by Franca Storm
Runner’s eyes flash and the next thing I know, he’s lunging at Eddie and wrapping his hand around his tie. He tugs really hard. Wow, his strength is…incredible. Eddie has almost a foot on him as well as weight. Runner’s about 5’ 10” and I’d say 180 pounds while Eddie is way over six foot and at least 230 pounds. I watch, open-mouthed, as he drags Eddie to the door. He lets go of him roughly, causing Eddie to stumble and then he slams his hands into his back, knocking him out of the door.
My breath catches in my throat as I watch Eddie start towards him.
Runner lifts the right side of his cut and I gasp as I see a gun there.
Eddie’s reaction mirrors mine.
He glares at Runner for a moment. And then he’s gone, storming back down the street away from the diner.
Runner slams the door shut.
His light brown, almost auburn eyes, are full of concern as he asks, “You all right?”
I can’t speak, but I manage a nod.
“Good,” he grunts.
And then he walks back to his booth and resumes eating his dinner like nothing has happened.
***
I glance at the clock. It’s almost midnight and time to close up. It’s Sunday tomorrow and the diner doesn’t open until 9am. I’m off. I have two of my girls working the shifts. Thank goodness. I’m exhausted. I pulled a double shift today, because one of my waitresses had a funeral to attend for her boyfriend’s grandfather.
I’m about to make my way into the back to get my cleaning supplies to tidy up the place when the doorbell chimes.
I look to see Runner walking back in. The smell of cigarette smoke wafts in with him.
He walks right up to the counter and orders, “So, tell me who that fuck tart were.”
I’m more than a little surprised at this, because he’s barely spoken since throwing Eddie out of here. That was a whole forty-five minutes ago. The extent of our conversation was him saying thank you when he handed his empty plate to me. Since then he’s just been sitting in my diner, reading one of the month-old magazines—one about cars—and going out for a smoke every ten minutes.
“Well?” he presses, folding his arms across his chest.
“It…it doesn’t matter,” I say, barely able to look him in the eye as usual. Argh. I hate that. He must think I’m like a pathetic little school girl. It’s just he’s so…hot. Like, scorching hot. Looking directly at him is beyond me. It has me burning up, blushing like a beet and mumbling like an idiot.
His sexy auburn eyes threaten to consume any woman who makes eye contact. His spiky black hair has me fantasizing about running my fingers through it. His body is all muscle and rippling biceps. And his butt in those jeans? Too much. Way too much. I can’t handle a man like him who just oozes sex with everything he says and does.
When I first met him up at Rox’s wedding a few months back, I made a complete fool of myself. I couldn’t even answer him when he came up to me and started talking. It was right up there with one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.
“Don’t matter?” he fumes. “The fucker threatened you.”
“He’s gone now, so it’s…it’s fine,” I say, fiddling with a salt shaker on the countertop. “Besides, you don’t want to get involved with him.”
It’s like he doesn’t even hear me, because he asks, “What’s he want?”
“I…uh…I don’t know.”
His hand shoots out then, clasping mine gently over the salt shaker. The sudden, unexpected move has my gaze snapping to his automatically. Oh God. Those eyes.
“Sarah,” he says softly. “Tell me, yeah?”
“He’s my…we dated and I…left.”
“He hurt you, right?”
“How do you—?”
“Saw how scared you were. Saw how he were with you. Weren’t hard to put the pieces together. What’s he want now?”
“He’s doing business here and he…found me.”
He lets go of me and I can finally breathe again. Whoa. That was intense.
“What business?”
“I don’t know. He always kept that private.”
“Name?”
“No, Zeb—I mean—Runner. Just leave it. He’s not a nice guy.”
“Name,” he growls.
“Eddie. Eddie Torvin.”
His eyes widen. “What?”
“You know him?”
“Shit,” he mutters. “Know of him. You dated that fuck?”
The way he says it with such disgust gets my back up and I snap, “It was a long time ago, okay?”
