Yet, in some way, her own world wasn’t the same place as it had been when she’d arrived. Something had shifted. The look in Ryder’s eyes and the heat of his body had set off a chain reaction inside of her, and nothing was quite the same. Her equilibrium was off-kilter.
The whiskey rasped on her throat and burned its way down, seeping outwards through her body like slow lightning. She had fire burning from both ends. What would happen when the flames met?
After this shot of bourbon, I’ll leave, Jess told herself. She should go. Should she have just one more whiskey? She shouldn’t be on the road with the amount she’d had already. He would probably be hours with whatever it was he was doing. He just as likely wouldn’t come back anyway. Gyro set a fresh glass in front of her. She should go.
Gyro told her, “You’ll get used to it,” and his look was reassuring, even though she wasn’t sure what he meant. Get used to waiting for Ryder? She had no intention of doing that. Get used to the club, maybe, but without some kind of status she would be taking big risks if she were to return.
“You want to fix yourself to be a nomad’s ol’ lady?” A woman’s low, Texan accent startled Jess out of her thoughts. The blonde at the bar next to her had elaborate ink decorating her arms and her chest. Swirling serpents, images from playing cards, flames and Celtic knots tracked her generous curves in a swirling red and blue contour map. They exchanged wary looks.
“And that nomad?” she asked Jess while she waited for her order. “You’re cutting out a tough road there, sister.”
The petite blonde looked Jesska up and down. A chain belt hung with silver charms and trinkets emphasized the sway of her firm, round ass in tiny ragged fragments of sprayed-on denim shorts.
Her stomach was bare up to the bottoms of her tits, which swung free below the cut-off gingham shirt. Red and blue ink wound over her bare arms.
Jess asked her, “Why do you call him a ‘nomad’?”
The blonde smiled. It wasn’t a particularly friendly smile. She said, “You really don’t know anything, do you?” as she carried two beer glasses away.
Jess did know a little about motorcycle clubs. They had rules, and they took them seriously. From what Jess could see, the clubs were about rules and codes almost as much as they were about bikes. Codes, honor and status. Male status.
Across the bar, Gyro told her, “Don’t let Mary Ann get to you, honey. She’s just fucking with you.”
Since she was little, Jess had learned everything she could about motorcycle clubs, probably since the first time she saw how her Daddy didn’t want her to know about them.
She knew that only two positions with any status were available for females. A woman who was ‘property of,’ belonged to one biker as his ‘ol’ lady,’ and he had all rights over her. He could treat her however he wanted, no other man would make a sound about it, and none would ever make a move on her.
Otherwise, women were ‘honeys’ or ‘sweetbutts,’ available to all the men in the club, like a communal property. A woman was owned by one man, or by all the men. Jess wasn’t sure if she could adapt to either of those situations.
If she returned to the clubhouse as a girl with no status at all, then she really would be just a ‘hangaround.’ Hangarounds were common, tolerated and mostly seen as easy prey.
Jess didn’t think poorly of them or look down on them. If anything she had a sneaking—perhaps even an envious—admiration. But she didn’t want to be one of them. She still hadn’t figured out what she could be in a club. Or, rather, she still hadn’t accepted that she couldn’t just become a member of the club.
As she nibbled off the rest of her drink, Jess saw Mary Ann weave through the crowd of bikers. She had little flutter of her eyelashes or a roll of her hips for every one of them, it seemed. Every man she passed got a flash of her eyes or a blow of her pursed lips. Those she passed closest to were favored with the lightest scrape of her fingertips dragged across his shoulders or down the side of his neck. She had a tiny gift of intimacy for all of the men.
Chapter 2
Ryder came to lean back with his elbows on the bar beside her. Jess had to drag her eyes off the rise and fall of the curves of his big chest, and the flat slope of his stomach down to the big, metal belt buckle.
As she sipped her whiskey, he said, “Look, I could be way out of line here, but I get the sense that you want to spend some time here, get a feel of the club and not have to throw yourself into the whole groupie stroke sweetbutt free-for-all thing. If I say that you’re here with me, that will be the end of it.” She wondered how he could be so sure, but her stomach fluttered at the calm certainty in his voice.
“And what would be your end of that deal? What do you get out of it?” Jess was cautious of his glowing eyes and his tricky grin.
“I’m just trying to be helpful to you, a’ight?” he said, “A girl on her own in an MC clubhouse is pretty much fair game for anyone with a saddle who wants some…” He trailed off.
“Some gash? Is that what you were going to say, Ryder? See, if you don’t feel like you can talk straight to me, it makes me wonder if you’ve got a… I don’t know…”
“A game plan?”
“There you go.” He was two men, one apparently sweet as pie, and the other maybe a borderline psychopath. She knew one thing, though, both sides of him made her hot in her panties.
He looked right in her eyes and said, “Well, I do.”
