Lessons In Corruption (The Fallen Men Series Book 1) Read online

  I gasped and pressed myself even closer to King, who swore viciously under his breath.

  Bikers on all sides of us, two closing in front of our bike so we were forced to slow down.

  My eyes swept over the litany of chrome, black and leather, the flurry of bearded faces and tattooed skin. The skeletal face of The Fallen MC’s infamous patch stared at me from all angles. It was like something from a horror film.

  Immediately, I knew I deserved whatever horrors came next. This was what I got for taking a risk.

  “Don’t be afraid, babe. I’m gonna pull off at the next shoulder,” King called through the roar of wind and gunning engines.

  I didn’t bother trying to answer both because it would be impossible to match the volume of the wind and because we had already begun to pull off the road.

  We were barely stopped before King was gently peeling me off the bike, mindful of my aching, inexperienced body.

  “I want you to stay here and don’t say a word, yeah?” he murmured to me as he settled me carefully against his bike.

  “Okay,” I whispered, my eyes darting to the small group of leather-clad men pulling up beside us.

  “Hey,” he said, pinching my chin between his fingers so that I was forced to look at him. “Nothing is gonna happen here. These guys, they’re my family. They saw me with a chick and they probably just want to razz me about it. No worries. Just let me deal with it alone. They aren’t the kind of men someone like you would understand.”

  Something flashed across his face, something that looked an awful lot like regret followed swiftly by shame, but he was moving away from me before I could decipher it.

  I watched his loose, rolling gait with a little bit of lust despite my discomfort. He called something to a short, stocky older man wearing all black with a shock of white hair he had spiked all over his head. They gave each other one of those manly, slam-a-fist-on-the-back kind of hugs before grasping each other by the back of the neck to bring their foreheads together as they spoke quietly about something.

  The other guys hung back, laughing and shooting the shit, looking at me curiously but keeping their distance. One guy started to walk over but King’s hand flexed and released—a subtle sign, but one that the advancing man heeded instantly.

  I noticed the enormous white, dark green and black patches on the backs of their jackets and vests and tried to swallow my apprehension. I’d been right all those weeks ago to think that King was involved with something dangerous in that back parking lot of Mac’s Grocer. He was part of The Fallen MC, the criminal gang that had cornered the market on the marijuana trade not only in Vancouver, but throughout the entire province and most of western North America.

  I would be a fool to get involved with someone like that. A criminal. Because if King was a biker in The Fallen, that was exactly what he was. I’d wanted some excitement in my life, a change from William and our modern day suburbia, but that didn’t mean I was ready for outright anarchy.

  I couldn’t deal with another person I loved going to prison and coming out so irreversibly fucked up that they were a different person. I couldn’t do the visitations, their evolution from forced cheer to inadequate silence to nothing because in the end, after things had gotten really bad, my brother Lysander had refused to let me see him anymore.

  My eyes settled on King again, seeing him throw back his head and laugh that laugh I had fallen in love with in the parking lot, that laugh that had been the final catalyst in my marriage. I barely knew the man, what he worked for, what he believed in, what he desired, and yet he had already irrevocably changed my life.

  I dropped my gaze when he turned around to gesture at me with a smile and a wink as he’d obviously said something about me to the older biker. I didn’t want them to talk about me. I didn’t want these outlaws to know my name. I’d trained my whole life to be a good girl, a good wife and woman, and I told myself that I wasn’t going to throw that away for a pretty face.

  I peeked through my hair to see King laugh again and groaned.

  A damn pretty face.

  “Sorry ‘bout that, babe,” King said as his clunky boots filled my vision.

  It disturbed me how sexy I found the sight of those manly shoes, so different from my husband’s loafers and Sperry boat shoes.

  “Babe?” His fingers found my chin and raised it so I was looking into his amazing ice blue eyes. “You good?”

  “I need you to take me home. This was a mistake.”

