“You got up and made us this huge breakfast. I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d sit down and eat with us before it got cold.”
“Well, I guess I can do that. Where are you from, Asa?” she asked him as she grabbed a plate off the table and began to fill it.
“I’m from Oregon.”
“Oh yeah? I’ve got a sister up there. I try to get out to see her at least once a year, but it’s getting harder and harder to do. Got a sister down here, too; much easier to see that one. These old bones don’t take to flying very well anymore.”
They talked for an hour, occasionally pulling me into the conversation, but mostly leaving me to chime in when I felt like it. The past eight hours were really catching up with me and I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, watching the big biker speak to my Gram as if she was The Queen of England. He never once swore, though my grandma did, and his table manners were impeccable. Who was this guy? I’d thought I’d had him pegged by the time we’d left the hotel room, but he wasn’t acting the way I’d expected him to.
My head began to ache, but I was too enthralled to leave the table, so I just laid my head down on my arms and let their voices wash over me. After a while, I found myself in that place between wakefulness and sleep where I could hear everything going on but I wasn’t quite conscious. I felt the table move a little under me, and seconds later I felt Gram’s gnarled hands sifting through my hair.
“She’s had a rough night. There anything I need to know about?” she asked quietly.
“No. She should be fine after a couple hours of sleep.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t act like nothing happened. I’ve buried two sons. I’ve watched three of my children go off the deep end, and I’ve stitched their wounds myself after bar fights and car accidents. My granddaughter walked in here looking shell shocked and scared and I want to know what happened,” she told him shortly, her voice leaving no room for argument.
“Far as I could tell, she went to a party with a friend and got left there. Not sure what happened to the friend, but she was alone when I saw her. Looked like she’d been drugged—not sure with what. She passed out, but woke up about two hours after I’d gotten her out of the house,” he replied, sighing loudly at the end.
“You were at the party? Why’d you need to take her out of there? Why didn’t you take her to a hospital?”
“I wasn’t at the party. I had… business with one of the men there. She looked like she could use the help, so I took her with me.”
There was a long pause before Gram spoke, like she was sifting through his words in order to decide whether to believe him or not.
“She… they didn’t?” she whispered, her fingers tightening slightly in my hair.
“No ma’am. She was downstairs and fully dressed when I found her. Even had her purse draped across her chest.”
I heard a small gasp above me, almost a sob, as Gram’s hand came down heavy on my shoulder. My head was beginning to lose that dreamlike quality that I’d been enjoying and I started to move, but I froze when I heard the way Gram’s breathing grew ragged before she brought it under control.
“Thank you,” she told him strongly, her voice once again at a normal level. “You’ll always have a place at my table. You’re in town, I expect you to come see me, you hear?”
When Asa rose from the table, his chair scraping across the linoleum, I raised my head to watch him with bleary eyes. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could stay awake, but I didn’t want to miss saying goodbye to him. Gram started bustling around the kitchen again. It was the way she coped with too much emotion, but I knew she was also trying to give us some semblance of privacy though she wasn’t ready to let me out of her sight.
“Thanks for bringing me home,” I rasped at him, my voice scratchy with sleep as I stood up from my seat. Once I was standing, the world tilted a little, so I braced the flat of my hand on the tabletop to get my balance. It didn’t seem to help, though, and I was swaying like a drunken sailor when Asa called out to Gram and reached for me, lifting me up like a baby into his arms.
He carried me in and laid me in Gram’s bed, kissing my forehead gently before walking out. I waited, listening to the sound of his motorcycle start up and drive away. The last thing I was aware of was Gram climbing into bed behind me and wrapping her arms tightly around my waist.
Chapter 5
Grease
I’d had an entirely fucked up night.
I was in California trying to hash out a distribution disagreement that my club was having with a gang in San Diego. I hadn’t been a member of the Aces Motorcycle Club for that long—only a couple of years—but my pop had been a member my entire life, and that gave me a little more clout than the other brothers who had gotten their cuts around the same time as me. I was happy to do what I could, but the whole fiasco had irritated the fuck out of me since I rolled into San Diego three days before.
The men I’d met up with were big fish in a small pond and they’d been pissed from the very beginning that Slider, my President, hadn’t at least sent the VP to deal with them. The entire thing had turned into a goddamn pissing match that they had no chance of winning, but that hadn’t stopped them from trying to piss the farthest and the longest. It was a fucking joke. The Aces controlled the gun trade over pretty much the entire western coast of the United States, and these jokers covered about a quarter of San Diego county. Comparing the two wasn’t even like comparing apples and oranges—it was more like apples and fucking maize.
Fuck, I have absolutely no problem with Mexicans. I don’t. I’ve met a lot of different Hispanic people that I liked a fuck of a lot. My half-brother is even a part of their little group, which is part of the reason Slider sent me down there in the first place. Dear old Dad spent some time in California about twenty years ago, and when he came back he left a pretty little Mexican girl brokenhearted and knocked up. He took care of her until he died, and he took me down to see my brother Deke whenever he had the chance. We didn’t grow up close, but he was my brother—it was as simple as that. I had his back and he had mine.
