Club Property: Adults Only Motorcycle Club Romance: Roadrunners MC (12 page)

“So… you were expecting to see him when you opened the door,” her father said.

“Of course,” she replied. “It’s his home after all, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to see you. What exactly are you doing here?”

“We were worried about you,” he replied.

“Oh yeah, I just bet you were,” she said in a disbelieving tone and folded her arms. “How did you find out anyway?”

“Bella was trying to get you at the college to let you know a letter arrived for you at the house,” he replied. “She got through to your student counsellor and was told an interesting tale.”

“Shit,” Carrie let out under her breath then raised her voice. “It was nice of her to tell you and Mum.”

“Don’t blame your sister,” Samuel replied. “She didn’t know what the hell was going on or where you were. What did you expect her to do?”

Carrie let out a sigh. She knew her father was right and that if the tables were turned she most likely would have done the same thing.

“I got Bella to contact your friends at college,” her father went on. “One of them spilled the beans about what you were doing.”

“Darlene,” Bella let out and saw her father nod his head. “So…” she went on, “you used your army contacts to track down Carl.”

She dropped in a seat and watched as her father moved to the sofa to sit down.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I needed to know if there was a chance,” she replied. “You know I liked him.”

“Everyone at the base knew about your crush on Carl,” Samuel said. “You didn’t exactly hide it, but that was when you were a teenager and you haven’t even seen him for four years. He left the base as a married man as well, so what suddenly put the idea in your head to go chasing after him now?”

Carrie shrugged her shoulders.

“I never really got him out of my system completely, to be honest,” she confessed. “I knew coming to San Francisco was probably a stupid thing to do, but once the idea was in my head I couldn’t stop myself. Like I say, I needed to know if things might actually work out between us and coming here was the only way to move on with my life… one way or the other.”

Samuel tightened his lips as he stared at his daughter.

“And what did you find?” he asked.

“I found out there was a chance,” Carrie answered.

“And what about your college course?” her father asked.

She shrugged her shoulders again.

“There are colleges in San Francisco,” she said. “I’m sure I could do something here if I wanted to carry on studying.”

She saw the expression on her father’s face and knew that her comment annoyed him, but it was her life and she was going to be the one making the decisions that affected it. If that irritated him, he would just have to cope with it.

“And Carl is happy with you being here, is he?” he asked.

“Well, he’s not married anymore and he’s not seeing anyone,” Carrie replied.

“That doesn’t exactly answer my question,” he went on.

Carrie was quiet for a few seconds as she mulled over the last few days.

“I think he has his reservations,” she admitted honestly. “But I’d say we definitely have a chance together. I know he has feelings for me and seeing him again made me realize how much I wanted to be with him.”

“He’s not what he seems, Carrie,” her father cautioned.

She narrowed her eyes as she glared at him.

“You would say that,” she accused him.

“Well, the information I found out got me more than this address,” Samuel went on. “As far as I understand it, he is part of a motorcycle gang called the Roadrunners.”

“No, that’s not right,” she let out, but hesitated as something Carl said came to her.

His words had been along the lines of him being a mechanic amongst other things. He never told her what those other things were, though, and that meant what her father was saying might very well be true. Crash certainly dressed like a biker and she recalled wearing his leather jacket the day before. On the other hand, he didn’t ride a bike, or at least she hadn’t seen him on one.

“When will Carl get here?” Samuel asked.

Her father’s words brought Carrie out of her thoughts and she looked at him.

“He said he would come home today,” she replied.

“What time is he due here?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “All he said was that he would return from his trip today.”

“Where was he going?”

Carrie was silent after the question was fired at her and it was her father who spoke.

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t,” she said in a voice that was more petulant than she intended.

She got to her feet and walked to the window to look outside.

“It seems like the man you want to be with might not have told you everything,” Samuel commented.

“I’ve only been here a couple of days,” Carrie protested. “It’s not like I know everything about him.”

“And if he’s a member of a motorcycle gang?” her father asked.

“So what,” she said in a determined tone. “It doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.”

“And what if he doesn’t come back?”

