Unholy Trinity (Rebel Kings MC #6)

by Garrett Leigh

Locke cocked a brow. “Making friends again?” “Don’t I always?” Locke chuckled and opened my car door. “Not really, queenie.” I dropped the hammock on my seat and faced him. “I’m your friend, aren’t I?” Locke kept his eyes on my face, pupils expanding as he gazed down at me. “If that’s what you want.” What I wanted had never been that important. I’d waited years for Nash, and in so many ways I was still waiting. For him to come home at night. Or to put himself first. For him to be himself, and for reasons I’d never understood, Locke felt like the pot of gold at the end of a Nash-shaped rainbow.

I scratched my fingers through the light beard on his face. He didn’t stop me. Didn’t react, save a flicker in his green eyes. Sighing, I let my hand drop. “Whatever happens, sweetheart, we’ll always be friends.”

Flapping the sheets dislodged one of his photos. I rescued it from the floor and put it back on the mirror, pausing a moment to study the face that was so almost his. Logan Halliwell. He had darker hair than Locke and a jaw that seemed narrower without so much scruff, but his face was identical in every other way. Except, it wasn’t. Logan’s eyes were the same sea-green orbs that crinkled at the sides with his crooked grin, but he wasn’t Locke. No one was.

I wasn’t taking life advice from River. We left him to play the biker version of Mrs Doubtfire and entered the chapel without knocking. Locke’s chest greeted me. When he saw it was us, he backed up, but not before I got an eyeful of hard muscle and man. Unprepared, it threw me, then I set eyes on the men at the table and the heat in my belly switched back to plain irritation.

Beside me, Decoy rose and gave his chair to Juana, joining Locke by the door. She took it, shooting me a wry look, still not over her unrequited crush on our oblivious club secretary. Her secret crush. It was a damn shame that Folk was absolutely perfect for our shy soldier. Though I couldn’t lie; Juana would’ve eaten him alive.

Folk shot me an apologetic look. I shrugged it off. “It’s okay, babe. I’ve always been a target.” Behind me, I heard the click of a lighter, the scent of a smouldering burning cigarette reaching me a second later. Locke. He was a stress smoker, and there was never any shortage of that around here.

“You are quiet, Mishka.” The man in question fired his sharp stare over my shoulder. “What are your thoughts?” Another pause stretched out, and I didn’t have to look to know Locke was taking a second to decide if the person asking his opinion was serious about hearing it. Decoy used to do it too, because his ex had bullied and abused his self-esteem into the fucking floor. Locke was a different man, but it burned me up to know his awkward reticence likely came from a place just as horrific.

Six-foot-five company, with blond hair and sea-green eyes that held too many emotions for me to pin down. Locke spread his hands. “I come in peace.” I didn’t want him to come in peace. I wanted him to come inside— Wow. Okay. Talk about a mood shift. I kept my gaze ferocious to disguise the fact that the end of that thought was ambiguous. Nash and me . . . we’d spent way too many nights rolling around my bed, drinking rum, and whispering dirty fantasies in each other’s ears, all of them hot as hell. Every single one of them about Locke. Nash had a thing for watching Locke fuck me. For fucking me while Locke fucked him. I had a thing for all of it. Whatever made them happy. But what did make Locke Halliwell happy?

“I’m pretty sure I know how you feel about this, but I kinda need to tell you that I kissed your man this morning.” “Kissed him?” “Yeah, I mean, it was just a peck to calm him the fuck down, but it wasn’t platonic, not for me, so I wanted you to know.” “It wasn’t platonic, not for me . . .” Some girls might’ve lost their shit over those six little words, but not me. The only thing that bothered me about them was the uncertainty in Locke’s gaze.

“How did you kiss him?” “Hmm?” “Show me.” I was joking. Kind of. But the second the words were out of my mouth, something changed. Locke gazed down at me, his hands frozen on my hips, his eyes alive with an energy that made my stomach warm and my breasts feel heavy and achy. “It was nothing.” “Then why tell me?” “I wanted you to know.” “Why?” Locke hesitated, all the while somehow leaning further in. “Because he’s yours.”

