STONE KINGS MOTORCYCLE CLUB: The Complete Collection

by Daphne Loveling

  My father. Clayton Greenlee. The town drunk. Well, I suppose technically he probably wasn’t old enough to be the town drunk. Don’t town drunks have to be old? But that’s where he was heading, anyway. He probably would have died of the drink eventually, except that something else killed him. Something else entirely.

  At the time, I was too young to know that the town thought of him that way. I didn’t even know what an alcoholic was. All I knew was that he and my mom fought about his drinking a lot. If Clayton and Maggie Greenlee had ever been happy together, those times were long gone by the time I had any memories. Mostly, I just remember the arguments, and of those arguments, I mostly remembered my mom’s criticisms. I knew that she blamed him for having to go to work after Cal was born. I knew she was angry that he had trouble keeping a job for very long. I knew she considered him half the man she had thought he was when they had met.

  But I didn’t really know or care about any of those things. Because to me, he was my daddy, my hero. Any weaknesses he had, I looked right past them and saw only the way he smiled at me, ruffled my hair and called me his SeeSee.

  Growing up the middle child between two brothers, I often felt out of place. Reed and Cal preferred playing with their own rambunctious classmates to spending time with their boring sister who preferred reading to sports. My mother seemed to choose her solitude over spending time with her only daughter or teaching her things. To be fair, it wasn’t just me she ignored. Maggie Greenlee never seemed to really take to motherhood. When my brothers and I were young children, it seemed like we were always trying unsuccessfully to get her attention. Whenever she did seem to notice us, it was usually to yell at us for messing up the living room or spilling milk on the kitchen floor. But whereas my mom could be volatile, aloof and temperamental by turns, my dad was always constant, doting and affectionate with me. He loved me, and I always knew it. His affection was the center of my world.

  Most of my memories of my father were hazy now that I was an adult: a hand on my head, the smell of his beery breath when I came home from school, his raucous laugh when he would tell me little-kid jokes. But by far my strongest, most vivid memory of him was when he died at my feet, in the street. Shot by my mom’s lover, a member of the local biker gang. The Stone Kings.

  In the weeks leading up to his death, my parents had been quarreling more and more. I’ll never know how long my dad knew about the affair, but I remember him coming home drunk more often, and that he had a haggard look in his eyes that I had never seen before. Then one day, just as school was letting out on the second to the last day of the year, Reed came running up to me as I was walking off the school grounds and told me Dad had been shot.

  I got to my father just moments before he died. I still remember being shocked by how ashy gray his skin was, and how vivid the crimson of his blood looked by comparison. As he wheezed his final breaths and I clung to him, he whispered something to me that I couldn’t catch through the sound of my own sobs. I opened my mouth to ask him what he had said, but he was already gone. It still haunts me that I didn’t know what the last words he ever said had been. I felt like I had failed him by not hearing them.

  As unknown hands were pulling me away from my father’s body that day, my eyes ran unseeing over the crowd of mostly adults, until suddenly they locked on the eyes of another child. I remember he was a boy, of about Reed’s age. A wave of anger hit me so intense it almost knocked me back to the ground. It was a blinding, rabid fury at him, whoever he was, for being a child like me, but who probably still had a father. Who would probably sit down to dinner that night with him, and tell him about school, and his father would ask him whether he had any homework. Things I would never have again.

  After the funeral four days later, my father’s name became all but forbidden in our household. It wasn’t that my mom ever said that, exactly, but somehow it was clear to all three of us kids. I didn’t want to talk about him much, anyway. My pain was too deep, too private, to share with anyone. My older brother Reed became sullen and withdrawn. My younger brother Cal asked for my father a couple of times in the first days, but after being hushed angrily by my mother, he eventually stopped. I retreated to my room, and tried to pretend that my daddy was still there, that he was simply at work and would be coming home soon.

