Steel: Blackthorne MC #1 (5 page)

It was another hour before we reached our destination. As Nick pulled up outside, I frowned. It didn’t look like any medical centre I’d ever seen.

Neon flashing lights shone above the sprawling shack, and rows of bikes were lined up outside. Men with tattoos and scantily clad women stood outside, and I could hear the steady thud of music coming from inside.

This was a biker bar. Why on earth were they stopping here when Nick needed medical attention? They were wasting time.

I slid off the bike before Nick could do anything to stop me and stormed up towards Damien.

I didn’t give any thought to my safety as I pulled on Damien’s arm so he would turn and face me.

He snarled down at me, but I didn’t back down. I must have been delirious from so many hours on the road.

“He’s injured,” I said, pointing in Nick’s direction. “He needs medical attention as soon as possible. Why on earth are you stopping at a bar?”

Damien smiled, and his gold tooth glinted in the neon lights shining down on us. He looked me up and down, no doubt noticing I was wearing Nick’s jacket.

He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and turned to Nick and smiled, but it wasn’t a genuine smile. It was a cruel smile, full of threat.

“It looks like you’ve got yourself a fan, Nick. What have you been doing on the back of the bike?” He looked at me and winked. “Nick’s always had a way with the ladies.”

He reached out his hand to cup my cheek and then with his thumb he gently traced a path along my jaw and down my neck to my collarbone, and then lower still, dipping beneath my T-shirt to touch the swell of my breast.

Horrified, I took a step back and wrapped Nick’s jacket tight around me.

Before I could do anything else, Nick was by my side, leading me away from Damien.
 

“The doctor is here,” he said in a low voice.

“I’ll leave you two to get better acquainted then,” Damien called after us and cackled a horrible laugh.
 

Chad and Tom joined in, and I flushed as I listened to their crude jokes. I felt Nick tense beside me as he pulled me faster towards the entrance to the bar.

“Maybe you two can get a room,” Chad shouted at us before we slipped inside.

If I was expecting him to thank me for my concern over his health, I was to be sadly disappointed.

“What the hell was that?” Nick demanded. His bright blue eyes bore down into mine as he held me by the shoulders.

“What?”

“Why did you talk to Damien like that? He’s dangerous, Ella.”

I shrugged off his hands, yanking myself away from his grip. I was fed up of being kept in the dark and driven around the state as a hostage.

“Why is everyone so scared of Damien anyway?” I felt strangely betrayed, which was dumb as Nick had never really been on my side.
 

He was just some hot biker I’d hooked up with, I reminded myself. But he was right about one thing: I needed to be careful. The best chance I had to get out of this situation unhurt was to be compliant until I found a way to escape them.

Nick was still staring at me and his chest was rising and falling rapidly. “I don’t want you to get hurt. That’s all. That’s why I’m mad, okay?”

I glared back at him and didn’t answer.

“It’s sweet that you are concerned about me, but you don’t need to be. You just need to keep on Damien’s good side, okay?”

I shrugged and then said in a brittle voice. “So where is this doctor?”

We walked through the bar, drawing the attention of the clientele. One woman, wearing a low-cut top and a denim skirt, looked Nick up and down hungrily. I couldn’t blame her. At first glance, he had everything a woman could want. His T-shirt clung to his abs, showing off his perfect body. Of course she didn’t know what he and the rest of his biker gang were really capable of.

We walked quickly through the bar and then out the back. Nick closed the door behind us and we entered a wood-paneled corridor, lined with photographs of Harley-Davidson’s and various badges and symbols of different motorcycle gangs.

“What are the others going to do while you see the doctor?” I asked as I followed him down the corridor.

“Get drunk, I should think. We’ll be staying here tonight.”

An idea started to form in my mind. There were so many people here. I must be able to get hold of a cell phone from someone.

But for now, I would have to stay by Nick side as he was watching me so intently.

“Are you the patient?” The voice came from behind us and we both turned.

The voice had come from a man I guessed to be in his fifties, he had messy grey hair, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and patchy stubble on his chin. He gave us a half hearted smile.

“Yeah, that’s me,” Nick said. “Are we using the room at the back?”

The man nodded and then he turned his attention to me. His bloodshot eyes travelled down my body until his gaze rested on my breasts. He smiled again. “Yes, that’s right in the back room.”

The room he led us into was dark, but I could see that there was a long bench in the middle of a room. A chair stood beside it, and in the far corner of the room, there was a sink.

He switched on a lamp behind the table.

I turned in a slow circle. Surely Nick wasn’t going to be treated here?

Nick sat on the bench in the centre of the room and then peeled off his T-shirt slowly as though the movement hurt him.

My eyes drank him in. I couldn’t help myself. He looked damn good fully clothed, but without his T-shirt he looked like a Greek god. He truly was devastatingly gorgeous. It took me a moment to realize Nick was looking at me, and when my eyes eventually managed to wrench away from his torso and back up to his face, I noticed he was smiling at me in a knowing way.

I flushed and looked down at the floor.

The guy, who still had the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, rubbed up against me as he moved past. At first I thought it was an accident because there wasn’t much room to get around the bench. But then he did it again, this time grinding his hips against my ass. I moved away and gave him a hard look.
 

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and smiled at me, showing off his yellow teeth.

“Where is the doctor?” I snapped.

“You’re looking at him,” the man said with a grin.

