Inflamed: A Shadow Riders MC

by Kiki Leach

  “Mmm,” she hummed against his skin and tightened her arms around his neck. He turned his face toward hers and clinched his teeth to keep from acting on just exactly what he felt in seeing her wrapped up tight and making sweet, sinful noises just for him.

  “Jesus, baby...” He turned away and rattled his head as his cock twitched.

  Blue chuckled to himself and rolled his eyes up into his head. He knew this motherfucker was gone for this bitch the second he saw her face again, whether he was willing to admit the truth to himself or not.

  “Get that bitch in there the fuck outta here,” he told Blue. “Call her a cab or do whatever the fuck it is that you’ve gotta do to make sure her ass ain’t here by the time I get back.”

  “Yeah, but um... You mind if I take a spin with her first, if she’s willin’? I’d call up her friend, but after lookin’ at that sweet fuckin’ face of the bitch in your arms, my cock is needin’ some kinda goddamn release right about now.”

  River glanced down at Mia and nodded. Better for Blue to screw a bitch he had no interest in taking another round with than one he didn’t want touched by any other asshole member of his club.

  “Yeah,” he told him. “She’ll be more than willin’, motherfucker. Just make sure she doesn’t make you wanna blow your fuckin’ head off in the goddamn process of it all. But get Styx on the phone before stickin’ any goddamn thing inside that bitch.”

  “Yeah, VP!” Blue took off into the club as fast as he could and headed straight for Courtney first thing instead.

  After digging around inside Mia’s purse for her keys, River carried her to her car and placed her in the backseat. She rolled her hands beneath her face and curled her knees into her stomach, revealing a hot pink thong beneath her skirt, and a nice brown ass without a single flaw to be seen.

  “Jesus.” River slammed the door shut and turned away from her the minute his twitching cock attempted to break free from his jeans. “Fuck.” He kicked the door with the back of his foot, then hopped into the driver’s seat; which given the range of her car, sure as fuck wasn’t easy for a man his size to become accustomed to. He jammed the keys into the ignition and fixed the mirror, adjusting it to get the perfect view of her in the backseat. “Mia,” he called out.

  She squirmed in the seat and mumbled something, but didn’t respond directly to him.

  And as her legs fell open, all he could think to himself was just how fucking much he wanted to slide right between them and make himself at home, with her.

  “Shit.”

  It wasn’t until that very second that he realized just how much being royally fucked by this bitch’s presence could potentially cost him. And not just his life, or the club and everything he had always known before her and worked his ass off to earn and keep. But his own motherfucking sanity, at best. And the ‘purity’ of his now rock solid cock, at worst.

  Chapter Five

  After taking her from the car, River took special care to keep from knocking Mia into anything that could hurt her as he carried her up the stairs and into her tiny box of an apartment. While in search of her bedroom, he started to accept that between her small car and even smaller place of residence, staying in what felt like a 5x4 room at the club for as long as it took to finally put that son of a bitch Ricky to ground and get his place of business back in order wouldn’t be much of the problem for her he was initially assuming it would be.

  When he finally found her room at the end of the hallway, he kicked the door back and walked her over to the bed. As he leaned over to place her down on top of her red and purple comforter, her arms tightened, then loosened around his neck. Her hands slid down his shoulders, gently wrapped around the muscles in his arms, and the moment her head hit the pillow, her eyes peeled open and she blinked up at him in a foggy haze.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  Her eyes rolled from one side of the room to the other as she tried to get an exact sense of where she was, and why. “Did you bring me back home?”

  He nodded while pulling away from her. “You remember just how fuckin’ much you had to drink of my booze back at the club?”

  “I don’t know, I just grabbed whatever was open behind the bar.” She pulled her knees up and placed her feet flat on the bed. As she swayed them side to side, her eyes turned to River. She smiled when she noticed his eyes traveling back down between her legs, though she had a feeling it wasn’t for the same reason as before. "It's okay," she said to him, attempting to keep her focus.

