I got out of my car and walked down the sidewalk to Ride hoping my outfit was okay. I’d put my hair in a girlie ponytail at the top back of my head, I was wearing low-rider jeans, low-heeled boots and my biker jacket. Mine wasn’t like Darla’s. It was a distressed tan leather, had a bit of quilting around the high waist, was lined with short, warm fur and had a six-inch tuft of fluffy fur at the sleeves. I thought it was hot and the deal I got on it was hotter. However, I wasn’t sure about the fluffy fur. I didn’t think bikers were concerned with animal rights. I thought they’d think it was an affront to their brotherhood and they might garrote me.
Welp! Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
I straightened my shoulders, walked into the cavernous store and turned direct to the long counter at the front. It held one cash register even though sometimes the place could get packed. Since I didn’t have his cell, my intention was to ask if someone there knew how I could get hold of Dog. I didn’t expect to see tall, broad, inked-to-the max, long blond-haired Dog standing at the other side of the counter. There was one big, rough biker guy on his side of the counter, three on the outside and all of them turned to me the minute I walked in.
“Hey Dog,” I called on a smile, walking toward him but stopping dead when his eyes sliced to me.
Uh-oh.
His eyes narrowed and his face didn’t get near to hiding the fact that one look at me made him extremely pissed off.
“Do not shit me,” he growled. I took the nanosecond before I peed my pants to try to remember the moves I’d learned in the one, half hour self-defense class I took.
When I made no response and didn’t move, Dog repeated, “Do not come in here and fuckin’ shit me.”
“I’m not shitting you,” I told him because, well, I wasn’t.
His brows flew up. “That cunt sent you?”
Uh-oh again. Dog was using the c-word. I suspected that the c-word wasn’t worda-non-grata in Biker Club Land like it was in the rest of the English-speaking world but still, it said a lot.
Before I could speak, Dog did. “She sent you. Jesus, Gwen. You got one warning, woman. Get your head outta your ass, turn that sweet tail a’ yours and get… outta… here.”
Wow. Dog thought I had a sweet tail. He was scaring me but he wasn’t entirely unattractive so I thought that was kind of nice.
I focused on the matter at hand, took a deep breath and walked forward. All of the bikers went on alert, or, more accurately, scary, biker guy alert so I stopped moving.
Then I said to Dog, “Ginger didn’t send me.”
“I’m bein’ cool with you, babe, go,” Dog replied.
“No, really, she didn’t. Darla came around this morning and she freaked me out. She did this.” I lifted my hand up and did the gun thing with the sound effect thing and my gun blast was nowhere near as good as hers but I forged ahead. “She seemed serious so I thought I’d check in with you, make sure Ginger is all right.”
“Ginger is not all right,” Dog returned instantly. “Ginger is far from all right.”
I closed my eyes. Then I sighed. I did the sigh thing loudly. I was good at that since my sister made me sigh a lot and I had practice. Then I opened my eyes.
“I take it you two aren’t together anymore,” I surmised.
“No, babe, we are not,” Dog confirmed.
Damn.
“What’d she do now?” I asked.
“You don’t wanna know,” Dog answered.
“Are the police after her?”
“Probably.”
I studied him. Then I asked, “But that’s not why she’s in trouble?”
“Ginger’s got all kinds ‘a trouble, babe. But if the cops are after her, that’s the least of her worries.”
“Oh boy,” I whispered.
“That’s about right,” Dog remarked then his eyes shifted over my shoulder.
I was turning to see what he was looking at when I heard a deep, gravelly voice ask, “Who’s this?”
Then I saw him.
I wasn’t into biker dudes but I could seriously make a turn to the Harley side for this guy.
He was tall-ish. He was broad and ripped and there was no “ish” about either of those. He had a lot of tattoos up his arms and neck that I instantly wanted to examine, up close, to the point of cataloguing them and maybe writing books about them. He had salt and pepper hair, mainly pepper, black pepper and it was long with a bit of wave but not too long or too wavy. Ditto with the pepper in his salt and pepper goatee that hung a bit long at his chin in a biker way that was mammoth cool. His cheeks were a couple days past needing a shave which looked good on him too. He had spikes of pale radiating in the tan skin around his blue eyes.
There were only two words to describe all that was him: Biker Yummy.
“Hey,” I whispered and his eyes went from over my shoulder, looking at Dog, to me and my whole body did a shiver.
Then his blue eyes did a body scan and it shivered again.
They locked on mine and his gravelly voice growled, “Hey.”
Another shiver.
Yowza!
“Tack, she’s cool. She’s with me,” Dog stated. My body did a lurch and I turned to see he was around the counter and heading my way.
“I am?” I asked and Dog’s gaze pinned me to the spot and said without words, “Shut the fuck up!”
