JAGGED EDGE: A BILLIONAIRE ROMANCE (ALPHA MALE) (13 page)

She had trembled, thinking about it.

“He beat you for doing it.”

Her eyes flashed. He’d done more than just hit her. “Yeah.”

“So he is alerted.”

Her face told him that she hadn’t thought of that. “Maybe not. He’s always pissed at me about something. That wasn’t anything special. It’s the only way I can fight back.”

“Okay. I just need to know.”

He called over to Trudy, one of the biker chicks. When the girl came over she smiled. “What do you need?” He liked Trudy. She wasn’t very smart, but she was nice to talk to. “We need some help.” He pointed at Audra. “We need a makeover. She needs to pass for my old lady.”

“Stand up,” the girl said. When Audra did, Trudy looked her over from head to toe. “Clothes? Hair? Skin?”

“All of it,” Dirk said.

“I’ve got some clothes that will do. But the hair and makeup are too… too fucking nothing that says biker bitch.”

“Can you fix her?”

Trudy turned to one of the other girls. “Meg, take a run to my place and bring a couple of sets of road clothes from my closet.” She smiled at Dirk. “You owe me for a set of colors.”

“Tell Bart to take care of it and that I said it’s part of the cost of doing business. His cost, not yours or mine.”

Trudy laughed and went to the bar and got a pair of scissors and a comb and her handbag. She checked the contents of the bag then crooked a finger at Audra. “Come with me. We have work to do.”

As she followed, Audra truly felt she was at the point of no return.

* * * *

Audra sat, somewhat stunned, as Trudy took her comb and scissors and began cutting her hair even shorter. Chopping it more than cutting it. Her reflection in the bathroom mirror showed the shock on her own face and the concentrated look on Trudy’s as she turned her straight hair into something Audra would’ve called ratty.

“The shoulder-length cut says nothing,” Trudy was telling her. “It’s too even, too fucking regular.” She looked at Audra’s face and laughed. “Yeah, you think I’m fucking you over, but it’s going to be hot.”

“Is it that big a deal around here, being ratty instead of regular?”

“Ratty? Think tough, girl. If you are going to travel with a biker, you better know that how you look makes a statement about him. Bikers want girls who are edgy, who don’t give a fuck what the rest of the world thinks about them. You walk into a place with him, you move your hips so guys will look, but when you do it you have a hand on his arm or his ass so they know you are just strutting your stuff. Even if this is playacting for you, you want it right, so people buy it.”

The girl was right, and edgy was exactly how she’d describe the new haircut.

Then Trudy had her wash her face. “Your makeup is too neat, too conservative.” When her face was clean, Trudy, behaving remarkably like her mother had when she taught her about makeup, went through the basic concepts. Naturally the concepts were nothing like her mother had taught her. The dark lipstick, heavy shadow, seemed garish. On the other hand, Trudy’s efforts were helping her look like another person, and she was going to have to be another person—for a while, at least.

Trudy had finished when Meg came in carrying the clothes Trudy had sent her for. “Cool,” she said when she saw Audra. “With these you’ll start to fit in around here.”

Meg handed her the clothes and Audra realized she was expected to change right then. As she took the clothes, she saw that road clothes meant pretty much what the girls wore in the bar—incredibly short denim shorts and tee shirts cut short to expose her flat belly.

“Cutter is gonna like you big time,” Meg said.

“Is that his real name?”

The two women laughed. “Real? Sort of,” Trudy said. “His given name is Dirk, but he’s the club’s Enforcer.”

“Real handy man with a knife,” Meg said.

Meg walked around Audra. “You can think of that as a good thing, cause Cutter doesn’t cut women, as far as I know.”

Trudy laughed. “He does gobble them up though. He will think you are just plain yummy.”

The idea unsettled her a bit, but if she was going to escape, if she was going to manage to get out of town without Terrance’s men tracking her down, she would have to deal with it. She would become this tough biker chick and if Cutter was a lady’s man, she’d have to play things by ear.

