by Kylie Walker
Asa’s face was white and Kyle wondered if he was angry about never knowing his sister or that she got a chance at a better life than he had…or both. “We need to figure out what to do about that out there,” Asa said. He wasn’t one to talk about his feelings and neither was Kyle. He loved his friend like a brother, he just hoped that Asa’s old lady Samantha could help him sort through this.
Rodney looked at Kyle and said, “First I want to know what you were talking about? What’s going on with you and Carl?”
“I couldn’t figure out why he didn’t like her. It just dawned on me that it’s for the same reason he doesn’t like Asa. He’s jealous and worried about his position here. Did you ever wonder how that crazy son of a bitch found us up at the cabin?”
“I assumed you were followed, or Strike was.”
“I know I wasn’t followed and I was surprised when I thought Strike had been. He’s careful and it suddenly dawned on me that no one ever bothered to ask Red Bull how he knew to send Martin up there. That cabin’s not easy to find. Those directions had to come from someone that knew exactly what they were looking for.”
“Fuck.” Rodney ran a beefy hand through his hair. “Asa go get Strike.” Asa got up and left the room. Rodney looked at Kyle and said, “You need to take her somewhere, maybe home to her parents…”
“She doesn’t want to live like that! We need to fucking fix this, Rodney. You need to fix this! This is your daughter. You supposedly wanted a better life for her so fucking fix this!” Kyle had never raised his voice to his president before but he was beyond caring what happened to him. He was in love with Levi…hopelessly, and he’d do whatever he had to in order to protect her.
Before Rodney could respond, Asa returned with Strike. Every time the door opened Kyle could hear the loud voices. He only prayed that they’d keep it inside until he had a chance to get Levi out of there. She couldn’t hear this bullshit from them. Strike looked nervous and he looked like he’d gotten involved in the fighting out front. “Sit,” Rodney told him. He took a seat and so did Asa and Rodney said,
“When you got back from taking supplies to Kyle at the cabin did you tell anyone where you went?”
“No.”
“No one at all? You didn’t talk about it to anyone?”
“No…I mean, Carl asked me how it went…” it was dawning on Strike what had just happened in the other room. He had a look of ‘Oh fuck,’ on his face. “I just told him everything looked good up there and I hadn’t been followed…” He was talking fast. He started to go on and Rodney said,
“Did you tell Carl where the cabin was?”
Slowly and looking like he wanted to spew vomit out all over the table, Strike nodded. “He said he might ride up there and check on them. Fuck…I’m sorry. I drew him a little map.” Strike was looking between Rodney and Kyle and Kyle could tell the kid was envisioning his dreams of being a full-fledged Black Skull disappearing.
“Okay,” Rodney said with a neutral face. “Go on.”
“Should I…?”
“You don’t say a fucking word,” Rodney told him. Strike nodded. Kyle doubted that was what he was going to ask, but whatever it had been he kept to himself as he got up and left the room. Asa looked at his father once the kid was gone and said,
“Now what?”
“Carl’s betrayal will have to be addressed in a meeting forum. If I get my hands on him he won’t be as lucky as he was today,” Rodney growled. It was obvious to Kyle that he was keeping his emotions in check, but someone that didn’t know him would be hard pressed to even know he was angry. Rodney looked at Kyle then and said, “Take her to Vegas. Check into a room under another name. Let me get this sorted out and then I’ll bring you both back.”
Kyle looked at Asa. As much as he was determined to get Levi out of there and to a safe place he was reluctant to leave his friend with all of this on his shoulders. Asa nodded at him. “We’ll have Jared act in your place while you’re gone. When you come back, things will go back to normal,” Asa said. “But keeping Levi safe right now is most important.”
Kyle stood up and put his hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Thank you.” Asa reached up and touched his hand and that was it. As Kyle closed the door behind him he knew Asa and Rodney’s conversation was far from over and it wasn’t going to be pleasant.
Kyle ignored the calls and questions from the guys as he made his way to the exit door and out to where the girls were preparing lunch. He saw Levi right away. She had on a pair of short denim shorts and a t-shirt with a picture of the Beatles on the front. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She looked like she did when she was fifteen and his heart swelled. He realized then that her dark hair and green eyes hadn’t really made sense in a family of blondes with blue eyes. He had no idea if she or Will ever questioned it…but that was about to change. She caught his eyes and smiled. She was talking to Samantha who turned and smiled at him as well. He tried to force a smile too, but he couldn’t even manage it. When he got close to them Levi furrowed her brow and said, “Hey, what’s wrong? We could hear all kinds of commotion…” That was when she looked down at his knuckles. “Oh my God! Are you okay?”
Kyle nodded. “I’m fine. You and I need to get out of here for a while…”
“Kyle what happened?”
“I’ll explain in a bit. Come on. We have to go.”
“Kyle is Asa okay?” Samantha asked. He nodded.
“Everyone is okay.”
“They came and got Doc…”
“Carl and I had a disagreement. Asa is in with Rodney. He’s fine.” He put his arm around Levi’s waist and led her away. When they got around front to his bike he handed her the helmet.