  He moved his eyes back up to her face and peered. "What's okay, darlin'?"

  She tiled her head and lowered her legs back to the bed. "You want to know what the scar feels like."

  He arched one brow and flexed his jaw. "Thought maybe crossed my mind when I first saw it, yeah." He took a seat beside her on the bed and pointed. "Shit still looks painful as fuck."

  "It doesn't hurt as much anymore, not physically speaking anyway. It just... looks bad. Like the stitches are still inside despite them coming out a few months after my surgery. Sometimes when I touch it, it can be so scratchy that it reminds me of the feeling of a rope." She rolled over on her side and rested her head in her hand in an attempt to keep herself steady. “Can I ask you something kind of personal? I mean, I may not remember the answer later, but I'd still like to know just for curiosity sake.”

  "What's that, doll?"

  She crossed one leg over the other and squint. "Why the hell do they call you River? I could understand them maybe calling you Hawk or something because of your last name, but... why River? What's the association?"

  “Truth?” he asked her.

  She nodded. “Truth.”

  He dropped his head and sighed. “My mother damn near gave birth to me next to a goddamn creek just outside of Crescent Beach. River sounded better than that shit, so it stuck."

  She snickered. “Are you serious?”

  “Yeah." He peeked over at her and contorted his features as a firebomb of anger shot straight through to his soul. "A day before she was due with me, two ni--” He stopped the moment he saw Mia slink away from him and sink down into the bed. He exhaled sharply and cleared his throat. “Two motherfuckers almost beat her half to death when she was walkin’ back home from work. She never told me why, and I’m not sure she ever really fuckin’ knew. They didn’t steal shit from her. Didn’t even try to...” He stopped. “They just fucked her up.”

  Mia’s eyes reddened and her face fell. She dipped her chin and shook her head against the pillow. “I’m so sorry,” she said as a sharp feeling of guilt suddenly struck her in the center of her chest like a lightning bolt.

  River shook his head. “Shit’s not your fault, babe--”

  “No, I mean, I know that... I meant that I was sorry because I thought it was maybe something else, but... not that."

  “What’d you think my name meant instead?”

  A bashful smile curved up the corners of her full lips and she suddenly grew shy. “I don’t know.” She shrugged.

  “Yeah...”

  He bobbed his head, knowing she was full of nothing but complete and utter shit when she said it, but not feeling all that eager to press her on it like he maybe would’ve someone else responding the same. Why? He didn’t even fucking know.

  No. That’s not entirely true – it’s not true at all. He knew exactly why he didn’t press her on it. And part of him didn’t like the reason behind it one fucking bit while the other part told him to just shut the fuck up and go with it.

  He turned to look her straight in the eyes; the stormy, greyish color of her irises, which he hadn’t noticed until that very fucking second, seemed to brighten and darken all at the same goddamn time the longer he stared. “When I found you outside of the gate in that goddamn, fucked up state you were in,” he told her, “it made me think of her; made me think of how she must’ve felt that day, how scared she must’ve been in bein’ fucked up by a couple of motherfuckers who didn’t seem to give a
shit about much, least of all whether or not she fuckin’ lived or died. That innocence she had about her was somethin’ they tried stealin’ from her. But she fought like a bitch to survive even as she bled out.”

  “Oh my God,” she breathed.

  “Wolf found her by chance on the way back from a meetin’ with another charter in Miami, and got to her before she could lose me. He took her to the first hospital he saw and she gave birth to me a few hours later. He and Verna took us both in not long after that when they realized we had nowhere else to fuckin’ go, and neither one of us ever looked back.”

  “Then you were basically born into the Shadow Riders?”

  “Yeah. But how I officially earned my patch is a hell of a lot different than you might think, darlin’,” he told her. “Hell of a lot more complicated and fucked up than you could ever fuckin’ imagine.”

  “I’d like to hear about it. The story of how you officially earned it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I may not understand what the hell any of it means, but it may not even really matter given my current state of mind.” She smiled up at him in that drunken haze for a second time and his goddamn cock went twitching like crazy again. He needed to be inside this bitch like most motherfuckers needed air to fucking breathe.

