One Step At A Time (Forbidden sins: Biker Erotica)

WARNING: THIS BOOK HAS A LOT OF DARK PLOT. FORBIDDEN FORBIDDEN AND 21+ EXTRA FORBIDDEN THINGS. SO IF YOU ARE NOT READY TO INDULGE INTO THE DARK WORLD, DO NOT READ! THANK YOU. JOIE’S POV "Cash? Baby, I'm home early. I brought the rigatoni from Lucarelli's, the one you always steal off my plate." The house was too quiet for a Thursday, and that should have been my first warning. Cash never sat in silence. If he wasn't on the phone yelling about a shipment, he had the TV turned up so loud I could hear the bikes revving on whatever race he was watching from the driveway. Tonight there was nothing but the hum of the fridge and the sound of something soft and rhythmic coming from the end of the hall. "Cash?" I set the takeout bag on the counter and followed the sound, and somewhere between the kitchen and our bedroom door I already knew. I think a part of me had known for weeks, every time he took a call outside, every time Gianna laughed a little too long at something he said. I just didn't want to be the kind of woman who always suspected or lived in scrutiny... Because Cash Delaney wasn't just my boyfriend. He was the president of the Black Saints MC, the most feared motorcycle club on the east side of the city, the kind of men who ran guns through the docks and settled their arguments in parking lots with tire irons. Being his girl was the only reason I could walk into a bar, pump gas at midnight, or sleep in my own bed without looking over my shoulder. It kept the Iron Vipers off me. It kept the Devil's Reapers off me. It kept the Hellfire Kings off me, and their president, Dom Kessler, had once told me to my face that one day he'd have me whether I liked it or not. All three clubs had fought over me like I was territory, and I had picked Cash because he was the strongest of them. As long as I wore his name, nobody touched me. If I ever walked away from him, I was f****d, and everybody in this city knew it. I pushed the door open. Gianna Russo was on top of my boyfriend in my bed, wearing nothing except the gold chain I bought him for his birthday, and Cash had his hands on her hips like he had done it a hundred times before. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me," I said. Gianna turned her head slowly, her long dark hair falling over one shoulder, and she didn't even have the decency to look surprised. She smiled at me like I had walked in on her trying on my dress. "Joie, bella," she said. "You're early." "I'm early? That's what you have to say to me? I brought you into this house. I let you sleep on my couch when your landlord threw you out. I lent you my clothes, Gianna." "And they fit me so well," she said, and then she laughed. Cash didn't move her off him. He reached over to the nightstand, picked up his pack of Marlboros, lit one, and took a long pull like he had all the time in the world. The smoke curled up toward the ceiling, and he looked at me through it with that lazy half smile that used to make my knees weak. "Come on, babe," he said. "Don't make it a whole thing. Close the door and get in here. There's room." I stared at him. "Are you out of your mind?" Gianna took the cigarette right out of his fingers, put it to her lips, and blew the smoke toward me. "Che c'è, principessa? Hai paura di condividere?" [What's wrong, princess? Are you afraid to share?] She thought I wouldn't understand. She had known me for three months and never once asked where my family came from, never noticed that my last name was Santangelo, never heard me on the phone with my nonna before she passed. "Non ho paura di niente," I told her. "Soprattutto non di una puttana che non sa nemmeno pulirsi il trucco prima di rubare l'uomo di un'altra." [I'm not afraid of anything. Especially not a w***e who can't even fix her makeup before she steals another woman's man.] Her face went white, and for one second I felt good. Then Cash laughed, low in his chest, and the feeling was gone. "Damn, Joie. I forgot you had that in you. See, this is what I like about you. Fire." He took the cigarette back from Gianna and pointed it at me. "Now cool it, get your ass over here, and we'll all be friends." Was Cash suggesting we engage in a threesome? He had lost his damn mind! "I'm leaving you, Cash." That was the moment his smile changed. It didn't disappear, it just went flat, the way it did when somebody at the shop came up short on money. He moved Gianna off him without looking at her and sat up against the headboard, the Black Saints cut hanging on the bedpost behind him with the skull and halo stitched on the back. "No," he said calmly. "You're not." "Watch me." "I'm going to say this once, so listen good. You walk out of this house, you walk out of my protection. You remember what it was like before me? You remember Tommy Vance from the Iron Vipers sitting outside your apartment every night for a month? You remember the Reapers jumping your car at the gas station on Delmont?" My stomach turned. "That was three years ago." "And they haven't forgotten you, sweetheart. They just respect my patch. The minute word gets out you're not mine anymore, and trust me, it'll get out by morning, every one of those animals is going to come for you. And I won't lift a finger." He tapped ash onto my nightstand. "You picked me, Joie. You picked me because I was the only one strong enough to keep them off you. That deal doesn't just go away because you got your feelings hurt." "You're threatening me." "I'm educating you. There's a difference." He nodded at the bed. "So, what's it going to be?" Gianna leaned back against my pillows and said something in Italian under her breath, something about how I'd come crawling back before the weekend. I didn't answer her. I grabbed my keys off the dresser, my purse off the chair, and I walked out of that room with my heart beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth. "Joie!" Cash shouted after me. "You'll be back! You don't have anywhere else to go!" He was right, and that was the worst part. I sat in my car at the end of the driveway with my hands shaking on the wheel, scrolling through my contacts, and every name was either one of Cash's people or somebody I had dropped because he didn't like them. My father was gone. My nonna was gone. My friends had disappeared one by one over the last three years, and the only new friend I'd made was upstairs riding my boyfriend. That left one number I hadn't called in almost two years. My mother. I didn't call her. I just started driving, and forty minutes later I was pulling through the iron gates of the Cuccio estate in the hills above the city, telling myself the whole way that I was only going because Marisa, my mother, was sick. My cousin had texted me a month ago that she was bedridden, that it was bad, that I should come see her before I regretted it. I had ignored that message too. I didn't want to see the house. I didn't want to see the fountain or the long white staircase or the portrait of my mother in her wedding dress that I knew would be hanging over the fireplace, because standing next to her in that portrait would be the man who had spent two years sending me flowers, showing up at my job, telling me he would wait for me as long as it took. Aleksander Cuccio had waited exactly two years. Then he married my mother. Three years passed by, my mother fell sick and they were still married! The front door was unlocked. The house was dark except for a lamp in the foyer and a line of light under a door at the end of the upstairs hall, the guest bathroom, the one closest to my mother's room. I could hear water running, and I thought maybe a nurse was in there, or maybe my mother had gotten up on her own. "Mamma?" I called softly. "It's me. It's Joie." Nobody answered. I climbed the stairs, walked to the end of the hall, and pushed the bathroom door open. Steam rolled out around me, and standing in the middle of it, with a towel in his hand that wasn't covering anything at all, was Aleksander. He didn't move. He didn't reach for the door or turn away. Water ran down the tattoos on his chest and the scar across his ribs that I had once asked him about and he had refused to explain, and his gray eyes went from surprised to something much darker in the space of a breath. "Joie," he said, his voice rough and quiet. "Three years after, and this is how you come back to me?"