Wild: Tiger's Blood MC (35 page)

Chapter Ten

Mickey

“Ouch,” I complained as Ella tugged the thread through the cut on my scalp. “That fuckin’ hurts!”

She shushed me impatiently, tugging at the stitches with her deft little hands. “I’m almost done. Now sit still and be quiet, I can’t have you making any movement.”

I sighed and leaned back on the bench seat. We were still in the parking lot of the truck stop restaurant, and Ella had been patiently stitching at my head for the better part of an hour. I sighed and looked out the window. Ella immediately slapped me on the arm and turned me back around to face her. The overhead lighting was killing my head, and I just wanted to go to sleep. Now that she’d drained me of my cum, I knew that I was free to pass out.

Ella
. Just thinking about her name drove me crazy! She was a wildcat, a little hellcat, even! At least in the bedroom she had been. Now, she was giving me her usual pensive silence. I wondered if I’d ever see the wild side of her again. Probably not—she was too busy focusing on her work. My head ached, and I put a hand up to shield my eyes from the light.

All in all, it had been a pretty crazy day. I’d met, seduced, and fucked this little rig driver only to find out that she was putting herself through med school. It was impressive, and not like the kinds of girls I was used to hanging out with. Women loved me, they loved my money, and they loved that I was an outlaw. But Ella didn’t seem to care about any of that. When we looked in each other’s eyes, we were captivated.

It didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t like being so attached to a woman, and definitely not one as sharp as Ella. I couldn’t even believe that I was feeling attached to her in the first place—we hadn’t even known each other for twenty-four hours. There were so many things about her that I didn’t know. I hadn’t even seen her eat! Chuckling to myself, I flicked my eyes to Ella and watched her face as she continued sewing me up. Her little pink tongue was sticking out of her lips and her eyes were screwed tightly in a look of intense concentration. I thought I could read the thoughts flitting in her mind, and I laughed heartily.

Ella smacked me on the shoulder. It didn’t really hurt, but I made a show of whimpering and pushing her hand away.

“I thought I told you to stay put,” she growled. I looked up in surprise. That tone was the closest thing I’d heard to anger coming from Ella. Even when we first met and she was swinging a crowbar at me, I knew it was because she was frightened. She was about as dangerous as a kitten, and much cuter. I knew I didn’t have anything to worry about where she was concerned.

“Am I going to have a scar, doctor?” I asked, gazing up at her. “Can you give me some good news?”

“Stop fidgeting,” Ella hissed. She straightened my pose and busied herself readying another thread for more stitches. “I’m almost done, but you have to quit moving. You think your head hurts, wait until I accidentally jab the needle in your eye!”

I shivered. “Alright, fine,” I relented.

Ella smirked at me. She looked adorable—exhausted, but very, very adorable. I wanted to tangle my hands in her hair and give her a deep kiss. The thought made my cock twitch inside of my pants.

Fucking Ella had been one of the best decisions of my life. Even though she just looked like the little brownie girl next door, she was hot, hot,
hot
! I couldn’t believe how eagerly she’d taken my cock, how she’d begged for it, how she’d screeched and screamed in the throes of her orgasm. It was incredible, it was like no other woman I’d ever been with. Other girls focused too much on looking sexy, on making faces like porn stars and leaning down at stupid angles so I could see their pussy and their face at the same time. But not Ella. She seemed to know exactly what made her feel good, and she’d reveled in it. I remembered the soft touch of her lips all over my body, the feel of her soft skin rubbing against mine. God, it was enough to get me hard again! I closed my eyes and remembered throwing Ella down on the mattress and ripping her clothes off. She’d had the tightest, most perfect little body imaginable. I couldn’t believe she’d been hiding it under those baggy jeans and a tank top. She was one hot number, and I couldn’t believe that I’d made her mine.

“What are you thinking about?” Ella asked quietly.

I felt her tug a thread through my skin and I winced. I’d been through some rough injuries in my day, but nothing quite this excruciating. It was a combination of the slow tension and the constant tugging of the thread. It was pretty ridiculous: me, Mickey, member of The Irish, about to cry over getting a few stitches. I should have been boasting and bragging, hell, I shouldn’t have even told her that I needed stitches in the first place!

