Bones

by Alexis Abbott

  Bones

  Heartbreaker MC #2

  Alexis Abbott

  © 2019 Pathforgers Publishing.

  All Rights Reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imaginations. Any resemblances to actual persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  This book is intended for sale to Adult Audiences only. All sexually active characters in this work are over 18. All sexual activity is between non-blood related, consenting adults. This is a work of fiction, and as such, does not encourage illegal or immoral activities that happen within.

  Cover Design by Wicked Good Covers. All cover art makes use of stock photography and all persons depicted are models.

  More information is available at Pathforgers Publishing.

  Content warnings: dark romance, biker violence

  Wordcount: 62,000 Words

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part of the Heartbreakers MC Series

  Bones

  1. Lauren

  2. Bones

  3. Bones

  4. Lauren

  5. Bones

  6. Lauren

  7. Bones

  8. Lauren

  9. Bones

  10. Lauren

  11. Bones

  12. Lauren

  13. Lauren

  14. Bones

  15. Bones

  16. Bones

  17. Lauren

  18. Bones

  19. Bones

  20. Bones

  21. Lauren

  Next from Alexis Abbott

  Also by Alexis Abbott

  About the Author

  Connect with Alexis

  Acknowledgments

  Romance Novels to your Email

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  Part of the Heartbreakers MC Series

  Reading Order:

  Don’t miss out on the rest of the Heartbreakers Series by Alexis Abbott!

  Breaker

  Bones

  Ironside

  Big Daddy

  These are all standalones set in the same universe, and are best read in order.

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  Bones

  I feel the force ripple up from my rough, cracked knuckles through my tattooed forearm and thick bicep as my fist finds its mark right where I want it, smack in the middle of the asshole’s nose and send him half-sprawled against the bar and into the people next to him. He’s a big guy, and he nearly knocks the other customers over, but I don’t care. I’m seeing red.

  And this fucker is gonna be spitting red by the time I’m done with him.

  “Get up!” I bark down at him as he stares up at me wide-eyed probably still seeing stars instead of the biker about to knock him the fuck out. “What’s the matter, fuckhead? Didn’t bring enough roofie for me too? Am I too much man for you?”

  The guy looks up at me, and I can almost see the gears in his mind turning as he realizes that I am in fact the leather-clad biker who just socked him in the face.

  “You hear me?” I shout, rolling my shoulders back and straightening my kutte before I roll my shoulders back. “Get on your fuckin’ feet, I’m not about to fight a man on the ground.”

  It was around eleven o’clock last time I checked the time at a bar in a middle-of-nowhere town called Pine Haven, Wyoming. Outside, the sky is silent and clear, the stars are beautiful, and the air is clean. Inside, the smell of stale smoke is hanging in the air, the sound of harsh music is thrumming from an old jukebox with its glass broken, and the whole bar is getting riled up as I stand back and the guy I just threw down with puts a hand on the bar to push himself up.

  “Hey hey hey, take this shit outside!” Eli the bartender tries to shout, and he reaches over the bar to put a hand on the shoulder of the guy I punched.

  But the guy shakes his shoulder away from the bartender and stands up to his full height, and he is most definitely looking down at me. Considering how tall I am, that’s impressive. The rest of the bar has directed its attention squarely to us by now. This bar isn’t exactly the kind of place you go looking for a fight, but it has its rough edges. About five seats’ worth of people have gotten up from their places at the bar to give us a wide berth. Most of them look a little surprised that a fight is breaking out so suddenly, but none of them look too bent out of shape about it either.

  The one person acting differently is the girl behind the big guy—the girl whose drink I saw him about to drug. The evidence is still sitting on the bar just inches from her drink, right where his hand was before I yanked him back and showed him what I thought about that. I barely had a chance to get a good look at her, and I still don’t, but one glimpse past his shoulder is all I need to make eye contact, and that’s all the time I need to know she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.

  All this happened in a matter of seconds, and each one feels like an hour. The fucker I decked must be able to see straight again, because his face turns red, and he lunges with a blow that just barely misses my ear as I dodge him to the right, letting him bowl past my body and stumble past me as I jeer at him from behind.

  “Come on, big guy, how were you gonna get your girl home when you’re that far gone?” I quip, laughing at the man to get him good and pissed off.

  On top of being big and burly, even by my standards, the guy has a pretty damn classically handsome face, to boot. He isn’t a biker, that much is for sure. He’s not wearing a kutte, and he’s dressed a little too nice for this place, just enough to tell me he isn’t a regular. Of course he isn’t a regular. Bastard probably wouldn’t risk drugging girls at his regular watering hole. If I have my way, he’ll be drinking through a straw the rest of his life anyway, so it won’t matter.

  “You just made a big mistake,” he says in that stiff voice that barely contains the anger boiling under the surface.

