Devil's Own Read online

  Devil’s Own is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Loveswept Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Megan Crane

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN 9781101968208

  Cover design: Derek Walls

  Cover photograph: © Mr. Big-Photography/Getty Images

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  By Megan Crane

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The last time Ryan “Chaser” Frey had been inside a high school was way back in the hectic blur of his mostly drunken senior year in Georgia, sometime before his last and final suspension, which his aggrieved principal had agreed to call an early graduation as long as he never, ever came back.

  He’d been a little rambunctious back in the day. Back before the Marines kicked his ass and the desert nearly killed him. Twice. Back when he was young and foolish and hadn’t yet figured out that quiet, deadly competence was far more intimidating than a whole lot of noise and bullshit.

  Chaser was a lot scarier these days, something he prided himself on and utilized daily in his role as an enforcer for his beloved Devil’s Keepers Motorcycle Club, and yet here he was anyway. Prowling through the overly shiny corridors of a sad, stuffy high school in Lagrange, Louisiana, on a blisteringly hot fall evening when he’d much rather be halfway into a bottle of whiskey with a stripper on his dick.

  But his kid’s fucking teacher would not stop calling him.

  And Chaser was nothing if not a dedicated and dutiful parent to his surly sixteen-year-old daughter, the lovely pain in the ass Kaylee, who had clearly inherited the Frey family’s genetic disposition toward fucking up her own life as much as possible, whenever possible. If what the obnoxiously chipper and relentless woman had said in all seven of the messages she’d left him over the past twenty-four hours was true and Kaylee was following in her old man’s footsteps—showing up at school wasted and belligerent—Chaser would deal with it.

  Just as soon as he dealt with the do-gooder teacher who was up on his jock like a low-rent stripper looking for a big ass tip.

  Chaser didn’t like being told what to do, in general, unless he respected the person giving the orders. He didn’t much like asshole teachers, and he liked even less being called into a parent-teacher meeting like he was a member of the PTA instead of the PTA’s worst nightmare. More than that, Chaser was tired. It had been a long, hot summer full of the club’s usual business and some serious extra bullshit besides, and he’d capped it off by spending the last two weeks up in the club’s North Dakota mother charter. And Chaser certainly felt more than a little reverence for the birthplace of his club, which was also the first place he’d lived as a full patch brother after prospecting there for a year. But the truth was that the original Devil’s Keepers clubhouse was way the fuck out in the middle of nowhere, twenty miles south of anything resembling a town and a good two hours north of the biker mecca of Sturgis in South Dakota. Way out in ranch country, in other words, where there was nothing to do but choke on club politics and wait for winter to come kick your ass when summer was done punching you in the balls.

  Chaser had bounced around a few other club charters as the traveling eyes and ears of North Dakota’s president for a time before he’d settled in Lagrange, where the serious DKMC business went down, thanks to the town’s prime location in the middle of a cartel corridor from the south straight on through to points north. But he was always called back up there every summer to reacquaint himself. And choke a little while he was at it.

  Chaser didn’t particularly like choking on anything, whether it was memories or club drama, something he’d had ample time to chew over on his long-ass ride home. He’d rolled into Lagrange all of twenty minutes ago, after the solid twenty-four-hour ride down into southern Louisiana from North Dakota, which he’d done with only a few extra hours for sleep here and there. He was cranky, to put it mildly.

  Luther, president of the mother charter and therefore the national president of the DKMC, and everyone else in North Dakota had wanted him to explain how the Lagrange president’s son, the much disliked but still fully patched-in brother Whale, had disappeared without a trace. He’d last been seen heading out of the clubhouse on one of his increasingly frequent and questionable secretive missions, but he’d never returned. The general assumption was that he’d finally proved himself to be the punk bitch the whole club had known he was from the start. Because only a punk bitch would run away from the DKMC, and Whale had shown signs of heading in that direction ever since he got a pity vote into the club on account of his father. His disappearance just proved it, the brothers muttered to each other.

  But Chaser knew the truth. He’d watched his brother Uptown take Whale out when Whale was about to hurt Uptown’s woman, and Chaser was prepared to defend it as a righteous, necessary shoot. But he didn’t like it. Brothers killing brothers meant war. There was no way around that. Which was why he and the other brothers who had been there that night were doing the right thing in keeping the particulars to themselves. But Chaser hated it.

  Digger, the president of the Lagrange charter, might suspect that his own son wouldn’t simply up and disappear in the middle of whatever shady shit the two of them had been busy cooking, but he couldn’t prove it. Instead, he’d disappeared himself. Three months so far without a word. And there was already suspicion throughout the Lagrange charter that Digger was betraying them to their many enemies. Whale had shot his mouth off too many times for it not to register that some shit was going down—the only questions were: how much shit? And with who? The Black Dogs were a rival club up in Little Rock who’d been trying to muscle in on DKMC territory—and their cartel business—for years, and it turned out that Digger and the Black Dogs’ asshole president, Fat Irish, were friendly.

