RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance) (20 page)

A flash of exasperation ran through me, both at Cal for putting me in this embarrassing situation, and at the mountain of muscle standing in front of me. Fighting the urge to apologize, I willed myself to keep my voice steady and firm. “I can’t find the keys for it. My brother left it here for me to pick up, but the keys aren’t —“

“Why did he leave it here?” he interrupted me.

Jesus, what a jerk!
I fumed. Like I
wanted
to be there. “Damned if I know,” I retorted, my voice coming out clipped and irritated in spite of myself. “It’s not like I asked—“

“This is private property, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart
? Seriously? What kind of cro-magnon man was this, anyway? “It’s not like I’m
trying
to trespass,” I said sarcastically. “I just want to get my car, but—“

“You should tell your brother not to go leaving things where they don’t belong.”

“Look, you jerk, will you
stop
interrupting me?!” I fired back. I got out of the car and stood facing him. Well, maybe
facing
wasn’t the right word. He had at least eight inches on me, eye level for me was just above his chest. I stood up as straight as I could and tried to ignore the fact that that corner of his mouth had just turned up a little more. Smug asshole, I thought. I took a deep breath. “Look,” I began. “I am
trying
to get my car out of here. But my brother left it here, and I can’t find the key anywhere. So until I can figure out where it is, or get hold of him, I’m stuck here. I promise you, I will get off of your very special private property just as soon as I can.”

He stood there for a moment, not talking. I watched as his gaze wandered over me, sliding from my face downward, lingering on my breasts, then further down to my… oh, my… An electric thrill shot through me, and heat flooded my body. After what felt like an eternity, his eye came back up to my face and met mine. “I see. So, you’ve looked for the keys?”

“God…
Yes
, I’ve looked for them.” What kind of an idiot does this misogynistic jerk think I am, anyway? “What, do you think I’m just sitting her filing my nails or something?”

“Mind if I take a look?”

“Ugh,
fine
. Be my guest,” I huffed. I stepped back and let him by me, feeling the heat from his skin as he brushes close. I caught a whiff of his skin, and it smelled somehow…
impossibly
manly. But clean. Like soap and leather. It was intoxicating. I willed myself not to close my eyes and breathe in the scent of him.

He leaned into the car and checked under the mat, then above the visor. I smiled smugly. Then, looking to his left, he peered into the side pocket of the driver’s side door. Reaching in, he pulled out a jingling set of keys.

He turned and stepped close to me. “These what you’re looking for?” he asked, dangling them in front of my face with a lazy grin. He was only about a foot away from me now, and my face flushed hotter, partly from embarrassment that I hadn’t been able to find my own keys, and partly because I suddenly found myself wondering how the combination of his rough beard and his soft lips would feel between my legs.
Whoa
.

“Yes,” I said weakly. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” He grinned at me, a slow, lazy affair that spread across his handsome face, transforming the gruff, sexy biker’s expression like we were suddenly in bed together. He was clearly enjoying that he had found what I had insisted wasn’t there. Good god, he was infuriating. His gaze was boring into me, his face inches from mine now, sexy upturned lips taunting me. I bit my lip in embarrassment and looked down. He reached down with his other arm and grabbed my hand, bringing it close to him. My breath hitched at the unexpected contact. I looked up at him in confusion.

Without a word, he licked his lips slowly and dropped the keys in my hand, then closed my fingers over them. He stayed like that, his large fist around my small one, and I felt my breath grow shallow and my nipples harden with desire. I swallowed painfully and took a nervous step back, pulling my hand away from his.

His hand, now free, lifted to my face, pushing back a stray lock of my hair with a gesture that was so intimate I shivered. He drew closer to me then, and leaned in toward me until his breath was caressing my ear. “Your brother picked a mighty strange place to leave your car,” he said in a low growl, his voice grown thick. “Not exactly the safest part of town.” His voice dropped to a near-whisper that felt like it was singeing me from my insides out. “You like danger, honey?”

It felt like I was melting. Without even touching me, he was making me feel things that no man ever had. My lips parted involuntarily, my eyes fluttered shut for a moment. I cleared my throat and struggled to speak.

“I… he’s a prospect of the motorcycle club,” I stammered. “My brother. He… he took my car last night to do some club stuff and never brought it back, so he told me he’d leave it here.”

The man pulled back from me for a second. His eyes lost just a hint of their fire as his expression became quizzical. “Your brother’s a prospect here?” he asked, cocking his head slightly.

