Motorcycle Man (5 page)

I fought the blush that was creeping along my skin and said, “Hey, Dog.”

Then I said no more.

Therefore, Brick asked, “You got a name?”

My body tensed and my eyes went to Brick. “You can call me Red.”

The steel arm tightened around my waist and my neck twisted, my head tipping back as Tack growled, “Only I call you Red, Red.”

“Why do you only call me Red?” I asked.

“Because only I do,” Tack answered.

I tipped my head to the side. “Is that really your answer?”

“Only one you’re gonna get,” he replied.

I stared up at him and he stared down at me. Then I gave up.

“Whatever,” I muttered, looking away, pulling again at his arm and not getting anywhere.

“So, again, babe, you got a name?” Brick asked and I looked up at him to see he was smiling.

“Is the name on your birth certificate Brick?” I asked a question I was pretty sure I knew the answer to.

“No,” he gave me the answer I was pretty sure I knew.

I looked at Dog. “Is your name really Dog?”

“Nope,” Dog responded, also smiling.

I looked up at Tack and pulled again at his arm and again it was ineffectually.

“And you? Did your parents name you Tack?”

“No,” he answered.

“Okay then,” I turned to the boys, “since it’s nicknames all around, I’ll answer to whatever you christen me.”

“Whatever we christen you?” Dog repeated.

“Sure,” I told him on a shrug. “I invite you to be creative.” Dog and Brick looked to each other and grinned but I looked to Tack and demanded on a request, “Can you let me go? I have an Employee Handbook to write.”

“No,” he answered and I felt my eyes narrow. He ignored the narrowing of my eyes and went on, “Darlin’, this order is totally fucked up.” And he shook the paper in his hand.

“I know that,” I informed him. “I told you I didn’t know what I was doing and I was going to screw it up. That’s why I brought the pen, so you could make amendments.”

He grinned. “Not enough room on this paper to write all the amendments, Red. How could you fuck this up so much when I wrote down everything I needed?” Then he shook the papers again, my eyes went to them and I realized the Sanskrit notes were his.

“Those are your notes?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“I can’t read Sanskrit, Tack.”

“It ain’t written in Sanskrit, Red.”

“You have worse penmanship than a doctor,” I informed him.

“I can read it,” he informed me.

“
Of course
you
can, you know what it says. To me, it’s a bunch of scratches and squiggles and since I don’t know anything about car and bike parts, I couldn’t guess very accurately. So you need to take some time and write out the changes…” I paused and concluded with emphasis, “
Legibly
.”

“Eloise hired an office girl who don’t know shit about cars and bikes?” Dog asked Tack and I looked at him.

But it was Brick who answered for Tack. “Eloise hired an office girl who wears fuck-me shoes and skirts. Who cares if she don’t know shit about cars and bikes?” Then Brick looked at me. “You just take your time, sweetheart, you’ll get it.”

“Thanks,” I smiled at him, deciding to ignore his comment about my skirt and shoes being of the “fuck-me” variety. I thought they were cute and girly but I was a woman, they were men. Men, I knew, thought way different from women and most of these thoughts, I knew, centered around sex so obviously cute to a woman would be something else to a man.

“You need any help, I know all about car and bike parts,” he offered.

I kept smiling. “Thanks, that’s sweet.”

“
That’s me, I’m sweet,” Brick smiled back and it was then I felt Tack’s body get tight. My head turned to look at him again and I saw that his neck was twisted and he was looking beyond Dog. My gaze followed his to two men walking from the door of the Compound toward our huddle. They were the two men Tack had been talking to the day before. And they were two men who didn’t look laidback and welcoming like Brick and Dog. In fact, they looked so
not
laidback and welcoming that they were more than a little scary.

When my eyes swung through Tack, Dog and Brick I saw that they, too, no longer looked laidback and welcoming and they, too, looked more than a little scary.

Yikes!

It was then Tack’s arm gave me a squeeze and I looked up at him to see his head tipped down to me.

“Back to the office, Red. I’ll be in in a minute to go over this with you.”

I saw his face was serious and although this was an order, it was voiced quietly, even gently and thus it felt weirdly sweet.

Therefore, I said quietly back, “All right, Tack.” I looked at the boys. “Later, guys.”

“Later, babe,” Dog murmured to me but his neck was twisted to the two men who were now close.

“Later, girl,” Brick muttered, he also was watching the two men.

Tack let me go. I smiled politely at the two men who were now stopping at the biker huddle then I turned and skedaddled across the cement of the forecourt, my heels clicking loudly as I went all the while wondering what in the hell that was all about.

Do You Want a Donut?

I was plagiarizing an Employee Handbook I’d downloaded from the Internet when the outside door to my office opened and sunlight shone through around the dark outline of Tack’s body.

Great,
I thought.

“Hey,” I said.

“Red,” he replied and walked toward me, demanding, “Call up the order.”

“Okeydoke,” I muttered, professional efficiency personified. I turned back to the computer screen and started clicking the mouse to call up the order. The screen with the order on it was loading when I felt movement close to me and heard papers rustling. I twisted my torso and looked up to see Tack plant his ass smack on the top of my desk, pinning me in my chair turned toward the computer with his muscled thigh.

“Um… could you not sit on my desk?” I requested.

“No,” he replied.

“I asked nice,” I told him.

“Answer’s still no,” he told me.

I stared up at him. He stared down at me. He didn’t look serious like he looked outside before I left him, Dog and Brick. He didn’t look laidback and amused either. I didn’t know what he looked like but I sensed everything was not okay.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“No,” he answered with surprising honesty.

Oh boy.

