BENT AT THE ALTAR

by Claire St. Rose

  Now the fun and games were over. I had to get to the bottom of this. Taylor was in hospital, and I didn’t believe that he’d fallen into drugs. He just wasn’t that kind of kid; I’d seen to it that he wouldn’t be, and I trusted him. Seeing that I had trust issues all around, that was a big deal. He had a good head on his shoulders, and he’d worked hard to make an honest life for himself. Mostly.

  He wouldn’t throw that away on drugs.

  Which only left one other option; someone had done this to him. And I was going to find out who.

  The upside of being part of a biker gang was that I had a lot of eyes and ears that could help me out on the streets. We all knew the ugly side of town, too, which meant that it was going to be that much easier to find out who did this. We had contacts with information even the police couldn’t get access to; we had connections who could get their hands on anything.

  I got on my phone and called Ben. He was my right hand man for when I needed anything to get passed along, and I needed them all together today.

  “Get the boys to meet me at the club,” I said. “We have an emergency.”

  Ben didn’t argue. He knew better than that, but he was also the one who had contacted me about Taylor. He knew where this was headed.

  I got dressed in my faded jeans and shrugged into the leather vest I liked to wear. Leather wasn’t the most comfortable material to wear, but it brought the right image across, and in my line of work, image was key. That was how I ran my show; I put my money where my mouth was and backed it with an intimidating look.

  I got into my black biking boots and left the house ten minutes later.

  The club was a rundown bar we liked to use as a meeting spot. It was an office of sorts, too, and it was the place where most of our business happened. No one in their right mind would just walk in there—it was a hazard on wheels and spelled out trouble—so we were left alone for the most part. Even the cops didn’t look into the place much. If there were no complaints, there was no reason to see what was doing behind the closed doors.

  If only they knew—there was a hell of a lot going on behind those doors.

  I was one of the first to arrive. Ben was already there—good man—and a handful of the guys, including Jack.

  The guy’s skin was so dark he could pass for Mexican, but with his grey eyes, he stood apart. Mixed blood. Dangerous. Just the way I liked them on my team. Different enough to stand out. Badass enough not to care.

  I held out my hand, and he shook it, turning his eyes down for just a second to show his respect to me. I was the leader of this outfit, and they all knew it and respected me as such. I ruled the gang with an iron fist, but it was more than just violence and authority. We were tight. We would bleed for each other. We would die for each other.

  “Ben tells me you were the one who found Taylor,” I said.

  He nodded. “There was already an ambulance on scene when I drove by, but I would recognize Taylor a mile away. Is he doing okay?”

  “He’s alive,” I said, thinking about that doctor we all owed his life to. “There was a good doctor on the team at the ER. I want to know who did this.”

  Jack nodded. He was thin as a reed so that the leather hung off him, but he had a mean look about him and the boys left him alone despite his size. A legit rep could do that for you.

  “What can you tell me?”

  Jack pulled out a smoke and lit up. I didn’t smoke, but I was sure my lungs were screwed enough with all the second-hand smoke I’d sucked in through the years. He sucked on his hand-rolled and blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “I couldn’t stop and find out much with the spectators there, but I didn’t get the idea it was something he snorted or popped as a pill. Those paramedics were freaked out about it, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Seemed to me something was up.”

  I nodded. Something was definitely up.

  The rest of my men started filtering in one by one. When the whole group was present, the little pub looked like it was bursting at the seams, holding so much leather and muscle within its walls.

  We were an ugly-looking bunch, us Rusty Lions, collected together the way we were now. Most of the men were my size or bigger, a combination of muscle and alcohol-induced fat. There was a mixture of completely leather-clad men all the way through to jeans and t-shirts with only the leather caps they wore when they rode.

  Smoke curled from the tips of a couple of cigarettes and collected against the ceiling to form an artificial sky.

  “First order of business,” I said, and the group fell quiet. All eyes were turned to me, and I saw anger and loyalty. “Taylor’s going to be fine. He looks like shit now, and he’s staying in hospital for a bit, but he’s alive.”

  There was a collective murmur of relief. Taylor wasn’t just my little brother…he was our lawyer, our mascot, our friend.

  “I want to know who’s out there and what they’re pulling. The doctors couldn’t tell me what it was. It was something they’d never seen. I want to know who’s running around town shooting up my boys.”

  Another collective murmur, this time with angry undertones.

  “I want you guys to keep your eyes and ears peeled. Anything you hear and see that’s out of the ordinary, you report back to me.”

  They all agreed—every one of them—and I knew they were good for it. The Lions would follow me to the death if it came down to it. We might have looked like trouble, but we were some of the most loyal men on earth. We knew what it meant to shed blood for another, and we did it with pride, choosing those who deserved it carefully.

