Page 30 of Viper's Desire
He nods. “It’s the club’s burden, Eden. Not yours. You go to class. You study. Those are the only things you worry about.”
He lifts my cut off the hook by the door—black leather, PROPERTY OF VIPER stitched on the back—and holds it out.“Wear this while National’s men are here.” He pauses. “I’m asking, not telling.”
“I was planning on it. But why is it so important?”
“These men don’t know your face. They know two kinds of women at a clubhouse, and a girl walking around without a claim reads as the other kind. The cut means they keep their hands in their pockets and their mouths respectful. I’d rather the leather do that work than my fists.”
“The other kind.” I take the cut from him. “You mean a sweetbutt.”
His eyebrows go up a fraction.
“Shelby and Bree taught me the vocabulary at the barbecue,” I say. “Club girls. Around for the party and whoever’s at it. They don’t belong to anybody, so nobody protects them, and nobody has to be polite.”
“That sums it up,” he says.
I run my thumb over the white stitching of my cut. I’d wear it to bed if the zippers didn’t bite.
I turn to the mirror, and the dress zipper defeats me again. He crosses the room and draws it up my spine with two fingers, slower than he needed to.
The cut goes on over it. Viper smiles when he sees it on me.
“You don’t have to come to my parents’ house tonight,” I say. It’s the third time I’ve said it today. “I mean it. You can drop me at the end of the street. He’ll be civil to me. I can’t promise how he’ll act toward you.”
“Eden.”
“I’m serious. You sat through one of his sermons. And you’ve heard me talk about him. You know what he’s like.”
He takes my face in both hands and tips it up.
“I’m yours. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me.” His thumbs frame my jaw. “You get what you want… like a house. I put in an offer today.”
I go still under his hands. “The Cholla Road house?”
He brushes his lips over mine. “You wanted the porch.”
“Tanner.” My eyes sting, and I blink it down. “You put in an offer, and you’re telling menow? While I’m panicking about pot roast?”
“Figured you could panic about both. More efficient.”
A laugh breaks out of me, the ugly snorting kind.
“We should hear back within forty-eight hours,” he says, and hands me my helmet off the dresser. “Let’s go.”
We roll up my parents’ street, the engine announcing us three houses early, and every curtain on the block twitches. A porch lamp comes on at our neighbor’s house. I press my cheek between Viper’s shoulders and wave at her window like a parade queen, and his laugh moves through his back and into me.
My mother answers the door before we knock.
She’s in her good apron, the one with the strawberries. She smiles at me and then looks at my man and doesn’t flinch.
“You must be Viper,” she says. Not Tanner. Viper. I’m the only one who gets to use his real name, and only when we’re alone.
“Ma’am.”
“Supper will be ready in ten minutes.”
She looks at the leather on my shoulders, reads the white stitching, and says nothing about it. Then she waves us both toward the kitchen, where the roast is resting on the stove, and she takes the rolls out of the oven.
I hang the cut on the hook by the kitchen door, next to her aprons. I didn’t come here to fight tonight.