  But Digger wasn’t around to explain himself. He wasn’t answering any questions, or texts, or phone calls.

  Most brothers in the Lagrange charter didn’t really know that Digger had gone AWOL because they assumed he was in contact with the other club officers—who were letting them think that. Luther probably wondered why he hadn’t heard from Dig in a while, but asking Chaser about it risked making him look weak and out of touch. The same way Chaser mentioning that their president had been radio silent for so long would make the whole Lagrange charter look weak. And weak shit invited an aggressive response, so no one was likely to announce it if they didn’t have to. Still, Luther was pretty damn clear that he did not want any dark, unpleasant grumbling in any of the DKMC charters. Especially not in Lagrange, where internal club problems could too easily bleed out into club-wide losses.

  And there’d been nothing but grumbling out of Louisiana for a while now.

  Now this load of bullshit was Chaser’s problem, which did not make him happy. He was about solutions, not speculation, and it pissed him off that he didn’t have one for th
e Whale and Digger issues. He needed a shower, some pussy, and whole lot of whiskey to make a dent in his bad mood.

  What he did not need was the interference of one of Lagrange’s few concerned citizens in his life, especially not a teacher with a bug up her ass who’d sounded a little too much like some kind of crusader in her endless fucking voicemail messages. Chaser’s experience with crusaders was that they spent a lot of time messing with shit they didn’t understand and ignoring the parts that didn’t suit their narrow versions of things. Take his old man, who’d regularly beat the living crap out of anyone unlucky enough to live under his roof but had been full of friendly, smiling concern every day in the pharmacy. No one had locked Harry Frey up. They’d never even given him a stiff talking-to, no matter how many bruises and black eyes his nearest and dearest had sported over the years.

  As far as Chaser knew, he was the only one who’d ever suggested to his dear old dad that the man rethink his hostility—a conversation that had gotten his ass on the regular, right up until Chaser finally got bigger than the old man and, one fine evening that he held forever in his heart, returned the favor. No one in the little Georgia town where he’d grown up—population: nine thousand hypocrites and a whole lot of not-so-closeted drunks—had ever taken Chaser’s back or given him a helping hand while Harry kept him, his mother, and his two sisters cowed and bloody. But they’d all sure been awfully worried about Chaser’s teenage indiscretions and all up in the potential ramifications for his eternal soul. Assholes.

  He was working himself up into a black-ass mood—not really much of a stretch for him, if he was honest—by the time he made it to the right classroom. He stopped in the doorway, scowling at the bleak sea of puny little desks connected to their chairs, which he remembered as instruments of pure torture. He was a big guy. He’d shot up to six feet three inches when he was fourteen. He’d started filling in the following year and finally knocked down his asshole father a few months before his seventeenth birthday. By the time he was eighteen, cramming himself into one of those seats had been a joke.

  Not a joke he’d thought was all that funny, so he’d found alternate ways to amuse himself in high school, to the chagrin of the authority figures tasked with keeping him on the straight and narrow.

  At the far end of the stuffy classroom, which the windows left open to the September evening did nothing to cool, sat a more reasonably sized teacher’s desk. It was placed directly in front of a chalkboard filled with the kind of overly neat, precise, and cramped writing that made Chaser’s teeth clench. It reminded him of all the ball-busting teachers he’d had back in the day, some of them more vicious than the Marine Corps drill sergeants who had whipped his punk ass into shape.

  But the woman sitting at that desk, between stacks of books as she frowned down at a pile of papers, did not look like steely, grandmotherly Mrs. Patterson, who’d had the unenviable task of drilling American history into Chaser’s hard head. This woman was much younger, first of all. Much, much younger. Not yet thirty, if he had to guess. She had a slight, slender build that would look good on a man’s bike, wrapped tight around his back. Her hair was a dark color that glinted red in the overhead lights, and there was something about the intensity of her focus on her work that made Chaser want to see what it would be like to have her pay that kind of attention to him. Or, more accurately, to his cock.

  Predictably, that greedy little bastard perked right up at the thought. Chaser leaned against the doorframe, crossed his arms, and waited.

  She had earphones in, whatever she was listening to loud enough that he could hear a tinny suggestion of a guitar lick. The music explained why she hadn’t heard him coming down the hall, his boots loud as fuck against all that industrial flooring.

  It took a minute. Maybe a couple. But then she glanced up.

  And freaked.

  She threw herself back in her chair, so hard it skidded across the floor with a loud screech. She made a gasping sound, one hand slapping into her own chest as she scrambled to her feet and all but flattened herself against the chalkboard behind her. She yanked her earphones out in the next second, her gaze clapped to his down the length of the room.

  Not an unheard-of reaction to laying eyes on him, Chaser could admit, though a little surprising from a teacher who’d summoned him here. But then, he was a scary dude, by trade and inclination. This was part of the deal and he certainly couldn’t claim he hated it.

