by Marla Monroe
“You were a fucking black market trader?” Lance pulled the still-unconscious woman closer to him.
“No. There was a difference back then. We hunted the black market traders down and took them to one of the jails that were set up at the time. The bondsmen helped families find their lost women when someone took them. We didn’t always find them in time, but we tried.” Carver closed his eyes as if he could still see some of them they hadn’t been able to save. Lance hadn’t known this about the man.
“Then it all started to change. Some of us didn’t know what was going on at first. Then when we figured it out, we tried to stop it, but too many of the members had turned to profit and had lost the vision we’d had of protecting the few women left and keeping the innocent families safe.”
“What happened that you finally left?” Lance asked him.
Carver was silent for a long time. Finally he started speaking again, only not exactly on the same topic at first.
“You know, the reason I joined them in the first place had nothing to do with saving lives and preventing people from being used and stolen from. I saw them as a substitute for my old MC. The club had been my life, those men, my only family. I missed that sense of belonging and knowing that my brother had my back no matter what that being a part of The Rebel Riders had given me. I thought I’d found that again. I was wrong.”
“What in the hell does this have to do with anything anyway?” Lance asked, still nursing his fist. It hurt like he’d broken it, but he could move his fingers despite the pain.
“I found out that some of the women we were taking hadn’t actually belonged to the men we gave them back to. We were being paid to hunt down women, any woman, and turn them over to the black market for auctioning off to the highest bidder. When I figured that out, I told the guy who’d been working with me since I’d joined. I respected him and never once saw him hurt a soul unless it was necessary to protect another. I should have realized that he was with me to make sure I didn’t cause trouble,” Carver said, staring up into the darkness.
“When you talked to him about it he told the others, didn’t he?” Lance said. “How did you get away, knowing what you did?”
“He didn’t say anything right then. He said he’d had his doubts about what was going on but that we needed to wait for the right time to deal with them. I went along with what he said because I trusted him. When we stormed a home of a family to take a man’s wife the next day, I kept waiting for my partner to do something, but he didn’t. I still trusted him and figured he was going to confront them later and take the woman back.” Carver ran a hand over his face and looked up as if trying to control his emotions.
“She fought as soon as we were away from the house. My partner laughed, telling her she could fight all she wanted but it wouldn’t save her. I didn’t understand at first, but later figured out they were planning to sell her to a brothel. He dragged her, kicking and screaming, but she was tough and managed to nail him in the balls.
He went insane and turned his gun on the woman. He would have shot her, but I shot him instead. I guess he figured I wouldn’t draw on him. His mistake. There were two others with us on that ride. I shot one of them, but the last one got me in the shoulder before I could get to him.”
When Carver didn’t say anything more, Lance realized that the comments earlier had been Carver’s way of testing him to see if he was capable of harming the woman if she refused them. It pissed him off that Carver didn’t trust him, but Lance couldn’t blame the man. Instead of saying anything more, he started to turn over so Carver wouldn’t have to.
“W–what h–happened to the w–woman?” a soft, shaky voice asked from between them.
Chapter Three
Vella thought she’d heard enough of the story to know that the two men lying closer than fleas on a dog wouldn’t hurt her. Since she was staking her life on it, she prayed she was right. They weren’t any of the men who’d tried to take her before she’d jumped into the swollen stream. She’d taken her chances that she wouldn’t drown when she’d jumped, and those chances had paid off. Not only had she survived, but the men who’d pulled her out sounded like fairly good men.
“I returned her to her family. They took care of my bullet wound, and I stuck around long enough to heal and make sure that when the group I was riding with didn’t return they didn’t send someone out after them. She was fine when I left,” the big man on her right said in a gruff voice.
“What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.
“Soon as you’re recovered, we’re going to take you with us if you want to go,” the man on her left told her. “We’re heading to a community near Yellowstone where some families are creating a safe place to live by joining together.”
“T–that’s where I was heading when some men found me and tried to take me. I jumped in the water to get away,” she told them.
“Dammit, woman. You could have drowned doing that. Not to mention that you’re probably going to end up with pneumonia anyway,” the gruff man said.
“Carver! Stop it. Don’t scare her any more than she already is,” the other man said, a scowl coloring his face.
“What should I have done? Let them rape me and kill me? One of them scared the mess out of me just by looking at me. I wasn’t sticking around to see what his idea of a good time was. I’ll take my chances in a river any day.”
The one the other man had called Carver sighed and ran one hand over his cheek, stretching his jaw from side to side. She couldn’t see very well in the dim light of the fire, but he acted like it was tender. She nearly jumped out of her skin when he spoke again.
“Sorry. I guess that was your way of fighting to live. I would have fought my way through them, but you’re not me,” he said in a softer voice that still held an edge of roughness to it.
“How did you end up alone out here in the first place?” the other man asked.
She turned her head to look at him. She couldn’t make out much about him, but he seemed to have a softer face than the other man. Though his voice was deep, it didn’t hold the same guttural tone that Carver’s did.
