Ravage: Lightning Bolts MC (5 page)

Eric

I had to give Gareth credit for one thing: he knew how to hold an auction.

I hadn’t ridden my bike in. I didn’t want to announce my presence, even if Gareth didn’t know I had it in for him. He was afraid of me taking over the Lightning Bolts, which was why he wanted me killed in the first place. If he knew I was just named president, he’d be more desperate than before to have me taken out. So I drove my normal, everyday car. Next to the Mercedes, Porches and BMWs I saw outside the warehouse, I looked like a bum off the street.

Well, looks were deceiving. I didn’t think having a half million dollars collecting interest across three separate bank accounts was on the same level as the men I was about to come face-to-face with, but it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of either. The club did well when it came to making money. We didn’t fuck around. For years before I went inside I had been stashing cash into my accounts. I lived alone, didn’t need much. Some of the guys had families—some of them even lived in much nicer homes than anybody in a club like ours should own. But the police turned a blind eye. As long as we didn’t make too much trouble for them, they didn’t make trouble for us.

I went inside the warehouse and whistled under my breath. I never would have expected something like what I found. When I realized the auction was in an old warehouse I imagined something skeevy and dirty, with rats in the far corners. This was nice. Upscale, even. It made sense when I thought about the cars parked out front. The men shelling out the dough for these girls wanted to be sure they weren’t dealing with a low-class amateur. They were, of course. He was a piece of human garbage. They didn’t know that.

“Champagne?” A girl in a French maid’s costume held a silver tray my way. I managed not to roll my eyes at how cheesy it was. Then again, when she walked away to offer drinks to three other men, they looked pretty happy to see her. I guessed you had to be a certain kind of slime to be here in the first place.

I couldn’t have cared less about the girls up for auction. Honestly, I didn’t have much respect for them. Then again I didn’t respect women in general—at least not the ones I knew. The girls in the club were nice girls, but nothing to get serious about. The rest of them were, in my experience, cheap, slutty, skanky, greedy or bitchy. Or some of all of the above. They were good for a screw, like the one I woke up with that morning. I still didn’t remember her name. I barely remembered meeting her, or what she looked like. That was as far as it went for me, and I was okay with that.

I looked around the room from where I stood in a corner. The walls were cream painted drywall, blocking the windows. That much made sense—didn’t want anybody peeking in, especially the police if there was illegal shit going on. The lighting was soft, warm. The floors were a practically new hardwood or a really high-quality laminate. Either way, it looked good. Rows of folding chairs sat in front of a stage with a red curtain hung in front. It was like a pageant.

I snorted to myself. Who the hell were these people? Who did this? Was this what men did for fun on a Saturday night when they were jaded by the world? They had had all the fun their money gave them, so they needed something new and fresh—literally.

They had no idea what it was like to experience life. They hadn’t seen half the shit I’d seen or done a quarter of what I had done. I wondered if they ever watched a man being tortured to death when he wouldn’t give information, like I had accidentally walked in on when I was fifteen. Or if they ever got into a motorcycle chase in the middle of the night, going down a dark road with no light except the headlights and the taillights of the bike ahead of them. Or if they ever raced down crowded streets for money. Or if they ever helped smuggle guns and drugs from motherfuckers who would eat their hearts for breakfast. Or if they had ever killed another person. They probably thought the height of thrills was zip lining or skydiving some dumb shit like that. They needed a new hit, something bigger. A virgin.

The auction was about to start, and everybody took a seat. I sat furthest from the stage. I still hadn’t seen Gareth, and I wondered if he even showed up at the actual event. I didn’t see why he wouldn’t, but then he was impossible to figure out. Maybe he wanted to keep his name and face out of it. I was sure if everybody there saw what he looked like, they’d be grateful.

The first girl came out. She looked scared to death. I felt sorry for her, which was rare for me. I didn’t usually wonder what was going on in people’s heads. Even less since prison. It didn’t do any good to start feeling sympathy. You might start caring, and even put yourself on the line for another person. The only thing I’d ever put myself on the line for was the club—especially now that I was president.

