I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances

by Sophie Brooks

  She put him in his late twenties; he had broad shoulders, dark wavy hair and intense gray eyes that looked surprisingly intelligent. He managed to look at her the way all these guys stared at girls, letting her know that he was assessing her tits and ass, deciding how touchable she might be, while listening to what she said.

  In the back of her head she found herself thinking about him—how he might be away from this dump. Her fantasy shaved the stubble off his chin, put him in nice clothes. He’d clean up nice. And the guy was built.

  The thought made her wonder at herself. She’d thought her asshole husband Terrence had made it impossible for her to even think about sex without wanting to cringe. Yet here she was, just a few hours away from him, and already fantasizing about a goddamn biker. A guy who was clearly muscle for a motorcycle club was turning her on.

  Get a grip, Audra.

  “My husband is probably at home. I told him I had a doctor appointment.”

  Dirk looked at his watch. “For what time?”

  “Noon.”

  “Okay, an hour ago. And you went to the doctor alone?”

  She laughed, sounding bitter. “I’m never allowed to go anywhere alone. That would mean he trusted me. There’s always a driver and sometimes a guy who tells me he’s my bodyguard. Today the driver did double duty.”

  That raised some red flags. “So your husband knew or suspected you were thinking of running?”

  She shook her head. “No. Not a clue. I don’t think he believes any woman would leave him. No, the escort is to show the world that I belong to him and probably to make sure I don’t meet some hot guy. He’s not only an asshole, he’s a jealous asshole. Even thinking he might be cuckolded would push him into a rage. Having me watched means he never has to worry about the possibility. He never turns down anything decent looking in a skirt himself so I imagine he figures every other guy is the same.”

  She looked at Cutter, seeing him toying with an envelope the president, Bart, had handed him. He fingered it nervously. “What’s this stuff got to do with getting me to Canada?”

  “Everything.” He titled his head, measuring her reactions. “I’m trying to find out our status. Bart said you were sure he’d hunt you down, so it helps to know if we have a head start or if we can expect them to crash the door down at any moment.”

  She smiled. “I doubt he has any idea I’m gone yet. We’ve got an hour before the clown waiting would even be suspicious, and what doctor appointment is ever on time?”

  Wrench smiled at her. “So what happened to your shadow?”

  “He’s sitting outside the office in the waiting room. Waiting. The doctor told him I needed to have a mole removed in an in-office surgery and that it would take at least two hours. I paid the bastard doctor to let me out the back door. I had a taxi waiting and left immediately, calling Bart and meeting him as we’d agreed. I paid him and he brought me here.”

  “Where did you meet Bart?”

  “In a parking lot a few blocks away.” She tossed her head. “He paid attention. We waited until the taxi left before coming here.”

  “How did you connect with Bart?”

  She looked embarrassed. “A woman my husband brought home. I don’t know the details but she thought he cheated her somehow. I was in the living room when she came out, swearing and unhappy with whatever game Terrance had played with her. When she saw me she told me she felt sorry for me. She wrote his number on a piece of paper and said if I ever wanted to have Terrance beat up and could afford it, I should call Bart.”

  “This was recent?”

  “Months ago. I came across the paper a few weeks ago and thought up my plan. I called him and talked about… this. I needed to know the price. He needed a week to get the papers done, and I made the doctor’s appointment.”

  Wrench started to speak and she saw Cutter gave Wrench a warning look. Even she knew that Cutter was telling Wrench to back out of this. Then he looked at her again. “You didn’t bring your things? Other clothes…”

  “I couldn’t risk it. If I brought anything the driver would be suspicious.”

  Watching the big man’s face, she caught sight of something that flickered in his eyes. It didn’t entirely disturb the strange calm she saw there, but it was a flicker. She had to hope it was of hope, or approval of what she’d done, or something else positive. She was putting herself in this man’s hands and she wanted something to go right for once.

  “You have a cell phone?”

  “Sure.”

  He held out his hand. Wondering what was going on, she took hers out of her pocket and handed it to him and watched as he opened it and took out the SIMM card, then smashed the phone. One of the other bikers and his old lady were headed out the door and Dirk waved at them. “Bobby, you heading home to get ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dirk held out the phone and card. “Do us all a favor and take this crap down to the cop shop and drop it in the dumpster out back.”

  Bobby smiled and took the card.

  “What’s that about?”

  “Your husband gave you the phone, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Phones can be fixed to make them easily traced. He could be on the way now.” Dirk reached over the bar, fumbling under it and brought out a cell phone. “Besides, biker chicks have club phones. There are some pictures of bikes and people in it, and your contact list has the burner cell number I travel with and Wrench’s. That’s it, other than some tweaks the club geek puts in them. That way you have a phone in case we get separated and because it would seem weird you not having one. Someone gets a hold of this phone they don’t really have shit. They’d never trace them back to this place.”

  She looked at it. “Whatever.” Acting tough was important so she tried not to show how much his thoroughness gave her a sense of relief. These guys might actually know what they were doing. Then she watched him open the envelope Bart had given him and shake out two passports. He opened one and showed it to her. It was her face and birthdate but with another name. “Heidi?”

