"It does, doesn't it?" I asked with a laugh.

"It's so fucking hot that you can shoot," Bear said, sliding out of me and down my body. My core tightened like it didn't want to let him go. "So fucking hot," Bear said again, this time over my clit.

His jeans buzzed and with a groan he reached over me and into the pocket. He pulled out a phone and looked at the screen. He frowned. "We gotta go." The playfulness from a moment earlier was gone. His hard jaw set in a straight line once again. He tossed me my clothes. "Get dressed," he ordered. "Now."

"What's going on? Who was on your phone?" I asked, pulling on my shirt and scooting to the end of the truck bed to shimmy on my shorts.

"More Bastards are on their way."

"They text you that?" I asked, confused. Bear pulled on his jeans and hopped down from the truck. He lifted me off the tailgate and pushed it shut.

"No, they told Cash that," he said, tossing me the phone he took from Cash's body to keep tabs on the MC. I looked down at the screen.

BE THERE SOON.

We took off for Logan's Beach in my father's truck without going back for Bear's bike, which he'd hidden in the back shed under an old tarp. Bear didn't say a word. He smoked a cigarette and kept checking the rearview mirrors. He'd called King to tell him we were on the way and he was waiting for us outside the garage by the time we got back. "I'll be back, go into the apartment and for fucks sake, listen to me and stay there," Bear ordered, but when I looked into his eyes I saw more than an order. I saw a plea.

"Fine," I said, a little sharper than I wanted. I went into the apartment and King and Bear left the garage, closing the door behind him.

Ray brought me some food but quickly left because the kids were up at the house all alone. I flipped channels on the old TV and scanned the pages of an old Guns and Ammo magazine from 2007.

I showered and put on one of Bear's t-shirts, tucking myself in bed. There was no way I was going to sleep without knowing where he was. I wanted to leave, to find out where he was, but I also wanted to keep my promise.

So I stayed.

It was well after midnight when I heard the door to the bedroom creak open and shut. I couldn't see him in the pitch blackness and I didn't know what to say. What to ask. The mattress dipped when Bear sat on the edge of the bed. I heard him kick off his boots then the clanking of his belt buckle as he removed his jeans. A cool breeze licked my back as he lifted up the blankets but was quickly replaced by Bear's heat as he came up behind me, surprising me when he reached out and grabbed my waist, dragging me up against his chest. He was naked. His erection twitching the second it came into contact with my bare ass. He rested his chin on the top of my head, his hand splayed out under my shirt on the skin of my lower stomach.

"Where did you go?" I whispered.

"Trying to sort shit out. Things have kind of changed. Plans needed to change," Bear said, hearing him acknowledge what had happened between us earlier made me able to relax into his hold.

"Do you have a new plan?"

"Not yet," Bear said with a sigh.

"Anything I can do to help?"

"This. This helps," he said into the back of my neck and I arched backward into his now hard erection. "You okay?" he asked, snaking his hand down between my legs. "Here, I mean. I got a little crazy before and forgot to ask you."

"I'm fine," I said. And I was. I was a little sore, but nothing that could outweigh the magnitude of what had happened between us.

"Good, 'cause I need inside you, Ti." Bear ran his tongue down the back of my neck and my lips parted when he sucked the tip of my earlobe into his mouth. He pushed one long finger inside of me. "Fuck, your pussy is so fucking wet for me already," Bear said, stroking my clit.

I moaned. "Gonna make this fast and hard," he murmured against my skin. He lifted up my leg and pushed inside of me, stretching and filling me in two hard long thrusts. He started pumping into me before my body was ready for him and the bite of pain made each stroke torturously erotic.

"Never felt nothing like this, Ti. Wanna fuck you and smack the living shit out of you all at the same time. Don't know what this is, but it makes me want to keep you filled with my cock all day long and dripping with my cum. I want to mark you. I want to fucking own you." He grunted as his thrusts became harder, more frantic, more erratic.

Just more.

"What the fuck are you doing to me?" he asked on a ragged exhale.

Sparks played behind my eyes and Bear must have sensed I was close because he reached over and circled my clit with two fingers until I came undone around him. "Fuck, so fucking good," he groaned, finding his release inside of me, pulling me so close into him that I thought he was going to crack one of my ribs.

