Maren

Leaving the dressing room, I wiped the corners of my mouth. Seducing that biker had been way too easy, and I didn’t even have to fuck him. He’d been too drunk to perform anyway. Hopefully not too smashed to go forth and tell of his exploits, if only to hurt his ex-fiancée.

Little did he know, I was the one to break his heart last month. I alerted my President, Killer of the Asphalt Gods MC in Arkansas about Hallow’s woman, Eve, contacting her brother at my club. Afterwards, her brother had to fetch her from Royal Road, making her leave Hallow on their wedding day. I also called my boss and told him about the Royal Bastards’ President’s new bride too. At the time I hadn’t heard she was pregnant, but the walls had ears and the whores talked.

Even if Hallow was too intoxicated to remember, I’d tell the whores myself that I sucked him dry. Leviathan would hear about me finally being with someone in this club, sort of. And that I had my eye on him as well. Seemed a man never wanted you until you were with someone else.

A smile burned on my face, knowing my trap was set. My plans were working. The danger grew. Biting my lip, suddenly, I regretted not taking that biker to my bed over the clubhouse. I’d been here over a month already and hadn’t had any sex. At a biker club like this, I should be having a smorgasbord of partners, but my mission didn’t call for it. My mission was to make a monster fall very much in love with me and break his heart. I was poking a hornet’s nest, and it thrilled me.

“What’s your deal?” a voice boomed next to me.

Fucking shit. He scared the crap out of me. I jumped like a cartoon cat.

Standing right outside the dressing room, Leviathan waited for me.

That was quick.

By the look on his face, I guess he’d been watching. The biker hadn’t spoken a word to me before, the whole time I’d been here. Up close, he was even larger and much more scrumptious. To me, Leviathan dripped with raw sex appeal. But everyone here feared him. I supposed a girl could fall in love with the devil if she didn’t know all his sins.

“I could ask you the same thing. Were you spying on me?” I accused him.

“What if I had been?”

“Did you like what you saw?”

Dressed for my act, I was practically naked. Leviathan was too covered for my liking.

The biker shook his head. “No, seriously. Who are you?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I take my job seriously. You’re not getting along with any of the bikers here, and then all the sudden you’re on your knees for Hallow of all people,” Leviathan said, the suspicion evident in his tone.

“You mean, I’m not fucking anyone. Is that a crime? Is sucking a dick a crime?”

He leered. “If it’s not mine, maybe it is. I know you ain’t attracted to no sloppy drunk.”

“How do you know? Have you been watching me?” I wanted to know if Paisley was right.

“A little whore whispered it in my ear.”

The whore was quick with her gossip, too.

“Is this your way of coming on to me?” I asked with a sly grin. I fluttered my eyes like Paisley had at me, like they might take flight.

“I’m curious what a girl’s doing at Royal Road if she’s not got a biker between her thighs. At least want one. Or a few. From what I hear, your bed’s staying empty even though you’re on the payroll.”

My whole face puckered up. “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman. I know you bikers like them young so maybe y’all don’t like me.”

“Bullshit. What are you, twenty-five? Young enough for most of these geezers.”

“I’m working. Excuse me,” I said, pushing past him, but making sure to rub my body on him as I did.

The biker seized my shoulders, stopping me. He twirled me to face him like I was nothing.

“Who are you?” he asked again, his voice lower. His enormous hands ran down my arms.

“Get your paws off me,” I struggled to get loose.

With that the biker only got closer. He wrapped his arms around me and there was no way I could move an inch. He smelled of leather and whiskey, mixed with his natural manly musk. A calloused hand snaked around my bare midriff to my back sending shivers all over my skin. With his firm grip, he secured me. The body heat radiating off him alone caused an instant sweat, but I was burning up for another reason. I fell against the Python in his jeans. The biker’s erection practically beat against my thigh like it had a lifeforce of its own.

Fuck me. Sincerely. Literally just fuck me. Right now. I fought the urge to scream it aloud.

“Who are you?” Leviathan growled this time.

Good gracious. I’d turned into goo. As I melted against him, I tried to keep the infatuated look off my face.

“Tell me.” He shook me, like he could shake it out of me.

Oh, my, his dick rocked against me. I dug my nails into him, but not to deter him. I was about to lose it. Sucking in a breath, I held it so I wouldn’t give myself away.

He didn’t budge. “Now,” he demanded, his voice sexy as all get out.

Oh, I was exactly who I said I was when applying at Royal Road. I told the manager who hired me I was an ex-gymnast who had aged out of competing. An ex-circus performer who had traveled the country. One who suffered an injury bad enough to keep me off the road. Maren’s my for real name too. Told the biker running this joint all I needed was a hoop hanging from the ceiling and the right lighting, and I could give these outlaws a show to remember. Opry informed me Royal Road was much more than a biker bar, that he needed someone like me, a true entertainer for his more refined guests, his high rollers who filled their coffers.