  There wasn’t much else to talk about. I checked the schedules with them, who was stationed where and doing what, and then I sent them out again. When the club was empty and I was the only one left, I sat down on a bar stool and breathed in.

  The air tasted like secondhand cigarette smoke and sweat, the aftermath of a collection of testosterone and revenge, and the walls felt like they were closing in on me. I was the overseer of this outfit, but sometimes it felt like this wasn’t where I belonged. I wouldn’t know where else I fit in though. Maybe in the kind of life someone like that doctor deserved.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t start thinking like that. Now was the time when I needed to pull every resource out of my pockets and avenge Taylor. I couldn’t think about giving it all up now when Taylor needed it the most. When I needed it. I didn’t have anything else to fall back on. My parents had seen to that when they’d left us high and dry to fend for ourselves, and I didn’t have a choice but to be the big brother so Taylor had something that resembled a life.

  I was going to keep doing this. I owed my men that, and right now I owed it to Taylor. He needed us to find out what was going on. Whoever nailed him had made an enormous mistake. You didn’t fuck with my little brother. You mess with the baby, you were going to get the mama, or how did that saying go? The whole gang was on this asshole’s case now.

  And it wasn’t going to end well. I knew this from experience, and it was extremely satisfying to know that someone was going to get hurt for doing this to Taylor.

  He was alive because of that doctor. He’d crashed twice, she’d said if I remembered correctly. Taylor had effectively died twice. I wasn’t under any illusion thinking that he pulled through by himself. I knew what death looked like, and there was no bouncing back from that shit.

  Gratefulness aside, that doctor was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. Her grey eyes were like steel, steady and serious, letting me know that she knew what she was doing. There was nothing sexier than a woman in control, and she ran that department like it was her empire.

  I had a lot of respect for doctors, especially in the ER. I’d sent enough people there with bullet holes and stab wounds to know that her job wasn’t easy. Chances were she’d seen more horrors than I had, and that was saying something.

  What was more, she’d taken care of them, and she’d saved lives. I didn’t get the idea she flinched at a hard task.
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  God, I wanted her. Not just because she was so easy on the eyes, but also because a mind like that was just a turn on. A brain like hers had to be magic, and that made me want her body, too. And who she was… there had to be something spectacular under all that sex appeal and genius, a personality someone would be a fool not to grab at the moment they could. Someone like her didn’t end up where they did because life dealt her a favorable hand. She’d paid her dues, and that was worth something.

  I’ve been around. I wasn’t going to lie about that. I’d slept with any girl I’d wanted at that time. I’d taken them home or gone to their place, had my way, and then left them wondering. I didn’t care. One-night stands were the way to go in my world. You didn’t want to get attached to someone, and you didn’t want to drag an innocent into this mess, either. My life wasn’t simple, so my relationships had to be.

  I knew this from experience. Ruby and I had dated for a lot longer than was done in this world, and it hadn’t ended well. Sure, we were still friends, still slept together, still worked together, but it hadn’t worked as a relationship, and there was resentment below the surface.

  The only reason it had worked at all with Ruby was because she wasn’t exactly on the straight and narrow either. It wasn’t a big deal to her to bend the rules, which meant she understood the risks that came with it, and screwing someone over or doing the screwing was really just a right-place-right-time kind of thing.

  That doctor, on the other hand… I couldn’t imagine her being a problem of any kind. She was good. She made a life of saving people. There was nothing to frown about with that, and that put her in another class.

  The type of class that moved away from one-night stands. I wouldn’t be able to walk away from a woman like her or forget a woman like her, even if it was just a one-night stand.

  Definitely another class. A class that probably had no space for someone like me.

  My phone rang, and it was Ben, asking me to meet him for some paperwork. I glanced at my watch. It was time to stop daydreaming and start working. The club wasn’t going to run itself, and I had my other business with Ruby on the side. I still had to go out and get that guy, come to think of it. Money didn’t happen all by itself, and if didn’t catch those guys, they weren’t going to pay up what they owed.

  Still, I wanted to prioritize Taylor. Ruby wasn’t going to be happy with me.

  My phone rang again. Speak of the devil. I silenced it so that the ringing wouldn’t bother me and let my voicemail take care of her. I wasn’t in the mood for her issues. She was more drama than anything else, and more often than not, it was really just too much.

  By the time I’d sorted out paperwork with Ben and gone to see some contacts about word on the street—learning nothing about Taylor and the drug in the process—it was sunset and Ruby had tried to call me nine times. In any other situation, I would have considered it an emergency, but she was just looking for me to find out why I hadn’t spent the night with her.

