HIS PROPERTY: A Dark Bad Boy Baby Romance (Iron Bandits MC)

by Zoey Parker

  “And tomorrow's the third Wednesday of this month,” Oiler said.

  “Exactly,” Carter replied. “We show up at noon, hit the place hard when it's got the most cash, and blow out of here with over a hundred thou. Plus what we got from the previous scores, of course.”

  “Sounds like a solid plan,” Hazmat said, nodding.

  “I dunno, guys,” Oiler said doubtfully.

  Carter sighed. “Oiler, I know doing time was hard for you. I know you almost lost your family over that shit, and you don't want to risk that again. But the Hobgoblins are toast, man. Gone forever. And without a new club and a real chance to start earning again, you're not going to be able to send your wife anything to take care of herself or the kid, and then you'll lose them for sure. If we do this thing right, we can get situated somewhere and you can send for them to come join you soon so you can be a real family again. What do you say?”

  Oiler sighed, then nodded. “Okay, I'm in. But no matter what happens, I ain't goin' to prison again. Let's get that clear.”

  “Fair enough,” Carter agreed, finishing his beer and getting up from his seat. “Now if you'll excuse me...”

  “Where the fuck do you think you're goin'?” Hazmat asked.

  “I'm going over to the bar for another drink,” Carter said. “And while I'm there, I'm going to see if I can arrange to spend the night in a nice bed with that girl's legs wrapped around me, instead of out under the stars with you two dickheads.”

  “I thought you were all about makin' sure we didn't do anythin' to get known or draw attention to ourselves,” Hazmat protested.

  “Hey, do as I say, not as I do, Yorick,” Carter answered with a wink, striding over to the bar.

  Billie looked up and smiled when she saw him approach. “You ready for another beer?”

  “I'll take a beer, sure,” Carter said, leaning against the bar and giving her his most devil-may-care grin. “I also came over to find out what it actually does take to get your motor running.”

  Billie's smile widened, and her eyes danced with amusement. “You're pretty direct, huh?”

  “Life's too short for anything else,” Carter conceded.

  “Well, I took a look out the window while you were conferring with your colleagues over there,” Billie said, “and from the look of those bikes outside, you already know a thing or two about motors and what makes them run. Why bother asking?”

  Carter shrugged. “Different makes, different models, different instruction manuals.”

  “Uh-huh,” Billie said, nodding. “Okay. Since you seem to be so brave tonight, I'll tell you exactly what you can do.” She pointed. “See that mechanical bull over there?”

  Carter followed her gaze. Sure enough, there was a humped, ugly-looking contraption with long horns and fake fur on the other side of the bar.

  “Pretty hard to miss,” he commented. “Never been on one myself.”

  “Oh yeah?” she said. “I've been on that one plenty of times, and earlier tonight, I lasted a whole two minutes. You stay on for even half that, and I'll spend the rest of the night on your lap when I'm not serving drinks. Deal?”

  Before Carter could answer, Oiler appeared at his side. “That doesn't sound like such a good idea, man,” he said. “We've, uh, got a pretty big day ahead of us tomorrow. The last thing we need is you mashing your ass and your nuts against a metal sawhorse tonight so you can't, y'know...ride tomorrow. Or anything else.”

  Billie looked at Carter, raising her eyebrows.

  Carter clenched his teeth. He wanted to tell Oiler to go fuck himself so he could hop on the bull and win Billie's attention for the night, but he knew Oiler was right. They'd come too far, and now that he'd talked Oiler into the final score, he couldn't risk blowing the whole thing over some random barmaid.

  Even if she was fucking gorgeous, and even if he'd been without sex for so long that his dick got hard when the wind blew.

  “My friend's absolutely right,” Carter admitted with great difficulty. “I'll have to raincheck you on that the next time I'm in town.”

  “I sure hope you will,” Billie said, handing him another beer. “Too bad it's not tonight, though. Either you'd have spent the rest of the evening in my ever-lovin' arms, or you'd have been splattered against the wall. Whichever one it was, at least it would've been entertaining.”

  Carter favored her with another smile and sauntered back to the table, silently cursing both Oiler and the aching erection in his jeans that was making it difficult for him to walk.

  “Look on the bright side,” Oiler snickered. “Maybe tonight we can point out shootin' stars an' constellations to each other.”

  “Blow me,” Carter retorted.

  Chapter 5

  Billie

  After the bikers and the other patrons finished their drinks and left, Carlito closed the saloon up for the night, locking the door and putting up the “Closed” sign. As Carlito rinsed and wiped the last few glasses, Billie put the chairs up on the tables.

  She kept thinking about the biker who'd flirted with her, and wondered what his name was. She'd been tempted to invite him back to her place that night, but some stubborn streak inside of her had insisted that she couldn't since he'd declined her challenge. Now she was thinking about the look in his eyes when he'd smiled at her and regretting that choice, especially when she considered the empty apartment that was waiting for her.

