Property of Baffle (Kings of Anarchy MC: New Mexico #2)

Chapter 1 Truth

Baffle

We had Saint, Piston, Rattler, and Short in from the Arizona Chapter of the Kings of Anarchy MC. They also brought a prospect with them, not that I could recall the fucker’s name. No telling if he would last, so no point in making it stick just yet.

The music was loud, the drinks were plentiful, and the women were already down to the bare minimum of clothing.

My eyes trailed over the bodies to determine who was the freshest of the bunch.

A shiver ran down my spine with the thought.

Convenient pussy was a blessing some days when I didn’t feel like putting in the effort, but knowing I was sharing the same woman with most of my club brothers took something away from the experience.

My eyes locked with Rosa’s as her body writhed to the beat of some popular pop song. It appeared to be an anthem of sorts for the women as they were all up on their feet or grinding away in someone’s lap. Some shit about pink ponies. I rolled my eyes and turned to the prospect behind the bar.

“What the fuck is this shit?” I pointed to the speakers in the ceiling and he laughed.

“Special request from all the club girls.”

“Put the regular music back on when it’s over. This isn’t their clubhouse and most of the men don’t want to hear that shit.”

“You sure about that?” The fucker asked as he grinned and pointed toward our enforcer, Grunt.

That asshole was singing along to the song at the top of his fucking lungs.

The chick with him threw her head back and laughed as he dipped her while she rode his thigh.

I could practically see the wet spot on his jeans from across the room.

“Well, shit,” I huffed as our prospect laughed again.

My eyes trailed back to where I’d last seen Rosa.

She wasn’t where I’d clocked her before but then I felt a tap on my hip and glanced to my left.

There she was with her flowing brown hair.

The big, bouncy curls she started the night with were beginning to loosen and straighten back out.

Not that it mattered, since she looked just as good with freshly-fucked, mangled hair as she did with the high-maintenance curls.

“Rosa,” I leaned down and whispered her name into her ear. She smelled of citrus and sunshine like she belonged on a beach somewhere and not some hole-in-the-wall biker club in the middle of nowhere New-Fucking-Mexico.

Her hand drifted from my hip, up across my abs, and underneath my cut.

“Baffle,” she sighed my name and while the sound was carried away with the music and general club noise, I could still read her lips.

More than that, I could feel the sultry purr she must have added to it as her eyes heated and her fingertips continued to dig into my body.

“Are you going to show me a good time tonight?” she asked, louder that time, so I could hear.

I smirked down at her. “Don’t I always?”

Her head bobbed in acknowledgment and something passed behind her eyes that I chose to ignore.

Rosa had a thing for me. She wanted my patch, wanted me in a permanent, committed way.

She was smart enough to know that would never come to pass.

At least I hoped like hell she was still on board with the way things were.

“I think someone’s jealous,” she mentioned and tipped her head to the side. I followed the subtle gesture with my eyes and found one of my oldest friends, Roxy, glaring at Rosa from across the room.

“We’ve never been anything more than friends. Did you do something to piss her off today?”

Rosa giggled and shrugged her shoulders. “Touched you,” she insisted.

I shook my head and leaned back until my elbows propped on the bar behind me.

“I have to be here for a bit longer. Why don’t you meet me in my room in about an hour?

It’s unlocked. Get comfortable and don’t fuck with any of the other men before then.

If they approach you, tell them I called dibs for the night. ”

“Anything you say, Baffle.” Rosa agreed with a knowing smile that probably meant she read a bit too much into my demands.

This would most likely be the last time I fucked her.

Despite being cool and knowing how I felt, she was starting to get too many ideas that maybe my mind could be changed.

That was usually when women got desperate, tried shit to lock down a brother, and then we ended up searching for new talent.

I’d like to think Rosa wouldn’t be like all the others, but we’d been through it enough for me to know that they all eventually fell to fucking unrealistic expectations.

Rosa wandered off and I turned back to the prospect behind the bar.

“Get me a Beer Creek,” I ordered. It was a pale ale we picked up from a smaller brewery out of Santa Fe.

We stopped off there about a year before on a run and ended up loving their setup.

More importantly, we fucking loved their brew.

We were only able to work out a deal to have some of their retail kegs on tap in the clubhouse but we did offer some of their IPAs and Porters at Violent Times, our club-run bar that was open to the public.

When I turned back around with my beer, Roxy stood in front of me with her hands on her hips. “Weren’t you even going to come say hello?” she asked. The snappy tone she used was completely fucking unwarranted.

“You wanna lose the attitude, doll?”

Roxy huffed and stomped her foot on the floor between us.

My club president, Bigfoot, was my brother in every way but DNA.

In the same respect, Roxy was like a sister and friend all rolled into one.

She called us best friends forever or BFFs but that sounded a bit juvenile to me.

I was thirty fucking years old and she was only two years behind me.

We all grew up together and I wasn’t fucking blind, her mom and mine had been friends at one time.

Bigfoot’s mom took up where mine left off, wanting to fix me up with Roxy.

That was never going to happen because I didn’t see her that way.

She was too fucking needy and jealous for my taste.

There was nothing wrong with a good claiming on the person you wanted to be yours, but Roxy took her jealousy to a very petty, insecure level.

“Damn you, Baffle,” she sulked. “What’s a girl got to do to get your attention? I’m your BFF and you look right through me sometimes.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I was looking for a good fuck tonight and not a conversation with a friend?”

