by Marata Eros
WRING
A Road Kill MC Novel
Volume 5
New York Times Bestselling author
MARATA EROS
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2016 Marata Eros
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to a legitimate retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Marata Eros Website
Marata Eros FB Fan Page
Cover art by Willsin Rowe
Editing suggestions provided by Red Adept Editing.
DEDICATION:
Camilla Olina T.
The spoken and written word—any talent, finesse or success that I possess—I owe to you. I loved you, Mom. I love you still.
I am forever... your Darling.
Music that inspired me during the writing of WRING:
Skin
by Beth Hart
SYNOPSIS:
Can a man's loyalty serve his country, his club and his woman at once?
Wring is a former Navy Seal expert knotter, and has given up serving his country to serve another cause: his club. He doesn't want commitment. Instead he's satisfied going through life on a river of contented autopilot.
When Wring meets Shannon, it's at the wrong place and time. Wring doesn't need a woman to take away his numb; feeling is for others.
But Shannon deliciously melts away old wounds while Wring fights to ignore their growing passion. Can Wring save Shannon from circumstances that threaten her? Can he save himself?
Works by Tamara Rose Blodgett:
The BLOOD Series 1-6
The DEATH Series 1-8
Final Enforcement ALPHA CLAIM 1
Shifter ALPHA CLAIM 1-6
The REFLECTION Series 1-3
The SAVAGE Series 1-7
Vampire ALPHA CLAIM 1-6
&
Marata Eros
A Terrible Love (New York Times bestseller)
A Brutal Tenderness
The Darkest Joy
Club Alpha
One of Many (co-authored with Emily Goodwin)
The DARA NICHOLS Series, 1-8
The DEMON Series
The DRUID Series 1-10
Final Enforcement ALPHA CLAIM 1
Road Kill MC Serial 1-5
Shifter ALPHA CLAIM 1-6
The SIREN Series
The TOKEN Serial 1-10
Vampire ALPHA CLAIM 1-6
The ZOE SCOTT Series 1-8
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Chapter 1
Wring
I bolt upright in my bed, the upper half of my body dripping sweat. My eyes automatically scan the room. Finding nothing but shadows seeking me from half-closed drapes, I toss myself backward against the soft pillows of my bed, trying to calm my racing heart.
Easier fucking said than done.
Flinging a forearm over my eyes, I force myself to take in my surroundings, moderating my breathing with a familiar, deliberate rhythm.
I'm not in the sandbox.
I'm staying in the fucking boondocks of Ravensdale. Having a place built in rural Orting. The club's letting me stay here until my house is finished.
After a full minute of coming to myself, I sit up, swinging my legs over the side of the narrow bed. My feet find purchase on the lukewarm scarred wood floor of the cabin.
Running a hand over my flat top buzz cut, I let a final shaky breath escape. My heart is still coming down from the nightmare adrenaline buzz.
Probably not one hundred eighty beats a minute. Maybe just one sixty now. Fucking Afghanistan. Got an honorable discharge. I'm tough as fuck… except for the dreams.
The nightmares won't let me go. I've done my time, and now, my commitment runs to less patriotic endeavors.
Like Road Kill MC.
I wish my brain could switch gears. Consciously, I've made the commitment, and my years of service, violence, and chaos are behind me. Subconsciously, the brain won't release me from my obligations. As a knotter. As a SEAL.
I rub circles on my chest, trying to ease the panic that seizes me like one of the knots I so skillfully execute.
Slower. Heart stops galloping. Fucking finally.
I take more deep breaths, letting them out in measured increments. Fucking shrink told me to own my physical body and the rest might follow.
Not working.
Naked, I stand and pad across the confining space of the cabin to the fridge and open it. It's a fucking antique, groaning and burping its displeasure all day long.
All night long.
A couple of lonesome beers stand crooked in the drawer, along with a bunch of science experiment shit.
I chuckle. Nice.
I grab a beer and take off the metal top with my college ring. Naval Academy. I take a lot of flak from the brothers for being a college graduate. Whatever. Dad was a graduate. Seemed like if I could follow in those footsteps, I should.
When Dad died from a heart attack, I turned SEAL.
Or the Navy turned me SEAL.
My lips twitch. Yeah, they pretty much turned me. I was a mess. And the boys saved my ass.
They're my family now—Noose, Lariat, and even dumbass Snare, who's really not dumb. Fun to razz his ass, though.
I roll the chilled bottle across my forehead, still feeling kind of spooked from the memories that claw their way up my throat in screams I don't voice.
I take a long pull, set the bottle down on the narrow countertop beside the fridge, and walk to each of the windows and the door.
Securing the perimeter.
Natural as breathing. Not having any fucker sneak up on me.
