The Bare Bones (The Bare Bones MC) Read online

  THE BARE BONES

  Book #1 in The Bare Bones MC series

  Copyright 2014 © Layla Wolfe

  Kindle Edition

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Cover art by Red Poppy Designs

  http://poppyartdesigns.com

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  To Donna Briody-Buccella. This bad boy (with no white tennies) is for you.

  To Cookie Grimaldi VonBehren for all of your invaluable help with cuts, scoots, and anal bead headbands.

  To Vella Day, Olivia Jaymes, Jenika Snow, Indigo Sin, and Kathryn Kelly—I seriously could never have completed this whole undertaking without your insightful assistance.

  If you ain’t living on the edge, you’re taking up too much room.

  The rose-colored illusion of Madison Shellmound’s girlish crush on biker Ford Illuminati is stomped into smithereens by his crude, perverse father Cropper, Bare Bones club President. Fearing Ford will kill Cropper if he finds out, Madison flees town, becoming an upstanding cardiology nurse.

  Madison and Ford have an ill-fated, star-crossed love that will last their lifetimes. Ford is a lifer in a different sort of enterprise, the gritty full-throttle club of guns, blood, and allegiance to his brothers.

  Twelve years and several tours of SEAL duty later, Ford is thrust back into Madison’s arms on the worst day of his life. Madison’s prospect brother Speed has screwed up big-time and owes the club his life. She offers herself to Cropper as a sacrificial lamb to save Speed.

  But how long until the fiery, full-on outlaw Ford discovers that the woman he loves was treated like a degraded slave by his own father? Well, meet the new boss. He’s not the same as the old boss.

  Publisher’s Note: This is not your mother’s contemporary romance. Readers will encounter molestation, drugging, consensual bondage and discipline, violence, and a HEA. It’s a full-length novel of 65,000 words. Recommended 18+ due to mature content.

  THE BARE BONES

  Book #1 in The Bare Bones MC series

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  About the Book

  One: Madison

  Two: Ford

  Three: Madison

  Four: Ford

  Five: Madison

  Six: Madison

  Seven: Ford, 30 years old

  Eight: Madison, 28 years old

  Nine: Ford

  Ten: Madison

  Eleven: Ford

  Twelve: Madison

  Thirteen: Ford

  Fourteen: Madison

  Fifteen: Ford

  Sixteen: Madison

  Seventeen: Ford

  Eighteen: Madison

  Nineteen: Ford

  Twenty: Madison

  Twenty-One: Ford

  Twenty-Two: Madison

  Twenty-Three: Ford

  Epilogue: Madison

  About The Author

  More Books from Karen Mercury

  CHAPTER ONE

  MADISON

  We were steeped in sin, immorality, the aura of wrongdoing. What did they tell you about love? Love isn’t meant to be all rosy. Love doesn’t sprinkle gold dust over things and give it a warm golden glow, like a Hollywood sunset in one of those John Wayne westerns. Love doesn’t fix your boo-boos, your bad haircuts, or your ugly glasses like Carol Brady’s platitudes.

  No. Love breaks your heart. It wrecks everything. It casts you into the lowest circle of hell and rattles you around in the shitty oozing muck. Love isn’t perfect because we aren’t. Did you ever wonder where they get that phrase, “He’s only human”? Rainbows are perfect. Dolphins are perfect. Babies are perfect before they open their eyes and see what a giant clusterfuck they’ve been born into.

  But lovers? We are here to love exactly the wrong people. We are here to screw each other up, to mess with each other’s heads. To lie and betray someone in the worst possible way, to kiss someone while turning the knife in their back just because we can. Humans are vile that way. As Ford’s favorite writer says, “Once I thought that to be human was the highest aim a man could have, but I see now that it was meant to destroy me. Today I’m proud to say that I am inhuman.”

