SCAR (LOST CREEK SHIFTERS NOVELLAS Book 2)

by Samantha Leal

  The bar had been quiet for the past couple of weeks, but that was mainly because a lot of the charters of the city had been travelling up state and Carl hadn’t wanted one gang, in particular, coming in anymore after what the creepy guys had done to Emily. It had turned out that they had been pretty high up in a rival gang, and trouble between them and Carl’s MC was pretty commonplace. But when they had disrespected Emily, it had been the final straw.

  But even with the bar quiet, it was still raking in the takings, and each weekend night was packed to the rafters with students or rock fans or people who were just curious to know what it felt like to walk into an outlaw bar and live dangerously for the night. In a city like theirs, there seemed to be no shortage of voyeurs, and neither Emily, Junk, nor Carl were complaining. It kept them all busy and on their toes.

  The front door swung open on its hinges and Emily turned. He walked in with all the swagger and confidence he had had the day she first laid eyes on him, and he still made her heart race and her pulse quicken. She couldn’t help but smile as he approached her, slid an arm around her shoulder and leaned in for a deep, long kiss.

  “Hey, Babe,” he smiled. “Mmm, you smell good.”

  It had been the new perfume he had bought for her. Another thing she had never expected to be given when she had started dating a biker. But Carl was anything but stereotypical and so far, he was breaking all expectations.

  He pulled her close to him and she looked up at him nervously.

  “Did you pick it up?” she asked as their eyes met.

  “Umm hmm,” he nodded as he opened his jacket to show her the inside pocket. She could see the pink edge of the box sticking up and she felt the nerves rise in her.

  Whatever the outcome, she knew that nothing would break them. They would continue to grow and thrive no matter what.

  “Come on then,” she said as she motioned toward a door that led out back to a corridor.

  They held hands as they walked down it toward the ladies bathroom and Carl handed her the box and waited outside as Emily disappeared inside and locked the door.

  Even though she hadn’t taken the test yet, she already knew it was positive. The wait between doing what she had to do and waiting for the result to appear were the longest three minutes of her life, and she stared up at the ceiling, wondering whether to open the door and let Carl in, or wait until she knew for sure.

  She looked down at her watch. The three minutes were up. It was now or never.

  She picked up the stick and let her eyes adjust to the little screen in the middle. Two very strong pink lines.

  No doubt about it.

  She was most certainly pregnant.

  She opened the door to the restroom and Carl turned to look at her with hope in his eyes, and he only had to see her to know the answer.

  It was really happening.

  They were going to be parents.

  He rushed toward her and swept her up in his arms. Emily looked into his eyes and they kissed each other deeply. When she had stepped into the bar all those weeks ago, she had no idea of how that small act of spontaneity would change her life forever, but she was so glad that it had.

  She had found the sexy, outlaw man of her dreams and now they were about to start a family together. Fate really had reached out and taken her hand. And she had never been happier.

  THE END

  What the Outlaw Demands

  Samantha Leal

  Copyright ©2015 by Samantha Leal. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic of mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Thank you so much for your interest in my work!

  1.

  Kristin watched the hands of the clock ticking opposite her. Every second seemed to drag and she bit the edge of her pen as she turned to look out of the office window. After working so hard to get there, now all she wanted to do was run. The thought of spending another week in that place was making her skin crawl.

  Outside, in the corridor, she could see the male partners all patting each other on the back and boosting each other’s egos. She was never invited into their little office chats, ones where she could be a part of the boys club. In the center of it was Pete, grinning from ear to ear, taking the odd glance back to her office because he knew she would be watching.

  Fucking Pete, she thought.

  She knew at home later he would be full of it. He’d swagger in, puffing his chest and try to make her feel inferior. It was how it always went… She got ignored and he made her feel like crap about it. She knew she needed to change firms…and boyfriends…but she had wanted to be a partner at Anderson and Coleridge Law so much that she just didn’t think she had it in her to walk away.

  She realized she was holding the pen so tight, it was almost snapping in her hand.

  “Shit,” she breathed out and dropped it on the desk. She was going to have to calm down. She didn’t need to work herself up like this… She was bigger than them and she wasn’t going to rise to it. Instead, she got to her feet, walked over to the door and lowered the blind so the pane of glass allowing her to see the little boys club grooming each other in the hallway was blocked out. She went back to her desk, sat down and closed her eyes.

  She was reaching her limit. She and Pete had been together for almost a year, and while it had started out really well, it had rapidly declined into something rather sinister. Pete was a control freak. He loved making her feel inferior, and even though she was a strong woman who could see right through him, there were times when she was afraid of what he was capable of. She could hear him out in the hallway, laughing and joking with the other male partners. She was the only female partner at the firm and was regularly left out, and although she was used to it, she was still struggling to accept it. Deep down she knew it was time to move on.

  Her phone rang and made her jump. “Hello?” she answered.

  “Hi, Kristin,” her PA Sally said from the other end. “Did you finish with the paperwork for the Green Case?”

