The Naughty List Romance Presents:
Ultimate Alphas
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(c) 2014 The Naughty List, Respective Authors
This work of fiction is intended for mature audiences only. All characters represented within fictional and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This work is property of its respective authors and used with their permission. Please do not reproduce illegally.
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Table of Contents
Fugitives MC
By Daphne Loveling
I Already Love You
By Harmony Raines
Love Lift Me
By Synthia St. Claire
The Alpha Wants Curves
By Arwen Rich
The Billionaire’s Help
By Zania Summers
Wild: Dark Riders Motorcycle Club
By Elsa Day
Free Books and More from The Naughty List
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Fugitives MC (Motorcycle Club Erotic Romance)
By Daphne Loveling
Chapter One
I stared at my face in the mirror with a skeptical eye. The eyeliner was good, I decided, but I definitely needed more mascara. Taking the wand out, I brushed the black liquid on my lashes in thick, broad strokes. I closed the tube absently, and then scrutinized my reflection. It had to be right, I told myself fiercely. I couldn’t risk any mistakes.
Standing up, I took a moment to straighten my tight, sequined pink tank top and short leather mini. Good God, I could barely breathe in this getup. I felt more like a sexy lollipop ready to be unwrapped and devoured than a human being. But I knew it was what I had to do. There would only be one shot to get myself in and hired by the Fugitives MC, and I couldn’t afford to blow it.
The hardest thing once I got there, I knew, would be to calm my nerves. Ten years had passed since I was last in Crystal Spring, and in that time I had gone from a gangly, coke-bottle glasses-wearing pre-teen to a surprisingly voluptuous twenty-two year-old. It would be almost impossible for one of the club members to recognize me as the little girl whose older brother had been a prospect once upon a time. But I knew it was very possible, even likely, that I would recognize a few of them. I had to prepare mentally for that -- to keep my cool, no matter what happened. I could not let them see the hate in my eyes. The urge to destroy. To annihilate. To shed blood.
Looking back at the mirror, I brushed out my long blond hair until it shone and gave myself an experimental smile. No, I scolded myself. Too uncertain-looking. I tried again. Better. I practiced my slightly vacant, bimbo bombshell look. I giggled, pouting my lips and thrusting my breasts toward the mirror for effect. They were, along with my generous hips, my best potential source of distraction, I knew. I needed to remember to use them. Above all, I needed to remember to keep my real self – sarcastic remarks and all – wrapped up tight. Even tighter than this freaking skirt that was threatening to cut off my circulation.
Satisfied that my appearance was up to snuff, I slipped on a pair of high heeled black ankle boots and grabbed my purse. It was show time, I told myself. Time to do this.
Game on.
* * *
I remember when my family first heard about Kyle. It was Spider Daniels who came and told us. If he hadn’t bothered, who knows how long it would have taken? We might have gone for days, weeks even, without knowing. But Spider was my brother Kyle’s best friend, and had been since middle school. It was normal that it should fall on him to come and break the news to us.
That he would be the one to come tell us our lives would never be the same again.
Even though Kyle was eight years older than me, the two of us were unusually close as kids, and had been for as long as I could remember. That wasn’t surprising, I suppose, given our situation. My mom was already sick when she had me, though no one knew it yet. When she was finally diagnosed with a very aggressive form of MS, I was just over a year old. She got worse quickly, and within a year, normal, everyday tasks that should have been no problem for someone who wasn’t sick became almost impossible for her.
Since she was weak and often bedridden, my brother took over many of the jobs involved in raising me: from feeding me, to helping me learn to walk, to putting me to bed most nights. It was a lot for a nine year-old kid to handle. I’m sure it was hard on him, but he never let me see that. All through my childhood, he never acted like he resented having to play the role of mother to his baby sister. Not even when it meant he couldn’t join sports teams or after-school clubs because he had to come home and make sure I got my afternoon snack, and make sure dinner was ready when our dad came home.
And so, my childhood passed, relatively carefree in spite of it all. I had a mom who spent most of her time in bed. My dad worked a lot to make ends meet, and when he came home from work he was often too tired to do more than eat dinner with us and then plop down in front of the TV. But even so, I was happy. I had my brother, after all.
Until the year I turned ten.
I suppose in a way it wasn’t surprising. Kyle was a boy who had spent most of his young life taking on adult responsibilities. Because of me, he had had almost no childhood to speak of. He had stifled most of his adolescent longings, raging hormones and all, in order to make sure our family didn’t fall apart. As a result, my brother had few friends, of course – he didn’t have time for them – but he did have one: Spider.