“This is the lovely Josie. Josie, please turn around so the men can see you.” She did an awkward turn in heels that were probably too high for her. I guessed she was around nineteen. Petite, very slim, could have passed for a pre-teen if she wanted to.

“Josie is just eighteen years old.” The woman reading the information off the cue cards looked familiar. I wondered if she was hooked up with the Reign of Chaos. She might even have been Gareth’s old lady. Maybe she was the one who did the collecting at the end of the night. “We’ll take the first bid starting at five thousand dollars.”

I almost chocked on my champagne. Starting at five thousand? How high was it going to go?

“I’ll take five.” One of the guys up front raised his hand. A younger man, maybe mid-twenties.

“We have five up front. Do I have five five?”

“Five five.” An older man. He could have been her father. I clenched my jaw.

“Six five.” The oldest of the three. Grandfather? My skin crawled.

“Seven.” The first guy, the one up front. The three of them went back and forth until the final bid was twelve thousand, made by a man who could have been Josie’s dad. I felt sorry for her. I really did. Why did an eighteen-year-old need to do something like this?

It went on like that. All of the girls came out, one at a time, and all of them had at least three, maybe four men bidding on them at once. I wondered whether it was proven upfront that the girls were actual virgins. Like, how did anybody know for sure? Were they sent to a doctor? If I was spending fifteen thousand dollars on something, and that was as high as one of the girls settled for, I’d want to know it was legit. Maybe there was a gentleman’s agreement. What a laugh. Gareth wasn’t a gentleman.

All of the girls looked sweet. They might have tried to look sexy or sophisticated, but the fact was they were all a bunch of kids. They were scared and innocent. I wasn’t into that. I liked a girl with a bit of an edge to her.

I was bored out of my mind after a half hour. There wasn’t anything going on that I could use against him. Nothing looked illegal. There weren’t any shady side deals going on. The girls looked healthy and willing enough. It wasn’t like he was drugging them. I was disappointed. What a waste of time.

I wondered whether I could sneak out without being noticed. Then, the final girl was called.

“If any of you gentlemen have been disappointed so far because you haven’t found just the girl you’re looking for, you’re in luck. Our final girl is worth saving for last. Her name is Michelle.”

The curtain parted, and the last girl stepped out onto the stage.

The first thought that hit my brain was
No way she’s a virgin
. They should have had a doctor look her over to make sure.

She was older than the other girls, for one thing. Not old, but not eighteen. Probably closer to my age, and I had just turned twenty-eight three days before my release.

She was also gorgeous. Stone cold, drop-dead. The green in her eyes almost jumped out at me. Her hair was a waterfall over one shoulder. I wanted to dig my hands into it, take handfuls of it, work her up and down my cock. I looked at her mouth, and it shone red and pouty. I started to get hard and couldn’t believe it.

Her body was tight and toned. Her legs went on for miles. She was tall, maybe almost six feet in heels. I would still stand taller than her. She had a grace to her, too. She glided when she walked. I bet men’s heads turned when she walked down the street.

And she looked like she hated every single one of us. I felt it coming from her in waves. She smiled and tried to look friendly, but she was seething inside. The muscle jumped in her cheek. I was intrigued. No way she hadn’t been laid in her whole life. That was bullshit. What was her real story?

I realized I wanted to know. I really wanted to know what she was all about.

“We’ll start the bidding at five thousand.”

“Five!” Two men raised their hands at once.

“One at a time, please, gentlemen. I think you came in first,” the emcee said, pointing to a man sitting in the middle of the room. Fat slob. No way he was good enough for her.

“Five five.” The second of the original two bidders. Young, skinny. A tech millionaire, I decided.

“Six.” The grandfather who first bid on the eighteen-year-old in the beginning.

“Seven.”

“Eight.”

“Ten.”

“Twelve.”

The number kept going up. I knew it was a mixture of two things. First, she was hot as hell. Any man with eyes would wanna sleep with her. Plus, she was last. The guys who hadn’t scored anyone yet were desperate to go home with somebody. They hadn’t been willing to bid so high on the others, but on her they would go for it just so they didn’t have to leave alone.