  That’s me. Inhuman. I have come a long-ass way to get to this point, and you wouldn’t believe the offal I’ve had to wade through on my journey. It’s been my trial by fire, and I’ve emerged the other side. I wouldn’t say unscathed—I’ve been pretty fucking scathed, to tell the truth. I’ve made it, I’m here, and it was no accident that I came to be the warden of Ford Illuminati’s beautiful, wracked, tortured soul. In fact, there’s no way to tell his story without also telling mine. Our stories are intertwined.

  You say to start at the beginning. My beginning doesn’t start with my birth and childhood in Cottonwood, Arizona. It was all fairly standard issue crap, maybe more Modern Family than Brady Bunch, but everything turned out all right at the end of the day. That is, until my father split when I was eight. My mother pretty much fell apart, refused to get a job, and more and more she stopped leaving the house altogether.

  The three of us had to fend for ourselves. When you’re that young, you know, you’re not really able to pull back and look at things objectively. It’s nice now that I’m twenty-nine I can look in the rearview mirror and finally realize that our mother had mental issues, and agoraphobia was probably the least of it. But because she had no money—my father sent her a pittance that just covered the mortgage and some utilities—and no way of making any, we had to fend for ourselves.

  A couple of teachers noticed that I always wore the same ratty jeans to school, that I had holes in the soles of my desert boots, that I clung to my threadbare bomber jacket with the Screaming Eagle patch on the sleeve because it had been my father’s. They called me in a few times and asked why I never had a lunch to eat, but I covered for Ingrid. I covered because that’s what children do. They don’t know any better. For them to wrap their tiny little brains around the idea that their parent is incapable, dysfunctional in some way, or unable to provide the sustenance they need, well…Their little heads would probably explode.

  So God or whoever gave children the ability to compartmentalize, as though their brains had little walls with incredibly tiny doors that usually remain locked. Call it “in denial” or what you wish, but my sister, brother and I were able, with straight faces, to tell the teachers that we just liked hip-hop or grunge or whatever the flavor of the moment was. Everyone always seemed to buy it, maybe because we rarely had bruises.

  Ingrid became more violent as the years went on. Now maybe I’m the one in denial because I can’t recall a single thing any of the fights were ever about—the usual childish crap, I’m sure. Our ceiling always leaked, we had buckets and plastic sheets covering our beds, and there was no water to wash clothes or ourselves. We had none of the gewgaws and accoutrements that teens want to show off to their peers.

  For young women that’s tantamount to hell, so I’m sure we yelled back at whatever Ingrid was dishing out. Luckily she was so weak we were able to outrun her, and by the time I turned twelve I was spending more time sleeping at my friend Sabrina’s or, when her mother got tired of my face, in the hills. My little sister June had friends who were more generous with their creature comforts and didn’t mind having her around. My little brother Robert, he
just kept to himself and retreated more and more into a withdrawn hoodlum place.

  I’d sleep under the cottonwoods by a creek in Coyote Buttes. I felt safe being outdoors. I guess I became somewhat of a nature girl. Sometimes I’d venture up into the swirling sandstone buttes themselves, warming myself like a lizard in the sun, curled up in a rocky cradle, reading the books I’d stolen from the library. I ate the food we took from Sabrina’s mother’s fridge or the stuff we stole from the store.

  Needless to say, I missed a lot of school this way. I was too young to drive—and couldn’t have afforded a car anyway—so sometimes I’d hitchhike to school, catch a ride with Sabrina and her brother, or more likely, stay in the hills. I shudder to think how many potential serial killers passed me by when I stuck my thumb out to strangers.

  I knew something was wrong. Something was missing from my adolescence. I must have known it wasn’t normal, but I had no way of blaming Ingrid until later. A teenager can’t blame her parents. They created you. They’re flawless and blameless. A teen turns it inward and blames herself, right? “Oh, I must be fucked. No wonder I’m unlovable. Look at me. I smell. Ingrid was right—I am stupid. I was faking all those straight A’s on my report card just to please her. I was just trying to get her to say one nice thing about me. I’m so dumb.”

