Summer and Smoke (The Bullets Book 2)

by Coralee June

  They're all wrong for me.

  Every motorcycle club has its old ladies.

  These guys … they share one.

  They share me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  My first memory is of feeling protected, safe. Even now, the scent of leather and motor oil calms my nerves, the roar of an engine a siren song that I can't resist. For years, I lived under the blanket of a lie, knowing that there were people out there who would protect me, no matter what, who had my back. It made the world seem less scary, more manageable.

  Then one day—I can't remember when—I woke up and realized it.

  My protectors, my family, they were the monsters.

  And their protection came with a hefty price.

  My legs are cloaked in black, smooth lines of leather that hang over the edge of the crumbling brick wall. In one hand, I have a cigarette. In the other, a small paper bag wrapped around a bottle. Inside, there's about half a liter of Jameson with lipstick smudges around the rim.

  “Jump, Gidge,” my best friend, Reba, says from below. She's dressed like a nun, in a long navy skirt that tangles in the brambles, and a white cardigan slung over slim shoulders. It's why we get along, me and Reba. I'm sin and she's salvation, that's why we work. I don't think I could handle two of me in the same town let alone the same school or party or sleepover. “I know you're afraid of heights—” she starts, but I'm already taking another swig of the whiskey and hopping down to land in a crouch beside her.

  I might be wary of heights, but I'm not sure that I'm afraid.

  I'm not sure that I'm afraid of anything, not anymore.

  That's what growing up around monsters will do to ya.

  “There must be easier ways to get to the bonfire,” she says, unhooking a stray thorny blackberry arm from the shoulder of her sweater. “Like, say, in a car.”

  I take a drag on my cigarette and give her a look.

  “Nobody in their right mind would risk giving me a ride,” I say, pushing past her and following a narrow trail through the brush. “And even if we could find somebody crazy enough to pick us up, there's always the chance Cat or somebody else in the club might see us on the road. Can't risk it.”

  Reba sighs and pushes some of her wavy red hair over one shoulder. Yet another reason we're friends—her father's the pastor of a local church. Mine's the president of an outlaw motorcycle club. She's been trained to hate him from birth; I've hated him since I was fifteen. We might be complete opposites, but we have that in common.

  Everybody else in this town … they're too scared of my dad to hate him. Reba thinks she's got God on her side. I'm not sure that I believe in God, but I sure as shit believe in the devil. I've seen him, him and his demons.

  And they all ride in Cat's motorcycle club—Death by Daybreak MC.

  They wear leather vests and smoke cigarettes, fuck groupies and drown themselves in booze and the skunk-y sweet scent of pot. They tame wild beasts made of chrome, bury men in the woods behind my grandmother's house, and they don't lose a wink of sleep about any of it. I used to think of them as giants, guardians, big men with beards and tattoos and arms rippling with muscles that stood watch over me like an honor guard over a princess.

  I don't think that anymore.

  “I can't believe you talked me into going to this,” Reba whispers, her Southern accent as thick as the humidity clinging to the late evening air. It's getting dark, and in the distance, I swear, I can see fireflies. They don’t live in the Pacific Northwest, but a girl can dream, right?

  I lead the way through the brush, alternating drags of my cigarette with sips of the whiskey. It burns my throat going down, but it's the only thing that keeps the memories at bay, locks them up and throws away the key. I'm only seventeen—I shouldn't have to deal with this kind of shit yet. Hang-ups and nightmares and emotional triggers are for people who've lived and loved and experienced and traveled.

  I've been trapped in a cage my whole life.

  So why is this happening to me?

  Blood drips to the floor in thick, crimson drops. It pools around the knife, stains her white shirt red. It's too personal, the way she watches that blade, like she knows. She knows she's going to die—and I know it, too.

  “It's our last big hurrah before senior year,” I say, looking up at the yellow-brown leaves on the trees. It's been a hot summer, too hot. Everyone in our neighborhood has a dead lawn and shriveled bushes, dusty driveways and a newfound hatred for the sun—our little Oregon town is more than ready for fall. “We have to make an appearance.”