I watched her. Her eyes went back and forth, finding every man who bid. I could tell from the way her face changed ever so slightly how she felt about each of them. The fatso she was repulsed by. The young guy, she was indifferent. The grandfather disgusted her, of course. Another man, a middle-aged George Clooney type, seemed to appeal to her.

No fucking way was I gonna let that happen.

“Thirty.” I couldn’t believe the word came out of my mouth. What was I thinking? I didn’t want to announce my presence, for Christ’s sake! But I wanted her. Even if it took thirty thousand dollars.

She gasped. I could hear it from the back of the room, over the mumbling of the other men. Some of them were pissed, some surprised. But none of them felt like outbidding me.

“Thirty thousand going once…twice…sold, for thirty thousand dollars.”

I felt like a deer in headlights. What the hell did I do? I bought her. I didn’t know what I was going to do with her now that I had. She stood there like she had no idea what to do. I knew she couldn’t have. I didn’t think the girls were exactly trained beforehand, since none of the others looked like they knew what to do when their time was up.

We stared at each other for a long moment before she left the stage and found her way to my side. The event was starting to break up since all the girls were sold and on their way to whatever their buyers took them. I felt sorry for a few who looked really nervous. It shouldn’t have been that way.

But I couldn’t think about that for long, because my own purchase was standing in front of me. The way she met my eyes with hers almost made me laugh. There was no hiding what she was thinking. I was scum for bidding, even if my bid was twice as much as what the next biggest final bid was.

Maybe I was scum, but I couldn’t think about that just then. Not when she stared at me the way she did. I started getting hard again, like I did when I thought about her going down on me. I fought it back. I wasn’t gonna embarrass myself, walking around with a hard-on.

“So. I guess we should get outta here before they turn out the lights.”

“I guess so.” Her voice was deep, throaty. She was so angry, too. She hated doing this. I wondered what made her go through with it. What would be that important?

I remembered how shitty my house was, but it wasn’t like she was going to take me home with her. Oh well. It wasn’t like I had planned on any of this.

Michelle

From the moment our eyes met, as I stood onstage and he sat in the audience, I felt drawn to him.

It was silly, like something out of a soap opera. That didn’t make it any less true. Something about the intensity of his eyes, the way he stared so hard at me. As soon as we locked gazes there might as well have not been a single person in the room besides the two of us. Everything else seemed to blur around the edges.

When he bid thirty thousand, my heart had leaped. Thirty thousand dollars! That meant twenty-five thousand five hundred for me. I could have fainted with stunned relief. Twenty-five thousand. I said the words over and over to myself. It would mean so much to my mom.

But then there was the issue of having to go through with it. Attractive or not, sexy or not, he was a stranger. It wasn’t until I stood beside him in the warehouse that I realized just how big a stranger, too. Taller than me even when I was wearing heels, broad-shouldered, with thick biceps and legs. I wondered what he did for a living, with that barrel chest of his. A body builder? A bricklayer? A bouncer? Something that involved his body, to be sure. It had to be.

Would I be able to fight him off if he decided to do whatever he wanted to me? A cold chill ran down my spine. Would I be able to stop him?

His eyes were blue, I noticed, as I stared at him with frank curiosity. What sort of man was he? He didn’t look like he needed to buy a woman. He also didn’t look like he had thirty thousand dollars lying around. He wasn’t dressed like the other men, in their suits. He wore jeans, a t-shirt, a leather jacket, work boots. His hair was longer than most businessmen, too, a deep golden blond that just barely reached the nape of his neck.

He was looking right back at me with the same curiosity. He probably wondered what I was doing there, just as I wondered about him. It wasn’t like I would tell him. I wasn’t trying to be friends with him. I needed his money, plain and simple.

I got my coat once we decided it was time to leave. One of the other girls was backstage. I pulled her aside. “When do we get our money? Do you know?”

