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- Herausgeber: Moreau Imprint
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
A childhood of betrayal. A disappointment of unrequited love. Can prince charming protect her against club treachery?
Hoodie
Someone has been stealing from the Squad Bar and the brothers can't catch the wily culprit.
Club brother Hoodie knows why. Because the thief is one of their own.
Having survived a childhood of betrayal, Hoodie learned early on that the worst treacheries always come from within. But even he was shocked when he discovered it was her.
Jazz—the sexy, vivacious biker chick who Hoodie secretly craved for years. A woman like Jazz would never be interested in a scarred beast like Hoodie.
He’d chosen to stay in the shadows. Until now.
Jazz
After getting over the disappointment of unrequited love, Jazz focused her energy on paying her father's mounting medical bills. Stealing from the club nearly broke her heart, but she was the only thing standing between her father and death's doorstep.
When Hoodie discovers Jazz is the thief, he makes a bold move to save her. Once Jazz realizes her prince charming was hiding in plain sight as the brooding, silent Hoodie, she’s crushed. A noble soul like his could never trust a woman who betrayed the club.
As Valentine's Day approaches, will Cupid have an arrow left over in his satchel for a mismatched love like theirs? Click here for a Valentine’s Day novella like no other!
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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HER HIDDEN VALENTINE
A DEMON SQUAD MC NOVELLA
STEAMY BIKER ROMANCE SERIES
MONIQUE MOREAU
CONTENTS
Meet Monique!
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilogue
More by Monique Moreau
Acknowledgments
Copyright © 2021 by Monique Moreau
All rights reserved.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used factiously. Any resemblance to actual events or people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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MEET MONIQUE!
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PROLOGUE
JAZZ
Jazz glanced over her shoulder and checked the dark hallway as she creaked open the door of the storage room a few inches.
Tucking her recognizable dreadlocks inside her hoodie, she peeked out from under the hem and zeroed in on the camera. With practiced precision, she targeted her infrared laser to the center of the camera lens.
Keeping her aim steady to disable it, she scooped up the three bottles of Redbreast Irish whiskey she’d moved close to the door at the end of her shift and dropped them one-handed into the large tote bag she’d dumped on the floor. Nudging the tote out of the room with her foot, she dropped her hand and yanked the door shut behind her.
Breathing heavily, Jazz tucked the laser into the bag and scoured the hallway once more.
Still empty.
It was the end of a long night, and only Johnny and she were left to clean and lock up the Squad Bar. Puck and Whistle, the two brothers in charge of managing the bar, were too obsessed with their new girlfriends to stay till closing.
Once upon a time, Whistle used to sleep at the bar in hopes of catching the thief.
Should he ever find out it was me…
Guilt stabbed her heart, and a shudder snaked down her spine.
Best not to think of how much she’d lose.
Shoving down the shame, she hitched the cumbersome tote high on her shoulder and made her way to the kitchen.
Poking her head in, she called out, “I’m off for the night. You good, Johnny?”
“Sí, mi amor,” he replied with a wave.
Jazz was one of his favorite co-workers, but then again, she was generally the favorite wherever she went. She’d learned young, from her father, the fine art of being charming. A wrench twisted her gut. Her charismatic father, once a popular jazz pianist, was now so low.
Although it was past two in the morning, Jazz’s night wasn’t nearly over. She still had to sell off the bottles she’d pilfered and get to a 24-hour pharmacy to buy his insulin ASAP.
“Need me to walk you to your car?” Johnny asked, pausing in the middle of scrubbing down the stove.
“No worries, I’m good. Since the security cameras were installed along the back alley, no one’s ever out there.”
With one last wave, Jazz let the door swing shut and hurried down the hallway leading to the back exit. Shoving it open, she breathed in the brisk wintery air.
She sniffed and caught the smell of snow. February temperatures in Upstate New York could drop so low that the air burned the lungs, but Valentine’s Day was just around the corner. Her favorite holiday.
Not that she had anyone to celebrate it with.
Jazz wasn’t sentimental by nature, but her tender heart yearned for her love to be reciprocated. She let out a heavy sigh.
Yeeeah, that was a pipe dream.
How could she let anyone get close? The answer was simple. She couldn’t.
A certain pair of mutable silver-gray eyes popped in her mind, but she brusquely shoved that away as well. Sheesh, the guilt was starting to turn her into a sap.
She had responsibilities, dammit. So she better get to them.
Going around to the trunk of her car, which she’d purposely parked facing away from the cameras, she popped it open and carefully transferred the bottles into the cardboard carton she kept there to stash her stolen goods.
After Hurricane Katrina, she and her father had left New Orleans. It hadn’t been easy, surviving in a backwater city like Poughkeepsie as a jazz musician. Keeping up with mortgage payments became her father’s reason for existing, outside of music, and just when it was finally paid off, he fell ill.
Closing the door of her little hatchback, Jazz bundled herself into the driver’s seat, blasted the heat, and tore out of the back alley in the direction of her old neighborhood to hawk off her illicit gains.
ONE
JAZZ
Jazz rubbed her weary, aching eyes in the early morning light at her job managing a coffee shop, Mornin’ Perk, on Main Street.
She shifted to balance her weight on the high ladder and leaned over to pound a nail into the wall. Dipping into her apron pocket, she pulled out a row of little cupids with arrows and hung them from two nails.
