MINE: Fury Riders MC

by Sophia Gray

  The heater was working overtime in a vain attempt to keep the small cab of my car warm. Unfortunately, the back window on my side wouldn’t roll up all the way and the back-passenger side door didn’t like to completely seal. The result was a constant whirring noise and a chill that never really went away. It was the reason I was blowing on my right hand and then my left, keeping only one on the wheel. My fingers were starting to feel numb, despite the gloves I wore.

  I supposed I looked kind of ridiculous, dressed in a leather jacket over a threadbare hoodie over a half-eaten wool sweater, sitting in my car, my beanie pulled nearly to my eyes and my scarf wrapped up around my chin, but what else could I do? I was trying to make it big in Nashville and, until I did, I was living the life of a starving artist.

  And let me tell you, it wasn’t half as glamorous as people made it out to be.

  My beater of a car was on its last legs to begin with and I would be damned if I asked my parents to help me get a new one. They were just a little less broke than I was and I wanted to keep it that way—at least until I made it big. Then I’d pay for every damn little thing. They’d be set for life, I promised myself

  I was going to see them for the holidays. It was only a week from Christmas and if you’d asked me three days ago if I thought there was going to be a flake of snow this year, I’d have said you were mad. Goes to show you I know less than the weatherman.

  “Shit, I can’t see a damn thing,” I muttered to myself.

  The snow was coming down like a fluffy blanket, covering everything in a nice sheet of white. Which would have been really pretty if I wasn’t trying to drive through it. Probably, the main roads were already closed, but I had taken one of those short cut back roads that my brother promised me was “the fastest way to go, darling” in an effort to avoid the holiday traffic.

  Brilliant plan that turned out to be.

  Now I was muddling through icy roads and mountains of snow and worse still, I wasn’t even on the interstate. Which meant I hadn’t seen a soul in ages and the signs were few and far between. Getting frustrated, I finally accepted that I was going to have to pull over and figure out where the hell I was before going any farther. With any luck, my phone might actually be working out here in the boonies.

  “Please let my phone work,” I said in quick prayer.

  I pulled my beater over to the side of the road, grateful that at least my speed wasn’t sucking the heat out immediately. But I knew I couldn’t idle here too long with the heater running, so I promised myself I would be quick.

  My cell was almost three years old now with a cracked screen and far too many glitches, but it was better than spending a small fortune on a new one, and definitely better than having none at all. I turned it on, dismayed to see that it was already at fifteen percent battery. “Damnit. I’ll have to make this quick,” I muttered as I went to the GPS. I was hopeful for about three seconds that I would get a signal. Then I saw the little red X and knew I wasn’t getting anything. Not here, anyway.

  Groaning, I bit the bullet and popped open my car door. Instantly, I froze. Even though I had the car still running and the heater blasting on full, the cold air from outside was just too much for my poor little car.

  Shivering, I pulled my jacket tighter around me with one hand and held up my phone with the other. I looked like an idiot out here in the woods, pulled off on the side of the road, holding up my cell in the middle of the night trying to get a signal. But what else could I do?

  Still getting nothing, I started moving around in an effort to get something, anything. Just long enough for the maps feature to tell me where in the hell I was. Somewhere between Nashville and Des Moines, because that definitely narrows it down, I thought miserably. Originally my family was from Kentucky, but I’d had dreams of my name in lights in Nashville and my father had been transferred to Iowa last year. My brother just roamed between the two areas, popping in whenever he needed a rest from his wandering lifestyle.

  My phone beeped to let me know it was dying. I cursed it—then froze.

  From my right came a low groan. Oh my God, it’s a bear! I thought wildly, trying to decide if a bear meant I should remain still or run for my life. Could I make it to the car before it tried to eat me? Wait, don’t bears hibernate in the winter? I wasn’t sure if that meant they didn’t come out at all or not, and if it wasn’t a bear, then what the hell was it?

  Before I could decide what to do, there was another groan and I realized it wasn’t a bear. It sounded…human. I wasn’t sure if this made me feel better or not. What if it was an axe murderer or something?

  I was about to turn and run back to my car—especially since my cell phone wasn’t going to do me a damn bit of good—but something stopped me. I didn’t know what it was, but there was the sudden sense that a human being out here in this cold, groaning in the night in the middle of a snowstorm was terrible. No one would survive out here. If I got in my car and drove off, whoever was here…well, they’d die.

  Could I live with that?

  Biting my lip, I wished the answer to that was yes, but it wasn’t. It was a risk to go to whoever was making that sound, but it was one I decided I had to take.

  Holding my dying phone in my hand, my running car still puffing and grinding, trying to survive, I headed towards the sound. I hadn’t heard it again and I wondered suddenly if I’d taken too long to make my decision.

  I took another step towards the bank, the side of the road sloping into a ditch that was mostly filled with snow. I didn’t see anything and had nearly decided I made the whole thing up when I noticed a mound in the snow. Mostly it was covered in white, but I saw just barely a tinge of black and green beneath it where the snow had been partially blown away. I bit my lip, debating once again. Finally, I went to the mound. I crouched down beside it, my toes cold inside my boots and the holes in my jeans sending goosebumps up my legs.