Her heart jumped. She felt the heat of his body. Her treacherous body wanted him nearer. Much nearer. His voice lowered as he told her, “I think you want the same thing that I do.” His eyes took a tour of her body. Her throat grew tight as his lip curled.
“I think you want to jump my bones. I think you want to feel my hot skin on yours. I think you want me to lick you to distraction and suck you over the edge.” The calm, matter-of-fact way that he said it unnerved her. “I think you want me to open you up. Spread your wings and stretch you wide.”
“You’re pretty damned sure of yourself, biker.”
“I’m pretty sure of you, little princess. I’m pretty sure you want a hot, hard biker cock in your throat.”
Her chest and her neck flushed. Her nipples stung irritably in her bra and, pressed on the seat underneath her, her panties were hot and soaking wet. He took a sip of his bourbon and said, “I think you just aren’t ready to admit it yet.”
Inside, she was. She was more than ready. More than anything, she wanted to have him, right now, right here in the bar, to feel his weight, his size, his strength on her. In her.
She wanted to have him peel her clothes off, tear them off. He could stretch her over a table. Have her, ravage her in front of everyone. On the stage, even. He could drive her with all the force and strength of his hunger, while everyone stamped and shouted.
First night, Jess, she told herself, Don’t let yourself go wild. Besides, she knew that what made her want him so much was his raw, cruel streak. It’s sexy as hell, but it can hurt you, too.
Chapter 3
Daddy took care of Jesska; he always had. Her older sister Tiffany took care of her, too. Jesska wanted none of it. She wanted to take care of herself. Daddy had always overcompensated for them losing Momma so young and he probably over-protected the two girls.
Daddy told Jess repeatedly how much he loved and adored her. Jesska didn’t believe that he even knew her.
Because they moved so many times, Jess went to three different high schools. “We’re moving up in the world,” Daddy would say as they packed up for another Las Vegas suburb, greener, leafier and more artificial than the last. Fake lakes and manufactured greenery was all there was to look forward to as she left another set of friends behind. She hadn’t seen or heard from Belinda for more than two years. Joanna had been her second friend on MySpace after Tom. They had done BeBo and LiveJournal and they still connected on Instagram, but they never quite graduated to SnapChat.
Jesska wasn’t sure she would even recognize Joanna if she
saw her now, unless she looked like her selfies. Nobody ever looked anything like their selfies, except maybe fish.
Perhaps that rootlessness, never being able to be fully attached anywhere was a part of why Jesska loved motorbikes, from when she first became aware of them.
Even though most bikes had saddles for two, Jess always thought of the two-wheeled horse as a vehicle for one. That meant a special kind of freedom to her. It meant not having to rely on people you might lose.
Jesska always felt that she was on the edges of groups, like she was temporary, not a full member,and always at the margin. She hated it. That and the fact that she was always guaranteed some notoriety from who her daddy was. It was bad enough when he was a big-time criminal lawyer.
He defended drug dealers, gangsters, motorcycle club members, and in pretty high profile cases, sometimes. Kids at school told her about them. They always knew way more about it than Jesska did, or they claimed to. Daddy wouldn’t ever discuss his work, so she heard more about it in the schoolyard than she ever did from him.
Even when Daddy became a judge, everyone at her school seemed to know the details of every big case he presided over. More than once, she found herself surrounded by what was known as the ‘bad element’ of the student body.
She had been pressed up against the clattering echo of the steel lockers and a voice hissed menace into her ear. “You better tell your daddy to do the right thing,” more than once. They were talking about some drugs case, armed robbery, or once even about a murder case.
Jesska’s answer was, “If I even told my daddy what he should do in a case, not only would he not do it, but this place would have the FBI crawling all over it in minutes. So, if that’s your cousin’s trial strategy, all I can tell you is he’s going to need better counsel.”
First time she said it, her legs shook so hard after she could hardly stand to watch as the sullen bully slunk away, murmuring dark threats. After she traveled that road a few times, she got used to the terrain.
She’d spit in their eye if they didn’t get the message fast enough. It never came to that. Probably just as well.
It seemed like everywhere she went, either Daddy had carved a place out for her or his name had. If it hadn’t, there was always Tiffany looking out for her. Tiffany was two years older. She was bright and beautiful and everyone loved her. Tiffany would do anything, risk anything for Jess.
She loved the idea of bikers. Everything she learned about them made them seem sexier, more attractive. From what Jess could see, bikers didn’t accept what they were given; they just took what they wanted. Don’t fit with the rules? Doesn’t matter, they’d do it anyway. Jesska admired that. The few bikers she’d seen were smoking hot, raw alpha dudes. That was a bonus, too.
Sex seemed complicated to Jesska, and scary. When she was still in high school, it appeared to be no more than a recreation and, from the looks of it, very much overrated. Girls in her class couldn’t wait to do it, and then when they did it, it just messed them up. They got miserable, they got into fights and lost their friends, they were dumped and many of them got pregnant.
One time after school she took Stephen Mohan up to her room and Daddy burst in.
