RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance) (51 page)

J
esus Christ
, what a crush of people.

It was nine p.m. on Saturday at Hammie’s Bar in Lupine, and already, the place was jumping. The space was lined wall to wall with students from the local college, townies, and just normal folks. You could barely fuckin’ hear yourself think. Normally, this wasn’t my scene, and I probably wouldn’t be anywhere near Hammie’s on a weekend, but tonight I was here at the request of my sister, Seton. Her best friend Andi Wagner was playing a big gig here with her band, The Nopes.

I’d been to Hammie’s a handful of times in the past, but usually I was on club business when I did show up. Like a lot of local businesses in town, Hammie’s was under protection from the motorcycle club I belonged to, the Stone Kings MC. The need for protection was a fact that most people in town probably didn’t know anything about. Hell, I didn’t know myself until I started out as a prospect with the Stone Kings a couple of years ago.

One of my first duties early on had been to run errands and shit connected with the protection of some of these places. Not long after I’d started with the Stone Kings, we’d had to run a street gang out of the community. The gang, called the Ravagers, was a bunch of punk-asses out of Denver. Apparently a guy who was originally from here in Lupine went up there, joined the Ravagers, and then brought their bullshit back down here a few years later, along with a drug trade that was mostly targeted at kids. Ever since, any business around here that catered to young people was a target for exploitation from the gang.

The Stone Kings, ever conscious of keeping our reputation as upholders of law and order intact — not to mention keeping the locals looking the other way from our own shadier activities — had generously begun providing protection to local businesses, in exchange for financial or other remuneration. And for the last year or so, the Ravagers had been pretty much a non-issue in Lupine.

Checking out the crowd, I noticed the bar owner, Angus North, from across the room. His bald pate was just barely visible in the sea of heads. Angus gave me a slight nod and a wave. I lifted my chin at him in greeting, and scanned the room for my sister. Finally, I spied Seton sitting at one of the few tables over to one side of the stage. It was such a prime spot it had to have been reserved for her by Andi and the band. I pushed through the crush of people and made my way over just as the stage lights went on and a warm-up act walked out.

“Hey, See!” I greeted my sister, putting an arm around her in a brief hug. “How’s it going?”

“Good!” she yelled above the din. “Crazy crowd, huh?”

“Yeah, looks like they packed ‘em in tonight.” Seton was sitting with another girl, Carly, who used to be her roommate, and Cherish, who was the old lady of Levi Wolff, our Sergeant at Arms. I nodded at the two of them, and they waved and smiled back. Seton herself was married to the president of our club, Grey Stone. It had been a little weird for me when they first got together, and they had hidden it for a while, but now seeing the two them together seemed as natural as anything.

Sitting across the table from Seton was Trig, the Stone Kings’ VP, and his woman Evie. Trig briefly nodded toward me in greeting, then went back to murmuring things in Evie’s ear that made her blush and laugh. The two of them were kind of still in that fuckin’ disgusting honeymoon phase, and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Catching Trig’s eye, I shook my head in mock disbelief. He frowned for a moment, then shrugged and laughed it off.

Turning to my sister, I tried to distract myself from the scene. “Hey, is Grey showing up?” I asked her as I slid into one an empty seat next to her.

“I don’t know,” Seton said. She took a sip of her beverage, which I was assuming was a Coke. After over a year of trying, Seton had recently found out she was pregnant — with twins, no less — and she and Grey were over the goddamn moon about it. “He said he’d try to show up later.”

I nodded. I knew Grey had gone out of town on club business, to meet with a chapter of the Stone Kings out in Las Cruces. He was supposed to be back today, but I hadn’t seen him at the club when I left there.

Just then, someone clapped me hard on the back. I turned around to find Levi standing there, giving me a rare, wide grin. “Hey, brother,” he shouted above the din. “Didn’t know you were showing up for this.”

“Seton made me promise,” I replied. “I figured she’d have my balls if I didn’t come support Andi.” Seton’s powers of persuasion were well known in the club. Even when we were little kids, she could have sold ice cubes to freakin’ eskimos. It was a running joke among the brothers of the Stone Kings that if the prez’s old lady asked you to do something, you were gonna do it, no matter how hard you tried to resist.

