That’s when I realized that there could be a reason that I was at the table. Angelica was at the door, showing Beanie in. He came forward, very slowly. Cox pulled out a chair for him.
Beanie’s eyes flicked around the table. Then he looked down again. He sat in the chair next to Cox. Cox made him look tiny, and he was hunching his shoulders together.
Cox looked at me and I felt hot, my heart thumped as he spoke to Beanie, “We asked for you to join us for this part of the meeting, Beanie,” Beanie’s eyes came pleadingly up to mine as he listened, hunching away from Cox as he continued, “and we’ve had Jurgen and Bent stay, as this concerns them, too.”
Now Beanie sat up. Like he’d resolved, whatever was going to happen, he was going to take it as a man. Cox looked at Bogart and Bogart nodded.
Cox said, “Jurgen and Bent, and Kaos Anarki of course, lost two of their club members.”
“And two brothers,” said Bent.
“Yes,” Jurgen said, “Whatever else they were, they were our brothers.”
Again Cox looked over to Bogart. Again, Bogart nodded. Cox went on, “It would appear,” now he was looking at me. My heart skipped and I tried to keep my face impassive, but I don’t think that I can have succeeded.
I was so awash with emotion at that point. Emotions of fear, shock and apprehension. All mixed up with exhaustion. And I felt an intense pull toward Cox as I waited for him to go on. He said, “It would appear as though Butcher took it upon himself to deliver vicious executions upon Snori and Trols.”
The air was heavy and the room was silent. Bogart said, “That would have been a decision for the council, not for one member to take alone. Especially not an associate, as Butcher was at the time.”
A slow wave of solemn nods drifted around the table. Bogart said, “A sanction could have been due to him for that.” There was quiet for a moment. Bogart said, “Nevertheless, Snori and Trols would seem to have slain one of our own.”
Bent said, “While they were honored guests of the club, too. That is unacceptable.”
“So,” Bogart said, “Savage MC needs to ask Kaos Anarki if they are satisfied that justice was done here. Butcher was sanctioned, but not for the killing of their brothers.”
Jurgen looked around the table at each man in turn. And at me. And he said, “With some regret, I have to say that Snori and Trols, our brothers, acted in a way that brought shame to our motorcycle club, and, with even more regret I must say that I think the punishment that they met was just and appropriate.”
There was some release of breath around the room. Jurgen went on, “I hope that Savage MC will forgive the abuse of their hospitality, and consider the matter to be over and in the past. I hope that it will not color the relations of our two brotherhoods in the future.”
Bogart said, “That’s noble of you, brother. For Savage, I can only say that I am glad that as it turns out,” he looked first at Beanie, then for a long time at me, “Butcher has already met with a fate appropriate to the crime and we can all consider this matter over.”
“Beanie,” said Cox. Beanie looked up nervously, “Hand me your cut.” Beanie’s face tightened but, true to his resolve he stood, shrugged off his leather jacket and he handed it to Cox.
Cox took it and said, “Your colors are not appropriate for you to wear anymore.” Beanie’s eyebrows quivered but he jutted his chin, He stood straight, like a soldier at attention.
Cox put the jacket on the table and reached for the edge of a patch. He ripped it off and held it up. Prospect, it said, “The council has agreed, Beanie. We’ll be adding a top rocker. You’re a full Savage MC member now.”
Cox looked at me and more than anything I wanted to jump across the table and fling my arms around him. His eyes seemed a little watery as he looked back at me.
Bent shook his head and said, “Trols and Snori.” And Cox said,
“Fucking Vikings.”
I’m Coming Home
Cox knew that he had to do something about this girl, this daughter of the police chief, this uncontrollable woman. His judgment clouded over, though. Every time he thought about her, her remembered the feeling of the tight little cheeks of her gorgeous ass in his hand. And that damn look in her eye.
All this time he’d avoided thinking about taking an old lady. The club was all the commitment he wanted, and it was more responsibility than he needed. But being with Nikka had made him feel different in so many ways.
Since Nikka had been around, Cox saw things differently, his perspective had shifted. When he thought about something or he had to make a decision, somehow he looked farther ahead.
At that meeting, Nikka had come closer to being offered a patch, at least a Prospect patch, than Cox or probably any of them would have believed possible for a woman. Previously he would have laughed at the idea. Now he wasn’t so sure about that.
She also came close to being sanctioned. When the he and Bogart had discussed what happened to the Vikings, neither of them talked about Beanie and Nikka, but they both were sure they knew what really happened. Both were sure the other knew, too.
He watched her hug Jurgen and Bent before they left, shaking their hands like a biker diplomat. Or, perhaps, like a biker diplomat’s old lady. Maybe a biker’s old lady diplomat. Woah this was good weed.
As the Norwegians rode away down the hill, he said to her, “Funny thing about Butcher’s gun, right?”
“How do you mean? It was his gun, wasn’t it?”
