Free Ridden (MC Club Biker Urban Alpha Male Erotic Romance) by Billie Kasper

 
    First Encounter
     
    “That’ll be $14.59.” My voice was bored, but who could blame me? It was a boring Tuesday afternoon. I should have known to be suspicious of Tuesdays, though. It’s always the most boring day of the week, after all, isn’t it?
     
    You see, Tuesday isn’t the beginning of the week, like Monday. Well, I guess it sort of is, but that’s beside the point. It’s not the very beginning of the week and it’s still so far away from Friday that the weekend is like a barely visible dream just over the horizon. On a Tuesday afternoon, it feels like the week will last forever and you might as well get used to it.
     
    And of course, that was my problem. I had gotten used to it. I had gotten used to my boring life. To working at this place. But it was all about to change. If only I had known…
     
    The stranger paused, perplexed. His treasures, a motley assortment of cigarettes, snack food, and, most strange of all, a teddy bear, had apparently cost him more than he imagined they would. He tucked the ten-dollar bill back into his wallet and hesitated for a moment before pulling out a credit card.
     
    “You take Visa?”
     
    “Of course!” I chirped chirpily. They told us to be chirpy, especially with the men, and especially with the men like this one, who looked tired, who looked beaten down, like they’d been on the road so long that they were the road, like the road was riding them.
     
    Men like him were born on the road and they responded, I had found, to chirp and so I chirped. I was good at chirping. I had always been good at chirping.
     
    My name is Hope Powell. I’m nineteen years old. I work at a no-name convenience store about fifty feet from an exit ramp off of I-7. It’s boring, boring work but it’s indoors and it’s a job, so I guess I can’t complain.
     
    Of the forty girls in my high school graduating class, I’d say about half are pregnant, a quarter have jobs like me, and most of the rest are messing around with drugs or gangs or both. One or two might have gone to college, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they had dropped out by now, owing to one of the other situations I just listed.
     
    So, when you put it all in perspective, it starts to seem like I was doing pretty good for myself. But it sure as hell didn’t feel this way.
     
    I glanced at the stranger’s Visa card as he handed it to me. Michael O’Connor was his name. I ran his card and printed off a receipt for him.
     
    “There you go, Michael,” I said, chirping still.
     
    “Slade,” Michael said. “I go by Slade.” He signed his receipt with a great big, illegible signature that, as far as I could tell, did indeed begin with a giant “B.”
     
    “Slade? Why’s that?”
     
    His eyes flashed. It was only then that I realized how… How handsome he was. In a torn up, beaten down, miserable kind of way. Like an old leather jacket (which, coincidentally, he was wearing). He couldn’t have been more than thirty, but there were years of wisdom in those dark brown eyes. His long hair was swept back into a ponytail with surprising care, with only a few strands drifting loose. What’s more, he was tall… And I love tall men. He looked like he had a model’s physique underneath the leather jacket and stained undershirt but I knew that men like him don’t get such bodies from years in the weight room. They don’t knock back protein shakes while on their bikes. They’re men who’ve had hard lives and so they get strong in response, like a diamond being forged over the centuries, and the result is the six-pack and firm biceps barely contained by his clothing.
     
    Weird as it seems, he reminded me somehow of an animal. I couldn’t tell you exactly what kind—maybe a wolf of some sort, or a bear? No, really, what it was… Was a jackal. He reminded me a desperate, lonely desert jackal, angry and powerful, ruthless, the kind you see on National Geographic documentaries with blood and antelope meat