Justice: Night Horses MC (3 page)

JESSE

The young man stared at the girl’s retreating figure with a grin. If his momma knew what he was thinking about her, she’d have boxed his ears with a newspaper.

Not that that had ever stopped him before...

He watched the lights of his mother's car fade into the distance. He'd offered, a few times, to buy her a better one, but she'd told him no. She said that she wasn't going to try to stop him, make him go straight, but she sure as hell wasn't going to act like it was okay.

So, his mother drove an old crackerjack box on wheels while his bike alone cost over ten grand.

He hated that, but he hated even more that she wouldn't let him give her a nice little stipend, enough that she didn't have to work the night shift any more.

It would have been a bit of a squeeze for him, but not too bad, and if he wanted to he could always work a little more.

He sighed, and turned back to the desk.

Something about the girl she'd brought in had captivated him. Not just that fine ass encased in jeans - something about her face. Her eyes.

She looked so sad, so frightened.

It had made him want to pull her into her arms, stroke that flaming red hair, whisper that everything was going to be all right.

It made him want to protect her.

----------------------------------------------------------

ALLIE

After a night of restless sleep, Allie crept out of her motel room at ten in the morning. She'd agonized for a while about whether it was riskier to leave the money in the motel where it might get stolen, or take it with her where it might get stolen.

With half of her money in her wallet and half hidden in the dresser, she headed downtown, carrying her sketchbook, pencils sticking out of the pocket of her dirty jeans.

Now that it was light out, she could find the popular areas easily. It wasn't far.

She chose a spot by a cafe that looked popular, and sat on a low brick wall, watching the people go by, making them come alive on her page with quick movements.

A little girl passing tugged on her mother's hand and pointed at Allie, who grinned back at her.

"I'll draw your picture if your mother lets me," she said.

The mother eyed her, cheerful and tolerant.

"How much?" she asked.

"Five bucks," Allie said.

The woman nodded, and Allie went to work.

"What's your favorite color?" she asked, when she was almost finished.

"Pink!" the girl said, so loudly that it made other people walking by stare.

The little girl's joy with the sketch of her as a princess, shaded with one of the few colored pencils Allie had brought was the best advertising she could have gotten.

More parents stopped by with their children as the line formed. Eventually, she closed her sketchbook as the last kid walked away.

She'd made a little over sixty bucks in a few hours.

Not too bad at all.

"How much to draw me?" a guy's voice asked. She knew she'd heard it before, and she turned to see the hotel desk clerk.

"Free," she said with a grin. "Hold still."

He obeyed, striking a ridiculous pose, lips out, muscles flexed.

She eyed him, getting down a few of her favorite parts of the ridiculous way he looked.

"Lovely," she said at last, showing him a caricature she'd sketched on the back of another sheet. He reached out for it and she yanked her book back with a grin.

"Free to sketch," she said. "If you want to keep it, you have to pay."

"That's how they getcha," he said, nodding solemnly. "My name’s Jesse. You new in town?"

She nodded.

"Had lunch yet?"

"I haven't even had breakfast," she confessed.

"Come on, man, you've gotta have breakfast," he said. "What the hell would you do without breakfast?

She wavered, and then relented when he offered to sit with her at the cafe she’d been in front of.

He bought her a scone and a coffee, and she devoured them.

Might be nice, if I kept getting all my meals paid for
, she thought, before scolding herself. If she did that, eventually someone would want more than she wanted to give.

She had to be careful.

“Will you thank your mother for me?” she asked, after a pleasant hour in his company.

“Sure thing,” he said. “Why’d she bring you? Didn’t get a chance to ask.”

Allie winced.

“I got off the bus in the middle of the night,” she said. “A guy showed me to a diner, wanted to walk me to a hotel… Your mother didn’t seem to like that idea.”

“Damn right,” Jesse said. “Some of the pimps around here watch the station, try and find pretty girls to… uh. To hire.”

The redheaded girl shivered, thinking of the man’s hands on her last night, and changed the subject.

----------------------------------------------------------

DANIEL

Fuck, he hated busybody waitresses.

The blond man paced back and forth in his bedroom, not looking at his bed. He wasn’t wearing a stitch.

Couldn’t take girls to Kay’s Waffles any more, had to find somewhere new, because one middle-aged bitch couldn’t keep her nose out of his business.

That girl would have been goddamn perfect, too.

He took a moment to think of her on her knees, naked, mouth open and ready for him.

Breaking a new girl in was the best part of this shitty job, and he hadn’t had a redhead, a fresh one, in so long.

He stopped and turned abruptly, marching over to the bed.

“Suck me,” he ordered the girl on the bed.

Her eyes had been following him with fear, and she moved over to where he stood so quickly that she knocked a pillow off the bed.

The girl was flinching even before the blow struck.

As she shook herself and got to work, he shut his eyes and pictured the pretty redhead.

If she stayed in town, he would have her.

He would have her.

----------------------------------------------------------

ALLIE

It didn’t take Allie long to get settled in to a routine.

She knew she should probably find an apartment if she was going to stick around in this city, but the motel was fairly clean and cheap and she was having decent luck at earning her fifty bucks a day from her drawing of the tourists.

