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  And he smiles.

  Heat exploded in my back, radiating through my shoulder, followed by the mind-numbing pain as the bullet connected with bone, tearing through the front of my shoulder. I’d been shot before, but it’s not a feeling you can get used to. Tiny grenades tearing through your skin and muscles then exploding once it’s sunk deep enough inside of you. Every nerve in my spine jumped and my arms contorted, steering the bike sideways, causing it to swerve all over the road. “FUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKK” I screamed through my teeth while white-knuckling the handlebars, righting my bike just seconds before my front tire was about to dip into the ditch lining the side of the road. Grass and dirt fanned out from under my tires, mud rained down on top of me as my tires again took purchase of the road.

  With bullets still whizzing around my head it took everything I had to keep the bike straight and keep up my speed. Just a few small ticks on the speedometer in the downward direction and I was a dead man.

  I may not have been wearing a cut, but I wasn’t some bitch, I was running toward Thia, not running for my life.

  I slammed on the breaks, spinning my bike around to face the bitches who were coming at me full speed. Tank and Cash. Two brothers I’d personally recruited as prospects.

  Ungrateful motherfuckers.

  Two brothers who were also about to learn the hard way that just because I wasn’t wearing my cut didn’t mean that I was weak.

  Or that I forgot how to pull a motherfucking trigger.

  My bike continued to spin as I lifted my hands off the handlebars and pulled both guns from my shoulder holsters. Pain ripped through my back at my sudden movement, but my aim was steady.

  I enjoyed the look of shock on those motherfucker’s faces as they barreled toward me and I began firing. Cash went down first, his bike turning on its side as I put two in his chest. Tank followed, flipping over his handlebars after I put one through his right cheek.

  My bike spun out of control, but it looked like it was the world around me spinning instead of me. Orange groves circled me and so did the smell of something rotting. I careened off the side of the road, smashing into the ditch I’d managed to avoid only minutes earlier. I sailed over my bike, flying through the air, smiling.

  I might have been going out, but at least I was going out knowing that I took those two motherfuckers with me.

  My last thought before I hit the ground was of a girl with pink hair.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Thia

  Mr. Carson had wobbled away on his own accord and I ran into the orange grove before he could remember he had a gun of his own. I was disgusted with what I’d done, and even more disgusted with the fact that I didn’t regret it.

  When my lungs burned and I couldn’t run any more I dropped down to my knees. “I’m so sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry I couldn’t save all this for you. For us. But most of all I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you,” I said into the trees. The leaves around me rustled with the wind, every so often I heard the THUD of a falling orange.

  I briefly contemplated burning it all to the ground, going as far as picking a leaf off a nearby tree to test how dry it was and how fast it would burn when the ground beneath me rattled, little bits of foliage and loose chunks of dirt jumped around my knees.

  I’d lived in Florida my entire life, and we’d never had an earthquake before.

  Was an earthquake even possible?

  A rumbling sound started in the distance and I stood up in a panic, preparing myself for the earth to shift. The rumble grew louder and louder and my heart beat faster and faster, every muscle in my body tensed as the seconds ticked by, slowly filling the silence.

  It was a sound you felt before you heard. A rumble that grew louder and vibrated in your bones.

  An earthquake on two wheels.

  A motorcycle. And from the sound of it, maybe more than one.

  Bear.

  He’d come for me.

  Don’t be stupid, Thia. Millions of people ride motorcycles besides him, it’s not him.

  But it could be the MC.

  And then…BOOM.

  An explosion so loud my hair blew into the wind like a bomb had gone off.

  A burst of bright orange light flew into the night followed by the contrast of billowing grey smoke against the cloudless black sky.

  I was running toward the explosion before I could talk myself out of it, reaching the road in less than a minute.

  The mangled wreckage of metal was strewn about both sides of the road. I wasn’t sure if it was one bike or two until I saw two bodies strewn across the road, lying at lifeless unnatural angles. I ran to the first body and my heart started to race out of control. The man’s arms covered in so much blood I couldn’t make out any of his features or tattoos.

  In a panic I knelt down and used all my strength to try and turn the man over but he didn’t budge. Then I pictured the face of the man I didn’t want it to be and I needed to know if it was him. I tried again, using all the strength I didn’t know I had. I wasn’t successful at turning him completely over, but had managed to get him on his side. The second I saw the rounded face and short brown hair I breathed a sigh of relief.

  When I came upon the wreckage I was positive it was a crash, an accident. I was sure that there were two dead bodies lying in the road who’d died on impact.

  I was wrong.

