Under Fire (Winged Enemy MC Romance) (6 page)

It was shocking to me that teenagers would join the club, but that must have been some latent mothering instinct in me that wondered where the kids were going wrong these days. It was funny, since I was all wrapped up in an MC gang myself and completely enamored with its leader.

There was Matt, Rick and Dave as well.
I should call them the four fours, since they all have names of the same length.

“Hey Dave, what’s the deal with Kat?”

He looked over in the corner and whistled. “Well, she’s a fox, isn’t she? She used to be around all the time back when I was younger. Her and Jed used to date, pretty serious, too. There was a lot of talk about them getting hitched, but it never happened. Then there was some big drama that went down in the club and she split town, although Jed stayed.” His eyes squinted as though he had never thought it through before. “Always thought that was weird, but I guess I just figured they broke up for some reason. The guys never told me what happened, and I guess I just stopped pestering them about it when the next distraction came along. I haven’t even thought about her in years, so I never thought to ask now that I’m old enough for them to probably be ok with sayin’.”

“Hmm. Drama, you say? It can’t have been too bad, can it? I mean, she and Jed seem pretty chummy now.”

Chummy was an understatement. Cozy would have been a better word. I wished I hadn’t brought attention to it, since everyone knew that Jed and I were seeing each other in some fashion.

Jed had his arm comfortably around Kat’s shoulder, and as the eyes of the watchers turned on them they burst into companionable laughter as if on cue. I felt my cheeks flame up as my boyfriend soaked up the attention of a gorgeous woman without a care in the world, on display for the entire gang to see.

“Oh, hey now,” said Dave when he turned back around and saw my face. “They go way back, you can’t go reading into things like that. I’m sure it’s not what it looks like.” The words rang a bit hollow, and Dave gulped as though he realized it. He turned in his seat a little as he cast about for a way to change the subject. “Oh look, Nathan and the guys are back!”

The vice president of the club had just entered the door, sweaty, dusty, and looking like he needed a drink more than anything else in the world. I started pouring beers for the men before they could even signal over to me.

The next morning I seriously considered just staying in bed. I had ducked out last night before the bar closed, unable to bear the sight of Jed and Kat laughing away in the corner anymore. Nathan had taken one look at my face and taken over at the bar, shooing me out more like an old auntie rather than the crusty old biker that he was. His stock rose considerably higher in my books with that move.

The hungry, horny, sexual fire that had consumed me with need for the past few weeks had been doused. All I had wanted was to get into Jed’s pants, but that seemed like less of a possibility than ever before. Kat and him meshed so well that I couldn’t dream of being able to turn him back to me.

My dedicated career-driven mind wouldn’t let me be a delinquent when there was still a ton of work to do, and so I muddled my way through my morning run and the rest of my routine. I decided to walk to the clubhouse, and tried to convince myself that it was because I needed the exercise rather than the truth; I want to delay getting there and seeing Jed and Kat’s relationship blossom in front of my very own eyes.

Every day for the past three weeks had consisted of one of two things - either working on the renovations to the Devil’s Roost or digging through the mounds of notebooks and junk in Frank’s old office in the clubhouse. We searched for clues of what he was up to while in charge of the motorcycle club. Now that the bar was reopened, more time could be dedicated to the task of figuring out the club’s next move. It was difficult to hunt down criminals and set up a bust if you didn’t even know who you were supposed to be planning to take down.

It was strange that no one had contacted Jed yet; as the new president of the club and with Frank first incarcerated and now dead all of the old business relationships should have fallen to Jed. It was as if Frank hadn’t been doing anything illicit at all.

When I turned the corner and walked the final approach up to the chop shop that served as the club’s headquarters, I saw Nightshade and Kat’s bike parked side by side. My heart clenched painfully and I had to forcefully blink tears out of my eyes as they welled up.

I am not a pansy. I am a strong, career woman. A federal agent. I do not do this bullshit!

The pep talk helped, and I managed to regain some control over myself and my emotions before I got to the open garage doors.

A handful of club members sat around in the garage. Two of them - Zach and Dave - were working on a bike while the others looked on and offered crass advice.

“Come on Zach, you’re supposed to treat it like a lady, not a fucking animal!” shouted one of the older men as the boy dropped a part. It clattered on the ground and he flushed bright pink as the sound echoed through the open space. The rest of the men laughed at the expense of the new member.

“Ah, leave him alone, Tim. Like you would know what treating a lady looks like.” My voice cut through the laughter and left jeers in its wake as the guys turned in a flash on their compatriot.

“Oh hey Leslie,” Tim said easily. “One of these days you won’t look askance at my proposals, and then I will have the experience I so desperately desire.” I had been startled at how eloquent the old biker could be when he wanted to when I first started to chat with him. He read books with a voracious appetite and had no embarrassment about it whatsoever. Whenever one of the boys tried making fun of him for it he worked circles around them with his wit.

He had no shame, and we always had a good banter between us; over the past three weeks I had developed a good working relationship with most of the men in the gang. It had been hard at first considering all of them had not only seen me naked, but also having anal sex with Jed. At the same time it had taken me off the pedestal of ‘agent’ and made me just another person.