The drop in heat was so sudden I almost gasped. “Yes.” I drew myself uncertainly up to my full height, and tried to pretend I hadn’t just been in danger of bursting into flames. I swallowed again and looked him in the eye. “His name is Calvin Greenlee. Cal. Blond, tall — a little shorter than you. Good looking.”

“Cal Greenlee…” He frowned for a moment, as if trying to place the name. Suddenly, his expression changed “Greenlee?” he repeated. His tone had grown strange. Hard, all of a sudden. “Your name is Greenlee?” he asked, an edge to his voice. His eyes were boring into me now, in a way that almost frightened me. I couldn’t read his expression, but it was clear I had said something that upset him.

“Yes,” I said uncertainly, frowning. “Seton Greenlee.” I didn’t know if I should say more, so I just waited.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered under his breath. The heat of the intimate moment disappeared as quickly as it had come.

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. He took a step back, away from me. For a moment he refused to meet my eyes. “You should go. You’ve got your keys, you’ve got your car.” He looked up, and his expression had become guarded, distant. “I wouldn’t come back here again if I were you. This area of town isn’t full of white picket fences, if you know what I mean.”

And without another word, he started toward the clubhouse. I watched him, open-mouthed, as he reached the door, pulled it open, and went inside.

What the hell had just happened?

F
uck
. Fuck. Goddamn it.

There was something about her eyes. Those bright green eyes that looked right into your soul. I saw it as soon as she looked up at me, startled, her plump, pink lips parted like they were just dying to be kissed, crazy brown curls going everywhere… There was something about her eyes that pulled me in instantly.

I couldn’t believe I didn’t recognize her right away. Even after all these years.

When we get prospects, the whole point is that they don’t get recognized as anything other than prospects until they’ve proved themselves. Until then, they’re just “prospect”. Most of the time I don’t even know their names until someone ends up slapping them with a road name that fits, but by that time they’re either already patched in or just as good as.

So I had no idea that the one named Cal was fucking Calvin Greenlee. The son of the poor fucker my uncle Lawless shot because he was banging the poor fucker’s old lady and got caught.

And this girl was his goddamn sister.

She looked a hell of a lot different now. Her flashing were are the same, though, even though the look of agony was gone, replaced by something deeper, clearly honed by tragedy. You could see it in her expression, she wasn’t like the mostly mindless club whores that hung around us, their bodies there for the taking whenever we wanted. She had some class. And some fire. I chuckled to myself as I remembered the irritation on her face when I found the keys for her in the side pocket of her car door. No shrinking violet, this one.

I grabbed a beer from the bar and went back to my office to think. Closing the door behind me, I sat down in the swivel chair behind my desk and leaned back. I took a long, slow pull on the beer as my mind went back to my first sight of her bent over her car seat. Her tight little ass was cupped by those short shorts. Long, lean legs flexed as she bent into the search, and just the slightest shadow accentuated her inner thigh, making me imagine what would await me if I slipped a finger between the fabric and her soft skin to find the slick dampness of her.

Jesus
. I was instantly hard as a rock just thinking about it. I reached down and stroked myself once through my jeans. Those perky tits straining through that tiny T-shirt, with the nicest rack I’ve ever seen, as she stared up at me wide-eyed and defiant. All I could think about was what it would be like to pull her out of the car and press her up against it, letting my hands do whatever they damn well pleased as she moaned and writhed against me. Goddamn, I could practically taste her, practically feel her nipples hard against my tongue as I flicked and caressed them, driving her crazy, making her thrash. I’d pull those shorts down, not giving a fuck who saw us, and lift her up onto my straining cock, taking her right there against the car as she screamed and I emptied myself inside her.

Unable to hold myself back, I unzipped and freed my aching cock. Spreading my legs, I thrust myself into my waiting hand and stroked three, four times until I came hard with a loud grunt into the waste basket. I sat back, panting, and closed my eyes with a mixture of relief and guilt.

Not guilt because she was the sister of a prospect. Fuck that.

Guilt because my family destroyed hers.

I still remembered the look in her eyes that day as she stared up at me in the crowd, hunched over the bloody corpse of her father. I had never seen a look of such desperation, such absolute loss. How her eyes picked me out, of all the other people in the crowd, I didn’t know. I just knew that the look she gave me had haunted me for years. Shit, it still did from time to time. The memory of that day had stopped me from doing a few things that I might have done otherwise. As president of an MC, I couldn’t afford to let my emotions get involved in my decisions. But sometimes the memory of that little girl’s eyes had been something like a conscience to me. And a conscience is easier to lose than you might think.

