Devil's Angels Boxed Set: Bikers and Alpha Bad Boy Erotic Romance (54 page)

“The one and only!” returned Micah, gesturing for Pedro to hand him the duffel bag. He spoke again when they were all cross from the man. “I've gotta say, damn refreshing dealing with a man whose dressed sharp and already popping open the cash.”

“Ah, we're just businessmen here Micah.” He turned the case around. “Ten mill.”

Abbey watched intently as Micah propped the bag on the crate and saw little bags of white jumbling inside. “Forty pounds of crystal.” She shuddered at how he said it and imagined SWAT teams storming out of their trucks now. “You know... you're a strange man. You've got all that green to burn and you asked for this when you could've gotten some high quality coke anywhere else.”

Abbey saw the man's eyes dilate and his stance shift. Something wasn't right here. “Ah, but where else can I get high quality crystal?”

Micah laughed. “It's cheap as hell to make. Shit you could've made your own lab with that kind of money. But I don't care. Money is money. Just be careful with it, the stuff will rot your teeth out.”

“Now that's the kind of attitude I can respect. Ten million dollars for forty pounds of methamphetamines.”
Is he another cop? Mulder didn't say anything about another cop.
The way he said things so clearly made her heart pound.

“Deal.” said Micah but before he could reach the case gunshots rang out and Pedro had fallen to the ground, smoking in a spreading pool of his blood.

“DEA! Freeze!” shouted Spider, holding the smoking gun. Rick and Luke ducked beneath a crate while the man in the suit and his three men pulled out their weapons.
Oh shit! Shit!
Before Micah could respond the windows burst into shards of glass, while tactical units roped in.

“MPD! Drop your weapons!” The man in the tailored suit winged Micah in the shoulder, while Rick and Luke shot him in turn. The rappelling MPD officers then took up positions among the crates and opened fire on the DEA agents and the bikers, sending splinters up into the air as the duo took cover.

Abbey took Micah to the ground and the two crawled on their hands and knees. “Fuck! I'm going to kill that little fucking snake...” she heard Micah over the firefight.
Christ! Blunder of the century. Cops firing on feds!
When the two got away from the center, they stood up and sprinted back to the floor entrance. Micah kicked open the door.

“Joe get ready to--” he stopped when he saw Spider leaning over the slumped old man, his beard red from his slit throat.
How the hell did he get out before we did?
Micah quaked with rage and barreled into the traitor. “I gave you a home, I treated you like a brother, and this is how you repay me!?” He broke Spider's nose in one blow, sending a ribbon of blood spewing across the pavement and then ripped the knife from his hands. Abbey watched as he gutted the man and then pulled the knife free.

“Still just a fuckin' criminal, no matter how much you dress it up...” rasped Spider as he slid down the brick wall, leaving a blood trail. Abbey's hands were shaking. The quick betrayal and retribution of it all shook her to her core. Micah was right.
I can't go through with this.
Her heart sank when she saw an officer running up the street to them, radio in hand, gun unholstered.

The DEA mix-up would have given her a clean get-away and Micah would have never known about the real Abbey. Now she had no choice but to make a choice.

They were coming. Coming to take away her Micah. The officer was within ten feet of them when she heard him. “This is Mendez. Officer Channing on scene with suspect, need EMT, two men down--” She pulled out the pistol tucked behind her belt and shot the man dead in the street and then shot him again until he stopped shaking. She took deep breaths and lowered her shaking hands.
It's done. I'm committed now.

Micah spun around, his chest spattered with blood and his face bewildered. “What?” Abbey shoved the gun back into her pants and gave him a quick kiss on his shocked face. She saw the confusion in his eyes, confusion that turned to recognition, and recognition that flared into something else.

She grabbed him before he had a chance to react. “Baby, I love you but we don't have time for this. We've gotta go. Now!” She heard the lack of shots from inside the warehouse and knew the worst had come to pass. Micah quickly mounted his Harley and started it with a cacophonous roar. She wrapped her arms around him. “It's just us now.”

He revved the engine and turned his head. “We're gonna have a long fuckin' talk after this... but Pedro was right, you are ride or die.”

She gave him a kiss by the ear. “Then let's ride.”

RETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS

EMILY STONE

CHAPTER ONE

Vanessa slammed the open palms of her hands into the sides of the steering wheel, screaming out a loud “Damn!” each time the wheel shook with the force of her blows. How had Duane found her? She hadn’t told anyone where she was going.

She hadn’t contacted anybody from back home since she left. She wasn’t using her real name. She wasn’t even using that degree in bookkeeping that had gotten her into all this. And yet, he had found her... again!

