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

situation. Well, you know she vanished when I was like three so I barely remembered her.”
    “Right.” I knew from the ICU nurse’s chatter that Rebekah Quail was in a terminal condition. She had no insurance but because she was of the White Mountain Apache tribe, she was being taken care of by the Indian Health Service. She seemed to have no one visiting her aside from a handsome son who had the nurses all atwitter. I had been longing to cast eyes on this devastating charmer. Now I knew why.
    But I hadn’t known Ford was part Apache.
    Apparently he hadn’t known that, either.
    “Well, it wasn’t her drug addiction that made Cropper kick her to the curb. You’ve seen my brothers, Maddy. They’re no strangers to substance abuse, that’s for sure. I was only spared from addiction because I’m so allergic to most of the substances. And you’ve seen the sweetbutts who give my brothers wine enemas. No, I don’t think drug addiction broke up my parents.”
    I could be frank with Ford. “Was it…the fact that she was Apache?”
    Ford looked at me grimly. “You noticed that? Are you an ICU nurse?”
    “No, I’m attached to Cardiology. But I know the ICU nurses.”
    “Yeah, that might’ve been part of it. I didn’t always accept that I was so dark-skinned due to Cropper’s Italian heritage. You know how most club members frown upon the ‘browns.’ Come to find out I’m one-fourth brown myself. But that’s not all.”
    What could be worse? I knew the club wasn’t too amenable toward people of color. It was just the way of biker clubs. They’d had a brother, Russ Gollywow, who they mostly just called Gollywow. He was undoubtedly white but he had a fascination with the Philly Soul group, The Stylistics. He often went on the road performing as a backup singer for a Stylistics-type group, wearing various shades of powdery suits and spinning in sync with the actual backup singers he worked with. Gollywow earned no end of disrespect for this hobby, even though he was quite good. I had seen him once performing in Mesa. He would mercilessly beat the shit out of anyone who heckled him, waiting until after the show because he was a professional.
    “Last week my mother told me something. The reason Cropper kicked her to the curb is she hadn’t told him she’s a carrier of the Tay-Sachs gene. He must be, too. I turned out okay, although I might be a carrier.” He took a deep breath and couldn’t look at me anymore. He looked back at the floor. “But she had another kid after me, a son. He was affected. That’s when Cropper booted her with nothing, no money, no nothing.”
    “You have…a brother?”
    “Had. He died when he was four, living in some shithole over at Fort Apache. Was in a wheelchair, blind and deaf, could barely move. It was a blessing that he kicked, according to my sainted mother. She knew she had the gene, just didn’t know Cropper had it, too, so she kept popping them out until she got a lemon.”
    Tears flooded my eyes. Being a nurse, you see a lot. I’ve had to deal with irate shrieking relatives who either want to kill the patient, say for leaving them out of a will, or for some deathbed confession. You get people storming down the hallways with machetes, lamp bases, hammers, I mean, you wouldn’t believe. Nurses do so much more than give people drugs. There’s the entire tolerating-a-buttload-of-shit that most people don’t think about when they think “nurses.”
    I’ve seen many people just ripped apart when someone they love has died. Dealing with death is a whole facet of nursing unto itself. Truth is, we get kind of blasé about it. I was only twenty-eight and I felt I’d seen it all.
    Until now. This week had been hell on Ford, the man I loved, the man I was falling in love with all over again. I slid my cool fingers around the back of his hot neck, stimulated to feel his thick, silken hair again. I scooted as close to him as was possible, our thighs pressed together. Not