My Ex-Military Biker (Bloomfield: MC #2)

Chapter 1 — Tate

The knife comes at me from the side.

I see the arc before I register the man holding it. Drop into the movement, feel the blade pass close enough that I catch the air displacement against my neck.

My elbow drives back into soft stomach, and the Marrow guy makes a sound like a punctured tire. His knife hand drops. I'm already turning, getting my hand on his wrist, applying pressure to the specific point that makes tendons stop cooperating. The knife hits gravel.

Behind me, Cain's got the other two occupied.

I hear boot meeting ribs, the sound of cartilage breaking, someone going down with the kind of wheeze that means they won't be up fast.

Good. I've got work to do.

The van's back doors are already open. Inside, cardboard boxes stacked neat with grocery store logos printed on the side like this is a legitimate delivery.

It's not.

I pull my knife and start cutting boxes. White bricks wrapped in plastic reveal themselves. Fentanyl. Enough to kill half the county if it gets where Marrow wants it going.

I drag the first box out, drop it. Start on the second. The knife guy behind me is still on his knees, trying to remember how lungs work. I track him peripherally while I move boxes.

Threat assessment is automatic. He's down but not out. File that information. Keep working.

I'm on the third box when I hear footsteps. Fast and unsteady.

I turn.

He's up. Still has the knife. Must've had a backup. His face tells me everything I need to know, all anger, no sense.

These are the dangerous ones. Not because they're good, but because they're stupid.

He comes at me wild.

I sidestep. Should be easy. Would be easy except the service road is loose gravel and my boot catches on a rock that wasn't there a second ago.

I compensate but not fast enough. The blade catches me across the ribs.

The burn is immediate. Shallow cut, I know this before I look, I've had worse. I’ve done worse. The blade was clean enough, angle was poor, he didn't commit to the strike. If he'd committed I'd be in real trouble.

As it is, I'm just bleeding.

I don't stop moving. Get inside his reach while he's still processing that he actually landed a hit. Drive my knee into his thigh. Feel something pop.

He goes down screaming, but stays down this time.

I turn back to the van and finish the job. Cain appears next to me thirty seconds later. His knuckles are split and already swelling, and he's breathing harder than I am.

"You're bleeding," he says.

"Yep."

"Bad?"

"No."

We don't talk after that. Just work.

Pull the rest of the boxes out. Destroy what we can here. The message needs to be clear. Marrow runs drugs through Route 9, this is the outcome. Every time.

One of their guys is unconscious in the dirt. The other is sitting up, holding his ribs, looking like he's reconsidering his life choices. The one I dropped with the knee is still screaming. Bone broke through skin on that hit. He'll need an ambulance.

Pity.

Cain pulls his phone and calls Clint. I listen with half my attention while I assess my own damage.

The cut runs about six inches across my ribs, left side. Shallow like I thought. Clean edges. Bleeding steady but nothing arterial. Field dressing will hold it until I get home.

I pull the kit from my saddlebag. Wrap the wound functional, not pretty. Gauze, pressure, tape.

It'll do.

Cain ends his call. "Clint says go. I'm waiting for cleanup."

I nod and mount up.

The movement pulls at the wound and fresh blood seeps into the gauze immediately. I start the bike anyway.

Route 9 stretches out empty. Heat shimmers on the asphalt like water that isn't there, sun sitting heavy in air that hasn't moved since morning.

This whole summer's been like this, heat that settles in and doesn't lift.

Bloomfield is twenty minutes east, and my house is three miles before town.

I run through the checklist. Get home. Clean the wound properly. Change the dressing. Disinfect. Check for debris. Call Clint with an update.

Normal Tuesday.

The shirt is soaked through by the time I'm ten minutes out. Sticking to my skin, pulling at the wound every time I breathe.

I'm thinking about whether I need to check the suture kit when I see her.