  The story behind my father’s death traveled quickly through the town’s gossip circles, and we became the subject of feverish whispers. I was too young to understand exactly what had happened, why my father had been killed, but I knew that people were saying whatever had happened was because my daddy was Bad, and my mommy was Bad, too. The town whispered about it when I or my brothers would walk by, to the drug store to buy candy, or walking home through downtown after school. Our family had the whiff of scandal about it now, and everyone knew the name Greenlee, though few talked about any of it to our faces.

  My mom grew even more remote after my father’s death. She had never been a particularly affectionate mother, anyway — as an adult, it seemed a mystery to me why she had had kids in the first place, given that most of the time she just seemed irritated by the mess we made or the noise we caused. But whereas before that day she had yelled at us frequently, afterwards it was almost as though we didn’t exist. Reed was just old enough to babysit us younger kids, and so Mom began to leave us fairly often to fend for ourselves in the evenings. We didn’t know where she went, but it didn’t seem to be in Lupine, because we probably would have heard about her goings on from other people in the town if they’d known anything. Reed would put us and himself to bed, and then in the morning, she would be back, and no one would talk about when she had come home or where she had been.

  Eventually, my brother Reed left home at seventeen, moving in with the family of one of his friends until he could finish high school. My mother didn’t protest. Once he turned eighteen, he left the area, and we had only had sporadic news from him after that. Barely three months after I graduated from Lupine Senior High, my mother packed up and moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, leaving me with a junker car full of possessions to drive myself to my freshman dorm at Aspen College. My younger brother Cal, who had just turned thirteen, went with her.

  I spent my freshman year of college mostly alone, save for the occasional terse hand-written letter from Scottsdale with a couple of twenty-dollar bills inside. I went “home” for the summer, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out my mom didn’t really want me around. Away from the taunting gaze of Lupine, she had found a new life for herself with a perpetually-tanned dentist named Darryl who smiled too much and laughed too loud. He put up with Mom’s moods, though, I had to hand that to him. And really, he was nice. But I felt out of place, and Cal was just old enough to have found himself a crowd of teenage boys to hang out with, and he was rarely around. So, I went back to school that year, and when I ran out of money to live on spring semester, I didn’t ask my mom for help. Instead, I took a leave of absence and decided to get a job to save up the rest of my tuition money myself. Somehow, I ended up back in Lupine, and three years later, here I still was, working at the bar and saving for a future I didn’t even know if I wanted.

  I finished up my coffee and my musings and went to take a shower. When I got out, Carly had come back. “Hey, girlfriend!” she called to me cheerily.

  As always, Carly looked supremely fashionable, her curly riot of blond hair mussed just to perfection, her makeup stunning without being overly noticeable. She was wearing a tight black dress and dark knee-high Frye harness boots. The exquisitely-done Mayan-design sleeve tattoos on her arms somehow made her look only more elegant. In my formless bathrobe and wet, straggly hair, I felt like a schlub next to her. It was a good thing she was so nice, I told myself, because otherwise I would have felt like strangling her.

  “Hey, you’re back!” I replied. “You want some coffee?” I asked, nodding over to the maker. “There should still be a cup or so left.”

  “No thanks,” Carly said, plopping down on the couch and heavi
ng a long, dramatic sigh. “Man, I am bushed! What’s up?”

  “Not much.” I decided to spare her the pity party of me whining about my last twelve hours or so. “I thought you weren’t going to be back until Sunday.”

  Carly rolled her eyes and grinned at me. “Yeah, I know. But my mom was already driving me crazy.” I had met Carly’s mom a couple of times, and to me, she seemed perfectly nice, but I knew she and Carly clashed over her career choice. “Besides, I ended up getting a last-minute wedding gig tomorrow. A friend of mine who is doing the wedding needs a hand because her assistant backed out at the last minute. So I have to go do a practice run with the bride and bridesmaids today.”

  “Cool,” I said. I knew weddings tended to pay well, even if they were very time-consuming and could be stressful.

