DAMON: A Bad Boy MC Romance Novel (3 page)

Tradition gives you solace, peace, connection,
he thought.
Tradition gives you a home.

And yet, more and more, Damon had found himself feeling homeless on his own soil.

T
ricia looked
over her desk at the library. Pencil holder, framed photo, knick-knacks gathered over the course of months. Papers she was done with. Papers someone else would need when they came. A computer, now wiped clean of her log-in information and e-mails and files. She didn’t take anything.

Tricia looked over her apartment. All the clothes she cared about, all the things she cared about, fit into a duffel bag at her feet. There were books on the shelves, still. Flowers in a vase on the little desk next to the bay window. DVDs haphazardly arranged in a pile beside the TV in the living room. Pots and pans and plates and glasses and all the detritus of a human’s need to eat in the kitchen. The comforter still on the bed. She looked for anything else she might take. She didn’t take anything.

Tricia looked over the Main Street of Duvall, Massachusetts. Tiny and bucolic, and not entirely unlike the town she was returning to. Now, in the first true blush of a Northern summer, potted flowers hung from the streetlamps and stores left their doors open to give passers-by a reprieve from the heat, a brief blast of air. There was no litter on the sidewalks. There were people walking to and fro, looking happy or unhappy; either way, it was no business of Tricia’s. She hadn’t made many friends. She didn’t take anything from Duvall.

All she had to take – all she could claim as new – was the feeling that she was better off than she was when she came. That she spent most of her days functioning perfectly normally. So perfectly normally that if you were to sit her down at a bar and swap stories over drinks, you’d be aghast and struck with disbelief when the truth came out.

Tricia thought that might be the reason she hadn’t managed to make more friends in the little town. Her coworkers at the library were pleasant and unscathed, all with decent marriages and simple stories. When she’d finally opened up about what had brought her there, they were sympathetic to a fault. And they never really treated her the same. They treated her like she was an orphan, or something too tender to touch. They meant well. They meant exceptionally well. She didn’t blame them for making things worse.

She loaded her duffel bag into the trunk of her car and sat behind the steering wheel. In a movie, she might have paused before starting the car and driving off – a long and poignant moment where she gathered her courage and everything else inside her into a tight bundle, prepared herself to propel into the past and the future at the same time. But she didn’t, just turned the key and pressed down on the pedal and left the town behind.

It had all started the previous autumn, when a motorcycle club, the Steel Dragons, came to the Volanis brothers looking to take over the marijuana business in Kingdom – they wanted to start introducing some more heavy-duty drugs to the small town, and didn’t want any competition from the gypsies. When the brothers refused, the Steel Dragons fought back, and they fought dirty.

Tricia’s involvement in the affair was pure, unfiltered bad luck. That bad luck had a name, incidentally; its name was Paul Tiding.

Paul was Tricia’s boyfriend that season. And he liked to show his affection with his fists. Tricia never thought of herself as the sort of girl to fall in with a man who’d abuse her, but there she was, being choked by her boyfriend outside the local bar. Cristov Volanis acted as her savior, running Paul off and bringing Tricia back to his trailer to spend the night in safety. The next morning, as she was leaving the trailer, someone saw her and made an assumption – an assumption that would change her life forever.

The bikers had confused Tricia for Ricky, thinking that it was Tricia who Cristov loved; they kidnapped her, intending to hold her hostage until the gypsies promised to leave town for good. For one awful night, she was at their mercy, tied up and bound. When she struggled and screamed, they punished her by putting her out in the frigid cold. Tricia had truly believed they would kill her. But they never got the chance.

Because Damon Volanis killed one of them first.

And, in doing so, Damon made sure that she would never forget him. He’d been the one to wrap his arms around her, offer her the first bit of warmth in that cold hell. Released her from her ties. Carried her to safety. When she thought of him, though, those weren’t the things that she thought of.

Instead, she thought of a joke he told her when they first met, before the kidnapping, when Cristov brought her back to the trailer he shared with his brothers. It had been a rough night for her, though nowhere as rough as the nights to come. Damon offered her the first thing that made her feel better. As it happened, it was also the last thing that made her feel better.

“Why was the nihilist dating service such a success?”

That’s what she remembered. That, and the way just being around him had seemed to make things calmer. The way his eyes held hers like a steel trap, and told her that it was going to be okay. The things he said without saying them. And the way she felt sure that she would meet him again. That something was going to happen between them. That something was meant to happen.