He dipped his head and brushed his lips to mine in the slowest, softest, shortest kiss. “I figured you’d like it.” “I do like it.” “Yeah?” “Yes.” I had one foot off the floor. How? When? No clue, but my leg was half wrapped around the muscular tree trunks that belonged to Locke, and I couldn’t find the will to take it back as I wondered if I should tell him that when the time came for Nash to kiss him back, he’d become a paid member of a club that contained only me.

“You two drive me fuckin’ crazy.” “Not on purpose.” “I know.” Locke tucked my hair behind my ears. “That’s why I let it happen.” Let it. As if he had any more control over this beautiful chaos than I did. But whatever. If he believed that, I wasn’t going to use my words to dissuade him. I kissed him again. Once. On his scarred lip. Then I ducked under his big arms and pointed at the clubhouse. “I need a drink. Next time you kiss Nash, do it like that.”

Locke had finished eating and stolen a moment with his tiny BFF, and man alive, if watching him handle that kid with his big deft hands didn’t do something to me. Couldn’t say what because, despite Rubi’s daddy-kink jokes, it wasn’t sexual. But it hit a raw part of me, a sweetly painful nerve, and whenever I saw him with Hope, I couldn’t look away.

Saint slipped out of the chapel, weaving between us with a stare that made me feel like we’d been caught naked. And then I pictured Locke naked, his brawny tattooed limbs tangled with Orla’s pale Irish skin. His big hands on her body, and on mine. I had this fantasy about watching them together, but more and more, I’d begun to wonder how it would feel to be caught between them. Images bombarded my brain. I tried to take them all in, but I was too tired to keep up with my wild imagination.

Locke chuckled, his mouth somewhere near my ear, the vibrations humming through his bones and into mine. “I want you to go to bed.” Come to bed would’ve sounded better, but as he rubbed his scruffy cheek against my temple, the quip was swallowed up by a rush of sensation I’d never felt when Rubi touched me, not even when he’d fucked me all those years ago.

He made a sound of discontent, but it was distant enough to my hazy mind that I ignored it and focused on dragging myself from his embrace, one atom at a time. And even then, it still happened too fast. Locke let me go. In my head, I turned to face him and said some words that made sense. In reality, I walked away before I did something that had Rubi banging on the windows and hiding jumbo rubbers under my pillow again.

Nash covered his face with one hand and reached for Orla with the other, finding a home in her dark waves. “She didn’t wake up?” “Nope. Just Rubi, but he didn’t see you.” “Fuck.” Nash’s jaw clenched. “Fuck.” I rubbed his chest, trying to soothe his racing pulse. “Breathe slower.” It came out like an order, one that Nash obeyed. He let his hand fall from his face and closed his eyes. I stayed where I was until I was sure he’d passed out, but as I rose, his calloused hand found mine in the dark. “Stay. Please?”

I stayed. Of course I fuckin’ did. Nash was rattled. Upset. And it was so unlike him that I’d have slept with any brother under those terms. Folk. Ranger. Hell, even Cam. At least, that was the reasoning I treated myself when I woke up the next morning pressed up against him, my hand splayed on top of his head, ignoring the multiple flaws in my thinking, including but not limited to this: would I have spooned Cam like a motherfucker and woken up carving a dick-shaped hole in his spine? That was a solid no. Fuckin’ hell.

As she said the words, Nash shifted closer, pressing his face against my thigh. It was kind of cute, but it wrenched home what had brought me here in the first place. How he’d needed me to calm him the fuck down when Orla had been right fuckin’ there. I need them both. I’d lost count of the times he’d said that in his tortured sleep. Could only deal with it because he didn’t seem tortured now.

Orla slipped under my arm like this was fuckin’ normal. I buried my face in her hair like I did in my dreams. The ones where Nash was right here with us. Fuck. Was I even awake right now? Add in the fact that the last time I’d seen Orla I’d had my tongue in her mouth and my hands roaming her curves, and I was going with another no.

My phone rang, buzzing up a storm, Willow’s face flashing up on the screen. Nash flinched, rolling over with a groan. I swung a leg out of his bed, but he caught me before I got too far, clamping an inked hand on my hip, pushing me back down. Stay. He tugged a pillow over his head, shutting me out, or giving me some semblance of privacy, maybe. Either way, it was hard to tell if he was really awake. Either way, I rubbed his back, the nape of his neck, sliding my fingers into those hidden golden curls as I answered the call from my kid.