It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body. Oh, at fifteen, I wasn’t a dupe about some of the stuff the Stone Kings got up to. But my dad had taken care to shield me from the worst of it until I was older, figuring I’d find out soon enough that being a member of an outlaw motorcycle club sometimes meant doing things that weren’t pleasant. I knew he always hoped I’d continue in his footsteps in the club. And hell, I could hardly imagine anything else. I’d grown up with the Stone Kings. They were my family: my uncles, brothers, cousins. Some of them were closer to me growing up than my own family was. But the day I saw my uncle Lawless kill Clayton Greenlee was the first time I’d ever thought to be ashamed of any of it.

My father, Jackson Stone, and my uncle Lucky Lawson founded the Stone Kings MC in the seventies, after my dad got back from Vietnam. Lucky was my mom’s brother, and the two of them were pretty tight back then. At the time, there weren’t that many motorcycle clubs in the area, so the MC’s main run-ins were with the law. Eventually, the MC established itself as a fixture in Lupine, and managed to establish a working relationship with local law enforcement to keep them off the back of the club. They started doing charity runs and other things for the community, and the folks of Lupine began to accept that the club was there to stay. There hadn’t been any serious brushes with the law in a while at the time of the murder. Not that the club hadn’t been doing shady shit, but the police had been more than willing to look the other way in exchange for the MC keeping its nose clean in public apart from the occasional bar brawl.

My uncle Lawless changed all that. Shooting a citizen in broad daylight in the middle of main street will do that. It turned out that he had been fucking Maggie Greenlee for a while, and she had somehow gotten the impression that it was more of a relationship than just sex. When Clayton Greenlee had confronted her, she had told him that she was in love with Lawless and that he was going to take her away from dusty Lupine to some better life where she wouldn’t have a drunken husband and three brats weighing her down. Clayton tracked down uncle Lawless to get his wife back, and the rest is history.

Lawless was lucky that the club had some ins with the local law enforcement. He ended up only serving three years in the state pen for Class Four felony homicide. Once he got out of prison, however, my dad and he had a falling out. Killing a member of a rival club over something like territory was one thing. But shooting a citizen over a non-club matter and making waves in the town was another. The club’s relationship with Lupine was cordial, and the club wanted to keep it that way.

Uncle Lawless moved to Reno not long after that, and started a chapter there. We hadn’t had a lot of contact with him since. He came up to Lupine when my dad died of heart failure three years ago, but that was the last time I’d seen him. That was probably better, as far as I was concerned. When my dad got sick, he warned me that Lawless might try to come back to the club once he was gone.

“Not everyone in the club remembers Lawless,” Dad wheezed, struggling for breath without the tubes he kept pulling out of his nose in the hospital. “He’s family, but he does what he wants. He hears I’m not the president anymore, he may try to come back, take over.” Luckily, that hadn’t happened, but it had stuck with me that my father didn’t trust him. Jackson Stone was a man of few words, so when he spoke, you listened.

I was getting sick of turning all of this past history over in my head. I grunted in frustration and got up to pace. Why the fuck would a boy whose father was killed by a Stone King want to prospect with us, anyway? Goddamnit, I didn’t want to know who Cal Greenlee was. I didn’t want the responsibility of caring about him. I didn’t want the temptation to give him special treatment because my uncle had killed his father. Or because his sister made me want to put her in my bed and fuck her senseless.

Fuck this
.

I went to the door and exited the office. I needed to get outside, clear my head a bit. I wandered through the bar and out the side door to the clubhouse, then out to the back lot. Winger and Levi and a couple of the prospects were in the back by the pool tables. The one Trig had called Frankenstein was getting his ass handed to him by Levi, our Sergeant at Arms, in a game of eight ball. The other prospect, Cal, had one of the club whores named Tawny on his lap and his tongue about halfway down her throat.

“Hey, Winger,” I called out. He grabbed the bottle of beer he was nursing and lumbered over to join me. Winger was a big, bald barrel of a man with a ZZ Top beard and a deep, rumbling voice that sounded like a Harley engine and scared the shit out of children and old ladies.

“Yeah, boss?” he grunted.

“The prospects look like they’re havin’ a little too much fun. My bike could use a wash.”