“He’s going to eat you alive,” Trudy said. Then she licked her lips. “If you can learn to enjoy that I’m pretty sure you won’t find it a bad thing at all.”

“Not at all bad,” Meg said. “Cutter is so hot.”

The look on Meg’s face said it all. She lusted after Cutter. Right now everything else was insane, but that sentiment she could understand, maybe even agree with.

Chapter Three

Jumping into the unknown is hard. When you have no idea when or how you’ll land, even if the place you’re standing is treacherous, life threatening, it can be hard to summon the courage to make a leap. And when you do, heart in mouth, your knees weak, you want it over so you can get your bearings as soon as possible, take stock of your injuries.

Audra had taken the leap and found herself totally disoriented. Disoriented and frightened. Even if she won the gamble, got away with her escape, then what?

But it was the only way. Stepping into the unknown was the only way to hide from Terrance.

Terrance, the man, the idea of him, the memories of him, his creepy touch, sent a chill through her. Just thinking about him terrified her. The man repulsed her. He had made her life a nightmare.

Breaking away from him took all the money she could raise by selling the jewels and gifts Terrance lavished on her during the rare times he was pleased with her, or just feeling generous. But she’d happily paid the price Bart set. She could manage it and when she was free, she’d find work. She’d get by somehow.

There was no doubt, however, that the process of breaking away from Terrance had propelled her into a surreal world. She, Audra Montrose, was riding past the city limits sign on the back of a huge monster of a motorcycle, with its engine throbbing sensually between her legs, and her arms tightly wrapped around the waist of a man she’d just met. And they were headed… she didn’t know where they were headed, other than the vague notion of Buffalo, New York, which meant nothing to her.

When Cutter saw her, it was clear that he approved of her new look. He’d taken her hand. “We can’t waste time. We need to hit the road and get some distance between you and this city.”

That had sounded right, that urgency appealed to her. With nothing more than that, he’d led her out to his bike, calling over his shoulder at Wrench as they went out the door, saying they’d meet up at a place he called The Black Hole of Calcutta.

And they’d left, leaving behind everything she had and everything she knew—her entire life. The only familiar thing in her situation, and that reached back to high school, was the roar of the motor, the smell of unburned gasoline and oil and the exhaust, and the wonderful sensations of hurtling down the highway. The vibrations of the engine and the tires on the road went rippling through her, giving her a sensual, sexual thrill. It had been a long time since she’d been on a motorcycle and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it. She’d never been on one this powerful and the difference was amazing, even sensual, just as she was realizing the man she rode behind was more powerful, more self assured than any man she’d ever met before.

The sensuality of the ride, the feel of the wind caressing her mixed weirdly with lingering memories of the horror of her recent sex life. Those memories faded with each mile, seemed less real and led her to a surprising sexual arousal. With her arms around the powerful torso of her biker protector, the surprising attraction she felt for him caught her off guard. She wanted him. She slipped in and out of fantasies about him.

She told herself it was only the situation, his closeness, his powerful masculinity combined with the throbbing engine. Those things, those sensations forced the idea of a white knight into her head, twisted her perspective, made her emotions cloud her thinking. How could she be attracted to this man? For all she knew the man was a killer or a rapist. She might have made a huge mistake putting herself in his hands. No one knew where they were, where they were going.

She would find out in time and nothing could guarantee her safety. But all that truly mattered to her was that mile by mile she was moving away from Terrance, out of his clutches. He was mad, insane, and a sadist. By now he’d know she’d run away. The driver would have finally gone into the doctor’s office looking for her and found she was gone.

Then he would’ve had to tell Terrance he’d lost her. Naturally Terrance would fire the poor man, or maybe do worse to him than that, but she couldn’t afford to care. He had to look out for himself. A furious Terrance would be turning his anger into some sort of action. He’d call the people who did things for them. He wouldn’t soil his own hands, but he’d send them for her and whatever his instructions to them were, they would mean dreadful things for her. He’d promised her that. He’d told her what he’d done to other women who’d crossed him, not done as he wanted.

