This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Long Ride: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Black Sparks MC) (Whiskey Bad Boys Book 1) copyright @ 2017 by Kathryn Thomas and E-Book Publishing World Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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Contents
Long Ride: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Black Sparks MC) (Whiskey Bad Boys Book 1)
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
Books by Kathryn Thomas
Raw Speed: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Tidal Knights MC) (Mean Machine Collection Book 3)
Raw Torque: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Gravediggers MC) (Mean Machine Collection Book 2)
Raw Need: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Padre Knights MC) (Mean Machine Collection Book 1)
Rebel’s Property: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Satan’s Martyrs MC) (Claimed by Him Book 5)
Reaper’s Property: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Valley Reapers MC) (Claimed by Him Book 4)
Brute’s Property: A Motorcycle Club Romance (The Blazers MC) (Claimed By Him Book 3)
Bad Boy’s Property: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Lost Disciples MC)
Biker’s Property: A Bad Boy Biker Baby Romance (Chrome Horsemen MC)
Possessive: A Bad Boy Second Chance Motorcycle Club Romance (Sons of Chaos MC)
Tangled with the Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Fighter Romance
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Long Ride: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Black Sparks MC) (Whiskey Bad Boys Book 1)
By Kathryn Thomas
Once you go biker, you never go back.
I thought I’d moved on.
But even though I let go of the bad boy, he never let go of me.
Nicholas Stone will either drag me to his bed and take me to heaven…
Or drag me to hell and watch me burn.
LIANA
I left home to chase a dream.
Instead, I stumbled into a nightmare.
My police officer ex has gone insane since our break-up.
He’s everywhere I look.
Lurking in my shadows.
Haunting me.
I flee, back to the only place I’ve ever felt safe.
But the devil waiting for me in my hometown isn’t much better.
In the eight years I’ve been gone, Nicholas Stone has become so much more.
More powerful.
More tatted.
More irresistible.
But just when I start to think that, if I let my guard down, I can be safe in his arms…
A gift arrives from a not-so-secret admirer.
My ex has discovered where I went.
He sees who I’m with.
And I know that my troubles are far from over.
In fact, they’re just beginning.
NICHOLAS
I’ve never forgotten the girl who broke my heart.
But I’ve filled the hole she left with nothing but pure f**king savagery.
The biker life suited me.
It lets me get my hands dirty.
There’s no feeling quite like the wind in your face, an open stretch of highway, and your enemies’ cries for mercy still ringing in your ears.
But Liana’s return threatens to undo the man I’ve become.
I need to know why she’s back after all these years.
There must be something she’s hiding.
And yet, she refuses to admit it.
Until the ugly truth comes roaring back with a vengeance and a death wish.
But there’s something different this time around.
Liana is mine.
And if her ex thinks he can come anywhere near her again, I’ll have to teach him the hard way:
Never, ever mess with a biker.
CHAPTER ONE
“Look at the princess now!” the old woman cackled, looming over Liana. The fake wrinkles in the actress’s face looked lurid as the lighting engineer overhead struggled to get his bearings.
Liana sighed as she penciled a note into her script that the writer had changed the line, again. If she was going to get her cue right, she would have to know what her fellow actors actually planned on saying.
The play was an updated version of the Grimm’s fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” in which a would-be princess is betrayed by her servant, forced to work herding geese until the prince recognizes her and saves her. Only this version contained a lot of tight black leather and pop culture references. It was edgy, said the director. It was hip. It was now. It had been rehearsing for six months and didn’t even have an opening date.
“Cut!” shouted the director. “That’s enough for tonight.”
“Thank god,” said the old lady, taking off her wig, ending the illusion that she was older than forty. “I need a cigarette.”
Liana kicked off the high-heeled character shoes she’d been wearing to rehearse and zipped up her knee-high black boots over her skinny jeans. She grabbed her handbag from where it was perched on one of the front row chairs, glancing nervously at the thinness of her wallet. She didn’t even want to think about the streets outside, or what might be lurking there. She was ashamed of herself. She didn’t used to be this frightened. But circumstances had changed. She smoothed her hair and prepared to approach the director, who’d been generous in the past, though she knew he couldn’t exactly afford to be.
“Maybe if you’d finally pay me I could afford that,” she muttered.
“I told you, nobody gets paid until opening night.”
“Which keeps getting pushed back. How do I know when opening night will be? You haven’t even settled on a script yet. Every time I memorize a scene, you change it and I have to learn my lines all over again. Anyway, I need to borrow ten bucks for cab. Pleas
e, Rob.”
