The Bare Bones (The Bare Bones MC)
Book #1 in The Bare Bones MC series
Copyright 2014 © Layla Wolfe
Kindle Edition
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Cover art by Red Poppy Designs
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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To Donna Briody-Buccella. This bad boy (with no white tennies) is for you.
To Cookie Grimaldi VonBehren for all of your invaluable help with cuts, scoots, and anal bead headbands.
To Vella Day, Olivia Jaymes, Jenika Snow, Indigo Sin, and Kathryn Kelly—I seriously could never have completed this whole undertaking without your insightful assistance.
If you ain’t living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.
The rose-colored illusion of Madison Shellmound’s girlish crush on biker Ford Illuminati is stomped into smithereens by his crude, perverse father Cropper, Bare Bones club President. Fearing Ford will kill Cropper if he finds out, Madison flees town, becoming an upstanding cardiology nurse.
Madison and Ford have an ill-fated, star-crossed love that will last their lifetimes. Ford is a lifer in a different sort of enterprise, the gritty full-throttle club of guns, blood, and allegiance to his brothers.
Twelve years and several tours of SEAL duty later, Ford is thrust back into Madison’s arms on the worst day of his life. Madison’s prospect brother Speed has screwed up big-time and owes the club his life. She offers herself to Cropper as a sacrificial lamb to save Speed.
But how long until the fiery, full-on outlaw Ford discovers that the woman he loves was treated like a degraded slave by his own father? Well, meet the new boss. He’s not the same as the old boss.
Publisher’s Note:
This is not your mother’s contemporary romance. Readers will encounter molestation, drugging, consensual bondage and discipline, violence, and a HEA. It’s a full-length novel of 65,000 words. Recommended 18+ due to mature content.
Book #1 in The Bare Bones MC series
MADISON
W
e were steeped in sin, immorality, the aura of wrongdoing. What did they tell you about love? Love isn’t meant to be all rosy. Love doesn’t sprinkle gold dust over things and give it a warm golden glow, like a Hollywood sunset in one of those John Wayne westerns. Love doesn’t fix your boo-boos, your bad haircuts, or your ugly glasses like Carol Brady’s platitudes.
No. Love breaks your heart. It wrecks everything. It casts you into the lowest circle of hell and rattles you around in the shitty oozing muck. Love isn’t perfect because we aren’t. Did you ever wonder where they get that phrase, “He’s only human”? Rainbows are perfect. Dolphins are perfect. Babies are perfect before they open their eyes and see what a giant clusterfuck they’ve been born into.
But lovers? We are here to love exactly the wrong people. We are here to screw each other up, to mess with each other’s heads. To lie and betray someone in the worst possible way, to kiss someone while turning the knife in their back
just because we can.
Humans are vile that way. As Ford’s favorite writer says, “Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I’m proud to say that I am inhuman.”
That’s me. Inhuman. I have come a long-ass way to get to this point, and you wouldn’t believe the offal I’ve had to wade through on my journey. It’s been my trial by fire, and I’ve emerged the other side. I wouldn’t say unscathed—I’ve been pretty fucking scathed, to tell the truth. I’ve made it, I’m here, and it was no accident that I came to be the warden of Ford Illuminati’s beautiful, wracked, tortured soul. In fact, there’s no way to tell his story without also telling mine. Our stories are intertwined.
You say to start at the beginning. My beginning doesn’t start with my birth and childhood in Cottonwood, Arizona. It was all fairly standard issue crap, maybe more
Modern Family
than
Brady Bunch
, but everything turned out all right at the end of the day. That is, until my father split when I was eight. My mother pretty much fell apart, refused to get a job, and more and more she stopped leaving the house altogether.
The three of us had to fend for ourselves. When you’re that young, you know, you’re not really able to pull back and look at things objectively. It’s nice now that I’m twenty-nine I can look in the rearview mirror and finally realize that our mother had mental issues, and agoraphobia was probably the least of it. But because she had no money—my father sent her a pittance that just covered the mortgage and some utilities—and no way of making any, we had to fend for ourselves.
