by Ali Parker
Ellie nodded knowingly. “I don’t know why I thought we’d be doing anything that wasn’t still illegal.”
“Who said anything about it being illegal?”
Ellie gave me a flat look. “People don’t switch their engines just for shits and giggles. Two of these are stolen, right?”
“That’s not information we need to know. As far as we’re concerned, we’re just the people hired to get the job done. That all right with you?”
Ellie smirked. “I get to get up close and personal with these bad boys. Of course, it’s all right with me.”
Yet again, she impressed me with her tenacity. She wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, whether that was literally or figuratively. Ellie was a strong woman. I had always thought so. And she was a dear friend. I couldn’t deny that I cared for her.
I had even gone to the lengths to ask Johnny to have her back as if she were one of us. Johnny had instantly agreed. She was part of the MC. She just didn’t know that. As far as she was concerned, she was still on the outside. That way, if the law or someone worse like the Black Hearts ever came knocking, Ellie would be safe on the sidelines.
We set to work right away removing the engine from the first bike.
After five hours, we took a lunch break. Ellie had packed her own food, which surprised me a little. I grabbed us each a beer and joined her outside on the grass with a sandwich in hand for myself. She was sitting with her legs stretched out in front of her as she let the sun warm her face.
“So, tell me. How did you get so good at being a grease monkey? I don’t think I’ve ever really asked. And I’m not trying to be a sexist asshole here, but you don’t see many girls with a mechanic interest these days.” Especially girls like Ellie.
Ellie popped the tab of the beer I handed her and took a sip. A little bead of it formed at the corner of her mouth, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “My dad.”
I smiled. So, she was a daddy’s girl.
“He taught you everything you know?”
“Everything I knew before you hired me, yeah. He always had me around motorcycles when I was growing up. Drove my mom crazy. She wanted me to go shopping with her or to nail appointments. You know? But I only ever wanted to be in the garage with my dad. I wanted to understand how so many tiny parts could make something so powerful. I dedicated myself to learning it all, and it made my dad really happy. I think that’s probably how it all started. I wanted to be the son he never had.” Ellie shrugged and drank more beer. “Once I started, I never wanted to stop.”
“Did your dad ride too?”
“Oh, absolutely. Not the kind of stuff you guys ride, though. He was a speed man. He had a few bikes. A Ducati and a VMAX. Once he got older, he traded in for something a little more practical. A V-Strom, if I remember correctly.”
“Never was a Harley man?”
Ellie giggled and shook her head. Then, she plucked a blade of grass and twirled it between her thumb and forefinger before peeling it apart into thin strips. “No. Dad never liked Harleys.” She looked at me as if she was worried she would offend me. “He thought they were all noise and little else. Just for show, in other words. And he could never justify spending the kind of money a Harley costs, especially because it couldn’t buy him the speed he was after.”
“And do you agree with your old man?” I sipped my beer. “Do you think hogs are a waste of money?”
“Yes and no.”
“I’m intrigued.”
“I think Harleys are more of a work of art than other bikes. Every piece is assembled with the intent of making a masterpiece. Other bikes are built to conquer the roads and ride fast and hard. They don’t have the same beauty a hog can have.” She looked over her shoulder to the bikes standing in a row in the shop. She pressed her chin to her bare, tanned shoulder, and smiled. “Dad never saw that part of them, I don’t think.”
“But you do.”
“Yeah. I do.”
The girl was making it hard to think of anything but her lips. I wanted to know how they would feel against mine and around my cock. What would she taste like?
After finishing our lunches, we got back to work. Ellie had her back to me as she crouched beside her bike. I could see the muscles in her back and shoulders as she worked. Her arms were strong, and the muscles down her spine were tight as she moved.
She stood and wiped sweat from her forehead. She blew out a breath, and my eyes fell to the swell of her breasts at the neckline of her muscle shirt. She was sexy as hell. Johnny’s words started echoing in my brain. Thoughts of throwing her down on my bed and ripping her clothes off ran rampant. I wanted to taste her. I wanted to fuck her so good, she couldn’t remember her own goddamn name.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I tore my eyes away from Ellie to answer it. It was Jax.
“Hey, man,” I said into the receiver.
Jax needed a lift so I left to go get him. Ellie said she wanted to stay and work a bit later. I agreed and felt completely comfortable leaving her at my place. I gave her the code to the gate so she could get out and let herself back in when she needed. For some reason, she smiled as I passed her a crumpled piece of paper with the code scribbled on it.
She tucked it into her back pocket and turned away from me to continue working on the bike.
Chapter 6
Ellie
At six thirty in the morning, Cade dragged his tongue up the side of my face. The smell of dog kibble and general doggy breath was overpowering. I wiped the slobber away and sat up in a state of still being half-asleep.
Cade leaped off the bed and whined. He needed to go outside.
I rolled off the mattress and followed Cade down the hall to the sliding glass doors. I let him out into the backyard, where he ran a few frantic laps before doing his business. As he frolicked, I filled his water and food dish.