“I told you. Trying to find the same community that you are looking for. I figure if I ever want to be safe again I’ve got to find them and ask them to let me live there. I can sew and cook, and tend to most any kind of farm animal. Do you think they’ll take me?” she asked, looking from one shadowy man to the other.
“They’ll take you even before they’d take us,” Carver said. “What Lance is asking is, why are you by yourself? It’s too dangerous for anyone to travel alone, especially a woman.”
The other man’s name was Lance. She wished she could see both of the men better than the hazy shadows the fire allowed.
“I’m by myself because I don’t have anyone else. My parents died during the tornados that tore through Kansas. My brother and I decided to move back home, to Gatlinburg.
That didn’t work out, so we decided to try out a community we’d been told about that had been formed by several men and women. They said that everyone worked and took care of each other.”
“My brother found out where it was and we set out to find it. It was hard at first to hike through the trees and up and down hills, but my brother made it interesting by teaching me things he’d learned in the scouts growing up. Then he was gone and it was just me when I arrived.”
Vella stopped, remembering her friends from back home and wishing they’d lived long enough to come with her. They would have made it if they’d all been together.
“Anyway, at first it was pretty neat. I remembered hearing about the ’60s generation and how they lived in communes where everyone was equal and everything was free. About a year later, things started changing. The self-appointed leader started making all kinds of rules that pretty much kept us from thinking for ourselves. My friends and I didn’t like it and wanted to leave, but they wouldn’t let us go. As soon as I found a way, I escaped and haven’t looked back since.
” She left out the previous attempts where she’d slowly lost her friends. That was too personal and still very painful.
The two men seemed to exchange looks over her, but she couldn’t be sure since the light was so dim. She wanted to ask them how they’d met, but started coughing instead. By the time she’d calmed down, Vella was so tired that she didn’t feel much like talking anymore. Her chest hurt now, and she was cold again. It didn’t matter how deep she burrowed between the two men, she couldn’t seem to get warm.
“Hell, she’s sick, Lance. This isn’t good.” Carver’s gruff voice ate through the haze of her brain.
“I’ll build up the fire. We need some kind of medicine for her,” Lance was saying.
“If she makes it through the night, I’ll mix up something my granny used to make us kids when we got a cold. Don’t know that it will work, but none of us died from it.”
Vella wanted to laugh at that, but it hurt too much to breathe. She wondered if she’d ever wake up again if she fell asleep. The big gruff guy—wasn’t his name Carver?—didn’t think she would.
Then everything got real weird. There were bulls and mules arguing with each other. That seemed kind of strange to her. Bulls couldn’t talk, and mules were just stubborn.
* * * *
“Are you sure this will work?” Lance asked.
Carver sighed. “No. I’m not sure, but we’ve tried everything else and nothing has worked. It’s been two days and she’s burning up with fever I’ve already told you a dozen times that I don’t have a clue if it works or not. It’s what my granny did for us when were sick. That’s all I do know. I haven’t made this crap in a long damn time.”
“If swallowing that crap doesn’t kill her, it sure as hell should cure her. It smells like cow dung,” Lance said with a grimace.
Carver just harrumphed and continued mixing the ingredients together. He knew just how bad it tasted, but he firmly believed it worked. He just wasn’t sure it would do much good for pneumonia.
“Pour up a cup of the hot tea and be ready to give her some. She’s going to need it to get this stuff down her,” he told Lance.
As soon as Lance returned with the tea, Carver knelt next to the shivering woman and held her head up so he could pour some of the concoction into her mouth. She actually sipped at it for a few seconds before the taste must have finally registered. Then all bets were off. She sputtered and tried to turn away, but she was too weak to have much of an effect on Carver. In between, Lance poured some of the sweet-tasting tea they’d made from some roots of a wild rose bush Carver had found. It might have helped some, but she still spit out more than she swallowed of both.
“That should be enough,” Carver said, lowering her head back to the makeshift pillow.
“Hell, she barely got down half of the stuff you made,” Lance complained.
“Which is why I doubled the amount I made up for her. I knew she wouldn’t get all of it down.”
“Does she feel a little cooler to you?” Lance asked, resting his hand on her forehead.
“Not really,” he touched the side of her cheek then her neck. “Still feels like she’s burning up with a fever to me.”
“If the fever breaks, she’ll be in the clear, right?”
“Probably. She could relapse if she doesn’t rest up afterwards and let her body regroup,” he said.
“So even if she pulls through this, we’ll need to hang around here for a few days to make sure she’s recovered before we start pushing west again?” Lance asked.
“Pretty much. We can give her a few days to rest up, and then move out to walk a few hours and rest for a few hours. Depending on how she handles it, we’ll increase the amount of time walking each day until she’s fully recovered.”
Carver could tell that Lance had already accepted her as part of them. He’d gone and made her family without talking it over with Carver first. It pissed him off, but at the same time, he didn’t blame him one bit. It was hard to completely distance one’s self from another human being, especially when it was a pretty female in need of help. Just about any man would go out of his way to make her theirs—any man but him. He knew the rules.
