by Amy Law
The came towards her as the bike leaned over to the left, then picked up at speed. They were headed for the mall. They were in Summerlin. She’d been in Summerlin all this time.
A police siren wailed behind them, and a helicopter rose and chopped the air as it loomed like an ugly insect. Weaving nimbly around the pay barriers, the bike steered into the multi-level car park.
Tiff had lost her Mini in here enough times that she knew what a labyrinth it was. There were more than a dozen levels, and who knew how many exits. That’s his plan, she realized. He’s going to be out of here before the cops can cover the exits.
Has he planned this, she wondered, or is he really that good?
He made straight for one of the far exits, shimmied around the barrier and cut into the downtown traffic. The helicopter buzzed over the mall, looking in all the wrong directions.
The bike slowed and blended with the traffic and stayed on the highway until they peeled off to the Regional Justice Center and courthouse complex. He stopped the bike in the shade and climbed off.
“This is your stop.”
She could step right off and onto the sidewalk. She stayed on the bike seat. “Take me with you.”
“Now I know you’re crazy. Come on, your Daddy’s probably in there somewhere. Go find him.”
“You really don’t know anything about my Daddy, do you? He isn’t at a desk waiting for a phone call. If he wasn’t in one of the leading cop cars, he’ll be in that chopper you left behind.”
“Then he’ll come and find you.”
“Take me with you.”
“Why?”
It was hard for her to answer, so she just told him the truth. “I don’t know why. It’s what I want, is why.”
She didn’t even know his name. Tiffany wondered if that was a part of what made her want him, need him so very badly. Looking at him made her ache.
Chapter 14
The dark, velvet blue sky was thick with splashes of tiny stars. Faraway clouds drifted across the high, bright moon. He guided the big bike around long sweeps of road, up and over rocky hills, and out onto a high plain. He parked up by a ridge.
She sensed that he wanted to talk, as did she. There were things that she needed to have said, things she needed to know, along with some things that she wanted to hear. But not yet.
She watched his eyes flicker in the twilight. He took her face in his hands and looked in her eyes a long time. She opened her arms and reached for him. He gathered her up to him, bringing her face to his. Their lips took nips and tastes of each other, both holding back, both straining.
Her mouth opened to him. His tongue met hers and mingled. Their heat melted and melded them together.
His chest muscles and biceps vibrated with his shaky breath.. Her breath shook, too. As he pressed into her, her foot slipped on the dirt and her eyes widened. In that moment, she was even more in his power than she had been, locked in the tiny room. There was no one here. No one for miles. There were only him and her.
She bit her lip and sighed as he pushed her to the ground. She wanted to be lost in him, swept away. She wanted everything obliterated. Here in the hot, dry desert breeze was perfect.
“Make it all go away,” she whispered. His strong arms held her down, pressed between her breasts, and reached up to her throat.
“Only protect me,” her voice trembled.
He seized her. He pulled off her clothes and he opened her.
He breathed her, tasted her. His hair brushed the soft skin inside her thighs. He ate greedily between her quivering lips and folds, and up to the base of her nub. His tongue flicked, vibrated with moans, and lapped hungrily. He made her hips writhe and thrash, and he held her down.
He pushed and drove the flow of her rhythm. He licked, sucked, and forced his sensual, muscular tongue up into her walls to push and press high inside at the front. Currents thrashed and beat within her, jagged splinters of lightning that sparked and spread out in unbearably delicious spasms.
Her back stretched and her feet stamped on the dirt beneath her. He was pitiless. His strong lips tenderly took her inside and out, rocked, rode and ravished her. At last, he pressed and sucked her into a deep, hard, slowing beat. She crushed his head between her thighs, she crested, cried, and felt herself gush into his waiting lips.
She quivered, shook into his mouth, and her body thrummed.
Then he lifted her hips and his huge shaft drove into her, stretched her and filled her. Her soft, wet flesh was dragged apart around his hard, beating rod. On his knees, he held her hips up and her head thrashed from side to side. Her mouth opened as she watched the glistening skin tense over his terrifyingly perfect body.
She watched as his body rolled in rhythm, his hips snaked and his muscles rippled. She watched his stomach clench. Her body furled and flowed, the force following faster and finding her currents crash, brim, burble, and burst into torrents of wave after wave, crashing, splashing, and exploding from the powerful shaking in her core to the wild clench of her fingers and the cramping crunch of her toes.
She watched his brow knot while as his rhythm overtook him and he pulsed unbearably hard inside her. Her eyes watered and her mouth opened wordlessly as his hot bolts beat and fountained into her, through her, and filled her.