“I would if I had the cash,” he replied, sounding distracted, shaking his head at the chaos around him. “But I can’t spare it. I can barely afford to turn the lights on in here.”
“I noticed that when I tripped over the prop table coming in.” She glanced down the street. Rob seemed to notice her trepidation.
“Look, don’t worry. It’s safe here. There’s a cop car just down the street.”
She froze, heart speeding up, sending hot blood pounding through her ears. “Where?”
“A block away. Why?”
“I’ve got to go,” she said, slinging her handbag over her shoulder. “See you tomorrow.”
“But the door’s that way.” He pointed, confused.
“I’m going through the alley.”
Maybe, she thought as the ragged heels of her boots clip-clopped on the cement, adding to the urgency—maybe, if she hadn’t spent an hour and half standing around onstage—or what passed for the stage in the run-down loft above a window factory—she would have gotten out early enough not to feel so vulnerable.
She only felt a modicum of safety as she sunk into the subway instead—not because she felt like shivering in the deserted tunnel waiting for the G train to take her home to Brooklyn apartment, but because she had ten bucks in her wallet at the moment and the driver of a cab would probably expect a tip. Besides, she needed most of that money to go to the bodega tomorrow to replace the box of Rice Krispies and the carton of milk she’d been living on all week.
The subway car, when it arrived eight minutes later, was deserted except for a guy in a thick black coat slumped in the corner seat, his face lurid under the fluorescent lights. She wasn’t sure whether she should sit closer to him, so he wouldn’t sense her fear, or keep her distance. Finally, though her feet felt like cement blocks, she didn’t sit down at all, merely hooked her arm around the metal pole and lurched when the train did, thinking about the audition she’d been on last week for a play—a real play, one written by an award-winning playwright, the type they wrote about in the New York Times.
“You’re talented, but you should take acting classes,” the handsome, curly-haired playwright had said. He was well dressed, in a plaid flannel shirt, trying to look rugged—though he wasn’t. Not really. It was all false. It was merely a weak imitation of ruggedness of the kind of men she had once known back in her hometown of Prudence, Ohio.
Besides, it was easy for him to say. He had probably grown up here, or in Connecticut with an investment banker for a dad. He didn’t understand that she couldn’t possibly afford acting classes on the tips she made pouring pints at the beer garden in Queens.
She looked at her hands on the pole, her fingers white as they gripped the straps. She’d been in New York for two years, and this was all she had to show for it. A few chorus roles, a playbill with her name in the back under “swing.” A couple of roles that had folded after two performances with nobody but friends and family members in the audience, let alone a big-time theatrical agent. And once, a stage door Johnny to hand her a bouquet of flowers so big she could hardly hold them.
He’d said his name was Jack. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. At the time, she’d been delighted, eating up his words, as he grandly offered her his hand to whisk her to Midtown for a forty-dollar rib eye steak at Mendy’s, and a bottle of champagne, too. That night, for the first time since she’d left home, she’d actually felt like an actress, a star. Now she just felt ill.
Her usual subway stop at Bedford-Nostrand was quiet, as it usually was this time of night, and the footsteps of her high-heeled ankle boots sounded loudly on the concrete floor beneath. She breathed a sigh of relief when, up ahead, she spied the light on in the window of her third-story walkup apartment.
A black-clad figure was coming toward her on the other side of the sidewalk, and she edged closer to the side of the building, ducking under the endless construction scaffolding that always seemed to mar this part of Brooklyn. She sensed footsteps behind her, turning around only to see a black-clad woman with a grocery cart making her way slowly down the street.
Still, she pressed herself up against a wall, fumbling with her keys to unlock the front door. As it turned out, she didn’t have to—it had already been unlocked. She flew up the stairs. She could hardly hear her own feet. There was a ringing in her ears, a kind of strange frequency, like her own voice screaming, though she was silent. The door of her apartment was wide open. She called for her roommate. “Misty? Are you home?”
No answer. She raced into the living room, then the kitchen. The table was cleared off neatly. In the center sat a single red rose. Hand trembling, she reached for it slowly, as if it might suddenly sprout teeth and bite her hand off. See you soon. -J.
She turned around in a circle, the shabby college-style decor of the apartment—Mumford & Sons posters, beanbag chairs, TV tables—swimming like an aquarium in front of her eyes.