  Because the human psyche inevitably can’t accept itself as flawed, there’s really nowhere to turn, right? No one to blame. The frustration builds because you want something to blame, right? You know your family resembles Modern Family more than The Brady Bunch, but at the end of the day even those defective people always spout happy platitudes. They drink eggnog over a bowl of roses and unicorns. In my family home, it was more like wooden coat hangers and three-day-old piss in the toilet because we couldn’t afford to flush.

  No wonder I preferred the wide azure sky and warm sandstone gullies of Coyote Buttes. I didn’t know what my life would bring. I didn’t think I deserved anything worthwhile. It had been hammered into my brain over and over how worthless, shitty, and wretched I was. Looking in the rearview now, I see that Ingrid had a lot of issues steeped in post-war German politics or whatever, and she sure was fond of taking it out on defenseless kids. Somewhere along the line I must’ve figured if I really was that worthless, I might as well act like it.

  So I grew armor, yeah. I did drugs and I became a little slutty because that garnered me attention. Not the negative attention of a mother—she didn’t give a shit where I was or what I did. No, it was the positive attention of boys. Socializing, having people around me, made my loneliness less painful. Sabrina and her brother Chuck would bring a few thuggish boys up to my Coyote Buttes camp. They’d bring some sixers and weed and we’d build a campfire, that sort of teenaged thing. Blast some Green Day or White Stripes where no one could hear us.

  Couples would break away to make out and more, sort of a slutty version of “Seven Minutes in Heaven.” I was too petrified to actually go all the way because I had no birth control, but I did learn to give a pretty mean blowjob. More and more boys would pile into Chuck’s Toyota Echo once they heard of the joy that might be found up in Coyote Buttes.

  I really relished the popularity, even though I knew it came from devaluing myself, my abundance of low self-esteem. At least I was popular. And some boys even took the time to talk to me. Some boys even brought me things, things they’d stolen from their sisters, so my wardrobe improved.

  I had a few frightening run-ins when boys—men, more accurately, by that time—tried to beat me down, to force me into submission. Why are men so fucking determined to penetrate a girl? How is that any better than a kick-ass blowjob? So this, combined with my mad fight club skillz learned at the hands of my witchy mother, I could pretty much handle all potential comers. Once I had to cut a guy on the forearm with my Bowie knife. Most of my Coyote Buttes beaus were thugs of one type or another—homeless boys, thieves, boys who had been raised in Juvenile Hall or shuttled from one foster home to another. They smoked weed and they kicked ass, but no one got too violent with me where I couldn’t handle it.

  When I was fifteen, during one of my trips home to raid the fridge, I noticed this thuggish boy sitting in the backyard reading a book. I had a radar for the bad boys.

  Maybe it was the fact that I was unseen, but every tiny hair on my body stood up in excitement. I clung to the edge of the wall like Kilroy, only peeking my eyeballs around the corner. Wow. I was a connoisseur of boys, but this long-legged velvety stunner was a tall cool drink of water.

  Slouching in a lawn chair with the reflection of the pool water under his strong chin, he was an immobile Roman statue concentrating on his book. His aquiline nose, his slightly parted, full lips, and his thick, glossy black hair gave him the look of a tempting demon, an incubus incarnated to rip the souls from men.

  Or women, more accurately. Something stirred deep in the pit of my stomach as I watched this rare beauty. He barely seemed to breathe as I devoured him with my eyes. His rich dark skin practically shimmered in the veiled sunlight. I was lucky he was shirtless, and my mouth watered at the coppery coins of his nipples. He was too young for much chest hair, maybe a couple years older than me, but the beginnings of a nice oily pelt started between his well-formed pecs, leading the eye into a mouth-watering trail of dark hair down the center of his rippling abdomen, where it disappeared beneath his low-slung jeans.

