Hard Rider Read online

  Ram slid Long on top of his lap, resting her crotch on his heavy thigh. He could feel the heat of her, the wetness. Her skirt was short and pleated, her panties barely there. Dark brown fingers slid up his thigh, resting against the heavy bulge he’d been forming since they had started talking to him. No doubt she had done this sort of thing before, but she had never done it with a man like Ram, and that made all the difference.

  Blonde pushed her heavy breasts against his back, whispering in his ear in soft Spanish that Ram couldn’t quite catch. He had a tin ear for language, and needed to hear them at full volume to really take them in.

  Still, he assumed it was something sweet from the way her hand slipped around to his crotch and squeezed on the fast-hardening shaft filling up his pants. Her fingers slipped against Long’s, and they both giggled and stroked more as his bulge grew even more, practically bursting through his pants.

  Long had one hand wrapped around his neck. She had pretty eyes—servile eyes, the sort Ram liked in a girl.

  In the outlaw’s world, the place of a chick like this was to serve and be seen, never heard. A girl who spoke up too much was trouble for the brotherhood—and the brotherhood came before anything else. He slipped his hand up under her skirt to no protest.

  Almost right away his fingers found that same wetness and heat he’d felt plying against his thigh. Soon after that, the tips of fingers brushed against the pulsing, gentle mound of her clit. She gasped, her thighs tightening around his leg. She leaned in and began whispering something heated and Spanish in his ear—he supposed more admiration. Her kisses were wet and messy against his neck.

  Blonde tugged at his crotch harder, whispering faster in that lilting rapid tongue. He wondered what it would feel like to have her slide all that language against his cock, every word choked on his meat. He turned and called Manuel over—Ram had taken his drinks, now he would take his women.

  “A room,” he called. “With a big bed.”

  The girls giggled, clearly fine with the request. Manuel’s eyes were big—he did not approach.

  Steps, heavy and full of violence. Ram had half-expected this.

  “You touching the wrong girls, man.”

  This was a Black Flag. Ram recognized him—Beretta.

  Ram was a little pissed that he hadn’t seen Beretta in the bar already. If he had, there would have been a much, much different atmosphere to the night. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t have come in, so as to avoid a fight.

  Beretta was a lot of things. Sergeant-At-Arms for the Black Flags. An enforcer, a gunman, a man so bad ass in his own gang that it was his elected job to police the other members of the Black Flags, just like it was Ace’s job for the Wrecking Crew. Big, dark-haired, and scary. He was nearly as big as Ram and had a face toughened from years of fighting. A long clawed scar was etched down one side of his face from behind his eye to his jaw, and he had a long jagged patch of healed burned flesh on one shoulder.

  He was also Ram’s former brother; a former member of the Wrecking Crew, and the number one reason that Ram had been pissed off for about two years straight.

  To say the two had unfinished business was like saying that the ocean was a little bit wet. No other man was more responsible than Beretta for the death of Ram’s sister.

  The only reason Beretta was still alive—as far as Ram was concerned—was to keep the peace with the Black Flags, and that was something that Ram cared less and less about as time went on.

  Ram did not turn, keeping his hand outstretched for a key to the flophouse.

  “They came to talk to me,” said Ram. “I got nothing to do with you. Looks like they don’t want to either.”

  The girls realized, very suddenly, that they had misjudged who Ram was. One biker may have looked like another to them. A rookie mistake. Long, her entrance still wet on top of Ram’s hand, shifted to move away. Instead, his fingers simply rubbed harder on her clit. She shuddered, throbbing in pleasure, sliding up against his thick body with a little moan. She could not stop herself from giggling and kissing against his neck, hormones taking over her judgment.

  Blonde backed away though, leaving Ram’s hard cock untended—and thirsty for release. His eyes narrowed on Beretta, wondering where the traitor scum would take this little dance.

  Ram was the sort of man who could find a thrill in anything. If he wasn’t going to fuck, then he was going to fight, and that was that.

