Biker Rockstar Billionaire CEO Alpha (Hers to Keep Trilogy Book 1)

by Violet Blaze

  “Does Maverick know this is the concert you're going to?”

  “Why should he care? Don't be such an uptight little snot, Laide. Get dressed. You've got so many cute outfits in your closet. It'd be a shame to let them all go to waste.”

  Layla stood up and turned on some Stone Sour on my iPod, grooving her hips to “Do Me a Favor” as she started digging through my clothes, completely unaware that she'd just ruined my fucking night.

  She might not know that Xavier Buchanan's son, Dash, was the lead singer of Pistols and Violets.

  But I did.

  How ironic.

  Violet Assassin … Pistols and Violets.

  We shared the color purple in both our names.

  Too bad the night would end in red.

  Tight leather pants covered in zippers, a pair of purple leather floral pattern boots that laced up the front with a three inch silver heel, and a long loose black tank over a purple cami. When I tossed a leather jacket over the whole thing, I looked badass and sexy.

  My knives went in my boots; my gun went under my jacket.

  “They won't let you in there with that,” my brother, Maverick, said when I came down the stairs with a full face of makeup, my purple hair frothing around my shoulders in loose, sexy curls, the bangs short and straight and halfway down my forehead. I knew what I looked like, like a slice of sex.

  But a virgin?

  Nobody would've ever suspected.

  “With what?” I asked innocently, tugging the edges of my jacket together in the front and doing a little spin for my brother's benefit. He rolled his hazel-gold eyes at me, but reached out and pulled my jacket aside, revealing the shoulder holster underneath. “Please don't tell me I have to lose the gun,” I whispered, trying to keep my voice low enough that my mom wouldn't hear me. I was her only child, her baby, and she could be twice as overprotective as my brothers.

  “The concert's being held in a stadium. Security will be tight for sure.”

  “The knives then?” I asked, my heart sinking as Maverick stared back at me with a dead serious expression on his face. So I was right then. My brothers—and by extension, the club—wanted me to kill Dash Buchanan tonight. “Why now?” I asked as Maverick ran his hand down his beard in contemplation.

  “You can keep the knives,” he said, turning away from me, refusing to give me even an inkling of what the club was up to. Figured. I might've been their Violet Assassin, but I wasn't a patched-in member and never would be. They hired me for certain jobs, paid me well, but I'd never be an inside man. “With what kids wear to these rock shows nowadays, a metal detector would be useless. They'll probably give you a pat down, so if you keep them in the boots, you should be fine.”

  “Should be,” I said with a sigh, following after him, across the worn linoleum tiles and into the new hardwood floors in the living room. After all this time, Mom was slowly getting her way with the house, finally erasing the last touches of my siblings' mother from existence. I was glad that after two and a half decades, she was actually able to make the house feel like her own, but I felt sad for the woman I'd come to know so well through the home and children she left behind. “Mave, you've got to give me more than that and you know it.”

  “Ten grand,” he said when we entered the living room and found it empty, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Haven't you been wanting to move? This could be your chance to start over. One last job and then you get the hell out of here and do something else, Adelaide.”

  I pursed my lips, but I didn't know what to say.

  It wasn't like I'd become an assassin by choice. There was no fucking assassin school out there that taught you to eliminate the rivals of your father's motorcycle club. No, I'd stumbled into this thing by accident and now, I was stuck with it.

  My eldest brother paused as my sister's footsteps came down the stairs.

  “You two go on ahead. I have some shit to deal with and I'll meet you in the city.”

  “You're not going to the show, are you?” Layla asked, pausing on the mid-stair landing and leaning over the freshly painted white banister.

  “Actually, I am,” Maverick said, his leather cut rustling as he lit a cigarette and disappeared out the front door, leaving Layla cursing behind him, her matching hazel-gold eyes following his back out the door.

  “Bastard,” she said, but she came down the stairs anyway and grabbed her jacket off a peg near the door. “He doesn't even like Pistols and Violets. All he listens to is Rev Theory on repeat. Is he coming just to keep me from getting laid? How am I supposed to pick a guy up with my brother breathing down my neck?”

