Still Waters
Greenstone Security #1
Anne Malcom
Copyright 2017
Editing by Hot Tree Editing
Cover Design by Simply Defined Art
Interior formatting by Champagne Formats
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author's Note
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part Two
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
Other Books
Acknowledgements
About the Author
To everyone who believes in soulmates, instalove, and kismet.
This is for you.
And for everyone who doesn’t.
This is for you too.
Before I even touched the keyboard, I knew where Lucy and Keltan’s story was going to go. With a lot of my books, the story is half written in my head. This was the case with Still Waters. Then things changed. My carefully laid plans for Keltan and Lucy were blown out of the water—pardon the pun. I had planned on drama, action and maybe an explosion or two (anyone who knows me or has read my books knows I love drama), but amidst that, a relatively simple love story.
I should have known better. There’s no such thing as a simple love story.
I’m warning you now, this is all about the instalove. So if this offends you as much as socks and sandals offend me, stop reading now. But even those who love instalove, I’m warning you too. This isn’t simple. In fact, Keltan and Lucy’s relationship goes through more drama than even I’m comfortable with.
It wasn’t my choice.
Or even theirs.
It was that damn universe.
Even authors can’t control the universe in the worlds they’ve created.
They just have to enjoy the ride.
I hope you enjoy this one.
Anne
Xxx
“Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink,” I murmured, tracing my blood-red fingernail around the rim of my martini glass.
A throaty laugh carried over the melody of “Motorcycle Man” by Saxon, a song only thrashed by true lovers of the genre.
Bikers. Of course. The original rockers. Rebels without a cause. The one percent that the AMA said didn’t stay inside those carefully drawn lines that governed society.
Outside the law.
Outlaws, in other words.
And so off-limits.
Despite the fact that if there was any case of spontaneous orgasm, it would be from a smoldering look courtesy of the many, many bad boy hotties currently shooting the shit and dripping male beauty all over the place.
It couldn’t be done, though. They couldn’t be done. By me, at least.
Most rules were made to be broken here. I’d broken a lot myself. Almost all of them, actually. Just not that one I’d set for myself. One that became necessary for treading water in this world when I started flailing nine years ago. Or, if we wanted to get really specific, two decades ago.
“Babe, you could drink,” Rosie told me, her mouth closing around a beer and taking a sip before she raised her perfectly groomed eyebrows at me.
She gestured across the party with her beer, the movement fueled with drunken excitement so white foam bubbled from the top and trickled down the neck of the glass.
“You could drown,” she corrected, waving the bottle at the sea of leather, not noticing the fact that she was watering the yellowing lawn with her beer.
I gazed at the very sea we were in the midst of. The one I was more than used to. Not that you were exactly immune to it. No matter how long I’d been involved with the Sons of Templar—which was since Rosie and I became best friends in kindergarten when we both posed a daring escape after becoming bored of finger painting—I wouldn’t get used to the fact that an unsightly percentage of their membership looked like GQ had lost a gaggle of models when they decided to do an “Outlaw Chic” shoot.
Though, these men were better than GQ. They weren’t groomed or sculpted or one-dimensional. They were real. Three-dimensional men who weren’t perfect by society’s standards because they didn’t live in a society where men paid three hundred dollars for haircuts and looked in the mirror more than I did.
No. They lived in a world where their chiseled and droolworthy muscled and tatted physiques weren’t to sell magazines. They were to stay alive.
To fight.
To endure.
And shit, did they endure well.
“No,” I murmured, my gaze finding Jagger, from the New Mexico chapter. His emerald eyes fastened on me and glowed with a look that I’m sure melted many a panty. Mine even felt deceptively hot. Even with the scar marring half of his face, he was something. Shit, the scar made him.
And the eyes. The ones that held the demons every woman wanted to conquer but few would be brave enough, special enough, to touch. Most likely only one or two would be capable of at least taming them.
But I had my rules. And amidst the lifestyle where rules were frowned upon, broken and stepped on by heavy motorcycle boots, they were important. Pivotal.
Control over those and myself was necessary for my continued sanity. And survival. Just like these men needed to endure, I did too.
I just did it with heels and an icy façade instead of a cut and a gun.
So, no horizontal tango with the bikers who I considered my family. It could, and almost certainly would, end badly. And then I’d have to either face the awkwardness of wading through the destruction of a relationship or cut out my family completely.
I wouldn’t do that. Couldn’t do that. Family was everything to me. The ones I shared blood with and the ones I didn’t.
Hence the rules.
I’d slipped once.
Or twice.