  “Yeah,” he told her. “Maybe I’ll tell you every motherfuckin’ goddamn detail about it over a bottle of water instead of that entire pint of tequila you swallowed.”

  She rolled over on her stomach and soured. “I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to raid the place like a hobo looking for something to warm my veins.”

  “Then what the fuck were you lookin’ for, babe?”

  “A release?” she asked, though it wasn’t exactly a question in the way that she meant it. “The idea of leaving everything I’ve ever known is kind of scary to me, you know? And not even kind of, but just... trading in my world for yours, it’s not..." She paused to take in a sharp, solid breath. "The life you live is nowhere near being conventional. And it’s not something I ever really imagined becoming a part of, just like I never imagined Ricky finding out that my daughter was also his. But at least those seven and a half years before he knew the truth were worth it.”

  “How the hell’d he find out about her bein’ his?”

  “His people have people, remember? And those people have low rent doctors working in slums that only people like me can afford. One of them recognized me from being with Ricky when I took Avery, that’s her name, to a clinic after she got scrapes from a bike ride. Somebody nearly ran her off the road, drunk, and she fell into a pile of glass. After getting the information on her, the doctor working on her put the pieces together about us and next thing I know, I’m dodging phone calls from that crazy son of a bitch, being turned down for help everywhere else and being forced to come to you as a result. No offense.”

  “None taken, babe.”

  She leaned up a little and swallowed hard. He pulled back when he felt himself moving in a bit too close to her in return.

  “Thank you for agreeing to this,” she said, her eyes rotating between those steel blue eyes and his full pink lips. She brushed her tongue back and forth across her own and rolled her bottom lip into her mouth; a silent groan escaped him that he refused to acknowledge aloud.

  “I haven’t done a goddamn thing for you, doll.”

  “You’re doing everything for me,” she replied, her voice going soft. “More than anyone else has or ever wanted to. And I know that it’s mostly because you’re getting something out of it too, but for all you knew, I could’ve been full of complete shit when I walked in there to see you today.”

  River arched his brow, remembering back to his earlier conversation with Blue. “If you were full of shit, I’d find out about it.”

  “I believe you.” She smiled softly. “Lying to a man like you just doesn’t seem like the smartest thing in the world for a woman like me to do.” She placed a hand on his arm and squeezed tight, then fell back and rolled over to the other side of her bed, facing the wall.

  River watched her breathe in and out and followed her pattern until he finally turned away from her and started breathing for himself.

  He bent forward to rest his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands together. “I’ve gotta leave you here now, doll,” he told her. “But some of my prospects are on their way, and they’re gonna escort you and your kid back to the Compound tonight. Ricky’s got more eyes on you than you even fuckin’ know, I’m sure of that shit. And he’ll try all he can to get even more of ‘em once he realizes you’re moved outta this place and in with us.” Mia squirmed against the bed but didn’t respond to him. River glanced at her over his shoulder and held himself back from sliding a hand right between her thighs and up to that sweet fucking cunt and just taking her for his own goddamn self-pleasure. “Fuck.” He jumped up from the bed and shuffled across the room. Raking his hands through the soft curls in his hair, he scanned every inch of her body and tried like hell to ignore that goddamn bulge in his pants rising higher and higher, literally shoving against the zipper and just begging to be released inside this bitch. He turned away from her for less than a second, then turned back to her and exhaled. “Never in my goddamn life has a bitch of your kind or any other damn near managed to fuck me up in the head the way you seem to,” he said. “And I’ll be damned if I ever fuckin’ let you start.”

  He stared at her one last time and adjusted his cock before heading for the door and slamming it shut behind him.

  Chapter Six

  “MAMA, MAMA, MAMA!”

