Outlaw's Ride: An MC Romance by Carter Steele (books recommended by bts .txt) 📕

strings attached, even if I couldn’t see them yet. With the way he was so willing to double cross Billy, Patrick was proving to be ruthlessly cutthroat. I’d better figure out what those strings were before they became a noose around my throat.

I was the last one back to the clubhouse trailer. It took me a lot longer than I’d figured to get to where I stashed my bike not to mention all the doubling back and wrong turns I had to take to throw anyone off my trail. I was being overly cautious, but after a raid like the one last night, I’d be stupid not to be. Keeping our home safe was always of utmost importance.

“Look what the cat threw up and dragged in now that all the heavy lifting is done,” Buck said, sitting in a folding chair outside the trailer. Must’ve been his turn to keep watch. We always went in shifts whenever we had to head back to the trailer while we were on the job.

I preferred to stay in motels while we were working but Dunk called us all back home. He probably thought we’d be too exposed out in the open and wanted us to wait till the heat died down. The cops had to have been called to the scene by now and would be starting their investigation, and then there were always those people that slipped through the cracks that would be looking to retaliate. No one would find us here. In this industrial park where Mac had us set up we were just one more tractor-trailer truck of many in the lot. It was a smart move but I still didn’t like it.

All the body work on the tractor and trailer was finished. Mac had spent most of his time patching and repairing all the bullet holes to make us look less conspicuous. There was no telling how much damage there was in the guts of the tractor until Mac finished going through everything. The last thing we needed was for the rig to shit out on us if we needed to make a quick escape.

“Well?” Buck smoothly cut a deck of cards with one hand over and over as he looked up at me from the video he was watching on his phone. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Laid low after the firefight then took Sarah back to the laundromat this morning,” I said, walking past him without breaking stride. I needed to see Dunk ASAP. However when Buck started chuckling, I stopped and turned. “What?”

“You’re going to be what gets us all killed. You know that, right? No heroes in this game. We’re all just bad guys taking what we can,” Buck slowly shook his head at me. “How the fuck you don’t know that by now, boggles the fucking mind.”

“What was so wrong with giving a damn about people?” I asked.

“I know which people I care about. Do you?” Buck shot me a hard look then went back to his video and card shuffling like I wasn’t there anymore.

I paused, trying to get the sting of his words out of my head. Failing miserably, I opened the side door to the trailer and went inside.

Yoga tossed me a quick nod then went back to chopping veggies. He’d taken over the fold out table and was doing a week’s worth of meal prep. It was good to see him back on his feet fully. Buck’s words still ringing in my head, I couldn’t help but feel responsible for what happened to him. Did it really have to be one or the other? Why couldn’t I look out for my brothers and take care of the people around me?

Like Sarah.

Dunk and Dreamer sat on the couch talking and making plans. I didn’t see Mac, but that probably meant he was in the cab taking a nap or watching TV. Couldn’t blame him, the bed in the cab of the truck was much nicer than the cots we all slept on. And after all the work he was doing on the rig by himself the old bastard deserved whatever rest he needed.

“Good, you’re back.” Dunk got up and made his way over to the safe. He took out an envelope and handed it to me. Thumbing through the bills inside it was easy to count a few thousand dollars.

“This our advance from Patrick?” I asked, not bothering to hide the sourness that puckered my face.

“Don’t look too happy,” Dunk snorted.

“It’s a far cry from seventy percent of all the expensive shit we saw last night,” I said.

“What is this, your first day?” Dreamer called out from the couch. “You know how this goes.”

“I just don’t trust the bastard,” I grumbled.

“What’s not to trust? Patrick is a sociopathic pimp who hired a bunch of MC mercenaries as his personal black ops team to disrupt an entire city’s criminal enterprise so he can live out some delusional Scarface fantasies,” Yoga said, sealing the tops on his now full, week’s-worth of glass, food storage containers. The systematic snapping pops of the lids being put in place punctuated his sarcasm. When finished he looked at us and shrugged innocently. “I mean, he seems like a standup guy to me?”

Dreamer smiled and extended a hand toward Yoga in agreement.

“You guys are a bunch of fucking assholes.” I sighed, letting their fun at my expense roll off my back. I tucked the envelope into my pocket, crossed my arms and continued with my point. “You know what I’m saying. He is going to fuck us on all this.”

“He’s gonna try no doubt.” Dunk clasped a hand on my shoulder. “They all do. But we’re still standing and most of those mother fuckers aren’t.

“Look, Wreck. Mac says we’ve got a few weeks until all the repairs on the clubhouse are done. The truck’s engine was in rougher shape than we realized. Besides it’ll take about that long for all the shit we stole last night