  I know that tone. It comes from a very rigorous kind of conditioning, and the guy’s buzz cut and stiff posture all make sense now. This guy has military training, I have no doubt about it. And is that about to stop me from tearing him a new asshole?

  Nah.

  “You’re the one with the bloody nose, boss,” I said, putting my fists up and getting ready for him.

  He didn’t like that much.

  To the guy’s credit, he was no novice. When he came in again, he didn’t do anything stupid like pull his arm back to give me a good idea of where the punch was coming from or leave a limb too exposed for me to catch. But I had gone toe to toe with some of the meanest sons of bitches on this side of the Rockies.

  He had also been drinking, and that meant all that fancy military hand-to-hand combat training was on training wheels. When he comes back for more, he isn’t nearly as clean and tactical. He tries to grab me, and like most bar fights do, ours ends up staggering aside as we struggle against each other. My arms are busy keeping his off me, but he gets one of his free long enough to throw a punch that catches me across my jaw.

  In return, I tighten my grip on his shirt and pull him closer so that I can crack that very same spot on his bleeding nose with my thick forehead.

  “Fuckin’ Christ!” he shouts as he covers his nose, and when I see the whites of his eyes again, they’re showing furious red veins.

  He growls as he barrels toward me again, and this time, I have to receive all however-many-hundreds of pounds of this guy there is as it pushes me back into the barstools. As I go back, I catch myself on the bar with one hand, and I throw a quick jab that catches his eye with the other fist. In the s
plit second that buys me, I reach out and grab his collar in an iron grip.

  Also in that split second, I catch the sound of the bartender shouting over the phone, which means security is on its way, which means I need to wrap this up quick.

  I’ve got the guy’s collar in my hand, so I put it to use. Using it like a real collar, I yank him down into the barstools, sending his whole frame crashing into the mess of iron bars and sticky, beer-coated concrete. As soon as he’s down, I pause and watch him for a moment.

  Any respectable man would know that was the end, but I was right to listen to my gut. I see his hand shoot into his jacket’s inner pocket. I am not about to wait around and find out what he’s going to pull out of there. Too many men have gotten knives in their ribs with that kind of good faith, or worse.

  Without another thought, I reach for the nearest beer bottle and don’t even spend time lifting it high over my head. I just clutch it by the neck and smash it to pieces over the guy’s head, right on top of it.

  Foamy amber liquid flows over his face and washes some of the blood off as his eyes lose their focus, and he mumbles before falling back onto the pile of fallen stools. His hand is still in his pocket. I stare down at him to make sure he’s down, breathing heavily and feeling adrenaline ripple through my body.

  It’s an old friend of mine.

  In the last few seconds of silence I have before the bar realizes that the show’s over, my eyes drift up toward the set of eyes I feel watching my kutte from behind, and I see her.

  I see legs too long to need the red pumps they’re wearing, and a black miniskirt much too small for ‘em, for that matter. And that suits me just fine, almost as much as the slim leather jacket over her shoulders, far too clean to fit in with the rest of its kind at this bar. She’s wearing a red blouse with a zipper down the front, and that tells me exactly what kind of time she’s here for.

  The look in her smoky eyes does an even better job at that, too. Those cherry-red lips are faintly parted, icy blue eyes wide as she stares at me with more interest than I figure I’ve ever been looked at by someone who wasn’t about to try to kill me. Then again, with this chick, I wouldn’t rule that out. There’s something in those eyes beyond just gratitude.

  But I don’t have time to find out what just yet.

  “I’m about to get asked to leave,” I finally say to her as I take out a $50 and lay it on the bar. “Got friends here, or do you want a walk to your car?”

  “I think I’d rather take a walk with you,” she says, hardly missing a beat.

  We stare at each other for a moment, trying to figure each other out. At last, I give a single nod, and I nod to the door for her to follow as I stride out, not giving so much as a second glance back to the crowd or the jarhead I just knocked out.

  Cool, dry air greets us as we step outside, and I rub my chin to check for damage. As I do, the girl in the jacket hurries up to my side and looks at me with worry, then gets in front of me to stop me.

  “Did he get you?” she asks, putting her hands up toward me and trying to look at my face in the light. “Are you hurt?”

  “What?” I ask, furrowing my brow. “No, are you kidding? Are you okay? You saw what he almost did to you, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, yeah I did,” she says, reaching up and clutching a strand of the golden hair making that outfit look so good. “And...no, I-I’m not,” she breathes. “Can I get a ride home?”

  What the hell does that mean?

  I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something going on with this girl, but my mind is too out of sorts to try to figure out what. She looks shaken now that I can see her in proper light, but there’s still that something else behind her eyes. Doesn’t matter right now. All that does is that this girl needs to get taken care of, and that’s what I plan on doing.

