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

by Zoey Parker

The pilot shook his head, following them up the ramp into the plane and shutting the door behind them. “All right, but this shit is gonna cost you big-time,” he muttered, climbing into the cockpit. “Leading the fucking cops here...I'm gonna have to arrange a whole new airstrip to land on before I get back...”

  “Just fly!” Billie yelled as the plane's engines started.

  “Cut the engine and get out of the plane now,” the bullhorn voice called outside. “If you don't, we'll have no choice but to open fire.”

  The plane started forward. Carter looked out the side window, white-knuckled with anxiety as the cops chased after it. A couple of them fired their guns at it, but the plane kept going—and a few moments later, it lifted off the ground and the gray airstrip was replaced by the clear blue sky.

  Carter looked down and saw that Billie was holding his hand. There were tears of relief in her eyes.

  “We made it,” she said.

  “Told you,” he replied, kissing her.

  Chapter 40

  Panzer

  A waitress from a truck stop near Del Rio had called the tip line a couple of hours ago, saying that two men who fit the descriptions of Hazmat and Oiler were sitting at one of her tables. This news had filled Harbaugh with obvious and savage delight, and Panzer's heart sank when Harbaugh contacted the local cops, telling them to stake the place out and wait for Carter and Billie to show up before slapping the cuffs on all of them.

  When they got the call that Carter and Billie had shown up, Harbaugh practically danced a jig as he ordered the cops to move in and take them.

  Then word came in about the high-speed chase Carter was leading them on.

  Now Harbaugh stood behind Panzer's desk, tense and wild-eyed as he spoke into the radio. “Del Rio PD, do you have them or not? Over.”

  Silence, except for the faint crackling of the radio.

  Harbaugh slammed his fist down on the desk. “Del Rio PD, answer me, goddamn it! Do you have Winslow and Rosewood in custody? Over.”

  Panzer waited breathlessly, his fists clenched so tightly that they hurt.

  More silence...and then a voice, saying sheepishly, “This is Del Rio PD. They, uh, they got to a plane and flew away.”

  Harbaugh balked, his face turning red. “Say again, Del Rio PD? What the fuck do you mean they flew away?”

  The radio crackled again. “They're gone. Over.”

  Harbaugh bellowed with rage, kicking Panzer's trash can across the room. Panzer tried to keep a straight face, but inwardly, he was celebrating.

  Good luck, Billie, he thought. Wherever life takes you, I hope you find happiness there.

  He cleared his throat. “Agent Harbaugh,” he said in his most official-sounding tone, “I believe I'd like my desk back, please.”

  Epilogue

  Billie

  One Year Later

  The golden Mexican sunlight glittered through the windows, and the waves of the Gulf crashed against the shore like a soothing lullaby. Carter and Billie had been living in the port of Tampico since they crossed the border, and the beautiful beaches and salty tang in the air suited Billie just fine.

  Now they were in bed and pressed against each other tightly, the bedclothes tangled around them as they made love. Carter's cock filled Billie up until she thought she might burst, and with every thrust, his thick shaft rubbed against her clit and sent sparks blazing and dancing through her. She loved the way their breath mingled on her lips, and the dizzying perfume of their combined sweat as it soaked the sheets beneath them.

  Carter was on top of her, one hand cradling her face as the other traced delicate patterns on her neck and breasts. She lifted her hips, desperate to feel every inch of him. She had never known such hunger for a man, and she knew that she never would again. Their bodies fit together perfectly, like two lost pieces of a puzzle that had gone unsolved for too long.

  “Never stop,” she whispered, biting his earlobe playfully.

  “I never will,” he answered, pushing even deeper inside of her. Moments later, they came together, their bodies writhing and pulsing in absolute harmony. They did their best to bite back the sounds of their passion so they wouldn't wake their baby in the next room.

  But even though they were as quiet as they could be, little Alden still stirred and started crying, interrupting their post-coital bliss for his afternoon feeding.

  She walked to the baby's room and took him out of his crib, wiping the tears from his chubby cheeks. He'd been born two months before. Even at this age, though, the resemblance to Carter, his father, and his grandfather was clear.

  The eyes, especially. The eyes couldn't lie.

  Carter joined her in the room, taking Alden from her. He walked the baby around the room in a circle, rocking him and singing to him gently. “As I was a-walkin' the streets of Laredo...as I was a-walkin' Laredo one day...I spied a young cowboy, wrapped in white linen...wrapped in white linen, and cold as the clay...”

  Alden stopped crying and looked up at Carter. Watching them together, Billie knew that the child would never spend a single day without knowing how much his father loved him, and that he'd always be there for him no matter what.

  He'd have what Carter never did. Her love for them both swelled in her heart until she thought she might burst.

  Plus, she knew that she could make love to Carter again later, once Alden had gone back to sleep.