Was he awake? Couldn’t be sure. Then I rubbed the base of his skull again and a low moan filtered out from beneath the pillow. A moan that made me want to slide down the bed and funnel his dick down my throat. “You can come out now, bro.” Slowly, Nash pushed the pillow away and treated me to my first proper glimpse of his face. Of his heavy half-lidded baby-blue eyes, and the sheet lines indented in his rugged cheek.

I spoke without thinking. “You wake up as pretty as your woman.” Nash slow-blinked, rolling his shoulders, wincing. “That ain’t true.” He was wrong, but the words kinda washed over me as his voice reeled me in. Whatever Nash was saying, I could listen to him talk all day. Mellow, deep, masculine, everything about him was a tranquilliser to my fucked-up soul. Except the wanting to bang him part.

“She loves you.” “I love her too.” Nash raised his head. “What do you need to tell me?” “The same thing I had to tell Orla last night.” Nash frowned, cogs turning, but he was still knackered and came up blank. “Can you just say it? My brain fucking hurts.” I massaged his corded bicep. “You hurt anywhere else?” “Why are you asking me that?” “Why aren’t you asking what the fuck I’m doing in your bed?” Nash finally seemed to realise he was poking me in the stomach with his morning wood.

“You wanna be in here, Locke? If you don’t, there’s no hard feelings if you leave. If you wanted to kiss her and not me. If you wanted fucking none of it, it’s all cool.” He was living on another planet if he believed we could crack the top of this can of worms with any real intent and nothing would change. But it wasn’t those words that stood out. “In what fuckin’ universe do you believe you’re not part of the equation?”

I reached for him instead, pulling him over me, his bare legs straddling my hips. His bare everything all I could see. Naked, remember? As if I could forget. Rippling abs, marked by ink, and the thin white line of an appendectomy scar. Hot skin. Thighs that squeezed the life out of me, and yet somehow I was still fuckin’ breathing.

I jacked him slowly, as though his phone wasn’t blowing up on the bedside table and we had all the time in the world. As if I’d kissed him properly instead of dying inside cos I hadn’t. You kissed Orla instead. No. That wasn’t it. Wanting them both was churning me up inside, but not because there were two of them. My blood rushed south for Nash, in this moment and every one I’d lived through since I’d set eyes on him all those years ago, but the inferno I carried for his beautiful girl burned as bright. As hot. I thought of her as Nash’s cock filled my hand and his strong legs trembled. Of them. Of us.

“Jesus—fuck.” Nash began to fuck my grip, hinging forward, dropping his clenched fists on either side of my head. I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck, holding his face inches from mine, knowing this was it. That more than having him naked on top of me and his dick in my hand, if my lips touched his, that lid my wise and wonderful twin had been banging on about would fly off into the stratosphere and never come down. That if I kissed him, I’d never fuckin’ stop.

I tossed him the cigarettes. “Lighter’s in the box.” Startled, Nash missed my throw and the smokes hit the deck. He crouched to retrieve them, shoulders knotted with tension that hadn’t been there before, brow furrowed so hard he looked like he was having a fuckin’ stroke. “Hey.” I reached him as he came upright. “What’s wrong?” Nash gripped my arms, anguish twisting his pretty face, those sweet baby blues a mess of grief and pain. “Brother, what the fuck happened to your back?”

He emerged in the yard with his torso covered and disappeared into the bunkhouse, a sight that wasn’t unusual as he didn’t use the bathroom in this building that often. I guess now I knew why, but there was no comfort in the knowledge that he’d been hiding something as terrible as the mess of scars painting his skin. Deep scars, roped and thick. Some old. Some new. All this time I’d spent believing whatever Frank Crow and his band of cunts had done to him was ancient history, but some of those marks on his back were barely fucking healed. Rocco lied.

Before this morning, I’d never seen him shirtless . . . Had I? No. Course I hadn’t. Even without the scars on his back, I’d have remembered the hard planes of his chest. The body hair. The ink. The abs that were apparently an adventure playground for my dick.