  “The next time you call a man seven times in twenty-four hours, maybe rustle up a better welcome when he shows up,” he drawled without moving from the doorway. He tried to remember the name she’d left. Something girlie and prissy at once. It clicked then. Ms. Lara Ashburn, she’d said, then repeated, like he might have screeched his bike to a halt by the side of I-49 and whipped out a fucking pencil to write it down. “As ordered.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Her voice was still thin with what sounded like genuine panic. And he should feel bad about that. He really should.

  He didn’t.

  The women Chaser spent time with tended to veer more toward the biker chick side of things, and were usually merrily, noticeably slutty to boot, which saved a lot of time. Tiny tank tops to show off big tits—real or augmented, he liked them both ways. Skintight jeans, a lot of studded leather, and big hair as a recognizable invitation. Ms. Lara Ashburn, on the other hand, was a tiny little thing. All fine bones and slender limbs, she looked like she might break in two with the kind of rough handling Chaser preferred to share with the women who routinely begged for his attention. But she was dressed in one of those skirts that made her look like an hourglass and some frilly, girlie blouse thing up top, and the delicate sleekness of the whole package—astonishing, really, in a biker town like Lagrange, Louisiana, that catered entirely to the club and its horny members—made him want to test that theory.

  “You called me about my kid,” he told her, maybe a little more ferociously than necessary, to see if it got to her. It did. He saw a tiny tremor work over her whole tight little body. “Seven times.”

  Then he watched, fascinated, as this little-bitty thing pushed away from the chalkboard and stood up tall. Not that “tall” for her translated into any inches. He figured she’d come up to the middle of his chest. Which meant that if he picked her up he could fuck her standing like she weighed no more than a football.

  He might have smirked a little at that. The fiercely strict Mrs. Patterson had certainly never inspired any fantasies. Unlike this new generation version of a history teacher. He wanted to taste Ms. Lara Ashburn everywhere. Get his hands beneath that absurdly feminine skirt and see how wet she was. Get his hands in her hair to see if it was as silky as it looked. And he definitely wanted to make her come. Preferably all over him. Face, hands, cock—Chaser wasn’t too picky.

  It helped that in addition to being so little, she was pretty. A perfect little nose in an oval of a face and sweet blue eyes that looked way too classy for a man like him. His favorite kind of dessert, in other words.

  And now she was sizing him up in a cool way that made him wonder what had startled her in the first place. Because most people got more intimidated the longer they stared at a man rocking a DKMC cut, to say nothing of all his tattoos or his big, powerful frame. He wasn’t the kind of guy who wore off. But she looked like she thought she was tough, standing there in those prissy clothes of hers that should have been melting off her in the Louisiana late summer heat. Holding his gaze like she thought she could hold her own.

  Obviously, that made him hard as hell. He was a simple man, really. Fuck it or fight it. That creed had pretty much guided him every step of the way so far.

  “You’re Mr. Frey.” Her voice was cool and matter-of-fact and should really not have made his cock even harder. “Kaylee’s father.”

  “Call me Chaser,” he corrected her.

  Her brows rose and her dainty mouth firmed as if his name offended her, which did nothing but intrigue him. Most folks were a little more careful aroun
d a man of his size. Particularly a man wearing a biker cut. Why wasn’t she?

  “Please come in,” she said in that fucking classic teacher voice, filled with quiet impatience and that obnoxious certainty that her time was what was important here—as if he’d been playing grab ass out in the hall and she’d had to wait for him instead of the other way around. “Are we expecting Mrs. Frey?”

  Chaser noticed she didn’t call him by his name.

  He ambled into the classroom, aware that an amble on him looked more than a little threatening to the casual observer. Chaser looked like what he was and he knew it. A biker to his core and in his heart besides, loyal to his club and everything that entailed, even in troubled times like now, with a past crammed full of the U.S. Marine Corps and an asshole of a father who’d taught him how to fight dirty when he was still in preschool. He was exactly who he was and he’d never wanted to be anything different. Sometimes he reined all his darkness in a little. He wasn’t like some of his brothers, all shit-eating grins and convenient charm like VP Roscoe or pretty boy Uptown, carefully calculated to disarm. But he could ball up and look a little less grim when he felt like it.

  Today he didn’t bother.

  “If you mean the junkie whore who gave birth to my daughter, kidnapped her, and then abandoned her in a fucking flophouse in Kansas,” he said conversationally as he moved through the classroom, “then no, she’s not coming, because she knows better than to let me see her face again. And she wasn’t Mrs. Frey, either. My dick might be dumb, but I’m not that stupid.”

  He expected uptight Ms. Lara Ashburn to get flustered. To flush with outrage or insult at his crude language or whatever the fuck got up the asses of women like this and made them scowl at him like his very existence appalled them. He saw them clustered outside of church, grabbing their daughters close when he rode by, like he was Satan on a Harley and might scoop up their little angels as he passed. They were totally blind to the reality that it was their own sweet little girls who snuck out of the house and made a beeline for the Devil’s Keepers clubhouse and all the rough and dirty biker cock they could handle. Regularly.