Page 17 of Property of Thrasher (Kings of Anarchy MC: South Carolina #1)

I didn’t drive forward. I rocked, a slow persuasion, letting her body meet mine and step back from it and then find it again, each pass a fraction deeper than the last until what had been new felt a little more known.

She tensed once—small, instinctive—and I stilled, kissed the line that pulsed at her throat, waited her through it.

Her hands slid from my shoulders to the nape of my neck, fingers threading there, and her body eased under me.

“Good girl,” I murmured, not out of habit, but because the praise fit the moment and I felt her shiver with it. Not fear. Something else.

I set a rhythm as careful as I knew how, one that let her own pulse rise up to meet it.

The room shrank around us until all I could hear was the catch of her breath and the rough sound of mine.

The bed caught our weight and gave it back.

Her legs tightened at my hips. I felt pure want in the way she lifted to me.

“Thrasher,” she said, like it was a question and an answer at the same time.

“Right here,” I told her, and meant it in more ways than one.

I didn’t rush the climb. I drew it out; I let it live in my chest and belly and thigh until I could tell where she wanted more and where she wanted me to stay exactly as I was.

When I changed angle, it was an inch at a time, watching her face, finding the place that pulled a sound out of her that made me grit my teeth to keep from losing the pace I’d promised her.

She reached for me, then stopped, uncertain, and I guided her hand where I liked it, low at my side, the grip that steadied me.

“You’re doing fine,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t even being kind. She was new and she was good and she was mine in a way that I hadn’t ever felt before.

Her hair stuck to her temple. I smoothed it back, kissed the skin I uncovered. Her mouth opened for me like a secret. The next breath she took broke on a sound that let me know the pain had drifted into something warmer, something that lit behind her ribs and moved outward.

“Better?” I asked.

Her answer was the way she lifted her hips to meet me, the way her nails bit just enough into my back to write her name there.

I let myself give her a fraction more. Not speed, instead depth.

Not force, but complete certainty. The bed creaked a rhythm that became ours, a quiet drum under the blood in my ears.

I felt the change before she did, the way her body gathered itself, the way her breath forgot how to behave.

I didn’t push past her, didn’t run ahead.

I stayed with her, right there in the moment.

“Go,” I commanded, and the word lived at the back of her throat when she did.

It wasn’t loud. It was honest. It rolled through her in waves I rode out with my jaw clenched and my eyes on her, taking every frame into me like evidence.

When she came down from it, she pulled me in with her arms and I let the restraint I’d held onto go.

I buried a curse in her shoulder and followed her over the edge planting my seed deep inside her womb.

For a long string of breaths, we stayed exactly where we were, joined and breathing like the world had narrowed to oxygen and heat and the steadying weight of a hand sliding up a spine.

I eased out, slow and careful, and settled half on my side, half over her, not ready to surrender the contact. Her eyes were closed; her mouth was soft in a way I hadn’t earned before tonight. I watched the pulse at her throat notch down, felt mine climb down after.

I brushed my knuckles down her cheek. “You okay?”

Her eyes opened. There was shine there, not tears, something like peace. “Yeah,” she said. The word was small and complete. “I’m um… yeah.”

“Good.”

I didn’t dress the moment with pretty talk. I don’t have much of that. I didn’t hand out promises I wouldn’t keep. But if I’ve got a vow in me, I wouldn’t hide it, either.

I tilted her face up with two fingers under her chin. “No other man’s gonna taste what’s mine. You hear me? You’re in this until I say we’re done.”

The words weren’t gentle. They weren’t meant to be. I watched them hit. I watched the first flicker of that fire I’d seen at the party kick in her eyes—surprise, then the quick assessment—then a resolve that warmed my chest in a way I didn’t expect.

“Okay,” she whispered, “but, you should know, I don’t know your world. You don’t know mine. I’m not owned by you even if you gave me the best night of my life.”

I bit back the desire to laugh because she was serious. “I like your honesty. It’s refreshing, Melody.”

“You know my name?” she asked in surprise.

“Yeah, birthdate too.” I told her playfully.

She gasped into the air between us. “I’m no better than them. I’m one of them,” the words were barely a whisper.

