Out From Under Read online

  Out From Under

  The Lovers Duet

  Selene Chardou

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

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  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Out From Under Playlist

  Part One – Before

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two – After

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  About the Author

  Contacts & Resources

  Published & Upcoming Novels

  Dedication

  To my editor, Juli Valenti, for making this novel kick ass; my friends and family for all their support and lastly, my readers and fans. I write because I love to entertain but without your support and love for my novels, I would be writing only for myself.

  Playlist

  “I Knew You Were Trouble.” – Taylor Swift

  “I Still Haven’t Found What I Am Looking For” – U2

  “Girl on Fire – Inferno Version” – Alicia Keys feat. Nicki Minaj

  “Paradise” – Coldplay

  “Demons” – Imagine Dragons

  “It’s No Good” – Depeche Mode

  “Salt Skin” – Ellie Goulding

  “Battlefield” – Jordin Sparks

  “Brave” – Leona Lewis

  “Desert Rose” – Sting

  “The Kill” – Thirty Seconds to Mars

  “E.T.” – Katy Perry feat. Kanye West

  “Roc Me Out” – Rihanna

  “Locked Out Of Heaven” – Bruno Mars

  “Breathe” – Faith Hill

  “Possession” – Sarah McLachlan

  “It’s Time” – Imagine Dragons

  “Savin’ Me” – Nickelback

  “Love Into The Light” – Ke$ha

  “Chasing Cars” – Snow Patrol

  “Run” – Leona Lewis

  “Wild Horses” – Alicia Keys feat. Adam Levine

  “Bleeding Out” – Imagine Dragons

  Part One

  Before

  Chapter One

  IT ALL STARTED with a boy.

  Well, technically, he was a man, but I’d only recently just graduated from high school the Spring before and was on winter break from the University of Nevada in Reno so I still thought and referred to him as a boy.

  I hung out with my brother, Trey, at the Demon’s Bastards Motorcycle Club compound, an activity that would have gotten me grounded for a month if my parents ever found out but I wasn’t too worried about that. My mom and dad were visiting my aunt and uncle in Connecticut and wouldn’t be back until after New Year’s, when Tristan and I would go out to dinner with them to celebrate my acceptance and departure to the prestigious Stanford University.

  It would be weird starting my school year in the Winter quarter after attending UNR for the Autumn semester but despite my grades and extra-curricular activities, I’d still been placed on the waiting list for the prestigious Ivy League university.

  We lived in the small town of Pine Bluff, Nevada. Population ten thousand. No, everyone didn’t know everyone else, but there was a grapevine and it always seemed like everyone always knew what everyone else was doing. We didn’t know each other personally but we knew of one another and in a town that size, my parents were very well known.

  So were my two brothers and I.

  Tristan was the jock of the family. He’d left on a full ride to UNLV due to his excellent football record and a 3.7 GPA. He’d also been accepted at the University of Southern California but had no desire to leave my parents in Pine Bluff without one son who could make it home in less than a day’s drive.

  I was the brains. I played tennis at school and although I was good, I wouldn’t be challenging the Williams’ sisters or Maria Sharapova any time soon. I opted not to try out for a sports scholarship but used my sports activities and my volunteer work at the local convalescent home to my advantage. My 4.3 GPA (due to the advanced college courses I took at Lake Tahoe Community College) easily should have guaranteed me a spot but despite everything, I’d been placed on the wait list and had to attend University of Nevada in Reno for the first semester.

  My parents were extremely happy about my Ivy acceptance because my mother had gone to Boston University, and my father had graduated from MIT. They were both Boston natives, though my mother grew up in Beacon Hill while my father was raised in Dorchester. All three of my brothers and I were born in Boston but the family had moved to Pine Bluff when I was only five—Tristan had been nine and Trey, my oldest brother, had been thirteen.

  Trey was the reason I was able to visit the MC clubhouse without being picked on by every horny, attached and unattached biker in the club. I had extra protection with Clooney who I had been secretly seeing on the sly for eighteen months.

  He was a prospect, only twenty-two years old and still baby faced with his soft Celtic looks, gray eyes and light brown hair with blond streaks throughout. He was built yet lean due to two tours of duty in Iraq with the Army. He’d had his leg shattered when his units Humvee hit a land mine and although the VA hospital managed to repair most of the damage, it was the MC who gave him the money to see a specialist and actually get the steel rods placed in his right leg, followed by physical therapy.

  Clooney still walked with a slight limp but at least he didn’t have to use his walking stick and he’d almost healed to the point where he could run.

  He was the man I’d given my virginity to and although we both knew there was zero chance of me ever becoming his old lady, we liked each other a lot. Too much because I was going to miss him with his girlish, creamy complexion covered in a handful of tats, and his lean body. I would even miss the scar that went from his left hip all the way down to his calf where the multiple operations had taken place. It was a thin, pink scar which had keloid and was slightly puffy against his otherwise perfect skin.

