Ruined (The MC Motorcycle Club Romance Series - Book #1) (2 page)

One thing about “The Smoke Joint” that attracted
people besides of course the outdated décor and the
Smokin
’
Jokers meeting room in the back was that when you walked in, you felt like you
had walked into something hidden and personal. It was off the beaten path and
not a place that couples or tourists usually frequented. It was rare to not see
the same five guys sitting on the same five worn, blue vinyl stools at the old
Formica bar. It was like when surfers find a “secret surf spot.” They keep
coming back and they don’t go spreading the word around for fear it
would be taken
over by “undesirables.”

In the case of The Smoke Joint, an “undesirable”
would be a suit or a cop. Eighty percent of its clientele were bikers who still
rode daily or old, tired bikers who were too arthritic to ride any longer but
couldn’t give up the lifestyle. The other twenty percent were women with biker
fetishes. Those women came in all shapes, sizes and ages and as I looked around
I noticed that they seemed to be coming younger than they used to. Hopefully my
dad was having the guys check IDs, but I doubted it. Even though I found much
to complain about as my eyes scanned the place, it was still home and I still
felt instantly comfortable there.

“Son of a bitch!”
I heard a voice shout. It was a deep, gravelly voice and it belonged to an old
coot named Buster Balls. No, that wasn’t what his mom named him, but I had
never heard him called anything else. One of the guys told me once that Buster
was like the whipping boy. He was always the one who got an ass chewing in the
club whenever anything went wrong, even when it wasn’t his fault and that was
how he had earned his nickname.

“It’s
Dax
, as I live and
breathe. Boy, you put on some meat and some muscle since I saw you last.” He
let out a low whistle. “And look at all them
purdy
CDC tattoos. They sure are making them nicer than they did in my day. All that
hunger striking for the colored ink was well worth it.”

I smiled. He was right. The inmates in the SHUs (Security
Housing Unit) across CDC had spent three summers in a row on an organized
hunger strike in an effort to gain privileges. Colored ink was one of the
things they
had been given
as a bargaining chip.

“How goes it, Buster?” I put out my hand and
although he could barely curl his distorted one into a fist he tried and instead
of shaking, he bumped mine.

“I
ain’t
dead yet, so I
ain’t
complaining. Why you
hidin
’
over here by the door? Don’t you want to say hello to your daddy and the other
boys?”

 
“Yeah,
where’s my dad?” I didn’t see him in his usual booth and he wasn’t behind the
bar.

“He’s over there with that new little kitten,
Samantha. Hey J.J.! Look who I found.”

Suddenly, all heads turned toward me and even in the
dim overhead lights I felt like a spotlight
had been shined
on my face. My dad looked up from the barely legal girl he had been…talking to
and at first it looked like he wasn’t sure who he was looking at. I had changed
a lot in two years and the lighting in the bar wasn’t all that great. I was surprised
Buster recognized me. But recognition finally crossed his face and something
akin to…discomfort, maybe. He knew I had just done two years’ time for the club
and not through any fault of my own. I often wondered if he felt even a little
bit guilty. I had to doubt it. His discomfort, fear or whatever it was always came
from a place of self-preservation.

“I’ll be damned,” my dad said.
“
Dax
!”

He came toward me and put his hand out. Grabbing
mine, he pulled me against his massive chest and patted my back hard. Before I
went in, that used to hurt…a lot. Thanks to my daily organized workouts, I
barely felt it.

“How are you, kid? I didn’t even know you were
getting out.”

“Mom didn’t tell you?”

“No, hell no.
We would
of
had a party for you. Wouldn’t we, boys?”

I noticed that the rest of the club members had
gathered around. Once they realized I didn’t have a weapon and I wasn’t there
to exact my revenge, I spent the next ten minutes shaking hands, receiving high
fives and pats on the back.

My dad grabbed two beers from behind the counter and
led me over to his booth. For a second I forgot where I was and
who
I was with. I thought he was going to sit down with me
and ask how I was and how the last two years had been. Instead, he called over
two of the barely legal in daisy dukes and introduced them as Lila and Crystal.
They
were known
as club girls. In other circles they
would simply be known
as sluts. They sat down and my father
whom I hadn’t seen in two years went back to his own club girl in the corner.

“Did you just get out of prison?” the one named Lila
asked.

“Yeah,” I said, taking a long pull off the beer.
Damn, that was good. I forgot how much better beer was than
pruno
that
had been brewed
in someone’s cotton sock.

“What was it like?” she questioned.

I furrowed my brows. Her affect was completely
incongruent to the question. She was smiling, flushed with excitement, talking
to a muscular and tatted up stranger in a biker bar about just getting out of
prison. She was getting turned on by it and making sure that I knew it.

The one named Crystal saw something she liked on the
other side of the bar and excused herself by saying, “I’m
gonna
get me some of that.” You just can’t buy that kind of class. Lila was still
looking at me adoringly and waiting for my answer. I went with the one that I
thought might get rid of her the fastest.

“It wasn’t all that bad, I had me a cute little
cellmate and I got to tap that ass as much as I wanted—” That was as far as I
got before she was making a disgusted face. I guessed there were some things
that didn’t turn her on.

“Um…I
gotta
go check on
Crystal,” she said.

I chuckled as she hurried away. That was kind of fun;
I would have to remember that line. For the next half hour I ate peanuts and
sucked down one beer after the other as all of the guys came over one or two at
a time to see how I was doing. A few of them had the decency to seem nervous,
but most of them had a smug self-satisfied look of people who had just spent
two years on the outside while I was doing their time.