  He reeled back slightly, his mouth slack, big body loose then suddenly tight with tension. I watched as he closed his eyes for a moment, as he dragged in a fortifying breath. When he opened them again I was surprised by the guardedness of his expression.

  “What changed in the last three minutes?”

  I fidgeted because I didn’t want to seem like the stick in the mud, snobby asshole that apparently I was to my core. “Nothing, I just had a minute to see the error of my ways. I don’t even know you, and this,” I gestured vaguely, “isn’t me.”

  His eyes narrowed on me. “I thought we agreed the best way to get to know each other was with you on the back of my bike? I don’t take that shit lightly. In fact, I haven’t asked a chick to ride with me like that in my whole fuckin’ life. So, I’m going to ask you again, what the fuck changed in the last three minutes?”

  My eyes flittered nervously over the bikers congregated over his shoulder. They were still chilling, some of them smoking cigarettes and what smelled like pot, two of them were arguing almost violently but then they burst out laughing.

  When I brought my eyes back to King, his were sparking with fury.

  “It’s the MC.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I nodded hesitantly. “I’m trying not to judge you, King, honestly. It’s just, I’m not that kind of woman. Trust me, I wish I were. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of woman that lets her hair down, dances on tables in bars and goes skinny-dipping on the beach. I’m just not. I’m the kind of woman who curls up with a book in front of the fire, who doesn’t drive at night in the rain because it isn’t safe, who has never even left the country.”

  Shame burned through me like brush fire, a sudden evisceration of my confidence and will. I felt hollow and worthless as I looked up into his eyes again, unafraid of the condemnation I found there because no one felt that more deeply than I did.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to do this with you,” I breathed through the sting of tears in my throat. “I just know that I can’t.”

  “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t even know if I’m part of that life you’re so fuckin’ afraid of.”

  “Are you?” I asked softly.

  His jaw flexed. “Yes, but not in the way that you think.”

  I waited but he only stared at me, the muscles in his corded throat starkly defined in his anger.

  “You’re not gonna give me a chance, no matter what the fuck I say, eh?”

  I swallowed noisily but didn’t say anything. Truthfully, I wanted him to push me. I wanted him to be the first person in my life to throw me into the deep end, to drag me from the light into the darkness and the shadows to show me what lurked there, to teach me how to play with the monsters instead of fear them.

  Instead, my stupid lower lip trembled and I rolled it into my mouth to stop the shakes.

  King stared at me hard for a moment before he cursed violently and ran his fingers roughly through his unruly hair. “Fuck me for fuckin’ digging some chick without the balls to see it through.”

  I flinched but he was right.

  “I’ll take you home.”

  He was quiet on the ride back into town. The spark between us was still there, and I had a feeling it would always be there like an electrical hum at the super market, but it was blanketed. His frustration rolled off him, made his body tense in my hold.

  I pressed my forehead to the back of his leather jacket, noticing for the first time that it didn’t have The Fallen MC patch on it. As t
he wind rushed past us, leaving this biker and me in a strange bubble of isolation amid the dark Canadian wilderness, it was easy to analyze my fears.

  When the only time you’ve ever let go and really lived resulted in your brother going to prison for five years, you learn to keep a tight leash on your impulses. The only time I’d let my inner wild child out in the intervening years was in random, unsuccessful attempts to seduce William to the darker side of my lust. Now, here was King, trying to blow open the lid on my conservative values and lifelong propriety. Recklessness had never got anyone or me anywhere. Being a teacher, my favorite historical examples included Napoleon’s rash march on Prussia and Picasso’s depressive suicide over his lack of artistic skill mere days before his first critical acclaim. Literary cautionary tales also abounded, Romeo and Juliet being the most infamous, but more, Abelard and Heloise, and my ultimate favorite, Satan’s crusade against the all-powerful God. My life and my studies had taught me that nothing good came from the unpredictable and I truly believed that even though I’d left William for a more exciting existence, dating someone like King would only destroy me.