After letting him back inside, I got ready for the day. I was heading back to Axel’s shop, and he had told me he wanted to get an early start. I wasn’t an early riser. I needed coffee, and lots of it, before I was able to concentrate on my work.
So, I brewed a pot of coffee and sipped on it while I got dressed and washed my face. I had a few minutes to spare before I had to leave the house, so I spent them with Cade on the sofa. I scratched his ears and patted his belly when he rolled on to his back.
“I gotta go, buddy,” I said as I got to my feet and made for the front door. Cade followed me, his claws clicking on the hardwood. “I’ll be back tonight, though. Don’t worry. We’ll watch a movie, and we’ll go for a you-know-what.” Saying the word “walk” around Cade was bad news. He would get too excited for his own good, and I would feel too guilty not taking him out. So I didn’t say the word, and I mentally promised him I would take him for a walk later that night.
“Bye, and be good,” I called through the crack in the door before closing it and locking up behind me.
On the way to Axel’s house, I stopped to grab us coffee and breakfast. I knew what he liked. I’d been picking up food in the mornings for us for years. I didn’t do it all the time, maybe once a week, but I knew Axel always appreciated it. He was the sort of man who never seemed to notice when he was hungry. If he had a lot on his plate, I hated to think how long he would go without taking care of himself.
I had worked an overtime shift with him one time where he didn’t stop to take a single break over the course of eighteen hours. When I asked how long he’d been working, he blew me off. I waited another hour or so before asking again. That time, I noticed the purple bags under his eyes. I had accused him of pushing himself too hard. We argued about it. I didn’t back down.
Johnny had been there and thought it was hilarious. He had found it especially humorous when I won the battle and sent Axel home to sleep and eat. He had returned the next morning and given me a sullen thank you. After that, we never brought it up again. That was one thing I really liked about Axel. He was a proud man, but he wasn’t ever too proud to tha
nk me or tell me he was wrong.
Axel was at the gate when I pulled into his driveway. He let me in and waved as I parked in my usual spot. I got out of the car and passed him a cup of piping hot black coffee. Then, I grabbed the fast food bag full of hash browns and breakfast sandwiches.
“Do we have time for a quick bite first?” I asked.
Axel snatched the bag out of my hand and peered into it. “Fuck yeah, we do.”
We dug into the sandwiches and hash browns and ate standing up. It didn’t matter to either of us.
When we were done eating and had been working for a half an hour or so, Axel tugged a rag in his back pocket and wiped his hands on his jeans. “Forgot to mention, I talked with a guy last night who’s selling a shop. It has everything we need. I’m buying it. Then, I won’t have to worry about people coming to my house. You and I will go in on Monday and get everything in order.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding as I digested what he’d said. “So, no more need to come here to work?”
“Nope,” he said.
For some reason, my heart sank. I was enjoying working with Axel at his home. I liked having time with just us. It had been easy for us to talk and laugh without the constant distraction of other MC members or the endless stream of customers. I would miss this.
After working a little while longer in silence, I began wondering how Axel could even afford any of this in the first place. His house and his property were massive. The shop itself was worth more than my apartment doubled, maybe even tripled. This was not the sort of income I had been led to believe an MC member had. Mind you, I knew a lot of things they let me believe were probably lies.
It was for my own good, of course, but they were lies nonetheless.
“Hey,” I asked as I crouched in front of one of the bikes. “How can you afford a place like this? I just, I don’t know, I never thought this was the kind of place you came home to at night.”
I knew my question was forward. It was really forward. But Axel never seemed to be bothered by how direct I was.
“I made some good investments over the years. I didn’t mess around with money when I was young. Never had any debt. I got lucky, I guess.”
I looked over my shoulder at him. He had never looked up from his work while he answered me. He was lying. I was used to it by now.
I chewed the inside of my cheek. It shouldn’t matter that he was lying. He didn’t owe me anything. He never had. But for some reason, I wished he would be honest with me. I wished he would come clean about how he and the others of the MC made their money. Like Johnny. It was a strange, wild, vicious way to live, and I wanted to learn everything about their lifestyle that I could. It was the same curiosity I had felt when my dad first introduced me to motorcycles. I had to know how everything worked.
He still had his back to me. He was wearing a white T-shirt and dark blue jeans today. The shirt was rather formfitting, casting aside all imagined thoughts of what might lie beneath the layer of fabric.
I could see the outline of what lay beneath. Abs. Broad shoulders. Muscled biceps. He was powerful. I had always known that. I had seen him dressed similarly before, too, but for some reason, it felt different today.
The muscles of his back were particularly hard to look away from.
His forearms were covered in grease and dark splotches from where he had brushed up against the exhaust. I watched him stand, and the hem of his shirt was rolled up ever so slightly. I could see tanned skin along his midriff, and below his belly button was a dark line of hair that vanished beneath the waistband of his jeans.
I swallowed as my gaze followed that down to the fly of his pants.
There had been a time where Axel’s presence made my panties wet and my mind race. He was a good-looking man. No, more than that, he was hot as hell and always had been. His dark and ever-present smolder had done things to my body that astounded me. I was always ready to go when he was around.
Which sometimes made things awkward.
