Saved by the Outlaw: A Bad Boy Romance

by Alexis Abbott

  But then, I remind myself that Leon isn’t really a random guy. In fact, there’s a stronger connection between the two of us than has ever existed with any of my past boyfriends. We have a history, albeit a vague one. He was the boy who saved me from drowning at the beach when I was a little girl. And he has been investigating my father’s death since before I even got here.

  Hell, he was probably one of the last people to see my dad alive.

  This thought makes that recurring lump in my throat surface again. I sigh and force myself to get up. I rub my eyes and pull my hair back into a messy ponytail to keep it out of my face, then quickly start pulling on my clothes again. I fell asleep naked in the basement of two innocent elderly folks. This is going to be the most ridiculous walk of shame imaginable.

  Then it hits me.

  My car!

  It’s still at Mickey’s Liquors! How the hell am I going to get back there? What if the police had it impounded? What if Mickey sought revenge and beat the hell out of it or slashed my tires or something? It’s a rental, and I definitely can’t afford to replace it if anything bad happened. My heart racing, I grab my bag and run up the basement stairs.

  “Oh, good morning, dear! Come get some breakfast!” Wanda calls out to me from her perch on the couch. She’s watching the morning news, a tray of bacon, toast, and scrambled eggs steaming on the coffee table. She sips from her mug and waves me over.

  “I — I’m sorry, I really need to go,” I tell her, shaking my head sadly. God, that food smells heavenly. Especially since I have a slight hangover from that bottle of bourbon I split with Leon last night. “I’ve got to catch a bus or something. My car — ”

  “It’s parked outside,” Gerald says, coming around the corner with a newspaper in hand to sit next to his wife.

  “Wh-what?” I stammer, furrowing my brow. I know he’s getting up there, but surely Gerry’s not old enough to be senile yet.

  “Yes, yes. That’s right. Dear Leon was up before the sun to fetch it along with some of the other darlings from the Club,” Wanda says, nodding and beaming.

  “Oh,” I reply, astonished and relieved. “I never got to tell him thank you.”

  Gerry looks over at me with his blue eyes twinkling. “I doubt that’s the last you’ll be seeing of him.You’ll get your chance, I’m sure.”

  I can’t help but blush. I hope to God they don’t know what went on last night in their basement. Too embarrassed for words, I simply stand there frozen, my mouth hanging open. Wanda swivels around in her spot, waving me over more emphatically.

  “I know you’ve got places to go, but you can’t expect to get far on an empty stomach,” she scolds me gently. She’s adorable in her purple floral nightgown. There are still curlers in her hair and fuzzy slippers on her feet. Gerry has his arm around her, his eyes occasionally flicking over to her warmly. I find the whole scene utterly endearing, and it fills me with a sense of unnameable longing. I want that. I want someone to look at me the way Gerald Lawrence looks at his wife, even after all these decades together. It’s like they’re newlyweds, the way they dote on each other. I can only hope to find something so precious someday.

  I obediently walk over and take a plate, loading it up with food before settling into a chair to watch the morning news with Wanda. There are the usual pieces about lost dogs and weather patterns, new businesses opening and old ones closing. Not a single mention of the liquor store incident. I smile to myself.

  Samuels and Greene must have done a hell of a job covering it up.

  When I’m finished, I thank the Lawrences profusely, and Wanda holds my hand in both of hers for a solid minute while she tells me how wonderful it was to meet me and how dearly she hopes I will come back to visit again. I assure her, with all honesty, that I certainly intend to.

  Then I hoist my bag over my shoulder and head down the front steps to my car parked half a block down. I panic for a moment at the locked door, then realize that Leon must have slipped my keys back into my bag when I hear them jangling. He really thought of everything. My heart skips a beat when I think about the way he held me last night, so tenderly and passionately all at once. I have never been touched that way before.

