by Julia Marie
“Why the hell did you leave the safe house?”
“I just wanted to get out for a bit. I was going absolutely crazy in there.”
“So you had to go to the mall where your roommate worked?”
I didn’t have a great excuse. “I said I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. It was stupid.”
“You’re fucking right it was stupid!” he shouted. I winced at the anger in his voice. I’d heard it used against other people in the office, but I’d never been on the receiving end of it before. It hurt, like a scathing rebuttal of everything I was and had done. “You could have gotten yourself caught — almost did. Who knows what would have happened once they got a hold of you, but I sure as hell know that it wouldn’t have turned out well for either of us!”
His anger, as justified as it was, still made my back rise. As much as I deserved it, I couldn’t help but start to feel put off by the reaming out I was getting.
“It won’t happen again,” I said, sullenly. “I’ll never leave the safe house again after today, even if it starts to burn down around me.”
I could see Shane look over at me from the corner of my eye, but I refused to meet his eyes, keeping my own gaze focused on the houses around us.
“Hey,” he said, his voice lower and more under control. “I’m sorry to yell at you. I’m used to dealing with the bikers at the warehouse, and shouting is part of the game in that world, otherwise they never take you seriously.”
He was extending an olive branch, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept it. My pulse still hadn’t recovered from my sprint, and I didn’t manage anything more than a weak “okay” in response.
I had gone overboard.
Jackie wasn’t a subordinate of mine, wasn’t a member of the motorcycle club. She had started out as an assistant when I’d first hired her, but I think both of us knew that we had moved beyond that stage. I wasn’t sure what we were, since the tangled web we were caught in didn’t give us much choice other than to be together, but she deserved more than I had given her.
Seeing where in the city we were, I changed course from my planned route, bringing the bike onto the highway for a few exits.
The feeling of her arms wrapped around me was stiff, and I could tell that she wouldn’t have even held them there if she wasn’t afraid of flying off the back of the bike if we hit a bump.
Finally, we got to where we were going.
Jackie looked puzzled when we pulled to a stop; we were still far from the safe house, in what was a mix between an industrial area and an older, rundown commercial district.
“Where are we?”
I said nothing, but swung off the bike and held my hand out for her.
“My lady,” I said, waiting patiently as she looked up at me. I could see the resentment warring with curiosity in her face, fighting for supremacy and control of her mood. I willed her to forgive me, but remained silent.
Finally, she let me take her hand and help her get off the motorcycle. She bent her knees slowly a few times, obviously sore from her first ever ride. “What are we doing here?”
“Well, we can’t drive back to the safe house right now, they are going to be swarming around the clubhouse and it’s not that far away. The neighborhood isn’t safe right now, especially with this bike. Marshall is going to meet us here and we’ll figure out our next steps.” I didn’t let go of her hand, instead pulling her along with me towards a short, squat structure.
A corner of the roof had fallen in, and it was clearly deserted and had been for some time. It sat next to a paved track behind a chain link fence, the pavement cracked and weeds growing indiscriminately across what used to be a tenderly cared for property.
A faded, garish sign read “Mad Tom’s Go Karts.”
The place was exactly as I remembered it; a little more ran-down, maybe, and certainly less busy, but there were enough happy memories in here to last a lifetime. I guided us right up to the fence, staring through the links and seeing things that were no longer there.
Jackie didn’t bother asking her questions, but I saw them written in her eyes.
“I used to come here all the time when I was younger,” I explained. “It was a great escape from the crushing poverty, whenever we had a couple dollars from a lucky lottery ticket or mom getting a couple of extra shifts at work, we came down here to get away from things for an afternoon.”
I was gratified to see Jackie take a look around with new appreciation. These days there wasn’t much to the place, but for a kid twenty years ago, this was the setting of endless adventure and dreams, the chance to run through the arcade, or take to the track and pretend to be a famous racecar driver.
“I take it this is where you learned to love driving fast?” she asked.
I nodded. “I was every champion race car driver whenever I came here. My kart was a finely tuned Ferrari racecar, and I stood on the podium after every race and sprayed champagne onto my admirers. Of course, the podium was a bucket and the champagne was a can of Coke.”
She laughed, the sound rich and velvety and so welcome after the silence and resentment of the drive. “And the adoring crowd?”
