DAX: Southside Skulls Motorcycle Club (Southside Skulls MC Romance Book 1)

by Jessie Cooke

  Chain Dog, his vice president and best friend, was sitting on the stool next to him. Chain was suspicious by nature and usually that was a good thing in their business. But Dax had spent the better part of the day with Angel and in this case he didn’t think Chain’s suspicions were warranted. “I bring women here all the time, and so do you.”

  Dax watched his friend’s eyes search Angel out. He rested them on her for a few seconds and then said, “There’s something about her that bothers me. She doesn’t seem like the type to go home from bars with men she doesn’t know, especially with one that takes her to his MC clubhouse.”

  “I sincerely doubt that she’s ever done anything like this before. But she seems bored with her life, like she’s looking for something different and exciting. Isn’t that why most people join up with us?”

  Chain’s dark blue eyes lingered on Angel a little longer than Dax was comfortable with. They’d shared many women over the years, but this one was different somehow. Dax knew for sure that when he did get into those panties, he didn’t want anyone else in there with him. “You’re not even a little concerned that maybe the Sinners sent her? I mean, it’s convenient that a woman like that shows up right in the middle of this war we have going on with them.”

  Dax smiled. “Not even a little bit. Have you seen the women that ride with them? This woman wouldn’t touch any of those guys with a ten-foot pole.”

  “Okay then, what about the cops? They’ve got this ‘task force’ now since the thing with Mayhem. How do you know she’s not a part of all that?”

  “Does she look like a cop to you?” Dax hadn’t overlooked the possibility, but he couldn’t imagine that the cops would be stupid enough to send a petite little sex goddess into the lion’s den just for a little information.

  Chain shrugged. “Cops look different now than they used to.”

  “True, but I just don’t see it. I think you just worry too much, my friend.”

  “And you usually worry just enough, that’s why you’re in the position that you are. But you seem completely infatuated with some pussy you haven’t even fucked yet. That’s not like you, especially in the middle of the biggest job we’ve ever taken on.”

  “I’m not ‘infatuated’ with her pussy. But rest easy, I will be fucking it…probably before the night is out.” Dax chuckled, and Chain Dog sighed and shook his head. Dax glanced over at Angel again. She’d had a couple more shots, some beer, and several hits off the blunt the girls were passing around now, but impaired wasn’t what he was looking for. He didn’t want to fuck her drunk. He wanted her inhibitions lowered enough that she’d agree to stay and then when she was comfortable being there, that was when he wanted to fuck her. He wasn’t sure why, but he had the idea in his head that it was going to be phenomenal.

  Chain was wrong, though, if he thought Dax’s fixation on Angel would get in the way of what he had to do when it came to the Sinners. Dax’s eyes went dark as he thought about Grant “Hawk” Benning. Hawk was the president of the Sinners, and there was no one on this earth that Dax would like to see suffer more than that man. He’d also love for that suffering to come at his own hands.

  Years ago, when Dax was still a boy and his father was the president of the Skulls, Hawk was a Skull and his father’s best friend. The two older men grew up together and they both joined the MC when they were only sixteen years old. Dax’s father came from an upper-class family. His father was a doctor. Brett Marshall always knew he was different and when he was only sixteen years old, he and his best friend…a guy named Grant Benning from the south side…ran away together and ended up becoming prospects for the Southside Skulls.

  The years passed and the men grew closer as friends. Hawk was hot-tempered and impulsive, but Doc had a cool head and although he was as lethal as any of the rest of them, he was known for thinking before he acted. That trait, along with his uncanny knack for business and making money, sent him up the ranks fast. He took Hawk with him and by the time they were thirty, they were running the club.

  Things went well for a while, but at some point, Hawk grew tired of Doc’s laid-back approach to things. He started to make a lot of noise in their meetings and even behind Doc’s back about all the things they could be getting into, but didn’t because Doc worried too much. Some of the men thought that Hawk should have been stripped of his patch, and grumbled that Doc was too soft on him. Doc did his best through it all to keep the men together, and then about ten years ago, the VP of a club out of New York was found dead in Connecticut. The police investigation revealed that the biker had been in Connecticut making a gun deal with the Skulls. Unfortunately, it was a deal that Doc knew nothing about. Dax was young and had recently gone from prospect to full-fledged member of the club. He vividly remembered the agony on his father’s face when he realized that he’d been duped by men that he trusted with his very life…men that he considered his family.

  When the police investigation was over, two of the Skulls had been arrested for the murder and Doc discovered that Hawk had plotted behind his back to steal guns from the New York club. He had aspirations of running his own club, and the money he made from the sale of those guns was going to fund it. Doc also found out that Hawk had threatened the families of the two men who ended up taking the fall for the whole thing and going to prison. Doc met with the rest of the executive branch to talk about what to do, and the consensus was that Hawk deserved to die and Doc should be the one to kill him. But for whatever reason, Doc would never go through with it. He always said that he didn’t want to start a war, but a young Dax suspected that even the rough old biker didn’t have the heart to kill his best friend.

