Hard Rider

by Lydia Pax

  Hard Rider

  Bad Boy Bikers

  Lydia Pax

  Published by Princeps Publishing, 2016.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  HARD RIDER

  First edition. March 17, 2016.

  Copyright © 2016 Lydia Pax.

  Written by Lydia Pax.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Get in touch!

  Also available from Lydia Pax: | The Affairs of the Arena series

  Hard Rider

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Epilogue

  Thank you!

  Further Reading: Desire of the Gladiator

  About the Author

  Get in touch!

  Lydia Pax Website

  Lydia Pax on Facebook

  Lydia Pax on Twitter

  Lydia Pax on Goodreads

  Also available from Lydia Pax:

  The Affairs of the Arena series

  Heart of the Gladiator

  Love of the Gladiator

  Desire of the Gladiator

  Want to get the latest new releases from me and offers for free Advance Review Copies before anyone else? Sign up for my new release newsletter!

  *

  Hard Rider

  They slid down onto the small bed in the darkness. The window was open and the cool summer night washed over their heated skin. He was tall and heavily muscled, his body built for breaking and bending. Dark ink swirled down his steel-coil arms, symbols of his heartache and his rage, meshing together in a beautiful web of sorrow and triumph. She watched the moonlight cast down his layered abs, his pecs thick and heavy like slabs of marble.

  And beneath his abs…an incredible, thick, hard vision waited for her there, already glistening wet with his arousal.

  Beneath this titan of masculine power, she felt slight, even girlish, for the first time in her life.

  She felt vulnerable. She felt ready.

  In moments he stripped her of her clothes, making her as naked as he in the pale light of the moon. He ripped her soaking wet panties to shreds, pulled at all her clothes until they came apart in his hands. Strength was so easy for him, so natural, and he wanted her so much. She could see his want for her—hard, long, pushing insistently at the underside of her thighs.

  They had wanted it for so long now—even without words to describe what existed between them, they still wanted one another.

  Her hands ran over his body, exploring in wonder at the muscles there, the hardness. Every inch was a new shelf of dense, strong tissue. Wet kisses from him, planted on her forehead, her cheeks, her chin, her neck, her breasts. They were gentle now…but only for now. Soon, his animalistic tendencies would take over, and he would ravage her harder than any other woman could ever dream.

  Soon, his fingers would clasp hard against her breasts, squeezing roughly and holding her down while he powered into her with stroke after stroke, thrust after thrust. Soon, her torso would have a landscape of soft red marks and even a bruise or two from the urgency of his cock driving inside of her. Soon, her fingernails would scrape into his back, her teeth pinching the dense muscled flesh she had come to worship and adore.

  Soon, they would sink into each other as lovers do, and forget the rest of the world.

  But their world didn’t forget them. It wouldn’t forgive them. And what they had started with this sweet coital joining would tear their world apart.

  Chapter 1

  War was in the air, and Ram was looking to get off.

  Nothing excited him more than the thought that he might have to fight soon. The best thought—his favorite thought—was that he might have to fight someone from the Black Flags, the rival club of his own Wrecking Crew. It warmed him like hard whiskey down his throat, like the heat of the summer air outside.

  The war coming in made his whole body pulse with dark, vicious energy, and he needed a release.

  He was with a party of his brothers, just pulling up at a road bar called The Hammerin’ Nail, a regular spot for bikers like him.

  Ram was a big man, twenty-six years-old, with thick dark hair that curled just above the edges of his heavily-patched vest. He was an easy six foot five, nearing two hundred and eighty pounds of solid muscle, his arms and chest heavily inked with wild, primal tattoos.

  Men got out of the way when they saw him coming. Women, the brave ones, got a whole lot closer. Sexual charisma poured out from him like the heat from a furnace.

  Outlaw bikers like him often got pulled over on the road. When Ram was pulled over, the cop always called for back-up. He increased his threat level for armed lawmen just by standing up.

  He strolled into the bar flanked by two of his best men, Ace and Mikhail, and their prospect Nate. Ace was always handy in bars—he staved off conflicts just by existing. Mean, lean, scary, and black, not much got through his firewall. That was largely why he got elected as the MC’s Sergeant-at-Arms.

  It was unusual for an outlaw MC to have a black guy in an officer’s position. But Ace was a war veteran who fought in Afghanistan for more than three years, and no one was going to fuck with him. He’d gotten the name “Ace” from his fellow troops in the military because he was always the first guy to wake and the first to hop into the fray.