So when we started having some payment issues with the Jimenez gang, Slider thought it would ease some minds if I went down to collect the payment. It wouldn’t look like we were trying to strong-arm them, even if that was our intention. It was a friendly reminder from the brother of one of their members; a warning to get us what we wanted.
Everything had gone down relatively well if I didn’t count the president of the gang beating his chest and trying to exert his dominance whenever I was in the room. The man was like five-seven and had to weigh less than a buck-sixty. I could’ve snapped him in two, but instead, I was fucking diplomatic and did my job. I wasn’t going to get pulled into some bullshit fight when my entire club was a good eighteen-hour ride away.
I had Tommy Gun and Dragon with me as back up, but Dragon was a fucking prospect and I’d known Tommy since birth and he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. I trusted them to have my back, but I wasn’t about to put them in a situation where they would need to—it was the first meet I was in charge of, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.
I thought I was free and clear. I’d been stoked to be headed home with money in my saddle bags, and I was looking forward to the long ride with nothing to worry about but piss breaks and truck stop food.
When El Presidente asked me to stop by and handle some business with Jose, saying he had a quarter of the money they owed in his house safe, I was irritated as hell, but I went anyway. Apparently, Jose had been dealing for the gang, and he’d just come into a shitload of cash, but he hadn’t yet paid up. It was supposed to be just a quick stop on our way out of town, but when we pulled up to the house I knew shit was going to go down.
The dude had a fucking house full of people when I knew he’d been told we were coming. I didn’t know if he was feeling squirrely, or if he just didn’t care who knew he was doing business, but I wasn’t pleased with either scenario. It was business, a
nd I was getting tired as hell of these fucking dicks acting like they were hot shit and not giving us the respect we deserved.
We parked our bikes by the road, and my brother Deke pulled in behind us in his little rice-grinder car. I wasn’t sure why Deke felt the need to follow us, but the hair stood up on the back of my neck when he told me he was coming along for the ride. I never ignored that feeling, so I just slapped him on the back before I climbed on my bike. I met Dragon’s eyes before we took off and I knew he was feeling it, too. Something was off.
The house was as full as it appeared from the outside, with people everywhere when we walked inside. I kept my guard up, but lucky for me, the dick I was looking for was standing in the entryway when we showed up. He had his arm around a woman who seemed to be having a hard time standing up, but I just barely registered her as I took everything in.
I didn’t see her as a threat, but I should have.
I glanced around the house and looked back at Jose just as the woman dropped her head back against his shoulder and I got a good look at her face. She was gorgeous. Nice tits, tan skin, and light blue eyes; a weird mix that seemed to work on her. But those weren’t the things about her that were the most apparent. She wasn’t a woman; she was a girl. Her cheeks were still a little chubby, and when her mouth went slack I could see braces in her mouth with little purple rubber bands. It made my stomach clench that Jose, who was at least ten years older than me, was groping the girl, but it wasn’t my problem, so I deliberately looked away from her face even though it fucking killed me to do it.
There was something about her. I’d been around a lot of bitches in my life, whores and good girls, but this girl was different. She didn’t fit the situation. She was like a colored puzzle piece mixed in with a black and grey puzzle. It bugged the shit out of me—but I couldn’t let it break my focus. Whatever she was doing there had nothing to do with me.
I started talking to Jose, telling him we had business to discuss, when four of his boys showed up from somewhere in the back of the house. As soon as they were close, Jose dropped the chick he was holding and I knew shit was going to get bad. Really bad. Three of his boys were packing, and what had seemed like an easy pick-up suddenly turned into something I hadn’t seen coming. I was trying to assess the situation, wondering why Jose was being an idiot instead of just handing over the money, when the girl he’d been holding crawled across the floor and grabbed a hold of my leg.
It only took a second.
I looked down at her when she grabbed a hold of my thigh, her fingernails scratching across my jeans, and that was enough of an opening for the fuckers. The pulled their pieces, and before I could say a word, started firing.
When people are shooting at you, it isn’t like the fucking O.K. Corral. You don’t stand there and shoot back and hope you don’t get hit. You get the fuck down and then you shoot back. So that’s what I did. I dropped hard on top of the girl as I reached for my piece in the back of my waistband.
When all was said and done, there were people all over the house fucking screaming and running, but Jose and his men were dead. My boys may have been new—or in Tommy’s case, completely fucking stupid—but they’d done their job. I climbed to my feet as people rushed out the back of the house and started to step toward the front door, but the look on Dragon’s face stopped me. He was staring at the floor, and that’s when I remembered the girl.
She was completely out of it, sprawled out on the hard wood. She wasn’t wearing revealing clothes, nothing that a normal teenager wouldn’t wear, but the way she was sprawled out on the floor made her short shorts and tank top look fucking obscene. Her legs were spread wide with the legs of her shorts gaping, one of her arms was crossed over her chest and the other was close to her face. With the way her hair covered everything from the neck up, it almost looked like she was sucking her thumb. She looked so goddamn young that I felt like I’d been punched in the throat.