  I wonder if I will ever see him again. I don’t have his number or even his full name. All I know is that he’s the closest thing to a knight in shining armor I’ve ever met, and if fate brought us back together once… then just maybe I’ll be lucky enough to find him again.

  I slide into the driver’s seat and pull my bag into my lap to take out a journal I found back at my dad’s house. I thrust it into my bag yesterday before I ran out to tail the motorcycle club to the liquor store, and I haven’t thought much of it until now. But I take it out of the bag and start poring through the weathered pages, blinking back tears at the sight of my father’s familiar handwriting, which is surprisingly neat and legible for a working man. There are pages of mundane observations about the weather, birds that landed in his yard, car troubles he worked out with his mechanic friend, and the frequent mentions of me.

  When I turn another page, a folded-up, black-and-white print out of a fashion website I write for falls out into my lap. I pick it up and realize it’s an article I wrote about peplum dresses and statement necklaces for autumn. Then I look at the journal page:

  I read another fashion blog update written by my daughter. She’s so talented, but these editors have her saddled with the most vapid material. I know she can do so much more with her skill and passion. All I really want is for Cherry to be happy. If this is what makes her happy, I will gladly spend the rest of my days printing out her gossip blog articles. I miss her, but I know she’s got her own life now in the big city. Things are too dull here for her. She deserves more than Bayonne has to offer, that’s for sure.

  Finally, after days of holding back, a teardrop falls and stains the paper, blurring my name on the page. I sniffle and hold the journal tight to my chest, closing my eyes and leaning back against the seat. I had no idea my dad was reading all those dumb, silly articles I wrote. I figured he had much better things to do than track down every single useless piece I published. Suddenly I am terribly angry with myself for letting him down. I thought I had years—many years—left to prove my worth to him. I wanted him to live to see me become the writer he knew I could be, the heroic truth-teller he wanted me to be. I never expected to lose him before he got the chance to see me really shine.

  And now, no matter how hard I work, he will never know. He died with the knowledge that his only child was nothing more than a puff piece writer. I swipe at my eyes furiously, my chest heaving as I finally let my emotions overwhelm me for the first time since his death. I can’t believe I’ve wasted so much time being anything less than he expected of me. All I want is to be good enough, but instead I’ve just spent my whole life messing around, taking the road most traveled because I’m too afraid to break free of the expectations the rest of the world puts on me. I’ve been living up to the image of my silly, girly name, instead of fulfilling who and what I really am inside.

  Well, that’s going to change now.

  “I can do better than that, Daddy,” I whisper aloud, shaking my head.

  I’m going to prove to him that I can be tough, that I can track down the hard, cold truths that people want to keep concealed. I’m going to find out what happened to my father, really. I don’t know how I’m going to make it happen, but somehow I am going to make this right.

  I look through his journal some more, turning on the radio for some background noise. After pages and pages of the same kind of stuff, I stumble upon a later entry describing something odd. I squint at the page, trying to make sense of the cryptic note:

  Commercial field possibly up for sale. Suspect something off. Near the docks. Will coordinate with Volkov to investigate.

  “Volkov?” I murmur to myself, trying to figure out if the name is familiar. But it doesn’t belong to anyone I can remember from my dad’s circle of friends. Maybe it’s
someone he was working with at the plant. Or maybe… it’s someone from the Union Club.

  What if it’s Leon?

  “Calm down,” I tell myself, rolling my eyes. I’m clearly just fishing for any reason to think about Leon right now. After all, he did give me the best sex of my life last night. I know there’s not much I can do to keep him out of my mind. Those strong arms, his powerful chest, and hard stomach… and that massive, glorious shaft.

  I close the journal and toss it in the bag before pressing my face into my palms. I can’t afford to be distracted right now! I have way too much to get done. There is a huge mystery surrounding my dad’s death and I did not come all the way back to Bayonne just to get all googly-eyed for some hot guy. Even if he is really, really super hot.

