Retribution: A Motorcycle Club Romance (2 page)

“Fuck, fuck…” she moaned with every thrust
of the Black Dog member that pushed ever deeper inside of her. Will lost
himself in the feel of his cock wrapped in her wet heat, in the feel of her
soft silk panties against him as he fucked her, at the sight of her writhing
underneath him, grasping at her own huge tits. He watched them move with his
thrusts and heard Tracy cry out when he bent to take a nipple in his mouth,
swirling his tongue around its sensitive nub.

“Fuck, I’m gonna come!” she whined.

Will felt her pussy contracting
around him with delicious pleasure. He wrapped his arms around her, grasping
her hair tight in his hand for leverage, and fucked her as hard as he could.
Tracy’s rhythmic moans became one long scream as she came around Will’s cock,
milking him to his own orgasm. He buried himself deep inside her as he came,
her face pressed hard against his shoulder, biting into him.

Will was lost in post-orgasmic haze
for a few moments. He could feel Tracy planting gentler, sweeter kisses on his
neck as his cock softened, still inside her. Once the bliss had passed, he
pulled himself out of her and stood up, heading for the bathroom. He threw out
the condom and gave himself a quick cleaning before he buttoned up his jeans
and came back into the room. Tracy lay as he had left her, stretched out on the
bed half-naked, her tits hanging out of her shirt. She gave him a lazy,
satisfied smile.

“Change these sheets, will you?” said
Will as he stood over her. He didn’t wait for an answer.

Ghost was back in the den, gathering
up a handful of beers for the crowd outside. He looked down the hall when Will
emerged and gave him a big, shit-eating grin. “Heard that!”

“Fuck you!” Will flipped him the bird
and didn’t stop walking.

“You don’t deserve it twice in one
day!” Ghost’s voice trailed him down the hall. Will only laughed and shut the
clubhouse door behind him.

He headed to his bike and got her
revved up before he looked at his watch again. Close enough to dinner time that
he might as well head out to the bakery. It’s not like his grandmother would
mind the early company, anyway. If he was lucky, he might be able to sneak a
piece of cake or some incredible pastry before dinner when she wasn’t looking.
His stomach rumbled at the thought.

Will maneuvered through LeBeau, the
streets buzzing with Friday night life, until he hit the highway and lay on the
throttle. The wind in his face felt freeing, relaxing. He chased the sunlight
around the curvy mountain pass until he hit the first exit for Howlett, and
then pulled his bike off the highway and into town. He could make this trip to
his grandmother’s bakery with his eyes closed, he’d been doing it for so long.
It had been almost seven years since his grandfather died, and since then, he
had helped his grandmother open her bakery in Howlett to keep her happy and
healthy without her husband around. And every Friday night, he made the trip
from LeBeau to sit at her table and eat her delicious homemade food, and talk
to her about books and old films while she played a Sarah Vaughan or Robert
Johnson album on the record player.

Will’s mother had been a troubled
woman, he was told. Smart, but her mind weighed on her happiness. She was too
lost to be a mother. His grandmother’s voice echoed in his mind:
One foot in
this world, one foot in the other.
She left Will with her parents when he
was an infant and never came back. They raised him as their own, and Will had
never wanted for anything. Sophia was as much his mother as anyone would ever
be, and he looked forward to their dinners all week.

As Will waited at a stoplight on Main
and Temple, he was pulled from his thoughts by the sound of sirens nearby. He
turned around on his bike to spot where they were coming from, ready to get out
of the way if he had to. A fire engine and two police cruisers came roaring up
Main, swerving around the line of cars and into the lanes of oncoming traffic,
stopping only long enough to clear the intersection before they rushed on. Will
followed as the light turned and traffic coasted on down the street. When he
turned onto Rowan Avenue and up the slight hilly incline toward Delphi Lane, he
could still see the flashing lights of the first responders up ahead, and tried
to hang back so as not to catch up with them.

