I feel Justine still warm against me as I slide out of bed, and I sneak to the bathroom to splash water in my face. I feel my muscles warming up as I stretch and head to the bar to make a pot of coffee, scratching my stubble as I do. I won’t bother shaving this morning, partly because I want to save time, and partly because I like the way the wind feels on my face while it’s still rough at the start of a trip.
When the coffee pot starts gurgling, I head back into the bedroom and approach Justine’s slumbering form, bending over her and scooping her into my arms. She murmurs as I lean forward and kiss her on the neck, then gently working my way up to her cheek and her forehead. When I turn the lamp light on, I see that she’s smiling, and I give a low chuckle and kiss her awake on the lips.
“Morning, sunshine,” I growl into her ear before she stretches and blinks up at me.
“Urghn,” she replies, somehow still cute. “What time issit?”
“We’ve got a head start on the sun, let me put it that way,” I say with a grin.
“Five more minutes,” she pleads, turning over in bed.
My hands reach forward and grope her round, soft ass and feel its give as she tries to squirm away from me in her little linen cocoon. Even sleepy and groggy, she gets me riled up faster than anyone I’ve ever met.
I crawl back into bed with her, and my rough, muscular arms swallow her and pull her into my chest as I grope her breasts and grind against her ass. “I said, it’s time to get up. Are you going to give me trouble, little girl?”
“Mhmm,” she murmurs candidly, looking smug as she tightens her grip on the sheets and tries to ball up.
“Maybe I ought to wake you up the right way,” I growl, “settle down that energy of yours before you’re squirming on the back of my seat.”
“I thought I smelled coffee,” she says in feigned innocence as I slide a hand under the sheets, searching greedily until I find her thigh.
My fingers glide over it and electrify the sensitive skin before they move all the way down between her legs and find her pussy. She tries to hold her thighs together, but I work my way in with hardly any effort and find her clit. While groping one breast through the sheets, I start to rub her clit with two fingers in small, tight circles and feel her gasp and goosebumps pricking up along the back of her neck.
Her mouth hangs open, and she pants softly as my relentless rubbing gets her sleepy body warmer and warmer. I waste no time, sparing her nothing as I torment her clit and feel her honey over my fingers--not a bad way to start the morning, if you ask me.
Now squeezing Justine against me, I feel her shake as the orgasm blossoms from her pussy and spreads through her body. I keep circling her clit while she comes, kissing her on the cheek and nipping her ear between deep, husky breathing.
She rolls over, letting out an overwhelmed breath and looking up at me with wide eyes. “Good morning,” she sighs with a warm, blissful smile.
“Alright, brat,” I say, chuckling. “Let’s get you dressed and head out. We’ll want breakfast along the way. It’s a long ride to your place.”
We pull on our clothes for the day, and Justine watches me slide my kutte over my shoulders. “How do you...get one of those?” she asks.
“You’re given one when you become a member of the MC,” I explain, going to one of my footlockers and opening it to dig around until I find my old green military jacket folded up where I left it. I shake it out and hold it up to Justine, who looks at it with raised eyebrows.
“Here,” I say. “This’ll keep you safe from the dust on the road.”
I slide it over her shoulders, and she blushes as the masculine scent of the crisp jacket surrounds her. She seems comforted by it somehow.
“Thanks,” she says, moving her arms around in the comically oversized thing. “It might double as a sleeping bag for me, if I curl up tight.”
I snort a laugh and pinch her on the ass. “C’mon, girl, let’s hit the road.”
An hour later, we’re pulling away from the greasy fast food joint on the side of the road a ways outside town, where we stuffed ourselves with a hearty, filling breakfast of sausage patty, egg, and cheese biscuit sandwiches--and at Justine’s insistence, a cup of fruit for each of us.
“Sorry it ain’t exactly a wholesome, balanced meal,” I say with a chuckle as we’re about to turn back onto the highway. “We can stop in Casper to pick up something...more up your alley.”
