Reckless Road

by Feehan, Christine

  “Never think that way, honey. I know you love me. I want you to wake me up.”

  Her breath came in the delicious little ragged musical pants he particularly loved to hear. He pushed deeper through those tight silken petals. Staring into her eyes when he took her this way always made him feel like he was looking into her soul and she was looking into his. It was incredibly intimate. Incredibly beautiful. He reached for her hands and threaded their fingers together as he rose over her, driving deeper, needing to be fully surrounded by her.

  “I have complete confidence that you love me, Player.” Her fingers tightened around his. Her legs tightened around his hips.

  “I’ll never get over the nightmares.” He surged forward, burying himself those last few inches. “Bog, baby, you’re so tight. I’m never certain I’m going to survive, it’s so good.”

  He moved in her slow, withdrawing, feeling the friction dragging over his shaft, over his ultrasensitive crown. The breath left his lungs in a rush. His woman. His miracle. He pushed back just as slow, one inch at a time. She rose to meet him, her hips matching that slow rhythm, in complete harmony with him. Savoring each other. Worshipping.

  “I know they’re a part of you. I love all of you. I don’t want to be shut out of any part of you, Player. I want all of you, including your nightmares. Including your past. You don’t give that to anyone else. Only me.”

  Her hot tunnel surrounded him like a scorching-hot fist of living silk, squeezing and gripping until he thought his head might explode from the sheer pleasure. He couldn’t keep that deliberate, measured pace that smoldered, a slow burn that built and built until the flames raced up his spine, threatening to consume him. He began to surge into her with harder, faster strokes. Forks of lightning streaked through his body, spreading through the fire until he could barely breathe.

  Player, tell me you’re with me on this. It’s important to me. I have to know you’re with me, that you understand how important it is to me to be this connected to you always.

  He could read her so easily when their bodies were one. When their minds were. Their hearts were so connected, and he swore their souls somehow had been woven together. Yeah. He read her. She wanted that closeness, even if it meant seeing his past and the ugliness of the life he’d had as a child. Sharing the worst of him. Knowing the ugly things he did to escape. Knowing the things he did to bring down those who preyed on children. She was willing to live with his sins. How could he not love her? Worship her? Feel so fucking much for her he burned with it?

  I’m with you all the way, Zyah. If it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.

  You give me your word of honor while we both can still think straight.

  You’ve got it, baby. He smiled down at her, looking into her eyes as he gave her his word. And then he was lost in her body. Burning in the flames and loving every minute of it. Loving her with everything in him.

  TERMS ASSOCIATED WITH BIKER CLUBS

  1-percenters: This is a term often used in association with outlaw bikers, as in “99 percent of clubs are law-abiding, but the other 1 percent are not.” Sometimes the symbol is worn inside a diamond-shaped patch.

  3-piece patch or 3-piece: This term is used for the configuration of a club’s patch: the top piece, or rocker, with club name; a center patch that is the club’s logo; and a bottom patch or rocker with the club’s location, such as Sea Haven.

  Biker: someone who rides a motorcycle

  Biker friendly: a business that welcomes bikers

  Boneyard: refers to a salvage yard

  Cage: often refers to a car, van or truck (basically any vehicle not a motorcycle)

  Chapter: the local unit of a larger club

  Chase vehicle: a vehicle following riders on a run just in case of a breakdown

  Chopper: customized bike

  Church: club meeting

  Citizen: someone not a biker

  Club: could be any group of riders banding together (most friendly)

  Colors: patches, logo, something worth fighting for because it represents who you are

  Cut: vest or denim jackets with sleeves cut off with club colors on them; almost always worn, even over leather jackets

  Dome: helmet

  Getting patched: Moving up from prospect to full club member (you would receive the logo patch to wear with rockers). This must be earned, and is the only way to get respect from brothers.