I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Bear I was telling the truth when I told Ti that I had no fucking clue what the plan was moving forward. Shit had changed so quickly. With her, and if I was being honest, with myself.

I wanted to talk to King the night before, but he had clients coming and going all night so I sat on the dock by myself with an untouched bottle of Jack on the ground next to me, trying to figure out my next move, and in the hours I spent down there all I figured out was that I didn't know shit.

Not yet anyway.

My new plan was simple. We'd meet with Bethany, the lawyer, and go from there.

We'd deal with the law first.

The lawless second.

"Where the fuck do you think you're going?" I barked as Ti walked out of the garage and right past where I was crouched down on the driveway trying to put my bike back together again. King had sent a tow truck to get it from the shed at Ti's house and thankfully it came back without raising suspicions. I wiped the sweat on my forehead with the rag from my back pocket and lit the cigarette that had been dangling from my lips. I drank in Ti's long muscular legs and my fucking cock jumped to attention like it always did when she was around.

God damn she was beautiful.

And she was mine.

"I was looking for you." She crossed her arms across her chest, pressing out her braless tits against the fabric of the t-shirt I'd given her to wear the night before. "I woke up and you were gone. You know it's okay to be nice. You don't have to snap at me all the time."

"I didn't sleep much," I said, standing up and taking a drag of my smoke. I felt bad for snapping at her but the truth was when I saw her leaving I had a flashback of her trying to run away and I immediately got heated.

"I can't sleep with your tight ass pressed against my cock. You need something?" I asked, taking another deep drag off my smoke and letting the nicotine invade my brain. Truth was also that it had been days since I'd hit the hard stuff and the headache I was sporting made it seem like the world was yelling at me.

She looked down to the gravel. "Yes. No. I mean...yes?"

"Ti, spit it out," I said, looking down at her rapidly healing face. The bruises around her eye were barely visible. Each minute that passed she looked more and more fuckable, and now that I'd actually had her, all I wanted was more.

I used to think that I wanted to go out in a blaze of bullets and glory. Now I think that I'd like to go out balls deep inside my girl.

MY girl.

"Can we just...for today, can we just, pretend?" she asked, rocking back on her heels and biting her lip.

"Pretend? Pretend what?" I took a drag of my smoke and slipped my other hand into my back pocket, leaning up against the side of the garage.

"Let's pretend that I'm just Thia Andrews, a girl whose parents aren't..." She looked away and sniffled, shaking her head. "And you're just Bear, and you're not pissed off at the world." She smiled and cocked her head to the side. "Not today anyway."

I searched her face for the punch line, but there were no signs of a joke.

She drew a circle in the gravel with her flip flop. "Today I want to be a normal girl and you can be a normal boy and we are going to do whatever normal people do so we don't get stuck thinking on all the bad shit that's been happening." She closed the distance between us and came to stand under me, looking up with pleading pale green eyes. "Please, Bear. Please. Just give me today. Be normal with me. Just for today."

The idea was ludicrous, I didn't even know what normal was. Normal was what I'd been battling since I'd left the club. I didn't know how the fuck to do normal. I opened my mouth to tell her just that, but the hurt in her eyes when she saw the rejection coming broke me.

She shook her head and turned around. "Never mind. I knew you wouldn't..."

I reached out and grabbed her wrist, pulling her back to me. "Go put some clothes on," I said. "Be back out here in twenty minutes." I sounded like an asshole again, giving orders to a girl who only wanted to hang out like a normal kid, but after years of actually being an asshole, it was a hard habit to break.

"Really?" she asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet and smiling from ear to ear. The girl didn't have a stitch of makeup on, there wasn't a false thing about her and yet she was prettier than any supermodel I'd ever seen on the cover of any magazine and not to mention the absolute most amazing fucking pussy I'd ever had the pleasure of sticking my cock in.

I really need to start thinking about something else...

"Twenty minutes," I repeated, coughing when my traitor of a heart actually skipped a fucking beat.

Who are you? A fucking preteen girl?

With her new brilliant smile plastered on her face, she spun around and skipped back into the dark garage toward the apartment.

I stomped out my cigarette on my boot and headed up to the main house. "Wait!" Ti called. I turned around to find her back outside again. "Where are you going?" she asked.