“Toy soldiers,” I said with a grin. “And the first time I brought them home without washing them and put them on the kitchen table was the last. My ass was sore for a week after mom had to wash the table down.”
We shared a heartfelt laugh, and Jackie let me slip an arm around her as she leaned into me and put her head on my shoulder.
The crunch of a car on the gravel behind us announced Marshall’s presence.
“There he is. We should get out of here quickly, you never know when the FBI might catch up to us.”
I turned as I spoke to see something I hadn’t been expecting. It wasn’t Marshall that had appeared, but a black SUV. Men in black suits poured out, four of them. Coming out of the passenger’s seat was McCrown. Our eyes met over Jackie’s head, his narrowing as they saw us wrapped in an embrace.
“Shit! Run!” I pulled Jackie along with me as I took off along the chain link fence, mind already racing, darting ahead of us, remembering the terrain I had once known so well.
Jackie had just been in a full-out sprint less than an hour beforehand, and I doubted that she would last very long against fresh agents.
Hell, I doubt I will be able to outrun them for long, even with this head start. It had been a while since the marines, and although I had maintained my body, I knew I wasn’t in the same peak physical condition I had been then.
I scanned the path ahead, looking for an opportunity amongst the mostly abandoned buildings. There were a lot of dead ends, and dark corners, and there weren’t that many FBI agents.
There’s only one chance here.
Not again.
Barely twenty seconds into the chase, and my lungs already screamed at me. There wasn’t much I could do about it other than tell my body to ignore all of the pain, all of the warning signs, and just push through it.
I didn’t even dare look over at Shane. The ground in front of us was rocky and uneven, barely even a path that strung along the backs of the abandoned stretch of buildings. Once more I turned my entire focus onto the task at hand, and that was to put my feet in front of each other over and over again, as fast as I could. Nothing else mattered.
I couldn’t let myself think of the men chasing behind us, because the second I did that, my feet started to wobble and a sense of hopelessness overcame me.
No. Come on, Jackie. You have Shane with you now. He won’t let you get caught, he saved you last time and he’ll save you again. He’ll find a way out of this for both of us, and then we will go away somewhere and find a way to survive. It will be okay so long as the two of us are together.
So confident was I in Shane and his ability to save us that I managed to convince myself that despite the burning in my lungs and the sharpening pain that struck like daggers in behind my right knee, everything would be okay so long as I kept putting one foot in front of the oth
er.
Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left.
The path forked into two, one heading to a cul-de-sac in between two buildings that were barely more than skeletons poking concrete fingers into the sky, and the other that continued to loop in behind. The way the path turned, for a few moments Shane and I would be obscured from the sights of those chasing us.
That’s when it all went wrong.
A strong shove into my shoulder put me off balance and sent me sprawling. It had been perfectly timed, and I stumbled through a darkened hole in the wall of a concrete and rebar building that looked like its construction had been halted halfway through and then been left to fall to ruin.
The brightness of the day vanished into darkness as I tried to keep my feet but failed, crashing into a mound of gravel that filled the entire back corner of the room. Somehow despite the outward appearance, the roof had remained intact and sheltered the interior from the penetrating sunlight.
Ow! What the hell happened?
It was a struggle to piece it together, but my mind worked on it as I lay there, struggling to breathe quietly.
Shane pushed me.
It was the only explanation that fit. He had shoved me into this building as soon as we ran by it, and kept on running.
Why would he do that?
Again, only one reason, and I had to make sure that I took his gift and didn’t let it go to waste.
I crawled from my spot on the mound of gravel, relatively exposed, into the opposite corner of the room where the shadows were even deeper and there was no line of sight with the hole I had entered through.
No sooner had I found my new hiding place than the pounding of footsteps on the trail outside filtered in through the door. They slowed for a second.
“The trail splits. Johnson and Anderson, continue on that way. Thompson, you’re with me this way.”
Two sets of footsteps ran off.
“Sir, what about in here?” Agent Thompson’s voice echoed inside the big room, coming from just outside the hole that Shane had pushed me through. I withdrew a little further from the door instinctively.
“Check it quick.”
A head poked through the opening. I was curled up in the corner, partly hidden behind a few cinder blocks but not completely obscured. I sat there and prayed that he wouldn’t see me.
