The skinny guy drops Fay-Lee and sprints over, pulling a knife—a lot longer than Roosevelt’s—from a sheath strapped across his chest. I roll to my knees, scan the dirt for a stick or a rock or a broken bottle.
There’s a thud as bodies collide, a scream, and then the sound of a dozen engines and tires churning up asphalt. A cloud of dust rises from the parking lot. The skinny guy bolts, making for the tree line in a flat- out sprint.
Three gunshots ring out in quick succession.
“Hands in the air!” Fat Guy raises his hands above his head. Skinny disappears in the undergrowth. Fat Guy checks himself for bullet holes, and I do the same, until I see Heavy, wild hair wind-whipped like some kind of Neanderthal giant, gun still raised from where he fired it in the air.
Steel Bones swarms the grassy yard, guns trained on the Raiders, each man’s face blank, his eyes cold and hard.
“In the woods! In the woods!” Roosevelt is shouting, but it comes out weak and wheezy. I’m pointing, shouting, too, and several brothers peel off and run into the trees.
Dizzy stands facing us, his finger on the trigger, aiming straight for the Fat Guy. I see his index finger squeeze and then ease off. His gaze swoops over my shoulder, and I turn to see Fay-Lee limp up from behind me, her arms opening wide.
“Baby,” she moans. “My ribs hurt.”
Dizzy engages the safety, and then he scoops up Fay-Lee, so impossibly gentle for a man his size, and he carries her off to a truck, shouting at her the whole way.
“What the fuck were you thinkin’, girl? You ain’t gonna sit comfortably ever again. Goddamn it!”
Fay-Lee snuggles into him. “You’re gonna have to wait ‘til my ribs feel better, baby, before you beat my ass. I kinda just got my ass beat, you know.”
I fall back on my butt, and I sit there, dazed, while Creech and Wall carry off the dude with the knife in his shoulder, moaning and limp, and Forty and Bullet wrestle the fat guy into Heavy’s Range Rover. There’s no sign of the brothers who took off after Skinny.
A whole bunch of guys are milling around. Wash and Boom are givin’ Roosevelt shit about how bad he’s fucked up, and Heavy’s givin’ orders, sending Gus and Eighty into the bar to make sure no one saw nothin’.
I’m sure they didn’t.
No one but Roosevelt’s payin’ me much mind. He stumbles over, gives me his hand, and I take it. As soon as I stand, a wave of dizzy crashes through me, and I sink back down onto my butt.
“Gimme a minute?” I suck down a deep breath, willing my stomach to chill out.
“Sure thing, dance partner.”
“That was a pretty slick move, wasn’t it?”
“Yes it was.” Roosevelt smiles. His teeth are coated with blood. I think he’s lost one.
“I know someone who can help you with that.” I wave my hand toward his face.
He laughs and glances toward the SUV where they’ve put the guy with the tear tattoo. “I think the dentist is gonna be busy tonight. Maybe tomorrow he can fit me in.”
Shit. Does everyone know about Larry but me?
I let my eyes drift shut. It feels like I’m spinning circles even though I’m sitting still. The adrenaline’s wearing off, and I’m getting weak and trembly. I want Nickel. I want him to stand, watching over me like he does when I give a lap dance, making me feel safe, like I’ve got a super power in human form backing me up.
I’d rather have that than dumb luck. I don’t kid myself—if the fat man had anticipated my move, it’d have been over. Shivers rack my body. I need to get up, get myself a jacket. My arms and legs are weights, though, and I can’t get myself moving.
Eventually, someone hauls me up, presses a bottled water into my hand, and half drags me toward a truck in the parking lot. It’s Gus. I guess he’s givin’ me a ride home.
I lean against the truck, waiting for Gus to unlock the door, when Cue’s yellow Mustang turns sharp into the lot, sending asphalt skittering. What’s he doin’ here? Except for catching Skinny, the situation seems handled.
The mystery clears when the door flies open and Nickel jumps out, his eyes swirling black pits, every visible muscle tight, roping, veins bulging. His lips are peeled back, rage and violence painted across his face.
This is the man I saw in the moonlight all those years ago. The one who plowed through three football players, sheer bloodlust and madness in his eyes.