  He shrugged and opened the other passport. She saw his face. “I got Burt, so suck it up.”

  “Why do you need a fake passport?”

  “I have no interest in your old man knowing who I am. I’ll be taking you across the border; if they spot you somehow, then they’ll be interested in who I am. This gives them a name and I’d just as soon he chased a phantom.”

  That made sense. “Fine. So let’s go. We can be in Canada tomorrow.”

  He shook his head. “Not the way we’re going.”

  “It’s a straight shot from here.”

  “No way we’re going direct.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the man is after you. As soon as he finds out you ran, he’ll check the paths that run straight to safety, the routes that seem to take you out of his reach. So he’ll blanket the airport, bus stations, train stations and border checkpoints. If he’s any good at all, by tonight he’ll be sure you didn’t go to Mexico, at least not Tijuana or between here and Yuma. He’ll also have a good idea that you didn’t hang around here unless you have someone who could hide you. If you do, they are in deep shit.”

  She shook her head. “No. No one.”

  “That sort of leaves Canada. If I were him, I’d turn my attention on every motel and rest stop along I-5 north, and the Pacific Coast Highway. Meantime, he’ll turn to any connections he might have with border patrol people on either side. If we head straight up to Vancouver they will be looking for you to cross, maybe circulating photos to people with instructions to grab you.”

  The idea staggered her. She’d been running only one hour and suddenly her clever scheme was falling apart. She wondered if she’d even get past this sleazy bar. “So what do we do?”

  “We take a scenic route. We meander, take a roundabout path. If we are lucky he gets bored and quits looking for you, or just the enthusiasm of his troops slackens and they give up. And we cross a long wa
y from here.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Buffalo.”

  “Buffalo?”

  Wrench smiled at them both. “Buffalo. As in New York.”

  “And then cross to Toronto or London,” Cutter said. “I hear it’s nice there this time of year. Shitty in winter though.”

  Wrench scratched his head. “Except for the elk.”

  She laughed. “Elk?”

  “They walk out in the road and stop. Big fucking critters, elk. A bike hitting one of them gets totally messed up. Hard to fix.”

  “It’s easy to cross the border at Buffalo,” Dirk said. “Not many elk there.”

  * * * *

  You sit in a bar to hang out and drink. Now Dirk sat in the clubhouse bar drinking in this girl, Audra, making no secret of running his gaze over her body. It was a nice body and she had to be used to having guys checking her out. Bart was right, saying she was hot. She was a fox who suited his weakness for petite, curvy girls. As he ran his gaze over her hair, she touched it self consciously. “I cut it yesterday.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Terrace insisted I keep it long, and I was pissed off at him.”

  “So he knows you are pissed.”

  She had trembled, thinking about it.

  “He beat you for doing it.”

  Her eyes flashed. He’d done more than just hit her. “Yeah.”

  “So he is alerted.”

  Her face told him that she hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe not. He’s always pissed at me about something. That wasn’t anything special. It’s the only way I can fight back.”

  “Okay. I just need to know.”

  He called over to Trudy, one of the biker chicks. When the girl came over she smiled. “What do you need?” He liked Trudy. She wasn’t very smart, but she was nice to talk to. “We need some help.” He pointed at Audra. “We need a makeover. She needs to pass for my old lady.”

  “Stand up,” the girl said. When Audra did, Trudy looked her over from head to toe. “Clothes? Hair? Skin?”

  “All of it,” Dirk said.

  “I’ve got some clothes that will do. But the hair and makeup are too… too fucking nothing that says biker bitch.”

  “Can you fix her?”

  Trudy turned to one of the other girls. “Meg, take a run to my place and bring a couple of sets of road clothes from my closet.” She smiled at Dirk. “You owe me for a set of colors.”

  “Tell Bart to take care of it and that I said it’s part of the cost of doing business. His cost, not yours or mine.”

  Trudy laughed and went to the bar and got a pair of scissors and a comb and her handbag. She checked the contents of the bag then crooked a finger at Audra. “Come with me. We have work to do.”

  As she followed, Audra truly felt she was at the point of no return.

  * * * *

  Audra sat, somewhat stunned, as Trudy took her comb and scissors and began cutting her hair even shorter. Chopping it more than cutting it. Her reflection in the bathroom mirror showed the shock on her own face and the concentrated look on Trudy’s as she turned her straight hair into something Audra would’ve called ratty.

  “The shoulder-length cut says nothing,” Trudy was telling her. “It’s too even, too fucking regular.” She looked at Audra’s face and laughed. “Yeah, you think I’m fucking you over, but it’s going to be hot.”

  “Is it that big a deal around here, being ratty instead of regular?”

  “Ratty? Think tough, girl. If you are going to travel with a biker, you better know that how you look makes a statement about him. Bikers want girls who are edgy, who don’t give a fuck what the rest of the world thinks about them. You walk into a place with him, you move your hips so guys will look, but when you do it you have a hand on his arm or his ass so they know you are just strutting your stuff. Even if this is playacting for you, you want it right, so people buy it.”