Spider came from a very different background: the proverbial “wrong side of the tracks.” But these weren’t just any tracks. Whereas our family had moved to Crystal Spring for my dad’s work shortly before I was born, Spider’s family had lived there for many years. His dad was the president and one of the charter members of the local motorcycle club, the Fugitives. The Fugitives were outlaws, or one-percenters: the one percent of bikers who don’t follow the law. They had their own laws, their own codes, and at least in Crystal, the local police force had no control over what they did. It was Spider who introduced my brother to the Fugitives MC.
In truth, if my family had been “normal” – if my mother had not been sick, my father less careworn and distracted – my parents would likely have not allowed Kyle’s friendship with Spider to flourish. As it was, Spider became something of a release valve for Kyle as my mother’s illness worsened. By their junior year in high school, the two had become inseparable. Eventually, Kyle began neglecting his duties at home to hang out with Spider and his friends. One day, he failed to come home immediately after school. The next week, it happened again. The third time, he stayed out past dark. When he got home, we had already ordered and eaten a pizza for dinner. When Kyle finally walked through the door, he wore an expression on his face I had never seen before: Defiance. Defiance, mixed with guilt.
I was immediately sent to my room when my brother got home so he and my father could “talk.” Through my closed bedroom door, my ear pressed tightly against the wood, all I could make out were the murmurs of my father’s calm, deliberate voice and my brother’s slightly higher one. My brother’s voice was rising in volume througho
ut the conversation. Finally, I heard Kyle cry, “Why should I have to take care of every fucking thing in this family?!” The world seemed to shift on its axis at that moment: I had never heard Kyle use that word before, and certainly never in front of my parents. It seemed something irrevocable had happened. With one sentence, Kyle had deliberately ripped off the heavy mantel of his duty, which until then he had always assumed without a word of complaint.
The pregnant silence that followed his outburst was broken by the sound of Kyle’s angry footsteps tromping past my room. His bedroom door slammed, and after a few moments I opened my own door carefully and peeked into the living room. There, on the couch, was my father, his face in his hands, silently shaking with the force of his sobs.
From that day forward, my brother stopped coming home after school to take care of me. I learned to fend for myself. I made Pop-Tarts for my afternoon snack and checked in on my mother to see if she needed anything. Then, I started dinner and plopped down on the sofa to wait for my father. Often, Kyle would not come home until late at night, and eventually he stopped coming home altogether. He finally ended up moving in with Spider’s family not long after he turned eighteen. He did end up finishing high school, for which my parents were silently grateful. I know they held out hope that this, at least, would be something he could fall back on, once he got the wildness out of his system. Maybe, they must have told themselves, he would eventually come back home, go to college, step into a life trajectory that was safer, more familiar.
But that was never to happen.
Shortly after graduation, we heard that Kyle became a prospect to the Fugitives. He and Spider prospected at the same time. I remember my parents being shocked that Kyle would go so far in as to try to join the club. I think we’d always assumed – hoped, anyway – his obsession with the MC was just a rebellious phase, brought on by too much responsibility taken on too young. But looking back at it now, I realize his decision, as terrible as it turned out to be, made a certain kind of sense. Kyle gave up one family for another. In ours, he had been responsible for everything, and no one took care of him. In the Fugitives, despite his responsibilities to the club, he was taken care of – protected from having to fend for himself. In a strange way, I imagine he felt safe there. Safe from the emotional toll of taking care of a terminally ill mother. Safe from the responsibilities of keeping a little sister from harm. Safe from the lack of a present, nurturing father who could stop the horrors of the world from bursting through our door and ravaging our family.
Unfortunately, any safety he felt as part of the Fugitives was just an illusion. Kyle – or Gonzo, as he eventually became known to the club – was killed not long after he was voted in as a club member. How exactly he died, we never found out. We only knew that it had something to do with an altercation with a rival club, a dispute over territory.
Spider, like I said before, was the one who told us. He showed up at our house one night just after dinner. I remember that I was working on math homework, and at first was happy for the unusual distraction of a ringing doorbell. Spider hadn’t been to our house, nor had we seen him, in over two years – not since before he and Kyle had become prospects. He was almost unrecognizable. Tattoo sleeves covered his forearms. His head of brown curls had been shaven clean, but his face sported the beginnings of a beard. He wore a pair of worn jeans and motorcycle boots. Over his black T-shirt hung a leather vest with patches on it. One of the patches displayed the name of the club, and the others various words that made no sense to me at the time.
The most vivid memory I have of that day is that Spider wouldn’t look at any of us. He refused to meet my father’s gaze, and he seemed to not see me at all as I sat at the table with my books. Still, my parents must have seen something in his expression, for as soon as he stepped through the door they sent me to my room. I think they must have known that Spider would not have come to see them in any other but the worst circumstances.
I didn’t hear what was said that night in the living room, but the aftermath haunts me to this day. After what seemed like hours, during which I sat frozen on my bed in the dark, I heard the front door open and then shut. A motor roared to life outside, then sped away into the night. “Tallie?” my father called, his broken-sounding voice on the other side of my bedroom door startling me out of my paralysis. He turned the knob, and a cone of light infiltrated the room like an intruder. “Tallie,” he said again, his eyes meeting mine. All the emotion had gone out of his voice. “Come out into the living room, please.”
