by Naomi West
The biker closed his fingers around hers, pressing the money back into her hand. “Consider it a tip. You deserve it.” He turned and left with a heavy sense of regret. What more could he have done? Blue didn’t want him the same way he wanted her, and even if she had, they wouldn’t be right together. He was too rough; she was too delicate. They might have had some similarity in their backgrounds, but that didn’t mean anything.
As he walked to his bike and fired it up, he wondered why that mattered. There wasn’t anything wrong with meaningless sex, and he’d had his share of it. His body wanted Blue, but there was something stopping him from just taking her. It disturbed him, the notion burrowing deeply in his brain. It was easier not to think about these sorts of things.
But as he reached the edge of the parking lot, he turned his bike around and cut the engine. Torque straddled the machine as he watched Blue through the window once again from the shadow of a few scraggly trees. She was a much smaller figure this time as she cleaned, going through the exact same motions he had seen her do before. He wondered if she took comfort in the cycling process of design, tattoo, clean, repeat. He knew he didn’t mind watching it.
In the darkened corner of the parking lot, he took a moment to look at the entire building. Spencer’s Shop was situated at the end of a strip mall, one that didn’t get a lot of business. There were several slots that had been empty for over a year, and the discount store at the other end of the string of businesses was the only one that seemed to have a steady clientele other than Spencer’s. The asphalt was faded, with weeds growing up through the cracks and disturbing the painted parking lines that were barely visible. Was this all Blue deserved? What about him?
Just as he was about to kick his engine back to life and head for the clubhouse, he heard the roar of motorcycles. He hadn’t mentioned to any of the members of Satan Seed that he would be here today, so he wasn’t surprised when Rat and his thugs rode in. They revved their engines as they pulled to a stop immediately in front of the tattoo shop, just as Blue came out the front door and locked it behind her. Their timing couldn’t have been better.
“Well, well, well.” Rat’s voice carried across the near-empty parking lot. “If it isn’t the little girl who fucked up my arm. Just the person I wanted to talk to. Guess your boyfriend isn’t here to save you this time, is he?” Rat grabbed Blue’s arm and yanked her forward.
Blue’s hair swept crazily around her shoulders as she stumbled to keep herself from falling. She yanked at her arm, her jaw tight, but Rat had a firm hold on her. Even from such a distance, Torque could see that her eyes were wide with fear.
Torque’s heart thundered, and adrenaline shot through his blood. His body acted without the permission of his mind, kicking his bike to life and slamming the throttle. He shot across the parking lot, barely stopping before he collided with the other men’s machines. “Let her go,” he called as his feet hit the ground. He was barely off his bike before he had turned it off again.
“You’re never far from the call of danger, are you?” Rat sneered as he turned toward the other biker. His eyes was covered by a bandage, but the angry redness around it was unmistakable. He didn’t seem surprised to see Torque.
“I guess you must be doing too well with just one eye. Did you need me to take out the other one, as well? I’d be happy to oblige.” Torque was outnumbered, and the Dirty Bastards didn’t appear to have been drinking this time. Still, he wasn’t going to just let them attack Blue. He had to do something; he just didn’t know what it was yet.
Rat hadn’t let go of Blue’s arm, and he shook her as he spoke. “You just stay out of this, motherfucker. I’ve got business to take care of. She promised to fix my arm, and she’s going to do it, now. It’s the least she owes me.” His fingers closed tighter on her, digging into her flesh.
“If you and your men hadn’t been acting like assholes, none of it ever would have happened,” Blue reminded Rat, her slim eyebrows angry. “I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot needle.” She spat in his face.
Rat’s free hand impacted her face, throwing Blue’s head to the side. She staggered, only remaining upright because of her captor’s grip. Red fingerprints burned against the milky skin of her cheek.
Torque shot forward, not willing to put up with any more this bullshit. Rage filled his body, exploding outward in a series of blasts that cast a red glow to the edges of his vision. “You bastard, I’m going to kill you!”
Flame and Stubble grabbed at his arms. That wasn’t enough to stop him, but Rat whipped a pistol out of his waistband and pressed the muzzle to Blue’s throat.
“I suggest you stay back. I want my revenge, and I plan to get it.” Rat cocked the pistol and pressed it harder, making Blue cough involuntarily. The biker’s eyes were wild, his tongue darting out to lick the corners of his lips. He was here for blood.
Torque’s mouth worked in anger and frustration. He had been thinking of himself as Blue’s savior, as her guardian, but he had failed completely. Why had he left her at the shop alone, even for just a moment? Had he stayed with her, this might not have happened. “What do you want from me?” he hissed.
