Page 15 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

MELODY

I liked the laundry room on the days the hotel was filled with the Kings.

It was quiet when they could sometimes be quite loud.

When I was in the lobby or at the front desk, even along the hallways, I had to be polite and inviting. Not only with the bikers but the guests. People came here tired or some just entitled. Either way whatever mess was left behind, the expectation for me to be a soft landing to everyone existed.

In the laundry room no one asked for anything except another stack of clean towels or bedsheets.

The machines did the talking. Industrial washers with a steady churn, dryers that rumbled like distant thunder with a click and clatter of zippers as they hit the drum or the hiss of steam if I cracked a door mid-cycle.

Those were the noises that surround me and helped to drown out the chaos in my head.

The room was hot, the kind of heat that stuck to the back of my neck and made my shirt cling between my shoulder blades.

Detergent sweetness layered with bleach bite; clean, but sharp enough to taste on my tongue.

I sorted towels into rolling bins, white with white, beige with beige, and the special pile of pool towels that were this beautiful teal color that I always worried would fade, but never did.

Routine steadied me.

Fold. Flip. Stack. Band with a strip of laundry tape.

Build a neat white skyline on the metal cart.

I could lose my thoughts to the rhythm and not think about the clubhouse party last night, or the way a man with a chiseled but stubble covered jaw had looked at me like he could see straight through my dress, my spine, into the softer things I tried to bury.

The door from the back stairwell thumped open.

I knew instantly it wasn’t one of the housekeepers. Their footsteps were quick, light, always in a half-jog because rooms didn’t clean themselves. These steps were heavier. Intentional. The kind that made old concrete pay attention.

I kept folding another towel like I could ignore the shift in air pressure, that small change you felt when weather rolled in over the mountains. Fold. Flip. Stack.

“Tiny down here?”

I turned.

It was him.

He filled the doorway with shoulders and shadow, the leather cut sitting like it had been stitched onto him, patches I had learned enough to read without pretending I wanted to be part of any of it.

Thrasher.

I hadn’t asked anyone, but the name had found me anyway in the clubhouse noise that trickled it’s way to the hotel. Up close, in fluorescent light instead of neon, the pale scar through the stubble at his jaw looked new and old at the same time, like this was his every day appearance.

I don’t know if I said his name out loud or only thought it. My mouth felt dry either way.

“He’s not here,” I said, and I hated that it came out softer than I meant it to. “I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

The door eased shut behind him on the hydraulic arm, the latch clicking like a period at the end of a sentence. He took two steps in, slow enough to be polite, close enough to erase the space I’d declared my own.

“You work down here?” he asked.

Not a real question. His eyes had already mapped the room, memorized my little island: the two stacks of folded towels, the open jug of detergent, and the battered radio that didn’t work unless I twisted the dial just so.

“Laundry,” I said. My hands had curled into the towel I was folding, knuckles white under fluorescents. “Sometimes.”

He nodded once like that answer satisfied something I couldn’t see. He didn’t smile. He didn’t look away. He just… looked, and I felt my pulse jump against my wrist like it wanted a way out.

He crossed the last two steps between us. The dryers hummed at my back and blew warm air up my spine, and even in that heat, a shiver skittered over my skin.

“Tiny’s not here,” I repeated, because saying anything kept me from drowning in the quiet he brought with him. “You can try the office.”

He didn’t even glance toward the door. “I’ll find him when I’m done with you.”

He stopped so close I could see where the stubble didn’t quite catch the hollow under his cheek, where the curve of his mouth could tip mean or soft and he’d get away with both.

Something sparked in his eyes—recognition, I realized with a snap of embarrassment.

He knew me from last night. From the moment I’d bumped into him like an idiot and he’d growled at me just to hear my fear.

I should have bridged that with a joke, with something easy, but my mouth forgot every word except the ones that would betray me, so I said nothing. The silence wasn’t empty. It carried the thud of the washer, the scald of bleach in my throat, the steady knock of my heart against my ribs.

“Thought so,” he murmured, like he’d followed a thread from the party to this room and pulled it tight as if to reel me in like a fish on a line. The way he watched didn’t feel like he was checking a box. It felt like I was the only thing he’d come down here to see.

