by Layla Wolfe
Roll like thunder. Gone like smoke.
PLAYING WITH MONSTERS
The Bare Bones #4
by Layla Wolfe
Copyright © 2015 Layla Wolfe
Kindle Edition
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Cover art by Red Poppy Designs
poppyartdesigns.com
Edited by Susan Foulkes
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All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
Roll like thunder. Gone like smoke.
Roman Serpico has abandoned a thriving rock star career to prospect for The Bare Bones MC. His goal: revenge on the cartel for his father’s murder. His black soul is a writhing mass of venom and rage, and joining the club fuels his ability to wreak havoc. His stepfather, the club’s lawyer Slushy, calls on him to save a stepsister Roman barely knows. Nurse’s assistant Gudrun McGill has fallen in with a bad crowd and needs an emergency extrication…now.
Roman believes he’s killed Gudrun’s assailant, but the loathsome, murderous fugitive Riker has nine lives. He lives to traffic in human flesh another day, and Roman is hell-bent on tracking the bastard down. But The Bare Bones votes to place Gudrun into custody with her stepbrother as her bodyguard. Things heat up between them when they hide in plain sight in the ghost town that surrounds The Citadel, their clubhouse.
Roman has vowed celibacy to fixate on vengeance. Gudrun wants nothing to do with men after losing her husband in a horrific car crash.
The terror of their situation brings them too close for comfort. Walls must come down. Barriers must be broken. Taking risks is in the nature of their new MC family. Roman has to roll the dice, to hit fast against Riker and the Chinese cartel. To preserve his newfound family, he has to roll like thunder and be gone like smoke.
Publisher’s Note: This is Book #4 in the Bare Bones MC series. This book is a stand-alone and can be read out of order, but the series is best read in order to gain the full experience. This is not your mother’s contemporary romance. Daring readers will encounter sexual assault, nonconsensual drugging, general violence between bikers and cowboys, and a HEA. It is not for the faint of heart. It’s a full length novel of 65,000 words with no cliffhanger. Recommended 18+ due to mature content and possible triggers.
PLAYING WITH MONSTERS
The Bare Bones #4
Layla Wolfe
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Publisher’s Note
One: Roman
Two: Gudrun
Three: Gudrun
Four: Roman
Five: Gudrun
Six: Roman
Seven: Gudrun
Eight: Roman
Nine: Gudrun
Ten: Roman
Eleven: Gudrun
Twelve: Roman
Thirteen: Gudrun
Fourteen: Roman
Fifteen: Gudrun
Sixteen: Gudrun
Seventeen: Roman
Eighteen: Gudrun
Nineteen: Roman
Twenty: Roman
About The Author
More Books from Layla Wolfe
CHAPTER ONE
ROMAN
Fred Birdseye, President of The Bare Bones Tucson chapter, held his mug of Bud on high. He was already three sheets to the wind as usual, but no one ever said a word about it. Fred was the best Prez the Tucson chapter had seen in decades. He had negotiated peace talks between the club and many arms of many cartels. Tucson was close to the border of Mexico, and if there weren’t understandings between MCs and cartels, bloodbaths could easily ensue. Things were running smoothly. No one wanted to rock the boat.
“In Roman Serpico, we’re gaining a true powerhouse of martial arts knowledge. Without a doubt, Roman—”
“Manhole!” a brother yelled from the back of the clubhouse.
Everyone guffawed. Some brothers clapped Roman Serpico on the back in thug hugs, but Roman himself glowered. He loathed that road name, Manhole. It had all come about when the club had sent him on a goofy initiation, riding his Harley FXR through a sobriety checkpoint. Naturally, the police had given chase. That was the point of the whole exercise. Roman thought it was a childish ceremony to endure, but he didn’t place himself above any other Prospect in the club’s history, and he agreed to it. It was juvenile and childish, but it might enable him to show off a little of his daredevil skills, carve around a few buildings, even jump over some obstacles. In his spare time, he enjoyed daredevilling in the flats outside of town, using a parachute to slow him down.