I blinked at him in horror. Instead of a white coat, he was wearing a stained plaid shirt and dirty jeans.

“Nick, this is not a good idea. You need proper a hospital and a proper doctor.”

“I am a proper doctor,” the man said, scowling at me.

Maybe he had been a real doctor once, but I was willing to bet he’d been struck off since then. I watched him closely as he fumbled about with some steel implements beside the sink.

I turned my attention back to Nick and watched him as he reclined on the hard wooden bench.

By the way he cradled his arm, I could tell he was in a lot of pain.

To my relief, the so-called doctor was at least washing his hands with bright yellow iodine soap.

“Don’t look so worried,” Nick said.

I shoved my hands in my pockets. Did I really look that concerned? I’d never been good at hiding my emotions, and I had a really bad feeling about this situation.

When I turned back to look at the doctor, I gasped. In his hand he held a huge needle.

“I’m just going to give you a little sedative,” the doctor said. “It will take the edge off.” He still had the damn cigarette in his mouth as he plunged the sharp needle into Nick’s arm.

“What sedative are you using?” I asked.

“Nothing for you to worry about sweetheart. It’s just something to make him a little sleepy.”

Although Nick’s eyelids drooped, he wasn’t completely asleep when the doctor started work.

He selected a sharp stainless steel scalpel and held it up to the light.

“I hope that’s sterilized,” I said and then bit down hard on my lip. It was crazy to care about Nick. He belonged to the gang of bikers who had just kidnapped me, but he was the one person in this whole place I felt like I could trust. I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him.
 

I tried to convince myself that I had an ulterior motive for caring about what happened to him — I wanted to use Nick to get away from all this. But really there was something about the strong, intense biker that intrigued me and made me feel that deep down he was a good man.

The doctor moved forward and pressed the scalpel against Nick’s skin.

“You’ll barely feel it,” he said.

That was obviously a lie. As the sharp steel cut into Nick’s shoulder, his body jerked in response to the pain.

The doctor grunted and used his body weight to try and pin Nick’s shoulder back down on the bench.

“You,” he said to me. “Get on his other side and try to keep him still. It’s not easy to work in these conditions, you know.”

“Can’t you give him more pain relief?”

“No, it doesn’t grow on trees. A big tough man like him should be able to cope with a little pain. If they go around getting themselves shot, they need to deal with the consequences,” the doctor grumbled.

I froze with one hand on Nick’s shoulder. “Shot?”

The doctor smirked. “How did you
think
he got this injury? Falling off his bike?”

I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Nick had been shot. I’d been too caught up with my own problems. I looked down at Nick.

The drugs were obviously making him feel a little out of it. He licked his lips and started to say something, but then he groaned in pain as the doctor set to work again.

“Hold him still!” the doctor ordered.

I leaned down, pressing my body against Nick, trying to keep him steady, but it wasn’t easy.

My face was so close to his I could feel his hot breath on my cheek and see the sweat forming on his brow as he struggled against the pain. I grabbed hold of his hand, and he gripped mine tightly.
 

It seemed to go on for ages. The doctor had started sweating too.

Nick started to grow pale, and I was worried he was going into shock.

“Can’t you go any faster?” I begged the doctor.

He didn’t bother to answer me. He was so intent on pulling the bullet from the wound in Nick’s arm.

Then finally he said, “Got it!” With a pair of forceps, he wriggled the bullet free from Nick’s flesh.

The sight of the small nugget of metal covered in blood made me feel dizzy. My year of medical school hadn’t prepared me for this. I started to think I wouldn’t be much good in the operating room.

By the time the doctor had cleaned the wound and put on a fresh dressing, Nick was out for the count. I wasn’t sure whether that was because the sedative had kicked in fully or whether his body was just exhausted from the trauma.
 

I ran a hand through my hair and noticed that my hands were shaking, so I crossed my arms over my chest.

The doctor jabbed Nick again, this time with a smaller syringe.

“What are you injecting him with now?”

“Antibiotics. He should be all right now if he manages to keep the wound clean.” The doctor threw the dirty syringe onto the counter by the sink.

Then he walked towards me, so close I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “If
anything
does
happen to him, you weren’t here, he wasn’t here and you’ve never seen me before in your life, understood?”

I nodded, wishing I could tell the doctor exactly what I thought of him.

He turned away to wash his hands again, and I took another look at Nick. He was still sleeping… he wouldn’t notice if I left.

I tried to sound casual as I said to the doctor, “I’m just going to go and get a drink.”

The doctor didn’t bother to answer or even turn around, so as quickly as I could, I left the room, going back down the corridor towards the main bar.

I paused in the doorway and took a moment to search the bar for the other bikers. Chad, Tom and Damien were sitting together at the same table. They each had a woman fawning over them. I was pretty sure they were paying for the company.
 

On the far side of the bar was a raised platform where female dancers wearing glitter covered bikinis were gyrating their hips in front of a crowd of bikers. The bikers waved dollar bills and called out to the dancers, encouraging them to remove more clothes.

Everyone seemed to be occupied. This could be my chance.

I needed to get to a phone.

I stayed hidden from view and studied them for a while. I wanted to get my hands on a cell phone, and I knew that my best chance would be to get one from someone in the bar. I’d need them to be drunk enough to let their guard down, so I could borrow their phone for five minutes without them noticing.

The only trouble was that Chad, Tom and Damien were all in the bar drinking, and I definitely didn’t want to attract their attention.