Dead Men Motorcycle Club (8 page)

My orgasm spurred him forward and I knew he couldn't hold on much longer. As if on cue, he tightened his grip on my body and his thrusts became frantic and quick. He pounded me with the speed and precision of a well-tuned piston, my whole body shaking and reacting to every impact. He groaned loudly and I felt the way he exploded inside me, his cum flooding into me in great bursts. He continued his thrusts, but slowly, riding his own wave of pleasure and pushing more and more of his manly cum into me.

His thrusts slowed and he released his grip from my body, allowing himself
to pull away and both of us to catch our breath. I was still bent over the low table, my ass thrust in the air and I could feel the way his fluid was already dripping from between my legs. I let myself live in that moment of afterglow for a time,
breathing deeply and savoring the feeling of the first time.

I pushed myself up from the table and turned. He was standing close by and without a word he pulled me close to him again for another long kiss. His touch felt more delicate, or
maybe it was just that he had expended all of his energy moments ago. Whatever the case, we embraced softly and let our bodies express what our voices hadn't yet managed. I knew in an instant that this man, as rough and as dangerous as he might be, was more than just a sweet face and a gorgeous body. I knew that what we'd just done was more than just a brief fling to let our lust off the leash for a while. The attraction between us had been visible even to other people that saw us together - who were we to deny it in ourselves?

We reluctantly got dressed, and I made sure to give him one last lingering look as he pulled his pants back up his legs. He let out a short laugh when he noticed.

"What?" I asked with a smirk, "A girl can't save a mental image for later?"

He grinned at me and tossed me my shirt from the countertop. He had the same lingering look for me as I covered myself up again. I was sure that he was sad to see my body disappear, even if it was just beneath jeans and a t-shirt. It was a certainty that we'd be seeing each other again soon and both of us knew it, even without saying it aloud
.

I helped him put his own shirt on, being careful not to twist and stretch his shoulder too much in the process. Then I handed him his vest and he slipped it over his shoulders
. I touched the leather and felt the hole where the bullet had gone through.

"Are you going to fix this?" I asked him.

"I'm not sure yet. The cut has seen plenty of tough times, and I think it adds character. What do you think?"

"Hmm," I mused, "I think you should keep it. You can remember that if it wasn't for that bullet, we might never have gotten together."

That made him laugh
again. It was silly to contemplate, really. That bullet may have brought us together today, but knowing the feelings we each had for one another, it suddenly seemed impossible that we wouldn't ever have acted on them. I was simply glad that it hadn't taken as long as all that. Now that I was free to express my feelings for him, I felt like layers of repression were disappearing from me. Anxiety and self-doubt vanished and were replaced by warm feelings and memories of passion that couldn't be contained.

Cash got his boots on and we stepped out in
to the bar room together. Half a dozen Dead Men, along with Karen, were sitting around the bar room. When they saw us, a few raised their glasses and gave out a loud cheer. I blushed instantly, knowing that their cheer
was for more than just Cash's survival. We walked to the bar together with the smiles and grins of the assembled crew all upon us.

He stepped behind the bar to get us some drinks and I sat on a stool next to Karen who was sipping at a vodka sunrise. She smiled at me and shook her head in bemusement.

"You're not great at following advice are you, Emma?" she said with a sly grin.

I grinned back at her and shrugged. "Some better advice came along," I told her with a wink.

She put her arm around me and gave me a quick squeeze.

"Welcome to the family," she said, and the smile that appeared on my face didn't fade for hours.

I carefully closed the hood of the BMW. It wasn't often that I got to work on a car of this quality. Even back home, my dad's shop was rarely graced by luxury cars. Sometimes we'd see something second hand that reeked of cigarettes and spilled beer, but luxury was a word that was never quite within the grasp of our regular customers. Out here in San Viero, things were much the same. Even though the town had all the perks of modern convenience, some things were still very traditional here. The sheriff was a tall, hard man with a bad attitude that wouldn't have been out of place in a spaghetti western. The waitresses were so uniformly sassy that you might think they'd been selected by one of the casting agencies down in Hollywood. And, of course, the richest man in the town of San Viero was the mayor. In big cities, the richest people often stay out of politics - at least directly. In a small town it's just the opposite. When you own half the town on paper, you might as well have another piece of paper saying that you have the hearts and minds of the other half behind you. And yet, here in this place, even the mayor drives a truck.

The BMW belonged to a man named Reginald Donnovan
. It was the kind of name that reeked of old money. He'd driven up from whatever seaside villa he owned to speak with Cash. At first I was confused as to why someone with that kind of money and influence would want to talk to the leader of a small town bike gang. Cash had pretended not to have a theory on that
himself
, but I could tell he was holding back. He told me that the guy probably just wanted to have a weekend adventure on a motorcycle, and that he didn't really know what the Dead Men were all about. At first that seemed like a reasonable explanation, but after seeing him for only a few seconds I began to doubt it completely.

Donnovan
was somewhere in the clubhouse talking to Cash as I finished up with the car. They'd been inside for more than half an hour, now. Cash had offered to have his mechanics look over
Donnovan's
car while they talked, and the job fell to me. Of course, there was nothing wrong with the car at all. It was in pristine condition. It had more than fifty thousand miles on it, but might have driven off the showroom floor ten minutes before he got here. I was sure that wherever he'd come from, this rich man had his own personal mechanic to keep his vehicles in perfect working order. He'd accepted Cash's offer because it would have been an insult to say that his mechanics weren't good enough to look at his car.

It was a slow morning and, aside from the BMW, there wasn't much to do around Peasant Motors. I wiped the small amount of grime I'd accumulated in my inspection off on a rag and walked over to Karen's office. She was sitting at her desk, crunching numbers on a calculator.