I was sitting alone at last and just under pleasantly
drunk when I saw the doors swing open and my best friend since I was a little
kid walked in. I guessed since he never came to see me that I might need to
amend the best friend thing later on, but at that moment I was ecstatic to see him.
He had a girl on his arm, but in the dim light I couldn’t see her. If I knew
Terrance though, she would be a looker. He liked the pretty girls. I was just
about to holler at him when she stepped into the light.

“What the fuck?” I groaned.

I downed the rest of my beer and squinted to make
sure I was really seeing what I thought I was. The girl on Terrance’s arm was
most definitely a looker. I knew this because she used to be my girl. It was
Olivia. Mother fucker…

CHAPTER
2

OLIVIA

Terrance and I were supposed to go to dinner, just
dinner, but as usual, we ended up at The Smoke Joint. I didn’t know why he was
so obsessed with the place. We had been right there in town, if he’d wanted to
go to a bar we could have found a nice one. I really hated the place. I hated
watching all the creepy old married bikers kissing and touching all over the
young wannabe biker babes.

It was sickening.

Especially when I had to see
Dax’s
father.
He was nice to me, but
he didn’t even try to hide the fact that he messed around on his wife. He acted
like
he was above having to explain himself to anyone,
even the mother of his child.
Dax
used to get pissed
off about the way he treated her and he and his dad fought constantly.
Dax
used to get pissed off at the club and his dad for a
lot of things before he started running drugs for them.

I followed Terrance over to the bar and sat down on
one of the empty stools. He was still standing. The woman on the other side of
me was a regular. I thought her name was Violet or something like that. She was
an old biker babe who I thought used to do porn back in the day based on the
rumors I had heard. She never made it to the coveted status of “old lady.”

I would never want to
be called
that, but to the women that hung around there, it was an honorable title. She
shelled out quite a bit of cash in hopes of it. She had the biggest fake boobs
I had ever seen and equally big, bleached blond hair. She smiled at me and I
smiled back. Most of her bottom teeth were gone. I guess the cash ran out.

“I think I just want water. I’m a little too full
from dinner for beer,” I said to Terrance.

He was still standing up and he was looking at
something or someone over at Bull’s table. Bull was
Dax’s
dad and the president of the club that ran the bar. I glanced over in that direction
but it was dark and all I could really make out was the shape of a man with a
lot of beer bottles sitting in front of him on the table. It wasn’t Bull. This
guy was too big, buff.

“Terrance?”

He didn’t answer me and he looked nervous. Terrance
was a big guy with massive shoulders and arms and long legs. He learned how to
fight at a young age and nothing seemed to ever make him nervous. If something
did, I knew to worry myself.

Terrance grew up in the club. His dad was
Dax’s
dad’s vice president and they had both been in the
club since before either of the boys was born.
Dax
and Terrance grew up playing in the back room of the bar together. I heard
stories from both of them about it. They were mostly nice stories, but they
both had their issues that I’m sure were caused by the darker side of it all
too.

I could tell by the look on Terrance’s face that
something was wrong. “Terrance, what’s going on?”

I glanced over at the booth again but he said, “No,
don’t look at him.”

“Don’t look at whom? Who is that?”

Terrance turned back toward the bar and I could see
his face in the mirror behind it. His dark brown eyes were wide and he looked
like he had just seen a ghost. He was starting to scare me and I wanted to know
what was going on.

I started to turn around again and he said, “Don’t
look over there; it’s
Dax
.”

I froze. I didn’t understand…
Dax
?
He couldn’t be there. He was in prison.

“What? Who’s
Dax
?
That muscular guy over there in Bull’s booth?”

“Yeah, emphasis on the muscular guy,” Terrance said.
“Shit! Did you know he was getting out?”

“Me? No! How would I know? I haven’t seen him
since…jeez! Has it been two years already?” I tried to turn around again but
Terrance actually put his hand on the back of my stool to stop me. “I don’t
think he should be out yet. Wouldn’t Gail have said something or Bull? That
guy’s too big to be him anyways and he has tats all over his arms.”

“It’s him, Liv. You don’t come out of prison without
tats and muscles unless it’s in a box. It’s
Dax
.”

“Shit, maybe we should go talk to him,” I suggested.

“You think?” he said. “What are we going to do?
Should we walk up to him and say, “Hey,
Dax
.
Sorry we never came to visit you in the joint the two
years you were gone, but look, we’ve been taking care of each other.”

Terrance looked nauseated.

My insides were quivering. I had done my best at
least for the past year to put
Dax
and our life
together out of my head. I was trying to concentrate on moving forward, with
Terrance. He was a great guy and he deserved a woman that could give him all of
herself
.

I wasn’t over
Dax
, I
wasn’t even sure if I ever would be, but I did a good job of not letting
Terrance see or feel that. I walked away from him because I couldn’t be with a
guy who would sell drugs. I also couldn’t be with a guy who would lie to me
about it the entire year
we were together and say he wanted
no part of his dad’s life
. He made such a big deal about not wanting his
kids to be raised
like
he was and around the kind of
people he was.

We had talked about getting married and having kids
after college. He never let on that he had changed his mind. I didn’t know a
thing about it until he
was arrested
. I wasn’t going
to bring a life into this world with a drug dealer for a father. I glanced over
to the end of the bar where Bull was making out with some girl younger than
me
. Look what kind of life
Dax
had; I wasn’t going to do that to my kids.