The girl wide-eyed the mess I’d left behind me. “Who are you?” “Nash. Who are you?” “Did you punch that dude?” “Only a little bit. Answer the question or I can get my missus and you can talk to her.” The girl tore her gaze from Bear and fixed me with a stare that was amused and nervous all rolled into one. A familiar sea-green stare as the girl held out her slender hand. “It’s okay. I’m not scared of you, Nash. My dad told me all about you.”

Willow grinned. “See? It’ll be fine.” “Folk isn’t a fuckin’ magician.” Locke gripped her slim shoulders and spun her around. “Okay, so you’ve already ruined Nash’s day, and you’ve seen Decoy before. This is everyone else. Say hello.” Willow waved at the room. “Hello!” “Now say goodbye. You’re going back to college.” “Dad!” “Willow.” Locke towed her to the door. “Let’s go.”

Locke chose that moment to check back into the conversation. He folded his tall frame behind the wheel, reclaimed his phone, and stern-faced Willow. “It’s not okay to blow off college. You want to end up like me?” “I like you,” Willow retorted. “You’re the only one who doesn’t.” Burn.

We prepared to move out, but another bike rumbled across the yard to join us, and my heart skipped the same beat it had been skipping since I was thirteen years old and that mop of golden curls first turned my head. My ride or die. My best friend. Nash rolled to a stop at Locke’s window. Despite the simmering heat between them, their relationship had always been easy—banter, bro hugs, and an unquestionable loyalty that seemed older than the short years they’d been friends. I wasn’t used to tension flooding the air as they stared each other down. Or the flatness in Locke’s voice.

Nash knocked on the roof. “We all like fun, brother. It makes the bad stuff hurt less.” He rumbled away before Locke could answer, and the sense that I really was missing something returned full force. I knew Locke as well as he allowed me to, but Nash’s soul was as familiar to me as my own, and he got this look about him when he thought he’d upset someone. This earnest guilt that weighed him down until he’d made it right. Like all the men in my life, Nash was emotional. He was also a leader. His hog took point while Embry guarded the rear, and our convoy left the compound.

Locke opened Willow’s door. She slid out at the same moment Nash appeared at mine. I unfolded myself from the car and licked his cheek. “Hey, lover.” Nash snorted. “Is licking lovers an O’Brian thing? I saw River do it to Rubes the other day.” “You ever see Cam lick Alexei?” “That’s the weirdest sentence you’ve ever said.” “Valid, though. For your O’Brian theory.”

“If it’s about snogging Locke, I already know. He told me this morning.” I started to smile, a dirty chuckle building in my throat. Then I remembered the tension between Nash and Locke back at the compound and my humour stalled. “How did you react?” “Me?” Nash steered me around a group of men clustered by a breakfast wagon. “It’s my ultimate fantasy. One of them, anyway. How do you think I reacted?” If I knew Nash, and I did, his standard clap-back to any suggestion of me and Locke was an eight-inch boner that wouldn’t quit. But I’d learned a lot watching Cam navigate his complex love life, and this . . . thing between the three of us, it was delicate, and most of it had nothing to do with sex.

“Did you talk about it?” “A little.” “And?” “And . . .” Nash paused to fire a glare at a dude who looked my way a little too long. “He seemed worried I’d feel left out. So I had a crack at convincing him otherwise, and I think it panned out, cos he manhandled me after that.” My skin felt too tight for my body. Too hot. “Define manhandling.” “I was naked.”

My sweet boy. I’d loved him for so many years, but in moments like this, my battered heart grew new wings. “It’s not going to change, is it?” “Not for me.” Nash’s tone turned cautious. “But we gotta be careful with him, Orls. He’s the daddiest daddy out there, but he’s been hurt as much as we have, and we can’t fix that with dick jokes and rum.” “I don’t make dick jokes. I mean every single thing I say about dicks.”

I’d spent the morning watching my chaotic kid flit around with her wild grin while also finding the time to ogle my favourite people existing in their life-affirming love bubble, and it made the fucked-up start to the day easier to forget. You want to forget wrapping your hand around Nash’s dick? The weight of his body holding yours down? Nope. But I’d happily forget my entire existence to erase the look on his face when he’d seen more of me than I’d ever wanted to show him.

