Only Fool Riding (Sacred Hearts MC Pacific Northwest Book 7) Read online

  Only Fool Riding

  Sacred Hearts PNW Chapter - Book VII

  A.J. Downey

  Contents

  BOOK SEVEN

  COPYRIGHT

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Also by A.J. Downey

  About A.J. Downey

  Published 2022 by Second Circle Press

  Text Copyright © 2022 A.J. Downey

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real except where noted and authorized. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Editing & book design by Maggie Kern @ Ms.K Edits

  Cover art by Dar Albert at Wicked Smart Designs

  Dedication

  To Clint for inspiring Blackjack and for all your help. Thanks for being my East Coast Bestie and for making life across the country easier in so many ways.

  Prologue

  Blackjack…

  It was late. So late, it was probably getting on toward early, but I’d stayed behind at Mav’s request. It’d taken a long while for him to deal with whatever needed dealing with when it came to Tic.

  None of the rest of the fellas had really been feeling it after church, and most of them had fucked off to do whatever. Any of the guys with women had probably gone off to fuck them.

  Suckers.

  I didn’t play that. The whole having an ol’ lady was overrated. Hell, Dahlia was enough fuckin’ drama for the lot of us as a free fuckin’ agent.

  Anyway, Mav had asked me to hang back and talk with him, and hang back, I did. I had a feeling he wanted to talk to me about my position within the club thanks to us losing our road captain for the foreseeable future.

  Sure enough, that’s what he’d wanted. As soon as Tic was out the back door, he was calling for me up the hallway at the bar to step into his office. Sure enough, he was asking me to step in as a temporary de facto road captain and was asking if he thought I could pull double duty or if I thought someone else would make a good tail gunner or what.

  “I can do both,” I said with a nod. “That’s no problem. But Tic, he’s coming back, right?”

  He heaved a big damn sigh and told me, “That’s up to Tic, but yeah, I think he’ll pull through and he’ll make it. He just needs to sort his shit out.”

  “Am I overstepping if I ask about Dahlia?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Consider my mouth shut.”

  We stared at each other over his desk for a long while and it was like the clubhouse itself held its collective breath before Mav finally let his out in a harsh rush and asked, “You mind keeping my confidence with this one?”

  I’d said, “I always got your back, man. You know that.”

  It’d been a long fuckin’ talk after that, and a bit of an eye-opening one. I think I understood a hell of a lot better Dahlia’s stack of issues. Shit, she had ‘em taller than the Space Needle, but fuck me… didn’t we all?

  I wasn’t so lost in thought that I was the only fool riding out here, even though in all actuality, I was the only fool riding out here. It was cold, it was clear, but there wasn’t but a cage or two out here with me. Still, I was alert, my mental faculties right where they needed to be, and yet still, it had to be some kind of divine intervention that I even fuckin’ saw them.

  Way up ahead, on one of the overpasses, a high one over I-5, someone was climbing over the railing.

  I let off the throttle, whipping my head over my right shoulder and giving the handlebars a twist to skate across several lanes as the figure clad in light jeans and what looked like a gray hoodie with some kind of blue logo on the front straightened up and stood, looking down on the unforgiving pavement below.

  I pulled onto the shoulder and glided up to a stop below and in front of them. I shut off my bike and got off.

  “Hey! Hey, yo!” I cupped my hands around my mouth and fuckin’ did everything I could to project. The figure slipped, their arms going back up and over the railing, barely hanging on.

  I heard sobbing, faintly, on the wind.

  “Go back, man!” I yelled and waved him back. “Go back! I’ll come up there and talk to you!”

  The person sort of let their arms hold them and halfway crouched down. They shook and I could tell they wept, they cried, and they were dead-ass fuckin’ serious right now.

  “Go back! It’s not worth it, man! Alright? Okay?”

  “What do you care?” the person shrieked, and the voice was so shrill with upset that I couldn’t tell you what I was looking at – a he, a she, or one of those neither persons that I couldn’t think of the name for them, but it didn’t matter all that much to me in this very moment.

  Nonbinary.

  It popped into my head unbidden, and I batted it away with my hands in an effort to frantically get the person above me to stop, to wait a minute, and to think.

  “I do care!” I yelled. “I-I’ll take you for a ride on my motorcycle!” I shouted, thinking it was fucking ridiculous, but if it worked… “Just go back over the railing! I’ll come up there, and we’ll go for a ride. It’ll make you feel better!”