  I turn the ignition and start up the rental car, adjusting the seat and mirrors to suit my body. Luckily, whoever drove it over must have been a woman or someone small, since I don’t have to adjust anything too dramatically. I wonder if maybe it was Anya.

  “Okay. Now where am I going?” I ask myself out loud, biting my lip.

  I wrack my brain, trying to figure out what field by the docks my dad could be referencing in his enigmatic note. It’s one of the last entries in the whole journal, dated only a week before his death. I don’t know if there’s any connection, of course, but it’s the best lead I have at the moment, so I need to check it out. But where is it?

  I’ve lived outside of town for so long, my memory of the area is a bit rusty. I screw my eyes shut tightly and think hard. Near the docks. I used to play around there a lot, riding my bike up and down the sidewalk that runs along the coastline. I hung out with some kids from that part of town who treated the abandoned industrial piping and building materials from deals gone bad like a playground like an obstacle course. We had all kinds of borderline dangerous adventures climbing on top of metal heaps and hiding inside huge cement pipes. That area always needed construction, always looked rundown and forgotten to some extent. And it kind of was.

  Then I remember: a field scattered with old auto parts and tires, just a half mile or so from the docks. That has to be it. I used to hang out there as a kid sometimes, picking through the rusting car doors and endless nuts and bolts. My friends and I pretended to be scavengers, like we were going to find all the necessary pieces of a car and build one like Doctor Frankenstein or something. I smile at the memory. What a bunch of dorks.

  I think I can still remember how to get there.

  Carefully pulling out of the parking spot, I drive off in the general direction of the coast, passing by familiar old buildings and neighborhoods, most of which have fallen into some degree of disrepair. The old general store where I used to buy sodas and pastries looks almost dilapidated now, the roof sinking in from years of harsh weather and not enough funding to get it fixed properly. I shake my head sadly at the state of things. The town I left behind was a quiet one without a lot of prospects, sure, but I never thought I would return to find it in an even bleaker place than I left it.

  When I pull up to the field, a wave of memories washes over me. I get out of the car, holding the journal in my hand as I carefully step over the termite-eaten wooden fence. It’s barely more than a few stubborn pegs in the grass nowadays, and as I look out over the field, I see that the car parts and tires have been cleared away at last.

  “At least somebody tried to help out a little, I guess,” I mumble to myself.

  But what could be the “something off” my dad suspected? His journal entry is short, but it’s easy to see that he was concerned about something going on here. I wonder if he ever made it out here to check. And if he did, what did he find?

  Then I see it. Up ahead, there’s a wide patch of overgrowth that looks… strange. Unnatural. The whole field is overgrown, of course, but that particular part doesn’t look the same. I approach it quickly, tucking the journal under my arm. Up close, I can see that someone has obviously dragged a bunch of ripped-up plants and underbrush from somewhere else and dumped it here. I kick my way through this shoddy covering to see a plot of recently upturned earth. The dirt looks rather freshly placed, as though someone were trying to bury something.

  “What the hell?” I breathe, my heart starting to pound.

  Did I just find a shallow grave?

  I start to feel dizzy and sick to my stomach so I immediately turn and bolt back to my car. I don’t know what could be buried there, but I know one thing for sure: I am going to find out.

  10

  Leon

  I can’t get her out of my head. The more I try to push the thought away, to stuff the feelings into the same box I shoved all the rest of my good memories of this town before it all went to hell, it just floats right back up to the surface, harder and stronger than before.

  She’s something else entirely. For her to come back into my life here, now, with everything that’s going on, I feel like I’m trying to ride out a storm inside me. I’ve always been the one who can handle these kinds of things. This is unbelievable. I’m the president of the Union Club, and one woman from my adolescence gets me turned inside out. She’s getting in my way in more ways than one, and the only thing worse than that is the fact that I don’t think I mind her doing so very much at all.

