Tempted: The Numb MC

by Olivia Stephens

  He nodded once.

  “I need to call nine-one-one.”

  “No,” Keith said immediately. It surprised Kristina how strong his voice was, especially considering the state of him. “Don’t.”

  “Someone beat the crap out of you,” Kristina said. “The police need to be informed.”

  “No police,” Keith said gruffly. “They don’t need to be involved.”

  Kristina might have protested further, but there was something in his tone that made her stop short of insisting. She looked him over and shook her head. “I have to do something.”

  “You can,” Keith said, as he tried to straighten up. Kristina leaned forward and helped him rise to a sitting position. He didn’t brush off her hands as she had expected he might. Instead, he gave her a nod of thanks and looked her in the eye. “You can patch me up.”

  “Me?” Kristina said, as fear tinged her tone. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “That’s alright,” Keith said. “I do. I’ll talk you through the steps.”

  Kristina swallowed hard. “Are you sure I can’t at least take you to a hospital? We don’t have to tell them anything about how you got in this condition.”

  “No hospitals,” Keith said shortly. “No doctors and no police.”

  With a sigh, Kristina conceded defeat and nodded once. “We can go to my dorm room. My roommate will be in class all afternoon. It’s only a short distance.”

  She expected him to protest, but he only nodded and attempted to stand up. Kristina helped him up, lending whatever support she could, but she was extremely aware of how small she was in comparison to him. He towered over her, casting her in his mammoth shadow.

  They walked towards the dorm in silence. Kristina was concentrating on walking straight and supporting Keith’s weight, and she didn’t let suspicion taint the task at hand. For the moment, she decided to first get him to the dorm, patch him up, and then start asking questions. She hoped that Marie would stay away for the whole evening so that she wouldn’t have to explain Keith’s presence in their room.

  It took longer than she had anticipated to get him into the dorm room, but they ran into only two people on their way there. Kristina avoided their curious gazes and kept her head down, but she didn’t check to see if Keith was doing the same. Once the door was closed behind them, Kristina breathed a sigh of relief as Keith sunk down onto her bed without invitation.

  “God dammit,” Keith breathed as he closed his eyes for a moment.

  “You must be in a lot of pain.”

  “I’ve had worse,” Keith said in a non-committal tone.

  “What do I do?” Kristina asked in a business-like manner.

  “Do you have a first aid kit anywhere?” Keith asked, looking around the room.

  “Not here,” Kristina said, shaking her head. “But I can get one from the dorm supervisor. Stay here and I’ll be right back.”

  Kristina sped through the halls to the first floor where Tracy’s room was and within two minutes she was back and panting softly. She locked the room door and turned to Keith. “Ok,” she said. “I got it.”

  “Bring it here,” Keith said, and Kristina moved forward with the box in hand.

  “Open it and let me see what we’re working with,” Keith instructed. He spent a whole minute looking through everything, and then he nodded once.

  “Do we have everything you’ll need?” Kristina asked.

  “We have enough,” Keith nodded. “Let’s start with the blood. You’ll need to scrape it off.”

  Carefully and guided by Keith’s prompts, Kristina went to work. She worked slowly and with avid concentration and in less than half an hour Keith was already looking far better than when she had found him. With all the blood and grime wiped off him, Kristina could see the full extent of his wounds and cuts. There were several lacerations along his chest that looked quite severe, bruises that covered his body in large black and blue splodges and a few wounds that were still bleeding slightly.

  Still, despite all this, Kristina could not deny that he was beautiful. His muscles looked as though they had been cut from stone. His biceps seemed to ripple without being flexed. His porcelain skin had a blushed sheen to it and his tattoos stood out despite the blood and muck that clung to them. Kristina tried to focus her attention on his wounds alone, but it was impossible not to admire the perfection of his body. He was a real man, carved in the image of a warrior.

  She was washing off the grime and dirt from his left shoulder blade when she noticed a tattoo that had escaped her attention before. It was a single name written in a flowing font with big loops. It read ‘Natalie’ and Kristina could tell immediately that there was a story there, one that didn’t have a happy ending. She stole a glance at Keith and wondered if his hard exterior and protective walls had anything to do with that particular name.

  “Those will need to be sealed,” Keith said quietly.

  “What?” Kristina asked, embarrassed to have been caught in preoccupation. She only hoped that he had missed the reason for her distraction.

  “The wounds on my side,” Keith said. “They will need to be sealed.”

  “Sealed?” Kristina repeated, as her voice raised two octaves.

  “Do you have a needle in there?” Keith asked conversationally.

  “I’m not going to give you stitches, Keith,” Kristina said. “If that’s what you need, then we’re going to have to get to a hospital.”