  I ran to the next man who was lying face up, with his head turned to the side, his eyes and mouth were wide open.

  A bullet hole in his cheek.

  I gasped. Standing up, I backed up into the grove from where I came, like for some reason I had to keep my eyes on the wreckage and the bodies or they would pop back up and come after me.

  That’s when I realized that my panic that one of the bodies would be Bear was for no reason. Both the dead men were wearing Beach Bastard cuts.

  They’d come for me.

  Bear hadn’t.

  I knew he wouldn’t, but I still couldn’t help but feel disappointed and afraid all at the same time.

  There could be more of them on their way.

  Slowly I backed up until the trees had almost swallowed me entirely. Crickets chirped all around me. Frogs croaked and the bug zapper on the front porch could be heard zapping all the way from the porch, which was a good half mile away. Further and further I stepped until I backed right up into something big and hard that definitely wasn’t a tree. Chills shot up my spine as a hand came around my waist and another covered my mouth, muffling my scream.

  “Ti, stop, it’s me,” Bear growled in my ear as I struggled against him.

  I stilled.

  He had come for me.

  Bear loosened his grip and I spun around in his arms. The moon was big and bright, acting like a spotlight right above our heads. He was shirtless and covered in dirt. His normally blond hair and beard were streaked with dark mud. His jeans were torn at the knee. “How busy is this road?” he asked suddenly.

  “Not busy. There is one other farm, but it’s back up the other way. We stop on a dead end.”

  “Anyone scheduled to come up this way? Mailman, deliveries of any kind. I need you to think.”

  “No, nothing. Mail goes to the box in town and the grove has been out of business for a while.”

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  There were no hoses anywhere, no running water since the water company turned off the supply when we couldn’t pay the bill.

  THUD. Bear spun around. “What the fuck was that?” he asked.

  “Oranges. They sound like that when they fall from the trees,” I said. With his back turned to me I saw the source of the dripping.

  It was coming from Bear.

  Blood.

  Streams of bright blood that appeared black under the light of the moon dripped from the back of his shoulder, merging onto his belt, then falling onto the soft ground. “You’re hurt,” I said, pointing out the obvious.

  Bear turned back around, his eyes darkene
d and glowed like blue flames. “I don’t give a fuck about my shoulder, Ti. What I give a fuck about right now is you taking off when I told you it wasn’t safe.” Bear looked down at me like I’d crossed him in a way I didn’t understand. “Maybe you didn’t believe me when I said the MC would be coming for you.” He nodded to the bodies in the road. “You believe me now?” he asked, his nostrils flaring.

  I took a step back and he took a step forward, not allowing me the distance I wanted to put between us. “Why did you come?”

  “What the fuck did I just say? I came because you didn’t listen. I came because it’s not safe and if I hadn’t come you’d either be dead right now or wishing you were dead once they got through with you,” Bear said. And for the very first time, I was afraid of him. Not because I thought he would hurt me, but because I’d never seen him so angry.

  “I don’t understand you,” I said.

  “You don’t have to understand me,” he growled, and as if he was proving his point he crashed his lips over mine.

  I wanted to push him away. I wanted to tell him no. But after thinking he could have been one of those dead men in the road, my body wouldn’t let me. My brain wanted to scream at him, punch him, but when his tongue ran along the seam of my mouth seeking entrance my traitorous lips opened for him, groaning when his tongue found mine, pressing myself up against his dirty body. He cupped his hands around my face and kissed me like he was screaming at me, punishing me for disobeying him, for being in his life, for not being in his life.

  I took his punishment and gave it back to him, telling him all the things with our kiss that I didn’t understand myself. The coolness of his rings pressed against the skin of my back underneath the hem of my shirt.

  Bear pulled back, breathing heavily, staring through me like he could see right into my soul. “You just have to fucking listen to me, but as much as I want to have a conversation with you right now where you tell me what a shit person I am and I tell you that you’re the most anger inducing girl I’d ever laid eyes on. And much as I want to keep my mouth on you, we have another couple of problems I’m gonna need you to help me take care of first before they become bigger problems.” Bear wrapped a muddied hand around my neck and closed the distance between us.

  “What?” I asked, trembling under the weight of his stare, somehow forgetting about the dead men lying only feet away from us.

  “You know how to sew?”

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “Not that odd seeing as I’m bleeding out,” Bear said, releasing me and grabbing onto his shoulder. “It’s clean through, just needs some putting back together.”

  “Shit. Here,” I said, ripping off my shirt I stood up on my toes to press it to the back of his shoulder blade.