The day had started out badly for Vanessa, and had gotten worse with each passing hour. To begin with, it was one of those gray, cold, freezing-rain, late-spring days that you can only get in a place like Minneapolis.

Her landlord had given her until today to pay up or get out of her dingy apartment, so the day began with her putting her meager belongings in the trunk and back seat of her car. She had been hoping to at least come up with enough money to get a room somewhere for the night, but the tips at work had been terrible.

Normally her warm smile and the tight, yellow short-shorts that showed off her curvy body could charm at least a couple of extra bucks out of the customers at the diner, but that night everyone was made of stone. And then, almost at the end of her shift, Duane came bursting into the place yelling at her and calling her a useless, runaway whore. The few customers that were there quickly paid their tabs and left as Duane continued his tirade of abuse.

The manager had the compassion of an alligator. He didn’t confront Duane. He didn’t call the police. He instead told Vanessa that they couldn’t have this sort of problem in a nice place like his. And then he told her to leave—permanently.

Tony, the owner, had suddenly appeared and was even colder... no, not colder, slimier. In his velvet voice, dripping with artificial sympathy, he said there really wasn’t much he could do on the diner side, but if she was willing to dance on the other side, the bouncers could protect her.

Tony ran a combination strip-club and restaurant. Actually, the diner side was just a plausible reason for your car being in the parking lot. It wasn’t a bad place to eat, but what Tony actually ran was a strip club with a built in excuse and lie to tell your wife.

Tony knew that Candy—that was what Vanessa was calling herself—could dance. He could see it in her athletic body, in the way her movements naturally showed off her breasts in her skimpy outfit. And he could see it in the way she treated the off duty dancers when they stopped by before or after their shifts.

“If you were willing to dance on the other side...” Vanessa said aloud in a mocking voice. Pole dancing was what had gotten her into this mess. Or, at least, that was how she had met Duane. It sounded corny, but she truly had been just a naive college girl from Iowa trying to pay off some debts by dancing in a club. It was a pasties and G-string type of club so she really didn’t have to show a lot more than she did on a beach in a small bikini. And nothing more than dancing was expected of her. Duane had seemed so nice... until she finally agreed to go out with him. Then he’d become an obsessed, possessive demon who followed her everywhere and made her life a living hell!

“You could even live in one of the apartments upstairs...” she repeated in the same bitter, mocking tone. A couple of the dancers lived above the club, or rather they danced in the club and worked in their living quarters one flight up. Tony was “offering” to let her live up there.

He was “willing” to let her strip naked on stage, and then take one or more of the customers back to her place... for a price. And Tony got a 60% to 80% cut of the action plus rent for the apartment.

Vanessa screamed out her frustration at the dark, wet highway as it all suddenly clicked into place in her mind.... Tony! She had used her real social security number on the tax forms when she was hired. The migrant workers on her father’s farm always had valid social security numbers, but it was never theirs. No one checked anything as long as the number was valid. Tony must have checked. And her social security number was on the restraining order she had gotten against Duane.

A lot of good that order had done. A slap on the wrist the first time he found her, and thirty days the second time when he burst into the apartment she thought he didn’t know about. A month in jail was all that Duane got for hitting her, because he’d gone into therapy.

This was the second time he had beaten her, despite the restraining order. The nurse at the ER said, “Honey, this is the truth. The only good those orders do is tell the cops who to arrest when they find your body. You gotta get out of town and disappear or that man will eventually kill you.”

Vanessa took her advice, and thought that she had successfully disappeared… but Duane had found her. And the only way Duane could have found her was if Tony had called him! It all fit. The manager’s lack of compassion. Tony’s sudden appearance on the diner side.

It was all part of his plan.

Somehow Tony expected that she would be grateful enough, or desperate enough, to become one of his whores just to escape her psycho ex-boyfriend. They had expected her to fold under the pressure and become what they wanted her to be—a cheap whore.

But Vanessa didn’t do what they expected. Neither the manager nor Tony nor Duane had expected her to grab her purse and run to the parking lot in just her waitress outfit, jump into her car and drive... and drive... and drive. By the time Duane had gotten to his pickup truck, Vanessa’s taillights had disappeared into the distance.

She didn’t know where she was going. She used a credit card for gas in Madison, but knew that she had to switch to cash or Duane would find her again. For some reason she felt in her heart that if she just drove south and got to someplace where it was warm, she could escape Duane and the hell that her life had become.

CHAPTER TWO

The sun had risen before she got to Chicago, and it set again sometime after she crossed the Missouri border into Arkansas. She had taken back roads through Illinois and southern Missouri, and back roads in a lot of the South means driving through miles of nothing but empty fields and tractors.

