I’d been looking pretty fucking forward to seeing Roni tonight. After jerking off thinking about her last night, I’d decided Why bother, when I could have the real thing… Or at least, I had a chance of having the real thing.
I’d texted her this afternoon, asked her if she’d meet me tonight for dinner. She said she was busy, already had plans, but could meet me afterwards for drinks. Which was in about forty-five minutes.
Bane confirmed that she was home, that Talia had gone into her building and stayed for over an hour, and left about half an hour ago. So I knew Roni wasn’t lying to me or having dinner with some other guy. She’d already told me Talia was helping her out on the New Year’s Eve event.
Right now, she was probably getting ready for our date, just like I’d been doing.
Shit.
I tossed my leather jacket on the bed and layered on a long-sleeved fleece shirt and a hoodie instead. I’d spent the afternoon texting with Roni, back and forth, fucking flirting, and this was definitely gonna throw her for a loop. She’d probably think I was playing games. But I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about that right now.
Right now, I had three guys committing a serious offense—several offenses, actually—on my behalf.
So I pulled on my Kings cut and sent her a text.
Me: Sorry, sweetheart. Can’t meet tonight. Make it up to you.
I should’ve called her, probably, so she knew for sure I wasn’t just blowing her off.
But I couldn’t talk to her right now.
Adrenaline was already coursing through my body, my heart thumping as I got on my bike and hit the road. Seventy minutes, straight out of town, to the dump.
8:33 pm.
I pulled off the sketchy dirt road onto the edge of the clearing.
It wasn’t an actual dump, but just what we called the place. Was pretty sure no one even knew why.
The property had belonged to a long-time King, a retired brother now, for-fucking-ever, and the stories about how the dump came to be called the dump were all over the place. Jokes about dumping bodies; those were obvious. A tradition of dumping old bike parts; that was true, but not so interesting. A story about a certain King bringing all his girlfriends here for a final screw before he dumped them.
Dumbass shit like that.
Wherever the name came from, it fit. This stretch of land was used for all kinds of shit, but mostly, if you didn’t have a place to do something or didn’t have a place to put something… the dump was your answer.
It was big, secluded, private, and varied to meet your needs. It even had a few random, creepy-ass buildings, if that happened to be what you needed.
When I pulled up in front of the shed, Maddox’s van was already parked, headlights shining on the small, weather-beaten and slightly-sunken wood building.
Maddox and Con stood in the beams of light, waiting as I parked my bike.
Lex came around from the back of the shed as I got off and strode over. “This place gives me the skeevies,” he said.
“Then quit wanderin’ around,” Maddox said.
“Had to take a piss.”
“Inside?” I nodded at the shed and Con nodded back. I started toward the door. “Keep the chatter to a minimum.”
“You goin’ in alone?” Maddox asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, brother,” Con said.
I opened the door, which creaked exactly like you’d expect it to. Really, in the daylight, the land around the shed was a rolling meadow. Even had some flowers. Kings had had family picnics here. But at night, the shed felt like someplace they shot one of those horror movies with the gnarly-ass torture scenes.
There were a couple of battery-powered lamps hung up on hooks on the wall. Otherwise the place was dark. The floor was a bunch of rotten boards with weeds growing right through. There was a single rusted chair and a couple of random buckets in the corners. One big wooden post stood in the middle, from floor to ceiling, about a foot thick.
Taze sat on the floor, facing the door, his back against the post and legs splayed out in front of him. His hands were bound behind his back and he’d been tied securely to the post.
There was a piece of duct tape over his mouth.
Some blood had dried around his left nostril and he was looking a little roughed up, but nothing serious. Lucky for him, I’d told the boys to use no more force than necessary.
Also lucky for him, I’d already seen enough violence in my life to last me several fucking lifetimes. And like all the ugliest shit in my life, at thirty years old, I was already beyond fucking weary of it.
My other friends, outside the MC, liked to joke about it. You need someone taken care of, just tell Jude to bring his gun. Har har. Those were the jokes made by people who had the luxury of joking about violence and darkness because it had never really touched their lives.
But violence was not an interest of mine, and to me, it wasn’t a joke.
Taze’s eyes met mine, and I could see his chest move with his breaths. His nostrils flared; that bloody nostril and the duct tape were probably making breathing a bitch. He was rattled, for sure. Pissed off.
Scared, obviously.
He definitely had no idea where the fuck he was, but even though none of my brothers had worn any Kings patches when they nabbed him, he sure as shit knew who’d brought him here.
And why.
I shrugged off my cut, slowly. I took hold of the chair, dragged it a few feet in front of him and turned it around. Draped my cut carefully over the back of the chair, so the back patches were facing him.
Then I watched him as he looked at it. Watched his chest working. My brothers hadn’t been gentle pulling his arms behind him and tying him there. He did not look the least bit comfortable.
And I took my time, fucking studying him.
It wasn’t like I couldn’t see what Roni saw in him. It was pretty fucking obvious. Women liked the cocky blond thing, right? Definitely seemed to work for Piper and Zane. I’d never known any man to attract women like those two did. And Taze was definitely a blond pretty boy with cocky written all over him.