His heart missed a beat when they
didn’t keep going up the hill, but made a fast right onto Delphi. Will twisted
his throttle and followed faster, watching as they passed a salvage yard, a few
bars and store fronts, houses just lighting up for the night. He looked up in
the dying light of the day and saw a huge pillar of black smoke soaring into
the sky. Every mile brought it closer and closer.

No. No. It’s not her.

Will lay on the throttle, mere
car-lengths behind the police cruiser now. They passed the John Deere dealer.
Miss Locusta’s music school. The historic Armstrong Manor, left over from the
18
^th
century.

It’s not her. It’s not.

The firetruck led the cruisers and
Will around the last wide bend his muscle memory knew so well. Brake lights lit
up as the first responders came to a halt, joining a cadre of emergency
vehicles already on the scene. Blue and red lights danced in the air, but they
were nothing compared to the hellish inferno blazing against the backdrop of
the mountains and the coming night. The entirety of the two-story building
where Sophia both worked and lived was consumed by the raging fire.

Will roared his bike around the EMS buses
and fire engines without pause. Men rushed in all directions, shouting orders
over the bellow of the four-alarm blaze. He could only stare at the fire like a
dumbstruck moth as he brought the bike to a sudden stop and stepped off,
letting it drop carelessly to the gravel as he stumbled away.

“No…
No!”
The sound of Will’s
scream carried, loud and long in its despair, as he fell hard to his knees in
the gravel.

Will screamed at the fire for what
seemed like an entire lifetime. He was still screaming when he felt alien hands
pulling at his chest and arms, trying to drag him away while he clawed instead
toward the fire, lost in delirium. He remembered feeling the intense,
unbearable heat on his face and chest before something sharp and small stabbed
into the muscle in his thigh, and the world went black around him.

~
ONE ~

Two Years Later

Eva had never been woken up by birds and the rustling
of trees before. Traffic accidents, domestic arguments, lights and sirens, sure—there
was even that morning when some insane raccoon was on her fire escape, clawing
at the windows like he had forgotten his key to the apartment. But to roll over
and feel the soft caress of early morning sunlight, and hear, well…
silence
…
almost made her wonder what she had been thinking, living all those years in
the noise.

She groaned and stretched her neck as
she pulled herself to sit on the edge of the bed. Her muscles were screaming
with new, strange aches from the old, lumpy mattress she had slept on. A glance
around the bedroom made her realize that a lot more than the mattress was going
to need to change, if she was going to stay here for long. The ugly, wood-slat
walls were bad enough, but Eva found herself creeped out by the collection of
porcelain figurines scattered around the room’s furnishings.

She thought she might say something
to Uncle Owen, but it would be tough to have that conversation without sounding
like a heartless monster.
Hey, Uncle Owen, I know you’re moving your beloved
wife to a care facility where she might die any day, but do you mind if I pack
up all her treasures and put them in a box somewhere?
Eva shook her head at
herself and rubbed the sleepiness from her face and eyes.

She and Charlie had only arrived
yesterday evening, so Eva had yet to unpack or really settle into her temporary
home. She dug through one of her bigger suitcases to scrounge out her
toiletries and went searching for the bathroom. The silent house told her
Charlie must still be asleep. She wasn’t surprised; it had been a long drive.

Once she got under a hot shower, Eva heaved
a sigh and realized that she was alone with her thoughts for the first time in
several weeks—since Owen had called, in fact. Her relatively boring life had
been suddenly interrupted by that one phone call.

Charlie and Eva hadn’t had much
interaction with Owen during their childhood; he married Eva’s mother’s sister
and moved her from the city out into the quiet country, where he worked manual
labor in some industry Eva couldn’t recall now. But several years ago, Owen had
gotten some big payout—an inheritance, maybe?—and quit the hard labor to open
his own bar. Things were fine until Aunt Geri fell ill, and just recently, the
doctors had told her it could be terminal.

Backed into a corner and in no
position to lose his only source of capital, Owen had called his sister’s kids,
desperate for help. He needed someone to run the bar while he took her to a
city with a larger medical facility, where Geri could have a chance at either
recovery, or a comfortable passing.

