Page 57 of The Kings of Kearny

Chapter Fourteen

Ihad no idea how Danieland Eva King did it. If I lived in a house as nice as theirs, I would never allow five, let alone fifty, drunken bikers inside it. The noise was deafening. People yelled to make themselves heard over the music. Between their shouting, the random bursts of raucous laughter, and some idiot gunning a bike engine outside, I was half a second away from plugging my ears.

Jakob led me through the first floor like a man on a mission. He’d threaded our fingers together the second we stepped inside, and now he all but dragged me behind him, barely raising his chin in acknowledgment of the greetings thrown his way. Maybe taunting him was a bad idea. Despite the fact that we’d been forced together almost twenty-four seven the past few days, I still didn’t know all that much about him. Sure, once or twice he’d dropped his guard and acted borderline playful, but now I couldn’t tell if cock teasing him had crossed some sort of line. To me it was foreplay, but with the muscle popping out along his jaw, Jakob looked more pissed off than turned on.

We followed a hallway through the center of the home and emerged into a living room. To my left, a big man gesticulated as he talked, beer in hand. Foam splashed out of the can he held and rained down on the hardwood floor. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care. The woman he spoke to glanced at the mess he made, but she didn’t look like she was in a hurry to clean up after his drunk ass.

We moved past them into the kitchen. I had to tug my feet up every few steps to unstick the soles of my shoes from the tile floor, evidence of still more spilled drinks and God knew what else. A big trash can overflowed in the corner. Cigarette and pot smoke mingled in the air, creating a haze of smog overhead. It was like I was back in high school and someone had thrown a rager while their parents were out of town. This felt more like a party for teenagers, who had zero respect for anyone else’s things, than for grown-ass adults.

I glanced at Jakob’s back. I was a pretty tidy person, and the sight of beer cans lining every available surface was making me twitchy. What was it doing to a clean freak like him?

I tugged on his hand.

He paused and turned to me, a brow raised in question.

I nodded toward the overflowing sink. “Want me to find you a pair of gloves and a scrub brush?”

From the flat look he gave me, he understood the joke and didnotthink I was funny.

I grinned up at him.

He shook his head and kept walking, hauling me forward. Straight ahead, a set of french doors opened onto a large porch. I took a deep breath of fresh air as we stepped outside. Tiki torches lined the railings around us, their citronella-scented oil keeping the worst of the bugs at bay. People crowded the deck, drinking and eating. To our left, a big man in an apron flipped burgers on an open grill. A young biker dashed past him and puked over the railing, her friends laughing at her.

I looked away, slightly queasy, and took in the scene spread out around us. The backyard was huge with what looked like a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of landscaping. On the far side, a towering retaining wall held a small hill at bay. An Olympic-sized swimming pool was sunk into the center of the yard, complete with diving boards, water slides, and a small army of deck chairs. Spread around the pool were seating areas, pergolas, picnic tables, a waterfall leading to what looked like a man-made river, two firepits, and still more drunken bikers.

The wordLupercaliacame to mind as I stared out at the crowd. It was an ancient Roman festival that revolved around sex and slaughter. The Kings looked like they were doing all they could to bring it back into practice. The swimming pool was packed with people in various stages of undress. A fully nude white man of average height and build stood on the edge of it, hands raised overhead as he yelled. His fully erect dick was huge. Like, porn-star big. Someone threw a beer can at him from the pool, and he leaped forward, trying to cannonball onto their head. In an adjacent hot tub, a man and a woman were going at it like jackrabbits, careless of the people they shared it with or those who stood nearby, watching them with rapt gazes. I looked away from the couple when two women rose from a picnic table in the back and started beating the hell out of each other. Several other bikers streamed forward, I thought to break it up, but instead, they joined in, and a small brawl erupted in their corner of the yard.

I was way too sober for this shit.

Jakob turned to me. “Like a rowdy night at the bar, huh?”

I sent him the same flat look he’d given me in the kitchen and tried to pull my hand from his. There was a cooler full of beer nearby with my name on it.

He tightened his fingers on mine and tugged me close. “You’re not going anywhere. This isn’t like a shift at Charley’s. The rules don’t apply here.”

I glanced past him. The woman in the hot tub started screaming as she came. “I can see that.”

Jakob gripped my chin and turned me back to him. “We do this every couple of months to blow off steam. People drink until they black out. They fuck who they want, and they fight who they want, and afterward, there are no hard feelings. There aren’t any consequences here, do you understand?”

He let me go, and I nodded up at him, trying not to let the mood of the crowd infect me. It was hard being the extrovert that I was. This was the kind of energy I fed off at the bar, only to a much greater degree. A heady rush of adrenaline sluiced through my veins, waking me up. Between what just happened in the car and then watching the couple in the hot tub, I was turned on. The sounds of a nearby brawl put me on edge as I waited for the violence to boil over into the rest of the crowd. It was a strange collision of emotions, and it made me feel reckless and wild.

I looked away from Jakob, back into the yard. God help me, I understood why they did this. Despite some small part of my psyche screaming at me to get out of here, a much larger part of me wanted to stay for a while. What would I do if, for a single night, I stopped giving a fuck? If I did whatever the hell I wanted without having to worry about consequences?

My clothes suddenly felt too tight. The night air was electric on my skin. I wanted to throw back my head and howl, strip naked and join that couple in the hot tub, push Jakob over the edge and see what he would do if he ever really let himself go. I had a feeling it would either lead to the best night of my life or scar me forever. Maybe both.

I felt the intensity of his gaze as I stared out into the revelry, and I slowly brought my eyes back to his. His pupils widened as he took in my face, like a predator sighting prey.

“Jakob,” I breathed.

---