Wild Rider (Bad Boy Bikers Book 2) Read Free

Texas named Marlowe, and she dated him while she lived there. He was a handsome man with a nice chin and a well-paying job as an executive lawyer. He was also controlling, exacting, and punitive—barely falling short of abusive, and she only gave him that much rope because he’d never hit her.
    But he had tried to shut out her friends. Probably would have tried the same with her family if she’d had any. She moved in with him only after a month of dating when her apartment complex was torn down for some few dozen code violations. By the time she moved out, she’d had to bring a few doctors and nurses with her from her hospital during the day while Randall was working to keep him at bay just in case he showed up.
    She had moved to Stockland, getting her new job at their hospital, completely rearranging her life mostly to get away from Randall. And then he had followed her.
    Fuming and in desperate need of the strongest fucking cup of coffee she could find, Helen slammed open the door to the outside, forgetting entirely about the auto-lock.
    It hit home when the door clicked shut; she swore and kicked at the door, tugging at it and then kicking again.
    “Goddammit!”
    She stopped, feeling her temper get the better of her. She was better than that. Better than that asshole’s poison. She let her forehead rest against the door, taking a breath.
    I’ve got a whole five hours left on this shift , she thought. I can’t go back in like this or I’ll beat someone over the head with a bedpan .
    That thought made her laugh.
    Men. It all came down to men. She'd had some rotten choices in them lately. After Randall, she'd rebounded with a heart-thumping stud, the kind that she'd dreamed about since she was a little girl. Big, tough, strong, and a biker, he had been everything to her.
    All her life, she had wanted to be with a biker badass. She had wanted to feel that strength. She wanted to wrap her arms around him and make out madly after he’d bruised his way through a bar fight, victorious and bloody. She thought from time to time that maybe in a past life she was the prized bride of some Viking warrior, cheering him on while he raided out townships and plundered their land, bringing it back to their homestead.
    A stupid, weird dream. But it was her dream.
    And then she'd fucked it all up.
    One day she just stopped seeing him. A terse, quick phone call— I can't do this anymore. I'm so sorry— and that was all she gave him.
    It wasn't something about herself she enjoyed remembering. All that fear and insecurity, the bad feelings that followed her like shadows. She pushed them away, hoping the memories would bury themselves for good this time.
    She turned the corner past the door, ready to make the walk back around to the front of the hospital. It would take most of the rest of her break, but it wasn’t a bad walk. Quiet, usually, especially this time of night. Stockland could be a bad town for a soft-hearted nurse—lots of violence, lots of drugs—but tonight had been relatively low-volume so far.
    And anyway, Helen wasn't exactly soft-hearted. She'd been a nurse for close to four years, and while she hadn't seen as much as someone like Georgetta, she still felt herself a pretty hardened soul. Bullet wounds and knife gashes did nothing to her anymore; the sight of blood was as familiar as turning on a car or hooking a dress onto a hanger.
    The door she had exited from opened up into the lot where the ambulances were kept. It was a well-lit lot. The concrete was cracked in places, tarred over in others. In the earlier parts of the day, coming out here meant she could watch workers refill the ambulances with their supplies.
    A banging, crunching sound filled the air. Not sure why, Helen followed the sound. For some reason, she thought it might have been a dog snuck onto the lot and pouncing on top of one of the ambulances.
    Animal control didn’t actually control much in Stockland, and packs of strays roamed the numerous