Page 15 of Cutter's Hope

God damn it! This man could kiss. He devoured me from the mouth down, my blood thrummed with alcohol and lust, no I wasn’t impaired, just pleasantly buzzed. His hands slid over my body through the thin dress and I pushed my hands under his shirt. He groaned into my mouth and I sighed with contentment. He broke the kiss first and leaned back with that debonair grin plastered to his face.

“Been wanting to do that for a couple of days,” he said.

“Why’d you stop?” I asked coquettishly and his grin broadened.

“If I’m going to take you, it sure as hell ain’t going to be in some grungy defunct bowling alley,” he stated and his tone held a finality to it that made me think a little more of him.

“Kiss me again,” I demanded.

Cutter raised his eyebrows, “You like it when I kiss you, Sweetheart?”

“No, not at all, now shut up and do it again.”

I pulled his mouth back down to mine, tugging on his leather vest to do it. Cutter smiled against my lips and flicked his tongue against my bottom one. I opened for him and he kissed me, his mouth warm, his taste overlaid by the crisp hoppy flavor of the beer we’d been drinking. He sank his teeth gently into my lower lip and I groaned. Things much lower in my body began to throb with need and I marveled once more at the attraction.

I had never had such a visceral reaction to a man and it was interesting to me. It was also extremely frustrating knowing that he was deliberately withholding the information Ineededto find the last woman to see my sister. I pushed back, breathless, and realized that his palm rested warm on the outside of one of my thighs up under my skirt which caused me to shudder. God I was horny but my hormones needed to take a back seat. I stiffened in his hold and he smiled down at me, almost a little sadly.

“Shh, easy girl. Nothin’ ain’t gonna happen that you don’t wanna have happen,” he murmured and the tone and delivery he used just turned me on that much more.

Cutter put my leg down which had been raised up over one of his hips, the scorching length of his erection pressing against me through the denim of his soft, broken in jeans, left my mound feeling almost bruised with the force with which he’d been pressed against me. It was a delicious feeling, I’m not going to lie. For a girl that could most definitely handle her own, it was a rare thing for me to find a man who could man handle me, but I suspected Cutter was up to the job. I liked that. I liked that a lot.

“That’s the problem, I want it to happen but it can’t,” I murmured and met his eyes with steely resolve.

Cutter had both palms pressed flat to the wall to either side of my head, my body bracketed in, trapped. Any other female and it probably would have been intimidating as hell but I wasn’t just any female. I was me, with some of the finest hand to hand combat training the world over locked in my brain, muscles and joints. So no, I wasn’t intimidated or afraid but a big part of that was the way that Cutter looked at me. He searched my face carefully, as if doing so could and would, divine every last little secret my heart held.

“You’ve been knocked down, dragged out, put through the wringer and don’t trust no one as a result,” he said finally and sighed, his tone liberally dosed with regret.

“You say that with some serious conviction,” I put on a musing tone as I said it, more curious to see what he would do. It was kind of unnerving how he managed to pick up on things so easily. Okay, for me, it wasreallyunnerving. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

“Look at you, hiding behind your high walls. You’re like a concrete maze, Darlin’. Just when I think I got you figured out, the maze changes and I’m right back to square one,” he leaned in as if doing a push up against the wall and whispered the last against my ear, his breath fanning and sending a pleasurable little rush down the side of my neck, “You trust me a little, I’ll trust you…”

He pushed back and his warm brown eyes searched mine. I let go of his leather vest with my left hand and held the inside of my left wrist in front of his face. His eyes refocused on the writing there and followed the sweeping lines.

“Virtue,” he read, “Gonna have to fill me in, Beautiful. I’m not picking up what you’re putting down.”

I licked my lips which were suddenly very dry and swallowed a couple of times. It was hard to think with him so close, smelling so good; like clean saltwater and ocean breeze.

“I have two sisters, Faith and Charity… One is missing. The girl I am looking for was the last person to see her.” I relented. Cutter stared at my face, hard. The lines of his own collapsing into neutrality.

“Wait here,” he said and kissed me one last time roughly. He pushed back up off the wall, away from me, before stalking around the corner and back into the bowling alley.

“Council!” he barked, “Outsidenow!”

Uh-oh. Looks like I just opened up a can of whoop ass on somebody. I almost felt bad about that. The guys that formed the leadership of the club weren’t half bad, that I could tell. I pushed off the wall and closed my eyes. With a groan, I fell back against it and leaned on it hard. What the fuck did I just do?

8

Cutter…

The boys were all silent, and like me, none of them were happy. I wanted to tell her, but the ramifications of that would be far reaching for my club, so I had to put it to a vote. The council stood around me at the far end of the lot and mulled over the implications.

“Tiny’s got our nuts in a fucking vice,” Nothing growled.

“Too fucking right. Wish the happy bastard would just fucking retire already,” Radar kicked a rock across the worn out asphalt of the parking lot.

“We can’t tell her anything, not until we know she’s not going to flip out. We need a full club meeting, make sure every damn one of us is on the same page,” Marlin said judiciously.

Pyro huffed a laugh and I looked at my best friend, “Play time is over. I’ll get everyone over to The Plank where we can put it to a vote. I’m sorry, Brother,” he said to me, “I don’t see this going any but one way. She’s connected to the cops. She’ll fucking fry us.”

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