Page 7 of Vengeance (Ruthless MC 4)
There’s just Vampire, waiting for me in the spot where Hyena felled the Bandit—even though it’s been two hours since I left him downstairs, along with the rest of Vengeance.
He’s both the tallest and the thinnest in the group. I don’t know his last name, but judging from his slight Boston accent, I’m pretty sure Vampire’s what they sometimes call Black Irish. He has inky black hair, pale blue eyes, and pale skin stretched over beautiful, sharp features. Or maybe he really is a thousand-year-old vampire. His whole personality seems to be one of those old English novels where the guy walks around large estates dropping terse sentences between long, dark broods. And I’m a woman of science, but if he suddenly flashed fangs, I’d be like, “Yep, that tracks.”
Vampire mostly ignores me. But he tends to suddenly appear like, well, a vampire whenever Hyena spends too long trying to flirt me out of my resolution to never go upstairs with Vengeance.
I’ve heard him say “Leave her alone” in that dark and smoky Northern accent of his more than I’ve heard him say regular things like “Hello” or “Whiskey straight.”
He’s the member of Vengeance who pays me the least attention. But he makes me the most nervous. My stomach doesn’t just flip when he closes the distance between us. My entire body goes haywire.
He stops just a couple of inches away from my toe line and rakes his pale blue eyes over me. And I feel like I often do with him. Naked and too exposed.
So even though I’m covered up, I try and fail not to cross my arms over my chest like I always do when he looks at me.
And he averts his eyes, like he always does when I cross my arms. As if that spark burning between us is too dangerous to acknowledge or even look at.
“What are you still doing here?” I ask, working hard to keep my voice from shaking.
A beat of silence. Then he raises his arm and jiggles a set of keys between us. “I’m taking you home.”
CHAPTER 4
DOC
So that’s how I end up on the back of Vampire’s bike, racing toward Nashville on Highway 40.
He’s going in the right direction toward my house. Even though I never told him where I live—and I said he could just drop me off at Nashville Baptist.
Maybe I should have tried to argue with Vampire harder about him giving me a ride. But I was tired. So tired after my terrible floor sleep and even more terrible morning cleaning job.
I try to keep it Strong Black Woman 100, but the truth is, I didn’t want to wait in the cold for thirty minutes or more for the first of the two buses it would take for me to get home.
So here I am, pressing my face into the back of Vampire’s jacket. Des-E stays in a cut, and Hyena switches back and forth, depending on the weather. But Vampire always wears a full leather jacket—even in the dead of August. Like heat’s just a myth he refuses to believe in.
A shiver goes down my back when he turns off at the exit leading toward Shypokes Walk. The neighborhood where I live.
I knew Vengeance liked me. Hyena had made that abundantly clear, even if I’d never gotten anything off Vampire but mild irritation and disinterest.
But I didn’t know they’d gathered enough intel on me to know where I live. And they do know exactly where I live.
Vampire roars to a stop right in front of my red-and-black brick two-bedroom house. Whoa.
I’m pretty sure there are feelings I should be having about this display of stalkery knowledge. But I’m too nervous about the house to pursue it, so I just climb off the back of the motorcycle with shaky legs.
To my relief, the place is quiet as a mouse. At least I have that on my side in a morning of interrogations and setbacks.
“See,” I tell Vampire, pulling off the helmet he gave me. “Everything’s fine.” At least from the outside.
Vampire scans the house in that military-grade way of his. I don’t know nearly as much about Vengeance as they do about me. But according to Hyena, he, Vampire, and Des-E served in the same military unit back in the day. They even joined the Reapers together.
I’m not sure what roles they served, but they all wear dog tags. And Vampire doesn’t walk into a room without scanning it at least once. On a slow night, I once watched him from behind the bar and counted. Ten times. He scanned the room ten separate times in the half hour it took for another biker to ask me for a drink. It almost seems like a compulsion with him.
And I wonder what happened to make him that way, even as I squirm while I wait for him to look his fill.