Fury burned red-hot in her eyes and her lips thinned as she pulled them tight against her teeth to keep from saying the first thing that came to mind. When she had herself a little more under control, she leaned forward. “We could always kill two birds with one stone.”

It wasn’t the first time she made a suggestion about us hooking up, but that was a path I refused to walk down.

“Never gonna happen.” I pushed off the bar with my beer in hand and walked past Roxy.

She grabbed hold of my arm to keep me from moving more than a step or two past her.

I glanced down at it and then back up at her. She knew better.

“We need to talk about that. I don’t know why you’re so opposed.”

“Friends, Rox. Nothing else. Keep pushing boundaries and we won’t even be that.”

“Patrick Mendoza!” I heard from my other side.

I glared at Roxy as she had the audacity to smirk at me.

It took two seconds to spin around and stare Bigfoot’s mother down.

I had a lot of respect for the woman as the former club president’s ol’ lady, and our current president’s mother.

Tilly had been a surrogate mother to me for a lot of years to boot.

She didn’t care that I was bigger or had more authority here than she did.

“Not your business what I do with my cock, Mom!” I emphasized the two most important words in that sentence so she would understand that I wasn’t about to allow her input on my sex life.

Tilly may have been a second mother to me, but there were lines I wouldn’t allow her to cross.

Meddling in my personal life was a big one.

I walked away while both women stood shocked for different reasons. There wasn’t enough time in the world to deal with their bullshit drama. I had a club to help run and a club girl to fuck out my frustrations with.

By the time I finally tracked down Bigfoot, the fucker was already three sheets to the wind as he was shooting the shit with Saint and Piston. “Hey asshole!” I called out to him.

His glassy eyes came up to meet mine and I knew whatever I said wouldn’t get through to him anyway. Since he became a father, it was rare that he let loose and tied one on. As he tipped his chin up in acknowledgment, I sighed. “You need to get the queen bee on a tighter leash, man.”

“The fuck did Mom do now?” Bigfoot managed to get the words out, but to say they were coherent was a bit of a stretch.

“Roxy.” That’s all I needed to say. He glanced over my shoulder as if both women in question would be standing there.

“They still trying to set you up?” Piston asked.

“Never stopped,” I confirmed.

“Damn, brother. That has to suck. She ever get in the way of you and the other women around here?”

I shook my head, but as I did so, it made me wonder. “Not that I’m aware of.” All the men around the table stopped what they were doing and slid their attention my way.

“Might want to check into that,” our other prospect, Joey, said. Then he remembered he was supposed to remain on the periphery and gave a panicked squeak before he took off to handle an overflowing garbage can.

“Mousy little fucker is right,” someone announced but I didn’t catch who said it. Instead, I nodded along and planned to do just that before I snatched Bigfoot’s mostly full glass out of his hands and relished in the burn as the bourbon made its way to my stomach.

“You owe me one, prick!” Bigfoot laughed and then almost tipped out of his chair.

“Looks like I did you a favor, fucker!” I left them to it and went to go grab another drink. The beer wasn’t doing it for me anymore. Fucking women. They ruined my night with their bullshit. Thankfully, Tilly and Roxy steered clear of me for the rest of the night.

An hour and a half, four glasses of bourbon, two shots, and a beer chaser after I first told Rosa to wait for me in my bedroom, I finally stumbled my way there.

I didn’t bother to turn the lights on because my vision was already tipping sideways.

I could tell in my fuzzy-drunken haze, and the little bit of light that swam in from the hallway, that there was a brunette in my bed.

She listened and that was all that mattered.

“Good thing you waited,” I mumbled. “Gonna fuck you stupid and then pass out. No lights cause I’m not getting up to…

” The rest of what I’d been saying was cut off when I tried to pry my shirt up over my head and realized I hadn’t taken my cut off first. “Fuck!” I peeled the offending layer of leather from my body, tossed it on my dresser, and then ripped my shirt over my head.

I kicked off my boots, dropped my pants, and managed to fight my way out of them before they tripped me on the way to my bed.

Rosa was her usual quiet self, waiting for me to give her orders. I was too fucking tired to play her Dom in the way she would want, though. “Alright, darlin’ toss those covers off and let’s get to it. I need to nut and not really interested in playing tonight.”

She made some sort of noise. I couldn’t tell if it was disappointment or disgust. Made no fucking difference to me. I reached over to grab a condom out of the dresser and almost fell off the fucking bed instead.

“Shit, shouldn’t have done those shots,” I managed to get out as clearly as possible.

Rosa held up a condom in front of my face, then she ripped the package open and rolled it down my hard cock.

That was weird, since she didn’t usually take the initiative like that, but I was too fucking out of it to question her odd behavior at the time.

“Aww, baby girl, are you eager for me, tonight?”

Her response was either too muffled for me to understand or I was too drunk to process words.

For all I knew, whatever I said wasn’t coming out properly and she thought I was grunting at her like a caveman.

I chuckled at the thought as I sunk down into her pussy.

It didn’t feel the same. Rosa was a tiny woman, and not just in stature.

She couldn’t really take my full size without a lot of prep work.

I figured, maybe she didn’t listen after all and had one of the other men while she waited on me.

I nearly tossed her out then, but the need to fuck before I passed out was stronger than my aversion to being sloppy seconds.