Men like him didn’t end up with women like the one they’d found. He hung with hard, cold men and the kind of women who loved them for who they were. They were equally hard and cold on the inside. It was the only way to survive in their world back then. If a man let a piece of tail under his skin then he was as good as whipped. It was one thing to choose an old lady to warm the bed and keep the place marginally clean, but it was another to let emotions cloud your judgment so that you took a sweet butt for a ride and ended up married to her when you really couldn’t stand the bitch in the first place.
No, he didn’t do the whole emotional roller coaster that most men put themselves through. His logic had always been to find a warm, willing woman who didn’t irritate him. Then he’d make her his old lady and life would be good.
That was before the world as they knew it had changed. Things had changed, and now there weren’t throngs of women vying for his attention anymore. If he wanted a woman in his bed and in his life, he would have to share her. Sex wasn’t really an issue to him. He could rub one off anytime he wanted to—didn’t need a woman for that, though it was a hell of a lot nicer way to come. It was the rest of it that made him think harder about Lance’s hope that the woman would be willing to become theirs.
Waking up to the sweet scent of a woman was one of the little joys in life. He missed having someone wrap their arms around him just for the hell of it. The no-strings-attached kiss or wink didn’t happen often in a motorcycle club, but until right then, he’d never considered that he’d been a piece of meat to the sweet butts and not the other way around.
Lance’s voice jerked him back to the present. He’d dropped his guard while he’d been thinking about the past. The past was over—dead. He needed to remember that and focus on the future.
“What do we do now?” Lance asked as he wiped her face and mouth with a piece of cloth.
“Wait. Keep her warm and help her when she coughs. That’s all we can do. I’ll make up another batch tomorrow, and we’ll do it again until she either makes it or she doesn’t.” Carver sighed and let his head drop back. His shoulders and neck hurt like a son of a bitch. “There isn’t much more we can do, Lance. Keep giving her water and tea. Wake me up in a couple of hours, and I’ll relieve you.”
Carver spread out the thin blanket they’d used to wrap the woman in when they pulled her out of the river. It had dried in front of the fire. Now they took turns resting on it while the other one watched over the woman. He wished they’d gotten her name out of her before she’d passed out again. At least then he’d have a name to say when they buried her. They should know her name.
He lay there for nearly an hour without being able to relax enough to sleep. After days of walking over rough terrain then pushing through thick underbrush, sitting still for long periods of time didn’t feel good. His muscles ached and stiffened up every time he was immobile for longer than fifteen or twenty minutes. He needed a good run, but he hesitated to leave Lance and the woman alone for very long. Not that he didn’t trust the other man around her while she was unconscious or anything. He actually did trust him. It was whoever might be out there just waiting for a chance to overpower them and grab the woman that he was worried about. Maybe he was paranoid, but after working with the bondsmen, he knew he had a reason to be that way.
The woman was a pretty thing. Her soft brown hair had copper, red highlights that shined like a new penny in the dancing firelight. Lance had been right. Her hazel-colored eyes had been ablaze with color when she had looked at him. Just before they had dulled and she’d started coughing, he thought he had seen the hint of attraction there.
Right. I’m really into fairy tales these days. Next I’ll be asking her to marry me.
He turned over, trying to get comfortable. He needed to get some fucking sleep. They hadn’t
gotten much the last few nights while they’d battled to keep the woman warm. A couple of times she’d struggled to get out from under the covers. It had taken both of them to keep her beneath the covers without accidently hurting her. It sure hadn’t stopped her from kneeing them in the balls a few times though.
Not knowing her name was bugging him. He needed to know what to call her. Just referring to her as that woman didn’t sit well with him. Maybe they could get her to wake up for a little while later. The first thing he was going to ask when she did wake up was to tell them her fucking name.
“What’s wrong?” Lance asked from across the cave.
“Nothing. Why?”
“You’re mumbling about something. What are you saying?”
“I’m not mumbling. You’re hearing things.” Had he been mumbling?
“I know what I’ve been listening to for the last thirty minutes. I just don’t know what it is you’re saying.” Lance was irritating on good days.
“Must be thinking out loud then. I don’t know. I didn’t realize I was mumbling. I’ll pay closer attention so I don’t bother you anymore,” he said with as much sarcasm as he could force into the words.
Lance just chuckled. The smart-ass was really going to piss him off one of these days. The bastard had somehow managed to get under his skin. Lance was beginning to grow on him, but Carver was just waiting for the other boot to drop. The only person he’d been able to trust with his back had been Mad Dog back in the days before everything went to hell. For all he knew, Mad Dog might have sucker-punched him at some point, as well. But after the mess with the bondsmen, Carver had a hard time at best trusting another soul.
The sound of Lance getting up had him turning his head to try and make out the other man’s figure through the dim light to see what he was up to. The other man walked over to the cave opening and threw some sticks on both fires before stepping just outside the cave near the far wall, and the sound of a zipper told Carver more than he needed to know.