  “You're twenty-eight years old, Layla,” I said, but she waved her shiny black nailed hand at me and reached for the handle of the front door.

  “Twenty-eight years old doesn't erase the older part of the brother equation; they'll be on our asses until we either get married or they die, whichever comes first.”

  I smiled at the joke, but only because I didn't realize how quickly the latter part of that equation would come.

  My entire band was made up of women—a personal choice. I'd spent my whole life around men, men, and more men. Frankly, I was fuckin' sick of 'em. Women, I'd discovered later in life, were smarter, smelled substantially better, and were a damn pleasure to look at.

  “Did you want to go over the set list?” my lead guitarist, Shelby Bryant, asked me as she stepped up beside me in a pair of tight white jeans with black roses all over them, her hair long and dark and tied up in a ponytail. She had a pretty face, almost too sweet for rock 'n' roll, but I let my gaze roll right over her.

  I might've been on a personal mission to pleasure the world's women, but there was no way in fuck that I was touching any of the girls in my band. They were the closet things I had to sisters—never got to know my real ones since, you know, I was kidnapped by my cocksucker of a father.

  “I got this,” I told her with a genuine smile, turning her cheeks red as the polish on her nails. Shelby stared up at me for a moment and then blinked away the stars in her eyes, nodding slightly and folding up the piece of paper in her hand. Technically, this wasn't our concert tonight. Since our band was local to the area, we were opening the show as guest stars of another group.

  This summer, we'd pack up and hit the road.

  That was the part of this job I looked forward to the most—I got to ride my bike between cities.

  And she was a beaut, too, one of the first models manufactured by Buchanan Bikes in their Nevada factory—my dad had dubbed the style the Sideswipe, maybe because he felt like he'd struck a glancing blow against his brothers-in-arms when he'd stolen the Weeping Bones' money right from under their noses and took off with it.

  It'd make some sort of sense anyway.

  As much as I hated my father, he had a gift when it came to designing and building motorcycles. My Sideswipe was a beast of a bike with forty-three millimeter inverted front forks, dual disc brakes, a chopped rear fender and a side mount license plate. The paint job was custom—an airbrushed piece of art that I had a tattoo artist friend of mine drum up. The band's logo was etched in silver and purple against a black background, the crossed guns, the spray of wilting violets. There were skulls lightly brushed in shadow beneath the image, tracing in a random pattern across the rest of the bike.

  If I had to choose a best friend—it'd be a hard choice between my bike … or my guitar.

  I played an Edge Strat with a custom paint job to match my bike. My drummer, Hailey, wasn't shy in informing me that that made me a goddamn douchebag, but I only had one thing in this life that wasn't tainted by Veer and his bullshit—and that was my music. So I wore my band logo proudly on my bike, my guitar, and my left arm. The tattoos traced from my wrist up to my shoulder; they were the only ones I had.

  I smoked my cigarette and waited for the show to start, my thoughts on the club, lost in the backstage melee and a haze of smoke.

  They were in town then?

  Fuck.


  This wasn't going to work on any level, was it?

  I could not see this situation ending well for anybody.

  As punishment for my actions today, my doting father had pulled my private security detail completely. O' course, back here in the venue there was plenty of security, but really? He'd risk his only son's life to make a point?

  I almost hoped the Weeping Bones carved their pound of flesh out of that son of a bitch.

  Because of what that bastard had done, I was a target for the club, too.

  Pistols and Violets was a true American hard rock band with a little bit of blues influence, a little bit of country. I was on rhythm guitar and vocals, a redheaded spitfire named Raelynn on bass, an African-American woman named Hailey on drums and, of course, Shelby on lead guitar. Although we were from Vegas currently, not a single one of us had grown up here. Raelynn was from Kentucky, Hailey and Shelby from Georgia, and me … I was from all the fuck over the United States. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, raised in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. I started high school in Southern California and graduated in Nevada.