Of course, she could never have predicted the circumstances that led to their meeting again, when he saved her with a bullet on a cold November dusk. And, compared to the kidnapping, her abusive boyfriend seemed like a walk in the park, making Damon’s ability to comfort her afterwards far less significant. But still…when she thought of home, now, she thought of him.

It had been just over six months, and outside of some trips to Delaware to testify against the men who’d hurt her, Tricia had been living in Massachusetts, where there was an outpatient clinic for crime victims and the safety of distance between her and the remaining members of the Steel Dragons who might want to silence her before she could bear witness. Living in a strange town, with a temporary name, a temporary address, a temporary job, a temporary everything had taken almost as much a toll on her as the actions that had made such precautions necessary. She missed her friends and her family. She wanted to come home.

But as she watched the landscape slip backwards on the interstate, her knuckles tight on the steering wheel and her jaw aching from tightness, she wondered if she shouldn’t take some wise words to heart.

You can never go home again
, she thought.

S
he was naked
on his bed, honey-colored hair draped across the pillow, eyes like melted gold looking up at him. Her lips, full and pink, pouted slightly. Moving down her body, her breasts generous, round as peaches and just as soft; her sides tapering down and then out again over the curve of her stomach; her hips wide and luxurious; thighs strong; calves quivering.

His hands at her neck were all fingers tracing her collarbone, the place where her ribs met. His mouth on her breast, then on her lips again, then playful, dipping into her bellybutton. Her thighs parted to meet him, and when he entered her it was with the sort of wild satisfaction that drew all existence to a single point. She was endless, and he had everything to give.

It seemed he would never stop finding places to bury himself inside her, that this first thrust would last forever. He bit down on the flesh of her shoulder, wincing as the smooth and warm walls of her accepted every inch of him and begged for more…

Damon woke up with his mouth dry, his heart pounding, and his cock hard as stone. He groaned, closed his eyes, wanting to keep dreaming that dream. But daylight was pouring over him, across his eyes, filtering in between his eyelids. And the dream was gone; all that remained of it was the throbbing between his legs, the insistent and annoying need.

Damon hadn’t masturbated since he was a teenager. It was a matter of principle, willpower. He felt that it would cheapen the real thing. Just because he
could
come whenever he wanted to didn’t mean he
should.
But mornings like this made that self-deprivation especially hard to keep up.

There was nothing for it but to wait for it to go down on its own. Luckily, he was alone in the trailer. That was the case more often than not these days, with Kennick and Kim living in the trailer that used to be the greenhouse and Cristov spending most nights at Ricky’s. He rose, trying to think of anything that would quicken the slow fade of his erection. Coffee. His morning run. A prayer. The fight that was rapidly approaching. Anything but the fact that Tricia was coming back to Kingdom.

His cock didn’t soften when he made coffee. It didn’t soften when he ate a bowl of granola. It didn’t soften when he stepped into the shower, even in the cold water. Normally, he would have waited until after his morning run to shower, but the idea of trying to keep pace with an advertisement for Viagra in his shorts was painful to even think about.

Somewhat amused by the resilience of his lust, but mostly frustrated by it, he hung his washcloth across his stiff member while cleaning himself off. When it still refused to recede as he stepped from the shower and into his bedroom, he hung a clothes hanger from it and swiveled his hips back and forth to make it swing. Finally, he felt his blood begin to rush back, and he watched patiently as the clothes hanger slid off, clattering to the floor.

Dressing for his morning run, Damon opted against a shirt. It was proving to be an unusually hot early summer, and at his size, Damon would easily sweat through even the lightest fabric. Before leaving, he checked himself in the mirror. He’d need to trim his black, bushy beard. His hair needed a trim, too; the same midnight black as his beard, he kept it short. A shadow of sideburns completed the dark frame around his face.

He cocked his head as he flexed slightly. Until he’d gotten the call about the fight, he’d been more lax than usual in his workout, and it showed. He was still considerably massive; far bigger than his brothers, and big enough to make kids on the street look at him wide-eyed. But he had some catching up to do, it was true.

He turned and eyed his newest ink, reminding himself that Cristov still needed to finish it up. The bold-lined, bright-colored lighthouse reached down his ribcage, the tattoo a recent addition to a body full to bursting with traditional American designs. Eagles and dice and pin-up girls lounging in martini glasses, Felix the Cat drawn as a skeleton, a devil eating a melty slice of pizza, a bow-legged cowboy. He liked the strong lines, the bravado and the humor.