  “Yeah. The money’s cool, anyway,” Carly admitted. “I hear from Gabi that the bride is kind of a bridezilla. So I’m sure she’ll be pissed that I’m coming in last-minute.”

  “You’ll wow them,” I assured her. And she would. I had seen Carly’s work. She was amazing at what she did. And passionate about it. Watching her grow more and more in demand as a hair and makeup artist made me wish I had some idea what I wanted to do with my life.

  I bent over and gave my hair a good towel-drying. “You shouldn’t do that,” Carly said mildly. “It’s damaging to your hair. You’re roughing up the cuticle.”

  “So you’ve told me,” I grinned. I was used to Carly’s beauty hints. If only I followed half of them, I was sure I would look ten times better than I did, but I was just not that much of a girly girl at heart. Laziness usually overtook most of my best beauty regime intentions.

  “You should really get a micro-fiber towel. Those things are amazing.” Carly kicked off her boots and put her feet up, leaning back against the sofa pillows. “So, what’s your story? What do you have going on today?”

  I told her I had to go pick up my car, and why, and she was appropriately sympathetic. She did offer to drive me to the bar to pick up my car, though, which was super nice of her, because otherwise I’d have to walk or figure out whether there was a bus that went by there. I ran to the bathroom and dried my hair, pulling it back into a loose pony, then went to my bedroom and changed into a white t-shirt and some shorts. I wasn’t really in the mood to put on any makeup so I decided to skip it. By the time I was finished changing, Carly was ready to go, too. I gave her directions to the address Cal had given me as she drove. Turned out the clubhouse was about four miles away, in an area of town I hadn’t spent a lot of time in.

  “There’s your car,” she said, pointing. Sure enough, there it was. In a parking lot full of Harleys of different sizes and shapes, my aging Mazda stood out like a sore thumb.

  I thanked Carly for the ride, wished her luck that afternoon, and got out. Walking over to my car, I suddenly realized two things: first, I had forgotten my spare key. And second, I had no idea whether Cal would even think to leave the set he had in the car for me. I groaned in exasperation. If I had come all the way here only to not be able to pick up my car after all, I’d have a four mile walk to get back home.

  I reached the car and tried the driver’s side door, which opened, thankfully. But when I got in, I didn’t see the keys anywhere. I looked under the floor mat, and above the visor. No luck. I checked the glove box, but they weren’t there, either. Frustrated, I sat in my car with the door open for a couple of minutes and tried to think what to do next.

  “You lost?” a deep voice said beside me, making me jump. I looked up, and locked eyes with one of the biggest men I’d ever seen.

  He looked down at me with strangely intense dark eyes, his expression unreadable. His hair was close cropped, his jaw square and hard. A shadow of a beard just made his features more striking. He was wearing a black t-shirt that stretched tight across his chest. A ripple of tattoos ran down his tanned, muscular arms. Faded jeans sat low across his narrow hips, and his thighs were so sculpted I could see their hardness through the fabric. Holy cow, this guy was ripped. And hot as Hades. I wondered in a daze whether I had ever seen a man so good looking in real life before.

  “Well?” He crossed his arms and looked at me, cocking his head speculatively.

  With a start, I realized I’d been staring, and that he had asked me a question. “Uh, no,” I stammered. “Not lost. I just… this is my car.”

  One side of his mouth turned upward slightly. A jolt of electricity ran straight through me to my core. “Why’s it in our parking lot?” he challenged. His brow furrowed as looked at me.

  A flash of exasperation ran through me, both at Cal for putting me in this embarrassing situation, and at the mountain of muscle standing in front of me. Fighting the urge to apologize, I willed myself to keep my voice steady and firm. “I can’t find the keys for it. My brother left it here for me to pick up, but the keys aren’t —“

  “Why did he leave it here?” he interrupted me.