“Where are we going?” She put the helmet on. At least she wasn’t going to argue with him.
“Vegas baby.”
**
Three days after Kyle and Levi got to Vegas and he told her the whole story she still seemed depressed or in shock and he was worried about her. She was sitting by the side of the pool now in a lounge chair, staring at the wall on the other side.
“Hey baby you want something to eat?”
She shook her head. “No thank you.”
“Are you okay?”
She finally turned and looked at him. “I will be. I just keep thinking of all of the opportunities they all had to tell me the truth and they kept choosing not to. I was putting you all at risk by going there. Rodney was going to do whatever it took to protect me and my parents knew that. I wasn’t privy to that however. I just thought he was an old friend of my dad’s doing him a favor. I had no idea that he’d risk the safety of the club to protect me.”
“It’s not your fault.”
She snorted. “I know. My ‘parents’ should have told me that night before they sent me to him or Rodney should have told me when I got there. Now the club is involved in some kind of war with these dangerous people…”
“Not yet baby. I talked to Asa this morning. He says Rodney has a plan and if it works then Ian Mulligan won’t be a problem any longer and we can go home.”
She sighed. “Somedays I wonder where home is.”
He reached over and took her hand. “Hey. Home is wherever you and I are together and happy. I should have told you this before, but if staying in White’s Bridge is not what you want, we can go wherever you think you’ll be happy. That’s all I want baby.”
She smiled at him then and his blood warmed. “I love you.”
He grinned and winked at her. “How could you not?” She giggled and he sobered his expression and said, “I love you more than I ever knew was possible and I won’t’ ever let anything happen to you.”
She squeezed his hand. “I know that. I don’t have a problem with Whitesbridge. It’s your home and your life. I was getting excited about the coffee shop. I’m just not sure we’ll ever be able to make any of that a reality now.”
; About a week after Kyle and Levi had gotten back from the cabin, she’d been having a hard time sleeping. She was having nightmares about stabbing Martin. Kyle had taken her for a midnight ride one night and they’d parked the bike and took a walk through the all but deserted downtown. As they passed a little storefront with a ‘for rent’ sign in the window he’d remembered something her parents had said about her dreams and he stopped. As he looked in the window she said, “What are you doing?”
“I was seeing if it was big enough in there for a coffee house.”
A slow smile had spread across her pretty face. “Why?”
Kyle stepped back and looked up. It looked like there was an apartment above the store. “I heard a rumor somewhere that was your dream.”
He loved the way excitement had suddenly colored her cheeks. “Really baby?”
“Why not?”
She laughed. “Well for one thing I don’t have much money…”
He shrugged. “Did I ever tell you that since I started pulling in a payday at the club, I haven’t really spent much of it? I probably have enough to buy this place outright baby…if you want it.”
She had tears in her eyes. “But…I mean…are you sure?”
He smiled. ‘I’m positive. I want you here with me but I don’t want you here giving up your own dreams. Maybe this way we can have it all.”
She’d thrown her arms around him and for the next two weeks before everything had fallen apart, they’d been working on getting the place together. Now neither one of them knew what was going to happen and it made Kyle sick to think she was going to have to give up her dreams yet again. “Baby let’s go get something to eat. I know you have to be…” The throw away phone that Asa called him on was ringing. They looked at each other. Both of them knew that today was the day Mulligan got into town and without talking about it; they’d both been obsessing in their heads about what was going on at home.
“Asa?”
“Yeah man, it’s over. Bring my sister home.”
Kyle sat there in shock for a second. He looked at Levi’s face. She looked worried. “It’s over?” She sat up straight then and leaned in. Kyle put the phone close to her ear and they both heard Asa say, “Yeah, somehow the ATF got wind that Mulligan was coming back into the states. They picked him up in Denver when he was changing planes.”
Kyle smiled. “Well I’ll be damned.”
Asa gave them a few more details and when he ended the call he looked at Levi and she said, “Rodney…. you think?”
Kyle grinned, stood up and held out his hand to her. “Nah,” he said as she stood up. “Rodney would never snitch. Let’s go home baby.”
That would be the last they would talk about it. Kyle knew that Levi was smart enough to figure it out for herself. If Rodney tipped off the ATF and anyone had proof of that it would jeopardize everything he’d ever worked for…maybe even his life. However he managed it, Rodney was smart enough and street savvy enough that Kyle was sure no one would have proof of it. No one alive that is.
All he cared about was looking forward to his life with Levi. Her parents…all of them…had taken her away from what they thought would have been a hurtful life. They were probably right to do that even though he might not agree with the way they did it. He planned on proving them wrong however. He loved his club and he loved his brothers and now with Levi in it he loved his life. He was going to prove to everyone that they really could have it all.
ASA
Black Skulls MC
Chapter 1
“What the hell do you mean you aren’t at the construction site?” Harry Walsh, the Editor-in-Chief of the Las Vegas Post, barked in her ear, his gruff and highly irritated tone coming sharply through her iPhone.
“Why do you think I sent you down to Death Falls, for fuck’s sake?”