His custom FXR was built for that. He crashed through a chain link gate at the Firebird Fuel refinery, heading toward the H2S plant where the possibilities for hot dogging it were endless. It was like Star Wars out there, especially at night, with all the chutes, tubes, pipes, and overhead tanks running every which way, twinkling lights like an intergalactic space shuttle. The challenge to Roman’s skills was at the apex here. He could’ve just chosen to lead the cops down Fairview Avenue, maybe through a car wash or a drive-through taqueria. Better yet, a motorcycle sales lot. But Roman had opted for the difficult maneuvers of the oil refinery, and he paid the price for his arrogance.
After all, he was riding in an area not really built for motorcycles. He had zipped through so many narrow openings between enormous silver silos, he’d lost every last cop. They probably figured the only crime he’d committed was busting through a sobriety checkpoint, and it was becoming dangerous to pursue him. That was when he’d ridden right over the open manhole. He’d been practically chortling with glee that he’d evaded the cops when bam, bam, bam, suddenly his eyeballs were rattling around in his skull and the entire landscape turned sideways. He realized as he did a high side over his handlebars that he’d bitten off the tip of his tongue.
He didn’t actually fall in the manhole, but the story had persisted. A couple of brothers had been tail gunning him to make sure he didn’t just invent some story about the cops, and they saw the entire manhole fiasco. Now he’d forever be labeled Roman “Manhole” Serpico, like some gash who was open for all comers. You called women manholes. Roman wasn’t gay, and he was as far from being slutty as it was possible to get. But men being men, immature most of the time, and the road name stuck.
Birdseye waited until the clamor died down to continue. “Without a doubt, Roman Serpico is the most daring rider in the club’s history. He should star in a movie about Evel Knievel with his giant canyon jumps, his ramps, his obstacle courses. He’s the man we want riding point when we roll together. With his flawless skills in jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai, and Taekwondo, he’s the man you want going to the wall for you. We’ve seen time and time again Roman come to the aid of his brothers regardless of whether or not he knew what the beef was. He doesn’t need to know the beef, because he knows a Bare Boner rat-packs to his brothers’ side in any altercation.”
“He kicked in the teeth of that wasted Dotard who was hassling me over my parking job in front of a Subway sandwich shop on Speedway,” testified Shady Osborne, so named because he was pretty shiftless and unreliable. “That guy’s going to be keeping his new teeth in a glass on his nightstand from now on.”
General Schwarzkopf spoke up. “Manhole stepped in when some citizen was b
admouthing us in a kiddie park. In front of our old ladies and kids, this buttwipe was telling his kids to stay away from greasy, violent types like us.”
Everyone hissed in air. That stung when a citizen taught a member of the younger set to fear bikers.
The General continued. “Manhole here picked him up and stuck him in one of those kiddie swings, you know the ones with the holes for the legs. His family scattered to the four winds in terror, and we left the asshat swinging in the breeze.”
Roman remembered that. It hadn’t been his finest hour, because he’d also done it in front of some club children and old ladies. Brothers were supposed to be as gentle as teddy bears with their own families—although most of the Boner old ladies had laughed. But the irony did not escape Roman that he was reacting violently to someone accusing him of violence. Oh, well. That was just his way.
Birdseye nodded. “I remember that. The next day the paper carried an item about a guy found in a swing with a ruptured appendix. Bet he’ll never badmouth a one percenter again.”
Everyone chuckled in agreement, as though fondly recalling seeing the near-dead citizen screaming with sepsis as he dangled from a baby swing.
Then a thin-haired, middle-aged man wearing a clashing shirt and tie stepped up. In the bar full of burly, surly men attired in leather cuts and covered in patches and ink, Slushy McGill stood out like a sore thumb. With his comb over and mild-mannered looks, Slushy seemed about as harmless as a garter snake. The truth was far deeper than that, Roman knew. As the club’s lawyer, Roman’s stepfather wasn’t a patched member, so he couldn’t testify on his behalf. But he sure could utter some embarrassing things.