“Nothing,” I lied. “Are you almost done?”

“Almost,” Ella said in the same soft voice. I could see her concentrating on my head harder than ever. “Sorry, I know it hurts.”

“It’s fine,” I lied again. “So, what’s the story behind medical school?”

Ella let out a long sigh. “It’s just something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said. “Haven’t you ever had something like that?” She looked at me with a weird expression on her face. “I mean, I guess being in a motorcycle club is kind of like wanting to do something.” She smirked again—that same blend of shy and knowing.

I rolled my eyes. “Don’t get sassy,” I told her. “And I get that, but why now? You’ve really been working hard for it.”

Ella sighed again. “You don’t get it,” she said. “I want to help people. That’s all I want to do. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. And I was broke and homeless for a long time. I traveled around the country working odd jobs and hitching rides. It was cute until I got to my mid-twenties, and then suddenly, I felt like a failure.”

I whistled. “That’s some story, kid,” I said, looking around the inside of the cab. It wasn’t new, but it was extremely clean and well taken care of. I knew rigs didn’t come cheap. “How’d you come across this beast you’re driving? I can’t imagine waitressing would have done that for you.”

Ella shook her head. “I had a…family friend who helped out,” she said, blushing slightly. “He was a friend of my parents. I showed up on his doorstep, alone, without a friend in the world, and he took me in and helped me. He helped me study and pass the exams for med school, and then he let me borrow his rig to use for trucking. That’s how I’ve made money. I rig for a semester or two, then take a semester at school. I only have two semesters left before I graduate, so I’ve really come a pretty long way.”

I whistled again. “That is impressive. So this family friend…what kind of guy was he?” Ella blushed again and didn’t answer. I imagined some grizzled old man, staring down the front of her shirt while she was studying.

“He’s really sweet,” she said, as if reading my mind. “He never would have done anything gross. He really cared about me, he wanted me to succeed.”

“Is he still around?”

Ella sighed. “He’s in a nursing home. He left me his truck when he started losing mobility. I feel bad, but there isn’t much I can do except go visit him when I’m home. I try to do decent things like that sometimes.” She looked away and I saw that her whole face was covered in a red blush. She hastily wiped a tear away from her eyes and tried to smile. I didn’t have the grace to look away; even when Ella was upset, she was still fuckable.

“So what if I pay for your schooling?” I asked, leaning back against the bench seat. “Wouldn’t that help you out? You could finish much more quickly, and then you could spend some time with the old man.”

She shook her head immediately. “No,” she said, before I even had time to push the issue. “No, I can’t do that, Mickey. It doesn’t work like that.”

I frowned. Women
loved
my money. One of the perks of being an outlaw was that I basically had a disposable income. If something ever happened, I could always rest assured that I’d be rolling in dough again by the end of the day. And I loved being generous almost as much as women liked taking what I offered.

“I mean, I can spare it, honey, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said, grinning at her. When I smiled, the side of my face hurt from the stitches. The anesthetic was beginning to wear off and I was starting to feel grumpier than before.

“No, that’s not it,” Ella said quickly. “I don’t want to take anyone’s money. I’m doing this for myself. I don’t want to date a criminal,” she said. “I mean, I can’t. I can’t risk anything that would get me in trouble. I can’t do that anymore, that part of my life is over.”

I narrowed my eyes. “There’s a lot in those words, honey,” I said, feeling slightly offended. “And I never said I was a criminal. And what do you mean by ‘that’s in the past’?”

Ella shook her head. “Forget I said anything,” she said quickly.

I grinned. I’d heard all of that before. I saw millions of my girls standing in front of me, telling me they didn’t want to date me. It was easy to say that, but harder to stick to it. Especially when money and my hard cock were calling out to them. They always changed their minds. Every single fucking time. It was the easiest thing in the world, getting women to change their minds. Especially when I was involved. I was practically a pro at it; it was like a sport to me.