At first I think it's heat shimmer doing something to my vision. Or blood loss. Or my brain making shapes out of nothing because that's what brains do when you're running on adrenaline comedown.

But I slow down and she's still there.

A woman in a long white dress, sitting on the shoulder of Route 9 next to a dead car.

I process this twice to make sure it's real.

Wedding dress. Full skirt spread around her on the gravel like someone staged a photo shoot and forgot to clean up. Dark hair that was probably all done up this morning, now half-collapsed and falling loose.

She's not crying, just sitting there staring at the empty road like she's trying to understand the series of decisions that led her to this exact spot.

I should keep riding.

Not my problem. I'm bleeding through a field dressing. Stopping for strangers on empty roads is how you end up in situations that didn't need to happen.

But.

Empty road. Woman alone. Car clearly dead from the angle of the hood. Sun's heading toward evening.

She's got maybe two hours before this becomes a different kind of problem.

The medic reflex doesn't do risk assessment, it just sees someone who might not make it home without help.

Same reflex that made me stay with Danny for forty-seven minutes doing everything right while he died anyway.

I shake that memory away and slow down, pulling over twenty feet past her.

The silence after the engine cuts is total. No wind. No other traffic. Just heat and stillness and the sound of my own breathing.

I sit on the bike for three seconds. This is still a choice. I could start it back up. Keep riding.

Someone else will come along eventually…

I get off the bike.

The movement pulls the wound wider. Fresh blood, warm and spreading. I feel it and file it under problems to address shortly. Walk back toward her. My boots are loud on gravel in the quiet.

She looks up when I'm still ten feet away.

Her eyes are clear. That's the first thing I notice. No tears. No panic. Just shock.

She sees the blood on my shirt immediately. I watch her eyes track to it, assess, move back to my face. She stands. The movement is economical, brushing gravel off the dress without appearing to think about it.

Then she takes two steps toward me.

She's looking at the blood. I'm looking at her.

Round face. Full cheeks. Wide mouth. Her body is soft everywhere the dress shows, which is her shoulders, her arms, the heavy curve of her breasts above the neckline.

The dress is fitted through the bodice, pulling tight across her chest and ribs before flaring out at the waist into all that fabric.

I look back to her face before the looking becomes obvious.

"Car trouble?" I ask.

"Yes."

Her voice is steady. I file that information too.

"How long have you been here?"

"I don't know. Twenty minutes, I guess. I wasn't really tracking time."

"You know where you are?" I ask.

"No."

"Bloomfield's three miles that way." I nod east. "Nearest gas station with a tow truck is eighteen miles back the way you came."

She absorbs this without visible reaction. Looks at her car. The hood is up. No smoke, but something under there gave up. Looks back at me.

"How bad is it?" she asks.

Takes me a second to realize she means the wound, not the car.

"Not bad."

"Can I see?"

I lift my shirt.

I watch her eyes track the length of the cut. She doesn't touch it.

When she looks back up, her evaluation is clear before she speaks.

"That needs to be cleaned and dressed properly. What you've got now won't hold."

"I know."

"Are you going somewhere to do that?"

"Yeah."

She thinks. I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes. Whatever decision she's working through is happening fast but not reckless. She's weighing options she doesn't like against outcomes she likes less.

"How far?" she asks.

"Three miles."

She looks at her car, dead on the side of an empty highway, then looks back at me.

"Can you give me a ride?"

I don't answer immediately.

Her eyes drift to the blood soaking through the edge of the gauze.

"If you're really headed somewhere to deal with that," she says, "I can clean it properly."

"I'll manage."

"Maybe." She meets my eyes again. "But I’m offering."

I look at the wound, then back at her.

"You give me a ride," she says. "I'll patch you up first."

I study her for another second.

"You know what you're doing?"

"Enough..." She says it without hesitation. "Deal?"

I should say no.

I don't know her. Don't know why she's in a wedding dress on Route 9. Don't know if she's running from something bad or toward something worse or just broke down in exactly the wrong spot.

