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  Damaged & Dangerous

  The Sacred Heart’s MC Book VI

  by A. J. Downey

  Text Copyright © 2015 A.J. Downey

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  All Rights Reserved

  Dedication

  To Jennifer Mitsada, Bethany Stonebraker, Jennifer Wolf, Melanie Beswick, Sherelle Ross, Deanna Bewley-Davis, Gabrielle Prendergast, and all the folks in NaNoRotica for all your support. Seriously. Y’all are my favorite bitches to bitch about bitches with. You’ve kept me sane, propped me up, pushed me to keep going and have just generally cheered me on through a lot of things going sideways over this last summer. This is for you.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Dani…

  Four months ago…

  I hated this. I hated what I’d become and I wished that Jared had never brought me here. Life wasn’t a fairy tale, though. It never would be. There wouldn’t be any Prince Charming to come to save the day. And I wasn’t some fairy tale princess, either. I was just an idiot girl who loved an idiot boy. And now here I was, sprawled naked and open on the pool table, the felt rubbing my back raw as my Ol’ Man pounded his cock mercilessly inside of me.

  The big problem was: I didn’t want him. I had never wanted him, had never felt anything close to desire for the giant ass, and I never would. I had loved Jared, believed in him and our teenage dreams, but that had all turned to shit the minute he decided to prospect for the Suicide Kings motorcycle club.

  I winced as Pig-Pen grunted above me. I turned my head to the side. Away from having to look at him. I’d become good at disassociating over the years, at finding a place inside my own head where I could pretend that I wasn’t here. That I was some other girl, in some other place. A girl who was happy and carefree, who had never been idealistic, who had never believed that Jared would protect me and that I was his special girl. He had been so stupid! And me? I had been right along with him. I was so incredibly naïve to believe that this was just a club, or that these men actually looked out for one another.

  I. Was. So. Stupid.

  I felt eyes on me, which was nothing new, and I let my gaze focus for a moment, sliding along the wall, along the couches and low coffee tables. There. He sat on the end of one couch with a foot propped nonchalantly on the edge of the table in front of him, the beer in his hand resting casually on his knee. I knew they watched, they always watched. Some even took their dicks in hand and jerked off while they watched. I hated it. I always had, I always would, and this was no exception.

  Pig did it just to punish me; the public sex. Honestly, the rough public fucks were always worse than the beatings were. It only happened when I really pissed him off. At the same time, the public sex didn’t always hurt the next day. That, at least, was something to be grateful for. Right? Well, they didn’t hurt unless Pig-Pen was in a sharing mood. Then they hurt. They hurt a lot, and for a long time.

  My thoughts drifted back to this particular man and his staring. I had to admit there was something different about him. His cool green eyes slid over me as he watched my tits bounce, his expression distant. He looked at me stoically, appraising, but with a detached interest. It was almost as if he was watching one of the other guys fix a bike.

  Finally, it struck me what was different. Unlike the others, he was not amused by my plight. A deep, hidden sorrow filled his eyes for a fraction of a second when they met mine. I swallowed hard. I didn’t cry anymore when Pig-Pen did this to me, but there was something about the way this unknown, new prospect looked at me. It caused my hidden shame to rush to the surface, pricking the backs of my eyes with hot tears.

  I tore my eyes away from the man and turned my head to the empty wall on my other side. Pig-Pen grunted and thrust into me one last time before letting out a gusty, satisfied sigh. He slapped my tits together and pulled out, tucking himself back into his pants, and all I wanted was to fucking shower.

  “You want a piece, Prospect?”

  I was horrified at the question. I mean, I knew I’d pissed him off. But he’d never offered me up to one of the prospects before. I clamped my mouth shut on my bitterness and covered my chest with my arms as I blushed furiously.

  “No thanks, man. I’m good,” the unknown man called from the couch.

  “Suit yourself. Get gone, Coon, I’m fuckin’ sick of looking at you.” He gave my outer thigh a rough, stinging slap. I sat up immediately, then jumped down from the pool table and snatched my dress off the floor. He didn’t need to tell me twice.

  I hated that nickname – Coon – hated it to the very bottom of my soul. I wasn’t Dani Broussard anymore, I was Raccoon. Rac, if they were feeling charitable, but still. The nickname was a result of just about always sporting two black eyes from Pig-Pen, whom no one fucked with. Forget about standing up for his bitch, his property. The name reduced me to a nothing, a non-person like the rest of the strung-out meth and heroine junky whores who hung around Pig and the Suicide Kings. I had never truly been one of them, and never would be. No matter how bad it’d gotten over the last three years, I never touched that shit voluntarily. I’d die first.

  I bolted for the nearest bathroom, taking advantage of Pig-Pen’s order to get fucking gone. He didn’t have to add the ‘or else’ anymore. Still, I felt the prospect’s sympathetic gaze slide down my nude back as I clipped along the narrow hall out of the game room. The back of my neck stung with heat. Whether I was feeling a blush of humiliation or a burn from the friction of the pool table’s felt, I had no clue. All I knew was that I had been dismissed, and I wanted gone. I wanted gone so badly it was a sharp ache in the center of my chest. I slammed the door to the bathroom behind me and leaned heavily against it, jumping when Pig-Pen’s booming voice filtered through the red-painted wood.

