Havok: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (19 page)

I
take a sip of cool
, sun-brewed iced tea, then set the glass down on the nightstand. Next to me, Abraham is asleep on Havok's chest, and Havok is dozing off as well.

Finally, a little bit of me time.

I look back down at the book on my lap, an anatomy study guide. I've been accepted into UWA, pre-med track. I have no idea how I'm going to raise a baby and go to med school at the same time, but I'll find a way to make it work. I've finally gotten the nanochip and tattoo removed from my neck, and I'm putting everything behind me.

My highlighter seems to have disappeared into the bedsheets, so I grab my purse off the floor and rummage around in it for another one. I finally find one rolling around in the bottom of the bag... and something else.

Three of my pills, wrapped up in a small plastic cylinder. I rack my memory, trying to remember where this came from, when I put them in here. But I can't. It must have been during some haze. I'm not sure how I never found them over these last several months. Or how Havok never found them.

I eye them, and I eye my iced tea sitting on the nightstand, collecting condensation. It would be so easy to reach over, take a swig, and pop these down. One last high.

My hands shaking, I stand up slowly, being careful not to wake daddy or the baby. And I tiptoe into the bathroom, unscrew the cylinder, and dump the pills into the toilet.

I flush them down, and go back to studying on the bed. That was my old life. My new one is with Havok and Abraham.

Mackenzie is finally out of the vet's office, and she's almost fully healed from her injuries. She created a business plan, took out a loan, and is opening her own art gallery in downtown Manhattan.

Soon, I'm going back to the woods where my dad is buried, and I'm going to say a proper goodbye to him. Tell him that I have everything I need in my life now, and that he can rest easy.

Havok stirs next to me. I put the highlighter in my book to save my place, and shut it, looking over at him. He cracks his eyelids sleepily, then turns on his side and gently places Abraham between us. He puts an arm on my chest, taking my hand, the baby safely between us.

I yawn. "I'm so tired. Can you watch Abraham while I take a nap?"

"Yeah," he says. "We'll go out for Chinese when you wake up. I'll watch both of you. I love watching you when you sleep."

I sigh, content, and snuggle into my pillow.

"Oh, and babe?" he says. "I can't wait for the wedding."

I slip away into the dream world, a smile on my face, feeling the diamond engagement ring on my finger.

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H
e'll crush
his enemies to protect me, but will he break my heart?

H
OLLY

When that rebel biker hunk Axl Archer thundered into my life, he kidnapped my heart with one kiss. Then the bastard Reapers put a hit on me, forcing Axl to bring me into his club—and his bed.

Now we're on the run, where death and treachery lurk everywhere. He's dangerous, and his existence threatens everything I love. I shouldn't want him, but the harder I shove him away, the deeper he slips inside me.

A
XL

She knocks me out like f*ckin' morphine. A good girl like Holly is a drug for a broken man like me. But I can't get that little spitfire outta my mind, so when she needs a bodyguard, I'm there. Until the brutal, bloodsoaked end—unless my love ruins her first.

They don't know it yet, but the f*ckers coming after her are already dead. I'm gonna make her mine, and no man will ever touch her again. I'm gonna make her drip with desire and then satisfy her, inch by inch. She's gonna beg for my baby, and nothin's gonna stop me from putting it inside her.

Even if it means going up against my own club.

**
A
XL is
a standalone romance novel in the Sons of Chaos MC series. No cliffhangers, and a guaranteed HEA.**

I
killed
my bike's engine as I slowed to a stop in the junkyard, pulling up alongside Ryker and Lynch. Behind them were ten or twelve guys on their bikes and the box truck that held our guns.

Everything was in place for the deal.

My bike's final rumble escaped into the scorched Arizona desert, echoing through the rows of dead, shredded cars. Then, the junkyard was quiet.

"Heat's fuckin' miserable," grunted Lynch, our road captain. He dipped his hand into a saddle bag and withdrew a silver canteen which he unscrewed and tipped against his lips. "Goddamn Reapers chose the most fucked up place ever for this deal."

