Ruined (The MC Motorcycle Club Romance Series - Book #1) (3 page)

I sought
Dax
out in the
mirror behind the bar. It was still too dark and shadowy for me to really get a
good look at his face, but I could see his form better now that my eyes
adjusted to the poor lighting. He was dressed in a white, wife-beater style
tank, blue jeans and black boots.
Dax
still had his
blond hair. I sighed, remembering how I used to love touching it.

Terrance was right about the muscle. His arms were
huge, as big around as my thighs and he was stretching his tank to its limit
across his chest. But the tattoos were the weirdest part.
Dax
always said he would never stain his body, but this guy had tattoos that ran
down both arms and were visible under the neck of his
tank
which
meant they went across his chest too.

“Aren’t prison tattoos black?” I asked stupidly.

Terrance looked at me
like
he couldn’t believe I was thinking about something so stupid. I was trying hard
to convince myself that the stranger in the corner wasn’t the man who used to
be the love of my life. If it were him, life as I had come to know it was about
to change…again.

“No,” Terrance said simply. “Not anymore. That’s old
school. It’s
him
, Liv. I need to go over there. He’s
looking right at us.”

This time I didn’t let Terrance stop me. I turned
all the way around and realized that he was looking right at us and it was most
definitely
Dax
. His signature jade green eyes had
always been his most captivating feature. They were huge and surrounded by
long, blond eyelashes. The first time I saw him I had trouble looking away.
However, this time I could see him looking at me, questioning. I felt my face
burning and I found the courage to turn away.

“I’m going over there,” Terrance said. “I have to
talk to him. I owe him that much.”

Before I had a chance to respond or protest, he headed
across the crowded bar. I didn’t expect it to go well and I really didn’t want
to watch. I couldn’t stop myself though. It was much too loud in there with the
music, the talking, and the laughing to hear anything. I watched anyway.

Terrance casually strolled over to him.
Dax
was still looking at me until Terrance got right next
to the booth and then he switched his attention to my new boyfriend. I couldn’t
see well, but I didn’t see a smile on his face as he looked up at Terrance. I
saw Terrance smile and watched as
Dax
said something
with a look on his face that told me I was probably better off not being able
to hear him.

Terrance was moving his hands as he talked. It was
what he did when he was trying to make someone understand his point. I didn’t
think
Dax
got it because he suddenly stood up. He
pushed Terrance in the chest.

I read his lips as he said, “Fuck you, Terrance.”
The bar got quiet, except for the music. The two men stared each other down,
but no one intervened.

I could tell by his posture as he came back over
that he wasn’t mad, but he was hurting inside. Whatever
Dax
said to him had hit home.

Dax
stood there and watched him for a minute and then he looked at me. He picked up
a beer from the table and chugged it and then stormed out of the bar. I saw
Bull look at him over his shoulder as he left, but he didn’t go after him—no
one did.

“He’s pissed, of course,” Terrance said, dropping
down onto the stool next to mine.

I put my hand on his shoulder and we sat for a
minute. I wanted to say something to make him feel better but I doubted there
were words for that.

He finally said, “He’s been my best friend since we
were two. We did everything together, we learned everything together. I
practically lived at his house after my mom bailed. He
was
locked
up and alone and I didn’t once go see him. What the hell kind of
best friend is that?”

“Terrance, you can’t blame yourself.”

“Why not?
He blames me. He just told me what a motherfucker I am for first abandoning him
and then for fucking his ex-girlfriend in the meantime. You know what, Olivia?
I had no defense for it either.”

“It’ll be okay.” I tried to convince him. “He
probably just needs some time to readjust to things. You and I didn’t do
anything wrong.
Dax
and I broke up before he even
went to trial. You and I didn’t start dating for another year after that. Besides,
you didn’t put him in prison. He did that to himself.”

The look on his face gave me the feeling he knew
things weren’t ever going to be all right between him and
Dax
.
I didn’t think I had ever seen him look so sad.

“You don’t date your best friend’s exes, it’s an
unwritten rule. I don’t know what the fuck I was thinking.”

I sighed. It was going to suck. Not only
was
Dax
back in town for me to deal with
but now Terrance seemed
to be rethinking our relationship. I was head
over heels in love with
Dax
back then, before he
screwed up and went to prison. My whole life
was wrapped up
in him, all of my hopes and dreams.

After he got busted, I tried going on
like
things were normal, but I just couldn’t do it. I was
failing my classes because I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about him in
jail. I finally just quit. It got to be too much.

I started working a day or two a week for my uncle
at the motorcycle shop. It was the shop that
Dax’s
dad and Terrance’s dad and all the other MC guys took their bikes for
modifications and repairs.

Terrance worked for Bull and his dad. He didn’t
touch any of the illegal stuff, not that he’d even admit any of that was going
on. I’m not sure if he really believed it or if he was just loyal but he wasn’t
like
Dax
. He didn’t talk about any of that other
stuff we all heard the whispers about.

What he did for them was bring in the bikes when my
uncle was to work on them and picked them up when he was finished. He ran parts
back and forth and I saw him almost every day. At first he was my link to
Dax
. I didn’t want to call his mother because I knew she would
try to convince me to stick by him. I wasn’t going to be her and
Dax
be Bull in twenty years; no way.

Terrance filled me in on
Dax’s
trial and his sentencing. I had gone to the courthouse, but I couldn’t bring
myself to sit in there and hear a judge remand him to prison. Besides, they
always brought him in to the courtroom in an orange jumpsuit and shackles and I
hated seeing him like that. That night, as
Dax
was on
his way to prison, Terrance sat up with me all night while I cried and he told
stories about
Dax
. He loved him as much as I did.