Levi threw back his head and laughed at my remark. “No, shit, brother!” He was in a good mood. I’d hardly ever seen Levi laugh like that. Never, in fact, until he’d met Cherish. He had always been the solemn, quiet type. When Levi spoke, you listened, because hardly ever opened his mouth unless there was something really important to say. But since Cherish had come into his life, he had begun to change. He was still the same tough-as-nails motherfucker I’d known since I started hanging around the club, hoping to prospect. But there was an ease and comfort with himself to him now that I hadn’t seen back then.

I watched Levi make his way to the other side of the table to where Cherish was sitting. As he wrapped his arms around her and murmured something in her ear, the look of devotion she gave him back was so intense I had to look away for a moment. The two of them had grown up in the same small, fundamentalist LDS community across the border in Arizona. Both of them had left at different times, eventually meeting here in Lupine when Cherish escaped the community and fled here for protection. It was obvious that Levi and Cherish connected on a deep, almost cellular level that was obvious to anyone who spent more than a few minutes in their presence. I figured that might have something to do with their common experience of what they had both endured when they were younger. Whatever it was, though, I had never seen anything quite like it. It made me almost jealous, looking at them now, but mostly, I was just fucking happy as hell for my brother.

Mostly.

As the others greeted Levi, and Seton filled them all in on when Andi’s band would take the stage, I found myself turning away from our group to stare out at the crowd. Lately, I had found myself feeling a little restless at odd moments, like something was sort of missing from my life. I wasn’t quite sure what it is, but being here with all this evidence of happy couples, I was feeling it again now. Frowning, I decided to take a quick breather to clear my head. “I’m gonna go grab a beer,” I said to Seton, and moved away from the table toward the bar at the back of the room.

On my way there, I took another scan of the crowd, noting that there was an exceptional number of young, scantily-clad coeds here tonight. Almost automatically, I started appraising them as a few glanced over my way, cocking their heads invitingly or biting their lips as they saw me checking them out. No one really stood out, yet, but hell. The night was young. Eventually, I’d settle on one, or maybe two, to take back to my place. I knew from experience that college girls were generally more than willing to take a walk on the wild side with a dangerous biker. Normally, the thought would have been enough to make me satisfied that the night was gonna end well, but tonight the idea seemed almost tedious. Still, I tried to push the thought away. Once I had one on her knees with my cock in her mouth, I was pretty sure I’d manage to be interested in the outcome.

I’d finally made my way through the sea of humanity to the bar, when I happened to run into Andi herself, all dressed and ready to jump up on stage. She was a bartender here at Hammie’s a few nights a week, when she wasn’t doing gigs with the band she fronted. As I strode up, she was just emerging from behind the bar in a pair of tight leather pants and a black tank-top that left not one thing to my already overactive imagination. Her short, platinum blond hair was falling into her eyes in an effortlessly sexy look, and her plump, pouty lips were painted a cherry red that made them almost impossible not to stare at against her pale, creamy skin. A few artful tattoos in strategic places around her body drew the eye to her perfect curves, practically daring you to touch.

She was fuckin’ gorgeous. She was also my sister’s best friend.

“Hey, Doll! Good luck up there!” I greeted her above the noise of the warm-up band, who had just started another song. “Or am I supposed to tell you to break a leg?”

She laughed. “I’m pretty sure that’s just for actors.” Her clear blue eyes flashed as she gave me a dazzling smile. “Thanks, though! I didn’t know you were coming tonight.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I lied. Damn. She was looking good tonight. It was fucking distracting.

Andi cocked her head at me and grinned. “Wouldn’t miss it, eh? Like you haven’t missed every other show The Nopes have ever done?”

She had me there.

“Okay, okay. You’re right,” I admitted. “Seton invited me. She said it was a big night for your band.”

Andi shook her head, and gave me a quirk of those luscious red lips that made me want to grab her in my arms and kiss the smirk right off of them. “‘Invited’, eh?” she teased. “You sure you don’t mean ‘held a gun to your head’?”

“You know See doesn’t need weapons to convince people to do her bidding.”