“You’ll change your mind,” I said confidently. Ella rolled her eyes, but I saw that her body was still angled towards mine. Her breath was coming in hot little bursts and I could practically see her pulse racing from where I sat. “Can I take you on a real date? I’d like to change your mind as quickly as I can,” I said with a grin. “And that’s the best way I can think of doing it.”

Ella shook her head quickly, sending her brunette locks flying over her shoulders. “No,” she said, a little more forcefully than before. “I told you no.”

I chuckled. She was so adorably innocent that I couldn’t deal. She liked clinging to her high-minded principles now that she’d finished stitching me up, but that hadn’t been the case a few minutes ago. A few minutes ago, she’d been shrieking and crying my name in the throes of a wild orgasm. A few minutes ago, she’d been mine. Completely. But now she was shy again. I laughed deep in my throat. Yes, Ella was an innocent at heart alright. And I knew that soon enough, I could get that to change as well.

“Ella, I’m not a criminal.”

Ella looked away. “I can’t take any chances,” she said softly. “Don’t you get that? I mean, seriously, Mickey. You showed up in a box in the back of my rig. Your friends ditched you. You just grabbed me and—” She clapped a hand over her mouth and blushed red. “I mean, nothing,” she said quickly, dropping her gaze.

My chuckle turned into full-blown laughter. Ella was so cute when she embarrassed herself. It was by far one of the cutest things I’d seen her do. I watched her situate herself on the bench and put her medical gear away. When she pulled her phone out of her bag, I reached across her lap and snatched it away.

Ella gaped at me. “What the fuck, Mickey? That’s mine!”

I shrugged and dialed a number, holding the phone up to my ear. “I have to make a call,” I said pointedly. “You wanna keep it down?”

Chapter Eleven

Ella

I stared at Mickey in horror. I couldn’t believe he’d just grabbed my phone! He was so infuriating, and now I couldn’t get rid of him.
But he grabbed you the same way, and you didn’t mind
, I thought bitterly. It was true, I hadn’t minded. Whenever I thought about the course of our interaction over the day, it made my head spin. For one thing, he’d promised not to touch me but then he had, over and over. And what’s more? I’d liked it. Hell, I’d loved it. No one had made my body sing like Mickey had, and I doubted anyone would ever again. He was like a god who had come down to earth just to give me orgasms. It was crazy.

Mickey caught me watching him and made a point of turning around. The stitches were swollen and oozing blood, but I knew he’d be okay. Head injuries always looked worse than they were because of how much blood flowed to the head. Even a bruise could take a long time to go away. I knew Mickey would have some swelling in the morning, but overall, he’d be fine. He might even have a new scar to add to his arsenal, just another way to get hapless girls like myself in bed with him.

Stop it, Ella,
I ordered myself.
You’re not really a girl anymore, are you? You’re thirty-one, for fuck’s sake.
Realizing my age made the events of the evening seem even worse. I was thirty-one, and I’d never been fucked like that. I was thirty-one, and it had taken a rogue like Mickey to really show me what anatomy was all about. I shivered when I remembered his rough tongue caressing my skin. Our sex had been explosive, but short. I wanted hours with him, hours naked in bed, hours torturing each other. I closed my eyes and imagined him trailing his tongue down my bare body and seizing between my legs, making me come again and again and again, until I was sobbing for release.

I couldn’t stand the paradox in my head. A man like Mickey was everything I despised: cocky, arrogant, insufferable. The kind of man who made promises that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ever keep. The kind of man who could bring me to the edge of the world and back in the bedroom. The kind of man who could do anything I wanted him to, except treat me with respect. I knew that I’d been sending him mixed signals. But then he was the one who hadn’t been trustworthy with me, either. He was the one who’d promised to keep his hands off me and then grabbed me and ripped my clothes off. He was the one who couldn’t respect my property. I burned with indignity at the way he’d grabbed my phone.