I didn’t think I had any left, but fear floods my limbs, priming me to run. It’s the only natural reaction to this man. All around me, brothers straighten their spines and eye Forty. He’s the only guy who doesn’t seem fazed. Forty approaches Nickel, slow and deliberate, hands up.
Nickel sees me. He rocks back on his heels.
I hold my breath.
He looks back to Forty. “Where are they?”
“Taken care of,” Forty answers. “Or about to be.”
“Where the fuck are they!” he howls. His eyes dart frenetically from car to car.
“Gone already.” Forty lowers his hands, and he stands in that weird way he always does, feet an exact width apart, arms straight, his finger and his thumb almost touching.
“Where?” Nickel demands, his rage a living thing beneath his skin, the motion of it accentuated by Forty’s stillness.
“Story’s over there.” Forty jerks his chin in my direction.
Oh, shit. I’m really feeling weak-kneed and a touch barfy, and I’m clinging to the truck’s door handle to keep myself upright. I’m not at all prepared for Nickel in a rage. He turns the whole force of his demented, black glare on me.
“How bad is she hurt?” he snaps at Forty.
Her jerks his chin at me. “Ask her.”
Thanks, Forty. He’s throwing me to the wolf. My stomach flops around like there’s a fish in there, and I try to swallow it down.
Nickel rakes his gaze down me, and I can only imagine what he sees. My hair is springing from the bun I had it in, there’s grass stains all over my jeans, and there’s a bruise where Ike grabbed my arm. I can tell when he sees it because every muscle in his body strains.
It so weird. He’s frozen in place. All the brothers are frozen in place. We’re all waiting, holding our breath. He’s going to blow. He always blows. It almost looks like he’s waiting for it, too.
But it doesn’t come.
Instead, he rolls his neck. Then he shakes out his arms and tosses his head as if to clear it. He takes a measured step toward me, and then another, and my grip tightens on the door handle. He stops a foot away, reaches out, and then his hand stills mid-air. He drops it. His eyes aren’t swirling anymore. He looks almost…lost.
“You hurt?” His voice is low. Just for me.
And the fight just drains from me, seeps out, and I sway, but before I can even stumble, he has me. He holds me up, propping me against the truck.
“Where are you hurt, baby?”
“I’m okay.”
He searches me again, head to foot, his rough hands skimming over my arms, my sides. It’s like getting patted down at a football game when you set the metal detector off.
“You’re okay?”
“I want to go home.”
He can’t seem to compute this. His gaze sweeps the area again, searching for the enemy, but they’re gone. He has to return his gaze to me, and when he does, he moans and gathers me closer, tucks my face against his chest.
“Please, baby,” he begs in his soft, raspy voice. “Tell me they didn’t hurt you.”
My head’s woozy, my stomach’s queasy, and there’s a dozen aches and pains in my ass and back from hitting the ground.
“I’m fine,” I say, my words muffled by his cut. “Please take me home?”
In this moment, I finally understand something. I’m stronger than Nickel Kobald. Nothing owns me like his rage owns him. I always felt smaller, like I was some pesky kid dogging his footsteps. That’s not the truth, though. I’m the one who can rescue him. I’m the one who can make it okay.
I d
raw back, watch as his palm hovers above my shoulder, all the want in the world pouring from him, and he’s too afraid to touch.
It’s backwards, this dance we do. I chase him. He follows me, watching. I’m wearin’ heels, but I’m going to have to be the one who leads. Neither of us know the steps, but I can hear the music. I’m gonna have to make this work for the both of us.
“Are you gonna take me home, Nickel?” I sigh. “Or do I gotta ask someone else?”
He searches the area one last time, desperate—it seems to me—for a problem he can solve with his fists, but he must see what I do, nothin’ but a bunch of Steel Bones brothers and beat up trucks.
“Okay,” he finally grunts and grabs my hand. “Can you walk?”
“Standing just fine now.”
He guides me across to the Mustang, walks me around to the passenger side, opens the door, and carefully hands me in. Then he pushes my hands aside so he can buckle me in himself.
