Jake Clarke, aka Tiger.
I’d never forgotten the first day I’d met him. He’d been waiting for me outside my school one day, sitting astride his massive black Harley and smoking a cigarette. He’d worn battered blue jeans, a black T-shirt with a leather vest thrown over the top, and there were chains attached to his belt, huge motorcycle boots on his feet, brightly coloured tattoos wrapping around both his powerful arms.
He was as beautiful as the animal he was named for and twice as dangerous. Mean as hell and sexy as sin.
The sun had struck copper sparks from his dark hair, and when he’d seen that school was out, he’d thrown his cigarette down right there in the street and ground it under his heel. Then he’d looked straight at me.
And I’d forgotten where I was. I’d even forgotten who I was.
His eyes were amber, the colour of expensive whisky or newly minted gold coins, and they had pinned me to the spot. A golden arrow straight through my heart.
His face was all hard lines and arrogant angles, his brows slightly winged at the corners, and he had the hardest, sharpest jawline I’d ever seen. He didn’t smile. His mouth was wide and beautifully carved, and the rounded shape of his bottom lip was the softest part about him, but it didn’t curve.
All my friends had stared at him—hell, everyone had stared at him. No one in my exclusive girls’ school had ever seen a man like him.
‘There’ll be someone there to meet you after school today,’ Dad had told me that morning. ‘In fact, he’ll be taking you to and from school for a little while so be nice to him, okay?’
Tiger had been that someone. An enforcer for the Knights of Ruin MC, he’d been assigned to be my bodyguard to protect me from the death threats another MC had thrown at my father. And Dad, being canny, had decided that the best protection from one MC was a rival MC.
I’d been terrified of Tiger and excited by him in equal measure, and I’d fallen in love with him the moment I’d seen him. But back then I was only seventeen and a nerdy, tongue-tied little girl, while he was twenty-six and a full-grown man, and so far out of my league he might as well have been the sun to my Pluto.
He was a star while I...I was barely even a planet.
It had taken me years to get him out of my head and I’d thought I’d managed it while I’d been away at college. But one look at him was all it took for those feelings to come flooding back. The fear and the curiosity and the dry-mouthed excitement.
I’d thought my situation couldn’t get any worse.
I was wrong.
Tiger
THE SIGHT OF the girl sitting on Crash’s bed, staring at me with the biggest, deepest blue eyes I’d ever seen, hit me like a fucking brick to the head.
Not only because she was as white as a goddamn sheet, but also because I knew her.
Summer Grant. Daughter of that well-known asshole Campbell Grant, the police chief.
What the ever-loving fuck was she doing here?
I’d been enjoying the party, aka the usual Saturday night at the clubhouse, and had gone off to spend a little quality time with Mercy, one of the club girls, and hadn’t been in the mood to hear some girl shout ‘No’ from behind a closed bedroom door, and still less to do anything about it.
But I didn’t have much patience with brothers who didn’t treat the girls right, so I’d kicked the door open to check out what was going on, to make sure things were okay. Only to find Summer fucking Grant sitting there, shaking, on the bed with that dumbass Crash trying to get his hands all over her.
The brother was drunk as a fucking skunk and didn’t appear to notice that his door was currently hanging off its hinges. Or that I was standing there. Or even that I’d asked him a goddamn question.
He reached again for the police chief’s pretty little daughter.
Fuck. No.
I took two steps into the room, grabbed Crash by his collar, jerked him off the bed, then shoved him up against the wall. ‘You hurt her?’ I demanded, gripping him by the throat. ‘Say yes and I’ll punch your fucking face in.’
Couldn’t have brothers hurting the girls here. Made for a bad rep and brought trouble, and if there was one thing the Knights didn’t need right now it was trouble.
Crash blinked at me, choking slightly in my hold. ‘No,’ he managed to get out, but I gave him a cuff over the face all the same, because he was an asshole and needed to learn a lesson.
I took my hand away and left him to drop in a heap on the floor, then I turned around to see how Summer was doing.
She was sitting on the bed, giving me big eyes and fear and not saying a fucking word.
‘Want to tell me what you’re doing here, baby?’ I asked her.
Crash croaked something from the floor, but I stuck my boot in his gut as a warning. ‘Didn’t ask you, dumbass.’ This time he must have found some brains from somewhere because he closed his mouth again pretty quickly.
Summer still didn’t say a word, hunching over and looking down at her hands like they were the most fascinating things she’d ever seen her life.
Fuck. Looked like my evening of beer, a smoke and a couple of relaxing blow jobs was toast.
‘Summer,’ I said, keeping things mild because it was clear she was shit-scared, ‘let’s start again from the top. What the fuck are you doing here?’
At that point there came a loud burst of noise from the corridor outside and I glanced towards the doorway, catching a glimpse of some shrieking girls and a couple of the brothers laughing as they all came in from the living area, obviously in search of some bedrooms.
Mercy, hanging around by the broken door, gave me a pointed look.
Christ. I needed to lock this shit down before someone going past got a look at Summer and recognised her, and started wondering what the hell the police chief’s daughter was doing hanging around the clubhouse.
‘Sorry, Merc.’ I gestured to the girl on the bed, who was hunching her shoulders and generally trying to make herself invisible. A bit of an impossibility when she was wearing a miniskirt that barely covered her pussy and left a pair of long slender legs very, very bare. ‘Got a situation I have to handle. Maybe we’ll have some fun later.’
And I did have to handle it. If Summer decided to make a complaint about Crash to her dad, things could go badly for the Knights. We’d already had some drama with the chief’s son and we did not need any more with his daughter.
Mercy made a pouty face, but she was a good girl who knew when to back off. ‘Yeah, okay, but I’m holding you to that.’
I didn’t look after her as she disappeared back down the corridor. Instead, I took a step over to where Summer was sitting with her head bowed. Crash made another sound, but I didn’t want to hear it, especially not from him. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ I warned him, not even bothering to look at him. ‘You try forcing a girl again and I won’t just punch you in the face. I’ll cut off your cock and make you suck it. Understand?’
He didn’t say anything, which was just as well since my evening was starting to look less like blow jobs and beer and more like complicated bullshit.
Annoyed, I kicked aside the clothing lying across the floor and came over to the bed where Summer was sitting. ‘Baby,’ I said again, ‘talk to me.’
But she just shook her head and hunched her shoulders even more.
It made me remember when I used to bodyguard for her.