That shit Roni said about his piece, his colors, his affiliation with the Sinners, making her feel safe? Maybe that was true, too.
Maybe he was even doing something right in bed, to hold her interest as long as he did.
But that was about as far as I could take it in my mind. The kid had fuck all other redeemable qualities that I could find, and I’d been watching him for the better part of a year.
“The other night,” I said slowly, “when you and your brothers forced me off my bike with a tire iron in my back, and you mouthed off to me and threatened one of my brothers… did you have any idea what I was thinking?”
He looked at me as I moved slowly closer. Just a few steps and I was right in front of him, so he had to tilt his head back to look up at me.
“I was asking myself, ‘Is he really this fuckin’ stupid?’”
He stared at me, and I could read the fear in his eyes.
I stared right back until he looked away.
“But then I remembered the shitbag MC you belong to, realized maybe it’s not your fault. Maybe none of your degenerate brothers ever took the time to properly educate you on how things work in the life.”
I pointed at the back of my cut.
“Or maybe you saw that ‘Nomad’ rocker I wear and misinterpreted my importance, my position in my MC.”
I let that sink in.
“So tonight, I’m here to educate you, Tyler Murphy, on who you are, and who the fuck I am.”
I squatted down in front of him. His eyes met mine, and yeah, he was definitely scared.
Good.
He needed to know, if he didn’t already—if he’d really managed to kid himself fucking otherwise—that an attack on me was an attack on every King. I threat against Lex was a threat against the entire club. Didn’t matter that he and his brothers took off their Sinners shit and tried to make
it personal.
Wasn’t personal.
But he was damn lucky it was me he’d forced behind that gas station.
If it had been any other King, fact was, he might be in the ground already.
Retaliation for that kind of shit would be fast, and it would be furious.
So I started his education.
“I’m the guy who could get on my phone right now and call up my brother,” I told him. “You know my brother. Piper. VP of the West Coast Kings. Maybe I tell my brother what happened the other night. You remember. You and your brothers and your tire iron. And Piper… he gets pretty upset. He gets on the phone to our President, who gets on the phone to your President, and fills him in. What do you think happens next?”
He stared at me, but he couldn’t answer me, of course, so I kept going.
“I’ll tell you what happens. Because you… are nobody. You’re a fucking thug. Your MC cuts you the fuck loose, strips your patch for moving on a King without sanction, and my brother swings around and picks you up. And I gotta tell you, Tyler, my big brother’s got some big love for me. How do you think your alone time with him is gonna go down for you?”
I let him think about the answer to that as I stood up and walked slowly around the shed.
“But maybe I’m not that guy,” I said, once I was standing in the shadows behind him. “Maybe I don’t tell my brother a thing. Maybe instead I tell my brothers outside.” I paused; the sounds of my guys outside could be heard, the shuffling of boots in the dirt, a muttered comment. “Those guys are not the VP of the West Coast Kings. They’re foot soldiers, like you. Soldiers who do whatever the fuck I ask. Who scooped you up off the street, threw your ass in a van and dragged you… way… out… here.”
I got close behind him, just off to the side, and crouched down.
“How do you think they’ll take hearing about what happened the other night? Maybe I leave them in here with you a while, they can let you know how they feel about it.”
I let that sink in. Then I got to my feet again.
“So, which of those two guys do you think I am?” I moved to stand in front of him again. “Tell my brother…? Tell my brothers outside…?”
Here was the beautiful problem with that question: the answer didn’t matter.
Either way, this ended the same for him.
And Taze knew it.
Basically, I was the guy standing in-between him and a very bad ending, and he was definitely starting to realize it. By now, he’d sweat right through his shirt. I could hear his raspy breathing getting shallow.
“I know. Tough choice when you really don’t know shit about me and you’re really not all that fucking smart, Tyler. But let me help you out. Personally, I always look at it like this: when you’re deciding between two options, even two good options… even two terrible-as-shit options… there’s always a third.”
I paused again, and I heard his dumbass voice, threatening me, in my head.
Forget. About. Her.
“So let me tell you who I am.”
I crouched down real low, getting eye-level with him. This time, he didn’t quite meet my eyes, looking somewhere near my chin.
“I’m the guy who doesn’t tell my brother a thing. I don’t tell my brothers outside a thing, either. I’m the guy who lets you walk out of here. Lets you go back to your sinkhole of a clubhouse. And you’re the guy who forgets about Roni Webber.”
I let him chew on that for a long moment before I spoke again. Eventually, his eyes met mine.
“You don’t go anywhere the fuck near her. You don’t make any attempt to communicate with her. You delete her contact from your phone. You unfriend her on fuckin’ Facebook, you left swipe her on fuckin’ Tinder, whatever the fuck you’ve gotta do to wipe her existence from your brain. You stay the fuck away from me. You stay the fuck away from Lex. And the second that changes, the second I hear you forgot to forget about Roni or Lex, you’re sniffing around Roni or causing trouble of any kind for any of my boys, I become a different guy, Tyler. A guy who tells my brother and my Prez exactly what you and your boys did, how you threatened Lex and your brother clubbed me in the back with a tire iron. All because you were trying to stake some bullshit claim over a woman who isn’t yours to claim.” His eyes widened a bit, and I leaned in real close to drive home my point. “She’s. Mine.”
