by Nicole Fox
Jessi rolled her eyes a little and cracked a bit of a smile at that. “At least it was useful, then,” she said.
“Oh, very useful,” I told her. “I haven't been on a new bike in ages. I'm thinking maybe I need to commission you to build me one.”
“Just wait until after everyone who needs a new bike gets theirs,” J.T. said as he walked into the shop. He eyed the new bike appreciatively and then came to swing his leg over it, settling on it, ready to ride. “This is a nice bike,” he said, sounding impressed. He glanced over at Jessi. “And you designed this all by yourself?”
Jessi glanced over at both me and Mick. “Well, I had some help with the fine-tuning of all of it,” she said modestly. “And obviously I didn't build the thing myself, but-”
“You're being too modest,” Mick said, his eyes shining with admiration for his daughter.
“Well, it's time that I got ready to ride,” J.T. said. “Rip, are you guys still coming along?”
“Yep,” I said, grinning over at Jessi. “I guess we should get moving too.”
J.T. wheeled his bike out of the shop and then revved the engine, looking pleased with the way that she purred. “That's a beautiful sound,” he said, grinning lopsidedly over at me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes a little. “You're going to have the nicest bike on the ride. Don’t worry, I know it.” I grinned over at Jessi, slinging my arm around her shoulder. “But at least I'm going to have the prettiest girl on the ride—and the latest hotshot designer, to boot!”
Jessi ducked her head a little. “Don't bring that up again or we're going to end up with more business than we know what to do with,” she warned.
“I'm still so proud of you,” Mick told her, leaning over to give her a one-armed hug before we climbed onto my bike. “The Severn's Young Talent Award for Design and the finishing touches on J.T.'s bike, all in the same week. What are you going to do next week?”
Jessi snorted. “Sleep, I hope,” she said. “It's been a lot of long nights and early mornings lately!”
“I second that,” I said, snorting too.
As Jessi swung onto the back of my bike, I grinned, feeling her arms settle around me. “You know, I never thought I would take someone else on this bike, but this is becoming a pretty regular occurrence,” I said.
“I know,” Jessi said. “I mean, I tried to tell you that we could take that experimental one that I've been working on, but ...”
“Anything that you admit to as being 'experimental' isn't something that I want to fly down the highway on,” I told her. It was a conversation that we had already had, but that made it easy and familiar rather than boring.
“I told you, the 'experimental' bit just has to do with-”
I revved the engine on my own bike, effectively cutting her off. “Come on, enough shop talk for the day,” I told her. “Let's get going.”
There were a lot of bikers out at the meetup point when we got there, and I looked around for familiar faces. Of course, Jessi had already met most, if not all, of the Hounds of Hades' club members, but there were a few guys from different clubs that I wanted her to meet—guys from different parts of the country that I rode with whenever they were in town. And Jessi seemed to be game to meet them all, fortunately.
We flew down the highway together, starting at 10am. J.T. was out in front of the Hounds of Hades group, and I could tell that he was loving his new bike—and if I could tell he was loving it, I was sure that Jessi could as well. She was good at reading people. That was part of why she was such a good designer.
Around noon, we stopped off to barbecue some lunch, and I made the rounds with Jessi. “This is Nick, but we all call him Chainsaw,” I told her. “And that's Rooster over there.”
“Chainsaw and Rooster,” Jessi said, shaking her head and laughing a little. “I bet there are some pretty good stories behind those nicknames?”
“Yeah, but not as good as the one behind Rip's nickname, which is just 'Asshole' because-”
“Hey!” I said, lunging playfully towards Mikey, who easily fended me off.
“We're going to have to give your wife a nickname as well, if she's going to be hanging around with us,” Chainsaw said seriously.
I blushed a little, and when I glanced over, Jessi was blushing as well. “She's not my wife,” I said to the guys. “We're just ...” I trailed off, because Jessi and I hadn't really had that conversation yet, despite the fact that we had cleared everything with her father.
“I'm his girlfriend,” Jessi said, looking over at me with a challenge in her eyes.
“She's my girlfriend,” I affirmed, smiling at her. Surprisingly, the words weren't as difficult to say as I'd expected them to be. I didn't feel any reason to go running for the hills now that we were getting closer to one another. We worked well together as a partnership, both professionally and personally, and now that Ellsmith was out of the picture, everything was good.
“Guys, hotdogs or hamburgers?” one of the guys asked, coming around from the grills. We put in our orders and he walked off.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked Jessi, slipping an arm around her waist. “There should be beer somewhere. Or there's water, probably.”
“Water would be great,” Jessi said, smiling up at me.
I raised an eyebrow at her. “And I can't tempt you to even a single beer?”