Somewhere on a gravel road a couple hours north of Saint Louis, she finally changed clothes. Her tight, skimpy shorts with “Tony’s” emblazoned just to the left of her crotch had caused some comments when she had stopped for gas and to buy some food. But the glare of a desperate woman will keep even the most leery man at a safe distance.

After she pulled jeans and a blouse out of the boxes of her belongings, she stripped off the shorts and then the matching blouse. It felt as if she was stripping off her past life as she stood beside her car naked for several minutes, letting the sun warm her body.

She balled up the clothing as tightly as she could and threw it as far as she could into the freshly plowed field. Her underwear was buried somewhere in those boxes, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. She pulled on the jeans, slid the blouse over her head, and continued her journey south.

That feeling of warmth and happiness stayed with her while the sun was up, but the sun had set a couple hours ago, and the drizzling rain had started shortly after that. Now she was just exhausted. The two-lane road on which she was currently driving would go through the town of Flat Springs in about another twenty miles. She would stop there... if she made it that far.

Vanessa hadn’t realized how far apart the towns were in this area. The little gas pump symbol on the dash had lit up miles and miles ago. It had been beeping at her for the past twenty minutes. And then... nothing... silence.

She coasted to the edge of the highway and pulled off onto the wet gravel shoulder. She turned off the car and sat clutching the steering wheel, too exhausted to do anything more than cry.

She didn’t know how long she had been sitting there crying when a soft tap on the window next to her startled her and caused her to scream. Duane had found her! But the person standing next to the car wasn’t Duane. Duane never rode a motorcycle and had often said that anyone who did so had to be a stupid, low-life loser.

There was a motorcycle next to her car, and the person standing in the dark, wearing full leathers, was too big to be Duane. He had a flashlight in his hand and was saying something, but she couldn’t hear him. He held up his hand and signaled for her to lower the window. When she looked back at him in fear, he held up his thumb and forefinger showing a gap of about an inch and yelled, “So you can hear me.”

Vanessa lowered the window so that a small gap appeared at the top. “Are you all right?” the man asked. Despite his size and rather rough appearance, his voice was surprisingly gentle. Vanessa couldn’t really see him clearly with the flashlight shining through the window into her eyes, but she could tell that he was a big man--much bigger than Duane.

“Yes,” she answered. “I think I’m out of gas. I mean, the car is out of gas. I mean... I’m just very, very tired. I’ve been driving a long way today.”

“Hopefully not all the way from Minnesota,” he answered. The fear in her eyes must have told him something because he quickly added, “Your license plates. They’re Minnesota.” Then he set the flashlight on top of the car so that it was pointed at him, and stepped back so she could see him clearly.

He had that reddish-auburn hair you find a lot in the south—at least, his well-trimmed beard was that color. She couldn’t really see his hair under the dew rag with a Harley emblem that was tied around his head.

His face had that somewhat hard look that a person gets when they have seen a lot of the wrong side of life, but he was smiling and his eyes were wide and peaceful. They weren’t exactly blue, but they weren’t really green either. They seemed to change colors as he moved in the light.

“My father runs a repair shop in town,” he said. “I can take you in, if you’re willing to ride with me.” He smiled again. “Or I can send one of the deputies out to get you, but they might be on patrol on the other side of the county and it could take another hour or so.”

Vanessa unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door. He continued, “My dad can bring you back out here tomorrow in his tow truck. If it is just gas, he can put enough in to get you into town. If it’s more than that, he can tow it in to his shop.”

She didn’t say anything, but stood silently beside the bike. “Make sure it’s locked,” he said. “And I’ll tag it so the county doesn’t tow it as abandoned before dad gets out here in the morning.” He opened a saddlebag and took out a small roll of plastic tape that looked like crime scene tape, only smaller, and bright green.

He tore off a piece and tied it to the driver’s side mirror. Then he put another strip on the top of the antenna. “That means it’s been checked and a tow will come for it when it’s light,” he explained. “It also means that my dad has claimed it as his tow.” He held up the tape so that Vanessa could see that it said “Brody’s” on it.

“I’m Brody, Junior,” he explained. “I’ve got a bike shop out in Colorado, but every spring when the weather first turns good, I close the shop for two weeks and make my long ride back home to see Momma. They aren’t really expecting me until tomorrow morning, so I wasn’t pushing it while it was raining.”

He smiled again. Vanessa liked seeing that smile. “Farmers around here are in the fields, and they drag some of that gumbo out onto the highway on their tires. When it gets wet it’s slicker than shit and can be a real surprise on a curve.”

“We have the same problem in Iowa on the hard roads,” said Vanessa. “Only they aren’t in the fields yet, and it won’t be warm enough for motorcycles for at least another month.”

Brody’s response was another smile and, “Welcome to the South.”