“I didn’t think you were the kind of guy who took orders from anybody, Cal Greenlee.”

Her liquid blue eyes stared up at me, so dark they looked almost violet. As my gaze locked on hers, I felt rather than saw her breathing speed up just a tiny bit, her lips parting in a sharp inhale. My cock hardened in response. Shit, I needed to change the subject. The more she mocked and teased me, the more I found myself wanting to push her against a wall and shove my cock inside her. There was an undercurrent of sexual tension surrounding us that seemed to be growing by the second. I often thought I sensed this almost electric buzz whenever I was around Andi, but usually Seton was there, which meant it stayed mostly under the surface.

Now, standing in this pulsing crowd with her not two feet away, it felt almost like we were alone. It felt dangerous. Like something could happen in a heartbeat that we wouldn’t be able to take back.

“So, uh… Are you still tending bar here full-time?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going.

“Less and less,” she replied, a flicker of something like disappointment crossing her features. She took a careful step back. “We’re getting more gigs to play around the area, and we just landed a standing gig in Denver on Saturday nights starting next month. So this is the last Saturday we’ll play here at Hammie’s.” She glanced around us. “I think that’s why the crowd is so big tonight.”

“That’s great,” I nodded. As torturous as this conversation had gotten, I was suddenly kind of glad I was there to see Andi’s band. She was right that I’d never bothered to go see them before. I was just sort of assuming it wasn’t my kind of music, since I was pretty much a classic rock kind of guy. But I was happy to hear that Andi was having success with her music, and it felt sort of good to come out to support her. After all, above and beyond the fact that Andi was hot as hell and had the best rack I’d ever seen, she was also pretty awesome. She had always been a loyal friend to See, sticking up for her and protecting her like a sister. Plus, she was sexy as fuck without being overly girly, with a tough girl attitude that drove me crazy in a good way. If she wasn’t my sister’s best friend, I probably would have hit that a long time ago.

And right at this very moment, I was regretting that she was my sister’s best friend quite a damn bit.

“Well,” Andi said, cocking her head toward the stage. “I’d better get back. This is the warm-up band’s last song, so we’ll be going on in a few minutes.”

“Good luck,” I repeated.

“You already said that,” she teased me, biting her lower lip softly with her teeth. “But thanks again.”

I watched Andi Wagner’s sweet ass sashay away from me in those tight leather pants, and allowed myself the luxury of fantasizing about peeling them off her, as I waited for the bartender to grab me a beer. By the time I’d made my way back to our table, the warm-up band had finished their set, and we only had a few more minutes to wait until The Nopes came on. Levi, Trig, and I shot the shit while the women talked among themselves, and eventually, the house lights went back down.

Raucous applause greeted Andi and her bandmates as they walked out on stage. People called their names and whistled, some holding up their hands to wave. They were obviously a big local favorite. Andi stepped up to the mike, a bass guitar strapped around her. She looked back and nodded at the drummer, who raised his sticks and launched them into a song I recognized after a moment as a grunge-inspired cover of a Prince song. It was pretty good, actually — their sound was not like anything I could remember hearing before, which kind of impressed me. Andi swayed in time with the music as she sang, her voice a sultry alto that rose above the other instruments. I looked around at the crowd as they danced and moved along with the beat, clearly loving the sound. When the song ended, the reaction was almost deafening, and as Andi launched the band into the next one, the energy level cranked up palpably, the room starting to feel electric.

The song she was singing was one I didn’t recognize. When I leaned over to See to ask her about it, she told me it was an original, written by Andi a couple of years ago. It was a little quieter than the first tune, not a ballad but more raw and emotional. Her voice became almost haunting as the instruments receded, leaving a sparser, more bare sound that let Andi’s soulful delivery shine through.

I wasn’t really in the habit of paying a lot of attention to music except for songs that were good for driving, but before I knew it I was practically hanging on every word that Andi sang. My stomach started to clench, feeling the anguish she was letting flow through her through the lyrics. It was a song about loss, about pain, and about not letting them end you. I felt like I was staring straight into her soul as she sang, and it was at once beautiful and uncomfortable.