  Jesus, what a jerk! I fumed. Like I wanted to be there. “Damned if I know,” I retorted, my voice coming out clipped and irritated in spite of myself. “It’s not like I asked—“

  “This is private property, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart? Seriously? What kind of cro-magnon man was this, anyway? “It’s not like I’m trying to trespass,” I said sarcastically. “I just want to get my car, but—“

  “You should tell your brother not to go leaving things where they don’t belong.”

  “Look, you jerk, will you stop interrupting me?!” I fired back. I got out of the car and stood facing him. Well, maybe facing wasn’t the right word. He had at least eight inches on me, so eye level for me was just above his chest. I stood up as straight as I could and tried to ignore the fact that that corner of his mouth had just turned up a little more. Smug asshole, I thought. I took a deep breath. “Look,” I began. “I am trying to get my car out of here. But my brother left it here, and I can’t find the key anywhere. So until I can figure out where it is, or get hold of him, I’m stuck here. I promise you, I will get off of your very special private property just as soon as I can.”

  He stood there for a moment, not talking. I watched as his gaze wandered over me, sliding from my face downward, lingering on my breasts, then further down to my… oh, my… An electric thrill shot through me, and heat flooded my body. After what felt like an eternity, his eyes came back up to my face and met mine. “I see. So, you’ve looked for the keys?”

  “God… Yes, I’ve looked for them.” What kind of an idiot does this misogynistic jerk think I am, anyway? “What, do you think I’m just sitting her filing my nails or something?”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  “Ugh, fine. Be my guest,” I huffed. I stepped back and let him by me, feeling the heat from his skin as he brushed close. I caught a whiff of his skin, and it smelled somehow… impossibly manly. But clean. Like soap and leather. It was intoxicating. I willed myself not to close my eyes and breathe in the scent of him.

  He leaned into the car and checked under the mat, then above the visor. I smiled smugly. Then, looking to his left, he peered into the side pocket of the driver’s side door. Reaching in, he pulled out a jingling set of keys.

  He turned and stepped close to me. “These what you’re looking for?” he asked, dangling them in front of my face with a lazy grin. He was only about a foot away from me now, and my face flushed hotter, partly from embarrassment that I hadn’t been able to find my own keys, and partly because I suddenly found myself wondering how the combination of his rough beard and his soft lips would feel between my legs. Whoa.

  “Yes,” I said weakly. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” He grinned at me, a slow, lazy affair that spread across his handsome face, transforming the gruff, sexy biker’s expression like we were suddenly in bed together. He was clearly enjoying that he had found what I had insisted wasn’t there. Good god, he was infuriating. His gaze was boring into me, his face inches from mine now, sexy upturned lips taunti
ng me. I bit my lip in embarrassment and looked down. He reached down with his other arm and grabbed my hand, bringing it close to him. My breath hitched at the unexpected contact. I looked up at him in confusion.

  Without a word, he licked his lips slowly and dropped the keys in my hand, then closed my fingers over them. He stayed like that, his large fist around my small one, and I felt my breath grow shallow and my nipples harden with desire. I swallowed painfully and took a nervous step back, pulling my hand away from his.

  His hand, now free, lifted to my face, pushing back a stray lock of my hair with a gesture that was so intimate I shivered. He drew closer to me then, and leaned in toward me until his breath was caressing my ear. “Your brother picked a mighty strange place to leave your car,” he said in a low growl, his voice grown thick. “Not exactly the safest part of town.” His voice dropped to a near-whisper that felt like it was singeing me from my insides out. “You like danger, honey?”

  It felt like I was melting. Without even touching me, he was making me feel things that no man ever had. My lips parted involuntarily, my eyes fluttered shut for a moment. I cleared my throat and struggled to speak.

  “I… he’s a prospect of the motorcycle club,” I stammered. “My brother. He… he took my car last night to do some club stuff and never brought it back, so he told me he’d leave it here.”

  The man pulled back from me for a second. His eyes lost just a hint of their fire as his expression became quizzical. “Your brother’s a prospect here?” he asked, cocking his head slightly.