Page 4 of Grim’s Angel

Then the growl of a bike rolls through the rain.

My body recognizes the sound before my mind places it.

In Black Pines, bikes used to empty sidewalks. Shopkeepers turned their signs to CLOSED, mothers pulled children indoors, and everyone found somewhere else to look when the Wolves rode past. The Damned Saints from Lovestone Ridge eventually drove them out, but fear has a longer memory than any town.

The bike sweeps into the lot and stops several yards behind the sedan, its engine growling through the rain.

The man astride it looks like every warning my mother ever gave me, which is rich considering she is sending me to marry a stranger.

Rain gleams across his black leather cut. DAMNED SINNERS curves above a hooded skull backed by crossed guns and framed by metallic wings. Dark denim stretches over powerful thighs, and his open cut reveals a charcoal shirt darkened across the shoulders by the rain. Black ink covers his forearms before vanishing beneath his sleeves.

He removes his helmet.

Dark hair brushes his collar. Rough stubble shadows a face made of hard, rugged angles, and a pale scar cuts through one eyebrow.

Then he looks at me.

His eyes are silver.

The color should make them cold, but the force of his attention sends heat through my stomach. My pulse kicks hard enough to qualify as a symptom.

My body has contributed nothing useful to this emergency, yet it chooses now to develop an attraction to the largest threat in the parking lot.

His gaze drops to the hand around my wrist.

Whatever warmth I imagined in those silver eyes disappears.

“Take your hand off her.”

His voice is deep and rough, the kind a woman feels against her skin long after the words end.

My common sense packs a bag and leaves.

The man holding me loosens his grip without releasing me. “This is private business.”

The biker swings one leg over the bike and rises.

He is taller than I expect, broad enough through the shoulders to make the men beside the sedan look smaller. The balanced way he plants his boots suggests training, although I cannot tell what kind. I only know he looks completely at ease with the possibility of violence.

He is the sort of bad decision a woman remembers more fondly than every good one.

“She’s telling you to let go,” he says. “That makes it my business.”

“We have authorization to transport her.”

His gaze finds mine again.

“You getting in that car?”

“No.”

The word tears out of me.

He looks at the fingers around my wrist. “It doesn’t seem like you have that authorization.”

The man releases me.

I stumble toward the station and cradle my aching wrist against my chest.