Then he would’ve had to tell Terrance he’d lost her. Naturally Terrance would fire the poor man, or maybe do worse to him than that, but she couldn’t afford to care. He had to look out for himself. A furious Terrance would be turning his anger into some sort of action. He’d call the people who did things for them. He wouldn’t soil his own hands, but he’d send them for her and whatever his instructions to them were, they would mean dreadful things for her. He’d promised her that. He’d told her what he’d done to other women who’d crossed him, not done as he wanted.
So if Cutter was a demon, if he intended her harm… even raping her, it wouldn’t be any worse than what Terrance would do to her when he caught up with her. He wouldn’t be worse than Terrance had been to her for the years they’d been married. From her perspective, almost every time they’d had sex in the last six months had been rape.
The reality of who he was, and how he got his pleasure came all too quickly.
By the time they got home, she’d learned he liked inflicting pain—not just beating her, but creating a universe around her that let her know she was owned, trapped. She’d tried cooperating with him, thinking if she joined in his games he’d see her more kindly, but kindness was foreign to him. Of all the strategies she’d tried, the only thing that had slowed him down was when she learned to play dead, refused to respond at all. When he wanted her, she let her body go numb, lifeless and she sent her mind far away. She thought of anything and everything but him, but sex.
The faraway look she got in her eyes when she did that had infuriated him. He wanted to see fear and her tactic got him madder than she’d ever seen him. He’d punished her, but then he punished her when she cooperated. But this was worse.
Still, it worked after a fashion. After a time he seemed to lose interest in trying to wake her up or convincing her to respond. He had other women, after all. There were always other women.
She began to hope that he’d tire of it, tire of her, and divorce her, or tell her to leave. That failed. Terrance stopped hurting her physically, but he began to take his pleasure by humiliating and degrading her in ways that it didn’t matter if she responded or not. And he tightened his grip on every aspect of her life, ensuring she was never alone, never unaware that she was his prisoner. He did what he could to make her life hell, and to ensure she knew that there was no escape, that she’d never be free.
That mental abuse took its toll. Surviving, not going insane, required that she harden herself to him, to his advances, to any hope of finding love. Yet, after all that, here she was feeling herself warm up to this man. It had been too long since she’d been around men who responded to her as a woman, much less a desirable woman. It made her afraid to trust her response, but she knew this biker excited her. She was aroused for the first time in a long time, by a man who was probably a public menace. Go figure.
Now she clung to him, filled with a bizarre and frightening combination of desperation and hope; she pressed against his back and let herself live in the moment, to enjoy the exhilaration of his closeness and their speed as they flew through this universe, his universe, this open road.
His bike was a big machine, steady and stable, and comforting in an odd way. Though she’d been on bikes before, she’d never ridden so fast. Underneath them the pavement flowed by in a swirl of black asphalt, broken by occasional splashes of yellow line, white markings or patches. The big machine roared with tremendous power, singing of its immense reserves of strength to call on, if they were necessary.
The rider, Dirk, Cutter, had that quality too—deep reserves of strength. They called to her, they echoed her need, her desire for a protector and she cursed herself for imagining being naked with him, running her hands over that muscular body. The awareness that she wanted him, wanted him to take her, to fuck her, frightened, surprised, and excited her. Her heart pounded loudly, nearly drowning out that pulsing, throbbing engine. She felt that heartbeat synchronizing with that of the engine, and the roar of the wind in her ears and she slipped into a strange and eerie place where her sense of time, space, and reality blurred into a swirl that could only be categorized, understood, as desire. Sheer sexual desire as she’d never felt before—a terrifying, out of control arousal that had to be controlled, or at least subdued.
It made no sense. No fucking sense at all. No, she knew these were fantasy thoughts. What was really happening was that she was escaping. She put a heroic mantle on the man because he was giving her a ride to freedom, whatever that would mean. He was a hired gun. She was paying him to help her escape. That was all he was and he meant nothing more to her than that.
Right.
* * * *
Dirk liked things kept simple. Understandable. Riding away from LA to help this girl escape bugged him. He didn’t know her, he didn’t know exactly what she was running from and that made lots of questions pop up as he twisted the throttle and left the club in his dust. Dirk hated questions he couldn’t answer.
What made a girl sell everything she had and hire a bunch of outlaws to get her out of the country? What kind of girl thought running to a strange country, where she knew no one, would make her safe? What did she imagine her life would be like when she did escape? What had her husband done to her to make her willing to throw her life away entirely?
These questions echoed in Dirk’s head as he pointed his bike toward I-40, which would take them to Kingman, Arizona. It was odd that he found himself wanting to understand Audra. Sure, the girl who clung tightly to him, who pressed her breasts against his back, was a hot piece, but he didn’t need to know her whole life story, or her future plans. This was a job, and she might turn out to be a nice fuck. But if they got it on, she’d be doing it for the adventure. Girls like her didn’t fall in love with a guy like him. He scared them away. A night or two with an outlaw for the experience was one thing, but the girls who fell in love with bikers, wanted to be with them, weren’t nice girls. They were sassy and sexy and all that, but they had to be misfits too.