  “We don’t need a hospital,” Keith said calmly. “And you don’t have to stitch me up either.”

  “Then who’s going to do it?” Kristina demanded.

  “I will,” Keith said simply. “Now pass me the needle.”

  Kristina hesitated for a moment and looked at him with doubt in her eyes. “It’s ok,” Keith said reassuringly. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Kristina watched as he set to work on himself. She felt her stomach turn, but she refused to turn from the sight. She didn’t want to appear weak in his eyes. She watched as he worked, carefully and precisely with hands that never shook. By the time he had finished his cuts had been expertly sealed and they looked neat and solid.

  “It looks like you’ve had practice,” Kristina commented softly.

  “The boys can get into quite a few scrapes,” Keith said. “And we all have an aversion to hospitals and doctors. It’s meant that we’ve needed to acquire a few… skills.”

  “Have you need to use those skills… often?”

  Keith looked as though he were about to smile. “Not as often as you might think.”

  Kristina nodded and cast her eyes over his body. It was amazing how he could manage to look so strong and powerful with so many bruises and wounds tainting his body. He exuded this raw strength that Kristina wished she herself possessed. It was the kind of strength that made others stop and take notice.

  “Now that you’re all…patched up, can you tell me how on earth this happened to you?” Kristina demanded.

  Keith’s expression turned sour immediately, and she saw a hood come up over his eyes, so that they were hard to read. “I’d rather not get into that,” he said shortly.

  Kristina felt anger rise up to meet those words. She took a step closer so that they were barely inches apart and looked him straight in the eye. “I found you bruised and broken by the side of the road, as though someone had left you for dead. You told me not to go to the police and I listened. I brought you back to my room and helped patch you up. The least I deserve is an explanation, and an honest one please.”

  Keith held her gaze for a moment. “I’d rather you weren’t involved in all this.”

  “Too late,” Kristina said. “You got me involved the moment you asked for my help.”

  Keith sighed. “It involves the business I’m in,” he answered evasively.

  “Does it have anything to do with that guy who called a few weeks ago? Kovic?” Kristina asked.

  “It does,” Keith nodded. “He wants to expand his busines
s.”

  “Which is a problem because…?”

  “It means encroaching onto ours,” Keith finished. “And that we can’t have.”

  “And you met with him last night?” Kristina asked, starting to piece together what had happened.

  “Yes.”

  “Alone?” Kristina asked incredulously.

  “That was the agreement,” Keith said stoically.

  “And you actually followed it?”

  “I know that might sound stupid to you… naïve even… but to me it’s a promise, a code of honor that I will keep,” Keith explained with his icy eyes on fire.

  “Bikers have a code of honor?” Kristina asked before she could stop herself.

  “Yes,” Keith nodded. “In every life of chaos… there is a code.”

  Kristina found those words so hauntingly poetic that she repeated them without thinking, and she saw Keith’s eyes brighten slightly. “We are not the mindless animals people take us for,” he said softly, his voice was deep and sultry and Kristina found herself leaning in without reason. “We are men, who have made a choice.”

  “What is the choice?” Kristina asked, mirroring his hushed tone.

  “The choice is freedom and fearlessness and the open road.”

  His words sent a thrill of some unexplainable pleasure through Kristina. He had just put into words what she had been craving this whole time. She longed to feel that sense of abandon; she longed to feel that kind of freedom and fearlessness so that her life wasn’t always governed by the safe choices. He was sitting before her, the embodiment of everything she had avoided her entire life, and Kristina realized that she didn’t want to avoid it anymore. She wanted to grab it in her hands and pull it towards her, into her if she could get away with it.

  “You make it sound so… tempting,” Kristina whispered, partially lost in her own dreams.

  “It is,” Keith said. “It can be.”

  Kristina leaned in a little further; she felt herself fall right into his intoxicating blue eyes and the urge to kiss him was overwhelming. She was just about to give into that urge when he cleared his throat abruptly and stood up, pushing Kristina out of her trance.

  “I should be going,” Keith said in a voice that seemed loud in comparison to their previous hushed conversation.

  “Going?” Kristina repeated.

  “I need to get my bike and your roommate might come back at any minute,” Keith continued. He walked to the door and opened it, and then he turned at the threshold to look back at her, a perfect wild silhouette framed by mundane surroundings. He nodded once, and then he disappeared before Kristina could stop him.

  Kristina just stood where she was, wondering how he had managed to empty her room of whatever life it had possessed. She sunk into her bed and closed her eyes, waiting for the color to return to her world.

  Chapter Nine

  Keith

  “Quiet down,” Miles said, his tone was clipped and serious.