  “Bitch!” he bellowed, “What the fuck did I tell you about slamming doors!?” I held my breath until my chest burned and waited for him to start hammering on the other side. Long moments ticked by, and I slowly let the breath out.

  Just yelling this time. No banging, no pounding, no fists… I was so relieved, the tears that had started earlier on the pool table came back again. I sniffed and forced them down. There was no sense in crying. If Pig saw it, he would just flip his lid. And I didn’t need that.

  Chapter 1

  Red-XIII

  Present day…

  The wind was cold, a blade made out of pure ice that cut across my exposed skin. That is, what little skin showed between my face mask and the ski goggles I used in the wint
ertime. I was a full-time rider: no cage, no fair-weather bullshit. I was on the back of my bike, rain or shine, and that’s just how it was. It had its disadvantages, like moving to a climate that actually had snow and freezing temperatures, but I adapted. Which is why I got the assignments I did.

  My main objective: to feed information to my real club. The secondary one? Running across state lines with a couple of Suicide King douchebags called Bandit and Flyer. This was the eighth time in the last six months I’d gone out on a run, and the first time still fucking got me. That first run had been just in time for me to miss a raid on the SHMC’s clubhouse – a raid that’d gotten one of our officers killed, along with another officer’s Ol’ Lady.

  We were all, and by all, I meant Sacred Hearts and Suicide Kings, stepping lightly for now. The clubhouse invasion was a clusterfuck on both sides from the word ‘go’. The Suicide Kings were a fucking joke as far as clubs went, just as much at war on the inside as they were on the outside. Griz wasn’t holding shit down for shit as Pres. And to top it off there was Pig-Pen, his VP, who had a habit of getting some really fucking great ideas when he was high. Pig had just enough guys terrified of his fucking psycho ass that they’d go along with whatever he said, as long as it kept them off his fucking radar.

  Only reason Pig’s reign of terror worked was because the club was mostly made up of new kids who didn’t know any better, or dudes who were just that fuckin’ dumb. I about shit a brick sideways when D called and told me what went down. As a prospect, I wasn’t entirely up on what was what. Any club worth their salt kept it that way until a prospect proved himself. At least the Suicide Kings had that half right. I’d moved up from hang around to prospect inside a month, which was un-fucking-real and honestly just a stroke of good luck.

  There had been a barroom brawl and I’d had Pig-Pen’s back, busting a bottle over some dude’s head who’d been about to waylay the SK’s VP with a chair. Griz had seen it and told Pig-Pen to make a note of it. But Pig, ever on his own fucking program, took that to mean he should move me up a rank. I could tell it didn’t sit well with Griz. But at the same time what had been done couldn’t be undone, not without losing face, so I’d graduated a couple months ahead of my class. Some serious fucking half-assed bullshit if I ever saw any. Especially considering that I knew where everything and everyone was inside the first month.

  Inside those first few weeks, I was able to tell D and the guys exactly where the Suicide Kings’ meth operation was. Griz’s home address, too. They’d gotten the drop on Danimal and Joker at the meth lab. Joker thought he was hot shit, slashing Blue like he did, but Blue was fucking fine. The meth lab was another story, blown to hell and gone. If that hadn’t filled Griz and Pig full of piss and vinegar! Especially Pig, now that his steady supply of crank was all dried up. Poor baby.

  I’d told D he should have killed those two rotten fucks, but he’d disagreed. Maybe he was going soft in his old age. Who the fuck knew? But after Chandra and Reaver … shit, man. I could feel it through the line, how much he was kicking himself for not listening to me. The thing I liked and respected most about D was that he didn’t make the same mistake twice.

  I rolled to a stop with Bandit and Flyer and sighed. We were almost back to the SKMC’s house, which was just a badass retrofitted garage building in an industrial area. No real sleeping quarters, not that it stopped them from crashing out, but it had the main club staples of any house. Booze, drugs, bitches, and some game tables.

  I fully intended to call dibs on their hockey table once we had all these sons of bitches in the ground. It was the one thing the SHMC’s house, which did have all the comforts of home, was lacking. Not to mention my real club had way classier Ol’ Ladies and club sluts. I wouldn’t stick my cock into any of these bitches even after wrapping it twice.

  Coon.

  The name came unbidden to my mind and conjured up the image of long black hair, silkier than a crow’s wing, and cornflower blue eyes that were un-fucking-real. Those eyes were surrounded by long, dark lashes, and pale, perfect skin that just begged to be touched. She was the only looker out of all the club’s washed out, drugged up bitches, and she was completely different from them all at the same time. She didn’t use. Her eyes were too sharp, too clear, and all it took was one look to know that she was fucking smart. So I didn’t have any fucking idea of A) why she was hanging around here, and B) how the hell she was hooked up with Pig-Pen, the worst of all of the fucking guys.