“Sure it was. It was his nine millimeter, there’s no doubt about it.” Cox looked down at her face. There was more to this woman than he had ever estimated.
He said,“See that’s the funny thing. Nobody can remember Butcher ever actually using a nine. Always carried one, but only in case he ran out of everything else. And, so far as anyone knows, he never did.”
I didn’t say anything.
“And I wonder why he lured them to that little motel. Luring them onto a bridge and then blowing up the bridge was more his style.”
“He shouldn’t have done it, though. Ending the two Vikings without the club sanction, he could have gotten killed for that alone.” He looked in my eyes for a long time. “But I guess we’ll never know what really happened.”
“And Butcher being a club member.”
“How do you mean?”
“The club rules are clear. But they only apply to club members.”
“You been talking to Angelica?”
“You don’t grow up in the home of the police chief without getting a feeling for law.”
Upstairs, she called him from the bathroom. He got to the door and saw her hanging upside down with her legs over the shower curtain rail. Her white shirt was hanging loose around her and the denim ruffled up almost to her crotch. She was holding a can of spray cream.
Cox saw that there were thick gobs of cream on the butterscotch skin of her tight stomach. More was on her bra and over her breasts. And now, she was spraying it up her skirt.
She looked up at him with her sad eyes wide and said, “I’m an awful mess, Daddy.”
THE DEVIL’S HAND
Knights of the Lost Highway MC
Alice May Ball
For Gat, my rock.
Without you, it wouldn’t mean a thing
Larry was a massive cock on legs. I saw it the first time our eyelines crossed. Fine legs, attached to a smoking bod, it has to be said. But even the steel balls of his hard, rolling ass are nothing but a delivery system, a means of propulsion for that rock of a cock.
Larry is driven by one thing only. To pump that monster into every beautiful woman he sees. It doesn’t make for much of a challenge when businesswomen, cheerleaders, teachers, cocktail waitresses – every kind of beautiful women — start tugging at their clothes and primping the moment he struts into a room.
Ordinary girls and women have the same reaction too, of course, but only Larry doesn’t ever notice. Never except for me, for some reason. I still don’t have a clue why me.
He isn’t dumb, not in any way. Thinking simply doesn’t occupy much of his time or energy. He makes his living, such as it is, providing muscle for bike gangs. That and what he takes from poker tables.
He could be a poker pro and make real money. Serious money. If he’d ever stop still long enough to hone his skills. If he would concentrate on one thing for more than ten minutes at a time. And if that one thing wasn’t a plump, hungry pussy.
He can focus on a pussy all day long. Long enough to get the girl’s attention — usually less than a minute — long enough to get her panties thoroughly wet — literally the twinkling of an eye — and long enough to get them off her. That’s a few more seconds.
He can look at a woman’s pussy through her eyes, he can taste it breathing into her ear. He can get a scent of it from the hollow by her collarbone. He can feel her arousal as the tip of his tongue grazes the side of her neck.
And he has the devil’s hand.
After that, his attention span will mostly depend on the girl’s stamina, her imagination and inventiveness, and by how outrageously filthy she is.
With me he was different.
Daddy’s reaction when I handed him the ten thousand dollars was a disappointment, most of all because it was exactly what I expected.
“Belle,” his eyes shone, “I’m back in the game. I can turn it around.” He didn’t even look up at me, he was transfixed by the little stack of bills.
Daddy was still a good looking man, even with the ‘distinguished’ gray at the leading edges of his retreating hair. His wide open, optimistic smile could get him into the senate. The thought of where it might get him in jail made me cold inside.
“Daddy,” I told him, “You can roll it back over the tables if you want, but Spinal will still be after you for what you owe him.”
“But Belle, I can turn this into…” I held up a hand.
“Daddy, the money Spinal lent you, what did you turn that into? And the money you borrowed from the Kazinzcis, what did you make with that?”
He was about to respond. I held my hand up still.
“You made a hole, Daddy. You dug yourself into a pit so you had to go borrow some more.”
The thought of where I’d been that past week, of what I’d had to face and what I had done inflamed me. “I thought about taking the money straight to Spinal myself, so you wouldn’t have to be in room with ten thousand temptations. But you know what? I decided, it’s your choice, Daddy.”
I looked him right in the eye. I thought of myself as immature for an eighteen year-old, and I always considered my father as a sage. But when it came to money, he was a gurgling infant. After the week I just had, I was middle aged, weary and worn.
“Daddy, don’t you even want to know, don’t you wonder how your teenage daughter came up with ten thousand dollars in less than a week?”
His big eyes sloped. At that point, I didn’t know whether it meant anything or not. Or, even if it did, whether all it meant was a variation on his old theme of, ‘Please, Belle, I don’t deserve you and I know it. Please don’t make me look at the consequences of my actions.’
