Bad Boy's Treat: The Possessed MC Read online

  It was the only time Beth had to get in and get out unseen. The cameras in the corners of the both office areas were just for show. Swiping her tongue over her bottom lip, Beth gripped the replicated key hard before pressing forward. It would be odd to outsiders if they saw her just standing there. She lingered by the doorway to the reception area first, then peeked around the doorframe. True to form, the reception desk was empty. The main lights were off, the room illuminated by the soft lighting of two lamps at the main desk and one on a small table next to the waiting area.

  Her feet pressed into plush mauve carpet, a recent addition to the office. The old carpet was beige and notoriously difficult to keep clean, but Beth wasn’t a fan of the smell of the newer carpet. Like New Car Smell, it gave her a bit of a headache.

  She could practically feel her heart hammering in her throat as she approached her father’s office door. With no light on beneath it, she drew in a shaky breath and pressed her ear to the wood, listening to any signs of movement inside. Nothing. Silence. Aside from the hum of the reception computer, it was all silence.

  That and her pounding heart, which could probably be heard outside.

  Clearing her throat, she shoved the key into the doorknob lock and turned, a strange thrill coursing through her at the sound of the lock mechanism sliding open. Seconds later she was inside, gently closing the door behind her and using the light on her phone to guide her over to her father’s desk. Once she was seated in his high-backed chair, she did a quick scan of the dark room—his most private sanctuary. With a trembling hand she reached for the lamp on his desk and tugged at the hanging chain, her whole body going stiff when the light clicked on. For a long moment, Beth waited, half-expecting campus security to bust down the door, stun guns and Tasers at the ready.

  Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, she was faced with long shadows scattered around her father’s meticulously organized office—that and twenty-five short minutes to find what she needed to convince Gryff of her father’s innocence. Setting her phone aside, Beth pushed through her nerves and turned on the computer, then went for the stack of journals in the corner of the desk. One for daily issues. One for weekly appointments. One for each month in summary. If she was going to prove that her father wasn’t responsible for all those awful deaths in the Steel Phoenix Motorcycle Club, his journals were the first place to look.

  After a quick glance to the clock, Beth dove into the first book, adrenaline pumping and feet tapping with jittery, nervous energy.

  It all went away in a second, however, at the sound of voices. Multiple voices. Women, in fact, entering the reception area. Beth’s anxious energy quickly morphed into fear, and she hastily went for the lamp on the desk, then shuffled off the high-backed chair and scooted under the desk. It wasn’t until she was completely under, all her limbs tucked to her body, that she realized she had left her father’s computer on and his desk a mess. He would never leave it like that.

  Exhaling a shaky breath, Beth tried to inch out and tidy what she could, but seconds later the door was being unlocked and the voices grew much louder.

  “It’ll just be a second,” Jackie, her father’s secretary, announced. Even though Beth knew she was standing in the doorway, it felt as though the woman was standing directly on top of the desk. Every part of her stood at attention, her mouth too dry to swallow, her breath wanting to rush out in panicked gasps. Sure, Beth was the dean’s daughter. Technically, she should have a reasonable excuse as to why she was in his office so late at night, but Jackie knew better. The woman had been her father’s receptionist for years. She knew Beth wasn’t allowed to loiter at her father’s workplace, no matter how urgent the reason. She’d go straight to Beth’s father with the news—because he was where her loyalty was—and Beth would be forced to explain everything.

  She had never quite perfected the art of lying to her father. Not yet, anyway. He even seemed suspicious of her coming over on Saturday night for drinks, but must have decided to just let it go.

  “Oh, Jackie, isn’t this it?” Heeled footfalls stopped moments later, and Beth pressed a hand over her mouth. The lights were still off, so hopefully the mess was missed. But the computer screen was on. Its reflective image pinged off the window behind her father’s desk.

  “Yes, there it is! Your offices are so cold down there. I couldn’t sit still for the next hour without my sweater,” Jackie said with what sounded like a relieved sigh. Speedy footsteps hurried away, and just before the door shut, Beth heard the woman add, “I hate going into his office when he isn’t here. Feels like such an invasion of privacy…”

  Eyes closed, Beth counted down the seconds until the door shut and locked again. Even then she didn’t resurface until the voices faded away. Once the silence became too much to stand, Beth was up again and in her father’s chair, lamp on, journals open, more determined than ever to get in and get out with whatever pertinent info she could find to prove once and for all that her father wasn’t the terrible man Gryff made him out to be.

  Chapter 30

  “Gryff?” Beth pounded her fists against his apartment door, ears tuned for any sounds inside. It probably would have been smarter if she’d called first to see if she was home, but she’d been so pleased with all her findings that she’d rushed right over. After a quick glance in either direction down the hall, Beth knocked again, this time a little more frantically, and called out to him.

  Moments later the door was wrenched open, and there stood Gryff in sweatpants and not much else, his chest glistening with perspiration. Her mouth practically watered at the sight, and for a moment, she was at a total loss for words. Gryff too seemed to struggle to find something to say. He gawked at her, his dark brow furrowing.