Outside, just as he’d known, it was already muggy and warm despite not yet being 7am. He started his run at an even pace, taking a few laps around the trailer park before hitting the road. He waved to Dago Tenniss, who was standing guard at the trailer park entrance. It was 3 miles to the start of town, 3 miles back. He usually spent his morning run going through the salient details of his upcoming day. What was happening at his cheese shop, what was happening in the
kumpania,
when he would go to the gym and what he would eat for dinner.

He had plenty to think about that day. He was expecting a shipment of very unique, very expensive
brunost
, Norwegian brown cheese, at his store, Let it Brie. He’d promised to help Ana set up for a tasting event at
her
store, meant to capitalize on the early-season tourism. A trip to the barber shop was in order, and there was a workout to fit in somewhere, too. And, the arts theater a few towns over was doing a one-night screening of “Wild Strawberries” with an accompanying lecture from a film studies professor down from Delaware State.

But, with all those things he
could
have been thinking about, he couldn’t stop thinking about Tricia. She would be back any day now. Would she come to see him? Should he go to see her? She would be different. She had to be different. Would she be so different that what he saw in her, all those months ago, would be gone? Or would it be even better? Would she even want to see him – or would he be just a reminder of all she’d been through?

She’d covered for him when the police arrived to investigate the kidnapping. Damon had shot a man who wasn’t posing an immediate threat to either of them. Rig, the man he’d killed, barely even had time to pull his gun before Damon’s bullet met his chest. Tricia had told the police that Damon saved her life, that the man had a gun to her head. She could hate him for that.

She could hate him for being part of the reason she was kidnapped in the first place. She could hate him for knowing more about her than any human should know about someone they’d met twice. Damon had seen her the night Cristov brought her home, bruises like a necklace from what her boyfriend had done to her. And then he’d seen her tied up and shivering, had carried her through the woods as she clung to him like a child. He’d seen her at her worst. If the roles were reversed, he didn’t think he’d be too eager to see himself. Not if he wanted to move on.

Six miles went by quickly, and Damon found himself back at the empty trailer, guzzling water. His phone was buzzing in the bedroom, but he took his time checking it. Cristov had texted him, presumably from Ricky’s bed.

Tricia coming back next Tues, R. planning a dinner for everyone at diner on Wednesday. You in?

Who was everyone? Was it Tricia’s idea, or Ricky’s? He sucked in a breath. He wanted to say yes. He wanted to see her. Soon. It had felt like long enough since the last time, at the trial, when she’d been ushered in and then away so quickly that they’d barely made eye contact. But Wednesday…that was the night he planned to leave for Miami. Fate had decided for him this time.

Can’t that night,
he typed back.
Cheese stuff.

He threw the phone on the bed and went back into the bathroom to take his second shower of the morning. He made it quick, washing off the sweat and stink. He still had an hour before he needed to be at the store, and he spent it at the kitchen counter with another cup of coffee.

He listened to the clock tick, uneven. That clock had been slightly off for as long as he could remember. It was at the half-hour; the seconds slowed just slightly, almost imperceptibly. It was only through years and years of listening that Damon could recognize it.

He’d mentioned it to Cristov, once, and been surprised when his younger brother had no idea what Damon was talking about. Kennick said he’d noticed, and always wanted to get a new clock, because it drove him crazy. But Kennick never remembered that when he was at the store. Damon urged Kennick not to replace it. He liked the inconsistency. It helped him meditate.

He supposed that was a testament to the difference between them all. Cristov couldn’t sit still long enough to pay attention to minutia. Kennick paid attention to everything, wanted to fix everything, but his priorities made some things more memorable than others. Damon didn’t just pay attention to the minutia, he focused on it so deeply that he accepted every flaw, every little detail, as purposeful, useful.

And then, of course, there was Mina, who had grown up in that trailer but moved out to live with her girlfriends in another trailer when she hit 16. He’d asked her about the clock, curious. She’d laughed, told him that she
did
notice the fact that it was a little off. And then she’d leaned in, winked, and told him that the
reason
it was a little off was because she’d knocked it off the wall one day when she was sneaking some cookies from the cabinet. It had never worked quite the same after she put it back up.

So Damon sat and listened to the broken clock and thought about other things that were a little
off.
Like dreams and women and hearts and histories. It was plenty to think about to fill an hour.