  They had all the time in the world.

  THE END

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  [FREE BONUS BOOK #2] RAVAGE: Lightning Bolts MC

  By Zoey Parker

  I’m a man of few words. The ones I use are violent:

  Brawl. Claim. Ravage.

  It was lust at first sight.

  She looked too damn nice up on that stage to pass up.

  A body that curved in all the right places.

  Skin demanding that I seize it and squeeze it.

  And those eyes…

  Eyes I’d never forget.

  What would you have done?

  I know what I did: I bought her.

  Then I took her home and let her know who she belonged to now.

  She screamed my name until the rafters shook.

  Don’t act like you would have done anything different.

  That should have been the end of it.

  But if she was just an expensive lay,

  you wouldn’t be reading this story.

  There was a whole lot more I had yet to find out.

  Only one thing I knew for certain:

  I hadn’t had my fill of Michelle.

  Not. Even. Close.

  Chapter One

  Michelle

  “Mom, please. Eat a little bit more of the broth, okay?”

  My mother pushed away the bowl I held out, as well as the spoon I dangled near her lips. “No. I’m not hungry.” Her voice was weak, tired. She was a shadow of the woman who raised me. That woman’s voice could scream the roof down when I did something to deserve her anger.

  This woman, the one withering in the bed in the house I grew up in, was something else entirely. She was so frail, practically a skeleton. She had always been so plump and curvy when I was younger—not fat, but well-endowed. Her hair had been a thick, lustrous dark brown. The color of coffee. This new woman who I called mother had thin, almost wispy gray hair. She was tired of everything. The pain, the anxiety resulting from wondering how much longer this would all go on. I wondered that, too.

  She needed a hospice. Anybody could see that. I took care of her pretty well in the beginning, before cancer robbed her of so much of who she was. It had gotten to the point where she could do almost no
thing for herself—she couldn’t bathe or feed herself or even walk without assistance. I nearly carried her from place to place, although her feet were always on the floor and she always made an attempt to hold some of her dignity by shuffling them along.

  I put down the bowl of beef broth with a heavy sigh. I knew better than to push the issue; she might have been weak, but when pushed too far she experienced brief flashes of strength. Only a few days earlier I’d ended up wearing a bowl of broth when her hand flashed out and overturned it onto me.

  She shifted fretfully on the mattress. I brushed stray hair back from her forehead. “Do you need another pill for the pain?” I didn’t like giving her too many of them, and she didn’t like taking them unless she absolutely had to. It wasn’t a great idea when she hadn’t eaten much of anything either. All either of us needed was for her to vomit after taking a painkiller on an empty stomach. It would be a waste of a pill, too, and they weren’t cheap.

  To my surprise, she nodded. “I’ll try to keep it down. I really need it.” That told me how much pain she was in. I went downstairs to fetch one for her.

  On the way to the kitchen, where the counter looked like it belonged in a pharmacy, I passed a stack of bills. The pile was big and getting bigger by the day. At first, I’d managed to keep up with it, thanks in no small part to Dad’s life insurance policy. Mom had been smart with the money, setting it aside for a rainy day. There hadn’t been any rainier than the ones we were in after her diagnosis.

  Now the money had dried up. Nothing like a Stage III lung cancer diagnosis to tap a person’s finances. Now she was in the end stages, and we were tapped out after so many doctor appointments, hospital visits, treatments, tests, medication. I stared at that pile of envelopes as I counted out a single pill, and to me, they represented every single cigarette I’d ever watched her smoke. When she grew up, people smoked constantly. She’d picked up the habit in her early teens and hadn’t been able to stop. At least when she had me, a late in life baby, she stopped during pregnancy and only smoked outside of the house after I was born. That was something, anyway. She had tried to help me, but she couldn’t help herself.

  And I couldn’t help her. The light on the answering machine blinked, and I knew the tape was full with the voices of bill collectors. First call, second call, final notice. It was almost funny, the way they thought they were going to get blood from a stone. We were drowning.

  A fist clenched my heart, squeezing tighter. There was a stinging behind my green eyes. I shook myself before the tears started to fall. Mom needed help with her pain. I couldn’t stand around daydreaming.

  I rushed back upstairs full of apologies for taking so long. She was asleep when I got there. Naturally, I listened to her breathing to be sure it was only sleep and nothing something else. The sight of her thin chest rising and falling was a relief.

  I sank into the chair by her bedside. I wasn’t equipped to be a caregiver, not to somebody at her stage of the game. She needed professional help, a nurse on-call twenty-four seven. Somebody with the skill I sorely lacked. I was a freaking bartender, for God’s sake. If she’d wanted a martini, I could have made one. I’d even listen to her problems while she drank, hoping for a better tip.