  Even as I solidified that opinion, there was a small part of me—that darker, crazier Cressida that lurked inside me like a schizophrenic bitch—that reminded me of one of my favorite Paradise Lost quotes, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”

  It was that small, sunken part of me that wondered if maybe it wasn’t William or my parents who still had me in their cage, or if I was just too cowardly to walk through the very doors I’d pried open for myself.

  I was so deep in thought that I jumped when we pulled into McClellan’s parking lot and came to a stop beside my ugly Honda Civic. This time when King swung off, he didn’t help me. Instead, he leaned against my car with his arms and booted feet crossed, guarded and angry.

  “For what it’s worth, I had fun tonight,” I said quietly because my conviction was shallow and I was barely able to form the words.

  King stared at me hard, it pushed at my chest and made it even harder to breath. I tried to look away from the condemnation in his stare and failed.

  “Fuck that,” he bit out.

  “Wha—”

  He was on me so fast I had no time to bring up my hands or to close my lips before his open mouth landed hot on mine, his tongue stroked against mine in a way that easily erased the words poised there. His lean hips pinned me against the bike, his hand found my neck and I was a goner. There was no hope for any girl when a man like King had them in his arms. Scratch that, no man but King had this kind of power and now, he wielded it over me mercilessly.

  “King,” I gasped when he almost viciously bit my lip, dragged it through his teeth then sucked it like a candy.

  “Yeah, baby. Tell me again how you can’t do this,” his voice rasped against me.

  “Do you want me to give in like this? Because you’re kissing me and not because I think it’s a good idea?”

  He closed his eyes, tipped his forehead against mine and sighed over my lips. “No, Cressida. What I want you to do is go home to your cold, lonely bed and think about doing all the dirty stuff you know I wanna do to you. Then I want you to wake up, make breakfast and think about how if I was there, I’d make it for you. After that, before school, I want you to bring your piece of shit car into Hephaestus Auto so I can take a look at it.”

  I was nearly dazed by his sweetness, about to ask how he knew I was a teacher when I was pretty sure that I hadn’t told him about my job, and how he knew my name, because I wasn’t sure I’d told him that either, until he started talking about my car.

  “Betty Sue is fine. Besides, what do you know about cars?” I demanded.

  His lips twitched and he tugged playfully on a lock of my hair. “If you could stop ogling my fine ass for two seconds, you mighta asked me where I worked and I woulda told you Hephaestus Auto and Mechanics.”

  My blush made him laugh, but he sobered pretty quickly when I tried to push him away.

  “Promise me you’ll bring that car in. Not comfortable with you driving something that may be unsafe, yeah?”

  “I don’t want whatever it is you want with me, King, and honestly, I, uh, don’t have the money to get my car fixed.”

  He scowled. “Knew it had problems. Now if you don’t bring it in tomorrow, I’m going to have to send a fuckin’ guy out to tow it and I won’t be happy about it. Bring it in, Cress. Just because you don’t wanna pursue what we got doesn’t mean I want you drivin’ a death trap.”

  “Okay, King,” I said softly, both because my tequila buzz was veering straight into pure exhaustion and because he was being sweet in that badass biker way I found myself liking.

  He nodded then smirked cockily as if he knew it was already a forgone conclusion that he’d get what he wanted from me. Before I could snap at him for it, his mouth was hard on mine and then he was maneuvering me to my car, tapping me on the ass and heading back to his bike.

  “Didn’t mention it before but I won’t mind if you think of me in the shower tomorrow too, yeah?” he added just before the roar of his bike starting up drowned any possible hopes I had at retorting.

  It was just as well. I was definitely going to think about him in the shower.

  I told myself I was spending extra time on my appearance that morning because I was evolving into a new post-William me, a woman who wore what she wanted even if it meant lipstick in the morning on a Thursday and a dress with a form fitting bodice and short, flirty skirt that almost showed too much leg. It was mostly true, so the little lie was easier to swallow.