  I lay on my stomach in his bed in the clubhouse and ran my hands over one of the military tattoos on his smooth, hairless chest.

  “So, what happens now? When will I see you?”

  Ugh, I wanted to avoid that question like the plague and wondered why I felt like our situations were reversed. Why did I feel like the man and him the chick? I knew I would let him down whatever I told him but it was no use.

  “You probably won’t see much of me,” I began in a cautious tone. “Stanford is no joke and I will have to work my ass off to maintain a good grade point average. I probably won’t be back until Spring Break or maybe summer vacation—I’m not exactly sure yet.”

  “Christ, that’s a long time. Why are you leaving now?” he inquired, as he stroked my soft, dark hair.

  Clooney loved my hair for some reason, though there was nothing special about it except maybe the natural chestnut highlights running throughout.

  “I want to settle into dorm life and school starts on the sixth of January,” I lied smoothly.

  Due to my unique circumstances, Stanford had given me two extra weeks to settle in and prepare. I would still be required to do the assignments due for
my classes but I wasn’t expecting to show up physically for my courses until the twentieth of January.

  The reality was, I just wanted to get the hell out of Pine Bluff and be around intelligent people my own age. I loved my parents but they were suffocating and although we’d spent Christmas together, their departure was a relief to me and gave me room to breathe. I would be able to prepare for my new university and a couple days after they returned, I would leave and be on my way to starting a new life in California.

  Thank God for small favors.

  He sat up in bed and stared at me before a smile graced his face. “I’ve got good news. I heard from your brother and the club’s gonna patch me in.”

  “Oh, really? That’s great news for you. It’s what you have been working for all this time and now you’ll be a full member of the club. Congrats.” I hated the flatness in my tone but at the same time, it also gave me the out I desperately sought.

  Now the opportunity presented itself before me, there was no way I wouldn’t take advantage.

  I bit my lower lip and looked down as he took my hand into his and our fingers intertwined. It was a beautiful sight, his creamy skin against my olive-toned skin. It provided me with the perfect excuse not to speak at all and for us to just enjoy a comfortable moment of silence.

  My mother was one hundred percent Creole and my father was one hundred percent Irish. Both my brothers had my father’s fair skin, though they’d inherited various shades of our parents’ dark hair. Tristan and I shared the same eye color, while Trey had our mother’s hazel-green eyes. I had inherited my mother’s olive skin and my eyes were my father’s—a gorgeous sky blue that changed from cerulean to a paler blue depending upon my emotions. The only way anyone could ever tell my brothers and I were siblings, despite our different coloring, was that we had the same features as our parents, just arranged differently.

  “Listen, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck and I don’t expect you to…wait for me. That would be unfair to both of us, especially because I really want to live the whole “college experience” and I know how it is here at the club when a party is going on. You are going to want to live it up, especially at your patch-in party. I think Trey had a hangover for about a week afterwards but that’s…club life…and it isn’t for me.”

  Clooney stared ahead, before his gray eyes looked toward me again and then dropped to my breasts.

  I looked good, I knew that. I would never be a skinny Minnie—it just wasn’t in my DNA—but I was healthy for my age at five feet, four inches and one hundred and thirty-five pounds. I always worried I was too fat and struggled for years to get into that coveted size six, but it never happened. I didn’t have an ounce of fat or cellulite on my body from years of tennis. I had nice toned arms that could rival the First Lady, a great set of natural thirty-two Cs for breasts, a slim waist and a womanly figure. It was my thighs that bugged me the most. They prevented me from wearing all the great outfits and teeny skirts because they were muscular and the reason why up top, I was a size six while all my jeans and skirts were a size eight.

  Of course, men never seemed to mind, and Clooney always went on and on about how I had a great body, shiny hair and a beautiful face. I loved him for that, but at the same time, I knew I couldn’t lead him on. We couldn’t happen because as much as I was tied to the club by my brother, I despised the whole fucking lifestyle. The violence, misogyny, and criminal activities were nothing I wanted any part of and I’d wanted to escape Pine Bluff since we’d moved here.

  It was that simple, but how the hell did I convince him of that?

  “I like you…a lot. You know that, Trista, so why are you making this more difficult than it has to be? Jax’s old lady, on SOA, is a doctor—why the hell can’t we work out?”

  I laughed at this sentiment though it was obviously inappropriate. “Sons of Anarchy is a television show, Clooney. It isn’t meant to be completely realistic. How many club members do you know have old ladies who are doctors? Hell, how many old ladies do you know that went to college at all? It doesn’t happen, not in the real world.”

  “So what do you expect me to do? Just forget about you?” He ran his hands through his silky, wheat-blond hair that was slightly greasy, before his hands cupped my face. “I don’t want to forget about you, Trista. From the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you were the one.”