  Carlito went to the small office at the back of the bar and grabbed his coat. “You can finish up on your own, right?” he asked her.

  “Sure,” she said. “Get home safe. And don't forget, tomorrow's my day off.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving at her dismissively as he left. “Have fun.”

  Billie went to the small television behind the bar and turned it on, flipping to the classic movie channel. The reception on the higher channels was fuzzy and the sound hissed, but they always played old Westerns after midnight, and she loved having them on in the background as she cleaned the bar up after hours—stories of daring robbers and brave lawmen shooting each other up. She envied their adventures, the way the stars rode the trails and tamed the wild frontiers while the background characters just stayed in the same small towns and watched.

  She knew she was just like those background characters, but she wished she could be like one of the stars someday and have an adventure of her own.

  As Dean Martin socked John Wayne in the jaw on the tiny screen while a horse whinnied in the background, Billie picked up the broom and started to sweep the dust, grit, and peanut shells into a pile at the center of the floor. When she extended the broom under the table where the bikers had been drinking and swept out the dirt, a soggy, crumpled cocktail napkin drifted out with it. She almost kept sweeping it toward the middle of the floor with the rest of the detritus, until she noticed several marks on it in blue ink.

  Maybe it's got one of their phone numbers on it, she mused, frowning down at the napkin. Maybe the handsome biker wrote it down for me when they left, but it fell under the table somehow before I could see it. Maybe there's a chance I might not need to spend tonight alone after all. The chances are slim—one of them was probably just doodling on it aimlessly while they were talking—but still, I've got nothing to lose by picking it up and taking a look, right?

  Billie bent down and snatched the napkin. She opened it up and brushed the dirt away. The blue ink was smudged and blurry from moisture that had soaked through it, but she could still faintly make out a rectangular shape. It was marked with X's and O's with arrows that reminded her of diagrams of football plays.

  No names or phone numbers. They'd probably just been talking about some game they'd watched on TV recently. Shit.

  She started to crumple the napkin up, then stopped and looked at it again. There were other marks at the edges of the rectangle, and she realized that they looked like they could be entrances and exits.

  So it's not a drawing of a football field, then, she thought. A building? The O's
all appear to be inside it already, and the three X's appear to be positioned so that two of them are entering while the third one stays outside.

  She thought about the bank robbers Panzie had mentioned and remembered the way the biker had told her the other one's name was Yorick (which was obviously fake) before he could answer for himself.

  And why hadn't the handsome biker told her his name when he was flirting with her, anyway?

  A small shudder of excitement rippled through Billie's body. What if they really had been the robbers, like Panzie thought? The rectangle they'd drawn was vague, but it could easily be a map of the McMurtry Bank & Loan downtown. The O's positioned at regular intervals could be the tellers, and the final O off to the side could be Rusty, the security guard. The X's could indicate a plan for two of the bikers to enter and carry out the robbery while the third one stayed outside as lookout.

  Billie heard gunshots and glanced at the TV. On the screen, a pair of masked robbers were leveling their six-shooters at a timid-looking bank teller and ordering him to reach for the sky.

  She laughed uneasily, tossing the napkin onto the floor. Clearly, she'd been watching so many of these stupid movies that she was starting to see outlaws everywhere. Bikers of all shapes and sizes came into the bar almost every day—in groups of two, five, ten, and yes, sometimes even three.

  And the crude drawing didn't have to be a bank, did it? Her mind had probably framed it that way thanks to the power of suggestion, but it could be anything at all, really.

  Besides, nothing exciting had ever happened in Cactus Hollow—at least not in her lifetime. How could she honestly bring herself to believe that this would change now?

  She finished sweeping and grabbed the dustpan, carefully lifting the pile of dirt and tossing it into the trash before washing her hands. Then she got her coat from the back room, shrugged it on, and locked the place up again before heading to her car. As she drove home, she kept picturing the sexy biker bursting into the bank downtown tomorrow with a gun in his hand and a rakish smile on his face, commanding everyone to put their hands in the air.

  She even imagined herself as his willing accomplice, keeping her own gun trained on Kathy and Mary Jo and the other plain girls she'd grown up with who made fun of her in school and went on to work as assistant managers at the bank. She'd relish the looks of shock and terror on their faces as they tossed heavy stacks of bills into a sack, taunting them about their boring husbands and boring kids and boring lives.

  Then she and the biker would fire a couple of shots at the ceiling just to spook the tellers even more before they ran out to his bike. He’d straddle it and rev the engine as she got on behind him, wrapping her arms around him and holding him tight while they blew out of town together. They'd hole up in some ratty little motel together, laughing and making love and planning their next big score.

  Silly thoughts, she knew. But they kept her company as she warmed up a dinner of leftovers and watched another Western, one where Lee Marvin menaced Jimmy Stewart's stagecoach.

  The fantasies were even more comforting later when she was in bed with her hand between her legs, wishing she knew that biker's name so she could moan it out loud in her empty apartment.