  Right now, I’m trying to get the thought of her out of my mind while I read over research on James & Son Realtors, a company that’s trying to sell off that big plot of land near the water. Keeping tabs on local realty isn’t something an MC leader is known to get involved in, but then again, not many MCs look out for local affairs as closely as the Union Club does.

  This particular plot of land is a big sell. It’s in a prime location for commercial activity, it’s close to the water, and it’s big enough to be split into a handful of local businesses, but the city has kept it as one big parcel and just sat on it for a long time.

  Part of that is our doing. Lots like this tend to be ready-made for big national business to draw in revenue. Lot gets sold off to some mega-corp from out of town, a huge store gets erected on the spot, and before you know it, most of the jobs in town get filtered into that one location, lining corporate pockets and driving local business owners to their doorstep. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to make sure, one way or another, that realty agents like James & Son don’t sell them off. Worker collectives can do wonders for political change on a local level. The things you figure out as an MC leader. We’d been about to start pushing for the city to split up the lot into smaller parcels to sell off to local upstart businesses, before the FBI decided to show up.

  My best guess is that their presence is what’s emboldened the realty agency to sell.

  Fuck, this is frustrating work. I’m not made to sit at a desk all day when I could be out on the streets getting shit done.

  I try to bat those thoughts away, but they keep getting in the way like flies.

  Cherry would be great at this kind of investigative stuff.

  I take a drink of my beer as I try to dispel that thought. Not many people get in the way of me and my club anymore, but it wasn’t always like that. When we were first starting out, the skeezy business owners would discretely try to hire thugs to threaten us, find dirt to blackmail us with, even come start fights at The Glass. I’ve had to fight a man off in front of the very desk I’m sitting at in the bar’s office in the back. The desk still has a chip in it where the man’s knife hit.

  The fact of the matter is that this is dangerous work we’re doing, especially with the FBI breathing down our necks now. I don’t want Cherry to get wrapped up in all that.

  I rub my temple. Who am I kidding? I’m not getting anything done tonight. Why do I even care so much about Cherry, though? She’s basically an out-of-town stranger at this point, right? Yet she’s slipped right into the swing of things as if she’d never left. She’s a liability, isn’t she?

  Well, actually, even acting alone with no resources, she’s been keeping up with our entire club every step of the way. She’s a
natural. Even the way she handles herself on a motorcycle feels like she was meant to be there. She’s got every bit of the fire I do to dive right into things at the first whiff of foul play. She’s got even more of a stake in the murder investigation, and she’s handled herself like a professional more than once.

  I feel a pang in my chest as I realize how much I’ve been thinking about her. What’s gotten into you, Leon?

  I’ve got to shake myself out of it. But fuck, it’s been a hell of a ride on my own, trying to fight upstream against what seems like the whole institution lined up against me. The patch members and my officers, they’re truer brothers and sisters to me than any flesh-and-blood siblings ever could be. I couldn’t ask for a tighter group to ride with, and we’d all take a bullet for each other if it came to that.

  To meet someone else, a ghost from brighter days, storming into town with all the tenacity and fire I had when I was just starting out, looking like a vixen with eyes and lips that could knock a man out, and a body so stunning I can still feel it when I think about her...

  “Hey, boss?” I hear Eva’s voice from behind the door with a light knock before she lets herself in. “Still tied up in all that paperwork?”

  Snapping out of my thoughts, I grunt in response, setting my beer aside and leaning back. “Kill me. We ought to hire a suit to take care of this kind of work for us.”

  “Might not need to,” she says with a smile. “we just got a tip from one of the maintenance workers at James & Son.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I say, sitting up with a sudden smile. I can’t express how done I am with dealing with this paperwork, and I’m eager to get out on the streets again.

  “Apparently he overheard a meeting with the bosses. It’s a definite lead, but you’re not gonna like it. They’re trying to sell to NexaCo.”

  I feel fire burning in my chest, and my hand clenches. They aren’t fucking around. NexaCo is the big leagues.