It was hard to be lofty when someone had seen you take a man in your ass for the first time.

“Come on Tim, we all know that hell will be long, long frozen over before that happens. I don’t think you’ve got that much time left to you.”

I breezed past, on my way to the stairs and the upper offices.

I heard voices as I got close to the president’s office, and I slowed down. Jed’s distinctive rumbling tones talked with the higher pitched but sultry voice of a woman. I hadn’t talked to Kat long enough last night to be able to recognize the timbre of her voice through the wall, but that was the only possibility.

The door was cracked, and I stepped as lightly as I could to try and get closer. I suppose I should have been grateful that the voices were talking and not engaged in moans and crying out in pleasure.

Just as I started to make out some words the floor squeaked loudly.

Fuck. Forgot about that.
I’d never had to try and sneak up on that door before.

The voices stopped. I sighed and braced myself before I pushed the door open and entered the office.

Kat and Jed sat across the desk from each other, not a hair misplaced on either of their heads.
Either they are astoundingly quick or they haven’t had sex this morning.
That didn’t say anything about last night.

“Good morning, Leslie, it’s great to see you again,” Kat said. “I was really hoping we’d have some time for girl talk last night, but Nathan said that you weren’t feeling very good and headed home a little early. How are you doing?”

She just had to be nice, too, didn’t she? Ugh, what a bitch.
I tried to keep up my righteous anger, but it was difficult. I settled for being short in my reply.

“Oh, I’m fine.”

They both kept an eye on me as though they expected me to say more. I kept my mouth shut.

“I was just bringing Kat up to speed on current events, Leslie,” Jed said.

“Weren’t you doing that last night? Or were you too busy doing other things?” I couldn’t help the barb.

Jed tried to catch my gaze, but I refused to match him. “Last night we just caught up in the general sense, and got to know each other a little bit again. This morning I was updating her on the news within the club.”

“The news within the club? You mean… Frank getting arrested?”

“She knows, Leslie.” Jed pissed me off with those words more than I could ever describe.

“What do you mean, she knows? That better not mean what I think it means.”

Before I had been the one avoiding Jed’s eyes, but I wasn’t running anymore. He was the one who suddenly found the wall fascinating.

“Please, Leslie,” Kat said. “Don’t blame Jed, I already knew some of it. I’d heard it through my contacts, and I’m smart enough to guess at least a little at the rest. Or at least get close enough to the truth that Jed thought it would be safer to just swear me to secrecy and tell me the whole thing.”

I glared at her. To her credit she didn’t waver one inch. It didn’t endear her to me.

“Why don’t you tell me exactly what you told her, Jed?”

He cleared his throat. “Everything. I didn’t hold anything back. We’re going to need Kat’s help moving forward, and we can’t afford to keep her in the dark about anything.” He saw the way my jaw set. “Leslie, come on. I trust her more than anyone else in the gang. You know that’s saying a lot.”

More than me?

It was unspoken, but I could read the subtext. Jed didn’t trust me anymore, and he needed someone that he could confide in and wouldn’t go running to the feds. I couldn’t be that person for him.

There wasn’t much I could do about it, no matter how unhappy I was with the direction events were headed. It’s not as though I could lock Kat up just for being here and being the perfect antithesis of me. Which was exactly what Jed needed right now.

“Fine. Let’s get to work.”

The rest of the morning and early afternoon passed in an uneasy silence. Occasionally Jed or Kat would make a joke about something they found of Frank’s, but after the first couple of stony responses from me they left me out of it.

For presumably a simple man of the road, Frank kept an absolutely enormous stash of files. Not only did it seem that he kept obsessive track of almost anything he had ever done or conversation he had ever had, which should have helped us, but he was also a hoarder, and the amount of useless information jumbled into everything was killing any flow that we tried to build.

“Seriously, what the fuck!” I burst shortly after noon. “There’s no fucking order to any of this! How could someone be so anal about tracking every little thing, and then have no organization to those notes at all? Look at this notebook.” I pulled one out of a pile at random. “There’s a detailed list of what Frank had eaten that day. Followed by what appears to be a chart that tracks the amount of on-screen time for each actor in Goodfellas, and then followed by a set of random numbers. What are we supposed to do with any of this?”

There were mounds of the little notebooks, stacks of loose papers, and bundles of folders. If the information we were looking for was hidden in the margins of the books in some code it would take years to figure out, if it was even possible.

“This is insane,” Jed said. “I mean, I knew Frank was an untrustworthy, cagey old man. And he definitely wasn’t stupid. But this is over the top. I can’t tell for the life of me if this is genuine mess, or all some sort of cryptic book keeping method that he had kept to himself all this time.”

Kat stretched out and yawned. “I don’t know about you two, but I need a break from this.” She turned to Jed. “Want to go for a ride?”

I bit my tongue. She had all the right in the world to invite Jed for a ride. She had her own bike, after all. She was a proper biker, raised in the culture, born to it, and loved it. I was just a woman who happened to get caught up with Jed and couldn’t seem to let him go even if we weren’t the best match in the world.

“That would be great.” Jed said. “I need to feel the wind on my face.”