  It was too cold outside. I needed to get back to my car.

  I reached out and brushed away some of the snow covering the mound. I uncovered a shoulder, then a neck and finally a face. A gasp escaped my lips and my eyes widened. His jaw was strong and covered with a fine sprinkling of red whiskers, his lashes a darker color and long almost like a woman’s. His eyes were closed, but I imagined they were beautiful, just like his face.

  Beautiful except for the purpling bruises along his jaw and left eye, the split lip that looked like it was probably going to be infected, and a jagged cut along his brow.

  “My God,” I muttered, brushing aside a half-frozen piece of dark hair that was caught somewhere between red and brown. “What the hell happened to you?”

  Of course, he was too unconscious to answer. Which was a problem for one very noticeable reason: how the hell was I going to get a large unconscious man into my car?

  I brushed the rest of the snow from his body and was rewarded with the sight of a large, well-built man. His muscular legs were encased in a pair of dark washed jeans, faded from use, not design, and he was wearing a heavy set of worn work boots. But up top he was only wearing a black t-shirt. I saw that the green color I’d noticed earlier was from a four leaf clover printed and faded on his back.

  I glanced nervously back at my car which suddenly seemed so very far away, then looked back at the man. How was I going to get him to my car?

  Maneuvering myself around to the front of him, I dug my half-numb hands into the snow to get a grip on his underarms, hoping I could maybe drag him over to my car. I tugged and pulled, but I didn’t get anywhere. My hands were now soaked through and even colder than before. I was a total mess, my clothes and my hair getting wet thanks to the snow that was still falling and the icy breeze was biting through me despite my layers. There was no way I was going to get him up and into my car.

  Realizing I was either going to have to leave him to get help or get him awake enough to move, I started slapping at his face. I winced each time, because he was already injured and I knew this wouldn’t feel good, bu
t I had to get him awake.

  It seemed like maybe he wasn’t going to get up. Worse still, I had the sudden, chilling thought that maybe he was already dead. Had he frozen out here in the time since I’d found him? Or maybe it hadn’t been him groaning at all. Was there some other critter out here in the dark? Was it watching us now?

  I was scaring myself stupid and it made me more aggressive as I slapped him once hard across the face. I cocked my hand back to do so again, but stopped mid-swing. He groaned.

  “Oh my God! You’re alive!” I cried in surprise and utter relief. I wanted to get the hell out of here now. “You’ve gotta help me get you up. We need to get to my car. Hurry, please!”

  I didn’t know how much of what I said he heard or understood, but with my help he struggled to get up. I had him under one arm, using all my strength to heft him up. His muscles flexed beneath my grip, telling me my first assessment of him had been right. He was definitely a well-defined, built individual. As we got him to stand, he almost collapsed back into the snow, but he fell heavily on me and somehow I didn’t buckle beneath his weight.

  I caught the barest glimpse of his eyes. I was right; they were absolutely beautiful.

  “C’mon, honey,” I told him in a soothing voice, trying to coax him into moving. “My car’s just up the bank. The heater’s on.”

  I felt him shiver beneath me, probably in response to the heater, and I hoped it was enough motivation to get him moving. Still leaning heavily on me, we hobbled together to my still running car, the dim interior lights a warm invitation.

  He wheezed and coughed beneath me, shivering and moving numbly, but he was definitely alive. By some miracle, we made it to my car. I fumbled with the door to the passenger seat, my fingers too numb to get a decent grip. Finally, I managed to get the door unlatched just before he collapsed from exhaustion and cold. I leaned over and he fell from me, landing heavily in the seat. His eyes were closed again and if it weren’t for his breathing, I’d think he was dead. His skin was pale and his lips were tinged with blue. Definitely not a good sign.

  Maybe it’s just the bruising, I thought, though I doubted it.

  I pushed his legs inside and made sure he was tucked up before closing the door. I’d have laid him out across the back seat, which would have been more comfortable, but the heater barely heated the front of the car and there was that damn half-open window in the back. The front seemed like a safer bet. Quickly, I ran around to the driver’s side and jerked my own door open. I slipped inside and closed the door, hoping I could get the cab warm enough at least to do something for the poor man beside me. I maneuvered his seat so he was leaning back slightly, buckled his seatbelt, then grabbed as many blankets and old sweatshirts as I could dig out of my meager belongings I’d dragged with me towards Iowa. I dumped them on him in the hopes that maybe they would help warm him up.

  I realized I still hadn’t gotten any cell signal, but what could I do? I couldn’t leave him and my car wasn’t warm enough to even try to wait out the storm. I was going to have to drive, and I vowed I would take the first turn off I found in the hopes that it might lead me to somewhere with a hotel and some heat.

  “Hold on there, honey,” I said, my own teeth chattering, the heater helping take off a little of the edge. “I’ll get you someplace warm. You just hold on.”