Then he kissed me.

No warning. No ask. His mouth found mine like he’d known exactly where to land.

Warm, sure, tasting faintly of smoke and wintergreen like a mouthwash from this morning.

The rough scrape of stubble shocked me enough to gasp, and he used it to angle deeper, to slide one palm up along my jaw and cup my cheek.

Everything in me went electric and liquid at the same time.

I didn’t think. My hands were already in his cut, fingers fisting leather like I had to hang on.

The towel slid off the table and fell to the floor in a soft collapse.

A dryer behind me thudded—zipper, belt buckle, or maybe it was my life roaring inside my head.

I pressed into him as if he were the only cool thing in the heat or the only heat in my cold.

I couldn’t tell which. The room narrowed.

It was hard to breathe. A subtle break in our kiss allowed the soft sound I hated hearing myself make when his thumb skimmed the hinge of my jaw escape.

He angled to deepen the kiss, careful in a way that didn’t match the size of him, the violence people attached to his name.

His other hand found the small of my back and anchored there, not pulling, just holding.

He had just enough pressure to let me know I wasn’t getting away until he decided to let me.

He was in control and somehow, that didn’t bother me a single bit.

My knees relaxed. I arched without meaning to, lost every rule I’d ever written about who I could be around men like him.

When he lifted his mouth just enough to speak, his breath stroked my lip. “New bunny, huh?”

He said it lazy and sure, like it was the shape I’d arrived in, the box I belonged to. The words snapped like a rubber band in my chest.

“I’m not—” The rest tripped over my tongue. Not a bunny. Not a anything. Not for him. I didn’t know how to finish the sentence without sounding like a girl who wore turtlenecks to biker parties and trembled in laundry rooms.

He didn’t wait for my explanation. His mouth found the hollow under my ear and pressed, open and slow.

I made another sound I didn’t recognize as mine.

The heat behind me turned molten; the heat in me burned hotter.

My hand slid up into his hair without permission from my brain, and my body leaned with a prayer, and as a problem.

I forgot to be careful. I forgot everything.

He moved with that same steady intention, not fumbling, not greedy, like he could take me apart in six motions if he wanted and he was choosing, for now, to map my body instead of dismantle.

The small of my back hummed where his hand held me.

My breath broke into pieces I couldn’t collect.

I pressed my thighs together and felt a jolt of shame and want that made me dizzy.

And then he stopped.

Not because I pushed him. Because he felt me go tense and he read it like a road sign. The hand at my back didn’t pull away, rather it eased. His mouth lifted from my skin. He looked down at me from that dangerous height, and for a half beat, the eye-contact felt like a kiss we couldn’t survive.

“You’re nervous.” He didn’t say it like a complaint. He said it like he’d dropped a pin on a map.

I swallowed and wished there was a sink nearby so I could pretend I needed water. Something to escape. My lips tingled. I could still taste him. A part of me begged for him to ignore me and another wanted to keep going.

“I—” I started.

“I know,” he said, softer than anything I’d heard out of him.

He stepped back a single step. I followed half a centimeter without meaning to, like a tide that hadn’t decided its direction.

He noticed. His mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile.

It was a man learning me. I didn’t like the scrutiny of his attention.

The dryers droned. A washer hit spin and rattled hard enough that the metal table shook against my hip. Somewhere above us on the second floor, a cart squeaked along tile. Life kept going like my heart hadn’t just re-written itself around a stranger.

“I don’t,” I tried again, then laughed once, breathless and humiliated. “I don’t know how to be like them.”

“Them?” His brow lifted, curiosity uncoiling without threat.

“The other women.” The words cost me something I couldn’t get back.

“The ones who know… where to put their hands and how to look at a man like they own the room already. The bunnies. I don’t,” I cut myself off before I admitted that sometimes I practiced in the mirror and still came out looking like a librarian who lost her keys.

I tightened my grip on the edge of the table and forced my lungs to keep working.

“I don’t know how to be that. And I’m not that.

” I paused and realized I might be offending one of my co-workers sort of friends.

“Not that there is anything wrong with what they do. It’s just not me. ” I rambled.

