Total pages in book: 38
Estimated words: 37123 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37123 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 186(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 124(@300wpm)
“Why did you…” I swallow. “Why am I here?” I ask quietly.
He just shakes his head.
“Later.”
I frown. “What?”
“Later.”
“Later what?”
He starts to turn for the door, and I catch the way his brow furrows.
“Wait, wait…” I scowl. “Do you not have a plan?”
He turns back to me, letting those deep, gorgeous blue eyes pierce into my gaze. He glares at me, and I know I’m at least half right.
“Hold on,” I mutter. “What sort of kidnapper doesn’t have a plan?”
“I’m not a kidnapper,” he growls.
“I beg to differ,” I shoot back.
He rolls his eyes again, turning for the door and walking over to it.
“Wait so I’m just like, here?”
“Yeah, like you are?” He tosses back in this mocking valley-girl way.
“I don’t sound like that,” I mutter.
He just shrugs.
“Oh, are we making fun of voices now, lucky charms?”
He chuckles, shaking his head.
“Do you want money?” I say a little softer. “Look, my dad—”
“I know who your daddy is,” he hisses, his face suddenly devoid of all humor, his brow darkening. We eye each other, and I swallow thickly.
“Is that it? That’s why you took me? My dad?”
He eyes me, saying nothing for a full half a minute.
“No yelling, princess,” he finally mutters. “Or the gag goes back in.”
He turns and abruptly walks out, closing and then audibly locking the door behind him, and leaving me even more confused and turned upside down than I was before.
Great. I’ve been kidnapped by the hot Irish guy to his 1950s cabin by the ocean, in the middle of nowhere.
…Now what?
Chapter Four
Killian
My entire body clenches tight, my muscles rippling and my control on the very brink of shattering. I’m seconds away from turning back, walking right back into that bedroom and just making her mine—and I do mean seconds away.
But then, that’s not my style, and that ain’t me. When I take her—and I will take her—it’ll be when she’s begging me for it. It’ll be when I’ve got her twisting on the line, moaning for more.
Then and only then will I claim her.
I growl as I march to the kitchen, my pulse still racing. I grab a bottle of whiskey and a glass from the shelf and slump into a seat at the table, looking out on the moon over the water as I pour myself a heavy drink.
I’m compromised beyond belief with this mission.
Fuck, now what.
At the end of the day, past my obsession with this girl, she’s an innocent in all of this. And this is not the normal Royal Bastards style of doing things. We don’t just take innocent people, but then, we’ve been pushed to the brink of extinction here. Yeah, sure, we’ve got chapters all over the damn country, but the Boston Bastards are a special breed of, well…
Stubborn.
We’re a bunch of stubborn pricks is what it comes down to, and it’s pretty much unanimous that we’re going to deal with this shit ourselves. So while this might not be our usual M.O. it is now. It is when we’ve been hammered and pushed to the edge like Leonard’s done.
I grunt, knocking back my drink and pouring another one as I look out the window. This isn’t my first time here, and even with the storm raging through my head, I can appreciate the peacefulness of this place. I like it here.
The little shore house out on Cape Cod belonged to Grey, our president’s, grandparents. When they passed, he took it, and now it sort of acts like a getaway for the club. He added a decent size garage on the property for fixing up bikes, but other than that, it’s the same, straight out of the damn fifties. And no neighbors for miles, which is a huge plus for the us.
And for me right now.
I think I might like it here too because it reminds me of a time in my life before I knew pain and fury. Back when I was boy, my brother Conall and I lived in a house not totally unlike this one on the coast with our Gran. It was after she died that we both got swept up in the system and shoved into a revolving door of boys’ homes in Belfast—sometimes together, often times apart. And that’s where I got hard.
That’s where I got mean, and got tough, and learned to survive in this world.
I grew up big, and I learned how to use that to stay alive. I learned to fight, and steal, and keep moving, until I aged out of the boys’ homes. After that, Conall and I fell in with whatever street crew would take me, pretty much doing whatever needed doing—knocking over jewelry stores, robbing private gambling clubs, hijacking trucks from the ports.
It wasn’t the life either of us ever wanted, but it was the one we got good at surviving in. That is, until the walls started to close in—until the ground started to run out beneath our feet, and until the heat started to get too hot to bear. And when it was clear we were both one wrong step away from getting shot in the back of the head or tossed into prison, we cut ties, and we bailed.