a flawless canvas for the art that covered almost every inch of his skin.
“Lex?”
I jolted at the sound of his call cutting into my reverie. My gaze snapped to his and that deep concern I’d seen far too often this morning was staring back at me.
I couldn’t have that.
So, I snapped into action and led the way into the kitchen just a few steps down the hall and to the left. “Let’s get those pancakes started.”
I just needed to recenter myself. That call last night had really freaked me out and taken a greater toll on me than I’d even thought. This morning it was coming through loud and clear though, hitting me hard.
Fortunately, cooking was a form of therapy for me.
It helped me to focus, kind of like my version of meditation.
It brought me peace.
I’d be back to myself in no time.
Everything was going to be all right.
It was just a setback.
But I had it handled. I had a plan. I had things in place, Slater in place, to keep it at bay.
Yeah, it was fine.
I had it all under control.
5
~Tricks~
SOMETHING WAS OFF.
With her.
With me.
With us.
But especially with her.
And that just happened to be the only part of the whole thing that I was comfortable with and willing to address. The shift in me and between the two of us since the other night was off the table. Down that road only lay real bad fucking shit and I really didn’t want to have to put Lexi in that category. It wasn’t easy for me to form friendships with people outside of my club brothers, especially not when it came to women. That had always been a no-go for me and seemed an impossibility, given the way I usually did things, and the crazy intense sexuality I exuded. Hell, I was a charming guy, and that usually didn’t make for friendships with women, just some good fucking.
But Lexi had changed all of that.
Somehow, we’d just connected.
We were both wild spirits, people who needed to run free. It was a fundamental part of our make-up. For a long time, Lexi hadn’t been able to embrace that, because of the bullshit on-the-run existence she’d been living. Now that all of that was over, she could, and she’d been drawn to the same thing in me. Like moths to a fucking flame.
I didn’t want anything screwing that up.
I’d never met anybody who’d come close to getting that about me before.
Even Anarchy, who’d been known as the wildcard of the club for the longest time, was more about the rebellious aspect of it all, rather than just setting yourself free in the purest sense. He’d been about hurtling headlong into trouble and the thrill that surviving that had given him.
It wasn’t the same.
We weren’t the same.
But Lexi and me were.
And that kind of thing didn’t come along easily. Hell, I’d lived for thirty years and this was the first time I’d ever encountered it.
The fact that I’d almost screwed things up last night was hanging heavy over me right now. It was why I’d hesitated on coming inside, on being alone with her, on spending time with her, something that I never would’ve passed up before, that I hadn’t for the last six months that we’d been hanging out non-stop.
My intention had been to head home right after her performance last night. And I’d failed. Before I’d known it, I’d found myself outside the changing rooms waiting for her. I’d said some shit that I shouldn’t have. Apologizing and her accepting that apology didn’t take away from the fact that it had happened. I’d given the words life, the sentiment behind them life. It was out there now. I was worried about that now and the fact that after that shitshow I’d started in that fucking corridor, I wasn’t certain I could keep my mouth shut going forward and lock it up like I needed to.
As I watched her cooking away, I could tell that she wasn’t herself.
I didn’t know how much of that was down to what had happened between us, or how much was about something else entirely. That phone call she’d gotten, for instance. The call that had rattled her so much that she’d been desperate to hide away and retreat home. Her car had been little more than a blur as she’d pulled out of the parking lot.
She usually hummed or whistled a tune to herself while she cooked. Her movements were fluid and free, kind of like a dance, as she worked on each aspect of whatever meal she was preparing at the time. Right now, she was stiff and stilted. There was no sound coming from her, other than the soft pitter pat of her bare feet on the linoleum floor.
Dammit. I couldn’t fucking take it.
Clearly, avoiding the topic was just worsening the tension between us.
And so was the way she was looking this morning. Her normally wavy jet-black hair was all wild from sleep, looking like something out of a shampoo commercial. She was wearing a black strappy tank, her breasts bouncing with every movement without a bra. A tiny little pair of gray and red pajama shorts with pugs all over them completed the whole getup. It was a confusing blend of sweet and sexy. It was fucking with my head, big time.
It had me putting it out there and asking as casually as I possibly could, “So, how long have you been working at Vista?” And how come I didn’t know about it? It was club-owned.
She stilled, halfway through arranging the strawberries on top of the syrup-laden pancakes. “A couple of months.”
“Months? And you never thought to mention it in all that time?”
She turned around, a tight smile on her face as she brought two plates of pancakes over to the kitchen table. “Well, given your reaction, you can see why,” she said, pushing one toward me. “Plus, you didn’t know because I asked Wraith not say anything and you’re not club security, so there was no real reason for you to be up on it.”
What the fuck? “There’s no way you could’ve known I’d react like that.” Even I hadn’t predicted it.
“Oh, really?” she challenged, tossing me a withering look.
“What?”
She rolled her eyes and gestured at my plate of pancakes. “Just eat your breakfast, hot stuff.”
