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  Savage Redemption

  “My life was all about revenge until I met her.”

  I want them destroyed.

  The Anarchists killed my father, haunt me and my brother, and seek to destroy my club, the Savage Kings.

  For years, I have stopped at nothing to annihilate them.

  But for years, I also never forgot her.

  She was everything to me.

  She brought joy to my life.

  And I had to leave her without explanation.

  But a chance encounter has brought her back to me.

  And now, everything has changed.

  My life is now all about having her—and nothing can stop me.

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  Forbidden Love

  Carter Steele

  Contents

  1. Parker

  2. Liza

  3. Parker

  4. Liza

  5. Parker

  6. Liza

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  1

  Parker

  “Sheriff Jones?”

  Shit, the sheriff?

  I should have been feeling mighty good right then—and, to some extent, I did. I’d just scored the lovely Liza on what had proved to be a surprisingly mutually agreeable decision. I had thought I’d have to woo her and court her to bed her, but instead, she seemed to be on the same page as much as I was.

  Of course, that left out the small detail that I was currently having feelings for her that I hadn’t had for any girl in some time—probably had something to do with her putting up more of a challenge than anyone else—but still, all things considered, I should have felt as good as a Texas boy after a nice, juicy steak.

  And instead, I was left wondering if our greatest civil ally in Romara had suddenly been killed.

  “Uh huh,” Liza said into her phone.

  I would have killed to have her put it on speaker so I could hear everything, but the more that the phone call went on, the further away from me she got. First, she kept her shoulder tucked close to her phone so I couldn’t hear anything. Then she stood up. Then she went and got her underwear on.

  I had to admit, even in my hazy, post-coitus state, that girl was still a bombshell, one that I reckoned I’d have back for many more rounds. But unfortunately, just as the phone call had killed the sexual high, her putting her clothes on was killing the erotic high of seeing her naked body.

  “Understood,” she said. “I’ll be right over.”

  With that, she hung up. In just about any other spot, with her topless, her gorgeous body before mine, and me lying naked on the couch, I probably would have lunged for her, picked her up, and thrown her back on the bed for some more. I might have needed a few minutes to refuel the engine, but that didn’t mean I could rev her up while I filled back up.

  “Sheriff Jones has been involved in a hit-and-run,” she said. “He’s not hurt that bad, but Officer Redd thinks it was on purpose.”

  That’s actually a hell of a lot better than I had feared. As soon as she’d said the sheriff’s name and adopted a serious tone, I just assumed the worst. It wasn’t the worst decision in the world, certainly not with the fucking Anarchists running around Romara and the neighboring towns, like the annoying little fly that eluded all swat attempts.

  “Well of course it was on purpose,” I said, a little amused at the idea that anyone in law enforcement—or anyone, period—in Romara could think such a crime spree had happened by accident. “How hurt is ‘not hurt that bad?’”

  “From the sounds of it, a possible concussion, maybe a broken bone in his arm, but it sounds relatively minor, all things considered.”

  “Goddamn,” I mumbled. Well, this night just got turned on its head.

  “I need to go,” she said. “I have to check in on the sheriff.”

  “Yah, and I’m goin’ with ya.”

  I stood up without waiting to see how Liza would react. As far as I was concerned, even if I was still on leave from the Savage Kings, I had a town to look after, and if our sheriff suffered an attack, I needed to make sure he was OK.

  But after I turned around upon putting my jeans back on, I saw a very sexy woman—she had put her pants on and was just in a top, looking like some sort of badass James Bond piece—but also a very annoyed woman.

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “This is police business. You’re just in the Savage Kings.”

  “First of all, I ain’t, not right now. And second of all, if it affects Romara, it’s club business too. I ain’t gonna let our sheriff get hurt and not do somethin’ about it.”

  “Great,” Liza said. “You can come in tomorrow after I check in on him tonight.”

  She went back to putting the rest of her clothes on, and heavens I had to fight the urge to snap back. We’d just had sex, for Christ’s sake, and now she was to tell me that not only did she have to shift into the police mindset, she was going to leave me behind in the process?

  “Do ya know who helped keep this town safe before ya showed up?” I said.

  Liza, her shirt just on, paused, sighed, and folded her arms.

  “I’m not concerned about what was, Parker, I’m concerned about what is. And the situation is that I, as a police officer, need to go and check in on my boss. My boss, not your boss. Not your coworker. I’m sure he’s a friend, but this is a professional matter first and foremost. Understood?”

  I shook my head. How could she go from having sex to being this cold and detached so quickly? Shit, this must be what all the girls I’ve been with at the club feel.

  Huh. Maybe karma’s a bitch. But I can’t help it if the sex is making me feel closer to her.