  “What?” they shouted down, standing up but turning slightly. I felt a surge of triumph. I think I was getting close.

  “Just go back over the railing! I’ll come up there and I’ll take you for a ride on my motorcycle. We’ll go somewhere and talk, man! Okay?”

  I mean, shit, a ride always made me feel better.

  What the fuck are you doing, man? Are you serious right now? I thought savagely to myself, and the answer was simple. I’d been there before, sitting alone, a half a bottle or more of Jack in my system, ready to suck-start my fuckin’ .45…

  I’d been there more times than I cared to admit, and you know what? Someone had been there for me. Had picked me up, sobered me up, talked me through, and helped me get my shit together. Had been my guide off the battlefield and into the club.

  I owed that motherfucker everything.

  “Just go back,
come on! Please! Don’t do this! Don’t make me watch you do this!”

  Yeah, it was dirty, but if it worked…

  “You’ll come get me?” they called down.

  I yelled back, “Yes! I promise, just go back over, and I’ll come get you! We’ll go for a ride!”

  “Okay!”

  “Okay?” I almost couldn’t believe it.

  “Okay, come get me!” they shouted.

  “Go back over!” I shouted.

  “I’ll go back over when you come and get me!”

  I was about sixty-five percent certain what I was dealing with was female at this point, but it didn’t matter. Not one iota. What mattered was keeping them alive.

  I got back on my bike and fucking put the hammer down, fucking flying to the next exit and figuring out just what fucking overpass they were on. There were like forty-fucking-six and two over downtown, but this was one of the last ones before the Montlake cut.

  I got myself fucking oriented and kept the corner building that had been behind them as a reference point in my field of vision, looking up, and looking up, and there! There! They were climbing back over!

  Yeah!

  Yeah!

  Fuck yeah!

  They heard the bike, they knew I wasn’t lying, and they climbed the fuck back over. Thank fucking God!

  I pulled up just as they rolled their ass over the big fucking metal tubular railing and fell on their ass onto the sidewalk. I pulled over and jumped off the bike as they broke into fresh heaving, just racking sobs that shook their slim shoulders under the oversized gray hoodie. I dropped to my knees and grabbed them, not caring at the wild scream of fear that barreled out of their chest as I bear hugged them into me and refused to let go.

  “I got yah, buddy. It’s okay, it’s okay. I got you.”

  They wailed, all worked up and stopped pushing against me. They just fucking sobbed into my cut, the bike chugging next to us, the warmth radiating off of the engine and the pipes probably doing them a little good. I mean, it was cold out. Cold as fuck. And all they had on was a pair of jeans and a goddamn hoodie. No telling if they had anything layered on under either of each.

  I pulled back, looked down, and pulled the hood off of glossy black hair pulled into a loose ponytail. They, no she, looked up at me stricken, mascara running down her cheeks in awful black muddy tracks. Her false eyelashes all but cried off, and her brilliant blue-green eyes catching the streetlight overhead made all the more vibrant with their red rims from her crying.

  She may be ugly crying, but it had a weird and fucked-up effect of making her beautiful.

  Like damn beautiful.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know what it is, but there’s no sense in a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I’ve got you now, girl… and it’s all going to be okay.”

  “Nothing is okay,” she said, and her voice broke. I nodded.

  “Come take a ride with me,” I said. “I’ll take you wherever you want to go, and we’ll talk. I’ll help you figure it out.”

  “Why?” she asked brokenly.

  I gave her a crooked self-deprecating smile and said, “Because more people ‘n I can count did it for me.”

  “I’m a nobody to you,” she tried to argue.

  Without thinking, I said, “Not tonight, you’re not. Tonight, you’re my everything.”

  We sat there on the cold, hard ground, glittering with ground and broken glass like so many of the sidewalks around these overpasses did for whatever reason and she asked me, “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Blackjack. All my friends do. What’s your name?”

  She searched my face and sniffed, tensing, and I realized she was young. I couldn’t tell you how young or old for sure, but she didn’t look like she was much over the age of fuckin’ consent, which made the hair rise on the back of my neck.

  “Angel,” she said. “My name is Angel.”

  “Is that a nickname or like your name, name?” I asked her.

  “What do you think?” she asked, and I smirked.

  “Fair,” I said. “Totally fair.”

  “What do we do now, Blackjack?” she asked, and I took a deep breath and looked this way and that up and down Denny and shook my head.

  “How about we go for that ride?” I asked.

  She nodded, and I helped us both get to our feet.

  “How old are you, Angel?” I asked her and she sighed.