Slushy said in his reedy, sandpaper voice. “When I married the good Yvonne Serpico three years ago, Roman was already long out of her house, a strapping youth with a successful music career.” Everyone nodded enthusiastically. They begged Roman to play guitar at every weekend fish fry, even though their in-house accompanying quartet was a barely competent garage band about ten degrees of separation from The Allman Brothers. Roman tolerated their lack of musicianship because it brought him closer to them. The club was his life. At thirty-four years, Roman had finally found his true calling in life.
Slushy continued to blather, as lawyers tended to do. “I married the stunning Yvonne, but I never knew I’d be talking to Birdseye here about sponsoring her son in his club.”
“Yeah,” added Roman, “after you vanished for six months into the wilds of the desert.”
“Hey, that was hardly my fault,” protested Slushy, shaping his hand into an axe. Then he chuckled. “Working for big Latin agribusiness, sometimes you have to go to the mattresses in order to protect your family.”
A wave of agreement washed over the darkened clubhouse. Roman’s replacement Prospect continued pouring mugs of beer behind the bar, but every other brother in the room was reflective, nodding with respect at the floor.
Slushy lightened the mood. “If it’s any consolation, the Ochoas had promised me I was going to manage a Cinnabon in Nuevo Léon, not get traded like a baseball card to The Bare Bones motorcycle club.”
Birdseye slapped Slushy on the back so hard the lawyer nearly pitched into the table full of chips and dip. Everyone roared and raised their fists as the Prez said, “The best day of our lives, Slushy! Hell, we don’t need any criminal lawyer. We need a criminal lawyer.”
Shady Osborne shouted, “I’d be doing another five to ten right now if Slushy hadn’t gotten me off on that technicality.”
“Heh,” chuckled Slushy. “It was actually Tobiah Weingarten’s creative computer skills that got you off. That videotape didn’t show you putting AKs into the back of a truck.”
“Yeah,” laughed Shady, “because an empty wheelchair suddenly got between me and the camera.”
Slushy pointed. “Showing that, as usual, The Bare Bones are all about helping the disabled.”
Everyone huzzahed and congratulated themselves, but Roman rolled his eyes. Today was supposed to be all about him going full patch and getting his top rocker, not about his stepfather’s legal finesse. Slushy had been a very well-liked fellow ever since being dumped by the Ochoas in the desert, to be literally picked up and “owned” by The Bare Bones MC. That was when Slushy had vanished out of Yvonne Serpico’s life, Roman now knew. At the time, there had been no explanation, of course. Slushy had only recently attempted to come back into Yvonne’s life. Yvonne seemed willing to take him back, although Slushy was now based out of the club’s Pure and Easy chapter up north. It remained to be seen how they were going to hash that out.
Roman still held a lingering resentment against his stepfather for vanishing without a trace, It reminded him distastefully of his own thuggish father, Dante Serpico. He found out later it was because Slushy was being beaten for intel in the back of a blacked-out Cadillac SUV. And when The Bare Bones had saved him, Slushy had been far too afraid for Yvonne’s safety to get back in contact with her. When it became evident Slushy could assist Roman by introducing him to a club he might want to Prospect for, Roman wasn’t above using their connection to the maximum. He knew Slushy would do anything for him to get back into Yvonne’s good graces.