He stalks back around, slides in the driver’s seat, and I relax, expecting this all to be over, but he doesn’t turn the key in the ignition. Instead, he sits there, staring at the console. Seconds tick by. I’m not sure what’s happening.
“Nickel?”
His head jerks up, and even though his pupils are still blown to hell, he seems calmer now. “Where’s your purse?”
My purse? He’s been sitting here wondering about my purse? Well, shit. I was about to leave it here in Bumfuck, Egypt. Maybe I shouldn’t judge.
I remember dropping it when I launched myself at the Rebel Raider. “Somewhere in the grass out back.”
He nods. Then he turns on the car and rolls the window down.
“Prospect!” He calls Wash over, tells him to get my purse, and then he backs out of the parking lot, and finally, we’re heading for home, fast but not too fast. I lean against the headrest, and try to breathe through the aftershocks shuddering through me every so often.
Nickel breaks the silence. “Don’t tell me what happened.”
I blink my eyes open. He’s staring at my forearm, at the bruise from Ike.
“Not until we get home.” He squeezes the steering wheel, knuckles white. “I need to be calm. To drive you safely. Okay?
“Ten-four, good buddy.” I pat his thigh. Right now, I don’t want to talk at all. I want an aspirin, a bath, and a drink. And I want to bask in this moment, Nickel’s clean, woodsy smell filling the car, my entire body wrung out.
I’m safe now.
What would have happened if he’d gotten there first? I shiver. There would have been bodies dropped in that field.
All the way back to Petty’s Mill, I sneak peeks at his face. I’ve never seen him like this before. It looks the same as when he fights himself over me. There’s a wildness in him. You can see it in the throbbing pulse in his neck and the slapping of his palm on the dashboard when we hit a red light and a dozen other tics, a frantic energy spoiling to burst out.
But then there’s this other thing. It flexes, forcing the wildness to stay contained, controlling it. I think he’s trying to manage the anger. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful. The wildness dancing beneath his skin, and the strength directing the motion. He’s mastering himself, and it’s so fucking beautiful.
CHAPTER 12
NICKEL
“Where are you?” Heavy barks.
I pull the phone away from my ear. Brother is big everywhere, especially his mouth.
“Story’s place.” I’m standing in the middle of her living room. Pink shit has me surrounded. Candles and pillows and a damn blanket shaped like a mermaid’s tail on her couch. The place smells like her, fresh and sweet. I have a semi just from bein’ this close to her, but even so, the place makes me uneasy.
“She okay?” There’s concern, but also respect for what’s mine. The brothers all know now. I’ve staked my claim as sure as if I’ve put my name on her back.
That should make me uneasy as fuck, but it don’t. I want everyone to know she’s mine. It’ll make it easier to prevent what happened today from ever goin’ down again.
“She’s banged up some. She took an aspirin for a headache, but then she asked me to order a pizza, so I guess she’s feelin’ better? She’s in the shower now. How are Fay-Lee and the prospect?”
“Fay-Lee has bruised ribs. Roosevelt’s gonna need some work. Broken wrist. Cracked ribs. Lost a tooth.”
“He earned his patch.”
It ain’t my call alone, but the kid has my vote. That boy-band-lookin’ motherfucker took a man’s beating, and he finished hard.
“That he did,” Heavy agrees.
There’s silence on the line for a while. He’s probably thinkin’ what I am. When Story gave me the short version of what went down, I nearly lost my shit again. She’s got the survival instincts of a suicidal lemming. What would have happened if she hadn’t come through with the knife? If the brothers had been even a minute later? My stomach balls into a tight knot.
“What’s next?”
“We lost the skinny guy in the woods. Forty’s taking lead on hunting him down. With that freaky eye, people will know him. It won’t take long, and then, ‘There will be retribution, and it will rain snares and fire and brimstone and burning wind will be the portion of their cup.’” Heavy’s quotin’ the Good Book again. His ma was a Bible thumper, and what with his perfect memory, we get treated to this shit on the regular.
“You better fuckin’ call me when you find the asshole.” If there was any space for anything in my mind ’cept Story, we’d be havin’ words about that right now. I shouldn’t have had to call him.