So if Cutter was a demon, if he intended her harm… even raping her, it wouldn’t be any worse than what Terrance would do to her when he caught up with her. He wouldn’t be worse than Terrance had been to her for the years they’d been married. From her perspective, almost every time they’d had sex in the last six months had been rape.

The reality of who he was, and how he got his pleasure came all too quickly.

By the time they got home, she’d learned he liked inflicting pain—not just beating her, but creating a universe around her that let her know she was owned, trapped. She’d tried cooperating with him, thinking if she joined in his games he’d see her more kindly, but kindness was foreign to him. Of all the strategies she’d tried, the only thing that had slowed him down was when she learned to play dead, refused to respond at all. When he wanted her, she let her body go numb, lifeless and she sent her mind far away. She thought of anything and everything but him, but sex.

The faraway look she got in her eyes when she did that had infuriated him. He wanted to see fear and her tactic got him madder than she’d ever seen him. He’d punished her, but then he punished her when she cooperated. But this was worse.

Still, it worked after a fashion. After a time he seemed to lose interest in trying to wake her up or convincing her to respond. He had other women, after all. There were always other women.

She began to hope that he’d tire of it, tire of her, and divorce her, or tell her to leave. That failed. Terrance stopped hurting her physically, but he began to take his pleasure by humiliating and degrading her in ways that it didn’t matter if she responded or not. And he tightened his grip on every aspect of her life, ensuring she was never alone, never unaware that she was his prisoner. He did what he could to make her life hell, and to ensure she knew that there was no escape, that she’d never be free.

That mental abuse took its toll. Surviving, not going insane, required that she harden herself to him, to his advances, to any hope of finding love. Yet, after all that, here she was feeling herself warm up to this man. It had been too long since she’d been around men who responded to her as a woman, much less a desirable woman. It made her afraid to trust her response, but she knew this biker excited her. She was aroused for the first time in a long time, by a man who was probably a public menace. Go figure.

Now she clung to him, filled with a bizarre and frightening combination of desperation and hope; she pressed against his back and let herself live in the moment, to enjoy the exhilaration of his closeness and their speed as they flew through this universe, his universe, this open road.

His bike was a big machine, steady and stable, and comforting in an odd way. Though she’d been on bikes before, she’d never ridden so fast. Underneath them the pavement flowed by in a swirl of black asphalt, broken by occasional splashes of yellow line, white markings or patches. The big machine roared with tremendous power, singing of its immense reserves of strength to call on, if they were necessary.

The rider, Dirk, Cutter, had that quality too—deep reserves of strength. They called to her, they echoed her need, her desire for a protector and she cursed herself for imagining being naked with him, running her hands over that muscular body. The awareness that she wanted him, wanted him to take her, to fuck her, frightened, surprised, and excited her. Her heart pounded loudly, nearly drowning out that pulsing, throbbing engine. She felt that heartbeat synchronizing with that of the engine, and the roar of the wind in her ears and she slipped into a strange and eerie place where her sense of time, space, and reality blurred into a swirl that could only be categorized, understood, as desire. Sheer sexual desire as she’d never felt before—a terrifying, out of control arousal that had to be controlled, or at least subdued.

It made no sense. No fucking sense at all. No, she knew these were fantasy thoughts. What was really happening was that she was escaping. She put a heroic mantle on the man because he was giving her a ride to freedom, whatever that would mean. He was a hired gun. She was paying him to help her escape. That was all he was and he meant nothing more to her than that.

Right.

* * * *

Dirk liked things kept simple. Understandable. Riding away from LA to help this girl escape bugged him. He didn’t know her, he didn’t know exactly what she was running from and that made lots of questions pop up as he twisted the throttle and left the club in his dust. Dirk hated questions he couldn’t answer.

What made a girl sell everything she had and hire a bunch of outlaws to get her out of the country? What kind of girl thought running to a strange country, where she knew no one, would make her safe? What did she imagine her life would be like when she did escape? What had her husband done to her to make her willing to throw her life away entirely?