Why wouldn’t a person fit in if they could?
Lots of times Dirk found himself wishing he could fit in, that he could work some steady job and come home to a girl in a nice house. That was crap, of course. Within weeks, if not days, he’d be climbing the walls, feel an overwhelming need to make a long ride to clear his head, maybe pick up a bar girl somewhere and bang her. That’s how he was. No nice girl would chain him down. But then he’d never be the kind of man that a nice girl would like, so he’d never know for sure.
When you grew up never knowing what it’s liked to be loved, how can you know if it’s worth looking for? When and where do you learn to let someone love you or what it means to feel love for someone? How do you trust such an abstract concept? When everyone else thought love was worth fighting for and you didn’t even know what it was or if it was real, did that make you cynical or the rest of the world delusional?
A person who grew up in the streets and never got out of them, was cursed. There were no two ways about it. Romance was like the inside of a rich person’s house—if you ever encountered it, you were standing outside, looking in through a window, and if anyone saw you, you knew you’d be chased away.
There it was again. That ambivalence.
That’s your problem, Dirk. You want it both ways. You want to be the tough, hard ass biker, yet you ache for a woman to love you. A good woman doesn’t lust after cursed men.
So he’d just have to stop wondering about the girl and just accept that she was there. Things would make sense that way, not trying to understand her. That left him free to do what he’d do with any chick, test the waters, see if she was ripe for a nice time between the sheets. Perhaps she was less nice than he thought. Maybe she was just a spoiled cunt and she’d enjoy a rough rider.
They had a long way to go, and that meant long nights in motels. Plenty of time and opportunity for fun.
The thing was… there was something about her that tugged at him. If she was telling the truth, she
was escaping a nightmare and where she wound up had ceased to matter to her. She was pretty brave doing this, splitting and taking nothing, whether the guy was in hot pursuit, or doing what Dirk suspected, banging some other chick and thinking good riddance.
Dirk could relate to running, leaving everything behind—he’d been there. Life had handed him a bowl of shit for breakfast. He’d had to eat it and smile… until he quit caring and being scared, and started fighting back, throwing the shit they tried to feed him in their faces.
Still, she had to have things fairly bad, this chick. You didn’t give up fancy clothes, a shiny expensive car, polite neighbors and dinner parties just because the guy was a jerk. It had to be pretty bad, and a small girl like that could get roughed up. Maybe running away was being smart.
When he was little he’d run too and gotten away from the worst of it, the abuse he couldn’t stop. Damn right he had. He’d run headlong away from that kind of shit, tasting fear, more than once. It hadn’t solved anything, because there was always more shit you ran into, but over time he’d learned when to run and when to fight. That was the heart of the curse. Fight or flight wasn’t just a response mechanism, it was a fucking way of life. Eventually he’d gotten good enough at fighting to not have to run often. He got good enough at fighting, and then hard enough to become the Enforcer.
Most of the guys in the club were cursed. You didn’t usually decide you wanted to be a biker when you grew up—you slipped into it. You fucked up at some point and maybe got kicked out of school or went to juvenile and then you were marked. The straight world was afraid of you then and kept adding rules, but those rules made it harder and harder for you to play their game. So you fought back and soon you were totally on the outside looking in. The club provided an oasis where you could be who you were. As long as you were bad ass, of course. As long as you played by the code—but the code you understood because it was simple.
The girls that ran with them were different but the problem was the same. They’d fucked up and society had no use for them now. They’d disqualified themselves from being soccer moms and corporate wives, and never had the aptitude to make it in business. Or in life, for that matter.
Bikers were predictable and made them feel safer than the straight world. Again, the rules were simple. The biker society was ruled by the men; the girls that thrived in it managed to pick out one bad-assed dude from the herd and do whatever it took to make him think that he hadn’t really lived until he’d met her. She’d do anything for him, and in return she had a role in that world. A standing. No one expected her to cook or clean house. No, she’d hang around with her man, say nothing when he flirted with other girls, and hang onto him by lighting him up. It was mostly sex, at least at first, but some of the guys had the same old lady forever. In that way they weren’t any different from anyone else. Some guys and some girls screwed around and some didn’t.
Dirk’s luck with women was mostly bad luck. He’d thought his last old lady was a keeper. She’d been hot and funny, always happy for a good time, if not particularly bright. They were together for a year and then she got sick. The end had been mercifully quick. Since then, although he’d been with other girls since then, he hadn’t met anyone he wanted riding with him. For a biker that was the big thing. Living with a girl was fine. If she pissed you off, you could leave. But taking a girl on rides, except on a job like this, meant something. She had to have the right vibe, she had to love the road the same way you did and not be bitching that she smeared her makeup or asking a thousand questions.
Try as he would just to enjoy having a hot chick riding behind him, this one was a nagging mystery. He couldn’t even begin to imagine the world she’d come from, the world she was escaping from. What she was doing, running from her old man, might be incredibly stupid, but it was gutsy. She was running away from everything people said they wanted, because she knew the clothes, cars, money, didn’t mean anything if you weren’t free.