  Hang-around: anyone hanging around the club who might want to join

  Hog: nickname for motorcycle, mostly associated with Harley-Davidson

  Independent: a biker with no club affiliation

  Ink: tattoo

  Ink slinger: a tattoo artist

  Nomad: club member who travels between chapters; goes where he’s needed in his club

  Old lady: Wife or woman who has been with a man for a long time. It is not considered disrespectful, nor does it have anything to do with how old one is.

  Patch holder: member of a motorcycle club

  Patches: sewn on vests or jackets, these can be many things with meanings or just for fun, even gotten from runs made

  Poser: pretend biker

  Property of: a patch displayed on a jacket, vest or sometimes a tattoo, meaning the woman (usually old lady or longtime girlfriend) is with the man and his club

  Prospect: someone working toward becoming a fully patched club member

  RESOURCES

  Bikers Against Child Abuse (BACA)

  bacausa.com

  Advocates for Youth

  1325 G Street NW, Suite 980

  Washington, D.C. 20005

  1-202- 419- 3420

  advocatesforyouth.org

  U.S. Department of Justice

  Project Safe Childhood

  810 Seventh Street NW

  Washington, D.C. 20531

  AskDOJ@usdoj.gov

  justice.gov/psc/index.html

  MaleSurvivor

  350 Central Park West, Ste 1H

  New York, NY 10025

  1-800- 738- 4181

  malesurvivor.org

  KEEP READING FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

  LIGHTNING GAME

  THE NEXT NOVEL IN THE GHOSTWALKER SERIES

  BY CHRISTINE FEEHAN

  AVAILABLE MARCH 2021 FROM PIATKUS

  Rubin Campo stood in front of the small cabin made of mostly broken lumber his brothers and father had dragged or cut from the trees in the forest and pieced together. No one had lived there in years, but he and Diego came back every year and fixed the place up. He had no idea why. Some compulsion buried deep in them that pulled them back, he supposed.

  They’d been born there. The cabin hadn’t been so large then. At the time it had been one room. His two older brothers and father had begun expanding it as the family grew in size. Eventually, there were nine children. Had their father not died when his horse stepped in a hole and fell, rolling on him, breaking his father’s neck, there most likely would have been more children.

  They had lived off the land and were distrustful of outsiders. He’d learned hunting, fishing and trapping at a very early age. By the time he was three, he had learned to shoot. Every bullet counted. None could be wasted. It mattered little what age he was, if he pulled a trigger, he was expected to bring home something to put in the cooking pot.

  “Someone’s been moving around the property,” Diego said, coming up behind him. “Tracks everywhere. Been coming here for a while.”

  “Stripping the place,” Rubin guessed. He’d noticed the tracks as well.

  The community was a very closed one. They didn’t let outsiders in and everyone within several miles of their land knew the brothers returned to their property. They were doctors and they came back and treated the sick. The people were so distrustful of government and everyone else, they refused to go to the nearest towns for medical aid, relying on homeopathic treatments. Rubin and Diego returning, two of their own, were welcome. No one would steal from them. Whoever was taking things from
their cabin had to be an outsider, yet the tracks indicated that the person was coming and going on a regular basis.

  “Maybe,” Diego mused.

  Rubin didn’t know why it bothered him that someone would take anything from the old cabin. It wasn’t like they lived there or needed the things they’d left. People were poor. He remembered being hungry all the time. Real hunger, not knowing when his next meal was coming or even if it was coming. He knew exactly how that felt.

  Rubin was ten months older than Diego, and they’d been seven years old when their father had died, leaving their mother with nine children and only the land to sustain them. Their two oldest brothers, at fourteen and fifteen, had gone off looking for work, hoping to bring in money, but they never returned. Rubin and Diego never learned what happened to them.

  The two boys, as young as they were, began to hunt, fish and trap to put food on the table for the family. The girls helped by gathering plants and roots and growing as much as they could to help provide. Out hunting rabbits, the boys discovered a spring up above their cabin. Both were already showing astonishing promise of their genius abilities in spite of their lack of formal education. By the time they were eight, they figured out how to use gravity to bring that water to their cabin, and for the first time, they had running water in the house.