  The girl was right, and edgy was exactly how she’d describe the new haircut.

  Then Trudy had her wash her face. “Your makeup is too neat, too conservative.” When her face was clean, Trudy, behaving remarkably like her mother had when she taught her about makeup, went through the basic concepts. Naturally the concepts were nothing like her mother had taught her. The dark lipstick, heavy shadow, seemed garish. On the other hand, Trudy’s efforts were helping her look like another person, and she was going to have to be another person—for a while, at least.

  Trudy had finished when Meg came in carrying the clothes Trudy had sent her for. “Cool,” she said when she saw Audra. “With these you’ll start to fit in around here.”

  Meg handed her the clothes and Audra realized she was expected to change right then. As she took the clothes, she saw that road clothes meant pretty much what the girls wore in the bar—incredibly short denim shorts and tee shirts cut short to expose her flat belly.

  “Cutter is gonna like you big time,” Meg said.

  “Is that his real name?”

  The two women laughed. “Real? Sort of,” Trudy said. “His given name is Dirk, but he’s the club’s Enforcer.”

  “Real handy man with a knife,” Meg said.

  Meg walked around Audra. “You can think of that as a good thing, cause Cutter doesn’t cut women, as far as I know.”

  Trudy laughed. “He does gobble them up though. He will think you are just plain yummy.”

  The idea unsettled her a bit, but if she was going to escape, if she was going to manage to get out of town without Terrance’s men tracking her down, she would have to deal with it. She would become this tough biker chick and if Cutter was a lady’s man, she’d have to play things by ear.

  “He’s going to eat you alive,” Trudy said. Then she licked her lips. “If you can learn to enjoy that I’m pretty sure you won’t find it a bad thing at all.”

  “Not at all bad,” Meg said. “Cutter is so hot.”

  The look on Meg’s face said it all. She lusted after Cutter. Right now everything else was insane, but that sentiment she could understand, maybe even agree with.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jumping into the unknown is hard. When you have no idea when or how you’ll land, even if the place you’re standing is treacherous, life threatening, it can be hard to summon the courage to make a leap. And when you do, heart in mouth, your knees weak, you want it over so you can get your bearings as soon as possible, take stock of your injuries.

  Audra had taken the leap and found herself totally disoriented. Disoriented and frightened. Even if she won the gamble, got away with her escape, then what?

  But it was the only way. Stepping into the unknown was the only way to hide from Terrance.

  Terrance, the man, the idea of him, the memories of him, his creepy touch, sent a chill through her. Just thinking about him terrified her. The man repulsed her. He had made her life a nightmare.

  Breaking away from him took all the money she could raise by selling the jewels and gifts Terrance lavished on her during the rare times he was pleased with her, or just feeling generous. But she’d happily paid the price Bart set. She could manage it and when she was free, she’d find work. She’d get by somehow.

  There was no doubt, however, that the process of breaking away from Terrance had propelled her into a surreal world. She, Audra Montrose, was riding past the city limits sign on the back of a huge monster of a motorcycle, with its engine throbbing sensually between her legs, and her arms tightly wrapped around the waist of a man she’d just met. And they were headed… she didn’t know where they were headed, other than the vague notion of Buffalo, New York, which meant nothing to her.

  When Cutter saw her, it was clear that he approved of her new look. He’d taken her hand. “We can’t waste time. We need to hit the road and get some distance between you and this city.”

  That had sounded right, that urgency appealed to her. With nothing more than that, he’d led her out to his bike, calling over his shoulder at Wrench as they went out the door,
saying they’d meet up at a place he called The Black Hole of Calcutta.

  And they’d left, leaving behind everything she had and everything she knew—her entire life. The only familiar thing in her situation, and that reached back to high school, was the roar of the motor, the smell of unburned gasoline and oil and the exhaust, and the wonderful sensations of hurtling down the highway. The vibrations of the engine and the tires on the road went rippling through her, giving her a sensual, sexual thrill. It had been a long time since she’d been on a motorcycle and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. She’d never been on one this powerful and the difference was amazing, even sensual, just as she was realizing the man she rode behind was more powerful, more self assured than any man she’d ever met before.

  The sensuality of the ride, the feel of the wind caressing her mixed weirdly with lingering memories of the horror of her recent sex life. Those memories faded with each mile, seemed less real and led her to a surprising sexual arousal. With her arms around the powerful torso of her biker protector, the surprising attraction she felt for him caught her off guard. She wanted him. She slipped in and out of fantasies about him.

  She told herself it was only the situation, his closeness, his powerful masculinity combined with the throbbing engine. Those things, those sensations forced the idea of a white knight into her head, twisted her perspective, made her emotions cloud her thinking. How could she be attracted to this man? For all she knew the man was a killer or a rapist. She might have made a huge mistake putting herself in his hands. No one knew where they were, where they were going.

  She would find out in time and nothing could guarantee her safety. But all that truly mattered to her was that mile by mile she was moving away from Terrance, out of his clutches. He was mad, insane, and a sadist. By now he’d know she’d run away. The driver would have finally gone into the doctor’s office looking for her and found she was gone.