  Just because sex was casual to me didn’t mean it was the same for her.

  I’d gone to see that doctor instead; she was everything Ruby would never be. Ruby was also going to go on about how I was neglecting the business, and I didn’t feel like listening to her nag in my ear.

  That was beauty of a breakup. I didn’t have to listen to her anymore if I didn’t want to. Perfect.

  My phone rang again, and I rolled my eyes. I was just about to kill the call this time, sending an obvious message to Ruby, when I realized the number wasn’t one I knew. I pushed talk and held the phone against my ear.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Emily

  After a long shift, like the one I’d had last night, I got the next day off to catch up on sleep. There was no use going into the hospital if I was that tired. I couldn’t afford to be off my game; my job was saving lives, and it was an expensive price to pay if I was too tired to make a difference. As it was, I’d be on-call later.

  I woke up at noon. My eyes still felt gritty, and it felt like I would have to sleep forever to make up for the exhaustion. At least the headache had gone and I was hungry for a change. I stretched under the covers. My muscles were tight, and my feet were sore. I spent most of my time on my feet, but I still reached my limit.

  I heard the toilet flush, the bathroom door open, and a moment later the television went on. Sarah was home.

  I got out of bed and walked to the lounge. Sarah sat on the edge of the couch with a cup of tea in her hands. When she saw me, she smiled.

  “Hey, sleepyhead.”

  I sat down next to her.

  “Were you out this morning?”

  “I went to check on the bar. They’re working on the mirrors at the back, and they got it wrong twice already.”

  She sipped her tea. Her blond hair was tied up in a bun, and she wore jeans and a tank top with sensible pumps. Sarah and I had been roommates since college. She’d dropped out of getting her medical degree to go to culinary school instead, feeling like that was what she wanted to do.

  Her bar was set to open in two weeks’ time, and she fought with the builders all the time about the final touch ups.

  “Do you think you’re going to be ready by opening night?” I asked.

  “There’s no option. It’s going to be ready. If this guy can’t do it right, I’ll fire him and find another one, I swear. I’m so over his shit.”

  I leaned back against the back of the couch. My body was still heavy with sleep, and I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands.

  Being a roommate with Sarah worked. Even though she didn’t have the same kind of career as mine, she’d always worked in restaurants and bars, so our hours had always roughly been the same. Our living arrangements worked, and we actually saw each other once in a while.

  “Anything new to report?” Sarah asked.

  “I met a guy last night.”

  Sarah turned to me, mouth slightly open.

  “What?”

  I smiled and shrugged. “He was the brother of one of the emergency cases that came in. He was all up in my face, and I slapped him.”

  “Oh my God,” Sarah said, and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “Why?”

  “He looked at me like I was a piece of ass. He didn’t even care that I was working and that we were in an emergency room.”

  I thought about him being so close, how badly my body had ached for him even though I’d been so upset with him.

  “You’re impossible,” Sarah said, but she was smiling. “Is he hot?”

  I nodded. “Wow.” There was no other way to describe it.

  “Are you seeing him again?”

  I laughed. “In a way I already did. He waited out in the parking lot and brought me flowers.”

  I nodded to the bouquets I’d stuffed into a bucket of water when I’d come home.

  “I saw those,” Sarah said and got up. “Now that I know who they’re from, it’s a total sin to leave them in the bucket.” She took them out and unwrapped the paper. With no colored paper around them, the bouquets really did look exactly the same.

  “Two bouquets,” Sarah said. “It’s a hell of a compliment.”

  “Or a bit of an over-achiever.”

  I got up and opened the fridge, looking for something easy and quick to eat. Sarah clipped the ends of the flowers one by one and arranged the two bouquets together into one big bouquet in a vase.

  “That looks nice,” I said, finding a yogurt container and pulling off the foil top. I licked it before dumping it in the trash.

  “They’re nice flowers. Good flowers and an attraction to you. This guy has taste.”

  I shook my head and sucked on the spoon.

  “He said he wanted to thank me for saving his brother’s life.”

  Sarah nodded, walking around the counter island and putting the flowers on the coffee table. “That’s noble. Understandable, too.”

  “I don’t think it was as much about that as it was about getting into my pant
s, though. God, you have to see this guy. Actually, here.”

  I pulled my handbag closer where it stood on the counter and fished for the card he’d given me. I handed it to Sarah.

  She took it from me and turned it around.

  “Seriously? Daniel and Ruby’s Bounty Hunting? God, you know how to pick them, don’t you?”

  I laughed and stuck another spoonful of yogurt in my mouth.

  “I know.”