"So what does that guy want with Cash, anyway?" I asked her.

She looked up,
just then noticing that I'd entered the room. She had a pencil gripped between her teeth, which she set down on the desk while considering me carefully.

"And don't say he's looking for a joyride. I didn't believe it from Cash and I won't believe it from you," I added.

She nodded, as if I'd just proven that I was enough in the know to get the real story, which she might otherwise have kept quiet. I'd learned in my short time here in San Viero that Karen almost always had the real story. How she came across the bits of information she gathered, I was never sure. Some of it was that the Dead Men often confided in her. I was sure she had other townsfolk gossiping to her as well. I strongly suspected that many of the things she claimed to know were just deductions that always proved to be right.

"It's about the mayor," she said, idly spinning the chewed pencil on her desk. "Or rather, it's about San Viero. I think
Donnovan wants it."

"What? He wants the whole town?" I asked, still not quite used to the concept of people who were able to purchase entire towns and towns that were small enough to be purchased in such a way.

"It's hardly a secret that the Dead Men are the real muscle in San Viero. You can figure that out with an internet search," she said, "The only reason a guy like
Donnovan would make Cash his first stop in town is if he wanted to hire that muscle en masse."

It all started to make sense. San Viero was far enough from the next big city that it wasn't part of any major metropolitan area, but that wouldn't last forever. The way things were going, every small town on the coast of Southern California would be caught in the gravitational pull of one metropolis or another soon enough. When a town got swallowed up by a larger city, there was an explosion of business. Reginald
Donnovan was heading off the efforts, and he probably stood to make a small fortune off of our little community when the developers became interested - assuming that he controlled the town when they got here.

I nodded at Karen, and she went back to her calculations. She and I had developed a strange sort of friendship. There was trust between us, certainly, but it was tempered by the knowledge that I'd ignored the first piece of advice she'd given me. Still, I was a capable mechanic and my relationship with Cash was enough to ensure that I was always part of the big picture here at Peasant Motors. Karen clearly had a protective impulse towards Cash, though he hardly required her protection. I knew that no matter how close the two of us got, Karen would always
worry over her nephew's well being.

I walked out into the lot and admired the sky for a moment. It was late afternoon, and there wasn't a cloud in sight. Back home it was probably snowing, but here in San Viero, it was a beautiful day nine times out of ten. I heard the door to the clubhouse opening and turned my attention towards it.

Cash and Reginald Donnovan
stepped through, talking in low tones.
Donnovan
had a small smile on his face that suggested he'd gotten what he came for. Cash looked, as he often did when talking with people outside the family
, calm and emotionless. He never gave these people an inch when it came to emotion. Somewhere along the way he'd learned that the best way to deal with strangers was to stay calm at all times. That was just part of his mystery, I suppose. Once you got close, he was exuberant, loud and passionate. From a distance he might have been a sphinx - always mysterious and carved out of stone.

"Everything where it ought to be?" Donnovan
said to me as they walked towards me.

"Absolutely.
That's a beautiful car you've got there," I told him. I could see Cash smiling at me over
Donnovan's
shoulder. I was sure it was the first smile he'd cracked in the man's presence, and that if he'd turned around, Cash would've hidden it away immediately. Still, he couldn't help but feel proud of me. It meant a lot that I would be the one to look at
Donnovan's
car, even if there was no real work to do. Though Zach and Vickers would be the last to admit it, everyone had come to recognize that I was the most talented mechanic on the lot. The first time I'd brought a car back from the brink - the kind of engine Zach called "dead on arrival" - and made it sing again, that was when they realized I was more than just another pretty face. Of course, in that garage, I was pretty much the
only
pretty face.

"Glad to hear it," Donnovan
said, taking the keys from me. He turned back to Cash, whose face predictably went back to stone the second he turned. I had to smile when I saw that, happy with how well I knew my man. "I'll call you next week. Until then, just keep your eyes open and let me know, alright?"

"Will do," Cash told him, offering his hand for a shake.

After a quick wave into the business office to Karen, Donnovan
drove his luxury car off the lot and out of our lives for the moment. Cash and I stood in the lot, watching him go.

"So, you gonna tell me what that was all about?" I asked him playfully.

"He wants us to make Taylor squirm. Says he wants
the mayor to decide that San Viero's
not worth the effort so he can buy it up," he said.
Just as Karen had predicted.
I swear
, that woman could give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money, some days.

"And, you're going to do business with him?"

"Yeah," he said, "He makes a convincing argument. At first I was worried about dealing with another rich asshole, but if it's not him it's Taylor. We may as well back the richer one and make a bit of profit off of it."

I couldn't fault his reasoning there.
Donnovan
seemed friendly enough, and from my limited dealings with Taylor, he was every bit the prickly old man who didn't think very highly of leather-clad bikers - or the women they loved. I also knew that a man like
Donnovan
wouldn't give up a project like San Viero just because a local bike gang had refused him. If Cash had said no, he would have gone down the road to the Trenchers or one of the other gangs and maybe tried to force the Dead Men out before putting his plans into motion. Better to get on the winning side early.

The intricacies of the MC life were opening to me more, every day. When I'd arrived in San Viero, I thought it was mostly about riding around, looking cool and drinking with your friends. That was all a part of the life, of course, but it was a business too. Every minute of every day, Cash and his boys were fighting for the scrap of freedom they'd secured for themselves. Sometimes that meant literal fighting with those who would take this place from them if given half a chance. Sometimes it meant getting into bed with a man like
Donnovan
who could steal their piece of the world with the stroke of a pen.