And just like that, Eva’s life had
taken a sharp left turn: now she was a barmaid, waking up in beautiful, quiet
places.

Lost under the comforting spray of
the hot shower, Eva jumped when she heard the sharp knocking on the flimsy
bathroom door.

“Yes?” she called out.

Charlie’s voice came muffled from the
hallway. “Hey, coffee’s on. I’ll be in the bar when you’re done.”

“Okay, thank you,” she said. Eva wiped
the water out of her face and pulled herself out of the daydream. She wrapped
up her shower a few minutes later and poured herself a cup of only slightly
burnt coffee in a well-loved mug decorated with kittens. She shook some of the
dampness out of her short, thin hair and felt the wet tendrils lay cold on her
jaw and neck.

Taking her coffee and heading out the
front door of the modest home, Eva smiled at the fairytale scene that greeted
her. Soft, spring-green forest surrounded the house, dappled with morning
sunlight. Trees swayed in the soft breeze as birds parlayed between them,
singing. The wind carried the scent of the wildflowers that grew in the small
meadow a dozen or so yards from the house. It felt like she had stepped into a
fantasy novel.

Charlie had said he’d be at the bar,
but instead, he came from around the side of the house carrying a small
hatchet. He saw her on the porch and gave her a nod. He wore what had been his
standard uniform for years, consisting of jeans, a brown belt, work boots, and
a plain white shirt, which he sometimes dressed up with a polo. His dark,
tussled hair reminded her of pictures of their father when he was young. And
like their father, Charlie loved work and almost nothing else. He kept the rest
of his life simple.

“This place is incredible,” she said
wistfully.

Charlie followed her gaze, gloved
hands on his hips. Whatever he had been doing this morning already had him
sweaty and breathing hard. He squinted, as if he was trying to find what it was
she was talking about. “Yeah, I guess. Kind of a dinky little house, though.”

“Not the house, necessarily, but the
land,” said Eva. “I’ve never been to a place like this.”

“You used to go to the park all the
time,” said Charlie, wiping his brow and pulling off his gloves.

“That’s different,” she said. “That’s
all manufactured. This is real.”

Charlie gave her that exasperated
smile that only brothers could give. He softly tapped her arm with the gloves.
“You read too many books. You gotta get out into the world. Then you won’t be
so amazed by shitty scrub forests.”

Eva gave him a glare and took a sip
of her coffee. “Oh, Christ. I’ve been out in the world. You make me sound like
a shut-in.”

“You kind of have been for a while,”
said Charlie. He rubbed the back of his neck, something Eva knew meant he was
only half-joking.

“Well,” she said. Her gaze fell to
her sandaled feet, suddenly feeling vulnerable. “There’s no reason to be a brat
about it.”

Charlie tilted his head and made a
soft noise, something painful. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,
sweetheart, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Around the same time Uncle Owen must
have been building his bar, Eva had gone through a transition of her own—she
finally left her neglectful husband of three years, a man who had charmed her
romantic side, only to become something much darker once she committed to him.
She became little more than his property, and although he never laid a hand on
her, he had damaged her, regardless. The years she’d spent married to him had
withered Eva’s spirits in ways she hadn’t known were possible.

But Charlie helped save her, as he
always had, big brother that he was. He helped her leave, and put her up in his
own apartment across town, where she could regain her footing.

Eva nodded quickly. “Look, I came out
here with you on purpose, for a reason, I know—to get out of my rut. I know
it’s time for me to get out of your place.”

“Hey, I’m not saying that—”

Eva put a hand up. “I know you’re
not, but you’re also my brother, which means you don’t have to. I can see it. I
mean for this place to make a difference.”

“I’m not trying to push you out, Eva.
I just worry about you. I know you’re not like me. You do better when you have
people around to be with. Having you around does make me feel less like an
insane workaholic, though.”

“But that’s exactly what you are,”
she said with a laugh.

“Well, you help me hide it.” He
dropped a kiss on top of her head. “C’mon, Owen should be here any minute. You ready
to become a bartender, or what?”

Eva shrugged with a laugh and
followed Charlie through the forest. “Guess that means I have to start drinking
more.”

