Black Dagger (Mad Jackals Brotherhood MC Book 1) Read Free

Sharona’ on the damn jukebox. It brought back one afternoon, she’d been hanging out with Ray, listening to the radio as she watched him work on his beloved bike.
     
    She’d started singing the words and, typically, got them completely wrong. She’d never been all that good at learning song lyrics; it was one of Ray’s pet peeves. He’d doubled over laughing when he’d realized what she was singing was complete nonsense. She’d punched him in the arm, instigating a play fight that left her breathless and in Ray’s arms. She remembers the streak of motor grease he had on his cheekbone, the intensity in his blue eyes as he looked down at her. He’d closed his mouth over hers, kissing her the way she’d always wanted; he turned her knees weak and made her stomach do little back-flips. It was their first kiss and it had been perfect.
     
    The song took her back to that place and the realization that Ray was gone, that he was really gone and he was never coming back, hit her like a ton of bricks. That’s when she’d cried, and when she started it didn’t feel like she would ever stop. Eli had comforted her, held her while she sobbed and whispered words of solace into her ear. He’d taken her back to his place because he was worried about her – her housemates were out partying and he didn’t want to leave her on her own. That had always been Eli down to a t. He always looked out for her, always wanted to protect her.
     
    She was drunk and tired, but there was also something else. Ray was gone and nothing would bring him back. Eli was all she had left and he had always been so kind to her. She’d fallen into bed with him that night. She’d slept with him, not because she was in love with him, but because she needed to feel something. She was desperate for comfort, desperate to feel something other than the heart-stopping pain in her chest that was suffocating her. And so Eli had been her first; she’d still been waiting for Ray, after all this time.
     
    She doesn’t even really remember what it was like to lose her virginity. All she remembered was that it had been fumbled and awkward, nothing like how she’d imagined. When she’d thought about what it would be like with Ray, she’d imagined fireworks and heat and a kind of specialness that only he knew how to create.
     
    Mia did remember the next morning with alarming precision. She’d hated herself for sleeping with Eli, for betraying Ray. And then she’d hated Ray for making her feel like that. She hated him for every reason she could think of: for promising to come back, for leaving her, for dying, and for still being able to make her feel like she should wait for him.
     
    Eli had been kind and sweet to her. They’d already been friends for so long; becoming more intimate seemed like the natural progression of things. He’d told her that he’d waited for a long time, that he’d always wanted to be with her, but he wanted to give her space to get over Ray. He’d poured out his heart to her and Mia had been too shocked to say anything. She had never known how he had felt. Some psychologist she would make, she’d thought to herself. In one night, everything had changed and nothing could go back to the way it was before. Since that night she and Eli had been a couple. She’d never asked herself if the relationship was something that she’d just fallen into or whether it had been what she’d wanted. It was a stupid question to ask; she was with Eli and that was that and she was happy, wasn’t she?
     
    She’d kept Ray’s patch under her pillow until that night. As soon as she’d gone back to her place, she’d taken it out and looked at it for the longest time, feeling the tears build behind her eyes. Mia had dropped it into the wastebasket by her bed, but, within a minute, she’d pulled it out again and slipped it into one of her books, keeping it safe. There was something about throwing it away that seemed wrong, disrespectful almost,