  Hawk disappeared for a while and the club muddled through, but none of the remaining members held the same respect for Doc that they used to. When Dax was twenty-one years old his father died from a heart attack, but he’d always suspected that it was more like a broken heart. At the time, Dax was sergeant at arms of the club, but he was tough and smart, and the respect the men had lost for the old man was given to the younger one. By the time he was twenty-five he was voted in as president, and for the past six years he’d been running the club effectively, efficiently, and with the continued respect of his brothers. The one thorn, however, that kept poking at him was the man he believed had killed his father…Hawk. Hawk resurfaced after Doc died as the founder and president of his own club, the Sinners. At first the club was based in a small-town way on the other side of the state of Massachusetts, but over the years Dax kept his ear to the ground regarding their movements; for the past three years they had been moving in the Skulls’ direction, all the while gaining members, and momentum.

  When the Sinners finally began infringing on their territory, Dax gave them an ultimatum—leave or end up in a war that he didn’t believe they would win. He wanted to go after Hawk himself, badly…but he couldn’t put his entire club at risk for his own need for revenge. Hawk actually made the decision easy for him when his club massacred the men from Mayhem. Mayhem was a club that the Skulls had formed an alliance with. That night, the Sinners had wiped out not only the men that Mayhem had lent to Dax to guard a shipment of guns awaiting sale, but they’d stolen the product as well. Dax couldn’t let that slide, and somewhere under the surface he was almost glad that it had happened. Hawk was going to finally get the reckoning he so richly deserved and Dax so badly wanted to give him.

  6

  Angel woke up with a pounding headache and cotton mouth. She was also completely disoriented. It took her a long time to remember where she was. She was in a comfortable but small bedroom with a twin-sized bed and yellow and blue ruffled curtains on the windows. There was what looked like a hand-made quilt on the bed; she’d woken up underneath it and sweating profusely. She pushed back the quilt and sat up. She was surprised to see that she was in a green satin nightgown that she’d never seen before in her life.

  She got out of bed on shaky legs and went over to the window. She was on the second floor of a hou
se that looked out across acres and acres of farmland. She could see the clubhouse where Dax had taken her last night, and she had obviously gotten drunk. She only prayed that she hadn’t said anything stupid to blow her cover or piss off her brother. As she pondered that and wondered if she should check in, there was a soft knock on the door. She went over and opened it and found one of the young girls from the party last night standing there with a tray of food. The first thought Angel had was that this was almost better than a hotel; the coffee smelled wonderful.

  “Hi! You didn’t do all of this for me, did you?” Angel stepped back and the girl brought the tray into the room and sat it down on the dresser.

  “We make breakfast every morning. I thought you might be hungry.”

  “Actually I didn’t think so until I smelled it. Now, my mouth is watering. Thank you so much.”

  “It was no problem. I hope you don’t have too much of a headache this morning?”

  Angel grimaced. “Not too bad. I didn’t make a complete fool out of myself, did I?”

  “No,” the girl smiled. Angel was still trying to remember her name. She remembered playing pool with her and doing a shot…or more…with her and one of the other women. She also remembered wondering if the girl was even of age. She looked about twelve years old. “Trust me, I’ve seen plenty of people make fools of themselves at these parties and you weren’t one of them.”

  “That’s good to know,” Angel said, nervously. “Is Dax…does he live here? I mean, not in this house, but on the…”—she was about to say complex because that’s what they called it at the station, but she’d heard the club members last night simply referring to it as “the property”—“…property?”

  The girl nodded. Suddenly Angel remembered her name. It was Danielle. “Yes, all of the guys do. The ones that are married and the executive board, even if they’re single, have their own house. There is one other house for us girls and two houses for the guys.”

  “Wow, like a big fraternity/sorority,” Angel said with a laugh.

  “Kind of.” Danielle went on, “we farm the land and the girls take care of all the cooking and cleaning, and in exchange we’re given free room and board and pretty much anything else we need.”

  Angel walked over and picked up the steaming cup of coffee off the tray; brought it to her nose and inhaled. After taking a sip and savoring it she asked Danielle, “So do any of you work, off the property?”

  “Yes, some of us do. I have a part-time job in the bakery in town. Celia owns her own business; she runs the coffee shop/bakery. Linda Bowman is a nurse and Callie Vickers works for the veterinarian’s office.”

  “Wow,” Angel said again. If anything, she had expected them to all be blue-collar workers. She wondered why so many professional women would choose to live as “club girls,” instead of having their own place and dating men that weren’t criminals. That thought brought Dax into her head, and the feelings she’d had every time she got close to him last night. She supposed that she could see a woman getting caught up in something like that. Some women, but not her. She just had to keep reminding herself who this gorgeous, sexy man really was. She had to keep all the things she’d learned about him, before she came to the compound, at the front of her mind. Dax Marshall was a criminal. His club could be credited with more deaths than she’d made collars in her career so far. He wasn’t the good guy that her heart and her body wanted him to be. She’d learned a long time ago that the old saying about beauty being skin deep was right much more often than it was wrong. She was here to do a job and she intended to do it.

  “Well, I should get down and start the dishes. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “I will, Danielle, thank you.” Danielle started for the door and Angel said, “Hey, can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why do women choose to live here?”