Epilogue
For a long time, they didn’t speak.
She had never known anything like it, felt anything like it, or even considered wanting anything like it. The desert was the perfect place. This man, this biker, was the perfect man for her.
She was lost between crying inside for how shocked and horrified she was, and weeping for how childishly complete it had made her feel. She wasn’t sure that she could ever live a day in her life without it.
His eyes narrowed and he chewed his lip as he looked into her face. “Okay. I’m going to send a text ahead.” She smiled to see that he pulled out an iPhone, out-of-date, just like hers. Identical, only his was black, of course, and hers was white.
They dressed. He climbed back onto the bike and fired up the engine again. As she climbed on behind him, she asked him his name, unsure if she really wanted to know. She didn’t hear his answer as the machine sprang forward beneath her.
She hung on tight behind him and put her arms around his strong body, felt him swing and sway the heavy two-wheeled beast. Something tugged at the corner of her mind. She’d probably never see her own iPhone again.
They were headed across the red and brown desert plain when the thoughts came together for her. On that first day, in the warehouse, when he called her Daddy, how had he been able to use her iPhone? There’s a passcode. How did he get by that?
Chapter 1
Jackson Sage remembered the stained bare wood of the table as he nursed the last of a tepid beer. He’d become used to finding his father in places like the biker bar. The bare wood floor was dull like the tables. It was worn and decorated with smears, gouges and dark stains that could be spilled alcohol. They could as likely be bloodstains. The grunge out of the juke-box was at a volume just below stun.
The apocalyptic thrash metal had his blood pumping. A girl flashed him a look as she climbed up onto the big table next to where Jackson and Karl sat. Karl was indifferent as the brunette with big hair and a lot of black makeup thrust her hips around. She had on a black leather jacket and a practically invisible pair of sheer black panties, along with the high-heeled spiky boots that she stamped on the table.
As her foot tapped, her eyes fixed on Jack’s and she curled her finger. His body tensed to rise, but with an effort he smiled back to her and shook his head. He was here to talk to his father, and it was important. Her bottom lip pushed out, but then she gave him a smile back as she turned away.
A peroxided friend climbed up to join her. She moved, catlike on the beat in heels, stockings and a necklace.
Jackson had come to tell Karl, his father that the Marine Corps had accepted him. That he had enlisted and he would be leaving before the weekend. He p
lanned to continue his studies during his tour of duty. He said that he would either complete his college degree during his tour of duty or after. “Depending on how I’m able to progress at officer candidate school.”
Karl’s eyes didn’t move. “Quantico’s tough. But you’ll do okay.”
Coming from Karl, it sounded like respect, but Jackson couldn’t ever be sure. He thought about what his father had told him. Karl could and did greet any news, whatever its source, with a dousing of wastewater. Karl covered everything until it stank.
The girls on the next table pulled up a big biker to join them. The two girls ground their hips into the biker’s pelvis and over his thighs, hard and slow. They bounced and pressed their soft bodies together. The biker’s grin spread right across his face.
The girls worked their way around and over, then up and down the biker’s jeans.
Karl greeted the news of his son’s enlistment with just the bucket of cold water that Jackson expected. Karl’s face carried no expression as he heard it, and no more when he announced that he was going to prison.
The two girls knelt around the front of the biker’s jeans. Their wet mouths met and their pink tongues flicked each other and they giggled as their lips and tongues met. Jackson forced himself to concentrate on what Karl said.
Karl’s gravelly voice scraped as he said, “My number’s been pulled and I’m getting the ticket to hard time.”
His face didn’t move as he waited for Jackson to take it in. “Likely a ten to fifteen.”
“What did you do, Dad?” Jackson kept his voice low as he tried to hold his emotions in check.
“It isn’t anything that I did. Someone better placed than me did something. Someone who doesn’t have to take the rap.” Karl took a pull on his whiskey. “Not while there‘s someone ready to fit me up for it.”
As Jackson began service for his country, Karl would serve time as an example of its corruption. Jackson peered into down into his glass and wondered about his future. Turned over his past. What his father had called his ‘heritage and traditions.’
“It’s a stitch up job. I didn’t do the thing that I’m charged with. I may have done other things, but I had no part in this.”
“Can’t Laughlan prove that? You pay him enough.” Laughlan was Karl’s lawyer.
“That’s not how it works, Son. Not this time. The law is just how some men get what they want.” He saw his father’s bitterness almost spill from a dry rage into a brimming frustration. “Rich men for the most part, or men who made the right connections. Men who’ve done the right deals and favors, that’s who the law works for.”