Stephen was a year above Jess in school. When he breezed down the halls, girls looked up from under their eyelashes at him. He had a great body, an easy, rolling walk and shy blue eyes.
Tania White shoved him up against the lockers one time. Wet kissed him while her little gang looked on with their eyes wide and their mouths open. Tania was almost a year older than Stephen. She pressed her body against his for at least a minute. When she pulled back, she had face like a lioness who’d just fed, until she saw the look of pity in his eyes.
Stephen sat by Jess at the back of the bus from school that afternoon. She turned down the volume on her iPod. She had an urge to take out the shiny little metal box with the white plastic top and the tiny screen. She was very proud to be one of less than a dozen kids who even had one.
She wanted it in her hand, so he could see how cool she was. She knew enough to know, however, that whatever you do to seem cool will have the precise opposite effect.
“Poor Tania,” Stephen said as he slid in by her side. “She doesn’t know how to talk to anyone. That’s why she puts on the big act like she’s tough.”
Jess told him, “I don’t think I know how to talk to anyone, either. Should I put on a tough act?”
He laughed. “No. For one thing, you can’t put on a tough act.”
She tightened up and her face pinched. “Oh?”
“You can’t act tough, Jess. You are tough. You’re the real deal.”
She didn’t know if he’d been complimenting her or if she was doubly insulted. That was the thing with Stephen. He was genuinely, effortlessly cool. He didn’t say things for effect. He just said what he thought. And he was usually right. So Jess didn’t know why did she felt all knotted about it now, but she did.
He still had on his easy smile, “Anyway, you can talk to anyone, Jess.”
She didn’t know if she could talk to him. There was something she desperately needed to say to him right then, but she didn’t even know what it was, never mind how to go about saying it.
He said, “That thing you played me on your iPod yesterday?”
Jess remembered playing him the track. She was surprised at his abrupt change of subject, but the tension melted out of her as she felt the conversation move to familiar ground. Jess knew her music. “It’s the coolest mashup. Everything fromAC/DC to Outkast and Aphex Twin, jammed up with like Good Charlotte and all kinds of rad stuff. There’s even music from a Hitchcock movie soundtrack. It’s got to be super illegal.”
His voice kind of softened. It slowed down as he said, “You said you had a whole album of it? Could I come and listen to it with you sometime?”
She knew he was saying something different from what was in his words. She said, “Now’s a time. You mean like now?”
Immediately she understood what he’d been asking. He was giving her the chance to ask him back to her room. She just jumped on it like a slut. Like Tania White would have done. Except she’d have grabbed him by the collar. Jess’s cheeks stung with embarrassment.
She only needed to say, ‘Sure. Why not?’ or something less gushy, less like she were desperate. But he was talking. He said, “Now’s a great time.”
Up in the sordid, stinky mess of her room, he sat next to her on the floor, leaning up against her bed. She talked too much. She told him everything she knew about every sample and every break on the album. “See, it’s not even an album. There’s no CD, you can only get it as a download. – Oh, this sample’s that guitar riff from Hole, dada-dada-da, speeded up,” and she leaned across him to pick up her iPod and run the track back.
His lips were near to hers. She stopped. Her lips were dry. As she licked them a frown flicked over her eyebrows. His tongue pressed out between his lips. His eyes moved from hers to her mouth. Then back. His fingers touched her cheek.
“Jess, you know, you’re…”
She couldn’t stop herself. She closed her eyes as she pressed her lips to his. Her senses filled with the scent of him as the music swirled in her head, The world drifted backwards and faded away. Her arms wrapped around him as he enfolded her. Her head tipped back and she yielded her mouth softly to his tender invasion.
Her fingers curled up into his hair. His body pressed against hers. His chest was so warm. pressed against her breasts. She couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to. She wanted to spin forever in this dance with no movement. She wanted it to widen and grow. To deepen.
She jumped as the door slammed open.
Seeing the look on Daddy’s face, Stephen went straight out through the window. He turned his ankle when his foot hit the lawn and slipped, but when he saw Daddy come after him by the same route, he got up and he ran like hell.
Jesska’s daddy in raging pursuit was a terrifying sight that anyone would instinctively run fro
m. Still, every time she saw or heard of Stephen after that her lip tightened in contempt. Her early exploration went bad on her, and she lost a friend.
That was the only time she ever brought a boy home. Afterwards, Jesska grew pretty wary of sex altogether. As for relationships, she heard someone say, “Sex is the currency of relationships.” Jess thought she’d save her currency, in case she found something she really needed.
Among the kids who she knew at school, it wasn’t just the currency, it was the whole business. A friend described a relationship as, “Like friends but with added benefits.” As far as Jess could see, it usually meant without the benefits of friendship.
Chapter 4
Outside the clubhouse in the hot night air, Jesska asked Ryder, “What does it mean when they say that you’re a ‘nomad’?” He handed her the glowing spliff.
Two Hitmen: A Double Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Lawless Book 1) Page 34