  Was he commando? His jeans were slung so low the expectation was to see the usual strip of male underwear. I blinked. Not possible. This man couldn’t be sitting in a stranger’s backyard, commando under his jeans. My practiced eye made out the arc of a well-hung cock reposing against his hip, but he obviously wasn’t reading porn.

  At that young age he’d already been working out, had a couple of tats, and one of the luscious pennies of his nipples was pierced with a silver barbell. A scarred, abused life—just like mine. I felt an instant connection to Ford Illuminati.

  Then, apropos of nothing at all because I know I hadn’t even moved, much less breathed, he snapped his head up to stare directly at me.

  I gasped. How could he see me? He was outdoors in the bright light. I was indoors, unlit. A boy had given me an SLR camera so I knew that this beauty must be able to see in the dark if he was seeing me.

  The book slowly lowered until it rested on his thigh. My heart literally stopped beating. I was so still I could feel my eyelids shivering.

  Just the barest hint of a leonine grin lifted one corner of his mouth.

  And that, as you asked, is the real beginning of my tale.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FORD

  “I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me—or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brains, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes, the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed—doomed to be mine, forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I’m a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable.” ~ Henry Miller

  Ford Illuminati could always tell when he was being watched. It was one of the many talents he’d honed over the years. Growing up in the outlaw lifestyle, the youngest fully patched member of the Bare Bones motorcycle club, Ford had developed all sorts of invaluable skills. He could shoot a smiley face pattern into a target with his nine millimeter Sig Sauer at thirty yards. He could squeeze a man larger than himself in a rear naked choke until he was unconscious. Once he’d dispatched a guy like that over a cliff with a boot to the ass.

  He was a hustler who did what needed to be done. Already he was the club’s go-to explosives expert, skilled at building IEDs of all nature. His father had indulged his love of blowing shit up and it had already come in handy on a few nighttime runs for the club. Ford’s boiling Italian blood endowed him with the sort of quick-tempered but slow burn that made him a nasty customer to deal with, even at the age of seventeen.

  He already had the right to wear a “Filthy Few” patch on his cut.

  Now,
once he became aware he was being watched, within a split second he discerned it was a female peering from behind that living room wall. His dad had told him that Ingrid had a couple of teenage daughters. Ford could only pray they were tolerable girls who didn’t blast ‘N Sync or Britney Spears. Fifteen and thirteen, Cropper told him were their ages. Old enough to moon over Lance Bass, but too young to realize he was gay.

  Ford crooked his finger at the girl hiding in the living room. He could have some fun with this. If he could petrify the little teenyboppers with his bad boy biker persona, he might have a couple of instant slaves on his hands. Maybe his dad’s attempt to lean right by moving into the suburbs with Ingrid wouldn’t be such a bust, after all. He could have these girls worshiping the ground he walked on, cooking for him and washing his ride, just like the sweetbutts back at the clubhouse did.

  She came over, eyes wide, face devoid of emotion, like a shy deer in the middle of the road just before you low-sided right into it.

  His heart missed a beat.

  This girl—no, woman—was exquisite.

  Her wide, frightened eyes were frozen, the effect of having seen too much in her short years. Her little pert button nose was just a tad crooked, as though it’d been broken once or twice. Her lips, parted in apprehension, could have as easily been parted in lust.

  But it was her body that knocked Ford out. This had to be Madison, the fifteen-year-old, but she already rocked the curves of a twentysomething. Impertinent, chubby boobs sat up nice and high and tight, displayed seductively in a push-up bra under a wifebeater T-shirt. Her softly streaked auburn hair, parted on one side, provided a curtain for her questioning eyes.

  It was those titties that had Ford’s dick lengthening and expanding in his pants. Even two layers of fabric didn’t dull the insistent erection of her nipples, and they sat like bullets, demanding to be sucked. His horndog of a dad should’ve warned him what to expect. Now, for one of the first times in Ford’s life, he was speechless.