  They were nine years old when Mary left to marry a man on the farm closest to theirs: Mathew Sawyer. There were few choices for men or women to find anyone where they lived, but he was a good man. She was barely of age and she died in childbirth nine months later. Their mother didn’t smile much after that, no matter how much the boys or their sisters tried to coax her.

  Rubin reached back and rubbed at the knots in his neck. “I swear, every time I come to this place, I think it will be my last, but I can’t stop.” He turned away from the cabin. “It’s really beautiful up here. I need the isolation of it. I love the swamp in Louisiana and our team, everyone there, but sometimes . . .” He trailed off.

  Sometimes he needed space. He had gifts—psychic gifts that were rare. He belonged to an elite and covert military team called GhostWalkers. All of them had psychic gifts. His entire team. It was just that his gift or one of his gifts happened to be extremely rare and they protected him. They shielded him so that any enemy would never find out that he had such an ability. As far as they knew, only two people in the world had the gift of a being a psychic surgeon. He was one of the two. The team tended to hover until sometimes he felt he couldn’t breathe.

  Diego sent a him a small grin. He got what Rubin meant without a huge explanation. “There’s nothing like the fireflies in the spring, is there?”

  Rubin referred to the fireflies as lightning bugs, and he always looked forward to dusk. The setting of the sun brought that first note in the beautiful melody, as the fireflies rose up to dance in harmony along the edges of the grass. He used to sit with his sisters and whisper to them of fairies and fey creatures, telling them stories he made up to entertain them. He knew Diego listened just as raptly as his sisters did.

  The lightning bugs represented peace to him. Magic. Their world was one of survival and grim reality. But in the spring, when the fireflies came out at the setting of the sun to dance and provide their spellbinding performance, Rubin took his sisters outside and would sit with them in spite of his mother’s forbidding silence. He would spin tales for them to go along with the glowing dips and spins of the fairy-like lighting bugs.

  A traveling man had once told stories to them when he had stopped by, trying to get their mother to purchase cloth from him. They had no money. They made their own clothes from hand-me-downs. Most were too small or too big because they traded with other families from farms. Rubin and Diego had kept a rifle on the man the entire time he was near them. He never saw it. They concealed their weapons under a blanket. Rubin had followed him off the property while Diego had gone up into the trees to cover Rubin. Rubin hadn’t liked the man, but he liked the stories.

  “I miss the lightning bugs when we’re in the swamp,” Rubin conceded. His throat closed at the memories welling up. His sisters. Lucy, Jayne and the twins, Ruby and Star. They would sit so still when he told them stories, rapt attention on their faces.

  Rubin and Diego were ten when they managed to find a way to get in the old mining shaft, found the equipment and stripped it. They figured out how to make a generator after taking apart the one at the mine. It was the first time their mother ever had hot water and electricity. That winter was a good one. They were able to keep food on the table. Their mother didn’t smile, but she participated a bit in the conversations.

  That next summer, four men hiked the Appalachian Trail and camped just past their land. Lucy, their twelve-year-old sister, had gone night-fishing with eight-year-old Jayne. It wasn’t uncommon for them to be gone most of the night, but when they didn’t come home in the morning, Rubin and Diego went looking for them. They found Lucy’s body half in and half out of the stream, her clothes ripped off her and blood under her fingernails. Little Jayne lay beside her, drooling, clothes torn, head bleeding from where someone had struck her a terrible blow. She screamed and screamed when she saw her brothers, not making any sense at all.

  Rubin carried Jayne home while Diego carried Lucy’s body. They left both to be looked after by their mother and Ruby and Star, the thirteen-year-old twins, while they collected their rifles and went back to look for tracks. They caught up with the four men the second night. The men had camped up by a little waterfall and were laughing and talking like they didn’t have a care in the world. The boys each chose a target, took careful aim and shot them through the heart. Two shots. Two kills. Just like they’d been taught from the time they were toddlers. They couldn’t afford to waste ammunition.