  Melodrama had always been one of Clooney’s weak points. He would be twenty-three in March and I’d just turned eighteen on the first of December. I was a classic overachiever who’d gotten involved with a guy who was sexy, belonged to a motorcycle club and barely graduated from high school with a 2.0 GPA.

  What the hell was wrong with this picture?

  Tristan would shoot Clooney if he knew, and Trey turned a blind eye. He didn’t exactly like Clooney—though he was the one who’d sponsored him—and the fact that he’d been boning me for the past year didn’t sit well with my brother at all. He was quite the player, my brother, but like most men in the MC, he suffered from double standards. What was good for the goose certainly wasn’t good for the gander.

  “We’ll just play it by ear and see what happens after you’re patched in, okay?” I said gently, keeping my voice even.

  I didn’t want us to have some huge fall-out or fight because I hated drama more than anything else in the world. It was probably why I avoided the Danielle Steel and Janet Evanovich novels my mother read like the plague, and stuck to more intelligent authors like Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Annabel Joseph when I craved my sexy times. I liked to think I was the kind of person who wasn’t completely selfish, but I couldn’t be too sure. I knew I was passionate and when people pissed me off, there was hell to pay.

  Clooney smiled before he kissed me, and I wrapped my arms around his neck. It was the day before New Year’s Eve and the club was already jumping. My brother was off on a job in Reno, though he was supposed to be back at the clubhouse that night. Trey “tolerated” Clooney and I together, but if he ever caught me in the prospect’s bed, he would beat his ass black and blue and probably frog march me out of the clubhouse.

  “I think we have time for one more round before my brother gets back from that run in Reno…” I trailed off when our kiss finally ended.

  “Then what the hell are we waiting for?” Clooney inquired, before he laid me down on the bed again and spread my legs with a determined hand.

  If this was meant to be—whatever it was we had between us—then why was my heart knocking in my chest a million miles per minute and why did I always feel like such an awful human being? I knew and so did he: there wasn’t a viable future between us in the long term. So why was I such a coward and why couldn’t I tell it to him straight? Why did I have to wait until I was far away from here before I would break the news to him with a phone call?

  I closed my eyes, surrendered to passion and tried not to let my deceptively bad behavior get to me.

  A new year was just around the corner and it was time for me to turn over a new leaf in life.

  Chapter Two

  LINX WAS TIRED of the shit and just plain exhausted.

  After spending way too much time on the Gods of Rock Tour, he was ready to pack it in, though the only way he would get away with that was pulling one of Seth’s stunts and that wasn’t going to happen. Their former lead singer had suffered from a drug overdose while they were in Copenhagen, Denmark.

  Dumb fucking bastard, Linx thought with bitterness and anger.

  Tired, horny and frustrated, he no longer blamed Talia—the former keyboardist turned new lead singer—for the situation at hand, but he would always resent her in his own way. He’d started Winter’s Regret with Seth, Niko and Kris.

  Lennon “Linx” Carter was twenty-six years old and already a rock star.

  He played bass and wasn’t just good, but fucking excellent. He didn’t believe in half measures and gave everything he was passionate about his all.

  Of course it didn’t hurt that he was good
looking, with a healthy peaches and cream complexion from the brief sun exposure they experienced while they were staying in Dubai. This one feature was complimented by natural brown hair with blondish highlights, which he often dyed black, and penetrating cornflower-blue eyes that made all the women melt, though he mostly kept them hidden behind a blacker-than-black pair of Ray-Bans.

  His soft Irish features included sculpted cheekbones, a long, straight roman nose, and slightly full lips that were as kissable as they were ready to flash a celebrity-made smile. He’d started wearing carefully trimmed facial hair that suited him for the tour and certainly didn’t impede any female attention.

  At exactly six feet, two inches and one hundred and eighty pounds, he was lean without verging into “junkie rock star” territory. His fashion sense completed his look and mostly included leather pants and a pair of shit kickers when he was on stage. While off stage, he was a jeans and tee-shirt or wife-beater type of guy, with clean white Nikes and a leather coat, if he needed to stay warm.

  Like most rockers, he was covered in tattoos: guns and roses on his chest, a heart on his stomach, shaped by the hands of his oldest nephew, and a full sleeve on his right arm. He had a half sleeve on his left arm, and knew he would eventually complete it once he was struck with the right inspiration.

  Winter’s Regret had started out like so many other rock bands heavily influenced by grunge and nineties alternative music. The original members were Seth, Niko and himself, playing for kicks and free beer in local South Boston bars though they weren’t old enough to drink at the time. Seth played lead guitar, as well as sang, and they were a great trio. The bars got bigger, they attracted the eye of a local manager and soon, they were actually making money doing what they’d always loved to do. What could be better?

  However, once they realized they were all dead serious about music, they noticed that although Seth was an okay guitarist, he didn’t exactly play at top form when he was singing too. Their manager forced them to place an ad in the local newspaper and Kris Nieminen responded to it.