Carrie thought of the night she and Crash shared together and couldn’t believe that he would just walk away from it. If he was a member of a motorcycle gang, then it was just something she would need to deal with. After making the effort to track him down and finding there was a chance for them, she wasn’t about to just walk away.

“He will come back,” she said and turned to her father. “So you should just go because I’m not leaving.”

Samuel remembered the words of Bella that if he came down too heavy handed he would just push Carrie into the arms of Carl. He decided to heed the warning, but wasn’t about to walk out of the door and abandon his daughter after traveling so far.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” Carrie replied and turned her attention out of the window once more.

She was certain that Crash would return that day and it was just a question of waiting, so that’s what she set her mind to do.

“Are you being fucking serious?” Patch let out in an incredulous voice.

“What did you expect?” Six replied. “After the job went to pieces so badly, we were hardly going to drive home after only a couple of days.”

“I get that,” Patch said. “But I didn’t anticipate a forced layoff that would last quite so long.”

“Well you better get used to the idea because we won’t be traveling to San Francisco anytime soon,” Six went on. “Things are still way too hot and the three of us showing our faces would just enflame the situation. Supposedly the Disciples are screaming blue murder that we stiffed them and didn’t supply their weapons as promised. The Mob was already on the warpath about us muscling in on their weapons and drugs trade. The fact that their planned ambush of us ended with two of their men being taken out has just upped the ante and made them a much more dangerous enemy. The word is they are gunning for the Roadrunners that killed their men, so we need to keep a low profile until things blow over.”

“That could be a long time considering just how fucked up things got yesterday,” Crash pointed out.

“We’re probably talking in terms of weeks, but there’s no way of knowing how many, so get used to being away from home,” Six replied. “I was told to keep in touch to get the word of when things are safe enough for us to make a move. We can only start thinking about a return when that happens.”

“Shit,” Patch spat out in a frustrated voice. “This isn’t even our fault. All we did was react to a bad situation that wasn’t of our making. Is there any news on how the Mob found out about our transport job?”

Six shook his head.

“The Disciples are adamant it didn’t come from them,” he said. “Unless either of you want to confess something to me, I can’t see that the information was leaked from the Roadrunners.”

“Great,” Patch exclaimed and threw up his arms. “So nobody knows anything and we have to stay hidden in this shithole for weeks on end.”

Crash looked around the kitchen they were sitting in. It was well laid out and neat, as was the rest of the property from what he’d seen of it.

“I’ve been in worse,” he commented. “As safe houses go, this is one of the better places I’ve been holed up in.”

“We’ll go fucking stir crazy being stuck in here for weeks, with no real prospect of going home,” Patch complained. “What the hell are we supposed to do?”

“You could always go to San Francisco and take on the Mob,” Crash pointed out. “I’m sure they would be happy to see you.”

Patch let out an exasperated sigh as he put his hands over his eyes.

“I told you a fucking new job was a bad idea,” he went on. “Didn’t I say that?”

“Yeah, well we can’t change things now,” Six replied. “What’s done is done, so quit your complaining. We’ll just have to make the best of things for the moment. Only the boss knows where we are, so I’m assuming there’s no way we can be tracked. It’s just a case of getting through the next few weeks and hopefully the heat will pass.”

“What about the job?” Patch asked. “Are the Disciples still expecting us to see through the deal?”

“There’s no point in worrying about that,” Six said. “It’s on the back burner and might come into play depending on what happens in the next few weeks. Our instructions are to keep our heads down and not bring any attention to ourselves.”

The three of them went silent in contemplation of the situation they now found themselves in. It was Crash that finally broke it as he got to his feet.

“Anyone want a beer?”

The other two nodded their heads, so he got three bottles from the fridge and handed them out. He wasn’t really in the mood to listen to any more of Patch’s grumbling about new jobs and being stuck in a shithole, so he decided to go and lie down.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he said and walked out of the kitchen.

Climbing the stairs to the first floor of the property, he walked along to the bedroom he was using and went inside. He closed the door and propped his head up on a few pillows when he got on the bed. It allowed him to drink his beer while his mind ticked over.

