Free The Bare Bones (The Bare Bones MC) by Layla Wolfe

especially when around Riker. I couldn’t blame her for that, but jealousy burned a hole in my heart when Speed told me Corinne had moved into that pueblo mansion that was so big it actually contained three separate suites.
    I wondered who else lived there. I wondered whether the cunt would be moving out.
    Why do I care? Am I still in love with him? I’d been carefully protecting some old prints of him for over a decade now, moving them from house to house whenever I moved. I tried to avoid looking at them because it wrenched my heart too badly. Ford Illuminati would forever be “the one who got away” to me, proof that I wasn’t good enough to nab him for myself.
    “Why am I here? Shit, you asked a mouthful, Maddy.”
    My heart literally flip-flopped when he called me Maddy. Walking next to him—having had his arms squeezing me tight again—was like turning the clock back twelve years ago to the week before I’d split my mother’s house. The carefree, happy days when we’d swum in the pool, gotten inked together, riding two up on his Softail…passionately made out in the pool.
    We had reached the quiet room, and as luck would have it, it was empty. There was a lovely view here of snow-dusted Humphrey’s Peak and the Coconino forest, the slopes blanketed with ponderosa pines in the frigid February weather. When I sat next to Ford I wanted to take his hands in mine, but I knew it was wrong.
    I had abandoned him. I knew from Speed that Ford had been violently upset about my disappearance. He had beaten my address out of Speed, and I’d even seen him sitting astride his bike across the street from the condo I shared with my old buddy Moe. But I’d hidden from him.
    I couldn’t tell him why I had left, because that would have defeated the purpose.
    Telling him about his father’s disgusting molestation of me would have resulted in Ford taking out Cropper. As much as I loathed the disgusting man, I didn’t wish him dead. At seventeen, Ford had done time in juvenile hall and already had the “Filthy Few” patch on his cut that meant he’d killed at least one man. I didn’t want to be responsible for the fratricide that would give Ford another patch, or whatever patch they gave serial killers.
    I had been about to move anyway come the fall. I didn’t necessarily want my old friend Moe to be the one to deflower me, but the price of rent was right—free. I knew what it took to get ahead. I wouldn’t hesitate to use my attributes and skills to succeed in life—to get away from Cropper and my equally loathsome mother.
    “Why am I here? God, it’s rough.” Ford rested his forearms on his thighs and looked at a spot on the floor between his boots. The scarring from the IED burn wasn’t as bad as I’d been led to believe. He was so devastatingly handsome anyway. It would just lend a tougher aura to an already tough-as-steel visage. It was his traumatic brain injury that worried me. That could be tough to deal with.
    “Well, my mother just died a couple hours ago. That’s basically why I’m here. She’d been ill for a month in intensive care with multiple organ failure, and she finally died just two hours ago. I was holding her hand when it happened. Just like they show on TV. The monitor flatlined and made that beeping sound and the nurses came rushing in and…”
    I did grab his hands now. I sat on the edge of my chair and brushed my cool, dry hand against his pitted jaw—he had haphazardly tried to cover up the burned skin with a sort of permanent heavy stubble and goatee that made him look even more handsome. Yes, such a thing was possible. “Your mother? I thought she was some…” I tried to be tactful, as I’d learned after years of nursing. I was going to say “club old lady who went down the wrong path” or some such crap, but Ford beat me to it.
    “Fucked-up drug addict, yeah, you can say it, Maddy. I found out a lot more about her. Some brother in our Flagstaff chapter alerted me to her