Rat gestured at his men with his head. A blow landed on Torque’s face, catching him off-guard. He hadn’t been watching the two thugs, keeping his concentration on the man with the gun. But they pummeled him now, knocking his legs out from under him and punching their fists into his flesh. His skin ground against the rough asphalt. The cold sensation of blood leaking from his body took over him, enraged him, and made him long to fight back. But he kept his eyes on Blue. One wrong move from Torque and her life would be over. The incident probably wouldn’t even make the newspaper, seen as nothing more than a fight amongst rival gangs. He let the kicks and the punches come, knowing they were the only thing that had a chance of saving her. Flame landed a blow with his boot to Torque’s ribs, his shrill laugh echoing through the parking lot.
As his left eye swelled, he heard the distant sound of sirens. Torque thought at first he was hallucinating, the high-pitched wail nothing more than a buzz in his ears. But Flame and Stubble suddenly let go of him. Rat threw Blue to her knees in front of him. She caught herself on her palms and gasped, reaching out for Torque’s hand.
“That will do for now,” Rat snarled. “You deserved it anyway, Torque, for interfering when it wasn’t any of your business. But don’t think this means I’ll forget what you did to me. I’d watch my back if I were you.” He and his men mounted up and roared off, the ground quaking underneath Torque from the rumbles of their bikes.
“Come on. We’ve got to get you inside.” Blue struggled to put her hands underneath Torque’s body and lift him, but her efforts were useless. He was so much bigger than she was. “Please, Torque. I can’t leave you lying out here forever.” She glanced over her shoulder as emergency vehicles went whizzing by on the main road. They passed the strip mall parking lot and continued on to their original destination. Nobody was coming after them.
Still, Torque got his knees underneath his body and allowed Blue to drag him inside. He staggered through the door, leaning heavily on her small form, and dropped onto the very same table where he had been getting tattooed. He cringed as he landed on his fresh inkwork, but that didn’t matter anymore. Nothing did.
He heard the distinct click of the door locking, and Blue swept into the room a moment later. She turned on the faucet. “Just lie still. I’ll get you cleaned up.”
It was one thing to have her work on him as a tattoo artist, and a completely different thing to have her play nurse. Her touch was still gentle, the warmth of her breath a welcome feeling against his aching skin, but she had a different purpose this time. He looked up into her cerulean eyes as she tended to his wounds, wondering how she could even stand to touch him after he had let this happen.
Chapter Six
Blue
Blue’s heart fluttered, but her hands were sure and steady as she wiped the blood away from Torque’s nose. As an af
terthought, she whipped the curtains shut over the windows. The shop was closed, and nobody needed to see the kind of bodywork she was doing right then.
It had been bad enough to find Rat and the others waiting for her as she walked out of the shop on her way home, but seeing them do that to Torque had been nothing short of a nightmare. She had screamed and kicked at Rat, begging him to stop, but he hadn’t even been fazed. No doubt it had been delightful for him to see the man who had taken his eye reduced to nothing more than a pile of bruised flesh and blood.
“You should have left,” she admonished as she worked on his wounds one by one. There were too many of them, so she started with a cut on his forehead and decided to work her way down. “I could have just fixed his fucking tattoo and been done with it.” Blue didn’t know why she was angry at Torque. Her solution sounded simple, but she knew it really wouldn’t have gone down like that. Rat probably would have had her fix his arm, but there was no telling what else he would have done to her once she was finished.
“What good would that have done?” Torque wheezed.
She didn’t have much of an answer for that. Rat was pissed, and he would have taken out his anger on someone. If Flame and Stubble had beaten her to the same extent they had beaten Torque, she probably wouldn’t have survived. “At least you’d be whole.”
“But you wouldn’t be,” he replied, echoing her thoughts.
Blue pursed her lips as she dabbed at his nose once again. It wasn’t showing signs of stopping anytime soon. She rolled up a damp paper towel and pressed it to his upper lip, knowing it would slow the supply of blood. “Hold this here.” She adjusted the chair underneath him and forced him to sit up. It had been flattened into a table for his tattoo work, but he was going to choke on his own blood if he stayed flat. “Still, there’s no reason for you to keep acting like my knight in shining armor.”
His dark eyes slid to her as he reached up to press the rolled towel in place. They were ringed with bruises, but he still carried fire in them. “Someone has to. Tell me, are you always this much trouble?”
“I like to think I wasn’t any trouble at all until you came along,” she retorted. There had been a few ruffians in the shop over the last few years she had worked here, but she had never encountered someone quite like Rat. He was determined to make things difficult, and it didn’t seem that he would ever be satisfied.
Torque laughed, but he clutched his chest and stopped. “Sure, blame me. Rat’s just an innocent bystander, after all.”
“Does he have some sort of grudge against you? I mean, besides you gouging out his eye with a beer bottle?” Blue hissed in a breath as she examined the swelling on Torque’s lower lip and hoped she had some ice in the freezer.
“What’s the matter? Is the blood getting to you?”
Blue scowled at him, still embarrassed that she had passed out the other day. “No, thank you very much. Although you are dirtying up my clean floor.”
“I’m such a dick.”
“I know,” she replied with a smile. “Anyway, tell me what you know about Rat.”