  “We don't have to do a darn thing, sugar,” Reba says with an exasperated little sigh. I glance back at her and see her pinching the scooped bridge of her button nose. She's the perfect Southern belle, Reba is, a Tennessee transplant with a closet-alcoholic mother and a proselytizing father. I'm not judging her or them—I don't have room to judge anyone—but I can sense that this is where the conversation's heading. “We're better than them, than all of that nonsense.”

  “You might be,” I say, giving her one last look before I turn my attention back to the trail, “but I know I'm sure as hell not.”

  I ignore Reba until I finish my cigarette. As much as she complains, I know she wants to be here, too. Everybody else will be. The whole goddamn senior class. She wouldn't miss it for the world. Reba and I might be best friends, but she's also friends with three other girls—Dena, Chardou, and Amiya. She'll want to see them, let them know that even if she hangs out with me, she can just as easily slip into their group and be one of them, too.

  A few minutes later, I'm starting to feel the Jameson in my blood and my steps get a little wobbly, my leather boots stumbling to the edge of the path as I weave my way through pines still green with needles and deciduous trees with sun-bleached leaves. Buzzed like this, the whole landscape looks prettier somehow, less dead and dry and more … I don't know, magical.

  Despite the heat, a chill runs down my spine.

  “Do you hear that?” Reba asks from behind me.

  I do.

  “Music,” I say with a sloppy, whiskey-laden grin.

  The sound of an eighties rock ballad sneaks through the trees, weaves itself into the wind and teases my hair. Johnny R. must be DJing tonight. He's the only person I know under the age of thirty who still listens to Lynyrd Syknrd. But since he's also the only person with a professional DJ for a dad (a dad who lets him borrow his equipment, mind you), he gets to play whatever he wants.

  We hit the edge of the trees and break through to the flickering light of a bonfire, built up and burning in an old swimming pool behind an abandoned country house. According to my mom, the family that lived there lost it to foreclosure in the seventies. It's been empty for so long that even she used to party here.

  There are people everywhere—at least half the senior class and some of the juniors, too—mingling around the edges of the pool, sitting on the weathered old deck with the missing railing, even lounging on the roof.

  I don't wait for Reba—she'll want to check in with Dena, Chardou, and Amiya first—and head straight across the patchy, shriveled stretch of lawn and weeds over to where Johnny K. is sitting, smoking a joint and watching his friends feed wood from a stack of old pallets into the flames. In sixth grade, both Johnny R. and Johnny K. wanted to simply be “Johnny”. Our class organized a fight out on the blacktop, right over the faded mural of all fifty states in bright primary colors. They beat the shit out of each other, so bad that by the time the teachers caught onto us, both boys had to pay a visit to the local emergency room.

  After that, it was pretty obvious that both Johnny Ranier and Johnny Kinner were going to have to settle for sharing the name. It hasn't been an issue since.

  “Mind if I have a drag?” I ask, sitting down next to him and not caring that the school's star quarterback is checking out the low plunging V of my shirt. I wore it on purpose. Not for him, but for me. It's my body and I'll decide how it's dressed. Not my father. Not the club. Not anyone
.

  God, if he knew I was here tonight …

  I laugh and Johnny K. gives me a strange look, his blue eyes flickering like he wants to fuck me but also like he thinks I might be crazy.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Johnny passes over the joint and then runs his palm over the short, shaved brown hair on the top of his head. He's got a nice wide chest, big arms for a high school boy.

  But I'm not interested.

  I'm ruined for high school boys.

  I think I was born ruined.

  I take the joint from him and pause at the sound of squealing tires, glancing over my shoulder too see our school's running back, Trevone Hundley, coming down the curving dirt and gravel road like a bat outta hell. A plume of dust rises in his wake, highlighted by the two massive floodlights posted near the road. It curves past the collapsed fence of the old house's backyard and winds its way down the hill into town. I have no idea what Trevone and his crew were up to in the woods back there. Frankly, I don't want to fucking know.

  I ignore him as he climbs out of his car with a hoot, dragging his best friend, Kellen Doughty, and the girl they're always fighting over—Tina Flacco. I haven't seen the three of them at all this summer, but last I knew, she was sleeping with them both.