“After all, this is Nashvegas,” he’d said. “Could use a contortionist.”

“Heard you were a carnie. Tell me about that,” Leviathan snickered, interrogating me. “Traveling?” But all the while he sniffed me and felt me up like a wild animal.

My hands soared to his vast chest to push him away. Though I played repulsed, I was eating his touch up.

“Yeah, I was a performer with a cirque style entertainment company. Real upstanding place where we weren’t called carnies for crying out loud.”

“Doing what?”

“Flying trapeze, mostly.”

The peril had been a rush, addictive. The start of all my troubles.

“Not contortion?”

“Only on the side. I’m not flexible enough to compete with the other performers.”

“Seem pretty good at it.”

“To a layman’s eyes, yeah.”

Leviathan licked his lips. “The way you twist into a pretzel... The things I could do to you in that position.”

“Like I haven’t heard that one before.”

“But have you done it?”

I gulped. “That’s not why I’m here, to let bikers fuck me in weird positions.”

“Hell, by the look of it, you could lick my balls while I fucked you.”

That warranted an eye roll. “If you only knew what I could do to a man you’d be a lot nicer.”

Leviathan took that as a cue to get meaner. His fingernails dug into my arms this time. “Why are you here? Why did you leave the circus?”

“Why do you care?”

“I’m asking the questions.”

I glared at his hand that squeezed my arm though he practically had me in an embrace. “Is this a date? Do you want to get to know me?” I asked him.

“If it was a fucking date, you’d know it.” The man almost smiled but in a menacing way.

Good golly. I liquefied again.

“Why so serious?” I asked and chuckled a bit at myself.

The big guy didn’t give an inch. “Tell me, and I might just let you suck my dick next.”

“So, you were watching me.”

“I didn’t like what I saw,” he said, his voice so husky.

“You think this will convince me to give up other bikers for you?”

Leviathan steered my arm behind my back, actually hurting me for a moment.

A rush zipped through me. I couldn’t let him know how much I enjoyed it. The chance I might be hurt. Thankfully, he eased up, so he didn’t break my arm.

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck you’re doing at Royal Road?”

I squeaked out, “Listen. At twenty-one I aged out of gymnastics. Before you ask, you wouldn’t understand. I was good. So good, I almost went to the Olympics as a teen. But my body ached all over most days. I got burnt out. Too old for the sport, I could still dance, only on the ground. My coach had me audition for a traveling show way out in Oklahoma. They liked me, and I didn’t have anything else to fall back on. I barely graduated high school. Yes, an RV became my home. We had appearances all over the US. I had some fun at first. Before I fell. They kept me on as a trainer, then a manager, and it turned into a lot of work. I got burnt out at the circus, too. I moved back home. I used to live in this area. Why wouldn’t I come to Royal Road? I needed a job. Money.”

That last part was a lie. I was from Arkansas although I’d been in Tennessee often enough as a teen to compete in gymnastics. The rest of my story was mostly true. The best way to lie was hidden in a whole lot of truths and within too much information. The more someone thought they knew, the more they’d believe. That was something I learned on the road.

What I didn’t tell Leviathan was that in my time in the circus, my love of the trapeze morphed into a love of danger. No. A bad addiction. And yes, with stage makeup, choreography, I made up characters. I had stage characters galore. I’d used them all over the country and in Arkansas at the Asphalt Gods MC clubhouse. None bigger than Spooky, my road name there, if I were to be patched. Unlike this motorcycle club, they patched women, made them members.

But Spooky was not who I was at the moment. I knew to pull off this trick, I’d have to be myself, simply Maren. I couldn’t be caught in a lie. The circus performer, Maren put an element of danger in all her acts unlike here at Royal Road where the seduction was solely the point of her routines. My routines.

By the way Levi spoke of fucking me as a pretzel, they’d hooked him.

My mission was the danger now, the danger of catching Leviathan in the act of trying to kill me. Once he found out I was his enemy. After he fell for me, of course, and I revealed my true identity.

He’s a monster. A murderer, Killer had told me. He’d exterminate any Asphalt Gods MC member he could catch for some reason. He’d massacre us all if he had the chance.

I was simply Killer’s beautiful bait.

What Opry didn’t know when he hired me was that I’d gone to the Asphalt Gods MC first. I became a dancer for their small club, but I rode with them too, became a prospect. Craving danger above all, being a member of a one-percenter motorcycle club appealed to me like nothing else. Killer, their President was so impressed he proclaimed I could use my skills for something else. As a probate I didn’t have a choice but to obey my President. I had the job of seducing a monster, no question.

Well, there were actually two options. I’d either succeed and earn my patch or I’d die trying, at the hands of one club or another.

My situation was precarious as can be.

“Just a job?” Leviathan wasn’t convinced.

“It’s the truth,” I added.

The monster smiled, and my world crumbled.

Hell.

Pretending to be in love wouldn’t be hard at all.

“I think I know you,” he said, shocking the hell out of me.