  My dreams seemed further away than ever. I scolded myself for thinking about my petty problems as my mother laid dying in front of me, but I couldn’t help myself. Every day that went by took me just one day further from being the chef I’d always wanted to be. When I started tending bar, it was a way to put money away for culinary school. It wasn’t cheap. But neither was cancer. It was one or the other, and I chose my mother. I had no other option.

  I sighed, taking my head in my hands. It felt so heavy. All the thoughts running around inside, bumping off of each other, made it hard to sit upright. I was only twenty-six. Wasn’t I too young to be worried about cancer and medical bills and researching hospice care? Wasn’t I too young to plan a funeral? Because that was where we were headed. There was no other way off the train Mom and I got on the day her diagnosis was passed down. She was headed for the end of her life. I couldn’t even make sure she was as comfortable as she could be.

  She worried about me, too. I knew that. She was sorry to take up so much time. She wanted me to live my life like she always had. I remembered the way she encouraged me to take risks, see what the world had in store. What did the world have in store for her? Numbered days filled with pain and regret? What a treat. I sometimes wondered about the purpose of life if all we had to look forward to was the sight that greeted me every time I walked into my mother’s bedroom.

  She had given me so much. I felt as though I was failing her.

  The phone rang, and I jumped in the otherwise silent room. The extension was in the hall. I tiptoed out as quickly as possible and shut the door before picking up. “Hello?”

  “Hello. I’m calling for Mrs. Rita Adams.”

  I closed my eyes. Why had I picked up in the first place?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s unavailable.”

  The bill collector asked, “When would be the best time to reach her?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll try to fit you in some time between the sponge bath I give her every morning and the lunch I can’t seem to her to eat in the afternoon. Or maybe you can call back while she’s throwing up into a bucket because her meds make her so sick. But they’re the meds that are supposedly treating her cancer so she can’t stop taking them, can she? Even though they’re not doing anything but we still have to keep buying them which means we still have to keep paying for them.”

  “Um, miss…”

  I was on a roll at this point. Nothing could have stopped me. “Or maybe you should come in person. Yeah. That’ll do it. You can help me lift her out of bed so I can change the sweaty sheets, and while you do, you can ask her when we plan on paying the hospital bills. How’s that sound?”

  “Miss, I’m sorry to hear of this. However…”

  “However, my ass. You people are vultures. Get a real job.” With that, I slammed the phone into its cradle and burst into tears.

  I fled to my room, throwing myself on the bed. I was acting like a heartbroken teenager, and I knew it, but my heart was broken and I felt younger and more scared than I had ever felt in my life. Every day took Mom closer to death, and me closer to being alone. With a ton of medical bills.

  What could I do to raise the money? I couldn’t possibly get a second job since the first one took me away from her too much as it was. We were lucky to have lifelong neighbors who spent evenings with her while I worked. She was normally asleep throughout my shift, so it wasn’t much work for them. Without them, I didn’t know that I could go to work at all unless I hired a nurse I couldn’t afford. It never ended.

  I thought about a Go Fund Me, but there were already so many of them out there started by people in my shoes. I didn’t have the time or the savvy to promote it either. I knew enough to know that just starting one and walking away wasn’t going to help me raise any money. I didn’t want to burden any of my friends with the task, either. They had their own lives to take care of. They didn’t need my bullshit.

  Then what? Could I sell something?

  It was an intriguing idea, and enough to sit me up on the bed. There had to be something of value in the house—we had never been rich, but we had a few decent things I thought I might be able to get a little money for. The silverware from Mom and Dad’s wedding, for example. Her china—I would never use it. A few heirlooms.

  Could I sell them, though? I bit my lip. The idea of the money was a relief, but it would mean parting with things that had meant so much to her. I was already losing my mother—could I stand to lose the things that represented her, too?

  I threw myself back with a cry of frustration. No matter which path I took, it always landed me at a dead end. I couldn’t sell off Mom’s things. They meant too much to her, and besides, my memories were the only thing I’d have left when she was gone. I didn’t have much of
my own that was worth anything. I didn’t even drive my own car, using Mom’s instead. I had already sold mine off to save money on the payments. It was ridiculous, the bare-bones life I was living. And it was never enough.

  My cell rang. Another reminder: my best friend, Mackenzie. Mac lived the life of the “normal” girl in her mid-twenties. I knew she didn’t mean to rub it in my face, but whenever we compared notes she always came out on top.

  “Girl, what’s up? I’ve been dying to talk to you.”

  I grimaced. “Yeah, well, it’s been the usual thrills and chills over here. Sorry. I’ve been a little distracted.”

  “It's okay. I didn’t mean to accuse you or anything. How’s your mom?”

  “The same. Worse, actually. But she’s clinging to life. She’s not giving up. I guess there’s something to be said for that.”