  “Hey! Pretty-boy! Stop yer fuckin’ dreamin’, get yer shit, and let’s go!” I looked over to Flyer. He had his nose so far up Gordy’s ass it was a wonder he didn’t have a white film over his eyes like some god damned cave fish. Gordy was another real winner. Loyal as all get-out to Griz, and a mean motherfucker. He was the new SAA for the Suicide Kings since the old one, a dude by the name of Snake who had served under Sparks and then Griz, had gone down in the attack at the SHMC.

  I got off my baby, a fully resto’ed 1963 Harley Davidson panhead. Her skin was a glossy, sleek black, and silky smooth to boot. Her chrome gleamed softly under the overcast, early March sky. I unfastened my saddlebags and threw them over my arm. With boots thudding and crunching against the half-gravel, half-packed dirt of the lot, I made for the club’s back steps and Flyer’s glowering mug.

  “What the fuck you daydreaming about, Prospect?” he demanded as I went to slide past him.

  “What do you think, after a long-ass ride like that?” I demanded. He frowned, perplexed, and I threw the dumb fucker a bone. “Pussy!” I exclaimed, and he barked a laugh and slapped me on the back.

  “Well the pussy is inside, boy.” I scowled.

  “Sure as fuck ain’t doing any of these busted-ass hoes,” I griped.

  “You ain’t lyin’,” Flyer snorted. “It does in a pinch, and some of ‘em suck cock real good.” I felt bad for any of these bitches that were required to put Flyer in their mouth. Not that he was a bad dude to look at, bearded with long hair to his shoulders, trim but not cut like me, certainly not fat or old, although he had some liberal doses of white to his short beard and greasy shoulder length hair.

  No, the way I heard it: Flyer – for a dude in his early forties – had partied a little too fucking hard, and wasn’t entirely careful about who he partied with. He didn’t always keep his shit clean and as a result he had, on more than one occasion, given a girl some VD or another. Nothing he’d passed around the club had been lethal or incurable, yet. But that was the operative word… yet. So far, it was just a case of the clap and something else easily fixed by antibiotics. Not sure of the name, but yeah. I had to shudder inwardly. There was no fucking way I was going to touch any of these bitches with the way these nasty fuckers shared. Except Coon. I might make an exception for her… You know, if she were checked out… and I’d still fucking wrap it up.

  Pig didn’t share her much. But when he did put her through that particular slice of hell, he insisted that the other brothers wear a raincoat. I knew Pig fucked around on her but when it came to any of these other nasty whores, he wore a condom. Even if they were just sucking him off. He may be a drugged-out, crazy, psycho motherfucker, but at least he had his shit straight on that one thing.

  I ruminated on all of this shit as we traipsed through the club. Lo, and behold! There was the girl of the hour. Last I’d seen her had been a week and a half ago, after I’d gotten back from the last run. One of the first times I’d ever laid eyes on her, she’d been laid out on the pool table, eyes vacant and staring as Pig had ravaged her body. Plowing into her like he was gonna come out the other side. It was disgusting and, at the same time, fuckin’ tragic. I could tell she’d gone someplace else, someplace deep inside her own head, and I couldn’t help but study the perfection that was her face.

  She’d felt me staring, I think, because her eyes had suddenly focused on me. Whatever she saw on my face, in my eyes, no matter how carefully I’d schooled myself neutral, had hurt her. Her bright eyes were suddenly so much brighte
r, illuminated by the tears she just barely managed to hold back. She’d turned away then, and I’d felt frozen and heartless down to my very core. Never in my life had I felt more like a depraved douche, and I’d done some pretty spectacularly shitty things in my time. Which was why I was here, in an effort to balance my Karmic scales some. So far, I felt like I was doing a bang-up fucking job.

  “You look like a tool,” Pig said from where he sat at the bar. Rac put another beer down in front of him, a cold one, and whisked away his empty. She turned and continued stocking the bar.

  “Good to see you too, Man,” I said with a smile. He chuckled. I set my bags on the unfinished concrete floor, unfastened my helmet, and ripped the grinning skull facemask off the bottom of my face. The Velcro gave way with an angry, grating sound. I whisked the amber ski goggles off my face and stretched my jaw, squeezing my eyes shut and opening them wide.

  I stuffed the headgear into my overturned brain bucket and set it on the bar before cutting to the fucking chase. I brought the two bricks of speed out of my saddlebags and set them on the bar by Pig’s elbow.

  “You got a brass pair to go along with that mile-long cock of yours, Buddy,” he said, taking a toke off the joint he had grasped between his fingers. He held it out to me and I took a hit off it. Weed had never done much for me but mellow me out and give me the munchies, but if I wanted to keep up appearances, this was the way to go. I really wanted no part in any of the other shit these guys did on the regular.

  I handed the joint back and exhaled. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

  Pig chuckled. “Get Whitezilla here a beer,” he ordered, and I put up my hand in Rac’s direction.

  “No thanks, Darlin’. If it’s all the same, and you ain’t got nothin’ else for me to be doin’, I’d like to take a ride out to the ol’ homestead and sleep for, like, a week.” I racked my neck from side to side and felt a satisfying pop.