As I watched my daughter run and jump on Nash’s back as if she’d known him her entire life, I fuckin’ fell in love with them a little bit more.

“Sea Rave Dark Nights? It’s in November. There is no camping.” “How do you know that?” I sent up a quick prayer of thanks to whatever deity had allowed my brother to fall in love with someone light years cooler than us. “Remy performs at the summer fest every year.”

Willow: His name is JAM JAR. Dad: okay Willow: This is literally the best day of my life. That escalated fast, but I couldn’t deny it put a smile on my face. I told her I loved her and shoved the phone in my pocket. Embry grinned and switched the radio station to some dubstep bullshit. “Being around you and your kid is better than therapy.” “Yeah?” “Yeah.” Embry dumped his phone on the dashboard. “Your relationship is fucking beautiful.” “That’s all her.” “No, it isn’t. She is who she is because that’s how you raised her.” “I didn’t raise her.” “I don’t believe that.” “Believe what you want. It’s fact. You think running with the Crows gave me time to be dad of the year?”

His back was to me, but the faded jeans he wore sat higher than the low-slung sweats he’d worn in my bed, concealing the thick, ropey scars that had shattered my soul this morning, and he let me see him. Let me come up close behind him and press my forehead between his shoulder blades, and god, his skin smelled so good it was hard to think about anything else. Even the harsh reality that a mere shift in variables could’ve ripped him away from me—from us—forever.

“Nash.” His voice was a low rumble that I felt more than heard. Then his touch hit me—his warm hand sliding back over my hip, and it was all I could do not to sway on my feet, woozy with a wicked combination of fear and arousal from the way he was hunched over the counter. I’d never thought about it. Fucking him. In my wildest wet dreams, when they got that far, it had always been the other way around. But I knew he was into it—that he was vers. I’d heard him and Rubi talking about it one night in the bar when they thought I’d passed out on the couch next to them. To be fair, I had, but the conversation I’d woken up to had kept me awake for days. “I don’t give it up that much, but when I do, I let fate decide how it ends.”

“Breathe, brother.” “I am breathing.” “Slower.” I tried. Locke tightened his hold on me. “Deeper.” Like that helped, but I made an attempt to obey him, because I liked it when he told me to do shit. The freaky authority he seemed to have over me. The earthy timbre of his voice. His unrelenting touch. Also, he was right. I wasn’t fucking breathing—not really. Not until I was, and the fog in my head began to clear. Locke rubbed my back. “There it is.” There it was. My head had found its way to his shoulder. I left it there for long minutes. Then I missed his face. Those eyes.

“Who?” The word was a growl from somewhere inside me I’d never been. Locke sighed. “Easy. It’s over now.” Because he was here. With us. But with scars like that, it was never over. It was Saint flinching when the smoke from the firepits blew into his face. It was the grief in Rubi’s eyes when he traced the white lines on River’s wrists. It was the pain that never left us.

Locke silenced me with a swipe of his thumb over my lips. Then he kissed me. Like, really kissed me, as if devouring me whole was as important as shutting me up. As if his mouth on mine held the answers to every question I’d ever had. And maybe it did, but I’d never fucking know it, because his kiss wiped my brain clean of every naïve dream I’d had of this moment. I thought I knew what it would be like to kiss Locke—to kiss any dude, any person—who wasn’t Orla. But I’d had no fucking idea. No clue that the moment his lips consumed me I’d be a different person. He kissed me hard, his hands rough and his tongue demanding, and I let it happen, barely kissing him back, barely breathing, until he slowed it to this chill ache of a thing that left me giddy all over again.

We collided. Locke held me up, still clutching the hard edge of my jaw, his body arching to meet mine, his low growl swallowing the desperate sound of my hitched breath, his hand at my waist roaming higher, sliding under my tee. His palm hit my hot skin, fingers dancing over the ladder of my ribs, thumb grazing my chest. The light touch set something off in me and I pulled him tighter against me. Then changed my mind as panic I didn’t quite understand reared its ugly head.