  She smiled and said, “You mean besides the pounds of hot male flesh and the almost constant party going on across the way?”

  Angel smiled too. “Yeah, besides that.”

  “Well, I can really only speak for myself. When I turned eighteen I wanted to get as far away—from this county and Massachusetts and Connecticut both—as I could get. I got on a bus headed south and I happened to get off here in town to stretch my legs. I met one of the guys at the station; he just struck up a conversation with me. He said his name was Bob, but they all called him Bubba. He seemed like a really nice guy and when he invited me out here for a barbecue, I thought, what the heck? I wasn’t in a hurry. That day was just…it was awesome. It was the first time in my life that I’d just been accepted like I was. I ended up staying the night with Bubba and the next day he took me with him on a toy run. I saw all of these big, burly bikers buying toys…just so they could donate them…and it warmed my heart. I stayed on another day and then another…and, well, I’ve been here now going on six years.”

  “You’re twenty-four?” She nodded. “Jesus, I thought you were twelve.”

  Danielle giggled. “I get that all the time. Good genes, I guess. I suppose I had to get something positive from at least one of my junkie parents.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to touch on a sore subject.”

  “It’s fine. You couldn’t have known.”

  “Well, thank you again, Danielle. Is there anything I can do to help downstairs?”

  “No, we have a schedule. Everyone has their job, so it’s under control.” Angel thanked her again and then went back over to the window. This place was like some kind of commune from the sixties or something. The sheriff had told her these girls were abused, and he made it sound like they were practically being held captive and used as sex slaves…but considering what she remembered from the night before and talking with Danielle this morning, that didn’t seem right. They all seemed really happy. She went back over to the tray and took the lid off the plate. There were fried eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast. A cup of fresh fruit sat next to the plate and there was orange juice as well as the coffee she’d been enjoying. She picked it up and had gone to sit on the edge of the bed to eat when her purse began to ring. She touched her finger to her ear. The transmitter was still there, so why were they calling her? She went over and picked up the phone. As soon as she recognized the number for the police station and hit accept, she heard Micah’s voice.

  “Angel?”

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Are you still at the compound? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I slept in the club girls’ house. They put me up in my own room and delivered breakfast to me this morning.”

  “You sound like you’re on vacation,” he said, sarcastically.

  “And you sound like you would rather hear that I wasn’t okay.”

  “You know that’s not true. We just haven’t been able to get in touch with you since midnight last night and we were worried. The captain wouldn’t let us call last night, but I couldn’t take it any longer.”

  Angel suddenly felt bad. “I’m sorry. David did say it would only be good for about eighteen hours before it needed to be recharged, so that would explain it. I’ll keep the phone handy until I leave here, but make sure no one calls me. I’ll call you if I need anything.”

  “Good, okay. Did anything happen that we should know about?”

  “Not tha…” She started to say not that she remembered, but she caught herself. What a shitty undercover detective she was turning out to be. “Nothing significant,” she said.

  Micah’s tone went soft and he said, “I need you back home and safe, Angel. I laid awake all night last night, imagining all the things that might be happening to you. Plus, I miss the hell out of you. I want you home, in our bed.” It wasn’t exactly “their” bed. Angel still had her own apartment, but she stayed at Micah’s more often than not. He’d asked her more than once to just finish moving in, but she was holding out…she wasn’t sure why or for what. She just didn’t feel ready to make that solid a comm
itment.

  “I want to be home too, Micah, but you’ve had to stay away for your job too and I dealt with it. I told him I had to be in Hartford tomorrow, so I’ll be back then, okay?”

  He sighed. “Okay. Keep in touch,” he said again.

  “I will. I should go. It looks like there’s a lot of movement going on outside.”

  “Okay, babe. I love you.”

  “Love you too.” There hadn’t been anything going on outside the window, but she didn’t want to talk to Micah about their relationship while she was on assignment either. Sometimes she thought maybe their roles were reversed and she was the man and he the woman. Probably growing up with all of those brothers had somehow affected her ability to communicate and express her feelings the way that a normal woman should be able to. With a frustrated groan, she deleted the call log and then turned off the phone. She took a shower then and put on the same clothes she had on the night before and went downstairs. She had one more day to find something out, and she resolved that today she was going to do that with a clear head. She wasn’t sure what had gotten into her the night before. Maybe it was just years of focusing on her career and the all but stale relationship that she had with Micah. She’d needed to cut loose. Of course, she needed to choose who she did that with and where just a little more wisely next time. Even with all the bad habits she’d picked up from her brothers over the years, she’d never let a pretty body make her forget her own scruples. But Jesus, Dax’s body wasn’t just pretty, it was perfect, and so were his smile and his voice and the way he smelled. The way that tattoo on his biceps peeked out in a burst of color every so often…the sound of his laugh…She knew as soon as she had those thoughts that continuing with this assignment was wrong and dangerous. But there was no way she was going back to her boss, her brother, and her boyfriend and telling them she had to recuse herself because her panties wouldn’t stay dry when she was in the same room as the bad guy. She’d get her bad guy and then she’d go home and get her needs taken care of there…at least most of them.