I couldn’t leave her there like that—alone and vulnerable to any dick that came across her.
So I took her with me.
Getting her on a bike wasn’t going to happen, so I stuffed her into the back of my brother’s car before we headed to a motel by the freeway. We’d been staying further south, but after that mess with Jose I wasn’t going to stay where we’d been. The gang had to have known within minutes what had gone down and I wasn’t about to be ambushed for something that wasn’t my doing in the first place. Their boy had decided he felt froggy and was going to stiff me the twenty-five grand he owed us. Bullshit. He took the first shot—fucking bad luck for him that he didn’t make the last one.
I wasn’t thinking straight. The adrenaline was flowing, and I was trying to figure out why I hadn’t just left that girl behind, so when we got up to the motel room, I was blindsided by the fact that I actually had a teenage girl in our room and my brother was pacing the floor, mumbling to himself. When the shit hit the fan, I hadn’t thought about what that would mean for Deke—he’d been put in a really bad position.
“Deke, man, follow us up. I can get you a meet with Slider, no worries,” I reassured him, but he wasn’t interested.
I tried to convince him to leave it all behind, but he wasn’t having it. He seemed to be under the impression that he wouldn’t have any problems, and he was a grown-ass man, so I wasn’t going to argue. If he wanted to stay, that was on him. Even though I was older by a little less than a year, I couldn’t tell him what to do. He’d been taking care of himself for a hell of a long time.
We were arguing about what had gone down, and the fact that I had a chick we didn’t know in my bed, when the girl woke up.
Everything after that was like some sort of fucked up version of The Twilight Zone that I couldn’t escape. She was as young as I’d thought when I saw her with Jose, but it wasn’t just that. She had to be around seventeen or eighteen in age, but Christ, in experience? She was a ten-year-old. She had no sense of self preservation and she thought I was some kind of hero for saving her ass from somewhere she shouldn’t have been in the first place. I knew she was young, goddamn, but when she climbed into my lap I felt myself growing hard underneath her.
It’s not like I was much older than she was, I was only twenty, but I’d stopped fucking girls her age when I was fourteen. There was a huge gap in life experience that made anything I wanted from her impossible, which was proven when she told me she had to call her grandmother and spoke to her like she knew she was going to be in trouble. When we introduced ourselves to her, she wrinkled her nose in confusion and I could tell the wheels were turning in her head as she gave us her name. For a split second, I thought she might have given us a fake one, but I could tell by looking at her face that she hadn’t—and she was kicking herself for it.
I made plans to meet the boys about an hour north of San Diego and took Callie to her grandmother’s. There was nothing else I could do. She was fucking jailbait, and even if she wasn’t, there was no way she was staying the night in my motel room. The girl had fucking braces on her teeth. She came from an entirely different world.
When I got her home, I thought I’d feel relief, but I didn’t. She’d spent the entire ride rubbing up against my back, with her little hands clenching and releasing my chest like a kitten, and her not quite innocent actions had me hard as a rock. I wanted her. Bad.
I’d programmed my number into her cell phone back in the motel room, but I didn’t see any reason why she’d ever need to call me. So when her grandma ordered me in for food, I took her up on her offer. I told myself that I just wanted some home cooked food, that I didn’t want to ride with my jeans strangling my dick, that I wanted to make sure she was okay from whatever she’d been given earlier in the night—but none of those reasons were the truth. I just didn’t want to leave her yet.
She was so sweet—the way she looked at her Gram, the way she served up my plate without even asking what I wanted, and the way she smiled with her mouth closed, trying to hide her braces. I’d never be
en around sweet like that before—I fucking loved it. She didn’t talk a whole lot, but I figured that might have been because of whatever she still had in her system. Her Gram was watching her with an eagle eye while we sat at the table, but Callie didn’t seem to notice. By the time we were done eating, she’d passed out at the table.
It fucking killed me to leave her there, but I knew that her Gram would take care of her and it really wasn’t any of my business. I had gotten her home safe and sound and I’d look like a jackass if I hung around too long—not to mention the fact that I probably had forty Mexican guys gunning for me.
I needed to get the fuck out of there before I did something stupid and got myself killed.
Chapter 6
Callie
I woke up alone in Gram’s bed to bright afternoon sunlight shining through the lacy white curtains. My head was throbbing, and my mouth tasted like something had crawled in there and died. I tried to roll over, but gave up with a groan when my entire body protested the movement. It only took a few seconds for me to go from wondering why I was so sore, to remembering exactly why I felt like shit.
My mind raced over the events of the night before, and I was completely baffled by everything that had happened. Shit like that just didn’t happen to me. I rarely got into trouble, and when I did it was for normal things, like talking back to my parents or staying out past curfew. I couldn’t have imagined the night before if I’d tried.
I was busy sifting through my memories, trying to catch the elusive ones, when Gram came into the bedroom to wake me up.
“Oh, good. You’re up. I’m heading over to Aunt Lily’s and figured I’d drop you off at home on my way. How you feeling?” she asked me as she walked around the room, pulling on a sweater and a pair of tennis shoes.