  “Beth? What are you…? Did you walk here?”

  She couldn’t blame him for looking so stunned. After all, she probably looked like a total mess, her mascara running down her cheeks and hair stuck to her head. The dry February was gone, but the warm temperatures hadn’t gone with it. All day it had been pouring, the heavens drenching Blackwoods in a downpour so strong that some of the classrooms on campus had flooded.

  “Combination of the bus and walking,” she admitted with a half-hearted shrug. Her father always insisted she call his driver if she needed to get somewhere in a hurry, but that was out of the question for today. Clearing her throat, she nodded toward the inside of his apartment, which was lit with a soft yellow glow of a lamp, and then said, “So can I come in, or…?”

  “Yeah, shit, sorry,” he muttered, quickly stepping aside and beckoning her in. “Why would you go outside in this? You’re probably freezing.”

  “Hadn’t noticed,” Beth remarked. Once in, she set her bag aside, a bag containing very precious information, then peeled off her soaked jacket and hung it on a hook on the back of the front door.

  “Let me get you something dry to wear,” Gryff said, and before she could insist that it wasn’t necessary, he was gone, hurrying into the bowels of his apartment and emerging moments later with a huge sweater. It didn’t exactly look like classic Gryff attire—he was more a tight t-shirt and leather jacket kind of man, which Beth greatly appreciated—but it was warm and dry, and a comforting coziness engulfed her as soon as she pulled off her equally drenched shirt and replaced it with his sweater.

  “D’you want a tea or something—?”

  “I broke into my father’s study last night,” she announced, too giddy with excitement to contain herself. Gryff’s eyes widened, stunned, and she nodded vigorously, all but bouncing on the tips of her toes with the nervous and excited energy that had carried over from her break-in the night before.

  “You did what?”

  “Broke into his study,” she repeated, grabbing her bag and heading for his living room. In it she found a mat and some obscenely large hand weights scattered around, pump-up rock music humming out of the speakers on the TV. Gryff hastily turned the sound off, then rounded on the spot to face her, his eyes narr
owed.

  “You—”

  “I had to,” she said, almost wishing he was more proud of her than annoyed. “You were going to crucify him—”

  “I hadn’t decided yet—”

  “So I needed to find evidence of his innocence,” Beth continued forcefully, then held up her bag. “And I did.”

  Like any good law student, Beth knew she’d need more than circumstantial hearsay to prove that her father was a good person. Sure, she could scream it from the rooftops all she wanted—yell that he would never do what Gryff had accused him of, but what proof would she have? What sort of evidence did she really have to show that her father was innocent of what he’d been accused of doing? Before she broke into his office, she had nothing but her ability to vouch for his character. That was it. And she knew by now that that would never hold up in a real court, much less the informal one that ran underground in the motorcycle club circles.

  She needed hard proof, and finally she had it. It had taken all day to gather everything and organize it—as if she was giving a presentation for a class—but Beth didn’t care. This could save her father’s life, but only if Gryff hadn’t already damned him.

  “Beth…” Gryff let out a long sigh and grabbed a small towel off the armrest of his couch, rubbing it over his neck before letting it hang over one shoulder. Her gaze flitted down to his toned abdomen again. It had been way too long since they were falling into bed together. He cleared his throat, which snapped her attention back to his face. “I really don’t want you doing this kind of shit. It isn’t you.”

  “What kind of shit?” she fired back, arms crossed. “Looking for evidence to exonerate my father? I’m a law student, Gryff. Finding and presenting evidence is what I’ve been trained to do.”

  It had taken her a while, but the last few days finally made her think that her classes were actually paying off in the real world. Gryff, however, didn’t seem to see it that way.

  “You can’t just… This isn’t the world for you,” he argued, toned arms bulging as he crossed them, their stances mirroring one another. “I don’t want you breaking into places just to—”

  “He’s my father, Gryff,” Beth remarked tersely, her temper prickling. “I have to fight for him. I didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter.” She paused, swallowing hard, then added, “You didn’t leave me much of a choice.”

  “Look, I told you about all this because I care about you.” He turned away, his expression hard and distant, and began putting his various weights into some semblance of organization. Beth watched, arms still folded across her chest, trying to ignore the fact that every breath she took she was breathing him in, his familiar scent, both comforting and arousing, all but radiating from his sweater.

  “Okay, so—”

  “I didn’t tell you so you could throw yourself into this shit and get your hands dirty, too,” Gryff continued, as he straightened up and observed his line of impossibly heavy-looking weights. She’d probably break if she tried to lift any of them. “If we took our sexual relationship out of the bedroom and turned it into an everyday thing, I’d forbid you from doing any of this. But seeing as I’m not your dominant out here…”

  “I can do what I want,” she finished for him, her eyes narrowing. “Must be tough for you.”