But they were careful slips, even a teenage me, inebriated on beer and testosterone, had been thinking.
Nomads.
Ones I had seen less than a handful of times since then.
Ones who didn’t pose a danger, because they didn’t take anything from me that couldn’t be given back.
I might not be able to take back my virginity, but I still had the box it came in, and that was fine with me. I read that on a T-shirt somewhere, so not an original thought, but apt.
“I won’t drown,” I continued after I’d
waded out of my mind. “Not when I’ve mastered the art of swimming.” I gestured with my glass, not spilling my precious martini because I’d only just arrived, and Rosie had been here since—I glanced at the table—at least four beers ago.
She could handle more than that.
Much more.
Despite her appearance—chocolate brown curls, delicate makeup and light pink, skintight dress with matching wedges—she was not innocent. Being the sister of the president of a motorcycle club, not to mention the daughter of the previous president, meant that innocence was something she wasn’t even born with.
In a good way, though.
Innocence was something that got publicity, prized in our society.
Or their society.
I hadn’t been part of that since kindergarten.
Innocence was a lie.
Guilt was too.
These men, this club, lay somewhere in between.
Rosie laughed again. “Seriously? Jagger looks like he wants to have you for dinner. And breakfast.” She waggled her brows, and I rolled my eyes.
“Yeah, well I’m not on the menu. At least not here.”
It was time for her to roll her eyes. “Are we ever going to conquer this? The bee in your bonnet about screwing the club?”
“The club is my family. You don’t screw family,” I argued.
She scoffed. “Well you don’t.”
I grinned at her. “Neither do you.”
She glared at her brother, who was arriving with Gwen, his wife. He was cradling his baby daughter in one of his arms, Gwen tucked into the other. Despite having some decidedly nonfraternal feelings towards him when I was going through puberty—and all through my twenties—I considered him my brother too. Which was why I grinned at the rough man clutching his adorable baby and not letting his beautiful and polar opposite wife out of his sight. He either had one or the other of those two in his hands at all times.
Both was his preference.
You couldn’t blame him. Not when she’d almost died, been kidnapped, beaten and then shot a guy while nine months pregnant. Not to mention gave birth in this very clubhouse with Lucky and Bull as nurses and Cade as midwife.
But that was a story for another day.
And a story that I was distracted from the moment I saw who was entering behind Cade and Gwen, chatting easily with Amy, Gwen’s insane and insanely beautiful best friend.
“It isn’t by choice, my celibacy from the club,” Rosie hissed. “It’s because my brother has threatened death and dismemberment to any man wearing a Son’s cut who touches me.” She shook her head rapidly so her chocolate curls tumbled out of her messy bun. “You’d think for big bad biker men who prize their ironclad balls they’d have a little more courage. But….” Her eyes widened, glancing behind Cade. She caught what I’d been looking at, drooling at since the moment she started talking. “But he isn’t wearing a cut, and he looks like he has a little bit of courage and would brave death and dismemberment,” she breathed.
I barely heard her, too busy battling with my melting panties. The man walking through the crowd with Cade, Gwen and Amy was nothing short of… droolworthy.
I didn’t say, or even think, the word “droolworthy.” And I was surrounded by the cast of Magic Mike in leather cuts.
This man was not wearing a cut.
Something in his favor.
But I think I would have been drooling even if he had been.
I would have burned my carefully crafted and treasured rulebook right there and then if he had been a new patch.
His tanned skin hinted at exotic origin, a milky chocolate that rippled over his sinewy forearms, exposed by his white tee. His left hand had a black tribal tattoo spanning from the top of his palm up his muscled flesh and disappearing under his sleeve. He was wearing plain denim jeans that I would have bronzed for the sheer fact that they had encased his powerful thighs. My gaze moved upward and instantly locked with his chocolate eyes.
Something seemed to shift in me that made me unable to look away from those eyes. Made me want to drown in them.
“Yeah, I think he would brave that. Death and dismemberment for the right woman,” Rosie said confidently. I felt her gaze on me, yet I found myself unable to rip myself away from a pair of chocolate eyes. “Just not for me,” she muttered. “Figures.”
Since then, my life was carefully sectioned into two slices.
Before Keltan and after Keltan.
The split between “before” and “after” may have been clean. But the “after” wasn’t. It was anything but. It was the most complicated, winding and chaotic “after” that I couldn’t have even imagined.
And I knew chaos.
Or at least thought I did.
Turns out I had no fucking clue about chaos.
I didn’t know that was his name until later in the night. Much later.
I had been a coward, hiding from that gaze once I finally found the necessary strength to tear myself away and find my scattered senses littered alongside cigarette butts, motorcycle boots and discarded beer bottles.