He stares at me, looking shocked at my rude response. And then he smirks. “So, you do got some bite to you then, huh?”
I turn away from that heated look in his eyes and tell him over my shoulder, “I need to close up. Thanks, but I’m fine.”
And with that, I hurry into the back before he can say anything else. God, he makes me into a gooey mess every time he looks at me or shows me any attention.
I need to shake this school girl crush on Zeb “Runner” Wilkes. Guys like him don’t go for girls like me. I need to get a hold of myself.
He’s just a customer. Just a customer.
I repeat those words to myself over and over again like a mantra in my head as I start getting to work on closing up the diner.
Chapter 3
~Runner~
Girl threw me through a loop when she gave that fire to me outta the damn blue. Really didn’t know she had it in her. Guess there’s more to her than I thought.
Sweet little thing’s in some serious shit, though. Seems like she don’t wanna admit it. I get that. She’s scared. But being in denial’s fucking foolish. Pretending she ain’t got a threat hanging over her head ain’t gonna make it just go away.
Jesus fuck.
Women.
Can’t believe she’s linked to Torvin. Of all the fuckers in all the damn world, why him? Saying he’s dangerous is an understatement. The club’s been keeping an eye on him.
A few months after Rox burned her position of power in Brockford, a bunch of shit heads started tryin’ to move on in now that she weren’t holding ‘em off. Tried to set up shop. Cuz Brockford’s next door to our town of Reirdon Falls, anything that happens here can impact us. We stopped a bunch of ‘em. Rox’s old man and our old club prez, Dealer, moved down here to keep an eye on stuff. So did Sin, Ax’s uncle. The two of ‘em are real dangerous guys with bad reps, so ‘em being here’s a good deterrent and all that. But now there’s this Torvin fucker. He’s been keeping off their radar.
‘Til tonight.
Ax is gonna kill me when he finds out I crossed Torvin tonight. Shit. It ain’t like I knew who he were.
But the second I saw him lay a hand on Sarah, I lost my shit. Didn’t give a crap neither. Thought he could hurt her like that? He’s lucky the club’s legit now and we got rules ‘bout beating on assholes like him, or I woulda had him in the fucking ICU.
Just seeing him touch her set me off, big time.
Took me a long time to calm down, too.
Couldn’t talk with it for a bit.
I were already in a worked up state, cuz of the issue with my screwed up sex life lately and throwing a bit of rage and violence into the mix tonight were some dangerous shit.
I stub out my smoke as I watch Sarah lock up and make her way into the parking lot.
She stops in her tracks as she sees me leaning against her rusty old Civic.
My bike’s parked right next to it now. I brought it ‘round from Temptress while Sarah were cleaning up the diner and thinking I’d left like she’d asked me to. Smiter weren’t nowhere to be seen. Guess he decided against fucking that uptight bitch after all and headed on back to the clubhouse.
“Runner?” she says, looking anywhere but right at me. She always does that. Weird.
“Get in, darlin’,” I tell her, pushing off her car and pointing to the driver’s door.
“Why are you here?”
“Gonna make su
re you get home all right. I’ll follow on my bike.”
“How do you know I don’t sleep in the apartment above my diner anymore?”
“There’s a lot of shit I know.”
“Creepy,” she says.
I laugh. “First time I heard you joke with me.”
She giggles and it’s the sweetest fucking sound. “I’m really okay. You don’t need to—”
“It’s late, darlin’. Not really up for fighting on this. So, just do it, yeah?”
She flinches at my rough tone. Shit. I keep forgetting she ain’t like the people I’m used to dealing with. She’s real sensitive. I gotta tone it down with her.
I step up to her and make my voice as gentle as fucking possible as I tell her, “Look, I ain’t gonna be able to sleep right tonight if I dunno you’re home safe after that run-in with that shit-head. So, can you do me a favor here? Throw me a bone, darlin’? Please.”