My shoulder twitched as something living stepped onto it.
It took all of my strength and will not to scream as the questing exploration of the rat ventured down my arm.
Agent Thompson’s head slowly scanned the room, although I knew from experience how hard it was to see anything after the blinding brightness of outside.
“Do you see anything?” asked the voice from outside.
The rat’s whiskers scratched my wrist, and I involuntarily flicked my hand in response, unable to bear the feeling any longer. The rat flew a couple of feet and started to run away, toward the entrance.
A loud bang shattered the quiet of the room, and the rat’s torn body twitched as it slid into the circle of light cast by the hole in the wall.
“Thompson, report!”
“Just a rat, sir,” said Thompson, his voice dripping in disgust. “Let’s go.”
I waited for another minute before I dared breathe, my hands pressed against my eyes as I tried to keep in all of the emotion that threatened to escape. I was worried that if I made any sound, I would start to scream and would never stop.
Fuck. Oh holy fuck.
For some reason the needless death of the rat haunted me, and not just because that could have easily been me if I have moved instead. He had only been curious about the human that had encroached on his territory, and had paid the ultimate price for it because I couldn’t stand him crawling over my body.
I sent a silent apology toward the still figure lying a couple dozen feet away.
It was another ten minutes before I was able to move, my legs beginning to cramp from the repeated strain of the two chases and then being forced to hold such a cramped position. There was a fainter light coming from the other direction inside the building that I was able to detect now that my eyes had adjusted to the darkness within.
Stumbling but doing so slowly and quietly, I made my way through the abandoned building until I got to the side the faced the street. There were the gaping holes of the unfinished doors and windows, which gave a view of the desolate cul-de-sac.
There were a few vehicles sitting in a ring in the center of the paved circle. All black, and with men in black suits standing all around.
I stayed as far away from the light as possible, but crept forward when I saw that all of the agents turned in one direction to look at a few men that were coming out from between a pair of buildings on the opposite side of the cul-de-sac.
My heart dropped when I saw the faces of the men, and Shane’s unmistakable features belonged to the man held roughly between two others, hands behind him.
He was ushered into the back of one of the SUVs, and then all but one of the vehicles pulled out and drove away, leaving a pair of men behind.
Shane…
He had saved me, and in doing so had been captured himself. It was all my fault, too. If I hadn’t left the house in some ill conceived plan to get fresh air and a break from the monotony, then Shane would still be free and we would be able to figure out a way forward.
Now he was taken in, and I was helpless. I didn’t even know how I was going to get away from there.
Scared to make any sound at all, and not knowing if there were any agents crawling through the ruined buildings looking for me, I withdrew into the deepest, darkest corner of the decrepit husk that I could find and curled up into a ball, willing my life to go back to the way it had been two weeks before.
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Blackmail
Restless MC – Book #1
Danger is sexy…
On paper it looked like a regular job, the sort of thing that Jackie Maguire is in desperate need of. Only when she arrives at the interview does she realize that the man she is going to work for is large, tattooed, and quite possibly incredibly dangerous. And she can’t help but want him.
Shane Hamilton has a special place within the Restless Motorcycle Club – he is in charge of operations, and that includes the shipping business that provides the front for their illegal pursuits. He is smart, powerful and a completely dominant personality, and when he sees something he wants, he never fails to get it.
The Motorcycle Club has enemies, and Jackie’s appearance on the scene is the perfect opportunity for them to get a leg up. Personalities and passions collide as Jackie is given a choice – dig up secrets from the dangerous biker gang or else face the consequences.
Excerpt:
Shane groaned and his hands came up to pull me even harder against him. I could feel him stirring against my leg, the sensation so unfamiliar and yet so primal, evoking a response in my body that was as old as time itself.
My gambit appeared to be working, distracting Shane from the events over lunch. It also prevented me from tripping up and letting slip that I knew that the business was a front for illegal motorcycle club activities. I didn't trust myself to be able to lie convincingly about it, and so I did the only thing I could think of - the thing that I’d wanted to do ever since I’d walked in for the interview and saw his face.
His hands were everywhere, tugging at the base of my hair, running down my back, cupping my ass through my clothes. I needed them against my bare skin, giving me the pleasure that I knew he could.
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Julia Marie, Capture (Restless Motorcycle Club Romance)