  But at least I got one good thing from my daddy—I could sing.

  “She's got a tight pair of leather pants, and I ain't the only man in this room that's takin' a glance.” I strummed my Edge Strat with a guitar pick, my black boot tapping a strong, steady rhythm against the gleaming black floor of the stage. “Nobody said this pretty little southern belle, that she'd be taking me straight to hell. Red, red nails and a razor sharp smile, my new baby's got true outlaw style.”

  The sound of my guitar bled into the spaces between my words as the audience pumped their fists in time with the drums, with Shelby's guitar. She might've looked small, but when she played, there was a wildness to her that inspired me enough to write this damn song in the first place. I penned the vocals; she wrote the music to the sound of my voice.

  Goddamn, we were on fire tonight.

  I tossed a wink out at the crowd and smiled, my head bobbing in time with the music.

  “I've gotta take care of my fiery new wildcat, or I might be seeing the sharp end of a scratch. She's got a million reasons to go but only one to stay. The devil's daughter sleeps in my bed at night, but I've never thought twice about giving up the fight. She's my only real reason for stickin' around, the girl I wasn't looking for until I found. Wicked little, wicked little, wicked little demon girl.”

  Shelby stepped up for the guitar solo, strumming her strings with those sharp red nails from my song, smiling at me and moving her body in time with mine, the crying choir of our strings sharp enough to summon the devil himself. Sweat poured down both our bodies, across the dark cherry tattoos that trailed down Shelby's arm as we carried our last song of the night through to another verse.

  “Tell me how it is, sugar,” I said into the microphone, stirring up the crowd as Shelby's voice joined me at the mic.

  “He best take care of his fiery new wildcat, or he might be seeing the last of this ass.”

  I laughed and smacked Shelby in the ass of her tight white pants as the crowd roared and cheered us on. There was always speculation as to which girl in the band I was sleeping with—if not all of them—but I hate to yell ya, world, that these were the only girls that I'd never been interested in.

  “Wicked little,” I growled with a sharp grin, “wicked little, wicked little demon girl.”

  The instruments carried through another twenty dirty seconds and trailed off with the musical equivalent of a smile and a wink.

  I tossed my pick into the crowd and put my hands to my lips, blowing a kiss to the audience.

  “Good night, Vegas.”

  Short and sweet, 's always how I liked it.

  I left the stage and passed my guitar over to a roadie.

  “Don't go out there sniffing around for groupies,” Hailey told me, her big white cow skull earrings swinging from her lobes as she gave me look and propped her hand on her hip.

  “If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were my mama, Hailey. What time you want to stop by and put me to bed tonight?”

  “You get us enough trouble with all your daddy's drama. We don't need anything else for the world to glom onto and gobble up.” She smacked me on the ass and sashayed off as I shook my head and lit up a cigarette. Well, hell, if I wasn't taking shit from my dad about the band, I was taking shit from my band about my dad.

  Funny how life works.

  I checked in with my manager and then took my ass out of the backstage fray, changing my clothes and slipping into the crowd from the front entrance, sneaking into the back of the audience in a dark purple wifebeater and a pair of acid wash jeans, black leather motorcycle boots tucked on my feet. My dirty blonde hair was styled in a messy undercut, my mother's silver cross draped around my throat. The tattoos were a dead giveaway, but I wasn't trying to hide—just trying to enjoy the rest of the show.

  I wove my way through the crowd to the bar and ordered a beer, leaning back against the metal surface as the next band took the stage, their music harder and closer to metal than our own. I cheered them on anyway, raising my bottle in salute and trying to forget the fact that there were outlaw bikers on my ass.

  But hell if I wasn't sweatin' like a whore in church.

  I got myself pleasantly drunk and rocked out with the crowd, bouncing with the music and pumping my fist in time to the beat. Down here in the trenches, it was as sweltering as the nasty motels my daddy raised me in, the ones that were too cheap to have AC even in the sultry southern heat. While he was out smoking crack or dealin' smack or whatever it was he did at the time, I was sittin' inside one of those hot boxes watching cartoons on an old TV with rabbit ears.

