Gun Totin' Annie

by MariaLisa deMora

  Gun Totin’ Annie

  Rebel Wayfarers MC

  #9.5

  MariaLisa deMora

  Edited by Hot Tree Editing

  Copyright © 2017 MariaLisa deMora

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  First Published 2017

  ISBN 13: 978-1-946738-01-1

  DEDICATION

  I ain’t afraid to love a man. I ain’t afraid to shoot him, either. ~ Annie Oakley

  For all the strong women

  who surround me with love.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I began writing this story, I’d set out to write a story about a strong woman. An author friend of mine had put out an open submission call for a charity anthology she was working on, and I needed a story to submit. Second in a series of three, the premise of that book was biker chicks. What’s more biker chick-ie than the leader of an all-female riding club?

  Originally this story was set in Texas, outside the influence of my Rebel Wayfarers MC books. I’d done that intentionally, trying to broaden my scope of geographic areas I describe. As ever, the Rebels drew me back home when I realized that our Deke’s brother, mentioned in a few of the stories, needed to cross over from the blue to the 1% side of things. It seemed only right to surround him with familiar faces.

  Annie herself was a surprise as she unfolded in my head, because while she is just as strong as she seems, she’s also got a soft side. I’m glad Domino was able to find that part of her and ensure she felt safe enough to expose it.

  Thanks, many thanks, to those who read the story along the way. Your feedback makes all things worth it.

  Woofully yours,

  ~ML

  Gun Totin’ Annie

  Chapter One

  Annie

  Annie slid down the wall, feeling the collar of her jacket catch on the light switch a moment before the room plunged into darkness. Shadows covered the scene in front of her as a numbing chill settled over her body. That darkness was broken by narrow strips of light fighting their way between the slats of blinds covering the single window in this rent-by-the-hour motel room. Driving bass beats from the adjoining rooms infiltrated the walls, two separate sets of music pounding through the space, filling her head with discordant noise. Her neck bent forward, chin hitting her chest as she tried unsuccessfully to push back the sounds she’d been making since she hit the room and saw what was waiting.

  Light also crept into the room from underneath the door to her left, and her distracted gaze fell to the carpet, tracing the glow near the door. Her focus locked into place as it stuck on a bloody bootprint framed between the heels of her black motorcycle boots. Her breath began to rasp hard, the noises deep in her throat filling her ears, drowning out the goddamn music. She saw the toe of that print pointed directly toward her ass, that ass now planted on the floor. Without conscious thought, her gaze rose, eyes rolling in her head so she looked at the room from underneath scowling brows. In the intervening seconds, her vision had adjusted to the dimmed lighting, so now instead of the blackness of dark, she saw forms. Shapes which her imagination had no problem fleshing out. She gagged and clamped her lids shut tightly, welcoming the darkness back in whatever form it came.

  Coates was sprawled across the narrow bed, one petite foot propped on the mattress, knees splayed wide, pussy on full display. Her hands were up above her head, tied wrists anchored to the legs of the bed frame. In the few seconds Annie had to look, she had seen the bruising on her sister’s face. Bruising that meant whoever the motherfucker was that did this, that motherfucker had had her sister for a while. She had also seen the broad, gaping mockery of a smile slashed across Coates’ neck, darkness of a different kind saturating the bed underneath her.

  “Fuck,” she whispered, having been somewhat successful in quieting the raw emotions threatening to drown her in grief, but her quavering voice was no competition for the music still pounding around her. With the level of noise in these rooms, other sounds in the building, and a general disinclination of the motel’s transient population to become involved, it was highly unlikely that anyone had heard anything; even if Coates had screamed. Bitch was tough, she thought, knowing Coates probably held it back until he forced it out of her. And even then, no one had heard, or if they had, not one cared enough to intervene. “Fuck me.”

  The vibration of her phone in her pocket accompanied by the glow through the thin material of her jeans startled her, and she slapped at the lump, eventually silencing it. “Fuck me.”

  Gaze locked on the single footprint leading to the room’s exit, she pushed hard with her still-trembling legs, levering her back up the flat surface behind her. She startled when her coat again snagged on the light switch, turning on the lamp beside the bed and illuminating the scene a-fucking-gain. Now, thank God, she felt somewhat separated from what she saw; shattered emotions beaten back by what she figured must be shock. Disconnected from what lay in front of her. “Jesus, Coates. Who the hell did you let in?”

  Without shifting her feet, Annie scanned the room, standing still and looking for anything out of place from when she’d walked out yesterday. She’d left her sister alone and headed for a meet with the Rebel Wayfarers, the local dominant MC, trying to ensure that nothing like this happened. Their club of two-dozen women had shit from all sides lately. Her and Coates’ mission was to defuse at least one of those sides, making a play for immunity from the one-percenters responsible for the region.

  Play gone bad, clearly. Fuck.

  Their small bags were on the floor by the closet; Coates’ exploded with the girly shit she liked. Her jacket with the single back patch telling everyone she was a proud member of the Gypsy Queens. Patch on the front with her club name: Cochise. Both pairs of their chaps draped across the top of Annie’s bag.