She does that tapping thing with her foot and looks down. “Okay,” she murmurs, biting her bottom lip shyly. Goddamn.
I react without thinking and I reach out, brushing my thumb over her lip. Her big eyes lock with mine. “You’re so fucking cute. You know that?”
Shit. What the fuck am I doing?
I jerk back like I’ve just been slapped hard across the side of the face.
And that’s when I hear it. The crunch of footsteps on the gravelly parking lot.
I’ve just picked up two guys in my peripheral vision when Sarah screams. I follow her line of sight to see another one, dressed like the rest, in dark sweats, stalking over to us.
I wrap my arm ‘round her quick and push her to the driver’s door. “Get inside and stay there.”
“I’ll…I should call 911.”
“No. Fuck, no.”
“What?” she asks as she fumbles at the door with her keys while I stand with my back to her, covering her as the three guys close in.
“The cops show up and I’m going straight in the slammer, darlin’.”
She don’t need to know the whole deal there.
“Lock the doors and don’t get out, no matter what you see or hear. You hear me?”
She nods and hurries into the car. I hear the locks snap into place a moment later.
I push off the car and stride up to the three shit-heads forming a wall in front of me.
“We got a problem here?”
“We’re here for the girl, not you.”
“What you want with her?”
“Not us. Torvin. They have some unfinished business. We’re just here to bring her to him. So, just step aside and let us do our job.”
I ain’t surprised ‘bout this little speech of not wanting to cross me. Torvin don’t wanna mess with me, cuz he knows that’ll mean crossing the club. Guess now he’s calmed down from earlier, he gets what a bad fucking idea that’d be for him.
“Yeah, I ain’t gonna be doing that.”
I look ‘em over real quick. None of ‘em’s packing a piece. Has me silently cursing Ax’s orders of not pulling our guns on civilians or doing any shit like that in public. Club’s legit now. He don’t want that changing. Problem is, right now, I could end this thing with three quick shots. I ain’t Ax. Don’t care that the guys ain’t armed and me shooting ‘em would be in cold blood. The way I figure it, if they’re gonna come at me, I got the right—moral right and everything—to stop ‘em any way I want.
But I’ll get my ass handed to me if I do that. Can’t go against Prez’s orders. I respect the club. Love the club. Ain’t gonna do nothing to put it in a bad position.
The talkative guy in the middle comes at me.
He’s big like the others. And slow.
Big guys always think they got every fight in the bag.
Most of the time they do, ‘til they go up against me. I got skills. I know how to fight real well.
I wait ‘til he’s close enough, then I slam the heel of my hand into his throat. As he’s gagging on that, I plunge my knee into the sensitive area right beneath his ribs. He hunches over and I knee him again. Guy drops to his knees wheezing, cuz I just broke a couple of his ribs. Yeah, he’s out. Won’t be able to do nothing more now. He’s gonna be heading to the ER tonight.
Second guy’s fist comes at my face. I swipe it away, deflecting it with my arm. I kick at the back of his knees and he goes down hard at my feet. I wrap my arm ‘round his neck, trapping him in a brutal chokehold.
Third guy comes at me then and I kick him back.
But he ain’t done.
I only got one hand free ‘til the guy in my arms passes out. Unlike in the movies, this shit takes a long time in real life.
Third guy is wild and pissed, cuz of me messing up his buddies.
His fists, knees and feet come at me. But I’m quick as a damn cat, fighting him back with one fucking hand and my feet.
But then he fakes me out, looking like he’s gonna kick me in the junk. I react fast to block it, but the sly fuck expects it and dodges. And that’s when I feel a white-hot searing pain rip through my right side.
His eyes shine with victory.
I look down to see him holding a blade buried in my flesh. He pulls it out and gets ready for another go.
Shit.
I got no choice.
I let go of the guy I been choking out and throw my hand out, grabbing his wrist just before he can bring it down again. I twist hard and he screams like a little bitch as I break his wrist. I knock him out with a brutal fist to the temple.