  The sound of a tiny, yet overly excited and high pitched voice, along with the slamming of a door from what sounded like miles outside of my head, literally pulled me out of one of the deepest, most disturbing dreams I think I had ever had in all my twenty-five years of living on this earth. It was almost like the hand of God Himself diving in to pull me out from beneath the water as I was slowly but surely drowning in a sea of my own self-doubt and misery.

  I was in the arms of a handsome biker, one I found myself heavily attracted to yet was heavily disgusted by all at once, from the things he said to me to the way he reacted to my very presence. And he smelled like liquor. And cigarettes. And beer, and rum, and tequila and... sweat. Sweet sweat if it was even possible, like the tiny beads of water forming around his nose and above his eyebrows were coated in pure honey.

  He was carrying me home in his arms, his very big, very strong, very muscular arms, and brought me back into my bedroom. After placing me on the bed, he sat down next to me and I asked him a few questions. He murmured some things I can't remember about his name, and then he left me alone. But right before he did, I remember feeling completely safe. Just completely and obliviously safe in his presence. It had been a long time since anyone, let alone a man and especially one like this, had made me feel that way, which is probably what made the dream so much more disturbing for me than it should've been.

  Then again, maybe it's because it wasn't a dream for me at all. It was reality, one I was all too desperate to wake up from, yet not all that eager to leave so far behind either.

  As I rolled over on my back and tried to focus my eyes on the ceiling, my head started pounding as if I had just been run over by two semis, followed up by a tractor trailer and a three-tier tour bus, twice. "Ugggg." I flipped back over on my stomach and smashed my face into the pillow, which wasn't much better since I had gotten a damn good taste and smell of my own, rancid breath. "Blech."

  Being at the club to ask for help and drinking to my heart's discontent when I was told what the conditions of that help would be, were things I remembered. My tongue tasting like a combination of acid and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts and joints sure as hell wasn't one of them.

  “MAMA!" That tiny voice screamed out again, sounding louder and more exuberant but still somewhat faint.

  "Avery?"

  I slammed my hands into the bed and jumped up from the pil
low so fast it felt as if a gust of wind had smacked me straight in the face like a spatula to a pancake. I flipped over on my ass and grabbed my head just as the room started spinning. "Uggg." I needed a trashcan and I needed one quick.

  "MA-MUH. MA-MUH! MAMA!" she called out again. That high-pitched voice of hers could've shattered glass given the pounding it was giving my eardrums.

  "Avery?" Despite my stomach making noises I hadn't heard since giving birth eight years before, I tried like hell not to sound as if I was just about ready to keel over and vomit all over myself and the bed. Or die. "Avery?" I glanced across the room at my dresser and noticed the time on the clock. It was just about to hit six-thirty p.m., which meant that she had gotten out of school six hours before. I reached over on the nightstand and grabbed my cell phone. Normally when one of my parents are forced to pick her up in my absence, they call me right after to let me know she's safe and sound. But when I checked my phone this time, there wasn't a single missed call from them, before or after. In fact, I didn't have a single missed call from anyone all day, not even the school wondering where the hell I was. "Avery?" I called out again, panicked this time. "AVERY!" I dropped my phone to the floor and jumped up from the bed. "AVERY!" I raced for the door, screaming so hard and loud my throat felt as if a lit match had just been tossed inside. "AVERY!" I no longer gave a damn about my stomach or my head anymore. All I gave a damn about was getting to my child.

  "Mama!"

  "AVERY!"

  "MAMA!"

  I bolted down the hallway like a maniac, swung my head so hard around the corner that my neck went stiff, and in almost an instant, found my little girl calmly sitting in the middle of the floor surrounded by toys, clothes, shoes, dolls (none of which belonged to her) and... nothing else.

  "Oh my God." It felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. "Oh. My God." My heart raced as my eyes frantically searched the room. Aside from an empty cabinet or two, the room itself was completely bare. The computer in the corner? Gone. The small television set that only worked if you turned the wires a certain way inside the box? Gone. The small loveseat, chair and tiny couch that aligned each plain white wall, all gone, gone, completely gone. "Oh my God."