  “Let’s keep this nice, huh?” said Beretta. “You step away. Go back to your table. Jack off with your friends, I don’t care. But you leave these girls to us. We paid for them.”

  “They drank my whiskey,” said Ram, finally turning around. “So who’s gonna pay me for that?”

  His voice reached a dangerous tone. The longer he and Beretta talked, the closer they would come to fighting. He looked for reasons to keep talking. The fight was close now, bending at the edges of their reality.

  Several Black Flags stood up—and so then, did the Wrecking Crew.

  Long finally got her shit together enough to back off of Ram’s lap, whimpering a bit as she did. He could still feel her wet arousal on his pant leg.

  Ram might have been in the wrong to start a fight at The Hammerin’ Nail—but that was a question for later. Brothers backed each other up in the moment, no matter what.

  The Black Flags moved forward like a wave. Pool cues and chairs in their hands. The Wrecking Crew did the same—Mikhail pulled out a pair of brass knucks and Ace unwrapped the chain he kept looped through his belt holes.

  Gunfire. In the brewing melee, Manuel picked up his shotgun from behind the bar and let it unleash on the ceiling, filling the bar with a heavy boom and dust from the shattered plaster. He pumped it and leveled the barrel at Ram and Beretta, who had been circling each other with fists up.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “Now.”

  Ram and Beretta backed up together, both keeping an eye on each other and on Manuel’s shotgun.

  Once through the door, Ram heard the telltale snick of a knife popping open. He twisted and snapped Beretta’s hand away just in time to avoid having steel jammed in his kidneys.

  Just like a coward-ass thieving’ low cocksucker like Beretta to try and stab him in the back. Once clearly hadn’t been enough for him.

  More bikers rushed through, fighting the second they flooded through the door. Fists flying into each other’s faces, boots kicking into ribs, hard wood smashing against backs—it was a brawl, plain and simple.

  There were seven Black Flags to their four Wrecking Crew. It wasn’t good odds.

  Ram liked that.

  Fists flying, knees hammering. He and Beretta rolled through the concrete and he smashed the traitor against the hard ground. The gas pump outside was near. He heard Ace and Mikhail duking it out with the Black Flags, the prospect roaring like mad, no shots fired yet. It wouldn’t be long. Ace and Mikhail were both packing, and no doubt the Black Flags were too.

  Ram didn’t carry a gun unless absolutely necessary. He was trouble enough on his own, most of the time.

  Beretta groaned on the ground. Blood spilled around his teeth and cheek where a cut had opened up. Ram pulled the nozzle from the gas pump and whacked him over the head with it. It made a hard, satisfying clang and thunk sound, opening up another gash on his head. Then, Ram sat down on his chest. The nozzle clanked against Beretta’s teeth—Ram wanted to drown the fucker in gasoline and set him on fire.

  Shots fired, bullets banging against the metal roof of the bar. Red and blue lights swarming in the dark of the night. The highway patrol, probably nearby to check the ID’s of the girls partying with the Black Flags.

  An old sting and an effective one if you weren’t careful.

  Intercom voices ordered the crowd of brawlers to stand down. Someone in the mess of outlaw bikers shot back at the cops, filling their newly-arrived cars with bullets. Ram saw blood—saw through the darkness one cop take one hard in the head, dead in an instant.

  Mikhail
shouted to him. “Ram, we gotta get out of here!”

  Ram roared with frustration, so close to killing Beretta, to ending the son of a bitch who might as well have killed his sister.

  And a good death, too, burned alive from the inside out. Too good for Beretta, but plenty painful all the same.

  No fuck, barely a fight, and not even a kill to speak of. His blood pounded, his cock still hard from the excitement in the bar.

  He got up, keeping himself level, and rushed back to his bike. Ace, next to him, started to swear.

  “Motherfuckers,” he growled. “They fucking took my bike?”

  “What?” said Mikhail. “When?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ram. “Get on!”