I didn't miss the way her hand strayed towards her stomach, although it didn't quite come to a rest there. “No, no alcohol for me today,” she said pointedly.
I blinked at her and then pulled her into a hug. “Jesus, woman, you're going to drop something like that on me in front of all these people?” I asked in an undertone. “Why not tell me about that when we can celebrate it properly?”
Jessi laughed and pulled away. “Well, I've been trying to figure out how to tell you for days now,” she said. “This just seemed like the perfect opportunity.”
J.T. chose that moment to wander over, a huge smile on his face. “I'm loving the bike,” he said. “She handles so smoothly, and she just really lays into those turns. Man.” He tapped Jessi on the nose. “But there are a lot of other guys who are eyeing the bike and seem pretty interested, so I have a feeling you're going to get plenty more work out of this deal.”
“She might not be working around the shop for too much soon,” I said, looking down at Jessi's stomach, even though I knew she wasn't showing yet.
J.T. raised an eyebrow at me, watching where my gaze went, and then he whistled softly. “You're going to be a father, aren't you?” he asked.
“And I guess you're going to be some sort of a godfather, aren't you?” I asked, a smirk on my face.
“Oh, no,” Jessi said, shaking her head. “This kid is having nothing to do with bikes. I'll send him away to boarding school if I have to.”
I laughed a little at that, even though I honestly had some of the same trepidations that she felt.
“Well, I'm sure that you'll keep designing, even when you're not working directly in the shop, won't you?” J.T. asked. “And, pretty soon, maybe the newest young talent will have some new young talent to inspire her.”
Jessi snorted a little. “I don't want this kid anywhere near bikes,” she said. “Last thing I need is for him to grow up anything like me or Rip!”
“Speak for yourself,” I said haughtily, and she laughed.
“In all seriousness,” J.T. said, shaking his head with mirth in his eyes. “Congratulations, you two. That's great news.”
Of course, that meant that things were really happening and that I was going to need to either run through the club rules with Jessi or quit the club myself. There would be plenty that we would need to figure out. But for right now …
I smiled a little and turned my face towards the sun, already thinking about what it would be like to have a son who I could ride motorcycles with and who I could work in the shop with. Someone who would eventually take over the family business, just like Jessi would
when her dad retired.
I leaned over and kissed Jessi lightly on the lips, stroking her hair back behind her ear. “If there's anything that you need, just let me know,” I told her. “You know that I'm here for you.”
“I know that you're here for me,” Jessi affirmed, smiling at me. “And thanks for that, Rip. You're a wonderful guy.”
“I love you,” I said quietly to her, my voice probably as serious as she had ever heard it.
She looked up at me with the same seriousness in her expression, though. “I love you, too,” she told me. “I love you, too.”
Epilogue
Rip
I glanced over at Jessi, grinning at her. “So how old does he have to be before I can take him on his first bike ride?” I asked.
Jessi rolled her eyes, then grimaced in pain, and I could tell that she'd had another contraction. I glanced at my watch. Yeah, they were definitely coming more frequently now. But she was staying pretty quiet about them still, powering through them in a way that impressed me.
She gasped a little towards the end of this one and then gave me a sheepish look. “Sorry,” she said, as though she'd done something wrong.
I reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “Should I be saying sorry for knocking you up?” I joked.
Jessi snorted. “Only if you take the kid on his first bike ride before he's twenty-one,” she told me. “Because if so, I'm going to kill you.”
I shook my head, laughing a little. “Right, like Jessi Ford's kid isn't going to grow up practically living on motorcycles,” I said. “You're the hottest talent in the country at the moment. That kid is going to be a master of riding bikes by the time he's, like, ten.”
“He'd better not be,” Jessi said, shaking her head as well. “Not that I have anything against the lifestyle, of course—obviously it's worked out well for me. But do you realize how dangerous motorcycles are? So many people get killed in so many stupid ways every year … and there's no way in hell that I'm ever letting him get involved with a motorcycle club, whether it's the Hounds of Hades or anyone else. The last thing I need is for our son to wind up in jail!”
“Guess he's not going to be working around the shop much then, huh?” I asked. Jessi still helped out a lot around the shops. At least, she had until her pregnancy had gotten too far along. They were both technically owned by the Hounds of Hades at the moment, just to make things simpler for her and her father to manage.
Jessi grimaced. “I sound just like Dad did when I told him that I wanted to go into automotive engineering, I know,” she said. “But seriously. This kid is not-” She broke off, her hands squeezing tightly into fists, and I began to drive a little faster. It would have been so much quicker on the bike, but there was no way I was driving a woman having contractions to the hospital on my souped-up motorbike.