Standing, Roman towered over the average-sized lawyer. His brothers-in-arms quieted down when it became obvious he would speak. Roman loved all of them, more powerfully than he’d ever loved any damned girl. Women came and went, as flaky as pastries. Roman was a tall, gangly, long-limbed man whose handsomeness tended more toward the elegant or exotic than the traditionally hot. He had inherited his father’s hawk-nosed profile that would have looked at home on the back of an Italian coin. He’d buffed up with the practice of martial arts, and he’d been eagerly testing his skills out, impressing his brothers with fearless beatdowns of rival club members and hapless citizens. Being a musician who was idolized onstage all those years had given Roman a cocky confidence that was easily carrying over into his MC membership. He was so desperate to belong, he’d learned more about guns and ammo in the past year than most bikers learned in their entire lives. He’d made it his business to know.
“I have to thank Slushy for introducing me to Fred Birdseye,” Roman started out, his clear voice carrying into the far, cobwebbed reaches of the bar. He had been sounding even drunker since biting off the tip of his tongue during that manhole incident. “That started the most eventful and important chapter in my life up ’til now. You guys have meant the fucking world to me, going through this tough and painful fucking time. You know what I’ve been going through, and I’m here to tell you, if you guys hadn’t of been there for me the past year, I don’t know where I’d fucking be. Ten feet under, no fucking doubt.”
He was actually starting to tear up. Getting sappy or wordy like this was definitely not in Roman’s wheelhouse. He saw the Prospect behind the bar wipe his nose on the back of his hand, and Roman told himself the guy just had an allergy. But it sure looked like General Schwarzkopf was sniffing too, turning his head away to avoid anything remotely maudlin. Men looked around the room at each other as though wondering who farted. Nobody in that macho, virile place was comfortable with any of the more tender emotions.
Inhaling deeply, Roman started on a different tack. Everyone sighed with relief, reaching for beers and potato chips. “I take my position here with the ultimate in deadly gravity. You need anything, day or night, you call on me. I may not be a Prospect anymore, but you can depend on me to have your back for anything that might seem like the tiniest—or the biggest—favor. I’m here twenty-four seven at your fucking beck and call, at your service. I’ll shut up when quiet is called for, and I’ll speak up when someone needs to be heard. I’m used to working with a team—my band—and I welcome with open arms any challenging op you might want to throw my way.”
He referred to the job later on that day that Fred Birdseye had alluded to. Mostly out of boredom because nothing hell-raising had been happening lately, they were going to hit up a rival Dotard’s stash house. They could p
ut a big dent in Dotard finances if the rumored meth shipment had made it to the house last night. They were going to go in all gangsta-like with full face masks and Rugers and AR-15s and just blitz the place. Adrenaline already flowed through to Roman’s fingertips thinking about it. He’d done some dangerous and dodgy shit as a Prospect the past year, but this was the first time he’d be hitting a rival target on the same and equal footing as his brothers. It was the most important thing in the world that he prove himself.
Fred Birdseye put his hand cornily on Roman’s shoulder. Roman even towered over Birdseye. who was a surly, gritty guy who resembled a ZZ Top band member. “We know you will, Manhole. We know you’ll level up to anything the club asks of you.”
Shady raised a fist, and so did ten other brothers. “You’re a good man, Manhole.”
“Manhole’s a good man,” echoed the men.
So the meeting was adjourned, men grabbed their phones out of the bucket, and the sweetbutts were let into the bar area. There was one in particular who had been draping herself aggressively all over Roman for months now, and he hadn’t as much as kissed her. He wasn’t into that in this phase of life. His concentration was narrow, like a laser beam. And that laser beam was his club.
Although he didn’t have to pee that bad, Roman wanted to avoid Myrna Pennyloafers with a passion, so he headed for the hallway. She was quicker, though, and nabbed him before he made it to the can. The new Prospect rushed on past him, eager to make sure there was enough toilet paper in the men’s.
Myrna pasted Roman to the wall with the sheer force of her double Ds. He always responded physically to her presence—he wasn’t dead, after all—but kept his mind strictly on business. I don’t have time for this shit. Women are just bloodsucking gashes here to rip out your heart and stomp on it. Even these fucking sweetbutts have mayhem on their minds. Which piece should I bring to the raid today?