He was right. I was drenched in sweat under my skullcap. My balls were boiling and every inch of exposed skin was frying in the sun. But it didn't fucking matter. Lynch should've known better than to bitch about the deal to his VP and President.

"Shut up, Lynch," I growled. As VP, I kept unruly Sons in line so Prez Ryker didn't have to. I led the men. Set the example. And shut whiny little cunts right the fuck up. "Ryker says we do this, we do it. Selling our guns to Reapers gets my fuckin' goat too, but this ain't a choice."

"Bullshit," said Lynch, turning to face me. "We could've sold to the Colombians, not the enemy," he sneered.

His face was reddened and rough, his shaved head pockmarked with scars. His nose was visibly crooked, broken in God knows how many bar fights. Ryker, with his long graying hair and gaunt figure, was rough around the edges himself. But Lynch was a real ugly motherfucker.

My fists tensed and my teeth clenched. "Fall in line, Lynch," I said. I locked my eyes onto his, my expression deadly. He'd been this way ever since I made VP. Wanted the job himself and now thought I was keeping him on the outside. Well, he wasn't wrong. Only reason he was still breathing was 'cause Ryker owed him big time, but I wanted him out. Fucker was a wildcard and couldn't be trusted.

"Lynch, you got a problem, we'll settle up later," I said. "This ain't the time."

"VP's right," said Ryker. His voice drawled and had a hint of his Scottish accent. "Stay hard, stay sharp. This is a deal with the devil."

Lynch grunted. I wanted to hop off my bike and put a fist through his eye socket, but Ryker was right. We had to focus.

I listened for Reaper bikes, but there was only the howl of hot wind sweeping through twisted, trashed car frames. I looked down at my watch. Sixteen minutes after three already. The Reapers were definitely fucking with us, letting us sweat. And since we needed their money more than they needed our guns, there wasn't shit we could do about it.

Then, I heard their bikes and saw dust and exhaust rising from the opposite end of the junkyard. Didn't feel like an ambush to me. Little disappointing, can't lie. For a Son of Chaos like me born to fuck and fight, any lost opportunity to crack Reaper skulls was a damn shame.

The Reapers' bikes came into full view and rode toward us, down the center lane of the junkyard. About a dozen bikes and one box truck, just like our crew. Just like we agreed.

As they pulled closer, I recognized the lead rider. Tony Vargas, fat man extraordinaire and Reaper president.

Ask the guy to walk his own grammy across the street, next thing she knows she can't find her wallet. Or just ends up dead in an alley.

Vargas came to a stop ten yards in front of us, his guys pulling up behind him. He dismounted his bike, its suspension groaning in relief. Next to me, Ryker swung a lithe leg over his bike and dismounted. He stepped forward, catlike, his dark and white speckled ponytail swinging in the desert wind. "Vargas," he said grimly.

Vargas's face broke into a shit-eating grin. I had to fight back an urge to charge forward, seize his pudgy Reaper head, and mop the desert floor with his face.

"Long time no see, Larson," said Vargas. "You got the guns?"

Ryker stuck his thumb out and motioned toward the box truck. "Fifty AR rifles. Converted. Full auto sear in each one."

Vargas rubbed his fat hands together. "God, that makes me hard," he said. "You know, this could really be the start of something beautiful."

Ryker shook his head. "No chance. One time only. And these are for killing Mongols only. If we ever hear a fucking whisper about these guns in Sons territory-"

Vargas cut him off. His face broke into a sickly sweet, innocent smile and he turned his palms upward, shrugging. "Have some faith, Larson," he said, pointing to a gold cross that hung around his neck. "I'm a man," he said, "of my word."

"Cash," said Ryker, stiffly.

Vargas motioned to a patch who had a duffel bag hanging from his shoulder. But as the man stepped forward, a voice from the pack of Reapers cried out.

"Boss—in the pickup!"

All heads, Sons and Reapers, swiveled to an old, rusted-out red Ford truck sitting next to our box truck. What I saw made my chest pound. Inside the pickup truck was a young little thing who didn't look a day over 20. She was crouched down low behind the steering wheel, her shimmering black hair spilling over her shoulders.