“Are you kidding?” she says, and I can hear the grin in her voice. “That was perfect. I was starving.”
“Damn, ha! I bet all that running around we’ve been doing took it out of you,” I say, grinning back at her.
“Y-yeah, it was the running around that wore me out,” she says with a blush, averting her eyes.
I reach behind me and scratch her on the thigh before I roar out of the parking lot, feeling my heart pound and my spirit soaring as I tear across the state.
The first leg of the trip takes us southward to Casper, and with very little between the two, I’m free to let my mind wander. It doesn’t wander far--in fact, it only wanders a few inches to the girl holding onto me in a warm hug.
I feel the same rush I felt back when I first started riding around rural Colorado. Those were the good days, before the military. Those days always felt sunny, and more than anything else, they felt free. I couldn’t explain freedom--I could describe it, but it was something else to feel it and not know how to share that.
But with Justine here this morning, I can’t explain it, but I feel like she shares it with me. The rush of getting up and packing in a quick breakfast for a groggy start comes with a sense of liberty, knowing the road can take you wherever you want, and the entire day is still ripe and fresh before you. That’s the feeling that told me I had to be a biker, and even though our destination is grim, we can enjoy the freedom while it lasts.
That’s special.
She’s special.
By the time we hit Casper, the sun is up and the day is getting busy. My route around the city takes us through some light traffic on the outskirts of the rush hour stream, but I do that on purpose. If we were to drive through the city at a quieter time, we’d be more likely to get spotted. I want to stay as inconspicuous as possible.
We stop to top up on gas on the opposite side of Casper, and just to be on the safe side, I park my bike behind the detached bathroom building after gassing up to let us both answer nature’s call.
“Want to stop inside and grab a snack?” I ask before we head in. “Can of coffee for the road?”
“Coffee sounds perfect!” she chimes. “Caffeine makes me talkative though. Be ready for that.”
I wink at her and enter the bathroom, chuckling.
As I’m cleaning my hands off inside the stall with a sanitary wipe afterward, though, a sound reaches my ears that makes my heart drop: bike engines. It sounds like they’re coming into the gas station, probably to refuel.
“Hey,” I say, knocking on the wall between me and Justine. “Hear that?”
“What do we do?” she hisses back through the thin wall. “Wait in here?”
“No, they’ll have to come here too,” I assure her, frowning. “On three, get out and head straight for the bike, I’ll see if I can get us out of here before they notice us.”
I count down, and we head out of the stall together and wrap around the building to my bike immediately. Sure enough, I catch a glimpse of the bikers pulling up to get gas, and I recognize some of the faces.
These men belong to my enemy.
I keep still on my bike as I watch carefully from around the corner. After most of the men finish fueling up, they head inside the store, and that’s when I take my chance. I pull out as quietly as I can and slip back around onto the highway, then gun the engine and take off in a beeline westward.
Justine holds me tight and leans into me, trusting me fully as she buries her face in my back and sighs contentedly. The adrenaline rush in my veins wakes me up better than a can of
coffee ever would have.
Our route doesn’t take us through the town where I found Justine, but we skirt around the borders of the county along the way. The next time we stop for “lunch” (whatever we can scrounge from a convenience store) a few hours later, I get on the phone with one of our MC’s allies in this part of the state, another club that we’re on good terms with. After a quick chat with one of their officers, I have intel on which roads are going to be more and less heavily patrolled this afternoon.
And that makes staying covert a hell of a lot easier.
The rest of our trip is more of the same, steering clear of the other outlaws whose colors say we’re not on good terms with--most of them connected to Diesel--and avoiding the state troopers that by now must have eyes out for Justine.
Justine has shed the jacket by the time the sun is high in the sky, and it’s about noon when we cross the Utah border. And as we do, some of the excitement of the day starts to melt away from her--I can feel it in her touch.