My exhale is frustrated. Should have taken Noose or Snare up on their offer of a room instead of this bum-fucked Egypt location that is so soundless, it seems like I'm the only person in the world.
I shake my head, denying the thought as soon as it intrudes. Yeah, that'd been great. Yelling my guts out in the middle of the night while their kids are trying to sleep? Don't think so.
I can just hear the questions now. “Daddy, why does Uncle Wring freak out in the middle of the night?” That would be the one from six-year-old Charlie, and Aria, Noose and Rose’s new kid, isn’t even sleeping through the night half the time.
Don't want to fuck up other people's lives. Don't want to see pity in Rose's eyes and empathy in Noose's.
Ditto at Snare's. Now that he knocked his sister up again. I chuckle. It is abso-fucking-lutely choice to work Snare over with the sister angle. Does't matter that fuck of a father, Riker, is gone from this earth. Technically, they're not even step siblings anymore. Still entertaining to yank his chain.
I scrub my scalp, feeling the prickle of my short blond hair. The pale color was a hassle when we were stealth. Had to be blacked out. I'm fucking white bread and hate not blending in. My looks didn't help the fun torture I went through, playing with the locals in Afghanistan.
Nope. They weren't partial to my all-American good looks. I didn't fucking care.
And that attitude is a bad combination during interrogation.
Read: torture.
Probably not as hard as Noose—Sean King is some kind of other species of crazy—but I'm damn close. We watched each other's backs. Sometimes that camaraderie hurt the three of us, but mostly, it felt damn solid.
I press my forearm against the wood divider that separates the panes of glass inside the antique cabin window. The glass is cold as the day turns gray, night breathing its last breath.
As I watch, bright white light washes the sky, singeing the tops of the trees to low-burning torches. When the red of daybreak creeps over the top of the woods, light like scarlet blood sears everything in its path.
Too bad that fire can't cleanse my ass of the past.
I take another pull of my beer, watching my millionth dawn claim the day, thinking I barely have the fucking sack to see another.
*
The Harley Davidson Fat Boy feels almost as good as a sweet butt between my legs.
Low purring vibrates in all the right places, but doesn't talk back.
I smirk.
My smile fades as I think about Noose and Snare and what they have. A woman who backs them.
Who they can sleep with.
I crave that intimacy almost more than fucking. I've sexed every club whore in Road Kill—I'm not short on tail.
What I really want is to wake up next to a woman. To feel the silk and warmth of her soft curvy body next to my hard one.
I squeeze my eyes against the image. No bitch who can take what the night brings me.
The nightmares steal the hope of anything permanent.
So I just fuck. Eat. Shit. Exercise. Sleep. Repeat.
It's a life, just not the one I wanted. Not the one I planned for.
If it weren't for Road Kill, I wouldn't be here. I slip the kickstand up and roll out of the rural driveway, giving a last look at the small homestead that Viper inherited from his great-grandparents. Morhorse? Something like that. It's not Vipe's last name, but I guess the family was a big deal back in the day. Homesteaded Kent, had a few holdings in Ravensdale.
Viper's place is tucked between two copses of trees, a small log gem, gleaming like a piece of fossilized amber.
Viper gets after the place, comes up here for the solitude, likes restoring shit on his spare time.
I turn away. The low rumble of my modified pipes thunder as I cruise slowly down a winding dirt road that's half a mile long. I cram a cig in my craw, willfully abusing my health, and take a deep drag. I sit at the end of the drive, blowing out smoke as the deep colors of dawn wash the clouds tangerine. A long ribbon of emerald-green grass bisects the middle of the gravel drive.
Prospects come out here and mow the swath of grass once a week—in between cleaning up after the club parties. Been six years since I patched in. Didn't take long for Lariat, Noose, and me to get through the fucked-up prospect slavery period.
Guess we just fit in faster. My smile is small, but the memories of being a fucking prospect are still fresh.
We like passing on the baton. I think of Trainer—his dumbass finally patched in. So young he can barely grow a beard.
I got one. It’s square and almost white it's so blond. I have one of those tiny clear elastic bands keeping it Fu-Man-Chu style and out of my face when I'm eating road.
Like now. My bike growls as I pull away, leaving Vipe's cabin behind.
Not much traffic as I take 516 all the way through Covington. Used to be Kent-Kangley. Maybe it still is. Kent's such a piece of shit now. I guess it's better than Federal Way, where Noose is from. Auburn, the town between the two, is an armpit too, from what Lariat says of his old stomping grounds.
But we're Southend boys—the club—all of us. And the illegals and gangs aren't pushing us MC men out even though they want to take over our territory.
Road Kill MC rides. We own the road and ourselves. We make our own rules. This is fucking America. Not a cesspool for those fucks to run over the top of citizens and innocents just trying to make a couple of bucks to keep their shitty hamster wheel spinning.