  “I know you won’t believe me, but I’m twenty-nine.”

  “I’ll believe you until you give me a reason not to, fair?”

  She nodded.

  “Fair.”

  “Same goes,” I told her. “You can trust me, only I promise I’ll never give you a reason not to. That’s not how I roll.”

  She didn’t say anything, just searched my face as I whipped my rag outta my back pocket, wiping at her muddy tear tracks.

  “We’ll go for a ride, find some twenty-four-hour place where you can clean yourself up in the bathroom and we can get something to eat and talk,” I said judiciously. I wanted to hear this story – whatever it was.

  “Sounds good,” she agreed, shivering, whether from emotion or cold, I couldn’t tell, and nodded her head.

  “Come on, let’s go.”

  I led her to the bike, got on, and helped her to get on. She huddled against my back and put her arms around me. I stuffed her hands into my coat pockets to cut the wind and try to keep them warm.

  “Hold on to me. Here we go!” I pulled out onto Denny and down. There was a place I knew that was twenty-four hours – high-end as fuck, but they kept it dark, and it would be a hell of a lot quieter than any of the diner places around here on a weekend night. That, and it was close, just down the road.

  I didn’t want to take her far, but I promised her a ride, so we wouldn’t go straight there, just when she felt calmer and like she was ready to talk.

  I had no idea what I was doing here. I was just winging it. What I did know was either Angel had a guardian angel looking out for her hide, or mine had some shit to say about her situation. Either way, this whole thing smacked of the divine in some way.

  Raven’s mystical witchy woo-woo ass is gonna have a field day with this story if I ever tell it, I thought.

  It was gonna be an even longer night.

  1

  Angel…

  I wanted to die, but let’s face it… I was too chickenshit to do it myself. With absolutely nothing to lose, getting onto the back of this motorcycle with a strange man was honestly the last thing I had to worry about. I mean, if I was lucky, he would do me a favor and would get the job done where I couldn’t.

  Could he rape me first? Sure. Probably. Would it hurt? Hard to tell. Perversely, I wondered; would I like it?

  I didn’t know… I didn’t know anything anymore. Just that I couldn’t keep doing this push and pull, this back and forth, with Devin anymore.

  I didn’t want to… and shit. If this guy did rape me and somehow let me live and I wound up back on Devin’s doorstep, he would probably accuse me of liking it and that it counted toward cheating on him – which I never did. Which I never would, despite how much and how often he accused me of it. Only to find out he was…

  I didn’t understand why love had to hurt so much.

  “Hey.” I startled and the man tapped my knee twice and I realized – we’d stopped. I shivered, and he tapped my knee twice a third time and said, “That means you need to get down for me, sweetheart – but be careful! The pipes are real hot and I don’t want you to burn yourself.”

  I carefully, and stiffly, got to my feet and stepped back. He got off his motorcycle, leaning it to its side slightly, onto whatever stand held it up, giving the handlebars a twist as he stood up.

  I didn’t even know what he looked like. His helmet was one of those full facemask ones, and though the thick plastic visor wasn’t tinted, you still couldn’t really get a measure of what a man looked like with a helmet like that on his head.
Especially in the dark, in the middle of the night, like it was. All I had was his voice, and that was nice enough.

  He pulled off his helmet, and I got a look at something more than just his intense dark brown eyes and I had to say, I was pleasantly surprised.

  He had to be in his thirties, and he was incredibly handsome. Like, incredibly handsome – long brown hair falling around his face in wisps that were coming loose from his ponytail, a trim brown beard surrounding full, lush lips.

  I hadn’t honestly known what to expect, but… but this wasn’t it. This wasn’t it by a longshot.

  “Come on, let’s get you warmed up and something to eat,” he said. He came around his motorcycle and captured my elbow with a firm hand.

  I guess my hoped-for murder wasn’t going to be a thing… although at this point, I was honestly only half disappointed. My curiosity had firmly been engaged now, despite how tired, how hollow, how raw and just… empty I was feeling.

  I wouldn’t wish this kind of hurt on anyone, I thought as he led me to the glass double doors of the tan cinderblock building.

  It didn’t look like much. A windowless building, the paint fresh-ish but covering unsightly blotches where the previous paint layers had chipped and flaked, falling away.

  Inside was dim, barely better than the dimly lit street outside… dare I say, even darker. The light a muted orange-yellow from above the tables.

  Someone came out from behind the bar off to our left and said, “Welcome to Thirteen Coins, just the two of you?”