Perhaps there was dissent in the ranks of the Chaos MC. This was probably not good. And it was probably even more not good if you were the president of the Chaos MC.

And because of this, for some insane reason, likely because I found the consumption of donuts soothed a variety of things that were not so good, I found myself asking, “Do you want a donut?”

He stared at me a beat and he did this with a strange intensity, something I did not get working behind his eyes.

Then, before I got it, he answered, “No.”

“Have you had breakfast?”

“It’s after ten o’clock, Red.”

“Have you had breakfast?” I repeated.

“No.”

“Then you need a donut.”

“I don’t need a donut.”

“Okay,” I gave in. “Do you want coffee?”

“No, babe, I don’t want coffee. I don’t want a donut. I want to sort out this order, get it sent and then I got shit to do.”

I now knew what he looked like because he sounded like it too and that was impatient.

“Okeydoke,” I whispered and turned to the screen.

This was a mistake because one second later, I felt Tack’s heat against my back. I felt this because he’d leaned in close. Then his hand covered mine on the mouse, his finger settling on mine, pressing in to click as he moved out of the order screen and back to the menu. Then, without a word or any instruction, he continued clicking through the screens, ordering the parts he needed, upping the numbers when necessary by clicking on arrows then he went to our on-line basket and removed practically everything I’d added that morning. He did this quickly, with practiced ease and the only time it took was waiting for the different screens to load.

“Uh…” I mumbled when I fought back the haze created by the rapidly flashing screens filling my eyes. “I’m not learning anything.”

“You learn somethin’, you don’t need to come to me to help you.”

I blinked at the screen. Then I twisted my neck to see his profile right there. And it was a very attractive profile. Not to mention he smelled good, a mixture of motor oil, musk and man.

Damn.

“I’d rather know what I’m doing,” I told his profile.

He kept clicking, his eyes on the screen when he replied, “And I’d rather watch you strut your ass to wherever I am when you need to sort somethin’ out.”

“Tack –”

His head turned, I got a full frontal of his face up close and stopped speaking.

“Red,” he said softly. “You entered the game, it’s my game, babe, you play it my way.”

“I don’t want to play games,” I told him.

“Oh yeah, you do,” he told me and I shook my head.

“I want to do my job,” I stated.

“You get to do that too,” he returned.

“Not very well, if I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said. “It’ll be annoying to have to find you every time I run up against something I don’t understand.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

I stared at him, feeling my blood pressure rising then I pulled my face back an inch and his hand on mine on the mouse tightened.

“Listen, seriously,” I started. “This is ridiculous. Can’t we just move on?”

“No.”

Argh!

“All right, fine.” I set my face and turned it to the computer screen, announcing, “You’re not the only person here who knows cars and bikes. Brick said he’d help. I know Lenny knows what he’s doing considering he’s a mechanic or a body guy or something but whatever he is, he is what he is around cars so he has to know what he’s doing. They might even be able to decipher your handwriting. I’ll be perfectly fine.”

“You ask anyone for help, Red, not only you but they’ll answer to me,” Tack warned. I tore my eyes from the screen to look at him to see he was gazing at the monitor then his finger pressed mine and the mouse clicked.

I looked back at the screen to see it said our order was submitted.

“Tack! You submitted the order and I didn’t even get a chance to scrutinize it!” I snapped.

“Babe, have you not been listening?”

I turned to glare up at him, yanking my hand from under his on the mouse then instantly finding it caught, his fingers curling around mine tight and then my hand was resting on his rock-hard thigh.

Crap.

“Tack,” I clipped, still glaring at him and now pulling in vain on my hand.

He ignored me and said outrageously, “I gotta go. Tip your face back further for me, baby, I wanna give you a kiss before I do.”

My stomach plummeted in a way that wasn’t altogether unpleasant even as I felt my eyebrows rise as did my voice. “Are you nuts?”

“No,” he replied calmly, his eyes moving over my face and settling on my mouth before he muttered, “Remember your mouth. It was near as sweet as other parts of you.”

Ohmigod!

I felt my eyes narrow mainly because he was too much and none of the too much he was was good.

I yanked at my hand. His fingers curled tighter and his other hand came up to wrap around the side of my neck as his upper body started coming toward me. Therefore, I pulled at my neck at the same time I yanked at my hand. This not only didn’t work, it made him slide his fingers around to the back of my neck, pulling up as he bent closer and he lifted my hand from his thigh to press it against his chest.

I was watching his face get closer, specifically his amazing lips surrounded by his kickass goatee. My mind took that unfortunate moment to remind me that I’d never had a man with facial hair prior to Tack and I’d liked the feeling of those lips with that goatee on various parts of me. In fact, every part they’d touched. And it was then we heard the door open.

Both our necks twisted to see a woman was standing in the door. She was pretty, with wild red hair that had liberal streaks of very fake blonde which I couldn’t decide in that instant if I thought looked good or kind of skanky. She also had clear, light blue eyes. She was wearing biker babe apparel of jeans, high-heeled boots and tight scoop-necked t-shirt with four buttons at the neckline, all of them undone exposing cleavage.

“Fuck,” Tack muttered right before the redhead exploded.

“
You are
fucking shitting me!
” she, for some reason, shrieked, walking in quickly after slamming the door loudly, her eyes going squinty, her face setting hard and I saw what I didn’t see seconds before. Her face was already hard prior to her setting it harder. There were lines around her mouth probably from smoking too much. There were also lines around her eyes that didn’t look like laugh lines, instead they looked like she got squinty-eyed, pissed off frequently. And her skin looked like someone should have introduced her to sunblock about three decades ago.