She was holding—what looked to me—like a fucking video camera.

I had no idea how in the fuck she'd managed to sneak in there, or what she thought she was doing. Oh lord, was she dead. The two clubs would never let her out of here alive.

And that was just a real goddamn shame, because she was the most gorgeous woman I'd ever seen during my entire 28 years on this fucked-up Earth.

I
grew up in Bumfuck
, Nowhere, an outskirt of an outskirt somewhere in the middle of Arizona. On a map it was called Coppertail, but it was the kind of town that even mapmakers forgot about.

In a town of rednecks and skeletons, I was the smart, shy girl. The one with a bright future, the first one to go to college. My parents and the local townsfolk projected their own unfulfilled hopes and dreams onto my future, as if it were my destiny to finally bring Coppertail its glorious dues. In a washed up old slum like that, my smarts almost made me a Z-list celebrity, which in Coppertail was a legitimate credential.

Probably the worst part of the town, aside from its isolation, was its lack of guys. I noticed it more and more as I grew up. The men were drunkards and gamblers and the boys followed in their footsteps.

My parents brought me up to be better than that. They wanted me to move to the city after college and marry a lawyer or a nice Jewish doctor. And that was... fine, I guessed.

But it wasn't exactly my fantasy. I mean, I was a nerd but I wasn't a total square. I really just wanted a gorgeous knight in shining armor to ride through Coppertail, sweep me off my feet, and take me away. I didn't think I was much to look at, but a girl can dream, right?

Of course, if that ever happened, my mom and dad would've been
"so"
disappointed in me for not "living up to my potential." Yeah, that was my parents. Always wanting me to make them happy, even if I sacrificed my own happiness in the process.

Anyway, no knight ever appeared to take me away. But my parents did well with their accounting business, well enough to eventually send me to Southern Arizona University without too many student loans. At SAU I met some guys and got a little experience, but they all faded into the background.

I did at least fall in love with something at SAU: photography and cinema. So I designed my own major that culminated in a senior documentary project, a video documentary of Coppertail. It was my baby, and maybe my way of saying goodbye to the town. I just knew I was gonna blow the lid off the national indie film festivals with my hot new release, and send my career into the stratosphere straight out of college.

At least, that was my plan until that Thursday afternoon when I went out to the old Coppertail junkyard with my new video camera. I had a great idea to use the junkyard to represent the spirit of Coppertail—some tumbleweeds blowing in the wind through a graveyard of old, torn up metal corpses.

I parked my car, a little Honda Civic with a long-broken odometer, outside the junkyard grounds. I'd heard that driving into the junkyard was a guaranteed flat, so I left it outside the perimeter and walked in.

I was filming next to an old red Ford pickup when I heard the unmistakable growl of loud motorcycle pipes. But it wasn't one bike, it was at least a dozen.

When they kept getting louder and louder, I got a weird feeling in my stomach. I always tried to follow my intuition, and my intuition told me to get out of sight. So I hopped into the truck and slouched down low. I kept my camera rolling, though, because that's the number one rule of video journalism. Soon a second motorcycle gang showed up, and it began to dawn on me that I was somewhere I really should not have been.

Unfortunately for me, I was far less stealthy than I'd thought, and the bikers spotted me easily. I almost threw up all over myself when one of the bikers shouted, "in the pickup!"

After the shout, there was confusion. Time paused while the stink of betrayal billowed over the scene. I didn't know much about motorcycle gang deals, but it didn't take an expert to figure out what was happening when the gunfire started: Each club thought I was working for the other. And as I found out, motorcycle gangs really don't like being spied on.

The only thing that saved my life was one biker—my knight in shining armor who I later came to know as Axl Archer—sprinting toward the pickup, diving in, and pinning my body down to the floor with his hard, muscled, tattooed, six-and-a-half foot body. It must've been the adrenaline, because even as I felt the shockwaves of bullets flying overhead, even as my video camera fell and shattered into pieces, all I could think about was how he instantly set my senses on fire.