  He was long-limbed and wiry, with nimble fingers that reminded Ram of movies he had seen about aliens. Like a lot of wiry guys, he went down hard in a fight. You had to damn near kill him. Only a few ever had actually taken him down, and Ram was one of them.

  Sometimes, in the brotherhood, discipline was handed out with fists instead of a proclamation. All the brothers respected this—and being able to hand out a beating to even someone like Ace was what made Ram so highly respected, even if he’d been a fuck-up in the eyes of some as of late.

  Mikhail was a childhood friend of Ram’s. They grew up on opposite sides of the tracks and Mikhail had always been teased mercilessly about his wealth. Marlowe, Texas was a small town and anything to make people different was singled out and held accordingly, like a gaggle of fisherman acquiring new hooks for their tackle box.

  When they were just eight years old, Mikhail had wanted to play in the poor neighborhood’s baseball sandlot. None of the other rich kids ever wanted to get out in the sun. Mikhail nearly got hammered with baseball bats for his inclination.

  But
Ram had seen something in him, and had told the other kids to let him play—and so Mikhail played. They had been inseparable ever since.

  Ram was like that, seeing qualities in people. He was the sort of man other men would follow into battle without a thought. He had picked out almost a quarter of the Wrecking Crew’s current patch holders and down-voted more than a dozen prospects who later ended up being junkies, stick-up artists, or worse. Once upon a time he’d trusted his intuition with not a single doubt—but after all that rotten business with Beretta and his sister Madeline, that had changed.

  Mikhail trained religiously in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He was proud of his body and often went shirtless, as he was now, bigger than Ace and smaller than Ram (as most were). Short, spiky blond hair cropped close to his dome.

  The prospect, Nate, trailed behind them with his chest puffed up. He never got to come inside with the brothers—usually left outside to mind the bikes at bars like this. But The Hammerin’ Nail was neutral territory, a place that hadn’t seen a fight between rival gangs in more than thirty years.

  If someone started shit, they’d be making history, and not the good kind. They’d be the assholes on the front line into Poland in 1939, they’d be the Black Hand with one too many pistols tossing themselves out into Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade.

  The Hammerin’ Nail had a bar at its far end, surrounded by a long u-shape of sitting space. It was a small establishment, no more than four hundred square feet in the front where the customers sat and drank, and on a busy night everyone would be crammed together.

  Tonight was not busy, but it was not empty, either.

  Ram and his brothers settled down in a corner, pushing a couple of tables together and settling them as their own. Across the bar they saw members of the Black Flags—their number one rival—sitting with girls and playing cards. Heavy waves of cigarette and cigar smoke powered through the bar from their table.

  Guns. Drugs. Gambling. Protection. The Wrecking Crew ran whatever enterprise it could get its hands on. Established so close to the border, there were plenty of opportunities to make money for enterprising criminal souls. The Black Flags had been pushing in on their territory as of late—spreading out from south of the border. It was a situation with war written all over it.

  “Don’t start nothing,” Ram said to Ace and Mikhail. “And that goes double for you.” He pointed at the prospect.

  “Sure, Ram. Whatever you say.”

  There had been a lot of heat between the Black Flags and the Wrecking Crew in the last year. But they were at The Hammerin’ Nail, and that meant no fighting.

  Some things were sacred, even to an outlaw like Ram. He wanted war like hell, and he wanted a fight almost as much as he wanted a fuck, but neutral ground was neutral ground.

  Ace and Mikhail just traded a smile. It said, “We’ll see.”

  The two knew that with Ram around, they usually didn’t have to start anything. If Ram ever turned in a resume—if he ever dropped to such indignities—easily he could write “self-starter” on it as one of his qualities. Fights, brawls, and worse entered Ram’s life on an assembly line of violence and death that stunned even the hardened veteran members of The Wrecking Crew.

  It had been getting worse and worse as of late, this violence. He knew it, and he didn’t care. It wasn’t his fault he was built like a fighting and fucking machine. Men broke and women gushed; that was the kind of response he was designed to create.

  He had been riding in the Texas heat all day. It was late May, and that meant in Texas that it was the summer. The temperature scorched over one hundred degrees, the kind of heat that drew lines in the distance and made the horizon look like a watercolor. War might have been in the air, but what Ram wanted right then was a good drink and a good fuck. The rest could work itself out later.

  In no time, the Wrecking Crew had rounded up beers and then shots and then beers again. Ram started to unwind. There was a flophouse in the back of the bar that counted still as neutral territory. There were more than a few fine young honeys shaking to the music, giving him and his boys the long eye of admiration and wonder. Especially Ram. He knew their looks—he knew that likely these girls had all been for rides before, but they were all wondering what a ride with a man like him would be like. All of them looking his age or younger.