The staircase outside the door creaked, and Liana jumped what felt like a foot in the air. She glanced around her wildly. There was no escape, except for maybe out on the roof. She felt herself shrink, as if she could turn invisible if she willed it strongly enough. It might be her only hope. The footsteps lurched closer.
“Liana?”
“Stay back!”
“Liana! What’s wrong?”
Liana sank down on the couch, heart still hammering, though the rush of pure adrenaline had slowed. “Oh, god, Misty, it’s you.”
Misty tossed her keys on the table and threw back the hood of her sweatshirt, revealing her curly mane of black hair. She flopped down on the couch next to Liana, concern swirling in her chocolate-brown eyes.
Liana’s mood had gone from terror to pure, overwhelming emotion. Tears ran down her face. She watched her hands shake as she swiped at her eye with the arm of her pea coat. Misty disappeared in the bathroom and came out with a wad of Kleenex. Liana dully grabbed it and dabbed her eye, staring at nothing. She’d read somewhere that too much adrenaline, too often, could actually kill you. She was starting to wonder what the threshold was.
“Did you see him?” she finally asked.
“No, I just got here,” replied Misty. “I stayed to close tonight at the restaurant. Why, what happened?”
Liana silently pointed to the rose sitting on the table, afraid to even look at it. Misty look at it with confusion, and Liana explained she’d found it when she got home, all the lights on and the doors open.
“How did he—?” Misty gestured to the door. “I know I locked the door when I left. Double-bolted it. I always do.”
“I know you did. I don’t know how he got in. He can get in anywhere.”
“You mean he’s done this before?”
Liana nodded.
“He can’t do this to you!” Misty demanded, leaping up from the couch. “It’s breaking and entering. It’s against the law. Liana, you have to call the cops!”
“I can’t,” said Liana miserably, staring at the blank TV screen, which had been blank ever since they’d had to choose between keeping their cable subscription and paying the gas bill.
“Why not?”
“He is a cop.”
CHAPTER TWO
Nicholas Stone signaled and pulled off the freeway at the exit to Chillicothe, where he had a meeting with Tryg Ryan, the president of the Black Sparks Prudence charter. On Main Street, a familiar curly-haired girl in a denim jacket and Ugg boots smoked a cigarette across the street from the junior high school. He didn’t know her name, but she seemed to wait for him there more often than not, probably hoping he’d get curious one day and stop to chat. He knew better than that, though. She wiggled her décolletage in his direction with a wink, and he tightened his grip on the handlebars, glancing back with a dismissive little smirk, knowing it would make her day – a little thrill for both of them.
Instead, he parked the bike in front of the Purple Hawk bar and vaulted off in less than a second, unfastening the strap of his helmet and slinging
it over the handlebars. The other members of the character were either behind him or already there, heading to their regular rendezvous point, whether they would meet the latest shipment from the Chillicothe Trucking shipment they would escort up Highway 50 to Cincinnati. It was a routine job, one that helped them keep the lights on in the clubhouse while they were waiting for the bigger scores. Since Tryg had taken over, it tended to be weapons shipments from Russia and Northern Ireland.
As much as the road relaxed him, the text message he’d received from Tryg that morning—Come early. Need u—did not. Lately, Tryg had been walking around like a load of bricks was suspended on a tarp above his head with the rope ready to be cut any second. Nick, as his vice president, couldn’t help but absorb that apprehension. He didn’t let any of it show, though, as he shoved one hand in his pocket and pushed open the door to the bar. Behind him, he heard another bike pulling in.
Kirrily, Ryan Tryg’s sinewy, strong Australian wife, greeted him with a cheeky wink. Behind Kirrily, there was a flash of even blonder hair, as eighteen-year-old barback Cora Hines, her face lit up like a gigantic chandelier, dropped the napkins and letting them flutter all across the counter and down onto the floor. More for the benefit of his fellow outlaws than for her, he shook his shoulder-length hair so its coppery-brown highlights caught the sunlight pouring in. Cora blushed and quickly slipped into the backroom.
“Looks like you just missed another another charter member of the Nicholas Stone Fan Club,” said Thomas “Tomahawk” Ripley, the sergeant-at-arms, slapping Nick’s broad shoulder. He was several years older than Nick, a barrel-chested, muscular redhead with a perpetual sunburn, his beard knotted into a tail. “You tapped that yet?” he asked casually, looking taken back when Nick shook his head. “Give me one good reason.”
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