  “Just give me five more minutes and I’ll bring it out to you,” she said with a sigh. She hated to admit it, but her work really was starting to suffer. She could never seem to keep her mind on the job.

  She looked down and scanned the explosion of files on the desk in front of her and wanted to scream. She rubbed her eyes and massaged her temples with her fingers.

  “I need to get out of here,” she whispered.

  She got to her feet and looked out across the skyline. It was almost five and the sun looked like it was already on its way down, which was impossible for summer, but she felt it all the same.

  “I guess it’s always night somewhere,” she said to herself.

  Her telephone rang again and she jumped. She turned around and grabbed the receiver. “Just five more minutes, Sally,” she snapped.

  “No,” Sally said quietly, clearly taken aback by her boss’s tone. “It’s a call from the police department. They have someone in custody who wants to talk to you.”

  “What?” she said rubbing her temples again. “Can’t it wait? We have a duty lawyer who could deal with that.”

  “They asked for you specifically,” she said nervously. “The cop said his name was Dan Lockhart.”

  Kristin paused for a moment, her heart rising into her throat at the sound of the name… A name she hadn’t heard for years.

  “Did you say Dan Lockhart?” she repeated as she sat back down at her desk.

  “That’s what the cop told me, yeah,” Sally confirmed.

  “Okay,” Kristin said quietly, “Put him on.”

  The line beeped, and there was a click before Kristin could hear shallow breathing on the other end of the line.

  “Dan?” she whispered, still unsure of whether she believed it.

  “Kristin?” he replied.

 
Her skin went cold when she heard his voice, but she instantly found herself smiling.

  “How the heck are you?” he asked, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  “I’m wonderful,” she smiled. “I take it things aren’t so great for you?”

  “Haha,” he chuckled. “They’re certainly not… I could do with your expertise.”

  “Which station are you at?” she asked as she grabbed a pen.

  “South,” he sounded as if he was smoking. “I would normally deal with this sort of thing myself, but I thought it might be a nice excuse to see you again after all these years.”

  “Just stay put and don’t say anything. You can explain to me when I get there.” She hung up the phone and grabbed her jacket.

  The Green case file would have to wait…

  2.

  Dan Lockhart… she hadn’t heard a word from him in over ten years, and here he was calling her as if it were only yesterday. She was a fool for going down there. She should have told him she was busy, or that she didn’t deal with criminal cases anymore… He was probably in hot water, after all. Hell, she should have told him anything. But there was something drawing her to him. Just hearing his voice again after all that time had instantly struck a chord.

  She slid into the driver’s seat of her Mercedes and fastened her seat belt. It was dark in the firm’s underground parking lot, and the summer heat was intense and stuffy. She started the engine and put the AC on full blast before she looked at herself in the review mirror. Her heart was pounding and her pupils were dilated. In a rush of memory she recalled the last time she had seen him… She remembered it all…

  ***

  Growing up, Kristin had fallen hard and fast for Dan. He was her next-door neighbor and one of the hottest guys at her high school. He was a few years older than her and she had watched him from afar while she matured. She had seen him go from being the boy next door to something else entirely…something frightening. She had heard the arguments. She had watched him come home tattooed and liquored up, and saw the bruises and the scars. Whatever he was doing, it was bad. And what surprised her even more than the fact that he kept doing it…was the fact that she liked it.

  He never seemed to really realize that she existed until one afternoon when she came home from school when she was about seventeen and he was out on the driveway having a screaming match with his parents. She pulled up in her car and parked it down the street before meekly walking up the path to her front door. He was screaming, spitting hate and anger at them. He had a red raw scar right down his face from the corner of his eye to his chin, and she knew she was gawping but she couldn’t stop.

  “What the fuck are you looking at?” he spat as she tried to reach her front door and pretend like none of it was happening.

  His parents rounded on him, his mother trying to pull him back from the truck that was waiting for him. Inside, a man tipped his hat and smoked a cigarette while laughing and cranking up the heavy rock he was listening to.

  “Please, Dan!” his mother called. “Don’t do this!”

  He stuck his middle finger up at her and strode down to the truck before pulling open the door and jumping inside. The driver pulled out of the driveway with a wheel spin and they shouted something at Kristin that sounded like “Show us your pussy!” and then they were gone.

  Kristin went inside, flushed red and turned on. She had no idea what had just happened, but it had woken something inside of her. From that moment on, Dan Lockhart, the dangerous boy from next door, was all she could think about.

  He came back a week later, black and blue and miserable. She watched him from her bedroom window as he lay in the backyard sunbathing with his shirt off, exposing his rippling abs and tanned chest. His tattoos were fierce and they covered him from neck to waist. Kristin bit her lip as she watched him and wondered what it would feel like to be swept up in his arms. When he caught her looking, she was so embarrassed she didn’t know how she would ever face him. But luckily for her, Dan wasn’t as shy.

  The following evening, she was down in her own backyard and he stuck his head over the fence and dangled a bottle of beer.

  “Care to join?” he asked her.