Their flight to get across the border the previous day lasted longer than they expected, with the state of the truck not helping matters and making it difficult to travel at speed. Not that they really could on the narrow, bumpy roads they were using. They eventually crossed into Oregon, but it wasn’t as if they could relax, and they’d remained on the smallest of back roads to give them the best chance of avoiding detection. That meant it took around four hours to get to the safe house and they placed the truck out of sight in the garage then unloaded the weapons to stash them in the crawl space under the property.

They’d switched on the television immediately after they finished the work to find that the story of the explosion and gunfight was being reported. There was no mention of the Roadrunners being involved in it, and the speculation of those saying anything was that the encounter was infighting between different factions of the Mob. That was good news for them, although they were a long way from being in the clear.

It was only later that night when Crash was in the quiet of the bedroom that his mind turned to what he left behind in his apartment. The compulsion to phone Carrie came over him and he gave into it in the early hours of the morning. The call rang out and wasn’t answered, which meant she was asleep and didn’t hear the ringing or she’d taken his advice and left. He suspected it was more than likely the former of those, but passed on calling again.

That was partly because he decided to keep himself busy and he’d gathered what tools he could find in the house and garage the following morning then set about repairing the truck. It gave him something to concentrate on, so he didn’t have to think about the situation he was in. He started by fixing the alignment of the rear wheels and spent until the early afternoon completing that. The damaged bodywork was a more difficult job to get done right, but he worked for the rest of the day on hammering the metal into some semblance of its previous shape. It was still obvious the truck had been involved in a collision, but the vehicle was at least in decent condition to drive should they need it.

He’d gone inside to the discussion about how long they likely needed to be in hiding and now that he was lying in the quiet of the bedroom, he was unable to stop his thoughts returning to Carrie. That annoyed him to an extent, since she only came in his life a few days before after four years of not really thinking about her. She shouldn’t be in his thoughts at all… but she was. He got his phone out and considered calling the apartment, but eventually couldn’t bring himself to do it. A twenty-year-old college girl coming into his world was something he never envisaged and he couldn’t really get his head around the idea of her being a permanent fixture in his life.

He guessed that she would still be at his apartment awaiting his return, but that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, and he looked at the screen of his phone once more and wondered if he should tell her what happened. Again he decided not to and slowly came to the conclusion that it would be for the best if he just ignored her in the hope she went away. It wasn’t like they were an item or he was breaking her heart. She would more than likely just make up her mind that he was a lying bastard for telling her he would return and eventually leave.

“Is that so bad?” he said under his breath then brought the bottle he was holding to his lips to take a drink of beer.

He couldn’t make up his mind if it was a bad thing or not. The sex they shared was certainly some of the best he’d ever experienced, and he would be more than happy to have that in his life. He suspected that Carrie would too if her enjoyment of the intimacy they shared for a night was anything to go by. On the other hand, she was a twenty-year-old girl and thirteen years his junior. It was difficult for him to think of her as anything other than the cheeky young teen that liked to tease him, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get past that.

He could remember doing his best to avoid her at the army base. That was mainly because of her young age, but also for fear of getting in trouble with his commanding officer, and there was still an element of that in his mind. Staff Sergeant Samuel Nelson would definitely not be happy with his precious daughter taking up with a thirty-three year old ex-army biker, and he wasn’t sure he wanted the hassle of that in his life.

“Just let her leave and forget about her,” he told himself.

Every way he looked at the situation, it seemed the sensible course of action for him. However, it also worked on the assumption that Carrie would just walk away. He’d got an insight over the last few days of what a determined girl she could be when she wanted something, although he knew that already from his time on the army base a few years previously.

“Fuck,” he hissed through clenched teeth as he struggled with his thoughts.

It felt like his life was going to shit, and he really didn’t know what to do. He dropped his phone on the floor and tried to just relax and enjoy his beer. The reality of the situation was that he was stuck where he was for the next few weeks anyway, and there was no doubt that Carrie would be gone by the time things cooled down enough for him, Patch and Six to make their way to San Francisco.

For the moment he decided the best thing he could do when it came to her was nothing at all, and he finished his beer then closed his eyes to get some rest.