Karl seemed on the verge of self-pity. It shook Jackson. He’d seen a lot of things he hated in his father, but this was a whole new downhill slope. “I’m out of position in the favor circle. Nope, somebody else did this thing, but this time it’s not going to be him who picks up the tab. It’s going to be me.”
Jackson had gotten next to nothing in the way of love or affection from his father, and he didn’t feel like he had a whole lot to give back, but still this deal stank. The law should act on what men have done, not on deals made in back rooms, hidden away from view.
Remembering lawyer Laughlan and his sad preacher eyes, Jackson knew two things now. He knew that when he completed his tour with the Marines, he wanted to be a lawyer. And he knew that he meant to be a better lawyer than that man.
Karl had never been much of a father to Jackson, but he had always seemed ready to be less of one. Always had some fresh disappointment ready to hand. This time, maybe it wasn’t his fault. Or maybe there was a whole other side to the story. Jackson didn’t know what to think.
He’d been trying not to look, but the girls on the next table shouted as the three bikers slapped their asses and beat their hips against them. The brunette had a hand in her hair and her mouth in a helpless ‘O.’ Her eyes didn’t look so helpless as she winked at Jackson. Her tongue flicked across her red lips.
Now Jackson’s mind as well as his body wanted just to say ‘Fuck it’ and get up to join the party. The blonde had turned and her drooling face was just a couple of feet from his. Her hands banged on the table and her mouth twisted as she gasped. Her eyes were wide on his and her face trembled.
Jackson couldn’t stop himself from smiling back to her. His father’s life was one that Jackson was determined not to follow or repeat. Damn if he didn’t live it against a vivid backdrop, though.
Every day of Jackson’s life seemed to draw some new low out of Karl, some unexpected trough that the ragged scraps of their dysfunctional family would be drug through. Over the noise of the five-way fuckfest and the grind of death metal, Jackson barely heard him say, “Hey, Maryette.”
Without looking up or even thinking, half sullen, half joking Jackson said, “Kind of a name is ‘Maryette’?” When he lifted his face from his bourbon he regretted saying it.
Her big, green eyes were right on him. Green, like the shade he saw in the mirror every morning. The recognition made a thud deep inside him. Maryette was raven-haired and curvy. She had the face of a smart, eager student and the body of a hot and horny suburban housewife. What stayed with Jackson, though was the look in her big, slow eyes.
She stood with one hand on the back of Karl’s chair. Her dark eyes were framed by her hair that fell to the collar of her open shirt. The glistening tops of her butterscotch globes heaved inside the shirt.
Her long fingers drummed on her tilted hip. The weary scorn in Maryette’s soft green eyes would follow Jackson for a long time.
Chapter 2
When Jackson left the bar, Maryette was outside by the doorway. Her scent reached him before he saw or recognized her, but as soon as he registered it, his senses went into overdrive. Before he saw her, he knew it was hers.
From the shadows her voice was sultry. “Maybe you don’t need to be so hard on your father, Jackson.”
“He tell you to come and say that?”
“No. He told me not to talk to you. Period.”
He turned to see her face, lit by the red desert sky in the frame of her dark hair. Her eyes shone at him with purpose.
What does she know about it? he wondered. Could be she knew Karl better than he did. Hell, that wouldn’t take much. Jackson hardly knew his father at all, but she knew nothing at all about him.
He said, “I’m just following the family traditions.”
He scowled as he turned to leave. She said after him, “Sometimes it’s good to break with tradition.” He looked over his shoulder and saw her leaning by the door, hip cocked and her eyes shimmering.
She said, “Breaking things can be good, you know. Some things.”
As she pushed away from the wall with her shoulder he caught that look again, Show me. The challenge stoked a fire deep inside him. Then she was gone.
His reaction alarmed him. Not only the physical reaction, which was big enough to be uncomfortable, bordering on painful. The way that she made him light up inside infuriated him. He wanted nothing to do with any woman from that life, so why would the sight, sound and scent of her ignite his whole being?
He had never felt an electricity so sudden and from so deep inside him. Why her? He figured it would pass soon enough.
All the way through training and all around his term of service, he remembered her eyes at unexpected moments. At the end of a long, hot, dusty day, or in the tense hum of boredom waiting for a GO signal, shaking over hills and scrub in the back of an armored Humvee, or prone in the cold night air behind a cinder wall, peering down the length of his M107 long-range rifle.