  Good for her.

  I doubt either of those football douches saves it just for her anyway.

  “Whoa, look what the Cat dragged in,” Trevone says, flashing a white-toothed grin my direction, dropping his legs over the side of the pool and reaching for the joint. I take a long, hot drag, smoke burning my lungs as I hold it in as long as I can and then pass it over. “Miss Daybreak herself. Daddy let you out of his cage for the night?”

  “Let's just say I picked the lock, shall we?” I tell him with a smile, leaning back and enjoying the warm summer air on my bare shoulders and arms, the silver bracelets on my left wrist tinkling. Raven-dark hair falls down my back in a silken wave as I look up at the stars, silver pinpricks of light in the navy wash of sky.

  “Good deal,” Trevone says, taking two drags before giving the joint to Tina. He hops down in the pool and within seconds, the bonfire is climbing with orange and red fingers, digging its claws into the darkness and driving it back to the fringes of the yard.

  More people arrive—big groups of them stuffed into cars, bringing coolers and kegs and unbridled laughter. I watch them all, part of the group but somehow still alone, sitting in my red satin halter top and leather pants, kicking the soles of my black heeled boots against the side of the pool.

  For a while there, I almost forget who my dad is, laughing and drinking and smoking until my head feels like it's spinning.

  “Well, somebody sure is havin' a good time,” Reba says, sitting down beside me, proper in all the places that I'm improper. Almost indecent, really.

  Cat would so kill me for this …

  Some people—ignorant people—think that having a dad named Cat is a little weird, especially considering his … chosen profession. But the guys call their president that for a reason. Cats are some of the most efficient hunters on the planet, taking down a wide variety of prey … and also, everyone knows that well-fed housecats kill for fun. Toy with their prey, play with it, torture it before they kill it.

  That's my dad. That's Cat, President of Death by Daybreak MC.

  And sometimes I think he's just as hard on his daughter as he is his enemies.

  “A really fucking good time,” I say, leaning into her.

  The acrid smell of smoke curls around the pair of us, me with my Jameson and Reba with her plain old Coca Cola. We sit there for the longest time, until Johnny K. asks Reba to dance and she accepts, joining the crowd to the right of the pool and hitting the makeshift dance floor with moves that were probably outdated by the time this old house was built.

  A few minutes later, Johnny R. gives up on trying to convert us all to records and old-school rock and sets up a playlist on his iPhone, leaving the DJ station to invite me to dance next. I abandon the now empty bottle of whiskey, run my tongue over my teeth to make sure there aren't any lipstick stains, and take his hand.

  It's warm and sweaty and unsure. Joining Johnny R. in the empty dirt patch where my classmates grind and bump and grin and grope, I know I'm dancing with a boy instead of a man.

  Flickers of a different party, a different moment, a different dance partner skitter around the edges of my mind, but I ignore them, letting the booze and the pot keep control of my brain and all the horrible things crawling around inside of it.

  After a few songs, I push Johnny R. away and stumble over to the edge of the yard, where the black silhouettes of trees stand guard like silent ghosts. Putting my hand on the faded white paint of an apple tree trunk, I lean over and try to fight the sudden, overwhelming nausea spiraling through me. It doesn't help that on the ground near my boots, the plump corpses of rotten fruit litter the dirt like splotchy scabs.

  The scuff of a rubber sole on the ground nearby draws my attention up and over to the black-on-black shimmer of a shadow hiding in the trees. As sick as I feel right now, my head still spinning with THC and alcohol, my hand drops to my boot and the hunting knife buried in a sheath behind the leather.

  “Shouldn't mix pot and booze, Gidge,” a rough voice says, just beyond the orange-yellow pool of light cast by the bonfire. It dances through the dark, vertical bars of the forest, highlighting the dry brown sea of undergrowth.

  Lifting my head up, I try my very best not to puke.

  “Crown?” I ask, but I already know it's him because there's nobody else in this town that's as big as a house but that moves like a cat, padding on soft paws through the night. I swear, I can see his smile before I see his face, just the Cheshire's grin floating in the darkness. “What are you doing here?” I whisper, heart pounding, beads of sweat sliding down the sides of my face.