  “Fuck,” Bear groaned. I let up on the pressure, thinking I’d hurt him. “Maybe you should let me bleed out. Might be worth it,” he said, licking his lips. I followed his gaze to my naked breasts. My nipples hardened under his stare.

  “Fuck, Ti, you may not have pulled the fucking trigger, but I got a feeling you’re going to kill me yet.” His hands settled on my ass, while I tried to stop the bleeding, his fingers kneading into my flesh as I concentrated my efforts on his wound.

  “What’s the other thing we have to do?” I asked, feeling the blush burning my cheeks and neck, grateful for the cover of night to hide my embarrassment over being so obviously turned on.

  “Cleanup.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Thia

  “I can’t go in there,” I said, stopping just short of the front porch steps, my arms crossed over my bare chest.

  “Needle and thread,” Bear said, wincing, still holding my bloodied shirt over his shoulder. “Where would I find it?” he asked and I was relieved he wasn’t going to force me inside.

  “Sewing room off the kitchen, right on the left. Mama kept that stuff in a tackle box in the draw next to her Singer.”

  Bear disappeared into the house, emerging a few minutes later with my mom’s entire tackle box. “No lights,” Bear said, tucking his lighter, which he had been using to guide his way through the dark house, into the pocket of his jeans. Of course there were no lights. The bill was past due before my parents’ deaths, and the dead don’t pay the electric bill. Most of the time, in our house, neither did the living.

  He tossed me a blue tank top that he’d gotten from my room and I hurried to cover myself with it. “Thank you,” I said. Bear’s response was a small grunt.

  I opened the toolbox on the porch and picked out a flashlight. I clicked the button and thankfully it came to life. “You’ve been here all day and you haven’t gone in yet?” Bear asked, sitting on the top step with his back to me. I shined the light down as Bear picked out what he needed from the tackle box.

  “I didn’t plan on coming here at all.”

  “Then why come back here?” he asked, pouring vodka from a bottle that I didn’t notice he’d come out with onto the thread. He handed the bottle to me. “Pour this on the back of my shoulder.”

  I grabbed the bottle and using the flashlight I was finally able to get a good look at Bear’s wound. He was right it was clean through, but it was much deeper than I’d thought. “Shit,” I said, dropping the flashlight. “Just pour it on, Ti and tell me why you’re here if that wasn’t your plan.”

  I shined the light on his wound and for some reason found myself closing my eyes as I tipped the bottle over and poured the alcohol directly into his wound. Every muscle in Bear’s body tensed. “Ti, speak. Now,” Bear said through gritted teeth. He grabbed the bottle from my hand and poured the rest over the hole in the front of his shoulder, bracing his hand on the ledge of the front step he tore off a chunk of the old rotted wood. When he was done he tossed the wood into the yard and set down the bottle, handing me the needle and thread.

  “Sheriff Donaldson isn’t in until the afternoon. I was going to go see him, but then I ended up here and I got…distracted.” Distracted was a good term for Ben Carson and his audacity to even step foot onto the grove.

  “You were going to confess?” Bear asked, the anger seeping back into his voice. He crossed his arms over his thighs and leaned forward so I could have better access to his wound. I set the flashlight on the banister and using the only stitch I remembered that my mama had taught me I pulled Bear’s skin as close together as possible and tried to pretend it wasn’t his flesh and muscle I was putting back together, but a thick quilt or tough leather.

  “Yeah, I thought it would be best to lay it all out, take whatever I had coming to me. My friend Buck is the deputy, figured maybe they’d cut me some slack. It’s not like if I go to prison anyone would miss me. The world would still turn. Nobody would even know I was gone.”

  “I would.”

  “Yeah, you would know I was gone, but you’d be happy to be rid of me,” I said bitterly.

  “Ti…” Bear started. I stopped breathing, waiting to hear what he had to say. “Aaaahhhh,” he grunted as I dug the needle in deeper than I’d anticipated.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, thinking that maybe I should remember that I was sewing a person after all.

  “I got a lawyer for you,” Bear said, surprising me. “Last one I wanted to call, but she’ll do right by you.”

  “You did what?”

  “I got a lawyer, a bitch of a woman. If the devil wore fancy suits and wore red lipstick it would be Bethany Fletcher. She’s good though. Right now she’s sorting through all this shit. Making calls and digging in a little deeper into your case. Right now you’re only wanted for questioning, you’re not under arrest. You bolted before I had a chance to tell you.”

  “You repaired the door, but you left it unlocked. I figured you were telling me to go,” I said honestly.

  “I was telling you that you weren’t a fucking prisoner,” he