A little over an hour later, the next time I pull over on the side of the road is when we’re at the sign showing the name of the town, and beyond it lies a community of probably a few hundred at most. It’s a wonder there’s anything that big out here at all.
“How do you feel?” I ask her, looking over my shoulder.
“Not great,” she admits.
“Here’s the plan,” I say. “What are your parents’ schedules like at this time of day?”
“The house should be empty for another few hours,” she says after thinking for a moment.
“Unless?” I ask.
She shrugs, bewildered. “Unless they have a reason to come home, I don’t know?”
“If there’s evidence that your dad was trying to make you someone’s bride against your will,” I say, “it’ll be at home, where he thinks it’s safest. And right now, you’re a legitimate runaway as far as he’s concerned, so his attention is going to be on finding you. If we’re lucky, he hasn’t had time to cover his tracks. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
She looks reluctant, but then takes a deep breath and nods. “Yes. I’m not the only girl in this county. Even if we can’t put Daddy in jail, I...I want enough to make it public. This happened behind closed doors, and I don’t want it to stay that way.”
I nod. “You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, Justine. If your dad were worth shit, he’d be proud of you like I am.”
She squeezes me softly. “It’s enough that you’re proud of me,” she says, half-teasingly.
I chuckle, and we pull off again.
Justine’s family house is a nice one, I have to admit. It’s a cozy two-story home with a tidy yard and a cozy feel to it, despite the otherwise dry environment of the town. Sure enough, there are no cars in the driveway. Still, I park down the block and leave my bike behind a fence sheltered by branches. We need to be quick and not draw attention to ourselves or the house.
Justine leads the way. “I’ve run through my neighbor’s yards all my life,” she whispers. “I know how to get us there without getting seen.” We weave through dry old trees and crumbling sheds until we reach her own home, where she looks around furtively before going to the back porch and taking out a small work glove from under the stairs.
She dumps the spare key out of it and grins at me as she holds it up. I chuckle and watch her unlock the back door and sneak inside, with me close behind her.
The house is deathly empty. Justine immediately changes once we’re inside. Her lip quivers for a moment, but she takes a deep breath and swallows, looking around at the place and taking it all in. I can only imagine what’s stewing in her mind.
The decor is kind of quaint and homey, but there’s something a little drab about it all I can’t put my finger on. It could be the peeling edges of the dated wallpaper, or maybe the faint musty smell of the carpet, but I can see why this kind of place gives her a sense of melancholy.
“Daddy’s office is upstairs,” she says. “But he keeps it locked.”
“Bingo,” I say, moving past her and taking out a bobby pin from my pocket.
We head upstairs, past Justine’s childhood photos and tense-looking family pictures, and it’s hard not to ask her about her past. I want to know everything about her and help her heal, but right now, she’s holding it together delicately. I shouldn’t interrupt that.
Once we reach the door she points out to me, I carefully pick the lock and get it open in a matter of seconds.
“Holy crap,” she says, blinking at my handiwork as I step inside.
“Language, young lady,” I say with a wink that makes her blush as I hold the door open for her.
We step inside to what looks like a typical home office, with a desk and a computer on it and shelves of books and award plaques on the walls. I don’t know what Justine’s father does for a living, and I don’t need to. His office tells me enough about his type.
Justine and I begin searching the room. She goes through folders in the drawers while I get on the computer and see what he was looking at last.
I start looking through his emails, sifting through the personal ones until I find one that has language I’m looking for: it’s vague, but it seems to be discussing a deal with another person. There’s a reference to a contract, and another exchange about it being signed.
“I think I’ve found your dad’s deal,” I grunt, stroking my chin, “but he words his emails carefully. I don’t know if this is incriminating enough. Let me see if I can find this contract he mentions. There might be a hard copy around here, too.”
“I found this that looks recent,” she says, taking out a clip of papers and showing them to me. “But it’s not signed. It must be a copy.”