Samantha knew exactly why he had sent her thirty miles south of Sin City to a rural desert town where vultures and buzzards outnumbered humans. It had nothing to do with waiting patiently to ask questions at the end of a press conference — that’s not how a real reporter got real answers. Harry wanted a story. He wanted her to dig until she found the truth. Or rather he wanted his top crime journalist on this one.
Samantha wasn’t his first choice, not by a long shot. But after years of slogging through drafting fluff articles for the Arts & Entertainment section, or worse, Health & Beauty, or even worse, Dating & Relationships, she had finally marched into Harry Walsh’s oak furnished corner office, slammed the door, held her head high, and asserted, demanded, no insisted that enough was enough. Her time was now. She wanted the Johnny Fox story and she wasn’t prepared to leave his office without it.
Bemused, Harry had snorted his gulp of coffee back into his mug, blotted his mustache, and after studying her determined expression for an uncomfortable moment asked her who she thought she was. “Samantha Wilde!” she had yelled with a little frustrated stomp. “And I didn’t claw my way up from the mailroom to write two hundred words a week about blemish concealer or why Goldie Hawn has aged well!”
When Harry told her to calm down, she immediately launched into a surprisingly well-worded diatribe about Johnny Fox. She knew his entire back story as well as that of the Black Skulls motorcycle gang of which he had been an integral member. She knew that his sudden and mysterious disappearance ten years ago had never added up to the rumors the club had put out about him taking off because he wanted a new life. Now that the body had been found underneath the construction site someone finally had a place to start getting some answers, and that someone was going to be her. “Fox obviously betrayed the Black Skulls and they took care of him!”
It was an argument that had both intrigued Harry and won him over, and as she now stood in front of her Prius in the desert heat and watched tumbleweeds bounce lazily between Boone & Boone Garage and a bar called Poison, Samantha dared to make the exact same argument, restating her case. “The only way to get to the bottom of this story and find out who killed Johnny Fox ten years ago is to charge headlong and guns blazing into the Black Skull’s clubhouse!”
“Guns blazing?” he questioned.
Samantha glanced down the tight and perky length of herself and was immediately confronted with a milky plume of cleavage where her black leather, lace-up bodice was squeezing her to sultry perfection. Not guns exactly…
“Something like that,” she allowed before returning her eyes to Boone & Boone Garage where dirty rock music was billowing out into the hot afternoon. The auto shop was dark but she had seen movement in the shadows within. She was just preparing herself to venture inside when Harry called and interrupted her. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything,” she assured him.
“You need to get your ass over to Conway Contractors now,” he corrected without even pretending to be polite. “I want you covering every inch of that construction site, God damn it. I want you so close to the God damn body that you’re able to bang out two hundred words on the stench alone, do you hear me? Every other reporter within five hundred miles is probably already there, sucking it up.”
“The remains of Johnny Fox are skeletal. There won’t be a stench,” she smartly corrected. The only reason they even suspected the remains were Johnny’s was a cell phone that had been found with the body. That fact Samantha knew was thanks to her contact at the police department. They hadn’t released it to the public. As far as the ‘body’ went, watching them extract the bones wasn’t going to help her get any kind of story. She needed flesh and blood for that and she was looking at a shop full of it.
“Samantha!”
“I get it,” she grumbled beneath her breath.
“What was that?”
“Harry, you’re going to have to trust me!”
“If I wanted to trust you, I would have kept you writing about the risks of penile implants! I don’t trust you for-”
“Hanging up now!” she sang cheerfully before slipping her iPhone into the barely-breathing back pocket of he
r insanely snug leather pants.
Samantha wasn’t a plump girl by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, she was fit as a fiddle and boasted only modest curves in all the right places on her lanky 5’6” frame—a shy B cup, toned stomach, and bubble butt that she rarely dressed to accentuate. As thin as she was, however, earlier that morning she hadn’t so much put her pants on one leg at a time but rather pour herself into them, twisting and writhing and sweating until she’d wrestled the stubborn zipper up. The bodice was no better, and the heels hurt like hell—black stiletto-heeled boots—but she looked like walking sex and that’s what she was going for.
She made a damn stunning biker chick even if she said so herself.
Samantha knew that there would be no better way to coax the Black Skulls into divulging what had really happened to Johnny Fox ten years ago than to walk their walk and talk their talk and dangle the elusive possibility of a feisty romp just out of reach all the while... That is if she could corner the right biker, someone high up on the food chain, someone who would know fact from fiction.
It was hotter than hell out, that was for damn sure, but as slick as the back of her neck felt, she fought the urge to sweep her shoulder length, strawberry blonde hair up into a bun. Wild, sweaty strands were sexy. A librarian bun certainly would not be. Reminding herself that she had left Journalist Samantha back in Las Vegas and while in Death Falls, she would be Ms. Wilde, she urged herself to quit stalling and get this done. She took in a deep breath of the thick, sweltering air and told herself, “One foot in front of the other.” That was actually easier said than done in those ridiculously high heels, but she forced herself onward. Swaying her hips and tossing her long blonde hair she neared the expansive auto shop, trying hard to control her breathing as she did. She had to step through and around lines of cars and trucks with their hoods propped up and mechanics working above and beneath them.