“And we're giving him the least biker-dude name that we can come up with,” Jessi continued, when she was breathing normally again.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I mean, it's got to be something ...good. Like James.”
“You do realize that J.T.'s first name is actually James, right?” I asked. “James Thompson—J.T. And he's one of the most stereotypical bikers that I've ever met.”
“So not James then,” Jessi said. “But, seriously. It's going to be something where we don't have to worry about him-”
“His name isn't going to determine whether he becomes a biker,” I argued exasperatedly. “But probably the fact that he's growing up with two bikers who own a couple different chop shops around the city … well, that's what's going to do it.”
Jessi shook her head stubbornly. “Nope,” she said. “That kid is going to become-”
“Whatever he wants to be,” I finished. “Just like his mama did.” I grinned over at her. “Jessi, you sound just like your dad. And you see exactly how well that turned out.”
Jessi grinned back over at me and reached out to hold my hand where it was resting on the gearshift.
“I love you,” I told her, even though I knew she already knew that.
She smiled over at me as well. “I love you, too,” she said. “Sorry I'm being a bit crazy about all of this. I just already can't stand the idea of him being hurt—either physically or because he's fallen for some asshole biker chick who never gives him the time of day.” Then, she placed a hand lightly over her stomach, grinning that same silly grin that she had got the day that she had told me that she was pregnant. “I love you two—both of you,” she said.
I gave her a soft smile, still hardly believing that things had worked out so well for us. “We both love you,” I told her just as we arrived at the hospital where our son would be born.
THE END
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(GIFT #1) Bad Boy’s Toy: A Bad Boy Hitman Romance
By Nicole Fox
I’ll put a baby in the escort’s belly.
She’s a whore on the run from her pimp.
I’m an enforcer looking for a new gig.
She thinks she can use me to help her climb out of her sh*thole of a life.
But I know how much her body is worth, and I’m determined to wring it for every last cent.
Micah
Don “Daddy” Williams is a sadistic bastard.
He painted a pretty picture of his business when I first arrived, desperate for cash.
But it didn’t take long before I realized his house was the farthest thing from legitimate.
He’s a pimp, a flesh trader – not a businessman.
And he doesn’t like taking no for an answer.
So when I tell him I don’t want to sleep with strangers for money,
He drops me off at a rough roadhouse with no protection.
I was about to get manhandled – or far, far worse…
Until Ford showed up.
The hired thug might be my only chance to escape.
And I’ll do whatever it takes to make it to Hollywood.
Even if it means letting him own me completely.
Ford
I was sick of my life.
Sick of hurting people.
Sick of stealing.
And most of all, sick of working for an old fox like Daddy Williams.
I want out.
But the future seems bleak, until a little gem named Micah catches my eye.
She’s in way over her head, and without me, she’s dead meat.
I lend a helping hand and get her out before something bad happens.
But she’s no fool – she knows I want something in return.
Her body.
I take her over the hood of my car, in a diner, in a filthy motel.
And when I find out she’s stolen from me,
I chain her up in a dungeon and make her beg for my forgiveness.
But when I learn that Daddy desperately wants his best working girl back,
I’m forced to make a choice.
Do I sell her back to the violent sex trafficker?
Or do I keep her for myself?
Chapter One
Micah
“What are we doing here, Daddy?” I asked as my eyes scanned the rowdy roadhouse crowd. It was the kind of place where you half-expected Patrick Swayze to be standing behind the bar, managing the security. But then, as you looked around at everything going on, the poker in the back corner, the fist fight out in front, you quickly realized that Swayze wasn't the one running security at this show. In fact, I was pretty sure there wasn't any.
But, still, the crowd had a wonderful energy that crackled through it like an infection. Here, with Daddy and his bodyguard, Mike, watching over me, I could appreciate the excitement and the roughness of the clientele and even let myself feel a bit of it from the sa
fety of their protection.
I would never leave their protective circle, though. Definitely not the way I was dressed, with my knee-length, white, backless, low-cut dress, and its impossibly high slits up both sides that showed the tops of my stockings on my long legs. I'd get mauled out there with the way I looked. Or worse! In fact, the only reason I'd even ventured to come in here was because Daddy and Mike were with me.
Don “Daddy” Williams was my manager, the man who owned the escort company I worked for. High dollars for high quality, that's how I saw it. And, with my dark red hair, perfect figure, and charming personality, I deserved a higher price tag and the best customers. Hell, most of the men I went on dates with didn't even want to sleep with me; they just wanted my company. Did I sleep with some of them, though? Sure, but it was always my choice. Luckily, most of the men who could afford me hadn't been trashy or gross, so, sure, I'd let some of them pull me into bed.
