Free Ride With Me: A Biker Erotic Romance by Emily Stone

 
    RIDE WITH ME
     
    There were no ‘Welcome Home’ banners hanging from the rafters for Manny Pershing. Ten years in the San Bernadino County Federal Detention Center on a bogus drug trafficking charge had given him plenty of time to think about who was responsible for putting him inside. The only people he cared about seeing were his son and his crew.
     
    They were waiting for him inside. Waiting for him to take back his position as President. His son, Rex, had taken over the Vice-President spot on Manny’s orders when he turned eighteen. Manny needed someone he could trust to keep an eye on things, specifically Xander Thorn, the President of a rival club, the Karthadossian Riders.
     
    In the three years since Rex had taken over the number two spot, things had gone from bad to worse. There had been nothing Rex or the others could do, it had been a deal between Xander and himself that had caused the issues.
     
    About a year after Manny had gotten locked up, Xander Thorn had come to him with a complaint against one of the smaller clubs that fell under the Siouxan Brothers protection. They made a threat against Xander’s daughter, a violation of the only agreement the two men had ever made. No matter what their rivalry was, their kids were off limits.
     
    He ceded the club to Xander as per the agreement. The man who’d made the threat was banished from the club and the others given the choice to stay and fall under the Karthadossian Riders group or leave the area for another club. Most had stayed, unable—or unwilling—to leave the area.
     
    Over the next five years, two other small clubs broke the agreement and were ceded to Xander. Again, most had stayed. The clubs that had been ceded were on strategic routes that the Siouxan Brothers used to do business in and out of San Bernadino County. Being behind bars meant there wasn’t much that Manny could do to stop the invasion of the rival club.
     
    He hoped that putting Rex in his second’s spot would cause some of the younger members of those ceded clubs to loosen their tongues. So far, no one was talking. Rex had managed to find out that Xander had installed senior members of his own club in those locations, but not why.
     
    Ten years inside allows you to talk to a lot of people you wouldn’t normally get to have conversations with. Especially folks from rival clubs who needed protection while they were inside for a few days awaiting trial. Ten years also lets you do a lot of thinking as to other people’s motives.
     
    Manny had a working theory and if he was right, all hell was going to break loose between the Karthadossians and the Siouxans.
     
    ***
     
    Rex Pershing was under a lot of pressure. Being the second in a motorcycle club was a lot of responsibility—even more so when the President was your Dad. He had a lot to prove to people who didn’t think he deserved the spot. He hadn’t earned it. He was too young. In the past three years, he more than earned his place, stood up when it was needed and gained the grudging respect of the others in his Dad’s crew.
     
    With his Dad home, he thought that some of that pressure would ease up. If anything the past three weeks had been more like hell than before. His Dad was determined to figure out what was going on with Xander and his group and he wasn’t wasting time planning out strategies for getting his territories back.
     
    So far, there has been no progress. No one would talk to Manny. No one was talking—period. Over the past couple of years several large storage units had been set up on the smaller club’s properties. Two or three times a year they would see large trucks unloading boxes into the units. Without breaking in they had no way of knowing what was in those boxes.
     
    The Karthadossians were flush with funds. They didn’t dabble in the drug trade the way some of the other clubs did and no one knew where the sudden flow of money was coming from.
     
    Manny wanted to cut the lock on