  “C’mon, Liza,” I said. “Ya ain’t gonna play like that, are ya? We just had a good time, I’ve helped save ya life—”

  “Don’t guilt trip me on this,” she said sternly. “I have a job to do. I’m giving you the chance to end this politely and then you can see the sheriff tomorrow, but if you’re going to make this worse, then I’m going to leave without a word and this is going to end on a sour note.”

  End? As in… all of this?

  “Shit, I thought we had somethin’,” I said. “I know it was just sex, but it was pretty fuckin’ good sex.”

  “Damn right it was, and if we can keep our heads right now and focus on what matters, then there will be many more times that we have great sex. But when business calls, it’s the most important thing. I would think that you, of all people, would know that.”

  Fuck. She’s really driving to my core.

  The most painful part of this was that I knew this might happen. It wasn’t like she’d spent the past discussing how she wanted a family and love immediately, only to pull this switch on me. Hell, the first time I’d tried to make a move on her, she had very explicitly shoved me away.

  But lust and romance had a way of blinding a man’s heart, and that was doubly true when the head of the body had as much interest as the head down below. Why the hell she made me feel this way…

  Well, the answer to that was easy.

  She was a challenge.

  But it wasn’t just that. A challenge would have lost its luster after sex; I would have fulfilled my goal, and that would have been that. Yet here I was, my dick still wet her juices, my body still tingling from the dopamine release, trying to keep her around.

  “When we gonna do this again, then?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You know I want to. I wouldn’t have come here for just a booty call.”

  Sure seems like it right now.

  Good Lord, I really can’t bel
ieve that this is how I feel right now. Like she just wants sex and I want more. If the boys at the club ever knew how this was playing out…

  “But I’ve spent enough time explaining myself,” she said. “I’m out.”

  “Liza!”

  But she already was walking out the door frame of the bedroom. My shoulders slumped forward as I felt a pain of regret. I had let myself fall for someone emotionally unavailable. I would have thought that I would’ve been better about that, but I guess I let my lust for a police woman morph into something more.

  Stupid.

  Real fucking stupid.

  And nice to know that I couldn’t even go to the club to vent and drink about it.

  Then I heard her footsteps coming back.

  “Change ya mind?” I said with a cocky grin.

  “I forgot you drove me here,” she said. “I need you to take me back to the police station.”

  “Oh, cuz what’s best for a fightin’ couple like us is to get on a bike, right?”

  “Couple?”

  And that’s enough Parker blabbering for the day.

  “Let’s just go,” I said, adding in my head, before I say something else really stupid.

  Liza and I didn’t say a word as we headed to my bike and hopped on. I normally drew such inspiration and confidence from my bike that it would seem to provide exactly the right words without me even trying, but today, it was failing.

  No club.

  No girl.

  No opportunities for at least a few more days.

  Fucking hell.

  You’re a fish out of water right now. You don’t have access to the club or to pussy.

  But not just any pussy.

  Her pussy.

  Her body.

  Her presence.

  Jesus Christ, do you even hear yourself, Parker?

  When I got to the police station, I hoped that me stopping would inspire some pithy line that would make her smile and say “sure, come along and come see the sheriff.” At the very least, maybe I’d say something that would draw a quick smirk with a promise to come to me as soon as the sheriff was released.

  Instead… well, it didn’t go very well.

  “Call me,” I said, a sentence that started out as a question but soon shifted to a statement, the better to sound more confident.

  “No promises.”

  Of all the fucking answers you had to give, was that the one you had to pick? Really?!? What the fuck, Liza!

  She didn’t even give me the courtesy of a smile and a wave back as she headed for her squad car. She had it on in seconds, forcing me to move to the side so she wouldn’t run me over.

  This was some bullshit. I guess I had more empathy now for all the girls that I’d discarded through the years, but only in the abstract sense. I certainly wasn’t thinking about any of them as I watched Liza drive off to the hospital.

  She was the only one on my mind. And now she was the only one that I couldn’t have as I wanted.

  Well, this sucks.

  2

  Liza

  I turned on the police car. I put it into reverse, backed up, put it into drive, and moved forward. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the hospital.

  I checked my speed carefully. I used turn signals carefully. I kept my eyes on a road.

  I became mechanical in my thought process, focused entirely only on the moment and the task at hand.

  It was a defense mechanism against the swirling thoughts in my head that lasted all of about two minutes before everything came roaring back.

  You slept with him. You fucking slept with him! I can’t believe you actually slept with him. Never thought that would happen, but sure seems like you don’t mind doing it, huh?

  My current defense against that thought, the strategy that I had utilized at Parker’s, was to just treat it as something minor. I hadn’t actually committed a massive faux pas by sleeping with him, I’d only had a casual hookup. We weren’t complicating emotions, we were just sharing our bodies. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, right?