They told me as little as possible. Perhaps they didn’t know much themselves. Kyle had been shot in the chest. It was during an altercation with a rival gang. He had died almost instantly, with no chance of getting him to a hospital. He had been brave, had died defending the club, Spider said. This last part my father said with a tone of bitterness I had never heard him use before. He did all the talking, struggling to find his words and keep control of himself as my mother sat motionless, tears streaming down her face. When my father was done talking, she simply got up from her chair, weaving a little in place, and walked unsteadily back to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. My father was left behind to comfort me as I began to scream and cry. My brother – the only real touchstone of safety I had in the world – was gone forever.
And the Fugitives were responsible.
In the months that followed, my mother’s condition grew steadily worse. Where before, she would always make an effort to spend at least part of the day in the living room with us, now she rarely left her room. I brought her meals in to her, but she almost never touched them. Her hair grew thin and scraggly; instead of turning gray, it simply seemed to lose its color completely, turning the same color as her gaunt, papery skin.
She began to tell my father that she couldn’t stand to live anymore in that house, in the town where her son had been killed. So he, desperate for anything that might help his wife’s spirits improve, put our house on the market and packed us up, moving us to Butler, a larger town on the other side of the state, where he had managed to find another accounting job with roughly the same pay.
I never returned to Crystal Spring again as a child. Even so, the place continued to haunt me. In my new school, I failed to make new friends, preferring to stay by myself rather than have curious strangers ask about my family and where I’d come from. My grades dropped, but my parents, preoccupied by bills and my mother’s health, barely noticed. The move failed to help Mom’s condition, and she grew weaker and weaker. Eventually, she developed pneumonia, and died just a week short of my fifteenth birthday.
Once she was gone, it was just the two of us left: me and my dad. Despite my awful grief and my young age, I tried to be strong for him. I forced myself to start paying attention in school. My grades went up. I told myself that I would make him proud. I would be successful enough to make him forget the pain of losing his only son.
But my dad, having lost his oldest child and his wife, never really recovered. He moved through life like a zombie. When he spoke to me, his eyes never quite looked into mine. It was as though after my mother’s death, he had sealed himself off from the rest of the world.
I graduated the salutatorian of my high school class, and was accepted into a veterinary science program at the state university on a partial scholarship. Leaving my father to go to college two hours away was the hardest thing I had ever done, but it was the only way I could think how to make him happy. I came home at breaks when I could, though the job I found at a vet’s office near the university meant that I spent summers away from home.
After college, I had always planned to go back to Butler to be near my dad. But in my last semester, he got hit by a car crossing the street in front of his office. When I got the call from the hospital, they told me to hurry: He wouldn’t last the night, they said. I raced back to Butler, my trembling hands barely able to control my beater car. Dad died just after I got there. The last word on his lips was my brother’s name.
There was a small insurance settlement, of which I was the beneficiary. It allowed me to pay my student loans and bury my father. The rest, I put in a bank account, to finance the next stage in my life.
After graduation, some of my college friends headed off to start graduate school. Others, the lucky ones who had found jobs right away, moved across the country or across town to new apartments, new beginnings. A few, those who hadn’t yet gotten their feet on the ground, packed up their things and moved home until their situations would improve.
I went back to Butler, locked up my father’s house, and drove to Crystal Spring. There, I rented a tiny furnished one-bedroom house and waited. Waited to take revenge, on the people who had destroyed my family.
It wasn’t too hard to be incognito in Crystal. So much time had passed that no one recognized me anymore. I remembered downtown, with its storefronts that seemed to be from another time. The outskirts were bigger than I remembered, now dotted with convenience stores, fast food restaurants, a Wal-Mart. I drove by my old house, painted beige now instead of yellow, where a young mother was supervising two toddlers in the front yard.
The strip club outside of town wasn’t hard to find – I remembered it from my childhood, when my mother would cast disapproving glances at it as we drove by. The club, called Teasers, was owned by the Fugitives – one of a handful of local businesses owned by them. After a few weeks of living back in Crystal Spring, I drove by the club one day and glimpsed a “Help Wanted” sign in the window. I pulled into the gravel parking lot and peered at the sign through my rolled-down window. They were advertising for a waitress. I wasn’t sure whether that meant waitress or “waitress,” but I had waited tables in college before working at the vet’s office. I put the car in gear and drove back to my place. This was a stroke of luck. If I could manage to get the job, I could infiltrate the club and take my time thinking of how to make them pay.
Ultimate Alphas: Bad Boys and Good Lovers (The Naughty List Romance Bundles) Page 1