Charlie gave her playful frown and a
laugh and led the way.

About five hundred feet from the house,
through the “scrub forest,” as Charlie had so lovingly called it, sat
Swashbuckler’s. Owen and Geri had purposely built a modest, relocatable home in
the back to allow them better access to their business, which is where Eva and
Charlie would now be residing while they did the same. As she waited for
Charlie to unlock the back door’s hefty padlock, Eva noticed the gravel parking
lot of the small dive bar was far bigger than logic would dictate. She reminded
herself to ask Owen about that.

The building itself was nearly brand new,
built from the ground up by Owen on an empty piece of land on the foothills
outside a town called Howlett. Eva had never heard of it before they got the
call from Owen, and had only first seen the twinkling of the tiny town’s lights
as she and Charlie had arrived in the dark yesterday. It was, by far, the
smallest place Eva had ever visited in her twenty-seven years. Three
generations of her family lived and died in the concrete jungle of Silverton
City, where she had always felt like a bee in a massive hive. Only through her
deep love of literature and stories had she visited places like this, small
towns where everyone knew everyone’s secrets and people didn’t lock their doors
at night. It felt a little like stepping into another world, complete with the
unusual feeling that always came with a visit to a new place—the feeling that
adventure could be around any corner. Part of her heart beat faster at that
idea; another part of it seemed to shrink in anxiety.

Charlie wrangled with the unfamiliar
locks until they finally gave, and led Eva into the back room of the bar. The
place had no extravagant kitchen, only the necessary washing equipment and
storage for inventory and other things. Most of the space had been devoted to
the barroom itself, which sat patient and empty, its neon signs dark. Only a
few small windows around the ceiling let in the sunlight, a design choice
obviously made on purpose. As she looked around at the pretty wooden bar, the
still-cushy stools, the line of shining vending machines in the far corner, Eva
wondered what it felt like to want to be in the dark all the time, like
Swashbuckler’s barflies clearly preferred. Even after Charlie hit the lights,
the place still felt dim.

One by one, Charlie walked by the
neon beer signs and yanked on their pull cords. He unlocked the front door as
Eva meandered behind the bar itself, running her hand on its polished surface.

“It’s not a bad-looking place,” she
said.

Charlie put his hands on his hips and
looked around. “No, not at all. At least it’s a new dive.”

“I’m not sure I’ve been in a dive of
any kind,” said Eva.

“You’d remember, if you had,” said
Charlie with a chuckle. “This place will look much different in twenty years.
Hell, in
ten
years.”

They began to check out the situation
behind the bar when they heard tires crunching in the gravel lot outside.
Footsteps came for the door not soon after. “Must be Owen,” said Charlie.

Eva looked at her watch. “At nine
a.m., I sure hope so. Otherwise, someone has a serious problem.”

The door to Swashbuckler’s squeaked
as it swung open. Fresh daylight blasted across the black-and-maroon patterned
laminate floor and sent dust scattering into the air. A man in his late fifties
stood a moment in the doorway, hands on either side of the frame, as he kicked
a bit of sticky mud from one of his boots. He entered and the door dropped
closed behind him.

“Now, that can’t be Eva,” said the
older man. He shook a finger at her with a smile. “I just won’t believe I’m
that old, no sir.”

Eva smiled at him. She tried hard to
mentally place him in some fond memory within the Murdock family, but she came
up empty. He stood tall, dressed in a faded but clean polo shirt and brown
jacket that seemed to come standard to every old man once they reached a
certain age. Brown hair that needed a trim shot out in all directions from
under a blue trucker hat decorated with the logo of what looked like a local
brewery. He had the wrinkled face of a basset hound, eyes a bit sad, even as
they shined when he smiled.

“Would that we could all be a little
younger,” said Eva.

Charlie walked out from around the
bar and greeted Owen with a hearty handshake. “Hi, Owen. It’s been a while.”

“It has, Charlie, it has!” said Owen
as he took the handshake. “I think you were still tearing around the alleys
doing your BMX stunts, the last time I saw you.”