  That bag still zipped shut because Annie’d gotten a call from the Rebels veep before she even sat the fuck down after crawling off her bike. The light didn’t reach far into the bathroom, but what she could see looked normal. Makeup and hair shit all over the counter, useless underpowered motel hair dryer mixed in, cord hanging down the edge of the cabinet, draped over the top of the closed bowl and plugged into the fixture. Coates had put some care into her look before going out.

  Annie swung back to the bed and she took in the sight of her sister again. Hair done up to the nines, makeup around her eyes raccooned with hard-earned tears, but still there, that slinky top she liked to go cruising for dick with. Taking care to look classy and pretty because she liked nice dick. “Who the fuck did you pick up?”

  Gaze sweeping the floor, she stepped closer, careful not to let her boots land in the nearly dried puddle that had pooled underneath the bed. That puddle creeped out to cover the floor in jagged swaths, attesting to the unevenness of the surface beneath the cheap carpet. Poor workmanship and shoddy materials contrasting in her mind with what she knew was pretty underneath the beautiful surface of her sister. She looked down at Coates, blinking sudden tears away.

  Focus.

  She needed to look at her sister.

  Look, and see. Really see.

  Panties around her narrow waist were ripped at the c
rotch and pushed out of the way, bunched up with her short skirt. Pussy raw looking, dark bruising high on her thighs. Fucking bite mark that broke the skin of her hip, blood smeared across her belly. She brought dick back to the motel, which meant…

  “You wore a skirt. If you wore that skirt, then you didn’t ride the fucking bike.”

  A glance towards the bags again, low-heeled sandals kicked next to the wall. Coates was tall and she liked dick, which meant she tried to minimize what she saw as her flaws and maximize her assets. Hence, the hair and makeup paired with a slinky shirt and short skirt, but low heels so she wouldn’t be taller than the dick. But, short heels meant she could have walked to wherever it was she found her trouble. Annie shook her head. Taxi could have hauled her ass, too. Speculation didn’t help.

  Focus, she reminded herself, mentally shaking her head even as she did it physically.

  Annie turned back to the bed, continuing her assessment. “Huh.” The rope around Coates’ wrists hadn’t been on her long enough to bruise, which was at odds with the beating her face had taken. The dick had left her loose a long time. Leaning to one side, not over the body, Annie stared at Coates’ fingers, seeing the broken and torn fingernails. “Got you some of that. Good girl. Fuck going easy.”

  Motherfucker liked his pussy fighting; besting a woman probably got his dick hard. Had to round it that way first, then bind the woman to fuck. She looked between Coates' legs again, saw no evidence of ejaculation, and grunted. Didn’t get off or used a condom, either way, how the bruising there looked, he’d slashed deep before he’d finished pounding into her. Fucking rough and dirty as she bled out underneath him. Shit.

  Annie’s phone going off again scared the shit out of her, and she jerked the thing out of her pocket. Thumb swiping across the screen to answer without looking as she put it to the side of her head with a loud, barked, “What?”

  “Got answers for you. Slate wants you back in the bar, one hour.” The voice was low and smooth, and she immediately called up the picture in her head of the one man who fit that sound. Tall, really tall, and really good-looking, tatted up in all the right places; definitely eye candy, but he seemed to be more, too. He had been vocal before the meet as well as after, but silent during, which told her he had sway, but no official place at that table. The fact that the president of the club had him try and recall her, well, that told the tale, too. This brother had pull.

  “Domino,” she called his club name softly. “I got a problem with that timeline.”

  Even over the music still pounding through the room his irritated sigh came through loud and clear. “Fuck, bitch, do you not get that you are not gonna get a second run at this? Thought you wanted to help out your sisters.”

  “Oh yeah, I get it, big man. But, I got a problem.” The music from one side changed, now echoing in through the outside door, too, and she turned to look because that meant one of the rooms next to her had opened. It was expelling some of that sound into the parking lot, which also meant the occupants could be on the move and with what she had in the room with her, this did not give her the warm and fuzzies.

  Bam. Bam. Bam.

  “Open the fuck up.” She realized that as she spoke to Domino, all along there had been music coming through the speaker of the phone, too. Fuck.

  Thumb moving on the surface of the phone, she disconnected and stilled. She stood quietly, thoughtfully staring at the door between her and a man who stood outside. A man who should not be here. A man who had still been at his club’s bar when she’d left after spending fucking hours there fucking waiting and then finally talking, but not resolving. A man she had not clocked following her on her way back to this room, where her sister lay cooling in her own blood.

  Bam. Bam. Bam.

  Through the door she heard, “Annie Oakley, open the fucking door.”

  Huh. He caught her full club name somewhere, which meant he had done some digging. Said he probably knew what else she had not told his president. Reaching to her back waistband, she drew her gun from the holster there. She took a deep breath as she reached up and flipped off the light before calling out in a soft but steady voice, “It’s open.”