For a second his eyes went dark in a way that had nothing to do with lust. It was thought. He was thinking. We stood there, steam painting a thin sheen across my forearms, his heat pulsing through our small distance like the world’s meanest space heater, and he thought about me.

“Good,” he said finally, and the word was such a surprise I forgot to be embarrassed. “We got enough of that. And you simply taste too sweet. I might not want to pass you around for a while. This could be fun, baby.”

“I, I,” the stammering just happened. I didn’t know what to do with that. “That doesn’t make me less… lost.”

He eased his hand up, palm open, not quite touching me, a question I didn’t have to answer. I leaned the tiniest bit, enough for the back of his fingers to skim the outside of my arm. Goose bumps burst like a stupid confession.

“You’re not lost,” he whispered. “You’re just not translated yet.”

“Translated?”

“From whatever the world told you to be into whatever the hell you actually are.” He shrugged one shoulder like it wasn’t the smartest thing anyone had said to me in a year. “Takes a minute. Sometimes a man helps. Sometimes he ruins it. You look like no one has ever spoken your language before.”

I didn’t mean to smile. It happened anyway, angling my mouth in a way that made the tingling worse. “I don’t know if that’s a compliment.”

“It can be,” his voice dipped like he was saying it somewhere more private than a hotel laundry room owned by a motorcycle club.

He let his hand fall, and I missed it immediately in a way that annoyed me.

My breath steadied around the edges. My heart didn’t.

“You came down here for Tiny,” I said, because I suddenly needed to push this conversation back onto rails I understood.

“He’s been bouncing between the stock room and the office. He’s hard to miss.”

Thrasher huffed, and for a second the sound held the ghost of a laugh. “That he is. Now who is captain obvious?” he threw last night’s jab back at me.

He didn’t move for the door yet. He watched me like he was reading the manual before taking apart a machine he knew he could rebuild without it. My face felt hot. My hands wanted something to do. I lifted the fallen towel and smoothed it into a shaky rectangle.

“Last night,” I said, before I could help myself. “You were,” I winced. “Unkind. Why the change today?” What was I doing? Asking a tornado why it spun? This was truly playing with fire.

His eyes darkened. “I said shit like it is, baby. All of it meant to keep you out of trouble. Sometimes I do that sharp.” His mouth eased. “Sometimes I do it because I like to rile people, fuck with their heads. It’s who I am.”

“Who you are isn’t very nice to new people.” I retorted and instantly regretted it.

He laughed at me. “You’re in my world, darlin’. I do what the fuck I want. And I rattled you exactly as I wanted to.”

“It worked,” I told him, even though it hadn’t, not really.

It had scared me. It had also made me burn. Neither count as shaking me up, but rather he confused me and even more so since our kiss.

His eyes dropped to my mouth like the memory sat there. They came back up with something like apology smudged behind the danger. “You didn’t run. And you’re still here, in my world.”

“I work here,” I said, as if that explained anything, as if I hadn’t also walked into the clubhouse on my own two feet just to see if I could breathe under a different kind of sky. “And my cousin?—”

“Is Tiny’s problem,” he finished, without malice. “Which means she’s ours. Which means she’s fine. You don’t need to worry about her.”

He shifted back, finally, like the tide moving out. The heat didn’t leave the room. It just learned to live in my skin. He stepped back another pace, and I stayed rooted, a towel clenched wrong in my hands, the exact shape of my mouth burned into his.

He reached for the door and paused with his palm on the steel push plate. “I don’t know that I want you to be anything but who you are.” He glanced over his shoulder and caught me square with it. “Only I haven’t yet figured that out yet, have I?”

If he’d punched me I might have stood up straighter. Instead, I swayed, a small step without moving. There wasn’t space to answer. A thousand answers crashed into each other anyway.

I don’t know either.

I’m figuring out life outside of the shelter I came from.

I know who I don’t want to be more than who I want to be.

Don’t kiss me again unless you mean it.

No, kiss me right now.

All the thoughts ran rampant in my head. I was dizzy from the chaos in my mind.

He didn’t wait for a single word from me. The door swung, and he left, his steps a slow drum down the stairwell, each one falling through me after he was gone.

Without a care he left me spinning wildly in my mind. A new desire burned in my belly, one begging for another taste.

I was definitely in over my head.