“I was unaware you were so…invested. How did you know, anyhow?”
“Ike.”
“The fuck?” Heavy don’t like this anymore than I do. Ever since our sit-down at The White Van, we haven’t heard shit from our inside man. Until today.
“He texted me.”
“You think he was involved?”
“He was hangin’ around the Rebel Raiders.”
“Which is what we asked him to do.”
“I don’t trust him, Heavy.”
“Story tell you what they said before they grabbed Fay-Lee?”
“Yeah. Two-thousand-dollar bounty.”
“We’re goin’ on lock down. Bring her in.”
Ah, fuck. I eye Story’s dresser through the rainbow bead curtain that separates her bedroom from the rest of the place. There’s literally a hundred bottles and tubes covering it. I look down. I’m standing on a pink shag rug. She’s got a carpet on top of a carpet.
“You want an escort to bring her in?” Heavy asks.
“Nah.” I think about my room at the clubhouse. She’s gonna be very disappointed.
Of course, she’s going to be disappointed. My digs are only the beginning of the let-down. I ain’t made for an old lady. Ain’t outfitted for one, neither.
“You run into anything on the way over, call Forty. He’s coordinating.”
“Ayup.” The shower shuts off, and my adrenaline spikes. She’s in the next room. Naked. Soft. My dick tries to punch its way out of my jeans. “I’ll find you when I get to the clubhouse.”
“Take care, brother.”
I hang up, and I turn to the bathroom door. It opens onto the room where I’m waiting.
Story’s whole place is laid out weird. It’s over one of the old retail spaces on Main Street, the ones with paper covering the display windows. The businesses have all gone bust, but people still rent the apartments overhead. Must be like living in the attic of a ghost town. Still, she’s got a separate bedroom and a kitchenette, which is more’n I do at the clubhouse.
When’s she comin’ out of that bathroom? A hair dryer starts goin’ and my dick goes back to half-mast.
I spend the next several minutes thinkin’ about when the last time was I got a house mouse to change the sheets on my bed. Story needs rest, and once we get to the clubhouse, she ain’t leavin’ my sight. I don’t want her sleepin’ on used sheet
s.
I text Jo-Beth real quick to see if she’ll straighten my room. She owes me from beatin’ the shit out of a client of hers who busted a nut and didn’t pay. She’ll do it if she gets the message. Or she’ll pretend she didn’t see the text. I’m standin’ there, fussin’ with my phone, when Story finally comes out.
Fuck.
She’s only wearin’ a towel. She’s got it tucked, but her curves are so bangin’, the edges don’t quite meet. There’s this narrow gap straight down her belly and past her pussy lips where I can catch a flash of pale skin and light blonde curls.
Oh, fuck. She doesn’t shave her pussy totally bare. There’s a little patch of curls over her slit. I love that. Blood rushes to my cock, and it’s pulsing now, beating to get loose. I want to see. I want to stroke those curls, collect beads of her pussy juice on my fingers, taste her.
I realize I’m standin’ like Forty, a soldier waitin’ on inspection. She’s standin’ still, too, watching me watch her.
“You want to see?” She cocks her head.
I nod without thinking. “Show me.” My voice is so low, it don’t sound like my own.
“You gonna start all that ‘I’m no good for you’ bullshit again?”
She rests her hands on her hips, and the towel spreads another quarter inch apart. I can make out lips now. Plump. Slick.
I groan.
“I ain’t. But I’m gonna be.”
“Huh?” She drums her fingers on her hips. I’m gonna be grabbin’ them before this night is done, holdin’ on while I plow her so deep she loses the ability to speak anything but my name. I’m done holdin’ back. That ride from hell used up all my restraint and left me raw with needing her.
“I’m gonna be so fuckin’ good to you,” I promise, licking my lips. “Now show me, baby. Please.”
She shoots me the cutest warning glance, like I better not be shittin’ her, and then she reaches up and undoes the towel. She’s a pro, so she don’t just let it drop to the floor. Instead she lets it drop bit by bit, showin’ me creamy skin I’ve seen before, but never like this. Never knowing it was all mine.
Nickel's Story: A Steel Bones Motorcycle Club Romance Page 10