But after years of rejection, that physical response to his presence had faded away. I thought of it as self-preservation. There was no way I could endure being so aroused by him every single day with no follow-through. There was only so much a girl could do with a vibrator.
Johnny had tried to push us together, but Axel withdrew and became closed off to me for a while. Now, it felt like we were finally back on the same page as friends, and I was more than willing to accept that.
But now, after spending so much time together just the two of us, my body was digressing back to how it used to respond to Axel’s presence.
My lips felt swollen. My mouth was wet. My fingertips were tingling with a fierceness that matched the heat between my legs as I thought about what mystery lay at the end of that trail of dark hair.
The way he moved was almost predatory as he leaned over the bike. The leather of the seat creaked, and his hand gripped the handlebars. I looked at his fingers. Strong, calloused, and probably warm. The compulsion to feel his hands on my bare skin was almost unbearable.
“You all right over there, Ellie?”
Shit, he was looking at me. There was no way in hell he hadn’t seen my checking him out. I was terrified that the rest of my body was giving me away. I could feel my nipples pressing up against the inside of my bra. There wasn’t much fabric between them and the air, and there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Axel was privy to a good look at them.
“Yeah, sorry, I got a little distracted, I guess.”
If he doubted me, he didn’t show it. Axel simply nodded his head, as if this was something I did often—which it most definitely was not—and scratched the back of his neck. “Isn’t there something else you’d rather be doing, Ellie?”
I blinked at him. What did that mean?
“S-sorry?” I stammered.
“You know. Have you ever given any thought to getting away from the MC? Away from all the bullshit and the life.”
“No.” I shook my head sternly. “No. I haven’t.”
He looked surprised. “Really? You’ve never been tempted to try something else? Or to work at a shop that operates a little differently?”
“You mean operates within the boundaries of the law?” I asked.
Axel nodded.
“I may have thought about it a little, a few years ago. Then the longer I stayed at the shop with you and the others, the more I came to see that working there wasn’t just a job. I always felt like I was amongst family. Everyone in the MC is my friend. You’re my friend. Johnny is my friend.” I wanted to tell him how much I felt like I belonged with them, but the words caught in my throat and I fell silent.
“Well, we like having you around.”
I looked up. Had he just said something kind to me? “You do?”
Axel threw his head back and laughed. I loved how it echoed off the walls in the shop and danced around my ears. “Yeah, we do. You’re all right, Ellie. You fit right in.”
I blushed for the hundredth time since working alone with Axel and dropped my eyes back to the task at hand. But I kept smiling for five minutes straight.
Chapter 7
Axel
Dan backed the tow truck up in the driveway and across the gravel lot. Once it was in park, he hopped out and shook my hand as he always did and fixed the orange and brown beanie on his head. It came past the tops of his ears, pushing his earlobes out in a cartoonish sort of way. He gave me a broad smile and nodded at the four bikes standing in a line out front of the closed shop doors.
“Just the four?” Dan asked.
“Yeah. For now. Thanks for coming to pick them up. You’re saving me a real fucking headache, man.”
“Whatever I can do to help. You and your boys have had my back plenty of times. I’m happy to repay the favor. Speaking of which,” he dropped his voice and shot Ellie a suspicious look. I suppose he wasn’t sure if I trusted her or not. “A couple of guys stopped by my place two nights ago asking if I had been doing any business with s
ome local boys. They specifically mentioned old bikes like these. Didn’t like the looks of them, Ax. They gave me a bad feeling.”
“And what did you tell them?” I asked. I didn’t like that someone had gone out of their way to ask Dan about me and my crew. It unsettled me. And it reminded me that we weren’t any closer to being out of the fire.
“I told them business was slow, and I’d be lucky to have anyone who needed my truck.” Dan patted the side of the trailer. “They fucked off after that. Didn’t seem too interested in a tow truck driver who was down on his luck.”
“Thanks for covering for me, Dan.”
Dan smiled, and I knew he didn’t see it as a burden. He liked having one toe in the deep end. I had promised myself a long time ago that was as far in as he would ever get, just one toe.
“You’d better hit the road.” I nodded to Ellie who got on one of the bikes and started it up. The engine roared as she played with the throttle and then rode the monster up the ramp onto the back of the truck. I couldn’t take my eyes off her the whole way.
Dan was suffering alongside me.
“Damn,” he breathed.
“I know,” I said.
“How the fuck did you get any work done?”
“Leave it alone.”
Dan instantly retreated from the conversation and put his back to Ellie. He was a man who never needed to be warned twice. I liked that about him.
I helped Ellie with the remaining three bikes, and twenty minutes after he arrived, Dan was pulling out of the driveway and I was closing the gate behind him. Ellie was standing behind me, and she gave me a bright smile when I began making my way back up the driveway.
“Now what?” she asked cheerfully.
“Now, we have a lot of cleaning on our hands.”
Her smile fell, and she scrunched her nose. “I miss the old shop. We never cleaned as much then as we do now.”
I chuckled. “Well, it wasn’t entirely mine, so I didn’t care as much. Now, get your ass back in that shop and hop to it.”
