“That’s not what this is.” He shakes his head. “You don’t obey me. You don’t obey anybody, ever again. Live your life. I’ll step in if something gets in your way.”
Then he pushes off the bike and stands close, looking down at me.
“If the law ever puts you in a room and asks what you’ve heard, I want the truth out of your mouth to benothing. No lying. No choosing. Nothing to give.” His thumb skims my jaw. “Protecting you means protecting you from club business. All of it. That’s not a leash, Eden. It’s a firewall.”
The law. I turn that over. “That’s the reason you can’t go after them, isn’t it? Whatever it would take would bring the police down on the club.”
He doesn’t answer, and the not-answering is an answer.
“I don’t love it,” I say.
“Didn’t ask you to love it.”
“But club business can never affect my career, right? I’m not quitting school. Or my clinical hours. I didn’t trade my father’s rules for yours.”
“I would never ask that of you.” He pauses, and then he gives me the rest, plain. “Club business will never hold you back. You need to be protected, and I’ll be there. That’s all there is to it.”
I do love the sound of that.
“Okay,” I say.
He lifts the kit off the seat and stows it in the saddlebag, and when his hand comes out, there’s leather folded over it. Black. Small. He shakes it open and holds it up by the shoulders, and stitched white across the back, it says:PROPERTY OF VIPER
An Old Lady’s cut. Made for me. In this world, there’s no bigger promise a man can make.
“Turn around,” he says.
I turn. He settles it onto my shoulders, and I slip my arms through. It fits. Not close. Exact.
A whistle splits the yard. Joker, two fingers in his mouth, and then bottles are going up all over the lawn, and Crash ischeering with his bandaged hand, and Violet’s son is cheering, too, without any idea why.
“About time,” Saber calls out.
Viper turns me by the shoulders to face him.
“You don’t have to wear it every day,” he says, low, only for me. “But when you do, every man who matters in this state reads it the same. You’re mine, and you’re the club’s, and putting a hand on you is the last mistake a man gets to make.”
“And you?” I hook a finger in his cut, right over his heart. “Where’s the one that says ‘Property of Eden’?”
The corner of his mouth climbs. “Don’t need leather. Everybody already knows.”
I look down at myself. Twenty-two years of being told what to wear. Collar buttons and hemlines andmodest, modest, modest—and now this. Leather that marks me as a dangerous man’s woman.
“I’m keeping it on,” I say.
“Good,” he says.
CHAPTER 9
VIPER
Trapper’s bikesits nose-out by the south doors, parked in the same spot he now claims at the community college every Tuesday. I’m one row over on my bike with a water bottle going warm against my thigh and a clean line of sight on every exit Eden could walk through.
With the Crimson Warriors getting bolder, Saber put out an order: No Old Ladies or kids move through town alone.
Both Shelby and Eden have classes at the community college, so there are prospects and brothers here any time one of them is in attendance. But I don’t need Saber’s order to protect Eden. I’m with her every moment possible.
Trapper yells over to me. “You ever think about taking a class? You’re here enough. Could get a degree in sitting.”