I shut the fuck up and turned back to Biker Hottie.
“Sheila know about her?” Biker Hottie asked.
I turned to look at Dog who was standing next to me. “Sheila?”
“How many bitches you need?” Biker Hottie went on.
“She’s not my woman, brother, she’s a friend. She’s cool,” Dog answered.
“All right. So who is she?” Biker Hottie, otherwise known as Tack, pushed.
“Her name’s Gwen,” Dog answered. Tack looked at me and I froze.
Then I watched his lips move to form my name softly.
“Gwen.”
Another shiver.
I’d always kind of liked my name. I always thought it was pretty. Tack saying it made me freaking love it.
“So who are you, Gwen?” he asked me directly.
“I’m, um… a friend of Dog’s,” I told him.
“We established that, darlin’,” he informed me. “How do you know my boy here?”
“She’s Ginger’s sister,” Dog said quickly. Tack’s entire, powerfully built frame went wired instantly and it was so damned scary, I forgot how to breathe.
“Tell me she’s here to drop the money, brother,” Tack whispered in a voice that was equally as scary as the way he was holding his body, if not more.
“She and Ginger aren’t tight,” Dog explained. “Like I said, she’s cool. She’s good people.”
“She’s blood of the enemy, Dog,” Tack whispered.
Uh-oh-uh-oh-uh-oh.
I didn’t want to be blood of the enemy, not anyone’s enemy but especially not this guy’s enemy. He was hot but he was also freaking scary.
Time to sort things out, pronto.
I pulled my purse off my shoulder and tugged it open, muttering, “Ginger. A pain in my ass. A pain in my ass since the day she cut off all the hair on my Barbies. She was three. I was too old for Barbies but they were mine. She couldn’t leave them alone? What’s with cutting their hair?” I looked up at Dog and said, “I think that’s what psychos do. We should have known then. She’s three, wielding scissors and causing mayhem and heartbreak.” I kept blabbing as I dug in my purse, found my checkbook and then kept scrounging for a pen declaring, “She was always, always a bad seed.”
I yanked out my checkbook, flipped it open, clicked my pen smartly, put the point to the check and looked at Tack.
“All right, how much does she owe you?” I asked irately, not happy to be bailing Ginger out again, especially when money and angry bikers were involved.
It was at this point I noted that Tack was staring down at me and he wasn’t being scary anymore. He was loo
king like he wanted to laugh. It was a good look.
I didn’t want to see his good looks, not his expressions or the rest of it all over his face (and hair and tats and body). I wanted to go home, whip up a batch of cookie dough and eat it. All.
“Well?” I snapped.
“Two million, three hundred and fifty-seven thousand, one hundred and seven dollars,” Tack answered. I felt my jaw go slack and his white flash of a smile surrounded by his dark goatee dazedly hit some recess of my brain. He finished with, “And twelve cents.”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
Tack was still smiling when he dipped his head to my checkbook. “Think you can get that on one line, peaches?”
“Oh my God,” I repeated.
“You need mouth to mouth?” Tack asked, leaning in. I took a step back, clamped my mouth shut and shook my head. “Shame,” he muttered, leaning back.
“My sister owes you over two million dollars?” I whispered.
“Yep,” Tack replied.
“Over two million dollars?” I repeated, just to confirm.
“Yep,” Tack confirmed.
“You haven’t made an accountancy error?” I asked hopefully.
Tack’s smile got wider and whiter. Then he crossed his big, tattooed arms on his wide, ripped chest and shook his head.
“Perhaps this is foreign currency and you forgot. Pesos, maybe?” I suggested.
“Nope,” Tack returned.
“I don’t have that kind of money,” I told him something I was guessing he already knew.
“Sweet jacket, peaches, but I was guessin’ that,” he replied.
Well, the good news was, the tufts of fur didn’t turn him off. The bad news was, my sister owed him over two million dollars.
“I think it’ll take me a while to raise that kind of cash,” I explained then finished, “maybe eternity.”
“Don’t got eternity to wait, darlin’,” he responded, still grinning so huge, if he burst out laughing it would not surprise me.
“I figured,” I muttered, clicked my pen, snapped shut my checkbook, shoved both in my purse and lost my mind.
I mean, I had reason to lose my mind and that reason had a name.
Ginger Penelope Kidd.
I looked up at Dog and demanded to know, “Why me? Why? Just innocently being born and seven years later, zap! God curses me with the sister from hell. Is it too much to ask for a sister who giggles with you and trades makeup secrets? Is it too much to ask for a sister who finds a great sale, calls you immediately but peruses the racks to stash great deals she knows would look hot on you, so you’ll get a shot at them before anyone nabs them? Is it too much to ask for a sister who’ll come over and watch the new Hawaii Five-O with you so you can both perv on Steve McGarrett and wish you had a Camaro? Is it? Is it?” I ended on a shout.