  Stepping to the side, she heard the knob turning in the door. Through the pounding beat she heard it click as it opened, the tongue of the latch slipping in near silence past the strike plate. The sliver of light steadily grew wider, angling across the room until it hit the bed, revealing the gory mess that lay there.

  “What the fu—” That was all he got out before she reached and grabbed his collar, jerking his head to the side and hard against the door. That moveable object sprang away, but he was startled enough she was able to push the door back against him, also hard, propelling him headfirst into the doorframe, dragging a grunt out of him before yanking on his collar one more time. Jamming the barrel of her gun into the small of his back, she ground it in as she slammed the door closed, plunging the room into darkness once again.

  “Might wanna fucking lead with why you’re here,” she cautioned him in a low, flat voice when he prepared to say something, pulling in a breath. “I got a dead sister in the room. A room and a sister that only your president knew about, and yet here you stand. So again, I’m telling you that you might wanna lead with what I wanna know.”

  “Followed you back. Slate wanted to know where you were.”

  She released his collar, and her hand moved to pull back the slide on the gun, feeling him jerk as the distinctive noise sounded, her hand moving back to reclaim her grip on the collar now sticking way up from his cut. Curling her fingers, she pulled it to a tension she hoped was uncomfortably tight.

  “Nope.” She shook her head. He came from one of the music rooms, meant he was here by the time she rolled in, which also meant he already knew where they were camped out. She had left her sister here last night, breathing and laughing. Left Coates hopeful that Annie could work her normal magic by getting the Rebels to leave their little band of chicks alone and he already knew where they were. “Try again, but I am not gonna be patient.”

  “Fuck, Annie. You had to know Slate would scope you before you got the invite.”

  That was true, and she’d expected it. She just hadn’t clocked it, which wasn’t like her. Meant she left her sister behind and uncovered, which led directly to that sister lying not five feet away with a raped pussy and slashed neck. That was on her, and she knew it. But she wished like fuck it could be on Domino, too, so she could deal some of her pain out, purge that bile from the back of her throat. She shook him, all her strength barely moving him in place now that he was tensed and ready. “You got boys in those rooms?”

  “Yes,” was his immediate response, followed by a grunt when she ground the tip of the barrel harder against his spine, digging deep.

  “They deaf?”

  “Let me check in, see what they might have heard, talk to—” He cut off because she pulled the gun back an inch, then thudded it against him, a thin smile flattening her lips when he spidered against the wall a little tighter, pulling his tense limbs into his torso.

  Amateur, she thought, propelling herself back across the room before he could make a move. She landed against the wall next to the bathroom with an audible “oof,” but still in control of the gun. Upper hand mattered in encounters of all kinds, but especially this one.

  He had twisted around and taken two steps across the room when she used the switch beside her to turn on the bathroom light. Domino halted, and she knew it was because her gloved hand was visible, rock steady and holding the gun aimed at his gut. “They deaf?” She asked the question again just to push him, because if she gave him a chance to think, he would realize she knew she was fucked. He was in the room, bigger and stronger and probably also armed. She had the drop on him now, but his brothers were on either side, also bigger and stronger. So even if she took him down, they’d hear and then there was no fucking way she would be able to make it to Calamity and ride.

  No, her best bet was bluf
fing, and she was fucking good at that. Had to be, her whole life nothing but one play after another. Poker face ran hard in her family. They pulled blank over small shit so when it mattered, it was like fucking Teflon, nothing mattered so nothing stuck. Poker fucking face.

  “No, they aren’t deaf, but I also didn’t get a chance to talk to any of them seeing as the man in the room I ducked into wasn’t there, and I didn’t make it over to the other room yet.” He lifted a hand, running fingers through his thick mop of dark brown hair. “You wanna let me pound a wall? Then we can see if they’re all gathered in the one room. Which would piss Slate off to no end, but they’re foot soldiers, not tacticians, so there’s that.”

  “Flip the light,” she said softly, taking care to enunciate clearly to make her point. “You take a good long look at my sister, and you tell me if I want your kind in this room.”

  “My kind?” he asked, flipping the switch, and in the bright light she could see his gaze never wavered from her, his eyes had locked onto her face, and he was trying to get a read on what she meant even before she explained. Poker face, she thought, but didn’t allow even that thought to glide across her features.

  “Dicks,” she clipped, and then tipped her head towards the bed and watched his eyes cut that direction. “Coates didn’t go easy. My next phone conversation is going to be with a dispatch queen to get some squads over this way. You think you need to warn any of your guys before I make that call?”

  His head shook back and forth jerkily, eyes scanning the bed and surrounding area. “Fuck,” he ground out, gaze flipping back to her. “You close with her?”

  “Close enough. We started the club together. She’s my sister.”

  “Not blood, right? Patch?” That he made the distinction led her to believe he might have the same kind of shitheel family she did, but instead of asking, because she did not want to know that about him, she let it slide. She did not want to know anything about him, because if she knew him, she would have a harder time disliking him. Right now, she really, really wanted to dislike him, so all she did was nod. He continued, “Brothers assigned to watch the room aren’t into unwilling. But, again, no one was home to the north. This is not giving me a good feeling, Annie.”