“I ride with Satan Seed. He’s with the Dirty Bastards. We’re rival clubs, and that’s enough. Everything that happened here,” he gestured around the room, “only solidified it.”
Blue wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. It meant that this feud wasn’t entirely her fault, but she was still very much involved. “Let’s get that shirt off of you. I can’t get to everything.” She grabbed at the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it up.
Torque cooperated, collapsing back against the tattoo chair as soon as the garment was off. Despite the blue and purple bruises that were already developing, Blue couldn’t help but admire his body. She had seen it before, in much better circumstances, and yet even in this state, he was delicious. His chest was perfectly carved, the muscles of his abdomen sculpted like a creek rippling over rocks that she couldn’t stop looking at. She curled her fists to keep from running her fingers over his smooth skin and moved to the sink for a wet rag.
“I don’t even want to know what your tattoo looks like after this. I’ll check it out in a minute, but I don’t think I want you to roll back over just yet. I’ll probably have to redo some of the blackwork once it’s healed, if it’s bled even half as much as the rest of you.”
“You sound so pissed,” he said with a small but pained smile.
“I am pissed,” she assured him. “Things shouldn’t be this way.” She was angry that Rat had grabbed her, angry that Torque had taken such a beating, and angry that she couldn’t seem to control herself around this man. Blue moved around him, tending to each one of his wounds.
His hand reached out and grabbed hers, the fingers wrapping around hers and stopping her for a moment. He twisted her hand gently so that he could see her palm. “You’ve got a scrape.”
Blue had hardly even felt the burn of the asphalt as it had ripped into her skin. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Sure, it is.” Despite his wounds, he brought her hand to his lips and gently kissed the abrasion.
Touched and yet startled, Blue stood there and watched. His eyes lifted to hers as he pulled her down to him and kissed her. His lips were salty, and he moved gently due to his own bruising, but he kissed her nonetheless.
When Blue pulled back, she didn’t straighten but kept her face only a few inches from his. She smiled, remembering what he had said when he’d kissed her at her place. “Was that me paying for what you did?”
“I think I’m the one who owes you this time. You’re the one playing doctor, after all.”
“Then I get to choose the payment.” Blue lifted her leg over the chair and straddled him, feeling the heat of his body between her legs. No longer worrying about doing the right thing, she gently set her palms against his lower abdomen and ran her hands up his stomach and to his chest, spreading out her fingers to touch as much of him as she possibly could. She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, delicately and uncertain at first. When Torque’s hands came up and wrapped around her waist, she deepened the kiss.
Their tongues danced, and his arms were around her completely. She moaned her need and he let her go. Blue got off him long enough to strip his jeans, exposing the rest of that fine body she had seen the other day back at her place. She traced her fingers up the long lines of his legs, playing with the delicate hairs.
“This isn’t fair,” Torque murmured as she pulled her shirt over her head. “I hurt too much to really enjoy you.”
“That’s all right.” Blue grinned at him as she dropped her shirt on a chair and flicked off her shorts. “I’m the one who’s supposed to be enjoying you, after all.”
His member was already hard and ready for her, and Blue didn’t want to wait any longer. She had spent so much time over the last few days thinking about him, fantasizing about him, wondering what it would be like to have him. If he was going to go to the trouble of playing hero twice now, then he was going to have play the role all the way. Still, his package was just too tempting. She hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it since the last time she had seen it, knowing what was on the other side of his jeans.
Blue bent down and took him into her mouth. He sucked in a gasp of air and she stopped. “Do you hurt too much for this?”
His knuckles were white as he pressed his hands to the chair. “Don’t you dare stop.”
Smiling, she slid him between her lips once again. He was rock hard under the soft skin, and she pulled him all the way in so that his head touched the back of her throat. It only took a small movement of her mouth to suck hard at him as she pulled back, and Torque writhed with pleasure on the table.
It turned her on to know that she could do this to him. There was something about a blowjob that gave her control over a situation, and control was definitely something she needed in her life right now. She worked at him with her tongue, tracing the base of his shaft and gently trailing up to his head before she put her entire mouth and plunged
him inside her once again. Torque moaned as she brought her fingers up to gently play with his balls. With fire zinging through every part of her body, she moved slightly up the chair to run his member between her bare breasts, pleased with the way it looked as it popped out of her cleavage. Electricity shot through her system, and she bent her head to continue her work, her breasts pressed against his balls and wrapped around his dick.
Seeing that hard cock and hearing the moans of pleasure from him turned her on and turned it up. Blue gently reached down between her own legs to touch herself. Her body relaxed as it came alive, reminding her that she was so much more than just a tattoo artist or a victim of an angry biker. All that energy needed someplace to go, but it wasn’t good enough.
Blue straddled him once again, rubbing herself up and down the length of his shaft. “I need you inside me,” she whispered.
His throat moved as he swallowed. “You’re a horrible tease.” But he made no move to stop her, gripping her hips in his thick hands and following the movements.