She shrugged. “After we do it, I guess. I think we have to come back here to collect. I’m not really sure.”

Great. I probably should have found out about that before I committed to anything. Now I was stuck with this person, and I didn’t know when I’d get paid or what he expected from me. Wonderful.

I got my coat and met him by the door—the emcee was just walking away from him, so they’d talked about something. The money, I guessed, and how I would get it. He had a sexy little smirk on his face. I wondered what he was thinking, but it didn’t take a scientist to know he was imagining what we’d be doing soon. I was imagining it, too, but without the same amusement he seemed to feel. I was dreading it. I hoped Mac was right and that it wouldn’t hurt. He was a big man. I could only imagine that whatever he was packing was proportionate.

His car wasn’t like the others, the sports cars. Another difference. I wondered if the buyers were vetted. Who knew for sure whether this man had the money? Then again, they hadn’t vetted us girls to see whether we were really virgins—and thank God for that, because I would have run screaming for the hills if they had. I wondered who ran this thing, and just how professional they were. Maybe they were only interested in collecting their cut of the money. I wouldn’t have been surprised.

We spent the ride to his house in silence, with me secretly texting his license plate number to Mac, along with a physical description. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Eric Turner.” He gave it up with no hesitation, and he didn’t take the time to make something up. I guessed I could trust that it was his real name. I sent it to Mac, too.

Good luck
, she texted back. Then,
How much did he bid?

I bit my lip, glancing at him from the corner of my eye. He seemed oblivious to my conversation.
Thirty thousand,
I replied.

WHAT? Holy shit!
She then sent a series of dollar bill emoji. I laughed to myself.

I wasn’t laughing when we pulled up in front of his house. It wasn’t much of a house. In fact, it wasn’t much of a neighborhood.

I turned to him before getting out of the car. “Can I ask you something?”

He frowned. “All right.”

“I hope you don’t find this offensive…but are you sure you have the money you put up for me?”

He frowned more deeply, then chuckled. “Yeah, I guess that’s a good question. The clothes, the car, the house. None of it isn’t very nice.”

“Not really. Again, I don’t mean to offend you.”

“Don’t worry about it. And don’t feel like you have to be so formal with me. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll show you my bank statements when we get inside.”

I looked at the house again and wondered why he hadn’t just taken me to a hotel. Wouldn’t that have made more sense than his house? Were any of the other men taking the girls to their houses? I doubted it. They were probably getting fancy hotel suites for their troubles. I had a rancher house with a cracked driveway and gravel garden. How nice.

Then we stepped inside the house and it took everything in me not to turn around and walk back out. It was a pigsty. Magazines everywhere—mostly
Playboy
and stuff to do with motorcycles. Plates, cups, takeout containers, pizza boxes. More socks than I thought any one person owned. It looked like a frat house.

“Sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I just got back from being away for a long time.”

“Oh.” It was all I could reply. It didn’t look like he’d just gotten back. There was at least a week’s worth of takeout in the living room alone. I peered down the hall to the kitchen, which looked just as messy. It took time to make that sort of mess.

“Can I get you a drink?”

I nodded. “Sure, thanks.” My heart raced so hard, I could barely speak. This was it. We were going to do it. In this pigsty. He could break me in half if he wanted to, with those massive hands and arms. I had no idea what to expect, and my knees shook when I considered the possibilities. I had to sit or risk falling over.

He brought me a glass of some amber colored liquid. “What’s this?”

“Bourbon.” I took a sniff and wrinkled my nose. “I guess I should have asked if you like it.”

“No, it’s okay. I’m just not used to it.” I had to play along, be game. I didn’t want to risk making him angry with me. I had the feeling things would go better for me if he was in a good mood. I took a tiny sip and winced as the liquid burned a path down my throat. I hoped it would loosen me up some.

“So you said you were away?” I asked. I thought it was an innocent question, but the way his face changed told me a different story.

“Yeah. For a few years.” He left it there. I had a sneaking suspicion he meant prison, and I didn’t want to know any more if that was the case.

“Can I ask you something now?”