  He didn’t say anything or even acknowledge my existence.

  If I thought the storm was going to get any better after my little stop to pick up my passenger, I was sorely disappointed. If anything, it seemed as though it had gotten worse. Grumbling about it, I turned on the radio and checked that the heat was on full blast. It was.

  The radio was static filled at best, but every so often it would clear up just long enough to catch a snippet of the announcer.

  “…biggest storm in...years…stay off the…unprecedented number of accidents after…”

  I caught a few more sound bites about the storm moving steadily northwest—the exact direction I was heading. Meaning I was likely to be lost in this weather so long as I continued to drive in it. It reaffirmed my earlier thoughts that I was going to have to find a place to pull off and hole up for the night.

  Except it was close to midnight and there wasn’t a damn place in sight.

  I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to find shelter anywhere, and what was worse was my impromptu passenger didn’t seem to be faring very well. The few times I reached over for him, risking taking off a glove to put bare skin against his face, he felt feverish and sweaty.

  Just great, I thought miserably, putting my glove back on. I saved him from the cold so he can die in my car from a fever!

  My poor car was crawling across the white covered roads uneasily, the tires sliding on patches of slick road that was icing over. It just wasn’t made for this kind of weather—it was barely made for driving as it was, and I lived in the city.

  I tried my cell again, but it beeped at me and told me that not only was I getting no signal, but it was also down to only five percent battery remaining. If I didn’t get it plugged in soon, I wasn’t even going to have a cell phone with no damn signal, for all the good that did me anyway. My car had a cigarette lighter, so one might think I could charge my phone. And I even had a charger cord that would work with the cigarette lighter.

  Except the lighter didn’t work.

  Under normal circumstances, that really didn’t bother me. The only people who really needed my cell to be on were my family. And the unemployment office. I spent more time jumping from job to job than I ever would have imagined, doing the worst things I could come up with just to pay rent. Well, maybe not the worst things. I hadn’t gotten into prostitution yet, thank you very much, but I admitted to myself that there had been a couple of times where I thought it might come to that.

  Mom and Dad never would have let that happen, I thought, remembering my parents bright and smiling faces. They were the homegrown type who belonged on a farm somewhere, even though my father sold insurance and my mother was a part-time school teacher. My brother wouldn’t let it happen either, if he had any way to stop it.

  My brother was probably what one would call the black sheep of the family. He liked to move around a lot, never seemed to hold down a job for more than a few months—not that I was doing better—and had had about a half a dozen different girlfriends in as many months. Our mother always liked to lecture him about how he needed to start being serious. How was he ever going to survive old age if he was alone and flitting about from one job to the next?

  Of course, Sean never seemed much worried about it and I figured he had a few years still to get his act together. Sure, he was almost thirty now, but I was, too, and I didn’t count that as too late to get settled.

  I glanced over at the unconscious and feverish man beside me. His breathing had become heavy and there were beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. I frowned. The heater was running full blast, the window was down in the back, and I was still freezing. But if he were sweating, would it be better to turn it off? Was it a better idea to try to cool him off or keep him warm?

  I decided warm, remembering it was usually important to let a fever run its course—assuming you couldn’t get any medicine for it. If it got really bad, I could dump him back in the snow to cool him off again, but that seemed like a terrible idea. He’d felt halfway to frozen when I found him, and besides, if he got out of this car, I wasn’t sure I could get him back into it.

  The drive was taking forever thanks to my significantly slowed speed. The snow was making it so I wasn’t willing to risk going any faster, but I knew my time was running short. Or at least, that of my mystery man, Mr. Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous over there.

  I glanced at him and frowned. Did he look better? Worse? Were his eyelids flickering? If they were, was that a good sign? He moaned now and then or shifted ever so slightly, but I couldn’t tell if that was due to the car’s bumpy ride or if he was half awake in there. When I looked back to the road, dipping and s
werving with what I hoped was the road, I finally saw it. A sign. A turn off. I’d nearly driven right past the thing. It was a miracle I hadn’t, in all honesty. It was a difficult thing to see, my headlights were foggy, and the sign was crooked and half lying in the snow. But just barely I was able to make it out. Lodging, One Mile.

  Relief blooming in my breast, I took the turn and hoped something was open.

  Chapter 2

  Ciaran

  I felt like hell. Worse than that, I felt like hell reheated, then frozen again, then tossed to the dogs to gnaw on. My head was pounding like a son of a bitch and I felt the uncomfortable, painful pinpricks of a body warming up after a long, cold night in the snow.

  Which was exactly where I’d been.

  My brain was a little foggy about some of the details, but I knew I’d been slumped over in the snow, freezing and half dead when I saw her. Beautiful. Perfect. And very clearly a figment of my imagination. She brushed the snow from me like a soft fleece blanket. Her hands were like petals, but petals on fire. They were so soft, but they burned everywhere they touched. She looked down at me with the biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen, like two shining orbs, beacons of light in an otherwise dark tunnel, and I thought she couldn’t be real. Something like that just didn’t belong in the real world.