“You don’t think it was fucking painful for me in there? Not to hear from you? Not to see you? I almost caved and called you a million times, but when I thought about what harm that could cause you…I couldn’t,” I finished, searching her face waiting for some sort of reaction.

She twisted her mouth the way she does when she’s thinking. The redness in her cheeks faded to pink. Her tensed muscles relaxed under my grip. “Well, when you put it that way,” she mumbled, looking off into the grove and then up at me. “Your mother really visited you in jail?”

I nodded. “Shot by my old man and tossed into the bushes on the side of the road, and she shows up twenty-five years later to say good-bye to me.” I laughed, because the entire thing was fucking absurd.

“Where’s she been all this time? And why find you now?” Ti asked. They were the very same questions I’d asked when she’d showed up.

I shrugged and told Ti how my mom thought that Chop somehow kept her captive, the idea that she’d been drugged all this time, and how Sadie said she wasn’t clear on any of the details.

“She’s why you have to leave again?” Ti asked, leaning into me instead of away from me like she had been. My cock jumped.

“Yeah, if she was important enough to my old man to keep locked up all that time, having her in my pocket wouldn’t be a bad thing. We might be able to use her to get to Chop and end all this.”

“We?” Ti asked.

“We,” I confirmed, and then I filled her in on the conversation I’d had with the brothers in the yard.

Ti smiled. “You have a club again,” she said, beaming up at me. Her reaction took me off guard. She seemed happy that I might find my way back into club life, when I thought it would be the last fucking thing she’d ever want.

I shook my head. “I wouldn’t go that far. I can’t. I don’t trust them anymore,” I admitted. “I’m not trying to run a mutiny. I’m still not a Bastard.” I paused, searching my brain for the right way to explain what I was trying to do. “This is more like banding together for the sake of revenge.” I told Ti the story of what happened to the BBBs and she gasped, covering her mouth with her hand.

“Holy shit,” she said, wrapping her arms around me.

The moment was interrupted when something with fur flew past us in a blur into the grove.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked.

“My dog?” Ti asked, squinting against the sun.

“You have a dog?”

“His name is Pancakes. Rage named him although I wanted to call him Muffin, or maybe Donut,” she said watching the spot where he’d just disappeared.

At the mention of donut my thoughts immediately went back to Deputy Dangley Arm. “We’ll talk about the dog later. Right now you just need to listen.” My anger started to boil again. “I told you to trust me, didn’t I?” I asked, squeezing her arms a little too tightly.

Her eyes snapped to mine. “Yes, and I did trust you. I’m here, aren’t I?” she asked. Her defensiveness only egged me on more.

“You weren’t here when I found you in town with that lawman’s tongue down your fucking throat,” I spat, and as I remembered looking through the windshield and seeing him practically on top of her, the anger I felt washed over me all over again. I pulled her closer.

“Bear, let me go!”

“No,” I growled. “No broken arms next. Next time I break his fucking neck.”

Ti pulled back again and this time I let her go. “I went there to help you! Bucky kissed me, but I didn’t kiss him back. Deal with it! If you can’t handle it or if you don’t believe me you…you can go fuck yourself!” she said, staring me down. Challenging me. Taunting me.

I fucking love this girl.

It was with those words that my anger and lust finally broke free. Any sort of control I thought I had shattered in an instant.

“I’d rather fuck you,” I said, my own voice rumbling in my chest. Reaching behind her neck, I threaded my fingers up through her crazy pink hair, yanked her face to mine, and crushed my lips to hers.

MINE

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Thia

KISSING BEAR WAS like getting a taste of a drug I needed to survive, a drug I’d gone without for way too long. I’d grown weak without it. Desperate. With one press of his lips to mine I went from being a junkie on the streets to a rock star, high on a drug I’d never planned on quitting in the first place.

Bear moved from my lips to my jaw, “You’re here, Ti,” he murmured when he reached my ear, his lips tickling my skin as he spoke like he still couldn’t quite believe it. He then licked and sucked the sensitive skin behind my ear, nipping it with his teeth. I gasped. He chuckled. I felt all of it deep in my core. “And you’re real. All the things I’ve waited so long to say are fucking useless sentences lost in the back of my mind somewhere, because the only thing I can think about right now is how much I need to be inside you again. How much I need to FUCK you,” Bear said, slowly emphasizing the word FUCK. His words sent a flush of wetness between my legs, my body unaware of any prior argument. Its only awareness was of Bear and what he was doing to me and my body. “This little fucking dress,” Bear said. He reached down and ran his warm palm up the side of my thigh, starting at my knee he, lifting the hem up to my hip along the way, and settling his hand on my ass.

His blue eyes darkened to a glistening black. The air around us changed, growing thicker, heavier, charged with energy.

I shook my head, trying to remember my train of thought. Trying to remember why I was so angry at the beautiful creature who at that moment only wanted the exact thing I wanted. So why couldn’t I just let this go and give in? “I may love you, Abel McAdams,” I said, breathlessly, using his real name for the first time, “but I am no fucking pushover. So don’t you ever pull that shit again. I won’t be able to take it. I won’t be able to—”

Bear cut me off. “Shut up.”

I wanted to be angry. I wanted to lash out at him and give him the verbal beating I’d planned the entire drive back in the truck but had somehow forgot. The last thing I wanted was for his demand to shut up to make me want to grab him by the beard and yank his face between my legs. I tried the anger route one last time, closing my eyes for a moment in an attempt to break free of the lust-fog that had taken over. I stomped my foot on the ground and took a deep breath and kept my eyes shut. “You can’t just tell me to—”

“Shut up,” Bear repeated again.

My eyes sprang open to find him gazing down at me, his eyelids heavy, his breathing erratic. Without thinking, I reached out and ran the pad of my thumb over the line of freckles under his eyes and much to my surprise he closed his eyes and leaned into my touch. He grabbed my hand and brought my thumb to his mouth, briefly sucking on the tip.

My nipples hardened, begging to be touched.

“Bear,” I started again, desperate to say my peace.

“Fuck me,” Bear said.

“What?” I asked like I hadn’t heard him, but I had. Loud and clear. My body had too, every part of me impossibly turned on and aching for relief from the torturous arousal Bear had ignited. My core clenched and I pressed my lips together, trying not to give away how affected I was by him.