I look at the guy I’d been choking and breathe a sigh of relief as I see he’s too far gone to do shit anyway.
A wave of light-headedness hits me and I stumble back into Sarah’s car as I slap my hand over my bloodied side. As I look down, I see how much blood I’m losing. Fuck. It’s way too much.
I hear the car door open and the next thing I know Sarah’s hands are on me, helping me into the backseat.
“I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay, Runner. I’ve got you, okay?”
“No…hospitals…okay?” I manage to get out.
I hear her slam the driver’s door shut and start the engine. “What?”
“Serious. Say it.”
“Okay. No hospitals. I promise.”
Phew. Good. Now, I can relax.
Fuck, I’m tired.
I can’t help it.
I close my eyes and everything slips away.
Chapter 4
~Sarah~
“Where’d you…learn to…do this?” Runner asks me, his voice hoarse and weak as he looks down at the stitches in his side.
“I just have some experience, that’s all,” I answer as vaguely as possible.
“You ain’t…a nurse,” he points out.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, taping some gauze over the wound.
I pull back and start packing up my first aid kit equipment that’s spread out all over my bedside table.
I hear him grunting and shifting uncomfortably on the bed.
I stop what I’m doing and look over at him. Oh God. In the seriousness and chaos of the situation, I hadn’t stopped to really notice the fact that he was actually lying in my bed shirtless and wearing nothing but his jeans. But now…my goodness. He’s ripped. And his tattoos are sexy. I’ve never really been a fan, but his are changing all that. He has the Black Thorns MC crest over his heart and a different tattoo on each shoulder. Before I can figure out what they are and get a good look, another grunt from him startles me out of my perverted thoughts.
“I’ll get you something for the pain.”
His hand shoots out and grabs my arm. “No.”
“What? I have to. You’re in agony. You can’t—”
“No, darlin’. No drugs,” he insists.
I don’t get it. Is he really that intent on keeping up his macho image here that he won’t take some painkillers? “Don’t be such a hard-ass,” I say, surprising myself that I’m talking like this to him.
“Ain’t that…can’t
…no drugs.”
“Why not?”
“Got…bad history.”
He tightens his grip on my arm and pulls me closer. “Swear to me. Might be…getting delirious…and shit. No matter…what I say…no drugs. Please. Please, darlin’.”
Wow, he’s begging me. Pleading with me. I’ve never seen this side of him before. Never seen beneath his cool, unaffected and tough exterior. But here it is. His vulnerability is so shocking that I don’t know what to say.
“Sarah?” he gasps. “Please.”
I peel his hand off me, which is easy because he’s so weak right now. He’s lost a lot of blood. I pick up a damp cloth from my bedside table and pat his forehead gently, wiping away the sweat and dulling the heat. “I swear. No drugs.”
He smiles weakly. “Thank…you.”
He murmurs softly and closes his eyes as I continue to soothe him with the cloth.
After a long while of silence, he says, “You’d make…a good…nurse.”
“I’m sorry. This is all my fault. You got stabbed because of me.”
“Nah, darlin’. Stabbed cuz…I took ’em on. I made…that call.”
“No one’s ever protected me like that before.”
His eyes open slightly and he fixes his tired gaze on me. “Their loss.”
I laugh. He must already be getting delirious. “Okay, sure.”
He lays his hand on mine, covering the cloth and rasps, “Sweet angel.”
I freeze at his touch and his gentle words. “Runner, I—”
“How’d you…do it?”
“Do what?”
His hand leaves mine and he struggles to move it as he points at his jeans.
I draw back in surprise. His thing is standing to attention. “Oh.”
“My dick wants…to fuck you…but I don’t.”
Well that’s just mean. I take the cloth away and climb off the bed, turning from him so he can’t see that he’s hurt me. No man will get to see that.
“No…I mean…cuz you’re too…too good.”
“What?” I ask, turning back to him.
“An…angel…and I’m…an asshole.”