The families with kids, in particular, seemed to tip well if she made their kids happy - and drawings of themselves as princesses and superheroes always made their kids happy.

When she wasn’t drawing, she bought cheap meals at the coffee shop or the diner, or stopped at the grocery store for bread, cheese, peanut butter… she’d never eaten that well in her life.

She wasn’t saving up any money, but it was warm, she had a place to sleep, all the food she could eat, and new art supplies.

Life was pretty damn good.

Sure, she sometimes woke up in a cold sweat from nightmares where she was shoved against walls, pinned to the ground, stripped, groped, humiliated… but not many nights, and she was no stranger to nightmares.

----------------------------------------------------------

Allie put the finishing color - yellow, this time - on a princess dress and handed it to the little girl, who spun in a circle and clutched it to herself, she was so happy.

The parents paid her in cash with grateful smiles and she put her sketchbook in her bag, carefully looking around anywhere but at the clock on the next building.

She didn’t have long to wait.

“Hey, hot stuff,” Jesse said.

“Hey, yourself,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him.

“You free for a walk?” he asked.

“I guess,” she said, with a careful air of indifference. “I can always come back here tomorrow.”

His smile warmed her heart as she headed away from her drawing spot. His long legs could keep up with her easily even when she walked quickly.

Her new shirt rode up a little when she stopped and picked up an old beer bottle, tossing it into a nearby trashcan.

“What are you looking at?” she asked him.

“Cute tat,” he said. “I didn’t know you were inked.”

She laughed out loud.

“Inked? It was my job. I have more tattoos than that,” she said.

“Wait, you do? You did? Is that one of your designs? Can I see it again?” he asked, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and staring at her, his voice rising with excitement.

Allie shrugged. She didn’t see the harm, so she lifted her shirt an inch or so, letting him see the floral tattoo on her hipbone.

“I did that one myself,” she said. “Drew it and inked it. It was one of my first.”

“Damn,” he said. “If that’s one of your first, you must be amazing.”

“I’m good,” she said. “No one’s been unhappy with my work. They’ve been unhappy with their choices, but that’s not my fucking fault.”

“Shit, no, that’s on them,” he agreed.

“You like ink?” she asked. “Why didn’t you say so?”

“I dunno,” he said, with a shrug. “I guess it just never came up. We’ve been too busy talking about dogs and shit.”

“I guess we should do a better job at getting to know each other,” he said.

He stuck out his hand to her, pompous and puffed-up.

“I’m Jesse McGill,” he said. “I’ve lived here my whole life. My momma’s a waitress and my daddy’s a shithead. I run with the Black’s Raiders and my Harley is my life.”

She shook his offered hand, too heartily.

“I’m Allison Murray,” she said. “I’ve been here for, like, three weeks. My mom’s dead and my dad’s a shithead. I don’t run with anybody and my art is my life.”

“Good, good,” he said. “Now that we’ve gotten that straightened out, let’s get some fucking lunch.”

----------------------------------------------------------

JESSE

Allie was a tattoo artist.

Completely fucking perfect,
he thought with a grin behind his helmet as he roared down the street on his Harley.

She’d been surprised to find out that he wasn’t really a hotel clerk, he just took over a friend’s shift as a favor.

He’d been afraid then that she would run screaming to find out that he was in a biker gang, but she’d just shrugged and accepted it. She’d still let him come walk her back to the hotel from downtown.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized she was inked.

As soon as he got to the bar, he scanned the room and headed straight for a table in the back.

“Merle,” he said. “Allie does good ink. Her own designs, too. She let me have this.”

Jesse thrust a torn page from a sketchbook in front of his leader, showing him the intricate skulls and daggers that covered the paper.

“We can hire her,” he said. “Then, those assholes wouldn’t dare touch her.”

“You must be completely smitten with this beautiful belle, if it did not occur to you that perhaps we were already in the middle of a private conversation,” another man drawled.

“Come on, Alex,” Jesse groaned. “I’m sorry I was an asshole, stop throwing the dictionary at me.”

“You do sound like you swallowed a dictionary,” the last man in the booth said.

All three men were older than Jesse, all in their twenties.

Merle was lean and dark, with an air of command and danger like a cloak. Alex was shorter and oozed charm, and the third man had a blond ponytail and bright eyes.

The dark-haired man took the sheet of paper from Jesse without a word and studied it as the other men in the booth bickered.

“It’s good,” he said, finally. “You sure she needs protection?”

“My momma said that she was having dinner with that asshole Daniel at three o’clock in the morning, and he tried to show her a nice, safe motel,” Jesse said, his eyes hard.

Merle slid further into the booth and patted the space he’d made.

“Okay,” he said. “We can offer her a job, but if she wants to go run with a pimp, I’m not going to stop her.”

“She doesn’t!” Jesse exclaimed. “She’s sweet.”

“Some sweet girls still want the money,” the blond said, his voice hard to hear over the hubub of the bar.

Jesse glared at him.

“She’s not that kind of girl,” he insisted.

“We believe you,” Merle said. “Calm down and have a drink.”

----------------------------------------------------------