There was something dangerous and entitled about him. It wasn’t just the way he’d shown up in the back of my rig, it was the way he swaggered around and acted like the world was his for the taking. And the way he’d been so nonplussed about his friends forgetting about him? I couldn’t believe that. There
had
to be more to the story. There just had to be. If it had been me, I would have been panicking. Then again, I didn’t really have any friends to think of. I didn’t have anyone who could have let me down, except myself. I wasn’t like Mickey. And his sure, smug attitude? I had no idea what was up with that. I chalked it up to the fact that he was used to getting what he wanted in life. After all, that much was obvious. He was one of those guys who acted like life had been handed to him on a silver platter. Seeing his hard, muscular body, I had no doubts that he’d been in some hard places in life. But it was hard to think about his struggles being the same as mine. It was hard to imagine that someone who prided himself on being a member of an MC “brotherhood” would have ever been homeless, or hungry, or working as a waitress in a dusty diner in the middle of nowhere. I almost resented him: he was cocky because life had been overwhelmingly easy. That must be it. There was no other answer.

Part of me wanted to hate him, but the other part of me couldn’t forget how amazing he’d felt inside of me. I’d never been fucked like that. I never imagined sex could be like that, except for in the movies. It wasn’t the kind of thing I ever thought would happen to me. Mickey was cocksure alright, but that was one area where he deserved to be a little cocky. And his cock had been
anything
but little. When I shifted on the bench seat, I could feel my sore labia pressing against the crotch of my jeans. It wasn’t exactly painful, but it reminded me that Mickey was no longer inside of me, and
that
was painful.

Mickey had taken the phone away from his ear and he was casually scrolling through my text messages. I felt my face start to heat up when I realized he’d see the messages from Rob.

Rob
. I’d actually forgotten about Rob. I’d met Rob a couple of weeks ago online, on a forum for rig drivers. I’d been looking for some help with a mechanical problem—I didn’t want to bother Paul in the nursing home—and I’d made the crucial mistake of revealing my gender. Female truckers aren’t really a thing, and while most of the men had automatically resorted to petty harassment, Rob had sent me a private message telling me that he’d be more than happy to take a look at my rig. I was overjoyed until I realized it was just a ruse to get in my pants. When he’d shown up with a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates, I’d kicked him out of my apartment before he’d even had the chance to take off his shoes. But somehow, he hadn’t gotten the message. Since then he’d been texting me and messaging me on Facebook nonstop. I wanted him to leave me alone, but if I was being honest, a little part of me liked the attention.

Thinking about Mickey seeing the messages made me flush. Mickey was scrolling through the texts and I felt a hot blush rising over my cheeks. He looked at me with his eyebrows raised.

“What?” I asked hotly, looking away so he wouldn’t see. “What?”

“Nothing,” Mickey said. He chuckled and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I need to call the club and check in, you good with that, little girly?”

“Don’t call me little,” I said under my breath. When he’d dialed a number and held the phone up to his ear, I frowned. I didn’t get it. I knew that he’d seen the messages between me and Rob, but he hadn’t said anything. And while I knew how I felt about Rob, maybe the messages were a little more ambiguous. It made me feel shitty to admit, but I knew that I hadn’t been as forceful with him as I could have been. I should have just told him to fuck right off and then blocked his number, but I hadn’t done that yet. Besides, I was still having that problem with my rig.

Mickey glanced at me while he was on the phone; the volume was turned up so loud that I could hear the other line ringing. I knew he was jealous: his jaw was clenched, his lips set in a thin line, and I could see a muscle twitching on the side of his face. It almost made me grin. I couldn’t believe that someone like me, Ella, could make someone like Mickey jealous.

But he’s already made you jealous
, I thought to myself, recalling the scene in the truck stop. Every woman had let their eyes hang all over him like fur on a dog, and I knew that I hadn’t reacted well. I’d been so obvious that Mickey had called me on it as soon as the waitress had walked away. Yeah, I’d been jealous. And while Mickey had no right to be jealous now, I’d
really
had no right to be jealous then. After all, we hadn’t even touched by that time! Well, not sexually at least.

