Rage (A Thunder Gypsies MC Outlaw Biker Romance) (7 page)

“We don’t know if he threatened her -- or whether she’s calling the police right now.”

Blood drained from my face like air leaving a popped balloon. Avery was right. The clerk might not even be alive. The piece of shit squirming beneath me for his life could have killed her. Or she was alive and the cops were on their way...

Or she sold us out and deserved a bullet in the brain to keep her from testifying.

Whatever the truth was, I didn’t have time to find out. Lifting the pillow, I slammed my fist with the gun in my hand against the man’s head, knocking him out.

“Grab my knife,” I ordered.

Avery reached into my boot and unfolded the three-inch blade I carried. She swallowed and then she looked at me, an ugly suspicion clouding her gaze. She wasn’t certain I would listen to her and let the man live.

“Cut up the shower curtain. I need strips so I can bind him.”

Relief brought color back to her cheeks as she ran for the bathroom. I took the man’s limp form and started dragging him after her. I studied him as I put him into position, his arms wrapped around the base of the toilet.

He had a leather vest on, a prospect’s patch on the front and the top rocker for Cain’s Disciples on the back. I shook my head at the stupidity of it -- his and mine. He had been stupid enough to believe he could sneak into the hotel room and execute me on his own, maybe because the Gypsies had spread the kill order to other clubs or maybe to speed along his probation period by taking out a Gypsy in Disciples’ territory.

As for my own stupidity, I almost choked on it. I didn’t think I would be recognized so far away without my colors. Just me, some shades, a nice bike and a beautiful girl on the back of it. Nothing to recognize -- except for the bike.

Frankenstein

I had picked that as the bike’s name for more than one reason. A modified Harley, the front came from a Suzuki 750, with a Harley Fat Bob slotted aluminum wheel that I had shaved about an inch of hub material from so it would fit between the front forks. The headlamp cowl was from a V-Rod and I had put a hinged V-Rod airbox cover over the gas tank.

Like the fictional Frankenstein, the modifications had been made from a graveyard of parts. But I had also painted the body a midnight blue and handcrafted chrome lightning bolts that ran along the sides and over the airbox cover. The lightning bolts complimented the bike’s name and the bolts on the Thunder Gypsies’ patch.

There wasn’t another bike like it in the southern United States, and I received comments and envious looks wherever I rode. So it was fucking stupid that I hadn’t stopped once we had half a dozen hours between us and Thunder Valley and done something to disguise the bike. I certainly should have, but part of me was running scared and the other part was controlled by my dick and the soft body pressed against my back.

I had fucked up and almost gotten both of us killed for it.

Growling, I finished binding the Disciple’s hands and feet. Since I didn’t want him screaming and I didn’t want a dead body, I wet a washcloth and shoved it in his mouth before tying a strip of the shower curtain around it. I wanted to do more, not to keep him in place but to hurt him. Only I didn’t have the time to bash his head against the toilet bowl until I felt better and I didn’t want Avery to see me do it.

If I wanted to keep her, I couldn’t be the monster Big Red and the club had been trying to fashion me into for the last three years. I had to be the man my father and brothers raised me to be. Even if they were likely out of my life forever.

Avery

Callan hustled me out of the hotel room. We couldn’t just hop on the bike and ride out of the hotel’s single drive. Not with the cops potentially on the way and the loyalty of the clerk in question. Callan pushed his bike up the steep embankment on our side of the parking lot. As early as it was, there was no traffic on the other side of the small hill.

He hadn’t spoken to me since telling me to cut up the shower curtain. Everything since then was communicated in grunts, curt nods and hard stares. I didn’t challenge him on it. I could see the tension that possessed his entire body. I could feel the sick shake of adrenaline that still infected my limbs and knew he had at least as much of the chemical pumping through his blood.

With the bike finally on the curb, I climbed on behind him and tried to hide the tremble in my hands as I fastened the helmet on my head. We had come up from Central Florida and had planned on heading north east from Atlanta until we got too close to the Washington DC area with its massive amount of surveillance.

I didn’t have a clue whether that was still the plan until we hit the onramp of I-85. We stayed on the freeway until Greenville. In Greenville, we stopped at a mom and pop grocery store. Callan had me stay near the front of the store, positioned at a magazine rack where I could look out on the parking lot while remaining relatively hidden. Once he had cleared checkout and we were back outside, we crossed the small shopping plaza to a hardware store. This time, he kept me with him while he picked up black spray paint and some kind of metal filler. The last thing he did before we left the plaza and Greenville was pry the chrome lightning bolts off the bike and toss them in a dumpster.

From Greenville, we took back roads, our direction more or less parallel to the interstate while avoiding it. He had filled the holes from the discarded bolts with the metal filler. The container stated a drying time of ninety minutes. We were a few minutes beyond that hour and a half when we stopped again, this time at a little roadside park commemorating some dead war hero.

With me off the bike and holding my backpack and the store bags, Callan pushed the motorcycle into the trees until we couldn’t see the park and its buildings. Finding a small clearing, he put a flat rock under the kickstand and grabbed the bag from the hardware store.

Shaking the can of spray paint, he nodded at the other bag. “You should eat.”

They were the first words to come out of his mouth since Atlanta and it bugged me. Someone had a gun to his head a few hours ago and he’d almost killed the man because of it. We left that man gagged with his hands tied behind the base of a toilet. And all Callan could say was that I should eat.

I didn’t need him to tell me something my own stomach was perfectly capable of communicating.

“So should you,” I replied, my throat almost too tight for speech.

He glared at me for a second then turned to the bike. He tucked the garbage bag around the front of the seat and began spraying. Midnight blue turned to black. I gave up trying to stare a hole in his back and sat down against a tree.