“What is that?” I asked feeling the blood pulse quicker in my veins because I had a feeling and I didn’t like it.

“A bunny. I just had sex with you and I don’t know your actual name.”

I turn over and meet her eyes with mine.

“You are not a bunny. I don’t share, Melody.

I won’t share you or the gift you just gave me.

My name is Enzo, everyone calls me Thrasher but you call me whatever you want, baby.

I don’t know what we got or how long this will work.

What I do know is I’ll end any motherfucker that touches you.

Before you and I decide this doesn’t work anymore, no one handles what is mine. Do you get me?”

She studied me hard. “You don’t share. Well, Enzo,” my name on her lips had me getting hard again, but I tried to ignore it. “you need to know, I don’t either.”

“Baby, I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

Relief washed across her face. I rolled to my back, pulling her with me and arranging her to be half draped over my body.

We lay there a while, the air cooling around skin that hadn’t gotten the message yet.

I memorized the weight of her head on my shoulder, the way her palm rested over my heart like it had found a place it recognized.

Every now and then her thumb moved, absent, like she was counting beats.

I let her, even as the old part of me, the part that looks for exits told me I was doing the stupid thing.

Eventually we made our way up out of the bed, the slow, clumsy shyness of two people who’d just crossed a line.

She padded to the bathroom and I heard water run, the soft rustle of towels.

I sat on the edge of the mattress and pulled my jeans on, leaving the zipper open, not in a hurry to be anything other than here.

When she came back out, she’d dragged my T-shirt on instead of her own, and the sight of her in it did violence to my self-control I was barely done rebuilding. It hung off one shoulder. It put something possessive and quiet in my throat that I didn’t voice because the room already knew it.

Moving around the space, I watched her from my perch on the bed. I fought the urge to yank her to me and take her once again. She was probably sore. She found her clothing piece by piece and put it on, finally tossing my shirt back to me.

The room smelled of sex and with every passing second I was wanting her more.

“Tired?” I asked as she yawned.

She nodded with a soft smile. “Yeah, I have to work in a few hours too.”

“I’ll walk you to your room.”

“It’s the same building,” she explained, faintly amused. “I’m pretty sure I can make it safely.”

“Not the point,” I replied and she understood.

It had been a long time since I found a woman who wasn’t trying to have a push and pull of a power play or one that wanted to be treated like some princess.

She had a spark to be on her own and yet this trust in me to submit.

It was what every man in my world craved.

We didn’t talk in the hall. We didn’t have to. She turned her face up once toward the fluorescent lights like she was steadying herself; I slid my hand to the small of her back and her breath evened out the rest of the way.

At the her room door, she looked up at me with that open-water gaze.

There was a small bruise blooming where my mouth had been at her throat.

I wanted it darker. I wanted the memories etched in her body, the kind that hides under fabric and aches when she reaches for a shelf and makes her think of me all day.

“You’ll ride with me again,” I told her. Not a question. “Tomorrow after work.”

“Yes,” she said, as simple as an agreement can be.

“And you’ll tell me if something in this place tries to bite,” I added reminding her of our first encounter.

A corner of her mouth lifted. “Which part of ‘no other man’ do you think I didn’t hear?” Then she winked at me as if she didn’t just lose her virginity. “Plus, I think I like the way you bite enough to let you have another taste.”

Oh this woman was a temptation like no other.

I let out the kind of low sound that’s as close as I come to a laugh when the world’s looking. “All right, Melody,” I said, letting her name live where I wanted it, on my tongue, in the room, in the air she was about to take in. “Go sleep, baby.”

She rose on her toes and kissed me once—quick, decisive—then slipped inside, swallowed by the door closing between us. I stood there one heartbeat longer than necessary after the lock engaged.

Outside, the sky had settled into that late light that makes anything look like the truth. I lit a cigarette, smoking it, and letting it burn down nearly to the filter while my head replayed the way she felt under me.

My phone buzzed once as business came clawing back into my reality.

I answered it, made the decisions that needed making, moved the pieces on the board the way I always do.

The whole time, there was a second rhythm under my words: the weight of a woman who challenged me and the feel of owning her first time.