It had been a long goddamn time since I’d had to hit the road to clear my head.

But that’s exactly what I needed right now.

The Devil’s Dragons were too tied up in their new assignments to notice how I bristled with anger as I stormed across the bar. Quick, stray glances were tossed my way to see if I was coming to rip someone a new one, but they all returned to their work as quickly as they’d paused.

Only one dared to stop me.

“Hunter.”

I grit my teeth and fought back a thousand curses under my breath. The strong, gloved hand of Grizz Hawkins held me firmly by the shoulder. My face turned, and his inquisitive, pale eyes took me in at a glance.

“Where are you going?” He asked calmly.

Grizz knew better than to challenge me, but my burly, quiet second-in-command knew me almost better than even I did.

“Out,” I barked.

“You seem angry.”

“No shit,” I snapped. “Release your grip.”

Grizz’s eyes trailed back the way I’d come, tracing my steps towards the back of the bar. “Sarah and you–”

“I gave you an order, Grizz.”

The gristled, hardened biker looked at me wearily but calmly. After a few more seconds, he finally let go.

“When will you be back?” He asked.

I grunted. “Sundown.”

Grizz looked conflicted, but I couldn’t really give a rat’s ass. He knew how to run things while I was away, and he’d done it countless times before I’d leaned on him to do so.

Hell, he’d been gone almost two months.

It was about time I took a brief break…

None of the others seemed to notice as I pushed my way out the front door and walked over to the parked bikes.

There she was, shining under the Texan sun.

She was my chromed pride and joy.

I mounted my prized motorcycle and keyed the ignition. Within the minute, I was roaring down the long stretch towards El Paso, trying to push away the guilt of leaving Sarah behind.

Kate was still there, at least.

She seemed to know how to help out with pregnancy issues. I suspected that there had been a miscarriage or something like that, but it wasn’t any of my business, and it sure as shit wasn’t my place to ask.

Sarah would be in good hands with her.

As for me…

The horizon was steeped with gray. Telltale signs of coming rain were laid out in front of me, matching the storm that I felt rising inside.

I revved the throttle, the roar of the engine cutting right through me. Still, it wasn’t enough to drown out the image of one man’s face.

It had been a long fucking time since I’d thought about goddamn Jack Buchanan.

None of my thoughts had ever been pleasant. The man was as small-town sheriff as they came, but he still got away with that in Phoenix. He was the man responsible for keeping up the law in our district, and a real asshole from the get-go.

The man had always been against us. Even before I ever wore leathers or owned a bike, he had me pinned for the kind of thug he didn’t want around his daughter.

As a kid, I’d made every attempt to appease him. I had naively thought I could maybe build a truce with him and walk the line – that our love for his daughter could bring the two of us together somehow, even if we didn’t necessarily see eye to eye.

That obviously never happened.

It wasn’t like I was a smug brat about it. I was madly in love with his kid, but that didn’t mean I had to stomp on his toes or try and talk her into rebelling against her father.

I knew my place; I sensed a natural order to things, and I was patient.

Patient, Jack was not.

When I didn’t back off, he increasingly put me beneath the heat. He and his cronies started by interfering with my schooling, forcing a ban from us having the same classes, the same lunch schedule…

That wasn’t enough, so he started knocking on doors. With his leverage and the support of his loyal officers, I was labeled a local menace. If I was seen around his daughter, he was tipped off. Hell, he did such a good job that if I was seen around any girls my age, their parents found out.

I dropped out of school not long after. The whole system was turning against me, and there wasn’t any point to it anymore.

But the harder he pushed…

The angrier I got.

Soon, it became the other way around. Until I got my hands on my runaway father’s motorcycle and learned to maintain it, I had made an enemy of the law. But now that I had wheels and nothing else to lose, the law had made an enemy of ME.

I became a thorn in Jack Buchanan’s side. The worst part was that he blamed every last, little unsolved robbery or act of mindless vandalism on me, just because I dared to love his daughter.

Because he thought I wasn’t good enough.

Thanks to her asshole cop father, the night we lost our virginity together was an evening I spent paranoid, no matter how well I hid it. There was no room in my mind that good old Jack would pop up at any moment with a shotgun in hand, dogs snapping against their leads, and officers fanning out…

Sarah and I found ways of meeting. I earned some favors among the local riff-raff and got a small place, nothing special. But it was nearby, off the grid, and it was a place we could have alone.

We continued our relationship in secret, right under the eye of her overprotective father. She and I had to meet like that for months, sometimes not seeing each other for a week at a time, always desperate for one another.

For our love was young and unstoppable. The burning blaze of our bond fueled our waking lives, and our dreams were built upon its embers.

All the while, Jack knew. He couldn’t catch us, but he knew – and Sarah had inherited his fierce stubbornness and grit. How she managed to keep him from breaking her down, I have no idea.

He wouldn’t take no for an answer.

But neither would I.

And then, one fateful day, our wills crashed…

The piercing red-blues in my rearview pulled me from my bitter dance down memory lane.

Growling, I slowly pulled over.

I had no idea how fast I’d been going. Fast enough to kick up a smoking dirt trail behind me, by the looks of it. The last thing the club needed right now was interest from the fuzz…

Swallowing my disgust, I killed my engine.

Surprisingly, the cruiser soared past. I spat at the dust that hit my face as my boot pulled my kickstand back up, and I twisted the key in the ignition.

The engine roared back to life.

And I drove.

I rode my engine hard into the waning day, keeping El Paso in the rearview. The city grew ever smaller until it was a speck in the distance, the smallest part of my world.

But, of course, my entire world was there.

As I rode hard, I lost myself deep down into the rumbling machine between my thighs. This bike had been my one true constant since my bitter teenage years… left to me from a deadbeat dad who vanished off without her. She had been left to rust in the garage, buried under shit until I pulled her free. I’d taught myself how to restore her to beauty.

And she was so beautiful to me.

I’d never renamed her. The word Scarlett was still chiseled into the chrome on a piece I’d never replaced. Dad had never told me why he’d named her that, seeing as there wasn’t any red on her.

But I’d seen plenty of red.

My hands were drenched with it.

All the assholes I’d had to put down in the dirt to save others. Every bastard with a death wish who had dared to defy me, left to rot in the sun.

But the one asshole I couldn’t put down was Jack Buchanan, the one who had started me on this path in the very beginning…

I glanced up at the setting sun.

I let out a bitter sigh.

Already, it was looking like upwards of an hour before I could get back to the bar…

I spat into the desert dust.

Too bad, Jack.

In the end, I won after all.

But the following weeks were determined to prove me wrong…