I pointed up to the main house. "You want to be normal today, right?"

"Yeah?"

I started walking again, calling back to Ti, "Then I gotta go figure out what the fuck it is that normal people do."

Bear Ray had looked at me like I'd sprouted an extra head when I asked her where she thought I should take Ti. "Bear, I'm nineteen, technically widowed, and engaged with three kids. That's not normal no matter how you look at it." She'd said.

She had a point.

I couldn't take Ti anywhere remote so I decided on the Rosinus State Park. It was public enough that if the MC did know where we were they still wouldn't make a move.

"Here, wear this," I said, handing her a plain black baseball cap.

"What? Is this supposed to be some sort of disguise?" she asked.

"Just put it on," I said, watching her thread her hair through the opening at the back.

"Can you recognize me?" she asked sarcastically.

"Smart ass."

"Okay so where is your brilliant disguise?" she asked.

I pulled the black v-neck t-shirt over my head. "Viola."

"A shirt? Your disguise is a shirt?"

"Yep."

"The funny thing is I can actually see how that could work," Ti said, looking me up and down.

"Really?"

"Nope!" She opened the door and bolted out of the truck, jumping up on top of the nearest picnic table, her tits bouncing as she danced around.

The park was small, no more than five acres with a beach type area, except instead of sand it was covered with pine needles that butted up against a huge lake. Tall pine trees lined the edge of the water, every tenth tree or so had been removed to make room for a picnic table or bench. There were people around but not too many to make it crowded, just enough to make witnesses.

Ti held out her arms and took a deep breath, inhaling the fresh air. She looked down at me as I approached and my chest tightened.

"This place is perfect," she said, flashing me another brilliant smile. She hopped down onto the bench part of the table and walked to the edge, leaping off dramatically before landing on her feet in the dirt like she was a gymnast, raising her arms above her head and taking a step back like she was in the Olympics.

"Seven," I said, holding up a fake score card.

"Bullshit, biker-boy," she scoffed. "That was at least an eleven. Seven? Please!" She jumped back up onto another bench and pointed her index finger in the air. "Let's go to the tapes!" she announced, queuing up her imaginary replay.

"Sorry," I said, sucking air in between my teeth and bobbing my head from side to side. I stood below her, my face just inches away from the top of her thighs. "The judges have reviewed the tape, and they all agree. Although it would have been a two..." I said, turning her around by her legs so that she was facing away from me. "But you got the extra points because I really dig your ass being at eye level." I turned my head to the side and rested my cheek on her ass like it was a pillow that I wanted to take a nap on.

Because it was.

I wasn't able to linger on the phenomenally sexy image of my face pressed against her naked ass for too long because she reached back and swatted at my head with her hat like I was a bee buzzing around her legs. "Bear!" she screeched playfully, jumping back down from the bench and then running around it, holding onto her butt like we were in a locker room and she was protecting it from an impending towel swat.

"Just watching you jump around is exhausting," I said, reaching into my jeans and pulling out my cigarettes. I lit one and waved the smoke away from my face.

"Mama used to call me her little jumping bean because they could never get me to sit still," she admitted, finally sitting down on top of the picnic table.

"Fitting," I said, feeling like I was able to relax now that the jumping bean had stopped jumping.

I took a drag of my cigarette and blew out the smoke. It had taken me forever to figure out where to take Ti. So long now that the sun had just started to set into the horizon. I liked the night. I liked the dark. Smoking in the dark always held more appeal for me than smoking during the day. Maybe it had something to do with being able to see the smoke against the dark background of the night sky. Or maybe it was being able to see the glowing ember from the end of the cigarette or the bright yellow flame when I fired up my lighter. Smoking was familiar to me. It felt good.

It also reminded me of home.

I'd be shit at making one of those anti-smoking public service announcements.

Ti leaned back on the table, closing her eyes like she was soaking up rays that had long disappeared with the setting of the sun.

"I feel like you know so much about me," she said, although I didn't think that was true. I don't think I'd tapped into even half of what made Thia Andrews tick. "But I don't know that much about you."

"You know more than anyone else," I said, and that really was true, but for the exception of King and maybe Grace. In the short time I'd spent with her, she learned more about me than the men back at the club.

Men who were supposed to me my brothers.