He grinned. “Mine, too. Hey, prospects!” he bellowed. Frankenstein looked up from the table, cue stick in hand. Cal momentarily stopped feeling up the club whore. “Go grab some buckets. Time to wash the club’s bikes.”

Frankenstein simply nodded, put away the stick and walked off toward the garage. Cal seemed a little less thrilled by the idea, but he gave one of Tawny’s tits a final squeeze, slapped her on the ass as she got up, and made his way over to us with a swagger.

“Sure thing, Winger,” he grinned. “Where you want us to start?”

We turned and walked out toward the parking lot, Cal following at a close clip.

“You’ll start with the prez’s bike, over there,” Winger said, pointing to my Dyna Super Glide.

Cal’s eyes grew wide as he looked over at it. “Okay,” he said, suddenly turning serious. I chuckled to myself. At that age, I would have had stars in my eyes looking at that bike, too. Hell, I still felt a surge of love and pride every time I got on the thing.

“And don’t fuck it up,” I growled, pointing a finger him. “I see one scratch on that thing when you’re done, and you’re dead meat.”

Cal nodded, his cocky grin disappearing. “Sure thing, sir. I promise, you won’t recognize it when I’m done.”

“I better fucking recognize it,” I spat.

“No, I meant—“

“Yeah, I got it,” I cut him off. “Just fuckin’ with you. Just shut up and wash my bike.”

Cal broke into a raucous laugh, but then cut it off abruptly. “Seriously, though, sir. I won’t let you down.” He looked back over at my bike admiringly. “I’ve always wanted a bike like yours.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I stood there for a moment, and cocked my head as I gave him a good stare. Generally speaking, I didn’t have much use for prospects until they’d proven themselves, but I was curious about this one in spite of myself. “You got yourself a bike yet?” I barked at him.

He nodded. “That one over there,” he pointed to the far end of the parking lot. “Just got her a couple days ago,” he added with pride.

I looked over at an ancient Fat Boy that he indicated. Stifling a grin, I said, “That right?”

“Yeah. I mean,” he added, “It needs some work, and everything. But I’ll get her runnin’ like a top. She’s got great bones.”

“Looks to me like she’s pretty big for a little shit like you.”

“No, no, I can handle her just fine!” Unconsciously, Cal drew himself up to his full six feet.

I nodded soberly, suppressing the grin that was tugging at my mouth. “Good to hear it.” Changing the subject, I took a couple of steps closer to him. “There was an old Mazda beater in the bar parking lot earlier today. A girl came to get it. Said you’d left it there for her.”

“Yeah, that’s my sister, Seton.” he replied. “I borrowed her car last night for that run Winger sent us on.”

“How come she came here to get it?” I asked, frowning.

He shrugged. “I was supposed to pick her up after she got off work last night — she bartends at the Cactus downtown — but the run went later than we thought, so I told her to pick it up here.”

I frowned. “You took her car and you were supposed to pick her up, but you made her come all the way out here to get it? How’d she get here?”

Cal colored. “I, uh, dunno. I guess probably one of her friends drove her here.”

A sudden wave of rage coursed through me, and I barely resisted the sudden urge to beat the shit out of the little punk. “That’s a fucking shitty thing to do to your sister, Prospect. To any woman. This place isn’t exactly the right side of the tracks.”

“I’m sorry—“ he began, but I cut him off. A few feet away, Winger cocked his head and looked at me with curiosity.

“You do not treat family that way.” I growled, my voice rising with my anger. “You got that? You don’t treat family that way. Ever.” I took another step toward Cal, making sure he was very aware of the four inches I had on him. I grabbed him by the collar of his T-shirt and twisted, drawing him closer until his face was inches from mine. “This club? It’s a family. These are my brothers. You never,
never
, let family down.
Nobody
becomes a Stone King who doesn’t get that.”

“Shit, you’re right,” he stammered. “I’m sorry. Really. I promise. It won’t happen again.” Cal backed away, raising his hands apologetically.

“You’re fucking right, it won’t,” I said through gritted teeth. Releasing him with a push that sent him stumbling backward, I turned and walked away before I lost control. Any other prospect, I might have punched his fucking face in for less.

Then again, any other prospect and I might not have been so fucking mad that he ditched his sister.

Later on, when Cal had washed and waxed my bike to a gleaming shine, I went to find Trigger and told him I was taking off for a while. I tried to tell myself I was just going for a ride.

But I knew better. I knew I was going by the Cactus Bar to see if her car was there.

It wasn’t.

But even though I tried to tell myself otherwise, I knew I’d be back.