We run the shit we feel like pushing. We don't hurt chicks. We stay relatively clean, keeping to the guns and the occasional drug theft from the gangs.
That's always fun. The first real grin of the day breaks across my face.
Getting closer to the clubhouse, I hit 132nd and head north. Then east again on 224th. When I get to the 196th turnoff, I quickly survey the area. Not seeing shit for movement.
Of course, it is seven o'clock in the fucking morning on Sunday.
I'm probably the only swinging dick stirring in the MC cauldron.
I chuckle as I pull up to the club. The gravel parking lot is filled with bikes from last night’s kegger, and I can faintly make out the faraway white noise of Highway 18. We're on the back side, sandwiched by Fairway to the north, Kent to the south, and Maple Valley to the southeast.
Good location. After the bullshit with Chaos Riders and the big cop/fed sting a few months back, Viper thought it was a smart idea to come up with a new location on the down low.
So the proposed pole barn became an exhaustive and expensive old building haul instead. Got the old structure at auction. Just had to pay a local outfit to move it to the property the Prez already owned.
Simple.
Except it wasn't. Kent has a bunch of lame fucking environmental laws that needed addressing. Impact fees up the ass. A real pain in the ass to own dick around here now.
Got lucky, though, and found a sympathizer to the club within the ranks of the zealotry of county planners and bullshittery. He greased the wheels for Road Kill.
No, we didn't have any bald eagles, spotted fucking owls, or marshland to save. Just set the building on a concrete foundation and be done with it.
I kill the engine on my custom candy-red painted Harley-Davidson Fat Boy then listen to the engine ticking as it cools. The birds and wind in the trees join the faint music of the highway.
My eyes travel to the clubhouse again. Noose and Lariat worked their asses off getting the interior into shape. Noose is a mechanic, but his skill set extends to carpentry, and Lariat's dad was a plumber.
They took a World War II artillery bunker and made it into a work of art. Bedrooms and shared bathrooms take up the second floor. The girls had bitched and whined until the guys relented and put a glass-topped garden thing on the top. The prospects clean that too.
My lips twist.
Finally got smart and did the lower floor with an all-poured concrete finish. Easier for the prospects to mop up the cum and booze fests. I grin. The other place we'd been leasing before this outfit had to go. Too many rules, building too beaten to fuck to save.
I shield my eyes as chiseled light pierces the dense canopy of western red cedar trees with drooping branches that flank the corners of the structure. At the front and back, trees have been thinned to allow light in so the girls can cultivate plants and shit at the top.
I shake my head. Can't imagine being that whipped. But Noose and Snare are different men since they got women.
Not worse men. Harder. Fiercer. They got something worth protecting, and they're more than who they were, not less.
Bright light nails the paint job of my bike, turning it to gleaming scattered rubies.
I stand, sloughing off my jacket, and stuff it inside my saddlebag. My cut moves like a second skin, creaking as I unlock my trunk, bend, and hassle with reorganizing my shit.
Just as I straighten, the front door to the club sweeps open, and Noose struts out, lighting up as he approaches me. Usually, I'm not blown away by his size. But as the shadows release him from the border of the building, sunlight strikes him like branded fire, and he looks like a giant waking up from a nap.
Tools whack his legs from the belt riding his hip as he saunters toward me. Noose stops in his tracks, hiking his chin. “What ya looking at?” He shoots smoke rings at the sky.
I lift a shoulder. “You're a big fucker
.” Images of him using his size during our time together in the Middle East slides through my mind like smoke.
Noose's lips tweak at the edges. “Yeah.”
I give an abrupt laugh.
“Just noticed?” Noose's eyebrow rises.
I shake my head.
He frowns, switching gears. Reading me like a fucking book. “Not sleeping?”
Don’t want to chat about that shit. I blow out an exhale, not bothering to hid my irritation.
Noose studies my locked-up expression. “Hey, man, whatever—Aria's keeping me and Rose up. Feel like a fucking zombie.” He cranks his free arm up behind his head, rasping a hand over his longish hair and making it go a million directions. He flicks his cig on the gravel and stomps it out, ripping his hair back and tying it at his nape with one of those hair tie things.
Makes his face look naked—and hard— without the hair.
I fold my arms, kicking my chin up. “So you come here at the ass crack of dawn to do work? That's restful.”
Noose nods, cupping his hand around his lighter. The glow from a fresh cig flares in the diffused light.
“When's this mess getting paved?” I kick a loose pebble and it skitters, landing close to Noose's black boot.
Noose's lip rises, baring his teeth. “Not fucking soon enough. Hate gravel with the ride.” His palm sweeps out at his machine glinting in the sunlight like a black pearl. A faint layer of dust covers all that chrome and black.
I nod. Yeah—a filthy ride blows.
