Chapter Four
Selena
He doesn’t take the gun from my head, but I can see in his deep emerald eyes he’s wavering. Those eyes — tinged with pain and riven through with more anger than I can wrap my head around — nearly take me in again, nearly make me waver, the same way they got to me the last time I saw him.
It’d be so easy to lean in and kiss him.
Once our lips meet, he’ll forget all about that gun. The only thing on his mind will be taking every ounce of anger out on my body.
It makes me tingle just thinking about it.
It’s been too long since I’ve had a good fucking. Two years.
I shake those thoughts away and widen my smile a bit. Sex — no matter how good — isn’t what I came here for.
First and foremost, I need to get him to listen to me.
I need him.
“Jynx, what the hell is she talking about?” says some thickly-built and strangely-accented man to Jarrett’s left. He sounds like he’s from somewhere Down Under.
“She’s lying,” he says. The whiskey wafting from his breath. He’s well into the bottle tonight. “That’s what she does. Ozzy, get her the hell out of her, or else I will put a bullet in her skull.”
I don’t move. Don’t speak. I keep my eyes on him. It isn’t hard to do. Jarrett has this pull to him, this unmistakable look to his muscular body and chiseled jaw that hints that whatever creator crafted him picked a flawed stone to carve something so strong from. It’s magnetic.
For all the strength in him — the abs, the biceps, the shoulders, all of it built through years of brutal training, hard fucking, and sheer physical work — anyone with eyes will notice there’s a crack in him. Something broken.
It makes the rest of him so much more compelling to look at, knowing that, at any time, that crack could shatter him to pieces.
All I need to do is be patient, play my cards right, and I’ll get what I came for.
He’s got a gun to my head, but I’m the one in control.
“Ozzy, get her out of here, will you, hun?” says a grizzled, older woman from behind the bar. I see her silently mouth the word ‘bitch’ while looking at me. “And Jynx, please take that gun away from her head. I really don’t feel like scrubbing blood out of the floor tonight.”
At her word, the guy named Ozzy thuds a heavy hand on my shoulder and practically carries me outside.
I go along willingly.
He’s good-looking enough that I don’t mind him touching me, and I know I don’t need to cause any more of a scene right now.
“You should probably get lost,” Ozzy says as he gives me a light shove out into the parking lot.
It’s just the two of us and a whole lot of bikes out here.
The air smells like pine and it’s heavy with moisture. A light fog billows and whips around the edges of the lot, snaking in smoky shapes under the light of the lot’s lone streetlamp.
“Did you know that Jarrett had an old lady?” I say.
The other guy shrugs. “No. But, to be fair, there’s a lot I don’t know.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Better to be honest than a know-it-all. Know-it-alls usually wind up getting painful lessons,” he says. Then he gestures towards the road leading from the clubhouse. “If you walk up that way a few miles, you’ll get to the main road. Turn right. Then about ten more miles, you’ll get to Stony Shores. Course, now that I think about it, the road isn’t that lit that well and it might be dangerous. Do you have a ride?”
“I’ll be fine,” I say. There’s something good-natured about this big guy that makes me lower my guard.
He scans the lot. “I don’t see that you’ve got a vehicle here. I could give you a ride.”
I smile at him. “Are you trying to pick me up?”
Ozzy shakes his head. “No. I’ve got an old lady. Maria. She’d kick your ass if she heard you flirting with me. I’m just trying to look out for you; There’s a lot of trucks that take that forest road out there much faster than they should. It isn’t safe. And I don’t think anyone except Jynx wants you ground up under an eighteen-wheeler.”
“Why do you call Jarrett ‘Jynx’?” I say.
“It’s a word that means bad luck. He ran into some bad luck in Reno a few years ago, so we started calling him that,” he says.
“Can you not be so obtuse?”
“I’m not working any angles here,” he says, matter-of-fact. “Besides, shouldn’t you know all about his bad luck? All the money he lost gambling in Reno? You said you’re his old lady.”
My eyes narrow.
Gambling? What the hell is he talking about?
“Sure,” I answer, glib. “Can’t say I’m that fond of the name Jynx. I’d just wondered if there was more to the story; Jarrett’s had more than his share of tough times.”
Ozzy shrugs, then gestures to the road. “Well, there’s the exit. It’s a long walk back into town, you sure you don’t want a ride?”
I laugh. “I’ll be fine.”
“Alright, well, take care and watch out for semis,” he says. “And I reckon it’d be a good idea for you to get moving. If Jynx catches you lingering out here, I doubt anyone could stop him from shooting you.”
“Go back to the bar, Ozzy. I’ll be fine. Though I appreciate your concern.”
I watch and wait as he nods a ‘goodnight’ to me and heads back inside. Minutes pass, and still I wait, until the music is roiling and the sounds of drunken laughter spill out into the lot.
Quietly, I stroll through the lot, going from bike to bike, looking for the unmistakable steel machine that belongs to Jarrett. It’s the fifth bike I look at, and I know the second I brush my fingers over its dark paint job and the chrome accents that it’s his. I pat the seat. This is where I rode behind him, all those nights in Reno, my legs wrapped around him, my cheek against his back, his scent in my nose and the roar of his bike vibrating between my legs — the heavy hum of steel and his intoxicating, violent sexuality sending me with full-throated enthusiasm into a toxic cocktail of love and lust.
We rode this bike together. We fucked on this bike. Some nights, we’d go screaming on this bike out into the desert, until the only thing we could see was miles and miles of empty sand and rocks, lit by the endless stars above.
Some rides, I’d wrap my legs and arms around him, and I’d let my hands drift low until I could feel his hard cock through his jeans. I’d play with him, rubbing, touching, teasing, just to see how long he could take it until he had to stop and bend me over his bike.
I pull my knife out of my pocket.
Bikes are easy to hotwire.
They’re simple machines, for brutal, simple men. They’re meant for speed, without any of the complications or comforts. It’s simply you and the road whipping by you at sixty-plus miles an hour.
I pry open the panel covering the wires connecting to the ignition and the battery. A few quick slices of my knife and I’ve stripped the wires I need to. A few twists of my wrist, and the battery runs some power to the ignition and the bike growls to life.
Easy.
I smile at my handiwork and, with my foot, I doodle in the loose gravel of the parking lot.
I hop on the bike. It feels so strange being on here without him. Shutting my eyes, I toss my head back and enjoy the familiar feel of the vibrating steel between my legs and the heady memories the sensation brings back.
Times with him.
Times when there was an ‘us’.
Then, with a twist of my wrist, the bike rolls forward and I head off into the night.
Let’s see him ignore me now.