Opening the grocery bag, my eyes landed first on a bottle of water. I pulled that out, cracked the seal and took a long drink before returning to the bag. My stomach sank at the next two items to draw my attention -- a box of hair dye and a pair of scissors. A deep brown, I knew the dye couldn’t be for Callan. He already had dark hair.

“It has to be done, Avery.”

I looked up to find that he had finished painting the bike and was standing over me as I stared blankly into the grocery bag. Bending down, he grabbed a second water bottle and two packs of tuna and crackers. He took the bag from me, tossing it behind him so that it landed next to the bike. Sitting next to me, he opened one of the tuna tins and handed it to me.

“Stop staring at the bag and eat,” he ordered.

I dipped a cracker into the meat and brought it to my numb lips.

“Baby, I could dye your hair vomit green and cut it an inch short and you would still be so beautiful it makes my body hurt.” Placing a finger against my hand, he gently guided the cracker into my mouth. “So stop worrying about how you’re going to look and get some fuel in you.”

I crushed the cracker inside my mouth then swallowed, shaking my head as I did so. “It’s not about vanity.”

His mouth quirked to one side, but he didn’t ask me why I didn’t want my hair cut or dyed. He probably knew my answer might change his mind.

Tears sprang to my eyes and I pushed the rest of my food at him.

Grumbling something about a crying woman, Callan pulled me into his arms. “Okay, tell me what it’s about.”

“No, it’s stupid.” I tried to wiggle off his lap but he wouldn’t let me.

“If it’s making you cry, I want to know.” He gathered my hair around one side of my neck. Kissing one cheek, he tenderly wiped a tear from the other side of my face.

I melted into his arms and wrapped my own around his shoulders as I angled my face upwards in search of his mouth. I couldn’t believe he actually wanted to know why I was crying instead of trying to bully me into stopping. Not that Callan was a jerk, just that I couldn’t recall ever seeing a man react to a woman’s tears with anything other than derision or violence.

My father had backhanded my mother the times he caught her crying, the old cliché falling from his lips every time.

I’ll give you something to cry about, bitch.

That wasn’t Callan. In between kisses, he coaxed me into telling him. “Come on, baby girl. Why does the idea make you sad?”

“Mama would brush my hair, sometimes for hours.” I buried my face against his neck to hide from his watchful eyes. “It was the only way she would touch me, and just my hair. If she wanted me to move, she would use the brush to guide me.”

It sounded awful, like maybe my own mother thought I was contaminated, but I couldn’t think of it that way. “She would tell me stories when she brushed my hair -- about a fairy princess trapped in the mortal world and that the only way the princess could visit her people was with magic potions that put her to sleep.”

Callan smoothed his hand up and down my back, the soft, repetitive gesture hypnotically calming me. “She was an alcoholic, your mom?”

I nodded, my tears lubricating the skin of his neck. “She said every time the princess visited fairyland, she tried to find a way to go back forever and bring her half-human daughter with her. But the other fairies said humans are beasts and wouldn’t allow it. So the princess had to stay in the human world because she couldn’t leave her daughter behind.”

“But then the magic potions killed her, didn’t they?” Callan asked gently.

I sobbed into his jacket. Yes. The potions had killed the princess and they had done it slowly. In the end, she left her daughter alone in the mortal world anyway.

Callan opened up a small space between us. Cupping my chin, he made me look at him. Slowly, he kissed the tears that kept falling and then my mouth, both of our lips salty. Taking a second, he stripped his jacket off and placed it on the ground, then guided me onto my back.

He kept kissing me, everything soft and slow. I moved against him, the direction and thrust of my hips becoming more obvious as my arousal grew. One hand wrapped in my hair, Callan pushed his other hand beneath the band of my jeans and panties. He didn’t stop kissing me as his fingers parted my labia and began to stroke my clit.

With the gap between my jeans and my flesh almost nonexistent, he had to keep his strokes short. I whimpered, wanting both of us naked and to have Callan thrusting into me.

“Come for me, baby.” He bit at my bottom lip, his finger and thumb pinching my clit between hard rubs.

As if his words alone could command my orgasm, I began jerking beneath him. He kept rubbing and pinching until I went limp. Then he brought his hand up to cup my face.

“I’m not trying to take you to fairyland, Avery.” He ran his thumb against my lower lip. The scent of my juices on his flesh coaxed a fresh burst of cream from my pussy. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”

I blinked slowly then nodded. Right then, my mind was a million miles away from the bag with its dye and scissors. Callan had just wrung one hell of a climax from me and I wanted to return the favor.

I palmed his cock, my cheeks coloring as I asked, “What about you?”

Laughing, he shook his head at me and eased onto his knees. “One thing is for certain. You’ll always blush like a redhead, baby.”

“We’ll worry about me later.” He stood and retrieved the bag. “Right now, let’s get your hair short enough you can cover all of it with the helmet.”

Pouting because I didn’t have his cock in me, I sat up and wiggled out of my jacket then brought the length of my hair behind my back. Returning to sit behind me, Callan took the first few snips.

I felt the weight of almost a foot of hair fall away from my head, the loss momentarily making me dizzy.

“We’ll dye it at the hotel tonight.” He placed the hair he had just cut in my lap and kissed me on the cheek. “This way the clerk won’t see you come in as a redhead and leave as a brunette.”

“Okay,” I whispered and started fashioning the cut hair into a braid. “Are we still heading toward DC?”

“Yeah, I want to hit Allenwood,” he agreed, more severed hair falling around my shoulders as he continued working the scissors. “Then decide where we go from there.”

“Isn’t that where Lincoln is?” Lincoln had allegedly killed their brother Boone as part of a gun trafficking operation across state lines and I knew Allenwood had a federal maximum security prison.

“Yeah.” The answer came as little more than a grunt. “He didn’t kill Boone.”