“Bet he’s got it in his car,” I grumble. “But he’s got to have a backup…”
I start to look through his folders until I find one that’s password-protected.
“Is your dad on the older or younger side?” I ask.
“Older,” she asks hesitantly. “Why?”
I type in Justine’s full name as the password, then just her first name, and a few other combinations until Justine gives me her birth date, and I add that to her first name. The folder unlocks, and I smile as I open it to find...pictures.
Most of them are of documents. In fact, the very first is a copy of the contract Justine is holding, signed by what looks like Justine’s father and another man. But while I try to save the emails and the contract picture to a thumb drive, I notice the other pictures that Justine is staring at.
They’re of her.
Some of them are modest photos, but others appear to have been taken without her noticing. Her face pales as she realizes that she might be looking at her own advertisement pictures.
“This one is from when I was in high school,” she says with a horrified face, hovering over one.”
Before I can respond, both of us freeze at the sound of the door downstairs.
Justine looks out the window, and she puts a hand to her mouth. “It’s my mom! S-she must be home for lunch,” she whispers to me urgently.
“Come on,” I say, taking the thumb drive, closing out of the folders, and crossing the room to the window. “Then we get out of here a different way than we came.”
I pull the window open carefully and quietly, and Justine carefully slips out onto the roof. She wobbles on the sloped surface, but I follow her out and keep her steady as we walk cautiously to the corner of the house, where we’re able to climb down a metal trellis covered in withered vines.
Our feet hit the ground, and we dart through the backyard, back to the bike, my heart racing as I hold Justine’s hand. I don’t even stop to look and see if we’ve been spotted. We race to the bike, hop on, and ride out of the neighborhood like we’ve just robbed the place.
“Oh my god,” I hear Justine breathe behind me. “Oh my god, we just did that.”
“Hell yeah we did,” I laugh. “Now hang tight, we’re taking a different way back
than the way we came, and I’m not stopping until I hit a motel!”
Sure enough, our ride takes us to a motel that’s a few notches above the worst I’ve seen on this side of the border. I paid for a room with one bed, and I took Justine by the hand as I walked her to the room down the open-air sidewalk.
“Hey,” I ask, squeezing her hand. “Before I order us pizza, how are you feeling about what we just did?”
“I...think it’s going to take some time to set in,” she says, giving me an uneasy but loving smile. “But I’m glad we did it before I had time to think myself out of it. Do you...do you think this will be enough to put him away?”
“I think we got our hands on more than he ever expected us to get,” I say with a chuckle, patting the thumb drive in my pocket and unlocking the door to the motel room. “You did good today, Justine. Real good. Now get in that bathroom and strip.”
Justine
I wake up from a beautiful dream feeling totally refreshed and relaxed. There’s a smile hovering still on my lips as the soft comfort of my dream hangs around me. It was lovely. I was in a swimming pool somewhere tropical, just floating around in the cerulean water. There was a beach within eyesight of the pool, and the sun was warming my face, caressing my bare skin and making me feel alive. Of course, any fantasy would be empty without my handsome captor-turned-savior lounging in the pool with me. In my mind, the image of blue water reflecting dappled light across his gorgeous, rugged face and hard, chiseled body still blooms like a flower. I feel so warm and happy inside, and I can’t help but wonder if my dream will ever come true. The idea of traveling the world and seeing beautiful places alongside the man of my dreams is almost too perfect to even imagine. Especially when I compare that dream to the life I have always lived back home. The repression, the boredom, the same routine day in and day out that left me feeling bedraggled and restless at the same time. I never knew how deep my thirst for adventure could reach, but there’s just something about being on the road with Ironside that makes me long for different horizons. I want to experience everything this world has to offer, good and bad, and I know I am brave enough to face it all with Ironside next to me, lifting me up, being my constant backup. He makes me feel safe and proud and brave all at once. It’s really quite amazing, I think.
Ironside: A Bad Boy Biker Romance (Heartbreakers MC Book 3) Page 13
