 by Joanna Blake.jpg)
Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 208(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 208(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
THREE YEARS AGO
Vice
The girl’s high pitched scream made the blood in my veins turn to ice. My body tensed, ready to go to battle. I should have hesitated. I was off duty, and off of club property. I didn’t have jurisdiction here. I was also rip roarin’ wasted, having been sipping top shelf tequila for hours. Not to mention being high as a kite, with a couple of good time girls hanging off my shoulders at a biker bar just outside the city limits. But nothing would stop me from running towards the sound of that scream.
As soon as I hit the parking lot I saw them, perfectly illuminated under the beam of his headlights. A massive guy wearing head to toe leather was dragging a girl towards his ride. She was half naked and cheap looking, like a lot of the women who hung around, but pretty in a seen-better-days sort of way. Not that I gave a shit what she looked like.
Me and my crew protected women. Didn’t matter who they were. Didn’t matter if they had stirred up a shit storm.
Men should not hurt women. Ever.
I didn’t like it when men hurt women, kids, or anyone significantly smaller or weaker than them. It made my blood boil like nothing else. Hell, no decent guy I knew would tolerate that shit. Maybe it was how I grew up, raised by a single mom, and then her sister after mom had passed.
Either way, I couldn’t just stand by and watch.
Two drunk bikers going to town on each other? Fine. Better than fine. That shit was wildly entertaining. Like WFF but much, much more dangerous. The stakes were life and death with our ilk when things got ugly. Hell, I’d pull up a bar stool and sip whiskey while I watched. But some asshole railing on a tiny woman?
Fuck no. Not on my watch. Not ever.
“Hey asshole,” I shouted, stopping a few feet away. The guy’s head snapped up and he stared at me, looking like a dumb animal. Come to think of it, I sounded pretty slurry myself, I thought as I swayed a little bit on my feet. Oops. “Let her go,” I added in a snarl.
“Mind your business, friend,” he said, not sounding the least bit friendly. He didn’t release the girl but he did stop dragging her.
“Aint’ your friend,” I said, standing up straighter. “Let the lady go.”
“And she aint’ no lady,” he said with a cruel laugh. But this time, he did let her go. She looked at me for a second, then scrambled away to join the crowd of onlookers. Clearly, she knew what was about to go down.
Somebody was about to get their ass beat. I was hoping it was him. But big as I was, this guy was pretty big too, and not nearly as pretty as I was. In the light I could plainly see what looked like knife scars criss-crossing his ugly mug, never mind that he was sporting a squashed looking nose that had clearly been broken six or seven times, easy.
Which meant he wouldn’t be trying to protect his face. He wasn’t pretty like me. Oh well. At least I was fucked up enough not to feel what was sure to be an even fight.
His eyes flickered to my patch. And then he got even uglier. He sneered.
“Fucking Untouchables,” he said and pulled off his leather jacket. I saw where it landed on the ground, the skull and wings insignia clear as day. Fucking great. I’d been hoping he was a random biker. But no, he just had to be one of the fucking Satan’s Renegades, the nastiest club on the entire coast. They had no code of honor, which meant I had to keep my wits about me if I didn’t want to end up with a knife in my side.
This very literally could be a fight to the death. Hopefully not mine.
“Fucking Renegade,” I said amiably. Now that the girl was out of harm’s way, I was less furious, which was unfortunate. Because every good man knew, fury was one hell of a painkiller.
And we were both about to be in a world of pain.
So be it, I thought to myself. I could use something to wake me out of the fucking stupor I was in. Nothing excited me anymore. And this motherfucker clearly deserved a beatdown.
If I went down, I was taking the bastard with me.
“Okay shitheel, let’s do this,” I said, as got my mind into fight mode. With my martial arts training it wasn’t hard. I even felt the haze start to lift. It didn’t matter that I’d had enough drugs and tequila to make a horse keel over. I was back in training again, with my Taekwondo instructor rapping my shins with a rod.