These questions echoed in Dirk’s head as he pointed his bike toward I-40, which would take them to Kingman, Arizona. It was odd that he found himself wanting to understand Audra. Sure, the girl who clung tightly to him, who pressed her breasts against his back, was a hot piece, but he didn’t need to know her whole life story, or her future plans. This was a job, and she might turn out to be a nice fuck. But if they got it on, she’d be doing it for the adventure. Girls like her didn’t fall in love with a guy like him. He scared them away. A night or two with an outlaw for the experience was one thing, but the girls who fell in love with bikers, wanted to be with them, weren’t nice girls. They were sassy and sexy and all that, but they had to be misfits too.

Why wouldn’t a person fit in if they could?

Lots of times Dirk found himself wishing he could fit in, that he could work some steady job and come home to a girl in a nice house. That was crap, of course. Within weeks, if not days, he’d be climbing the walls, feel an overwhelming need to make a long ride to clear his head, maybe pick up a bar girl somewhere and bang her. That’s how he was. No nice girl would chain him down. But then he’d never be the kind of man that a nice girl would like, so he’d never know for sure.

When you grew up never knowing what it’s liked to be loved, how can you know if it’s worth looking for? When and where do you learn to let someone love you or what it means to feel love for someone? How do you trust such an abstract concept? When everyone else thought love was worth fighting for and you didn’t even know what it was or if it was real, did that make you cynical or the rest of the world delusional?

A person who grew up in the streets and never got out of them, was cursed. There were no two ways about it. Romance was like the inside of a rich person’s house—if you ever encountered it, you were standing outside, looking in through a window, and if anyone saw you, you knew you’d be chased away.

There it was again. That ambivalence.

That’s your problem, Dirk. You want it both ways. You want to be the tough, hard ass biker, yet you ache for a woman to love you. A good woman doesn’t lust after cursed men.

So he’d just have to stop wondering about the girl and just accept that she was there. Things would make sense that way, not trying to understand her. That left him free to do what he’d do with any chick, test the waters, see if she was ripe for a nice time between the sheets. Perhaps she was less nice than he thought. Maybe she was just a spoiled cunt and she’d enjoy a rough rider.

They had a long way to go, and that meant long nights in motels. Plenty of time and opportunity for fun.

The thing was… there was something about her that tugged at him. If she was telling the truth, she was escaping a nightmare and where she wound up had ceased to matter to her. She was pretty brave doing this, splitting and taking nothing, whether the guy was in hot pursuit, or doing what Dirk suspected, banging some other chick and thinking good riddance.

Dirk could relate to running, leaving everything behind—he’d been there. Life had handed him a bowl of shit for breakfast. He’d had to eat it and smile… until he quit caring and being scared, and started fighting back, throwing the shit they tried to feed him in their faces.

Still, she had to have things fairly bad, this chick. You didn’t give up fancy clothes, a shiny expensive car, polite neighbors and dinner parties just because the guy was a jerk. It had to be pretty bad, and a small girl like that could get roughed up. Maybe running away was being smart.

When he was little he’d run too and gotten away from the worst of it, the abuse he couldn’t stop. Damn right he had. He’d run headlong away from that kind of shit, tasting fear, more than once. It hadn’t solved anything, because there was always more shit you ran into, but over time he’d learned when to run and when to fight. That was the heart of the curse. Fight or flight wasn’t just a response mechanism, it was a fucking way of life. Eventually he’d gotten good enough at fighting to not have to run often. He got good enough at fighting, and then hard enough to become the Enforcer.

Most of the guys in the club were cursed. You didn’t usually decide you wanted to be a biker when you grew up—you slipped into it. You fucked up at some point and maybe got kicked out of school or went to juvenile and then you were marked. The straight world was afraid of you then and kept adding rules, but those rules made it harder and harder for you to play their game. So you fought back and soon you were totally on the outside looking in. The club provided an oasis where you could be who you were. As long as you were bad ass, of course. As long as you played by the code—but the code you understood because it was simple.

The girls that ran with them were different but the problem was the same. They’d fucked up and society had no use for them now. They’d disqualified themselves from being soccer moms and corporate wives, and never had the aptitude to make it in business. Or in life, for that matter.