A couple of teachers noticed that I always wore the same ratty jeans to school, that I had holes in the soles of my desert boots, that I clung to my threadbare bomber jacket with the Screaming Eagle patch on the sleeve because it had been my father’s. They called me in a few times and asked why I never had a lunch to eat, but I covered for Ingrid. I covered because that’s what children do. They don’t know any better. For them to wrap their tiny little brains around the idea that their parent is incapable, dysfunctional in some way, or unable to provide the sustenance they need, well…Their little heads would probably explode.
So God or whoever gave children the ability to compartmentalize, as though their brains had little walls with incredibly tiny doors that usually remain locked. Call it “in denial” or what you wish, but my sister, brother and I were able, with straight faces, to tell the teachers that we just liked hip-hop or grunge or whatever the flavor of the moment was. Everyone always seemed to buy it, maybe because we rarely had bruises.
Ingrid became more violent as the years went on. Now maybe I’m the one in denial because I can’t recall a single thing any of the fights were ever about—the usual childish crap, I’m sure. Our ceiling always leaked, we had buckets and plastic sheets covering our beds, and there was no water to wash clothes or ourselves. We had none of the gewgaws and accoutrements that teens want to show off to their peers.
For young women that’s tantamount to hell, so I’m sure we yelled back at whatever Ingrid was dishing out. Luckily she was so weak we were able to outrun her, and by the time I turned twelve I was spending more time sleeping at my friend Sabrina’s or, when her mother got tired of my face, in the hills. My little sister June had friends who were more generous with their creature comforts and didn’t mind having her around. My little brother Robert, he just kept to himself and retreated more and more into a withdrawn hoodlum place.
I’d sleep under the cottonwoods by a creek in Coyote Buttes. I felt safe being outdoors. I guess I became somewhat of a nature girl. Sometimes I’d venture up into the swirling sandstone buttes themselves, warming myself like a lizard in the sun, curled up in a rocky cradle, reading the books I’d stolen from the library. I ate the food we took from Sabrina’s mother’s fridge or the stuff we stole from the store.
Needless to say, I missed a lot of school this way. I was too young to drive—and couldn’t have afforded a car anyway—so sometimes I’d hitchhike to school, catch a ride with Sabrina and her brother, or more likely, stay in the hills. I shudder to think how many potential serial killers passed me by when I stuck my thumb out to strangers.
I knew
something
was wrong. Something was missing from my adolescence. I must have known it wasn’t normal, but I had no way of blaming Ingrid until later. A teenager can’t blame her parents. They created you. They’re flawless and blameless. A teen turns it inward and blames herself, right? “Oh, I must be fucked. No wonder I’m unlovable. Look at me. I smell. Ingrid was right—I
am
stupid. I was faking all those straight
A
’s on my report card just to please her. I was just trying to get her to say one nice thing about me. I’m so dumb.”
Because the human psyche inevitably can’t accept
itself
as flawed, there’s really nowhere to turn, right? No one to blame. The frustration builds because you want
something
to blame, right? You know your family resembles
Modern Family
more than
The Brady Bunch
, but at the end of the day even those defective people always spout happy platitudes. They drink eggnog over a bowl of roses and unicorns. In my family home, it was more like wooden coat hangers and three-day-old piss in the toilet because we couldn’t afford to flush.
No wonder I preferred the wide azure sky and warm sandstone gullies of Coyote Buttes. I didn’t know what my life would bring. I didn’t think I deserved anything worthwhile. It had been hammered into my brain over and over how worthless, shitty, and wretched I was. Looking in the rearview now, I see that Ingrid had a lot of issues steeped in post-war German politics or
whatever
, and she sure was fond of taking it out on defenseless kids. Somewhere along the line I must’ve figured if I really
was
that worthless, I might as well act like it.
So I grew armor, yeah. I did drugs and I became a little slutty because that garnered me attention. Not the negative attention of a mother—she didn’t give a shit where I was or what I did. No, it was the positive attention of boys. Socializing, having people around me, made my loneliness less painful. Sabrina and her brother Chuck would bring a few thuggish boys up to my Coyote Buttes camp. They’d bring some sixers and weed and we’d build a campfire, that sort of teenaged thing. Blast some Green Day or White Stripes where no one could hear us.