Free Ride Me Hard: A Biker Romance Serial (The Devil's Host Motorcycle Club Book 1) by Shari Slade

Chapter One

    T welve hours into what should be an eight-hour shift and my new uniform still feels foreign on my body. Scratchy and wrong. Unpleasantly damp. Yesterday I’d worn jeans and a Jimmy’s Diner T-shirt. Tonight, I’m packed into a polyester dress that looks like it came from a catalog full of naughty Halloween costumes—1950s Pinup or Sexy Soda Jerk.
    I tug at the powder-blue skirt barely covering my ass and adjust the ruffled apron. Who thought white aprons were a good idea in a restaurant full of ketchup, jam and gravy? Jimmy Jr. The idiot.
    I wince.
    Hot coals have replaced the muscles in the small of my back; that’s the only explanation for the searing pain that radiates with every wobbly step I take. My new management-issued shoes are as ridiculous and nonfunctional as the dress, strappy black Mary Janes with pointy toes, pointier heels, and some kind of no-skid treatment on the soles. Thank God for small favors.
    The whole tacky getup cost eighty bucks. Cheap, but still too rich for my blood. The cherry on top of one very shitty sundae. At least they’d take it out of my check in installments, because I’d barely made a quarter of that tonight, proving once and for all that waitresses are invisible no matter what they’re wearing. Jimmy’s Diner is invisible too, now that the new bypass is finished and the truckers can barrel past town doing eighty miles per hour.
    The locals coming in for early bird specials aren’t going to cut it, and no sexy gimmick will replace the volume of being on a high-traffic truck route. Short of throwing up a roadblock and diverting traffic, Jimmy is fucked.
    I dip my hand into my apron pocket and stroke the tiny wad of singles, reassuring myself it’s still there. Five to shove in the coffee can I keep under the sink and then…not even enough to fill a gas tank, let alone make a dent in the weekly rent my landlord is salivating over. He’s already looking for any excuse to eject me from the little garage apartment his new wife wants to use for a craft studio.
    I’m pretty fucked too.
    It’s not like I’m working here by choice. If this job bottoms out…I can’t even think about that particular dead end. Instead I focus on the present…fifteen-minute increments. I can survive anything for fifteen minutes. I know that from experience.
    Fifteen more minutes without a customer and I can lock the doors, kick off these torture devices, and finish the last of my side work.
    I pull out the tiny funnels and the big buckets of salt and pepper to do the most boring sand art ever. That’s my life. Boring, painful, and thanks to the bypass and circumstance, cut off from the rest of the world.
    I can hear my cousin Harry singing in the kitchen, and I know he’s mopping up. He always sings while he mops. Humming along with him at the end of a shift makes me feel like a part of something. Not a family exactly, but something.
    I wouldn’t have this job if it weren’t for him. Not that he’d done much other than tell Jimmy I needed work. Sometimes not much is all it takes to make a difference.
    Fifteen more minutes and he’ll haul the trash out to the dumpster and lock the back door behind him. If I time it right, we can leave together. I poke my head through the window where he sets the orders as they’re finished. “Can you give me a ride home tonight?”
    “I don’t know, Star. I’ve got stops to make.” He twitches and wipes sweat from his neck with a bandanna before swishing dirty water over the floor again. Like I don’t know about his stops late at night? Probably to see the same people that sometimes pop into the diner, also twitching and sweating. Looking for pills or meth. I’m not sure. I don’t even really care as long as I don’t have to walk home alone in the dark.
    “But—” Harry spins around with the mop like he’s twirling a lover and bumps the prep table. Three beer bottles crash to the floor, and I notice a fourth is clutched in his hand