He understood that, respected it. When you got down to it, freedom was the only thing he really valued. They shared that value but it made him want to know more about her, damn it. Besides, her attitude, that gutsy, ballsy attitude, was even more of a goddamn turn on than her curvy body, that luscious little ass of hers, those sweet titties.
As he rolled that big machine down the highway, he let himself imagine being naked between those soft, pale thighs, her arms and legs wrapping around him as he rammed his swollen cock into her.
Focus on that. Focus on how sweet it will be to just fuck her.
Even with that, he sensed that somehow his feelings about her were changing. He wanted her more than ever, but he wanted her to want it too. He had the feeling that she was drawn to him. That complicated things and Dirk didn’t like complications. He wanted things simple and as black and white as he could get them.
She wasn’t helping. Liking her could be bad news. He might even want her to like him and that wouldn’t happen. She might want him as a hard core biker lover, but she wouldn’t ever like him. She couldn’t. He was cursed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Smiling Jack Crawford didn’t smile unless he was enjoying himself, and when he was enjoying himself it meant that someone else was in pain. A lot of pain. The more pain they experienced, the more fun he had. As long as he was the one causing the pain, that is. And it wasn’t just a hobby. Jack took pain, other people’s pain, very seriously and he’d made a study of it—how to inflict pain, how to keep a person suffering for a long time, holding them right on the edge.
He’d been smiling quite a bit that morning, but the smiles were over for now. His patient, as he called him, was unconscious. He knew many ways to wake him, but the man’s nerve endings were overloaded. Just the sight of the bloody scalpel in Jack’s hand, a recollection of the pain he’d endured, would probably make him pass out again.
No, there wouldn’t be any real pleasure in it until he’d rested a bit.
Not much. Just enough. Jack knew the boundaries where pain met oblivion and his personal joy came from herding his patient, keeping him on the side of pain as long as possible.
“He’s here.”
Jack turned and looked at the goon who’d spoken to him, broken his reverie. “The client?”
The man nodded. Jack’s world recognized four categories of people: clients paid him to apply his skills to extract information, punish the wayward, or simply to provide a lesson; there were goons he hired for muscle and other tasks he didn’t like soiling his hands with or have the particular skills for; there were his patients, either selected by clients or for his own entertainment; and there was everyone else. This last category he thought of as simply victims—beings you killed if they got in your way, or ignored.
He’d worked for this client before, he knew his terms, his preferences. He liked what Jack did but lacked the stomach to do it himself. He directed the scalpel, but couldn’t wield it. That told Jack volumes about the man, told him he was weak but wanted the world to fear him.
Setting down the scalpel, he nodded toward the goon. “Go meet him. Tell him I’ll be right in.” As the goon went out, Jack went to the sink. He took off the rubber gloves he’d been wearing and threw them away. Then he washed his hands and his scalpel thoroughly, taking his time because he knew it would irritate the client. That was the most pleasure you could extract from a client beyond their money. He pictured Terrance Montrose’s face and imagined him tied up and tracing a red line across the man’s neck with his scalpel—not a deep cut, just one that he’d feel enough to remind him of his vulnerability.
Perhaps one day, just for fun, but not now. Not while he was a paying customer. After all, Jack had a business to run and a crew to pay, and he loved his work. This client paid well and gave him interesting assignments.
He went into the room where Montrose waited, sitting stiffly in a chair, not wanting to rumple his expensive tailored suit. He dressed impeccably, this weak, rich, asshole. Terrance Montrose was a very handsome 28-year-ol
d who looked significantly younger than that. He had pale skin, an almost pretty face, floppy blond hair, and bright blue eyes that looked deceptively innocent.
Montrose didn’t go anywhere alone. That was a sign of his fear. By reflex Jack sized up the bodyguard, noting offhandedly that he carried a gun in a shoulder holster. Jack didn’t care for guns and wondered why the man thought he needed one. He was pretty big. Montrose liked to surround himself with a variety of impressively big goons and this one was undoubtedly well trained. Perhaps the gun was just to reassure Montrose.
Jack hired a lot of the goons himself. They had their uses, but he held them in disdain. Big men were clumsy and slow, in his experience. Jack was about five seven and weighed a trim 175 pounds. Goons didn’t take littler men seriously. His red hair and sunken green eyes gave him an almost clownish appearance that he’d found useful. Guys like this goon wouldn’t believe he’d even challenge them or be a threat. If things started to happen, that worked in Jack’s favor. By the time they realized he intended to make a move they would be on the ground with their throat cut, lying in a pool of their own blood, bleeding out. Unless he just incapacitated them, saving them for encounters that promised more fun.
Montrose looked up at him.
“Did you learn anything?” he asked.
“I learned that he doesn’t know shit. His story holds up. He took her to the doctor and she snuck out the back way.”
“You believe him?”
“I had a quick chat with the doctor. The asshole nearly shit himself in his rush to spill his guts. She paid him to let her go out and for him to sit there and not do anything for the entire session. He thought she was coming back. He was thinking she was meeting a guy for a quickie and would come back before the session was over.”
“Okay. But the driver had to guess something was going on. If she was planning a runner…”
I Need A Bad Boy: A Collection of Bad Boy Romances Page 77