  Ace hopped onto the back of Ram’s bike, clearly unhappy. Ram was ready to murder every last cop and Black Flag on the scene. But there was too much heat on them already—and he had just started an all-out war with the Flags.

  They rode off into the night, leaving the mess—and the dead body—behind.

  Chapter 2

  June was lucky the diner was there. Her car started smoking just fifty miles out of Marlowe. It was packed full of her entire life, stuffed into the trunk in a series of tote bags and grocery sacks, some luggage, and a long crate that she only barely had room for. The rest was in the boxes strapped to the top of her small sedan with heavy rope.

  She knew how to tie knots. Her dad wouldn’t let her join any wilderness groups like she had wanted when she was a kid, but she did manage to tag along on all of her younger brother’s adventures in the Boy Scouts. From the bowline to the clove hitch to the sheet bend, she could do them all.

  She had a business idea (and she had dozens of business ideas) of opening a small shop for young women to let them learn how to do all the stuff that was normally relegated to boys. An hour would buy them time with knots. Two hours would fit in basic auto maintenance. Three hours would go on to cover power tools, and so on.

  Such a venture was borne, like much of her obsession with getting enough money to never go back to her home town again, from her need to be away from her father for a good long time. Maybe forever.

  For four years now, she had been independent of her father’s prying ways. After graduating high school, she set up base in Austin, where she studied English and Philosophy at the University of Texas. Her grades were good; the university had paid for everything.

  Now she was returning to Marlowe dead broke, fresh from a break-up, none of her internships or interviews panning out into a job, tail already between her legs—and now, of course, she would have to call her dad to come pick her up and save her skin. An inauspicious beginning for someone hoping to break free of her parents forever.

  June’s mother had been exultant when she heard the news of her only daughter’s return the day before when June made the call.

  “That’s wonderful! Your room is just as you left it. And, oh!” June could hear her rustling around on her desk in the kitchen. “I’ll call Paxton and let him know. Did you know he’s single? Son of the mayor and he’s single, isn’t that a shocker?”

  “Oh god, Mom…” the thought of dealing with that white bread cowboy sent a small shiver of revulsion through her. “No. Don’t even start.”

  Her mother quickly changed the subject, but all the same, June was fairly certain Paxton Prince was going to be expecting a date by the time she got home.

  She had not missed her mother very much, though more than she did her father. There was a lot about West Texas she had not missed, though it brought on a strange sense of nostalgia to see it about her now—the cactus patches on the side of the road, the deep brown flatness of the land, the long winding sky that went on past the curve of the horizon, wind mill farms positioned every few dozen miles and swallowing up the sky with their long rotating blades.

  It was familiar and friendly, yes, but that her mother expected her to want to settle down here forever was a bit beyond June’s comprehension. It would be like settling on the moon.

  After breaking up with Simon, June wasn’t entirely sold on the idea on another relationship for a while.

  It wasn’t that Simon had been awful. It might have been better if he was—then at least June would have a negative picture of everything she didn’t want in a relationship. But Simon was nice, caring, attentive, and cute—June just didn’t feel anything for him. The conversation of their break-up felt more like she was changing her checking account than changing her life.

  Worst of all, Simon seemed to feel the same way. Leaving June wasn’t anything to get excited about for him.

  Her life felt devoid of passion—and if she couldn’t get that passion from a guy who was on-paper as perfect as Simon, trying again felt like another long series of disappointments already.

  Especially with Paxton. Ick.

  June’s car continued to smoke and she pulled up into the diner. She thought she could see flames flying out from the hood. But she did not panic; panic got a person nowhere.

  At school, some of her friends had called her the Icewoman. She wasn’t an Ice Queen, that was for sure—she liked boys too much, and up until two months ago she’d had a regular boyfriend besides. But she could still be the Icewoman—the one who took a shovel to the snakes that slithered onto their driveway, or who cleared out the over-sized spiders that landed in their bathroom.

  Once she had forgotten to write a history essay, only finding out during class that it was due that day. She rushed back to her dorm, wrote the essay, and turned it in before class was over. The professor gave her an A. June had a way with words.