"Sure," I say.

I turn and walk back toward the bike.

I hear her following, the dress makes noise when she moves. Fabric rustling, layers catching on themselves.

I swing my leg over the bike, settle into the seat. The wound pulls. I breathe through it.

She stops next to the bike. Looks at it like she's working out physics she's never had to consider before.

"You been on a bike before?" I ask.

"No."

"Left foot on the peg. Swing your right leg over. Hold on."

She tries. The dress is massive. All that white fabric, layers of tulle, structured underpieces. Getting on a motorcycle was not part of the design specifications. She gets her foot on the peg, tries to swing her leg over, fabric catches.

She stops. Regroups. Gathers the skirt differently. Tries again.

She doesn't ask for help through any of it.

Third time she makes it and settles behind me with the dress bunched and caught and probably ruined beyond repair.

Then her arms wrap around my waist to hold on and every muscle in my body goes tight.

Her hands land just below my ribs. The pressure hits the edge of the wound and pain spikes sharp and immediate.

I lock it down. Breathe through it. But under the pain is something else entirely.

The soft weight of her tits pressed against my back through too many layers of fabric. The curve of her stomach against my lower spine. Her thighs bracketing my hips, thick and solid and warm even through denim and wedding dress.

I can feel every point where her body makes contact with mine.

My cock starts twitching.

Wrong time. Wrong situation. I'm bleeding through gauze and she's a stranger who needs a ride to somewhere that isn't the shoulder of a highway.

But my body doesn't give a fuck about wrong time or wrong situation. Just knows there's a woman pressed against me and wants to know what she feels like without all the fabric between us.

I adjust my grip on the handlebars and force my mind to the wound. The steady burn across my ribs. The blood seeping warm against my skin. Anything except the woman wrapped around me and how much I want to pull over in half a mile and find out if she's soft everywhere.

She shifts her weight, settling in. Her grip tightens a fraction. Those soft tits press harder against my back.

Fuck.

I start the bike. The engine is loud enough that conversation becomes impossible, which is good because I don't trust my voice right now.

The ride to my house is four minutes. I experience every second of it.

The vibration of the engine travels up through the bike into my body and hers. The wound pulls with every breath, every small adjustment to balance. Her body moves with mine when I lean into the turns. Her thighs grip tighter when I accelerate coming out of a curve.

By the time I pull into my driveway I'm half-hard and bleeding and my control is thinner than the gauze holding the wound closed.

I kill the engine.

The silence that follows is sudden and total.

She gets off first. Has to work the dress free from where it caught on the exhaust pipe. She manages it without tearing anything, which seems like a minor miracle given the situation.

I get off slower. The wound protests the movement.

The erection makes everything more complicated than it should be.

My house sits back from the road. Nothing special about it from the outside. Nothing special about it from the inside either.

It's just where I live.

I walk to the door and unlock it. The key sticks like it always does. I push the door open and step inside.

The door closes and I turn around.

She's standing in my living room in a wedding dress.

The image is surreal enough that I have to process it twice. This is my house. My space. I've lived here for six years and the most dramatic thing that's happened in this living room is a prospect bleeding on my couch after a bar fight.

Now there's a woman in white, looking around like she's cataloging what my space says about me.

There's not much to catalog. Couch. Coffee table. TV I barely turn on. Kitchen visible through the doorway.

Everything clean and functional and containing almost nothing personal.

She looks at me. I look at her.

The charge between us is real, taking up more space than either of our bodies.

I don't know her name. Don't know why she was sitting on the side of Route 9 in a wedding dress. Don't know anything except that she's here, in my house, and I want her here.

She's waiting for me to tell her what happens next.

Instead I just look at her for three seconds too long.

She looks back.

"Bathroom's this way," I finally say.

My voice comes out rougher than I intended. She doesn't react to it, just nods once and follows me down the hallway.