"Who are you? Who fucking sent you?" he yelled over the gunshots. His elbow stabbed hard into my chest, pushing me against the Ford's crusty floorboards. His weight crushed the air out of my lungs and brought me back to reality. Anger and confusion seethed through his perfect teeth and through his soft-looking lips. Sweat plastered his thick, black hair over his forehead, and dripped down his square jaw into his dark beard. He was like a heartthrob actor, meticulously vetted for a movie role, costumed and made up by the best in the industry. Except it wasn't Hollywood, and he wasn't an actor. He was the man that Hollywood tries to mimic.

His stare penetrated me. And despite his anger, despite the violent scene unfolding outside, I don't know if I'd ever felt so safe and protected in my life as I did pinned beneath him. As if no one—nothing—could touch me.

"N-no one," I gasped, struggling to breathe. "I'm a-" I inhaled sharply, my lungs struggling to expand under this man's weight. Finally I succeeded, my windpipe wheezing. "-A film student," I puffed.

The biker's glare hardened, the muscles in his jaw popping out, his teeth gritting. He pressed his elbow even harder into my sternum, and I grimaced. Lying on my back on the truck floor, I could only see the clear blue afternoon sky through the truck's missing sunroof, but outside I heard yelling, screaming, and more gunshots. I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my bloodstream.

"Right," he spat, yelling over the commotion. "Don't they fucking teach you to stay out of other people's business?"

"Sorry," I croaked. "I-"

He cut me off by lowering his face to mine, our noses a fraction of an inch apart. His scent flooded my nostrils. God... it was pure man. How could such a scruffy biker—a dangerous criminal—have this effect on me? And in these circumstances? I felt a strange distance, as if I were outside my own body looking in. This was bad. Seriously bad. What was I thinking?

"Do exactly as I fucking say," he hissed, "Or we're both dead."

I swallowed hard and nodded, feeling his breath on my lips as he spoke.

"I'm going-" The biker began to speak, but was interrupted by the driver's door at our feet swinging open. He twisted his body to look behind him, temporarily taking some of his weight off me. I craned my neck forward, lifting my head off the truck's floor to see what was happening. My stomach knotted as I saw a leather-clad figure looming just outside the truck, his gun raised, the barrel pointing straight down at us. The patch above the left breast pocket on his jacket said, "REAPERS."

My jaw dropped, a scream building up inside my chest. But before I could make a sound, the biker on top of me reacted. He sprung up, flipping onto his back and sitting up at the same time. His hand darted toward the gun faster than the Reaper could react, seizing the metal barrel and twisting the man's wrist backward until the barrel pointed directly into his own chest. There was a brief struggle, and then a deafening blast. A hot shell casing flew backwards and bounced off my arm, burning me and leaving a red welt. The Reaper's eyes rolled back into his head as his body collapsed into the desert sand outside the truck, his life taken from him.

The biker sitting on top of me—my protector—looked back at me over his shoulder. I gasped.

His handsome face was spattered with the blood of the dead Reaper.

Outside the truck, the gunshots were becoming less and less frequent. I tried to wiggle my legs out from under the biker to sit up, but he reached out with one powerful hand and pressed me backward, his hand over my breasts. He shook his head "No," and peered out of the truck. There was one more gunshot, some yelling, and then the roar of motorcycle engines.

He looked in my eyes again and nodded cautiously, taking his weight off me and carefully stepping out of the truck. I lifted myself onto the passenger bench, poking my head up just enough to see outside. But before I could process the scene, the biker reached back into the truck and pulled me out forcefully.

The clearing in the junkyard was now a scrambled mess of leather, metal, and bodies. There must have been five or six dead bikers, and it looked like a couple wore the same insignia as the one on my protector's jacket: SONS OF CHAOS.

I began to feel lightheaded, suddenly overwhelmed with the gravity of the situation. I sensed my protector, who was standing behind me, move closer. Another furious-looking, fat biker stormed toward me. "This bitch," he screamed, "is fucking dead!"

I'd never fainted before in my life, but I did this time, falling backward, my knees giving out. Before I blacked out, the last thing I felt were strong, warm arms encircling me from behind and breaking my fall.