  He didn’t have to shout to be heard. He had that quality of commanding attention no matter how quiet he was. His words carried through the meeting room where all the gang meetings were held and the group fell silent.

  “I just got more news,” he continued after a small pause. “Another shipment has been hit.”

  “Another one?” Gordon hissed. “What does that make…?”

  “Fourth one this week,” Lewis interrupted. “Fourth fucking hit this week.”

  “How bad is it?” Keith asked quietly.

  “The whole shipment is gone,” Miles answered.

  “What about Deronda and his boys?” Tucker asked. “Aren’t they supposed to be protecting it?”

  “Deronda’s dead,” Miles said without tone or expression. “I don’t know if his crew is alive or dead. Half of them probably are by this point.”

  “Fuck,” Keith spat. “Fuck.”

  “They’re hitting us from all charters across the Southwest,” Miles went on in his calm, unhurried manner. It was only from the tension in his posture that Keith could tell the attacks on their shipments were wearing on him. “The money has stopped since the third shipment was hit, and we’ve lost two contracts already.”

  “Has Finessy contacted you?” Durham asked bleakly.

  “No,” Miles said. “But it’s only a matter of time. He’s not going to want to continue doing business with us if this is the result. It won’t take long for Kovic to wheedle his way into the heart of the arms trade.”

  “We owe him a huge debt,” Tucker said standing up. “For all our contracts and for Keith.”

  “Forget about me,” Keith said immediately. “I don’t need the Dragons putting their lives on the line for me.”

  “Then you should have thought of that before you went to meet with Kovic,” Miles snapped, gaining Keith’s attention.

  Keith stared at Miles for a moment. “I am the vice president,” he said in a low voice. “And I made a necessary call based on sound judgment.”

  “You are mistaking pride for sound judgment,” Miles said.

  Keith turned to face Miles…and he felt the atmosphere in the room change immediately. “I did what I thought was best.”

  “No,” Miles said, shaking his head. “You did what you needed to do in order to face Kovic again—one on one.”

  “That’s not true,” Keith said through gritted teeth.

  “Then why didn’t you inform me about it?” Miles demanded. “I am still president. I should have been told.”

  Keith took a deep breath. “You had enough to deal with; I didn’t want to give you more to worry about.”

  “To fuck with worry,” Miles snapped. “That is the nature of the world we live in and the business we run. It’s part of the package…no matter what is happening with our personal lives. You didn’t tell me because you knew I would oppose it.”

  “Opposing it would have been the wrong choice,” Keith insisted. “If you or I had not been there, Kovic would have taken it as an insult.”

  “And who here gives a fuck about that?” Miles demanded. “I didn’t think you cared one way or another if Kovic’s pride was insulted?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Then why?” Miles hissed. “You did it because you wanted to take your revenge out on him for what he did to Natalie. You wanted to kill him; you probably would have if he hadn’t brought backup along.”

  Keith stared at Miles struggling for words that would counteract his arguments. After a few seconds had gone by and no rebuttal came to him, Keith began to realize that Miles was right. He had been foolish that night and he had been arrogant. He had been trying to ease the pain in his gut that clawed at him every time he thought of the fact that Natalie was dead and Kovic was still alive.

  Slowly, Keith sunk back into his chair and kept his head lowered. He heard Miles adjust his position, and slowly he felt the tension drain out of the room.

  “Give us a minute,” Miles said, and moments later the gang cleared out and left them in silence.

  “I understand why you did it,” Miles said finally, breaking the silence. “But I still don’t agree with it.”

  “I know,” Keith nodded. “And you were right. I had made an unconscious decision about Kovic… but I should have considered…”

  “You should have considered a lot of things,” Miles said. “But it doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done. Let’s move on, ok?”

  “Ok,” Keith nodded. “How are we going to handle Kovic?”

  “We can’t reason with the man,” Miles said. “He’s like a petulant child when he doesn’t get his way.”

  Keith nodded. “He’s dangerous,” he said. “Especially because he doesn’t play by the rules. We need to be extremely careful; he’s capable of anything.”

  Miles looked up. “What do you mean… exactly?”

  Keith sighed and repeated the threat Kovic had made just before they had parted ways. “I’m going to kill the Dragons and sell their bitches,” Keith said the words with
bitterness in his mouth. “But this time, I’m going to fuck them first. Those were his exact words.”

  Miles eyes turned dark. “He’s a rabid dog that needs to be put down.”

  Keith nodded in agreement. “That’s not going to be easy though.”

  “No, it’s not,” Miles nodded. “But it’s the only way to rid ourselves of this problem.”