Daredevil (Book 1): Venom Chasers MC, #1

By Kathryn Thomas

This is book 1 of the Venom Chasers MC romance series! Books 2 and 3 of this motorcycle club romance are available everywhere now!

 

He took me like he knew I was already falling for him.

 

I thought I left the past behind—all the horrible memories, each one worse than the last.

But in a single moment of weakness, I found myself sucked back into it all.

 

I was just doing my job.

Turns out that was the worst idea possible.

 

While out on a boat, taking notes on the marine ecosystem, I see something that definitely doesn't belong:

A dead, floating corpse.

 

It's like something out of a nightmare.

After giving my report to the police who show up, I head to the bar for a drink to calm my nerves.

And that's when HE showed up.

 

The biker.

 

Pax is handsome, scary, intense, leaving me speechless.

Something makes me beg for his searing kiss. Crave his scarred body. Ache for his big heart pounding away against mine.

 

He is everything that's wrong for me. Everything that I should stay away from.

But no matter what I do, something keeps pulling me back to him.

 

I know he can only break my heart.

But I can't stop believing his voice rumbling against my throat as he says the magic words that make me fall to pieces:

 

"You belong to me now."

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBook Publishing World
• Release date: Apr 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393559429

Book preview

Daredevil: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Venom Chasers MC Book 1)

By Kathryn Thomas

He took me like he knew I was already falling for him.

I THOUGHT I LEFT THE past behind—all the horrible memories, each one worse than the last.

But in a single moment of weakness, I found myself sucked back into it all.

I was just doing my job.

Turns out that was the worst idea possible.

While out on a boat, taking notes on the marine ecosystem, I see something that definitely doesn’t belong:

A dead, floating corpse.

It’s like something out of a nightmare.

After giving my report to the police who show up, I head to the bar for a drink to calm my nerves.

And that’s when HE showed up.

The biker.

Pax is handsome, scary, intense, leaving me speechless.

Something makes me beg for his searing kiss. Crave his scarred body. Ache for his big heart pounding away against mine.

He is everything that’s wrong for me. Everything that I should stay away from.

But no matter what I do, something keeps pulling me back to him.

I know he can only break my heart.

But I can’t stop believing his voice rumbling against my throat as he says the magic words that make me fall to pieces:

You belong to me now.

Chapter One

My blonde hair whipped against my face as the boat coasted onward. I was starting to get pissed off. I’d brush the strands out of my eyes only to have them blow back across a second later. Between the wind and the spray off the water, I’d been fighting my new bob of hair all day. I should have left it long so I could tie it back in a ponytail like I’d always done.

I checked the coordinates on the plastic sheet, the pounding of the boat as it hammered through the swells making it difficult to read. I didn’t even need to see them, really, but I took pride in my work and wanted to hit my sample location dead on every time. I went out into the Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve three times a week as part of my job at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology to take water samples.

I’d gotten my master’s degree there, and my graduate degree advisor, Mark Suttman, had invited me to stay on as his lab manager. It had been the perfect start to a new life. Besides the fact that it was my job, I lived and breathed the ocean

Most people thought the wet, overcast weather, typical for the Oregon coast, was miserable and depressing. I disagreed. I liked it when the weather was gray and dreary like this, and it made me feel vibrant and alive. My colleagues had tagged me with the nickname Ducky because I loved the water and the rain even more than the sunny beach days the tourists hoped for.

I breathed in deep and tasted salt. This was home more than my birthplace had ever been. I turned my attention back to my clipboard with its plastic sheets covered with grease pencil writing, checking the coordinates written there against the GPS one more time. I adjusted my course a bit to starboard as I backed off on the throttles even more, slowing to a crawl as I approached my sample coordinates. It was the best way I’d found to record the sample information without the paper turning into so much mush from the spray and rain.

Mark was on a three-year study to research the effect of oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean on the Pacific ecosystem—something I would be doing one day if my life went as planned—and we were between research assistants. My tech, Paula, had returned to Cal-Tech when her classes had resumed. That meant I was the designated scribe for the weekly sample runs. I didn’t mind at all. I liked being out here on the ocean and in the thick of things. Any excuse to get out on the water was good enough for me.

I checked the weather every morning as a habit and dressed appropriately. Oregon weather was only horrible when you weren’t ready for it. My black raincoat was slick with the sea spray and rain, and underneath I had on my personal uniform of jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, red Wellingtons that my friends said I’d stolen from Paddington Bear, and binoculars looped around my neck in case something exciting popped up.

The ocean never slept, and you never knew when you were going to have a chance to see something special.

Even though I was a hydrologist, I spent too much of my time in a lab, and not nearly enough time with the ocean, which was what had gotten me to Oregon in the first place. These kinds of jobs, where I could be alone with the wind, weather, and water, were why I’d wanted to come to Oregon in the first place. I’d visited the area when I’d been in college, just after my father had died, and I’d fallen in love with the ocean.

It had called to me like a siren, offering me distance and refuge from my problems.

I checked the GPS and closed the throttles, the thirty-foot boat coasting to a stop in the water as the big twin Mercury Marine outboards fell to idle, then silence as I switched them off.

As the boat bobbed gently in the swells, I began collecting the samples, pulling up water from three different depths and carefully labeling the samples. Samples collected, I recorded the water temperatures from all three depths along with the air temperature. The rest of the analysis would have to wait until I got back to the lab.

I pushed my hair back, out of my face, with both hands and held it, willing it to stay in place, but the moment I removed my hands, it swirled in my face again. For at least the hundredth time since I pulled away from the dock, I wished I hadn’t chopped it off. Pulling it back into a ponytail had been so much easier for these sample runs.

I’d needed a change, so I’d gone to the hairdresser and told her to do whatever she felt like. She’d chosen a style that, rather than making me feel more mature and sophisticated and in charge of my own destiny, made me look wide-eyed and innocent. It made my blue eyes bigger, my cheeks rounder, my face younger.

It made me look pure and unscathed, which was a lie.

This was the last stop for the week, and once I had the samples secured, I cranked over the engines, and then pushed the throttles to their stops as I made a big looping turn for home. The boat bounded through the waves, and I was using my legs as shock absorbers, but at least I was heading into the