  “Of course,” I say, stepping around her and heading toward my ride. “All I’ve got is my bike, though—that a problem for you?”

  I come to a stop at my black motorcycle, its sleek body gleaming in the light coming from the porch of the bar. She swallows, and I see the faintest blush cross her cheeks before she nods her head quickly and approaches me. We don’t say much as she gets on. I think she’s too dazed by everything to get her thoughts together. She keeps looking back at me, but she doesn’t protest as I show her how to sit behind me on the bike before I fire it up.

  I feel her gasp as the engine roars to life, but then I feel her grip around my torso tighten, and I head off into the night. It’s not exactly how I planned on ending this night, but I’m not about to turn my nose up at it.

  “Where do you live?” I shout over my shoulder as we start rolling out of town.

  “I don’t live in town,” she calls. “Take the next right, I’ll point you!”

  I nod, and we’re off.

  The girl isn’t kidding about not living in town. When I first saw her, I guessed she might be someone’s granddaughter, or maybe a tourist passing through who happened to just be unlucky. That clearly isn’t the case. It’s about twenty minutes of riding into the hills before she says that we’re close, and at last, she leads me down to a cute little house nestled away out of sight...with no neighbors in sight.

  “You’re not alone out here, are you?” I ask as we come to a stop at the curb, and I look over my shoulder at her.

  I fully expect her to say no regardless of the truth, because it didn’t occur to me until too late that a guy like me asking a girl like her if she’s alone out in the middle of nowhere might be unsettling. But a blush crosses her cheeks, and she hasn’t let her hands fall away from my torso yet.

  “Yeah, I am,” she says, halfway between sounding matter-of-fact and being unable to believe she’s saying the words. “Hey, I know this is weird, but do you...want to come in for a drink?”

  It takes me all of one second to decide to reply, “Yes ma’am, I do.”

  As we make our way toward the door, I can’t tear my eyes off her ass as she walks ahead of me. I don’t know how to make heads or tails of this girl. But from the outfit to the attitude, she knows what she wants, and I like that. She might be a new face, but she’s no tourist, that’s for damn sure. Maybe it’s the adrenaline, but I could swear there’s more sway to those hips than there needs to be.

  She unlocks the door, and we step into a quaint living room that I barely get a chance to look at before she shuts it behind me again and looks up at me. She brushes a strand of hair out of her face and gets her first real good look at me in the light, and she’s about as transfixed as I am with her. And then that spark in her eyes clicks in my mind. I know what it is.

  It’s barely restrained desire, long held back and long bubbling under the surface, desperate for a place to breach. And as I recognize it, those deep blue eyes know, and she pushes on ahead with what she’s wanted to say since we first stepped out of that bar.

  “Thanks for what you did back there,” she says. “You didn’t have to do that. And you could have gotten...well, it could have been really bad,” she says, not wanting to think about what might have happened if I lost that fight.

  “Don’t mention it,” I say, shaking my head softly. “Not about to let some fucker do that to anyone.”

  I want to ask her what she was doing with him in the first place, why they were talking, and whether she had any idea that was going to happen. None of the answers matter right now, though. She casts a quick glance around the living room, and I’m not sure, but I feel like I can recognize a moment’s hesitation. Is she having second thoughts about inviting this big, scary biker into her home? Did she get a look at my kutte and see the devil skewering a heart and decide to back out? That isn’t what’s written in her eyes when she looks back up to mine, but I have to be sure.

  “But let me ask you this,” my voice growls as I step forward and look down at her. “What’s a little slip of a thing like you doing, living out here all alone and going to biker bars?”

  What I mean to ask is why she’s l
ooking for trouble. And she knows it. The way she looks up at me, you’d think I was her father catching her misbehaving. Maybe that’s why her cheeks are burning.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she says softly, putting a brave hand on my chest. “What I want is to thank you.”

  She pushes herself up as high as those heels will send her, and she presses a warm kiss to my lips that makes the half-mast shaft bulging through my pants get hard as a rock.

  Lauren

  I have never felt this before.

  Every faintest touch of this handsome stranger’s fingertips across my body feels like spirals of fire and electricity spreading out like stormy skies beneath the soft porcelain of my skin. I have spent so many long years in hiding, in silence, biding my time and watching from a safe distance. Always at a distance. Always from afar. I never even knew touch could feel like this. Like fire and ice. Like fear and hope and guilt and deep, abiding pleasure all rolled into one potent formula that makes my heart race. I can feel the blood pumping faster through my veins, rushing in my ears. My face feels warm and flushed, and I know in the dim light he can probably still see the rosy tinge to my cheeks and forehead. I wonder, if I were to pull away from his earth-shattering kiss and look down, would I see that my body is blooming rosy, too? It feels like I should be afraid. Like I should be ripping apart at the seams. This is wrong. Every part of this feels like sin, but god, it feels like heaven, too.