  The other two men took to cover, hiding. Scared. It didn’t matter. They were varmints. And they were hunted by experts. They might be boys, but they were elite trackers already. They both could call on animals to hunt with them, usually raptors. They knew the land. This was their world, and they were merciless when they had to be. By early the next morning, the other two men were dead as well.

  They didn’t bother to bury or hide the bodies. The men had gone off trail. The boys had no respect for them, so as far as they were concerned, the vultures could have them. They were many miles from their run-down cabin, and by the time someone did find the bodies—if they did—there would be no tracks leading back to them.

  Rubin glanced down at the tracks around his cabin. They were recent. The grass was barely pressed down, as if the person going in and out of their home didn’t weigh much or enough time had passed that the grass was beginning to stand again. He’d let his brother figure it out. Diego was amazing at tracking.

  “You going inside?” Diego’s southern accent had deepened as it often did when they returned to their roots.

  “I’m thinking on it,” Rubin said. “It was a long trip and I’m tired, but if I go inside and the place is a mess, I’ll be upset and won’t be able to settle for the night.” He wouldn’t anyway. There were too many memories crowding in. It always happened that way when they came back. He was always conflicted when he first came home. Always. How could he not be? They’d lost so much.

  The flu hit the winter they turned thirteen. Ruby, Jayne and their mother all came down with it. Rubin had never felt so helpless in his life. He’d tried to nurse them back to health. He tried every potion and herbal medicine he knew to cure them. Nothing seemed to work. He couldn’t bring down their fevers. They buried Jayne first. Three days later, Ruby died. Their mother was down for six weeks. She never spoke a single word after that. She sat in a chair and rocked back and forth, humming songs and refusing to eat or acknowledge any of them no matter how much Star tried to coax her.

  The winter they turned fourteen was a bad one and they had no choice but to go out hunting, often long distances, or starve. When they returned from one particularly long hunt, Star was sobbing. Their mother’s body swung from a rope
hung from the center beam of the miserable little cabin. Star was inconsolable, certain their mother’s death was her fault. She’d fallen asleep for just a few minutes. It was left to Rubin and Diego to cut their mother down and bury her alongside her husband and children in the graveyard behind the cabin, a nearly impossible task in the hard, frozen ground.

  They woke the next morning to find a note from their sister explaining she couldn’t stay. She was sorry and hoped they would forgive her, but she was going to the nuns in the neighboring town a good distance away. Rubin and Diego were alarmed. The snow and ice were bad and the distance too far. None of the family had good winter gear. She was dead by the time they found her, frozen in a small crevice near the stream where Lucy and Jayne had been attacked. It took them three days to dig a hole deep enough to bury Star in the family graveyard.

  The graveyard was still behind the house. They planted wildflowers over the graves and kept it nice each year they returned. They also worked on the cabin, improving it just a little, knowing they would return to help those who distrusted doctors and refused to go anywhere near cities or towns and outsiders, but would trust one of their own.

  “You going inside or just going to stand there with your hand on the door?” Diego prompted him again.

  “I’m contemplating.” Rubin gave him a look. Sometimes being ten months older meant he could be bossy, not that Diego ever acknowledged anyone was his boss. He preferred to think they were twins and therefore the same age.

  Diego flashed a little cocky grin. “If you keep contemplating, we’re both going to have white beards by the time you make up your mind whether to open the door.”

  “Did it ever occur to you this could be a trap? Someone might have a grenade strapped to the doorknob, and if I turn it and walk inside, that’s the end of both of us? We’ve got a few enemies. I could be saving your life.”

  “I don’t make enemies. No one ever knows I exist. I’m a ghost,” Diego pointed out.

  That was true enough, Rubin had to concede. In a forest, or just about anywhere really, Diego was difficult to spot. He was one of the best, and once set on an enemy, he would find them. Animals and birds aided him. He was silent and deadly. Diego appeared mild-mannered, but he truly was a dangerous man.