“Okay.”

“Why did you do this?”

“What? The auction?”

“Yeah. Why does a girl like you have to do something like that?”

“It’s not like I was waiting for an auction to get laid, you know.”

He laughed. He had a nice laugh. It made me feel a little more comfortable. “You know what I mean. You don’t need to sell it. You don’t look like you’re into drugs or anything.”

“I’m not.” I looked down at my glass. The ice was melting, making wavy patterns in the bourbon as the water mixed with the liquor. “I just need the money.”

“Student loans? Credit cards?”

“Medical bills. Hospice care.” My voice was a whisper. I must have finally gotten through to him.

“Oh. Oh, shit. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “That’s why. So thanks for bidding so much. It’ll help a lot.”

“Sure. Honestly…I’m glad I did.” It sounded like just saying those words was difficult for him. I got the impression he wasn’t the type who said what he was feeling very easily.

“You like motorcycles?” I motioned to one of the magazines. It was either that or
Playboy
. I didn’t think it would be appropriate to ask if he liked boobs.

“Oh, yeah.” His face lit up a little. He was really handsome when he smiled. I took another sip of my drink. A warm little fire started in my belly and spread through me. “I’ve been riding since I was a kid,” he continued.

“Really? That’s cool. Is it in the garage? I didn’t see it outside.”

“Yeah, I have her parked under cover.” Her. How cute.

“I’ve never ridden on one,” I admitted. He gave me the sort of look I’d expect to get if I admitted to killing kittens for pleasure.

“You have to. There’s nothing like it.” He became more animated and told me more about the way it feels to be one with the open road, or something like that. All I could do was stare at his body. When would he want to get down to business? The anticipation was killing me.

“What do you do for a living?” he asked.

“I’m a bartender.”

“And you’ve never drunk bourbon?” He laughed.

I couldn’t help but laugh with him. “You’re right. It sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way. But I’m not drinking. I’m serving.”

“What do you do for fun? Besides going to auctions.”

I blushed at the tone in his voice. It was a little more suggestive, a little less friendly. I wondered if his drink, which was twice the size of the one he’d given me, was loosening him up a little bit.

“Not much. I haven’t had much fun lately. Can we change the subject?” I finished my drink with a quick toss down my throat. It burned, and I coughed, but I needed to numb up a little. I couldn’t let my emotions get in the way. If I had to go through with the sex before getting my money, I had to brace up. Who wanted to sleep with a girl who was crying? If I did, what if he refused to pay?

“All right. Sorry. I’ll ask this, then.” He leaned toward me ever so slightly. The mood shifted, thanks to that one tiny move. My heart skipped a beat, my palms went clammy. I gulped.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“How does a girl like you stay a virgin for so long?”

I blushed furiously. “That’s a pretty intimate question.”

“It’s a pretty intimate night,” he pointed out. “And I’m curious.”

I made the mistake of looking into his eyes. They were so blue. It felt like they were reaching into me, pulling the answer from my mouth without my wanting to give it up. “The right person never came along,” I admitted, my eyes never leaving his. My breath was coming fast and short, even faster when he moved closer still.

“Isn’t that funny? You waited all this time for the right person, and you ended up doing this.”

“Yeah. Isn’t it funny?” My heart was beating so fast I was afraid it might give out. He was so close now, inches away from me. Seducing me, I realized. Warmth grew and spread between my legs. What would he do to me? What did I want him to do? The anticipation was intoxicating.

He reached for me, the backs of his fingers grazing my cheek. I closed my eyes, sighing softly. It felt so good to be touched, and the instant his skin made contact with mine, it felt so right.

“I can’t believe some guy didn’t sweep you off your feet by now,” he muttered softly, running his fingers up and down and sending scorching heat throughout my body. How was it possible that he made me feel that way just by stroking my cheek?

I didn’t have long to think about it because then his face was so close to mine, and he was uncurling his fingers to pull my face to his, and I went with it. I handed myself over to him without thinking, without speaking. I wanted it as much as he did. No, I needed it.