  “It is, but not for the reason you think.” He pinched the bridge of his nose briefly, eyes clenched shut, then sighed again. Beth was sick of the sighs. “This is a fucked up world that you’re just hovering on the edge of. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. It’s dangerous, and I don’t want you involved. You… I want to keep you safe.”

  “From who?” she demanded.

  “Everyone!” Gryff threw his hands up, exasperation seeping from every pore. Stalking torwards her, he seemed like he was going to grab her, but he stopped at the last moment, and Beth backed up until the backs of her legs knocked against the couch, throwing her arm out to steady herself. “From the Phoenixes, from your dad, from yourself! Don’t you see that, Beth? I want you to distance yourself from this person you’re on the verge of becoming.”

  “What? A confident woman who—”

  “Who might just get herself killed if someone thinks she’s sticking her nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

  Her eyes widened, tears threatening to surface. “Gryff!”

  “It’s true. The danger is real. It’s not a TV show or some bullshit thing that won’t matter once you graduate. This is real, Beth. I told you about it as a courtesy, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if something happened to your dad, not so you could get involved.”

  A chill coursed down her spine, her skin prickling, but she refused to back down. With a gulp, she drew in a shaky breath and tried to hide the fact that her hands shook. Beth held his gaze, her shoulders back and chin raised defiantly. “Well… You can see why I had to get involved, didn’t you? I had no other choice.”

  “Beth—”

  “Do you want to know what I found or not?”

  Chapter 31

  Of course he wanted to know. Gryff wasn’t an asshole—he didn’t want to see an innocent man executed by Micky or Toby or Hammond. He might have done a lot of fucked up shit in his life, but he wasn’t a heartless bastard by any means. Beth was… important to him. Gryff didn’t want to see her suffer.

  But if he said yes now, he was just opening the door a little wider, beckoning Beth into his world. Soon she’d be immersed in it, shrouded in its thick cloud of danger and drugs and darkness. Suffocating. She’d suffocate in his world, and he just couldn’t have it. She was too good for this—too pure a woman, their sex life aside, to become wrapped up in the underbelly of Blackwoods.

  Looking at her face though, the desperation in her eyes, Gryff found his response dying on the tip of his tongue. With another firm clearing of his throat, he turned and stalked off to the kitchen, needing the space to find his courage again. Soft footfalls followed him, swiftly and at his heels, and they stopped when he did at the fridge.

  “You want a beer?” he asked, knowing she wouldn’t, then fished out a bottle as she huffed.

  “Gryff!”

  He could practically feel her stewing behind him, a little white-hot ball of rage as he blatantly ignored her. Focused on the task at hand, he went for his cupboard and pulled out a glass, then found the bottle opener. A few seconds later he was filling the glass with beer. Normally, he’d drink it straight from the bottle like any sane fucker, but he just needed something to busy himself. Once he was done drinking it, he’d head for the shower, maybe ask if she wanted to join him. His workout might have been interrupted by her arrival, but he’d still worked up quite a sweat.

  “I have him at a gala on one of the nights there was a… a hit,” she stated, following Gryff out of the kitchen so close that she stumbled into him when he stopped abruptly. “I have his journals, his records. He was doing something all the nights when people were killed.”

  He groaned. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It’s an alibi!”

  “No one’s saying he pulled the trigger, Beth,” Gryff snapped, looking to her with a glare. All around her he could see the darkness consuming her, piquing her curiosity and dragging her deeper down this hole. He had to put a stop to it before he lost her forever. “You don’t need to be at the scene of the crime to be responsible for it happening. I have good leads that show him moving funds around to pay for something big. Something like a hit.”

  “But… But…” Beth went for her bag and pulled out a file folder full of what appeared to be black-and-white photos. “No. I have… I have proof that he was busy. He’s been busy for years now. There were no mysterious appointments in his diary, no secret meetings—”

  “And who would record secret meetings?” He gave a cold laugh without meaning to, and he hated himself for it when he saw her face fall. This must be killing her. After taking a quick sip of his beer, he set the glass aside and moved in close to her. This time she didn
’t run. She didn’t even flinch away when he set his hands on her slim shoulders, missing the feel of them—the feel of her. “Beth, I’m so sorry. I know this is hard. I mean, who just blindly accepts that their dad is a bad guy, but—”

  “He’s not,” she hissed, tears brimming over her eyes and trailing down her cheeks as she shrugged him off, “a bad guy.”

  “Beth…” He trailed off, unable to come up with any other valid argument besides the most obvious. “I just want to keep you safe from him. All my evidence against your dad is damning.”

  Beth stared at him for a long moment after that, and it was only then that he realized she was shaking. Trembling. Her legs, her hands, her lips. Maybe it was from the cold, but Gryff wasn’t that naïve. All he wanted was to wrap her in his arms and hold her close. Whisper in her ear that he’d protect her, that this fight wouldn’t spill over into her life, and that he wouldn’t let any of the guys he knew use her to get to her dad. She had to be worried about that kind of shit, right?