I heard Mickey’s voice floating over to me from the other side of the cab. He didn’t have his usual fun, jokey tone that he took with me. In fact, he sounded more severe and stern than ever. He didn’t sound playful at all. He almost sounded scary. I thought of him taking the same growling tone with me and another flush passed over my cheeks. Mickey knew how to rile me up like no one else. I didn’t understand the hold he had on me; it was unlike anything else that I’d ever experienced. Even with Derek, our relationship had felt equal. I’d been the one pushing him for sex! With Mickey, well, I just couldn’t see that happening.

Mickey broke my train of thought when he tossed my phone back onto my lap. When I looked up at him, he jerked his head up.

“Come on, let’s get going,” he said, yawning and stretching. A wave of his body musk washed over me and I tried to hide my arousal. My body was so aware of his presence, it was like I couldn’t possibly sit down without thinking about how close he was to me. I could practically feel the heat and lust coming off of him. It had been half an hour since we’d fucked, and I could tell he was already dying to do it again.

“Where?” I frowned. “Did you get in touch with your friends?”

Mickey shrugged. “They’re at the clubhouse,” he said. “Can you drop me off? Or are you afraid of getting arrested?” He grinned at me wickedly. “You know, because we’re all a bunch of criminals.”

I rolled my eyes and brought my rig to life. The headlights washed over the restaurant and my stomach grumbled. I’d completely forgotten about the cheeseburger dinner that Mickey had ordered for us, and suddenly I felt ravenously hungry. My stomach rumbled and I gasped in embarrassment and surprise.

“Don’t worry, princess,” Mickey said in a smooth tone. “You can get a snack when you drop me off.”

“Fine,” I snapped. “Let’s go.” I shifted my rig into gear and got back on the highway towards Dos Palmos. The night was still, an endless beast of dark, and I knew that it was unlikely I’d get any sleep that night. By the time I got home, showered, and had a snack, the sun would be coming up soon. My little vacation had been off to an explosive start, and I doubted the rest of it would even compare.

As we approached the clubhouse, I kept shifting my gaze over to Mickey. He had his eyes closed and was leaning his head against the window. His features were twitching and I realized that he’d actually managed to fall asleep in the bumpy cab. I envied him. I was so keyed up that I didn’t think I could sleep for hours. When I closed my eyes, instead of seeing highway mile markers, I saw Mickey’s gloriously sculpted body leaning over me and taking me.

“Yo, wake up,” I said, reaching over and shaking him awake. “We’re almost here. Where do you want me to drop you?”

Mickey yawned. “It doesn’t matter,” he said lazily, rubbing his mouth with his hand. “Anywhere is fine. If it’s too hard for you to pull in, don’t do it.”

“I can do it,” I snapped. “I’ve only been rigging for years, after all.”

“I forgot,” Mickey said with a grin. “The woman truck driver extraordinaire!”

“You better believe it,” I said drily. I expertly downshifted the truck and stopped right in front of the clubhouse. It wasn’t an intimidating-looking building—it was a garage with a low wooden building attached, but I could see decorative art of grim reapers and skulls and crosses.
The Irish
was painted on a wooden banner above the building. It looked so innocuous, but I wondered about everything that went down inside. Probably lots of criminal activity, even murder. I jumped as Mickey grabbed my arm and turned me to face him.

“Thanks for the lift,” Mickey said. He raised his eyebrows at me.

“No problem,” I said, struggling to keep my voice in a neutral tone. It was harder saying goodbye to him than I’d imagined, and I wondered what he was going to do now that he was free of me. As I was thinking, the deafening roar of motorcycles approached the rig and circled round, pulling into the parking lot. I saw a bunch of gruff, leather-suited men hopping off and walking inside the clubhouse. When they flicked the lights on, I saw that the bulbs inside were red.

“Bye,” Mickey said. He hopped down from the rig and strutted off towards the clubhouse.

Inside I felt a mix of emotions that really surprised me. Who was this guy, exactly? And why did I have the sudden urge to run after him and wrap my body around his?

I shifted my rig into gear and pulled away from the clubhouse. When it was almost out of sight, I pressed my hand against the horn and honked loudly.
Let’s see how he explains that one to the guys
, I thought with a snicker.
There’s no way they’re gonna believe he got a ride from a chick.