“Gwen, babe, think you should calm down,” Dog muttered and I could swear I could read on his face that he was wondering if he should knock me out for my own good.
“Calm?” I yelled. “Calm?” I yelled again. “She owes you guys over two million dollars. She cut the hair off my Barbies. She stole the lavalier my grandmother gave me on her deathbed and pawned it to buy pot. She got drunk and stuck her hand down my boyfriend’s pants at Thanksgiving dinner. He was straight-laced, went to church and, after Ginger’s antics… the hand down the pants was only the culmination, he caught her snorting coke in the bathroom too… he thought my family was insane, possibly criminally insane, and he broke up with me a week later. He might have been straight-laced and, looking back, probably boring but at the time I liked him!” Now I was shrieking. “He was my boyfriend!”
“Peaches,” Tack called and my body swung to him to see he’d moved into my space.
I tipped my head back and snapped, “What?”
His hand came up, fingers curling around my neck, then he dipped his face into mine and whispered, “Baby, calm down.”
I stared close up into his blue eyes and instantly calmed down.
“Okey dokey,” I whispered back.
His eyes smiled.
My body shivered.
With his hand at my neck, I knew he felt it and I knew it more when his fingers curled deeper into my flesh. Something flashed in his eyes that made me shiver someplace he couldn’t see but I could feel. A lot.
Time to go.
“I could probably sell plasma and a kidney but I don’t even think that will get me enough money, so, um, can I just leave my sister to deal with this?” I asked politely, wanting to move from the strength of his hand but scared to do it.
“No one takes a blade to you for Ginger,” he said quietly.
“Okay,” I replied.
“Or at all,” he kept going.
“Um…” I mumbled. “Okay.” I said this because I didn’t want anyone to take a blade to me for Ginger or at all and I didn’t want that in a big way.
His fingers curved deeper into my neck and he pulled me up a bit so I was almost on my toes and his face was closer. Way closer. Too close. Shiver close.
“I don’t think you get what I’m sayin’ to you.” He was still talking quietly. “This Ginger shit heats up, you get on radar, you mention my name, yeah?”
Oh no. This didn’t sound good. This sounded worse than owing a biker gang two million dollars. And I suspected there weren’t a lot of things worse than that but, if there were, Ginger would find them.
“Um…if you’re asking ‘yeah?’ as in, ‘Yeah, I get you’, then no, I don’t get you,” I told him honestly because I was thinking with Tack honesty was the best policy.
“All right, peaches, what I’m sayin’ is, you get in a situation, you mention my name. That means protection. Now do you get me?”
“Um… kind of,” I answered. “But why would I get in a situation?”
“Your sister has shit where she lived, she’s shit where she didn’t live, she’s shit everywhere. You walked in here and had no clue. Don’t bumble into another situation because others…” he paused, “they might not find you cute like I do.”
“Okay,” I whispered, liking that he found me cute at the same time regretting my decision not to call my father or, say, get on a plane and fly to France. “If I um… have to use your name… um, what does that mean?”
“It means you owe me.”
Oh boy.
“Owe you what?”
He grinned but didn’t answer.
Oh boy!
“Owe you what?” I repeated.
“I gotta get on my bike and get you out of a situation, we’ll talk about it then.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine,” I assured him and said a short prayer in hopes of making that true.
His grin got bigger.
Then he let me go but slid my purse off my arm and before I could make a peep, he dug into it. I decided to let him have at it. He’d already touched me and I wasn’t certain I wanted that to happen again. I wasn’t certain what my response would be but I was certain that jumping his bones was high up on the list of possibles. I also figured he could best me in a fight for my purse so I was going to let him take what he wanted. My best lip gloss was in that purse but at that point, if he wanted it to give to one of his bitches, I was willing to let it go.
He came out with my cell, flipped it open, his thumb hit buttons, he flipped it closed, dropped it into my purse, then slid it back on my arm.
“You got my number, darlin’. You need it, use it. You don’t need it, you still wanna use it, don’t hesitate. Now, do you get that?”
I hitched my purse further up on my shoulder and nodded. I got that. He thought I was cute.
I fought back another shiver.
“Nice t’meet ya, Gwen,” he said softly.
“Yeah,” I whispered, “later.” Then I turned to see Dog grinning down at me and I said, “Later.”
“Later, babe,” Dog replied in a way that made it sound like he’d actually see me later which made me have to fight back another shiver.
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I turned to the silent biker boys behind me, saw them all smiling, found this scarier than them being scary, lifted a hand and called, “Later.”
I got a bunch of chin lifts and one, “Later, darlin’.”
Then I got the hell out of there.
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