  Fuck, I had a messed up childhood.

  Just before the headliner, I excused myself outside to stand in the cool desert air, taking a breather, my hands on my hips as I watched the bright city lights from down below. Even from here, it was no hard task to find the Strip, crawling with tourists and glittering in the dark desert landscape. Beyond the city, there wasn't a whole lot else, just desert and mountains and abandoned ghost towns that my dad used to make us squat in when we ran out of money and he was trying to come up with a plan. Once, we stayed in a crumbling gas station in an empty town called Nothing, Arizona.

  “Hey there.”

  A sultry voice drew my attention around, smoke trailing from a fresh cigarette as I glanced to my right and found the face of a fucking angel.

  “Sweet baby Jesus,” I said as I dropped my smoke to the pavement and turned to look the girl over properly. “You've got purple hair, sugar.”

  The girl in front of me was tall, curvy, dressed in leather pants that looked painted on, her full mouth colored with lipstick as dark as the night sky, tinted as purple as her hair. Her eyes were lined with blackness, drawing my attention to the bright gold-grey color of her irises.

  “So I do,” she said with a sharp smile.

  As soon as I saw the look on her face, I knew I should turn tail and run.

  This girl right here, she was gonna give me some serious trouble.

  Too dang bad I was right on the money with that one.

  Dash Buchanan.

  Fuck. If I hadn't been told who I was looking for, I never would've made the connection that this boy was the same kid I'd climbed trees with so long ago, before his dad had stolen that money and disappeared. For years, the boys had looked for Xavier Buchanan and the traitors he'd taken along with him. For years, they hadn't been successful. But then, out of nowhere, this business starts getting press, making money, building bikes.

  Xavier, a man my brothers used to make fun of and call Veer because he was always crashing his bike, had started a business with the club's money. Now, he was rich and his son … his son was a rockstar.

  “Violet,” I told him, providing my favorite alias with a smile that took too much out of me to be fair. Seeing this man onstage was one thing; running into him out here was a whole other.

  I felt �
� breathless, constricted, broken up inside.

  Dash was … he was beautiful.

  His mouth was full but not feminine, and his features had this rough masculinity that begged to be touched, traced by my fingers. He was a little scruffy which helped with that beautiful mouth of his, and his hair was blonde-brown and ruffled up. He had eyes the color of old Scotch, eyes that snapped straight to mine and held there.

  Inside, a tumultuous rockslide took place around my heart, burying the hatred I'd held on behalf of my brothers, the club. We'd almost lost our house because of this asshole's father.

  But not because of him, my brain inserted as I walked up to him in my high-heeled boots, trying to still the frantic thrumming of my pulse. I'd never been attracted to one of my targets before, and it was unnerving as hell.

  “And you are …?”

  He smirked at me, the expression thick and heavy with desire. His lids were already drooping, his pupils dilated. Dash told me without words that he liked what he saw.

  The knives in my boots felt heavy all of a sudden and that money—ten fucking grand—seemed like a lot less now than it had before. Where on earth did the club get that much money to blow on a single hit? And here I was, taking care of the son when it was really the father that they were interested in. I couldn't wrap my mind around it; something was wrong.

  I just had no way of knowing what that might be.

  “Dash Dante Buchanan,” he said, like he didn't give a crap that I was pretending not to know who he was. He held his hand out like he expected me to take it, but I just reached out and plucked the cigarette from his fingers instead. For the briefest of moments, our skin touched and my mind started to conjure all sorts of dark, awful things that we could be doing to keep ourselves entertained.

  With just a brush, a spark, I felt like I was being spirited away by Dash's body.

  What would it be like to do more than just graze the skin of his long fingers by accident?

  I took a drag on the cigarette, even though I wasn't a big fan of smoking. Most everyone I knew was at least a pack a day smoker, so it helped me fit in—especially on the job. Asking for a light was a great way to get a man's attention. Hell, it worked on girls, too.