Page 7 of No Fear
Almost as if his thoughts had conjured the bastard, the speakers cracked and a familiar voice hushed the crowd. Everyone in the barn looked up in time to watch his cousin step out onto the ledge of the loft high above them. He might as well have been taking center stage.
Lincoln knew how to command a room. He’d give him that. These were Abel’s fights. It was Abel’s barn and Abel’s domain but Lincoln was their leader and he wore the mantle like a king. He grinned down at the now mostly silent and riveted crowd, a not so benevolent leader that would have them all beheaded if he saw fit.
“Friends, family, random fuckers…” Lincoln chuckled at his own joke, “So glad you could join us for tonight’s festivities.”
The crowd roared at the welcome. Most of the people cheered and clapped. Several whistled and stomped their feet. But even amid the dull roar a few boos of dissent could be heard.
He wondered if anyone else noticed the way Lincoln’s sharp eyes scanned the crowd, looking for the source of those boos. His smile didn’t falter. His charisma was still on full display. But the warmth was gone as he searched the crowd beneath him for the idiots dumb enough to publicly oppose him.
“You see who the fuck did that?”
Remy shook his head at Ford’s question, “No, I told you...”
“I know it’s fuckin’ crowded Remy. If you ain’t got nothin’ helpful to say, shut it. Some of us want to catch this asshole.”
He opened his mouth to tell Ford where he could stick his attitude but sighed and brushed it off instead. The guy was right. Complaining wasn’t helping and getting in an argument with Ford about it only distracted his cousin from doing what they’d all come here to do. Find the bastard responsible for hurting Colt, and the family, and make him pay.
Remy tried to help scan the crowd as Lincoln continued his opening remarks. Amid the dangerous looking men and the overly made up and under dressed women, were a few familiar faces. He easily spotted more family members doing the same all around the barn but since nobody was dragging anyone out by their collar he assumed they had no idea where the dissent had come from either.
He gazed around the room again, hating that they were outnumbered. There were so many Bomars, it was a rarity, but he felt it tonight. He knew the mindset that anyone that wasn’t one of them was against them was extreme but that was how it had always been. Even when he didn’t feel like one of them, he knew his last name meant he had people on his side.
It was more than some people had.
Outside of family, he recognized a couple of people from town. Guys he’d grown up with or met in the past few weeks. Guys that worked for Lincoln boosting cars or for Abel and his boys running God only knew what sort of illegal products through their small town.
There were also women, lots of women. Lincoln called them groupies and he wasn’t wrong. They hung around the Bomar boys like some women hung around rock stars and in a way, he supposed that’s what his cousins were to these people. Dangerously handsome fuckers that knew how to have a good time and didn’t promise a damn thing but exactly that. Remy had met his fair share of women willing to climb him like a tree simply because of his looks and last name since he returned home and he saw more than one of those women in the crowd now, eyeing him like he was a piece of meat on auction.
Lincoln had explained to him earlier that it was a general rule after a fight, the winner got his choice of the ladies for the night. These women came here knowing full well what they were signing up for and were more than happy to be used for a few wild hours just to say they’d been with a fighter or a Bomar or both. Remy had only rolled his eyes at the idea and told Lincoln to get the hell away from him.
He had zero plans to take a woman home with him tonight. There was only one woman that he wanted. Only one that he fantasized about stripping naked, about kissing and touching, about sinking inside of again and again until she screamed his name… and she wouldn’t be caught dead in a place like this.
That was why, the first time his gaze strayed over the familiar face in the crowd, he dismissed the resemblance as his mind playing tricks on him. He wanted to see her, so he did. That was all. Even still, he couldn’t stop himself from pausing and retracing back through the crowd. When he found the dark-haired girl with big, storm-cloud gray eyes looking back at him he stopped breathing.
No, his mind screamed with denial but his body knew it was her. It was already reacting. His heart had started to race, his pulse unsteady. His fists clenched with the need to reach out and grab her and he was hard instantly.
That only ever happened for one woman these days and all the logic and reasoning in the world seemed powerless to stop it. He’d tried. There was just something about her that turned him on and he couldn’t turn it off. He couldn’t ignore it and he didn’t want to ignore it. It was her, even if right now she didn’t exactly look like her. Maybe especially right now because she didn’t look like her.
Lord, he’d never seen her like this, so much of her on display. Usually she dressed more conservatively, almost as if she were hiding. Not tonight. Tonight she was showing off everything God gave her and the man upstairs had been generous.
She was built like a damn porn star.
His mind fractured with questions he’d never thought to ask himself. Was that why she dressed the way she did? To hide that body? Because it was bound to draw attention otherwise? Of course she did, he scowled at a man a few feet away that was openly eye-fucking her. If she was scared of men, and he knew her well enough to know that she was, the way every man here was ogling her must have scared the hell out of her.
He tried to tell himself that he wasn’t one of those men but he couldn’t seem to pull his eyes off her either. No, he wasn’t one of them. He was so much worse because he was supposed to be her friend but all he could think about was what it would feel like to get that soft, curvy body underneath him.
He’d had a pretty good idea she was curvy. She wasn’t some tiny little thing that he would’ve had to worry about breaking in half if he ever got his hands on her. He’d known there were curves hiding beneath her oversized clothes but he’d never quite imagined this.
She’d donned a pair of skimpy denim cut-offs that barely covered her ass. She had great legs. The perfect length to wrap around his waist. She wasn’t tall but she wasn’t short either. He figured most people would’ve called her average. Average height. Average weight. Average. But he never had and damn if he could think of her as anything buthiswhen his cock was hard and he was aching from just a glimpse of her.
The simple white tank top she was wearing with the open flannel shirt over it wasn’t risqué by any means. In fact, she was probably more covered than any other woman here. But this wasn’t just any woman, and what was under that shirt had his mouth watering and his blood boiling.
He’d never considered himself much of a boob man but she had just converted him. He suddenly had a whole slew of new fantasies about his shy, sweet princess. Like her in his lap, those lush breasts in his face as she rode him.
Fuck, he had to forcibly shake his head to clear those thoughts.
He dragged his eyes back to her face and he got lost in those big, beautiful eyes of hers. He knew from experience that up close they were actually blue but it was so light they looked gray at this distance, like storm clouds threatening heavy rain. He could drown in those eyes but it wasn’t just the color.
She looked at him like he was the goddamned hero of the story instead of a villain and it was addicting as hell.