Terrance and I became friends and then lovers…and it
just stuck. But now, I had a feeling things were about to change. Terrance had
a lot of guilt. I wasn’t even sure he wouldn’t break up with me. I had my own
issues with
Dax
being back. I wouldn’t admit this to
anyone, but just those few minutes of looking at
Dax
across the bar made me want to run into his arms. I hadn’t let myself think
about how much I missed him or how much I still loved him for a
really long
time, until now.

CHAPTER
3

DAX

“Your mother says you’re thinking about going back
to school,” my dad said while lying next to the bike that he had propped up on
blocks.

“Yeah,” I said, handing him the wrench he was
holding his hand out
for
. “I
gotta
do something with my life, I guess.”

Dad lifted his head slightly and looked at me. He
knew better than to tell me that I could come and work for him in the “family”
business. He knew I was still pissed about giving up two years of my life for
him and his club, even though he had never actually admitted it had a thing to
do with him.
 
When you figure that the
felony convictions would follow me around forever I gave up a lot more than two
years.

He also knew that my mom would be pissed if he tried
to recruit me. She didn’t put her foot down about much with him, but when it
came to the club and me, she always had. I’m
pretty sure
it’s what saved me…if you can call what my life has become “saved.” I sometimes
wished she would have just left him and taken me with her when I was a kid.

“What is it you want to end up doing?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “I was majoring in business before I
went inside. I finished my AA while I was in there, but you can’t really do
anything with an AA in business. I’ll need to get a BA and maybe a master’s.”

“Hand me the torque,” he said. “And then do what
with all that?”

I handed him the other wrench and answered, “I don’t
know, a CPA or maybe even open my own business.”

“That would make your mother happy,” he said,
sitting up and lighting a cigarette.

“What about you?” I asked him.

He looked at me long and hard and in true Bull
fashion he said, “What about me? It
ain’t
my life, it’s yours. You have to figure it out.”

That’s what he had been telling me since I was
twelve. He was the perfect example of parenting gone wrong. It wasn’t that he
wanted to instill independence in me; it was that he really wasn’t all that
interested. He didn’t want to be that involved in case it didn’t work out. It
couldn’t come back on him. They should have used a portrait of him in parenting
classes to tell people what not to do.

He stood up and as he did I heard his knees pop. He
wasn’t a young man anymore. He looked down at the bike and asked, “You think
you can put the rest of it back together?”

I looked at the bike. It was mine, a 2003 FXDX with
an Arlen Ness fairing. For my sixteenth birthday in 2009, he had given it to
me. It had been his and it was the first ride I could call my own. I had it
painted at Olivia’s uncle’s shop, a color called “Mysterious Red.” Olivia
didn’t live there at the time. She came to live with her aunt and uncle for
college and that was when I had met her.

The bike also had black and chrome typhoon wheels
and chrome pipes. It had a twin cam
98 which
was
outdated. My dad and the other guys were running theirs much hotter. It would
work for me, for now. I had missed her while I
was locked up
and I was more than a little worried that he would sell her off or give her to
one of the other guys.

As far as whether or not I could put it together
myself, I had been putting bikes together since I was five. Terrance and I used
to have one we would rebuild just for fun when we were kids. We wanted to be
like our dads and the other guys when we grew up. It was sad to think about it.
I looked at my dad. I wanted to be anyone but him.

“Yeah, dad, I got it,” I told him. I knew the
psychology of thinking about him the way I did, yet spending all of my time there,
was really jacked up
. However, I didn’t have anything
else to do.

“All right, Blake and I have got some business to
handle this afternoon. Do you want to go for a ride with us?”

I knew full well that I should say no. That was
exactly what put my ass in CDC’s care for the last two years. I had gone for a
“ride” with some of my dad’s guys. We
got stopped
, I
wasn’t worried and I wasn’t carrying anything…or so I thought.

My fucking saddle bags
had been
packed
with ten “rocks” of pure heroin. They were wrapped in baggies and
stuffed inside thick plastic baggies and wrapped in soft cloth and loaded five
on a side into my bags underneath the stuff I normally kept in there. Each rock
was 0.4 oz. so all together they got me with four ounces. It was enough to land
me two felonies.
One for transporting with the intent to sell
and the other for intent to transfer across state lines.
Drug trafficking at its finest.

We
were headed
into Nevada
out of California at the time. It was just supposed to be a fun ride; at least
that was what I had thought. I was so fucking stupid. I really believed that
after I explained to the cops it wasn’t mine and they looked into my background
and saw that I was an honor student with absolutely no record at all I
would be let
go. Yeah right.

My stupidity didn’t stop there though. The cop that
handled the case knew in his gut this wasn’t me and I had to give the guy
credit…he did everything he could to convince me to point the finger at my dad
and his club. I wouldn’t do it though. There was the problem that although I had
suspected my father dealt in drugs, I had never really seen any hard evidence
of it.

I was actually even working under the delusion that
my dad was going to step up at some point and try to save me. Maybe at the last
minute but I just knew he would step up, especially if this had anything to do
with him. He wouldn’t let me go to prison for something I didn’t do. He
wouldn’t leave me there to rot if it was for something he was ultimately
responsible
for
. There was nothing in my history with
him to back up any of those delusions, but I was still hopeful…right up until
the night they loaded me on that bus and gave me my brand new blue denim shirt
and jeans that said CDC in bold yellow letters across the back and down the
side.