  Kristin was a mess of nerves and excitement inside, and although she knew she should stay away and go back inside, she just couldn’t. She had to get to know him some more.

  She went to his yard, and they sat on deck chairs and drank straight from the bottle. He barely spoke to her, but he eyed her continuously and kept flashing her a mischievous smile. She knew it was the start of something, but she also knew she couldn’t let it happen. She was a good girl. She was on course for bigger and better things than her dumb small town, and she couldn’t let a bad boy hold her back… No matter how much she wanted it.

  She went to leave, but he pushed her up against the wall of his garage. “You’re all I’ve thought about since the moment we moved here, did you know that?” he said. His knuckles were skinned raw and the smell of stale smoke clung to him, oozing out of his pores. Instead of turning her off, it made her even hotter for him.

  “I’m going to get you one day,” he grinned. “Little Miss Good Girl… you’re not even going to know what’s hit you.”

  Kristin’s heart pounded as she ran back home and locked herself in her bedroom. She stripped naked and ran a cold shower before jumping in and cooling off. Dan Lockhart was such bad news, the worst kind…

  She didn’t seen him again after that night. Her mother told her that he had been arrested and that he’d got involved with a gang. Kristin left for college a year later and trained to be a lawyer. She heard snippets of information from her family and his about what he was up to, and it was never anything good. Their mothers had become good friends, and they regularly chatted about both Kristin and Dan, but the last she had heard, he was heavily involved with bikers and organized crime. When she got the call from him, she was more surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. She was pretty sure she would be the only lawyer he knew.

  ***

  As she pulled up outside of the station, she looked into the mirror again and reapplied her lipstick. It had been over ten years since the night in the yard that summer, but after hearing his voice again, it felt like only ten days. She was excited to see him but also apprehensive. He’d been her first crush and completely forbidden because of his edge and criminal ways. She had no idea what to expect. He could be anyone now. He could be married for all she knew. But there was something deep inside her that had the feeling he was about to make good on his promise.

  I’m going to get you one day… Little Miss Good Girl…

  3.

  Kristin walked into the station and buttoned up the middle of her jacket. She groomed her hair behind her ears with her long, manicured nails and clipped down the hallway in her stiletto heels. There were cops swarming the reception area, and as she placed her briefcase down and announced who she was, a few of them turned to look at her up and down and check her out. She was used to being stared at. Kristin was petite but curvy and had incredibly large breasts. They were like a bull’s-eye for leery men.

  “I thought you were off criminal cases?” a familiar voice chimed in behind her.

  Kristin spun around to see Jonny, a cop she was used to dealing with when she had represented the majority of the city’s criminals.

  “This is a one-time thing,” she raised her eyebrows. “Take me to Dan Lockhart?”

  “Yikes,” Jonny whistled. “Locke, huh?” He shook his head and nodded reluctantly. “If you say so….”

  He turned and motioned for her to follow him. She swiped her visitor’s badge from the reception desk and pinned it to the side of her skirt. Jonny slowed down and said discreetly over her shoulder, “What you getting mixed up in that for?”

  “Excuse me?” she demanded.

  “I know it’s none of my business, but… Well, I mean… Lockhart… you know who he is right?”

  Kristin pushed her tongue up under her fro
nt teeth.

  “Yes,” she said irritated. “He’s my old neighbor.”

  “No,” Jonny laughed and pulled her by the forearm to one side. “He’s more than a bit dangerous, Kristin…”

  “I’m sure I can handle him.”

  “Well, I’m not,” he said seriously.

  “Jonny… He’s a client, I’m just doing my job.” She tried to move past him, but he kept his grip on her arm.

  “All I’m saying is guys like him don’t need lawyers… even when they are up for murder… Keep your wits about you.”

  Kristin stopped and took in what he had said.

  Murder.

  She took a few deep breaths and nodded her head.

  “Like I said, he’s a client… This is business… I’m just here to advise him today.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Jonny said as he opened the door to the interior cells where the interview rooms were. “There you go, door five.”

  Kristin stared down the hallway and saw the two cops flanking the doorway.

  “Thank you,” she smiled, and then she turned and began her slow walk down.

  ***

  The door creaked open and she stepped into the cell. Dan Lockhart stood with his back to her. She couldn’t see his hands so she knew they were probably handcuffed in front of him.

  “Dan?” she said quietly as she walked forward.

  “No one’s called me that in years,” he said.

  He was taller than she remembered, and his shoulders were broader. He looked like a great hulk of a man in that room, his head almost skimming the ceiling. He began to turn slowly, and Kristin held her breath.

  His eyes caught her first. His deep blue eyes that had always made her weak at the knees. She was instantly floored that they hadn’t lost that effect. The scars on his face had faded, but they were still there. Instead of making him look mean, they added to his raw sexiness, creeping along his skin in crisp, faded lines. The tattoos had extended up his neck and across his knuckles. He smiled at her from beneath his floppy dirty blonde hair and it lit up the room. He didn’t look like the sort of person who would smile that way, but it instantly pulled her in.