  Chapter 6

  Panzer

  Panzer sat at his desk in the sheriff's office after midnight, staring at the fax he'd received from the state police. It included several photos from the security cameras of the previous banks, and he carefully studied the heights, weights, and postures of the three robbers in their black ski masks.

  The more he looked at them, the more he was sure that they looked like the three bikers from the bar.

  Maybe Billie had seen three different bikers earlier that day and confused them with the ones who came in later. Or maybe she'd told him she'd seen them when she actually hadn't, as some kind of joke at his expense—she made a lot of those jokes, and he didn't understand most of them.

  Either way, he knew he shouldn't have just walked away. He should have made sure.

  In one of the photos, one of the robbers had a narrow strip of skin exposed between his mask and the collar of his vest, revealing a tattoo of an eagle. And hadn't one of the bikers in the bar—the mean-looking one with red hair—had some kind of winged creature inked on the side of his neck? Panzer wasn't sure, but he cursed himself anyway. He should have walked up to the redhead and demanded to examine the tattoo...

  ...and then it would have turned out to be a skull with wings or something like that instead of an eagle, and Billie would have laughed at him, and everyone else in the bar would have laughed at him too.

  Just like they always did.

  Damn it, why did he always feel like no matter what decision he made, it was the wrong one?

  When he and Billie had been in high school together, he'd taken her to the movies almost every weekend so they could watch Westerns, thinking it'd strengthen their friendship to the point where it could become something more. Instead, it just gave her a taste for wild, reckless outlaw types.

  He'd behaved like a perfect gentleman toward her and treated her with nothing but respect, only to watch her fall in lust with a never-ending string of foul-mouthed, dirty-minded boys who snuck cigarettes and swallows of whiskey between classes. He started drinking beer to impress her, and she mocked him relentlessly for trying to seem like a “bad boy” when he so clearly wasn't and never would be.

  And when he got old enough, he became a deputy and later ran for sheriff, thinking that the gun and badge would remind her of the heroes from their beloved Westerns and finally earn her respect. But the first time she saw him in uniform, she howled with laughter, saying he looked like Dudley Do-Right from the old Bullwinkle cartoons.

  And year after year, it was “Panzie” this and “Panzie” that, no matter how many times he told her he hated that nickname. As though his feelings simply didn't matter to her.

  He wished he could just forget about Billie and move on, but even if he could—and he knew damn well that he couldn't—it wasn't like there were other women in town who would be willing to date him. He was well aware of how everyone made fun of him behind his back, even though he tried not to let it show. They all thought he was an awkward, potbellied, slow-witted lump of a man who'd only become a lawman because he knew nothing dangerous would ever happen here.

  But those robbers in the photos...it was them. The bikers. He was ninety percent sure of it.

  Still, ninety percent was not a hundred.

  He briefly thought about calling Coop Scanlon at the bank tomorrow morning, just to put him on alert in case he was right. But then what? The robbery wouldn't happen after all, and Coop and the rest of the people in town would have another hearty chuckle at his expense.

  Panzie, the useless donut-muncher. Panzie, the boy who cried “wolf.” Panzie, who was actually dumb enough to believe he could stop a real crime.

  Panzie, Panzie, Panzie.

  No, he decided. He wouldn't call Coop or tell anyone about his suspicions. Not even Broyles, his deputy—who had an IQ of about 80, and was the only person in town who actually seemed to look up to him. He'd keep it to himself, but he'd keep his cruiser parked close to the bank tomorrow anyway, just out of sight. Just in case.

  If Panzer was wrong, no one would ever have to know.

  But if he was right...

  Well, maybe he could arrest some real criminals for once in his career, and earn the respect of Billie and the rest of Cactus Hollow.

  Panzer put down the faxed pages, put his feet up, leaned back in his office chair, and dozed off. He dreamed of exciting shoot-outs, of headlines and medals and Billie's voice in his ear as she made love to him and called him her hero.

  Chapter 7

  Billie

  Billie woke up in her cluttered studio apartment and rolled over in bed, looking at the clock on her nightstand. It was 10:52 a.m., which meant the bank had been open for almost two hours.

  I wonder if those three guys have robbed the place yet
, she thought. This idea made her laugh as she got up and walked to the bathroom, preparing to start her day.

  But as she scrubbed herself in the shower, the thought started to become less and less silly the more she considered it. By the time she had toweled off and started brushing her teeth, she had almost convinced herself that the bikers really could be the robbers Panzie had told her about.

  What if they actually had held the place up already?

  Billie spat out her toothpaste, rinsed, and went over to switch on the TV. She flipped around the channels to see if any of the regular programming had been interrupted by news of a heist at McMurtry Bank & Loan. Instead, all she saw was the usual array of daytime talk shows, infomercials, and grainy reruns of programs from the '60s. At one point, she heard the high-pitched whine of the Emergency Broadcast System cut into “The Andy Griffith Show” and she got excited for a moment, but it turned out to be a tornado warning for southern Oklahoma.