  That should have been a tip-off for him right there, but he was feeling too good to take notice. This was deep in Southeast Texas, a hundred miles outside of Ram’s hometown of Marlowe, and there shouldn’t have been any girls that pretty or that young hanging out in this place.

  But Manuel, the proprietor of The Hammerin’ Nail, often hired out girls to come and liven the place up a bit. Bikers frequented his bar, and when bikers thought they would get laid, they broke less property. So Ram wasn’t entirely out of his mind to imagine that the girls were free game.

  He strolled up to the bar, gesturing for a bottle of whiskey from Manuel. Manuel had on a white button-up, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. Thick layers of sweat covered him like they covered anyone working a real job this close to the border under the merciless sun. Even indoors and at night, the sun invaded, ever pushing and creeping, pressing through the battered efforts of the decades-old air-conditioner.

  The bar owner knew Ram was good for the bottle and did not ask for him to pay. As a point of pride, The Wrecking Crew always paid their tabs.

  Six years ago when a brawl had broken a bar in Beaumont so hard that it was closed for near half a year with renovations, the Wrecking Crew paid for every wall, chair, table, pool cue, and window they wrecked.

  Ram knew the figure he cut at the front of the bar. Tall. Built like a young god. His muscles darkened from the sun and the road dust of the day. Biceps thicker around than most of the necks of the pretty little things sliding up next to him. They were smiling and busty, and his cock pushed against the heavy denim of his pants, ready for action.

  He’d been too long without a good fuck, that was for damn sure.

  The whiskey went down his throat smooth and burning like the road he had left behind for the night. Both girls sidled up next to him were Latina, both were pretty. As the whiskey hit his blood and then his brain, he toyed briefly with the notion of bending one over on the bar and just taking her in front of the Black Flags. It might do those pussies good to see a quality dick in action.

  Women went crazy for him. He was used to it at this point. He liked it. They always wanted a trip on the wild side. They wanted to know what it was like to fuck a man who didn’t follow the rules—a man who would rather die than live in chains. A man who preferred the unpredictability of lawlessness to the lazy comforts of an office or a paycheck.

  One was a blonde with breasts almost as big as her head. They hung loose in her tight shirt, bouncing with every other movement. The other was less busty, but had a longer torso, the kind he could imagine stroking his hand down—grabbing, gripping, never letting go. Girls like this were common around the Wrecking Crew bar back in Marlowe—broads, honeys, chicks. A dozen names for them all amounting to the same thing—women who liked to be in the presence of the pure, unrestrained masculinity of an outlaw.

  “You’re with the crew, huh?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. Best in Texas.”

  “You got here pretty late for the party,” said Blonde.

  “All the other guys have been taken up,” said Long. She pointed at the Black Flags gathered around at the other end of the bar, shouting and laughing, tequila dripping down on their shoes.

  When he’d heard her say “crew,” he had heard “Crew,” as in, his Wrecking Crew. But now he knew what these girls were—paid company for the Black Flags.

  That was trouble.

  Already, some of the more sober of their company had started sending glances his way, talking in hushed whispers.

  If it weren’t for the Wrecking Crew, the Black Flags would be the baddest gang—let alone motorcycle gang—this side of the Mississippi. Their leader,
Acero, had a reputation for making brutal examples of the people in his territory who refused to pay rent. The last one Ram had heard of had been strung up above his house on a length of barbed wire.

  The reason the Wrecking Crew were badder than the Black Flags wasn’t that they hung more people, though. It was just that people knew the Crew well enough not to get themselves hung by causing some shit. Their reputation was solid.

  Another whiskey splashed down his throat. He’d had nearly a quarter of the bottle now and he felt like he was just getting started. If the girls wanted to talk to him instead of those bozo wimps, that was their problem, wasn’t it?

  He hadn’t called the honeys over. He hadn’t forced anything on them. They wanted to slide their hands around the monster waiting in his pants, and he wanted to give it to them.

  Both of them, why the fuck not? He’d done two before, and he could do it again. Women like this wouldn’t satisfy him for very long—no woman ever had—but they could dull the burning in his heart for at least a little while.

  “Why don’t you girls have a drink?” he said, winking at a Black Flag giving him the evil eye. “Didn’t you come here to have some fun?”

  Shots of whiskey lined up on the bar and then disappeared down the gullets of Ram and the girls. He could see Ace explaining something in detail to the prospect, Mikhail not listening and getting antsy. Whether Mikhail was antsy from the lack of girls near him or the fight starting to brew was anyone’s guess.