  When the car was safely out of the highway and into the diner parking lot, she stepped outside with a fire extinguisher in hand. The day was hot—hotter than it was supposed to be, even, pushing easily past a hundred and five. It was a dry heat and she could feel the moisture suck from her skin like she had walked under a giant vacuum.

  Quickly she had the hood covered in the CO2 mess spewing from the extinguisher. She breathed hard, her knees feeling a bit weak, but her actions were all nerves. From the trunk with all her things, she gathered up a rag and popped the hood. Heat and smoke powered up into her face, forcing her to step back. She sprayed the extinguisher again, knowing that probably it was doing something awful to the insides of her car.

  That was okay though. Just so long as it all stopped burning.

  After a few minutes the smoke cleared. The soupy sludge of the extinguisher hissed and chattered as it slipped down the engine chassis. She didn’t know a lot about cars, but it looked like something metal had melted. She knew enough to know that was bad.

  Her guess was the radiator, overheated from the day. Her father used to always prescribe driving during the hot Marlowe summers with an extra tank or two of water in the back. It had come in handy more than once for him. She had forgotten such things—had tried to forget a lot about her life in Marlowe. It was not a friendly place for her.

  A heavy-duty motorcycle pulled off the road just behind June and its rider walked toward her now.

  June had to stop and watch him approach. He was that sort of man. Tall, heavily built. He wore a tight black t-shirt, practically painted to the heavily chiseled body underneath. Long sexy lines and delicate shapes of ink decorated the steel-hard skin of his arms.

  She watched his pectorals shift, feeling something akin to hypnosis. A beard, dark and thick, was cut close under his chin. His gaze stared a hole right at June, and suddenly she felt under-dressed and overdressed, both.

  Under-dressed, because that kind of gaze made her feel close to naked. And overdressed, because that kind of gaze from that kind of man made her want to get naked. He was like sex incarnate, and she wasn’t sure if she could even survive a round with him in the bed.

  And part of her desperately wanted to find out.

  Her hair was long and chestnut and she pushed it to one side as he approached, suddenly not sure of how to approach the use of that fleshy thing between her teeth.
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  A tongue, was that what it was called? Words failed her, suddenly ending an alliance forged years and years ago when she’d picked up her first book of poetry at a swap meet.

  “Radiator’s shot,” he said, taking a cursory look at the damage. “That’s what you get for picking a foreign car.”

  She tried to compose herself and say something smart. “Who shoots a radiator?”

  Oh, yes, June. Very smart. Let him think you’re an idiot, let him put his guard down.

  He smiled, though, and took a long look at her, up and down. Appreciative, making a clear judgment in his head. There was a leather jacket vest in his hands, dark white and red patches on its surface. She couldn’t make any of them out.

  June found herself vainly hoping he liked what he saw. It was stupid—idiotic, really—she was a woman with a personality and a goddamn college degree. She was more than a long pair of legs in tight jeans and a pair of breasts in a slender shirt, more than a piece of meat. But there was something about this man’s vibe, something about his scent, that made her kind of want to be seen as a piece of meat.

  “I meant it got over-exerted. Probably from—”

  “From the heat, I know. I was joking. I’d been driving for six hours and hadn’t stopped. It’s my own fault.” Her clumsy reticence was quickly being replaced with clumsy babbling. “I should have brought some water, but there wasn’t room in the car with everything else. It’s my whole life in there, you know, and I just—well. I’m trying to set up in Marlowe for awhile, and I couldn’t leave anything behind, so—”

  “Marlowe?” he smiled. “Hell, that’s where I’m from, too. My name is Ram.”

  He held out a hand. It was big and covered in callouses, near twice the size of June’s. She took it, gripping firmly. June had spent a lot of time practicing her handshake on frat boys in Austin and she knew her handshake was easily their equal.

  It didn’t seem like it would be Ram’s equal—but then, he didn’t try to squeeze her fingers off like those idiots in Austin did.