  I smoothed the silky fabric over my thighs as I pulled into Hephaestus Auto and Mechanics and turned off the engine. The garage was surprisingly large and thrumming with activity even at 7:30 in the morning. I spotted over a dozen men milling about the lot, working on cars or chatting over parts. The garage had a reputation all across Canada for being the best at automobile upgrades and motorcycle additions but I could never have imagined what a colossal venture it would be.

  Suddenly, I was intensely aware of my run-down, fourth-hand Honda Civic. I pulled into an empty spot between some kind of Ferrari and a sleek black sports car with an insignia I’d never even seen before. I sat in my car, stroking the wheel absently to soothe us both as I took stock of the operation.

  Hephaestus Auto sprawled across an enormous industrial lot that bordered the ‘good’ side of downtown Entrance from the seedier neighborhoods. The parking area was large and bracketed an undesignated pathway that led up to a small brick building that must have housed the office areas and reception. To the left were the garage bays, five huge caverns all currently open and filled with at least one or two cars. To the right was a little park area, incongruent with the asphalt jungle, verdant with a small garden and huge earthenware pots and troughs that held long grass and, in the spring, would probably bloom with beautiful flowers. Beyond that lay another long, low brick building with a huge black door studded with metal and very few windows. There was a super cool graffiti sign to one side of the door that showed a terrifying skull bracketed by huge charred and tattered wings with ‘The Fallen’ written in black letters across the top. I figured that it was some kind of clubhouse or meeting hall where they conducted all their criminal business.

  My lips thinned as I thought about King’s part in all of that.

  I’d done my research last night after an hour of lying in bed wired and unable to sleep. The Fallen MC was the premier source of BC marijuana in the province and all of North America. They ran into problems with gang warfare only in the southern states of America and California where they crossed territory with the Mexican drug cartels but otherwise, they’d cornered the market. They didn’t deal in other drugs, which I found kind of strange, and the rest of their ‘supposed’ criminal enterprises consisted of munitions dealing and money laundering.

  I had been born and raised by older, conservative parents who didn’t believe in divor
ce. Then, I’d been married to a deeply reserved, repressed lawyer who felt about nothing so passionately as he did his own social standing.

  I’d wanted to shed my old skin, those old connections, but did I really want to do a 180? If I took up with a biker, there was no chance William or my parents would take me back. I tried to tell myself that I didn’t care about that but I did. Even though they didn’t make me happy, they had been my entire life and I wasn’t ready to irrevocably emancipate myself from them yet.

  I sighed deeply, steeling myself against King’s inevitable temptation. Just because he was the hottest thing I had ever seen—living or dead and that included Elvis Presley who was the original hottie—didn’t mean I would lose control around him and say, fall to my knees and beg him to bed me like I’d fantasized about in the longs hours without sleep the night before. No, I was a strong, independent woman.

  Still, I flipped down the mirror to check and then reapply my deep berry lip stain before I got out of the car.

  Before I could approach the reception area, an enormous man covered in tattoos from chin to finger tips, approached me with a crooked smile.

  “Lost, lady?”

  I swallowed back my unease because the guy was both scary and ridiculously attractive. His tattoos were all done in blacks as deep as his unkempt hair and long-lashed eyes, and they contrasted deeply with his porcelain skin tone.

  “I’m looking for King. He told me to bring my car in for servicing.”

  The stranger’s inky black eyes trailed the length of my car. His lips twitched but at least he didn’t laugh. “You sure he didn’t mean to send you to the dump?”

  Shame rippled down my spine. “I’m sure. Betty Sue is all I can afford and she just needs… a face lift.”

  “Thinking if you can’t afford a new car, you sure as hell can’t afford the facelift this piece of crap needs to stay running,” he told me.

  I blew a huff through my lips and planted my hands on my hips. “Listen, that’s exactly what I told King but he wouldn’t listen to me. I’ll just get in my car and go then. I’m sorry we both wasted our time.”