Good thing there were a lot of wide, muscled men in black cuts to do that behind.
“You’re hiding,” Lucky observed with a grin, taking a pull of his beer.
I glared at him, all the while positioning myself so the bulk of my body was obscured by his.
Not hard considering he dwarfed me with his muscles and height.
I was tall, especially in black strappy Guccis—vintage and fabulous—but these guys were straight from the radioactive spider plant or something.
Or, at the very least, Valhalla.
“No, I’m not,” I hissed, glancing from the caramel-skinned, tattooed, bald-headed and utterly delicious biker to stare at the man I’d been catching glimpses of all night. When my eyes locked on his piercing stare, directed at me, as if he’d been watching and waiting for me to meet his, I darted my gaze away to meet Lucky’s amused irises. They were lighter, more mischievous and a lot younger than my mystery man.
My?
At what point in this night did I claim him mine?
The fifth stare?
The fiftieth?
Or the first?
“You are, darlin’, and it breaks my heart that you’re usin’ me as a human shield. ‘My body is a wonderland,’ to quote John Mayer, and I’ll not have it used for such purposes,” Lucky stated seriously, hand on his chest in mock shock.
“How is it possible for you to quote John Mayer and be in a motorcycle club that pretty much runs on masculinity instead of gasoline?” I teased, forcing myself not to look in the direction I knew he was.
“I’m a multifaceted man,” he defended. He stepped forward, his eyes flickering with the trademark seduction he’d been using on me since I was sixteen.
Well, me and every other girl with a vagina and legs.
“Plus, I’m very confident in my masculinity and my wondrous body that you’re currently using as a shield,” he continued, tilting his head with interest. “And I’m very intrigued as to why you’re doing so. I mean, you’re finally getting flustered over a man at one of these things.” He tapped my head. “I thought your programming didn’t allow for that, Cyber,” he teased.
I glared at him. Cyber was Lucky’s nickname for me since he was baffled that I was the only woman who wouldn’t jump into bed with him. Or any of his brothers.
Apart from Rosie, and Ashley, both of whom had known him since he was a skinny runaway with demons at his back. We considered him a brother.
A hot one, to be sure.
And also, a total dork.
One who wouldn’t hesitate to kill a man if he looked at me, Ashley or Rosie the wrong way.
“Just because I don’t want to have the wondrous experience of having to visit my gyno for just looking at your bedsheets doesn’t mean I’m a nun. Or a lesbian. Or a cyborg,” I told him.
“No, I disagree. I mean, you’re in the face of true manly beauty, and you’re too busy
trying to both hide from and spy on our newest visitor that you probably couldn’t even tell me how many veins I have in my neck.”
I rolled my eyes. “How would anyone know that?”
He grinned. “Because that’s where women imagine their mouths while looking at me.” He waggled his brows in a good imitation of Rosie. “Amongst other places.”
“You’re a pig,” I informed him.
“And everyone loves bacon,” he countered.
I sipped my drink in response.
“You’re not curious, then?” he probed, folding his arms and grinning so his harsh male features softened, revealing the puppy dog he actually was.
If you had asked me before I met Lucky if the Devil could still be bad and good at the same time, I would have told you the Devil didn’t exist. That was, after all, the greatest trick he’d ever pulled. I glanced around, my eyes touching on Bull, leaning on his knees and dangling a beer bottle between his forefingers, watching the fire.
The Devil existed. In all of these men.
He just wasn’t entirely bad.
I glanced to Cade, his dark eyes watching his wife while he moved his daughter in his arms just enough to reveal the Glock shoved into the waistband of his jeans.
He wasn’t entirely good either.
I moved my attention back to the smiling devil in front of me, studiously avoiding the place in the crowd where fire burned at my temples.
“I’m not curious?” I repeated. “About what syphilis feels like?” I shook my head. “But I ever get that way, yours will be the first door I knock on,” I replied sweetly.
He laughed, something he did easily and often.
He killed too. Something I knew he also did easily and often.
But that didn’t make me love him any less.
It didn’t make me love any of them any less.
Especially when Bull was the one who pulled the trigger on… him.
That’s why I loved him the most; somehow it had created an intangible connection between us. A comradery, maybe. These men had all shared blood, bathed in it. But Bull and I, what we had lost was more than blood.
Me? A piece of my soul so small I could build around it. Sure, it would never be whole—it was broken and mangled, if I was being honest—but I’d be able to laugh with Lucky as I was now. I could smile and enjoy the taste of the sweetness of this life.