“I worked hard,” I told him, “and I did some things that I never wanted to do. And I did it all to give you the chance to pull yourself out of the hole. If you want to stay down in the hole and play some more, that choice is yours.” He couldn’t help his smile from brightening.
“But I’m done with it, Daddy, I am out of here.” The pitch of my voice shocked me as it deepened, “I’m not going to watch you do that to yourself. I don’t want to go with strangers to identify parts of you.”
The scents of stale perfume and beer with the perpetual background burble of slot machines was not how I had imagined a casino, not from the ways that Daddy talked about them, so what I found behind the big doors of the the Copper River Lounge was a surprise.
I don’t know exactly what I had expected. Tall, wide rooms and people in evening dress, elegantly poised around huge roulette wheels, maybe. What it was, it was like a cross between a hotel lobby the size of a football field and a low-lit mall with no glass walls and where the neon was all inside.
Most of all I think I expected an atmosphere of excitement. Danger even. Most of the people that I saw in were in work clothes or sweat pants and tee-shirts, stood in clumps around tables or sat in lines and hunkered over slot machines.
From what I heard betweenDaddy and his buddies about casinos, I expected some kind of a low-light glamor. The kind of thing that you’d see in a James Bond movie. If not that then at least something like the glimmer and golden glow of a gangster movie.
The lights were too bright, too ordinary. A buzz rose in the pit of my stomach, but it could have been the rising empty zing in my stomach, a mixture of anticipation and fear at what I had come to do.
The warren of tables meandered like an indoor market. Small, semi-circular blue tables of blackjack and long roulette tables with LED readouts on poles were surrounded by lines of slots and video poker screens. Players hunched blank-faced over the flashing screens and prodded the big buttons like it was a minimum-wage job.
Players around the roulette table were more animated. A tall man in a business suit, maybe in his thirties, checked me out as I walked by, making me feel conspicuous and even more out of place. I felt his eyes on me, appraising her. I realized that he was liking what he saw.
A pair of eyes on the far side of the bar, way off to one side watched me over a pair of shades and under a mop of black hair. The man in a black leather coat watched me walk across the floor like I was an unknown species. Like he found me out.
His brown eyes melted my insides as his head shook so slightly I could almost believe I hadn’t seen it. I lifted my chin and tried to act like nothing had happened. The way he looked at me, like he saw all the way inside me almost stopped me in my tracks.
Then he threw back his drink, bourbon or a brandy it looked like. He looked at me a moment, then he rose, turned and headed for the back where, I guessed, the private games rooms were.
My heart pounded as I tried to focus. I had come here, come into a casino when all my life I swore it was one thing that I would never do. Here I was, out of options and about to attempt the most desperate thing I had ever considered in my life. Something I had to do.
The fifteen bucks in my purse didn’t seem like it would ever be enough to achieve what I needed. The rising swirl of panic boiled and chilled inside me. It was too important. I couldn’t fail, but how could I possibly succeed?
Daddy said, over and over as far back as I could remember, ‘Protect your bankroll. Got to protect your bankroll. That way it doesn’t matter how slow you roll, as long as you’re rolling it your way.’ It was like a motto. When the money rolls to your side of the table, detain it.’
If he’d listened to any of his own advice, I wouldn’t be alone in a room that clattered with money and smelled of desperation. I wouldn’t be here with clammy palms and a banging in my chest. With a bankroll so small it was almost invisible.
I picked my way through to the farthest part of the room where the noisy craps table was. Men, all of them were men, jostled around the sunken table. A tall, rangy man glistened in a sheen of sweat at the far end of the table. He rolled the dice around in his loose right hand.
Some heads turned and some male eyes roamed over my tight, thin shirt and my short denim skirt. “Hey, baby,” a cute, short-haired jock called across the well of the table, “Come bet with me.” I just returned his look. I gave him no smile, no expression. He tried again, “C’mon. We can both get lucky.”
From the edge of the sunken table, I carried on looking at him while I lifted my fingers to say ‘enough,’ still not smiling. He was cute, though. Then I looked away.
My attention was for the shooter. Tall and lean with a shy look in his dark eyes, he wore a loose blue work shirt open over a tight black tee-shirt. There was a body moving under there, muscle rolling. On his slim, cocked hips, his jeans had a
thick black leather belt with a big metal Harley Davidson logo for a buckle.
Bright eyed with a smart look on his pretty face, all I wanted to know was, would he do it, would he make the next roll? Then the next. Then the next.
Before he threw, he held the dice in a deliberate clamp between his fingers and thumb. His movements were slow and careful. The thrill in the pit of my stomach buzzed at a higher pitch. I had come at a good time.
This shooter wasn’t grey and ordinary. He wasn’t someone who would just roll with no idea what he was doing. When the dice hit the inside wall at my end of the table then bounced back, the result wasn’t going to be a mystery to him.
Savage Angels: A Savage MC Erotic Romance Page 11