I stood up. Stood over him for a while. Just letting him wonder if I was gonna knock him in the face with my fist or kick him, like he’d done to me.
But pain was not my weapon of choice.
All I needed was fear.
“Forget about her,” I said, once I’d let him sweat it out a while—how close he’d come to getting his ass kicked, or worse, in some fucking creepy-ass shed in the middle of God-knew-where.
Let him feel exactly who had the power here.
Then I walked out.
Chapter Thirteen
Roni
I spent the night working, mostly at the little desk in my dining room, the one that faced out the big window.
Today, I’d booked our opening act for the New Year’s Eve event. Fabulous. I should’ve been a lot more excited than I was. I wanted to share the news with Jude, actually… but like hell I was messaging or calling him.
Not when he’d brushed me off.
After I’d read his text, I’d put my phone aside and dug into my work. I’d had a brief meeting after work with the manager of the Pandora, and another meeting with Talia to go over some things. My lawyer was working on the contract and promised to have it to me tomorrow. I was aiming to have tickets on sale by the start of next week, if all went according to plan.
Lucky for me, the potentially hardest part of my job, on this event, would be the easiest—because ticket sales would not be an issue. I still had a careful publicity plan worked out, which I’d go over with Brody the day after tomorrow. But he’d already assured me Dirty would sell the place out, easily and probably immediately. And I knew both Dirty and DJ Summer would deliver on performance, so really, this gig was just getting sweeter and sweeter the more I pulled all the pieces together.
But then there was the bullshit with Jude.
Canceling on me, like forty minutes before he was supposed to pick me up for our date tonight. I’d been putting on my makeup and I already had my lacy-as-hell push-up bra and thong on—you know, the one I was hoping he’d rip off with his teeth after we had a few cocktails. And then he sent me some lame-assed text to cancel our date.
Nothing to make a girl feel irrelevant like putting a bunch of effort into getting sexy for a guy she’s about to see, only to have him blow her off like she meant exactly zero to him.
Though I was pretty damn sure, after the other night, he wasn’t blowing me off because his dick had magically lost interest.
Which meant he was blowing me off because he had something else to do—and he wasn’t telling me what that was. He didn’t even make up some random excuse about having to meet Jesse or something.
Which could mean only one thing.
Club business.
And I knew what that meant.
I’d dated a few bikers over the years and I knew whatever he was up to, if it was club business, he was not gonna tell me the where, what, why or with whom. No matter if I begged, threatened or threw a hissy fit.
Fair enough, really. I understood enough about the Kings and the Sinners, in general, to know why they wouldn’t tell me anything. Their protection. My protection.
Fine.
But I also knew “club business” was therefore also a convenient cover for anything at all they didn’t want me to know about. I was pretty sure when Ben, a King I’d dated years ago, cited “club business,” that business often involved fucking a stripper named Lissa. I was also pretty sure that when Taze cited “club business,” it sometimes involved something similar. However, because, you know, “club business,” I could never exactly prove it.
It bothered me, but probably not as much as it shoul
d. Maybe because it wasn’t right in my face and I could just kind of ignore it?
Maybe because I was never in love with either of those men.
Maybe because even though I was faithful to Taze, I still kept a Tinder account and flirted with men online, and in person at nightclub events, and honestly had never really stopped looking.
Looking at other men.
Looking for something better.
But the mere thought of Jude blowing me off because he might be at his clubhouse with some other woman in his lap?
It made me feel mildly homicidal with jealousy.
I sat at my desk, looking out at the slice of water and the sparkling lights of downtown, which I could see through a gap in the high-rise buildings across from mine. My phone lay in front of me, the little light blinking to tell me I had new messages. I’d left the sound off for the last couple of hours while I worked on my laptop.
And maybe because I was avoiding him.
What if he messaged with some lame-ass explanation (i.e., lie), and/or blew me off more permanently?
What if he didn’t message at all?
I never play a game that I can’t win.
That’s what I’d told him, and I’d definitely meant it.
Especially when it came to him.
Neither do I.
That was what he said, and I believed him.
Was I just a game to him, then? A game to be played and won, or manipulated however he liked, or worse—abandoned as soon as things didn’t seem to be working out in his favor?
And if so, where did I really fall on his priority list?
Dead last?
When I finally checked my phone, there was no new message from Jude. Just some random Tinder dudes and Instagram messages. And Jessa, asking me if I’d hang out with her on Friday night, after my meeting with Brody.
I texted her back: I’ll bring the wine and ginger ale.
Since she was breastfeeding, I knew she wouldn’t drink with me, but hey, I could drink alone, right?
When I finally went to bed, all I could think about was how hard I’d fallen for Jude Grayson, once upon a time. I really didn’t think about it, ever. But now it was all coming back, the memories sharp and painfully fresh. As if they’d been waiting all along. As if being ignored for so long had only made them stronger.
Dirty Like Jude: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 5) Page 14