  Except that there was a reason it was called a defense mechanism and not the actual, honest beliefs I had about the situation.

  I liked Parker. He was charming, funny, shameless, and cute with his words. His Texas accent was unlike anything I had heard before—at least as far as people I was close with, physically or otherwise—and it added to his character. Sometimes, men had a tendency to blur together, but Parker was one that stood out.

  And to have slept with him might as well have been the largest conflict of interest I had ever committed.

  It was no wonder that I was pushing him away. Now that the sheriff was incapacitated and now that the Anarchists were coming in full force, it was easier than ever to use work as an excuse to avoid being close. It was easiest of all to use the line “conflict of interest” when in reality I knew full well I wouldn’t stay in Romara forever.

  And it wasn’t like I’d been called in to deal with the Savage Kings. I was here to deal with the Anarchists and go home. Parker wasn’t going to be anything more than a dry buster, someone that had gotten me off after a pretty long period without sex.

  That all sounded good, right?

  Focus on the road. Watch your speed. Use your turn signals. Man, that was some great sex, wasn’t it? What other lines would you cross if you didn’t have to think so much?

  Slow down. Stop. Wait. Red light. Not an emergency. Parker’s so fucking hot.

  Goddamnit!

  I got to the hospital about ten minutes later. Officer Redd may have emphasized that nothing truly bad had happened, but that didn’t mean that visiting a cop in a hospital after a violent attack was something just easily brushed off. Hell, Sheriff Jones could have gotten bit by a spider and gone to the hospital as a precaution, and I still would not have felt great about it.

  There was just something about seeing men and women you had worked with actually suffering for the work that you had done. It was a stark reminder that sometimes, those who enforced the law got pushback in rather violent and hurtful means.

  I found Sheriff Jones on the first floor. He was in bed, watching ESPN on the screen. A baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers was wrapping up.

  “You’d think on a day like today, the Dodgers would at least give me the courtesy of being competitive today,” he said. His voice was definitely drained, and he sounded like he needed some sleep, but by no means did he sound on death’s door or seriously wounded. Had I not known better, I would have wondered if he had perhaps had a few too many drinks.

  “They usually are, I guess they decided to take the night off,” I said. “Are you OK?”

  Sheriff Jones waved his hand in dismissive fashion, as if the idea of him being hurt was ridiculous.

  “I shouldn’t even be here, but you know how it is. You get involved in an accident, people want to take precautions, no matter how unnecessary they are.”

  “Sir, all respect, but you were involved in a hit-and-run, one that, rumor has it, was purposeful.”

  “Oh, I know this isn’t very legal of me to say, but I am quite certain it was purposeful.”

  And then Sheriff Jones did the damndest thing.

  He started to laugh.

  “Sir?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? We bring in legal force, and unless and until we bring in force strong enough to overwhelm them, they’ll keep making life hell.”

  Don’t take this where I think it’s going. Don’t—

  “We gotta work with the Kings, establish a direct line of communication with them. We’ve treated them as civilians and a militia of sorts, but we gotta integrate—”

  “Maybe that collision did hurt you a little bit more than you think,” I said. I didn’t particularly relish the idea of facing all of the Kings after sleeping with one of their members. “Let’s focus on what we can control—”

  “Liza,” the sheriff said in that fatherly tone that was both calming and pa
tronizing at the same time. “I know you want to do this the right way or without their help, but we need them. They nearly killed you. They tried to kill me. Both times, they failed miserably, but if we keep facing danger like this, we’re not going to emerge unscathed. The best case scenario is that we get hurt badly enough that we can call in more help, but is that something you want to risk? Do you want to have the upside be a bad injury for more reinforcements, and the downside be death?”

  Well, sure, if it was put like that, then the answer was obvious. But that had to be a false dichotomy, right? The Anarchists were bad, but they couldn’t be that bad. I’d dealt with gang and MC violence before; a lot of them, even the most sociopathic of the bunch, talked a tough game, but few of them actually went to the step of killing a cop. They knew the consequences for them were severe.

  My phone buzzed. Sheriff Jones deliberately looked back to the baseball game, as if giving me the chance to check it. Realizing he wasn’t going to look at me until I checked my phone, I unlocked it and looked at my texts.

  It was, unsurprisingly, Parker.

  “I’ll be here when you need me.”

  That was it. No emojis, no other texts. Just a simple message of support.

  But was it support for me, the police officer, or me, the single woman? Why not both?

  You know why it can’t be both.

  “Well, I don’t think it’s fair to make any decisions until you leave the hospital,” I said. “I understand the desire to work with the Kings, but that is not something in good conscience I can make without your input and your advice. So I am going to stay to the side and let you work that out when you get back.”