  Crown is my father's right hand, the vice president of Death by Daybreak.

  “Looking for you,” he says, stepping into the light, all six foot five of him cloaked in black leather and bullshit. Oh, don't get me wrong—Crown is as brutal as Cat on a good day. On a bad one, he's twice as dangerous and packed with enough emotional issues that he may as well be walking dynamite. But he's charming and he's handsome and the man all the club whores fight over.

  My stomach turns and I lean over, planting a hand across lips painted ruby red. Crown knows I'm not allowed to wear makeup—ever. It's just another one of Cat's archaic, sexist, fucked-up rules.

  “As soon as I heard there was a senior class bonfire happening tonight,” he says, leaning his forearm against the apple tree, “I knew you'd make the great escape.”

  I fall to my knees and throw up, the sickly sweet smell of overripe apples making the situation ten times worse. I just hope Reba doesn't see me and come over here. It's already pretty damn clear how she feels about the drinking and the smoking; I don't need further confirmation that what I'm doing is wrong.

  “Finish up and let's go. My bike's parked down the hill.”

  I raise eyes rust-red eyes up to glare at him, wishing I'd never touched that joint. Pot on its own is fine; alcohol I can handle. Crown is right—I shouldn't have mixed the two.

  “I can't just leave Reba here,” I say, even though I really could. Not only can she take care of herself—she says all good Southern belles know how to kick serious 'booty' if needed—but pretty much everyone here likes Reba. There's not a soul on this property that would refuse her a ride. Except, you know, maybe Crown.

  “Reba's just fine, and you know it,” he says, his moss green eyes taking me in with a flicker of amusement and just the tiniest spark of anger. He rubs a hand over his mouth and the dark stubble surrounding it. “Gidge, you're already in deep enough shit as it is.”

  “Cat knows,” I said, and the words come out a breathy sigh.

  “Yeah, Cat knows,” Crown tells me as I look up, and up, and up toward that handsome face of his. He has a nice square jaw, a full mouth, and green eyes
that drop panties with a single glance—and trust me, they drop a lot of panties. In my humble opinion, Crown is a whore. He got his name by getting drunk on a whole bottle of Crown Royal whiskey—back when he was still a hang-around with the club—and ended up butt-ass naked on the roof with a groupie sucking his dick. Whore. That's what he is, no matter how charming he might seem at times.

  “Fucking great,” I say, getting to my feet as Crown just stands there and watches me stumble. Thanks for keeping your mouth shut, you asshole, I think as I take deep, steadying breaths and watch the world tumble and spin around me. But I know better than anyone that Crown—as well as the rest of the club—doesn't owe me shit. The only reason they associate with me at all is because of Cat. “I'm gonna tell Reba I'm leaving so she doesn't worry.”

  Crown crosses his big, muscular arms over his chest, leather vest crinkling with the motion.

  “What?”

  “Your friend's just fine, Gidge. And putting it off won't make it any easier.”

  I close my eyes and resist the urge to punch the apple tree in frustration.

  Once upon a time, I liked having Crown watch out for me, knowing that he'd be there if I needed him. Now I realize that he's more like a glorified prison guard. He's there not only to keep me safe, but to keep me period.

  I feel like screaming.

  Instead, I open my eyes and start hiking into the shadows of the trees, Crown silent and steady behind me.

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  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the support of my dear friends, Denise, Savannah, Claire, and of course, Madison.

  Also, I am especially indebted to my author tribe: The Cats Pajamas. Goldie, Geminem, and Tate Motherfucking James make this author gig fun, yo. I’d also like to thank my incredibly motivating Sprint Team. All of them not only encourage me to work hard, but inspire me to be a better writer.

  I am grateful to all of those with whom I have had the pleasure to work with during this book. I’d like to especially recognize my editor, Helayna Trask. She poured hours of tough love and attention into my manuscript. Without her, this book wouldn’t have been possible. I would also like to thank all the members of CJ’s Elite and The Walker Zone.