She gave a small sigh of satisfaction as she arranged the little cherubs just so. Valentine’s Day wasn’t only about celebrating love. It was the one pop of excitement at the tail end of a dreary Upstate winter, when everyone was sick and tired of brittle cold and gloomy skies.
The bells attached to the door chimed a warning that a customer had arrived.
Turning her head toward the entrance, she caught sight of a broad set of shoulders pushing the door open.
There was a flash of red hair, a beard and a pair of stormy gray eyes, the color of thunderclouds. They locked on her for an instant before scouring down her front to her wiggling toes.
A surge of heat drenched her in the wake of that heated look, almost tipping her off the rung of the ladder.
Gripping the metal beam in time, she managed to hold herself steady.
Damn, it was like her body had been raked over a bed of coals, leaving her skin crackling with heat. Goose bumps exploded down both her arms. Sheesh.
Although covered from the neck down in a tight dress with a flirty hem and a pair of black tights, she suddenly felt as exposed as if she were standing buck naked.
The reason for her sudden loss of control was the silent, broody, and oh-so-sexy resident graphic artist of the Demon Squad MC.
Hoodie.
As an honorary member herself, or as much as a woman who wasn’t an old lady could be, the Demon Squad was the other reason why she remained in cold Poughkeepsie.
Hoodie had to be the only red-headed man who dripped of sex. Besides his tall frame, broad shoulders, and defined musculature, it was the way he moved—no, prowled—across an expanse of space that had women freezing in place, stopping whatever they were doing to watch him.
After the stare that left her panties a ruined mess, Hoodie silently crossed the floor and went behind the bar. Noting that she was busy decorating the walls, he took it upon himself to prepare his own cup of black coffee from the stainless-steel coffee server.
Dropping a couple of bucks on the counter, he stuffed a ten-dollar bill in the tip box and took a seat by the window.
To say Hoodie was a man of few words would be a severe understatement. Except with his close friend and fellow patch brother, Whistle, he was a man of no words. The exact opposite of Jazz, who tended to use one too many words.
Hoodie had only recently started coming to the coffee shop after one of the rare times they’d conversed at the clubhouse when she’d mentioned her second job.
Once he’d started showing up, he never missed a day. At least none of the days she worked, and she worked most days.
Over the weeks he’s been coming around, Jazz became increasingly envious as she watched women concoct various ploys to engage him in conversations when he sat up shop at a table and did whatever work he was doing on his laptop.
But he shot them down, each and every time, sometimes with nothing more than a monosyllabic word or a firm shake of his head.
While those moments gave her a vindictive sense of pleasure, he rarely engaged with her, either. Some days, she’d get nothing but a chin lift as he slipped out the door in the afternoon.
This morning, he must’ve come straight from the Box, the MMA/boxing gym owned by the Demon Squad, because he was only wearing a workout shirt underneath his jacket. She didn’t miss the way his track pants clung to him tightly, showing off a great ass and what he was packing between his legs. Hmm, just seeing the outline of his cock had her feeling itchy and needy all over. What she’d do to be the one to scratch any itch he might have.
Jazz bit her bottom lip as she watched him pull out a chair and take a seat.
His biceps swelled as he propped his elbows on the tabletop while waiting for his laptop to turn on. God, they were huge bulging things. Strong enough to hold up a woman as he rammed his big cock into her against a wall—Stop, Jazz. Just S-T-O-P, stop!
Secret.
Thief.
You.
Right, right.
Jesus, Jazz, try to remember, will ya?
There was no way she could take her tongue and lick even one single inch of that delicious man candy. It was tempting, what with his stormy eyes and hulking muscles.
But he was off-limits.
Shaking the image of his husky body shuddering against hers out of her head, Jazz returned to her task.
She took a few steps down the ladder, bent over the table to grab a red streamer with paper hearts, tucked the hammer into her armpit, and slipped a few nails between her lips. She wavered for a moment but held a tight grip on the ladder until she managed to straighten up.
Taking a half dozen steps to reach the ceiling, she felt a burning heat on her backside.
Quickly, she glanced over her shoulder.
Hoodie’s gaze was riveted on her ass, his lids dropped to half-mast. Her skin flashed hot and cold. Hot. Cold. Hot. Cold. Unable to help herself, she pushed her ass out reflexively.
His auburn lashes blinked, turning his eyes from gray to silver.
A woman moved in front of him, blocking his view, and Jazz felt the heat of his stare cut off.
A whoosh of cool air chilled her skin. The girl who’d stopped by his table was a cute blond thing. College girl, from the looks of her. That kind of preppy, entitled, clean-cut type of girl crawled under Jazz’s skin.
The only thing holding her back from stomping down the ladder and shoving that girl out of the way was Hoodie.
Rumor had it he rarely had sex.
There was one biker bitch he’d hook up with when he first came around the club. Always in the dark. That was the one condition, she’d told Jazz. They’d fuck in the pitch-black darkness. Not that it was a relationship, nothing like that. The woman had moved on, and with her, so did Hoodie’s interest in sex, it seemed. At least with the women in the club.
Other than the one bitch, no one had any idea of how he satisfied that monster he was packing.
After wasting years crushing on Whistle while stuck in the friend/fuck-buddy zone, Jazz refused to give her heart away again. But a hard-and-dirty fuck? Now, that was the kind of goal a woman could get behind.