Goddamn, they look good. There was a stack of four positioned perfectly in the middle of the plate with strawberry halves surrounding them in perfect formation. There were full ones on top with whipped cream and strawberry sauce, and syrup drizzled down the sides. It wasn’t just a meal, it was a masterpiece with the way she’d handled the presentation.
“Spill it, woman,” I urged her, forcing myself to hold off with the delicious breakfast in front of me.
As she settled herself into the chair opposite me, she gave a shrug then told me, “You’re just a little overprotective sometimes.”
“Overprotective?”
“Yeah,” she said, cutting off a chunk of her pancake and shoving it into her mouth.
“How’s that?”
She took a moment to finish chewing, then told me, “Yeah, you know, like just after I’d moved into the clubhouse under club protection, when a couple of the guys were hitting on me you made Spartan up the protection order to a strict hands off in every sense of the word?”
She knew about that? “Anybody who’d seen what I had would’ve done the same thing. In fact, Spartan would have too if he hadn’t been so distracted by the crazy-ass threat bearing down on the club at the time. It just happened that I got there first.”
“How about the way you reacted when a couple of the club whores got up in my grill because they mistook our friendship for something else and thought it meant you were off the market?”
Up in her grill? Damn, she was hilarious.
“That was all on me. It was only right that I fixed it.”
“Then I’m just over-analyzing it, I guess.”
“Exactly, yeah.”
“Well… good.”
Was I seeing things or did she look… disappointed?
I didn’t get the chance to figure it out as, in the next moment, she was shoving a sliced strawberry at me. I blinked at it and just reacted, biting it out of her fingers and taking it into my mouth. A little shriek escaped her and she giggled. “Hey!”
“Just following orders.”
“Good. Eat up before everything gets all mushy.”
“Mushy, huh? Is that the technical cooking term for it?”
She grinned. “It’s my term.”
“You’ve got a lot of cute little terms and phrases.”
“Urgh. Cute. I guess it’s a side-effect of spending too many years cloistered away and shut off from the world for the most part. It might’ve made me a little sheltered. Well, from that sort of sexual attention anyway. Other things, the darker parts of life and all that, not so much.”
Yeah, I knew it had. It hadn’t taken me long to notice it and from the moment that I had, it had awakened a protective instinct in me, one I’d never fucking felt before and one I couldn’t shake. Well, I hadn’t really tried that hard to accomplish it. I didn’t really want to.
We fell into a comfortable silence then, the both of us just eating away.
There wasn’t much choice after the first bite. Her food was too good to do anything but pay every delectable bite my full attention.
As I finished up and sat back against the chair with a satisfied sigh, I saw that she still had over halfway to go. Another thing that wasn’t the norm for her. She ate like a beast just like me. She had a voracious appetite and she loved food.
“You might want to take a break, Lex.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “From what?”
“You’ve been working two jobs for the last couple of months. Overworking, basically. It could start wearing on you, causing burnout, if you don’t take a break here and there. Or, a timeout at least.”
“Like you’re one to talk. You’re a workaholic too.”
“Nah, darlin’. I do work hard, yeah. But I also party really fucking hard.”
“Well, that can be tiring too.”
“Not when you love what you do.”
She rolled her eyes. “Right. Fucking like a rabbit.”
“Know where your talents are at, right?”
Her nose crinkled in that adorable way that let me know I’d gone too far down the dirty road for her to handle. “Disgusting, Aaron.”
I laughed and held up my hands. “You’re right. My bad. Not something we should be talking about over breakfast. Or, right after breakfast, which was amazing, by the way.”
“One of my talents,” she said, smiling proudly back at me.
“All jokes aside, I think you should take some time to just chill out and enjoy yourself. No cooking, no Vista. Just something to take the edge off.”
“Like what?”
“Off the top of my head, I’m heading to a party down at Sky’s club, Excite, a couple of nights from now.”
“Her bachelorette party?” she asked, frowning in confusion.
“Hell, no. They’re doing that somewhere else in the city, some fancy thing in one of her luxurious high-end lounges. Golden Oak, I believe. Nah, this party is being hosted by her club, but Sky won’t be there. She’s handed a bunch of things over to her staff with all the prep for her upcoming wedding to Deviant. It’s a themed thing. Heaven and Hell.”
Her eyes lit up. “With costumes?”
“That’s right.”
“Awesome!”
“Yeah? You’re up for the whole costume thing?”
“I am, but are you?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, you kind of have your own version of a uniform. Your gray leather jacket with the Iron Kings patches on the back, the black tee and jeans.” A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I didn’t think you knew how to dress another way.”
“You’re seriously giving me shit when I’m extending you an invite to one hell of an awesome party?”
“Yes,” she giggled.
I shook my head at her with mock offense and slapped my hand to my heart. “Well, I’ve got the costume thing covered. I’m down for pretty much anything.” What other way was there to really live? If you weren’t open to whatever came your way, you’d end up missing out on so much, squandering opportunities and experiences left and right.
She thought on it for a while and murmured to herself, “I wonder what I should go as. Something from heaven or hell? Hmm.”
