Biker Stepbrother - Part Two Read online

  BIKER

  STEPBROTHER

  Part 2

  ROSSI ST. JAMES

  COPYRIGHT 2015 ROSSI ST. JAMES

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher or author. If you are reading this book and you have not purchased it or received an advanced copy directly from the author, this book has been pirated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or, if an actual place, are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  DEDICATION

  To my college writing professor, Mr. Billman. Thanks for believing in me.

  OTHER BOOKS BY ROSSI ST. JAMES

  Biker Stepbrother #1

  DESCRIPTION

  Eve’s ex-stepbrother has recently come back into her life, bringing with him a promise of a new life and a way to escape the lackluster future that awaits her if she stays.

  But after she calls off her engagement to Holden and packs her bags to leave town with Gray, Gray is nowhere to be found. He didn’t leave without her, of that she’s sure. He promised he wouldn’t. But where did he go? And who is he with?

  As she struggles to find Gray and to get answers, she realizes that certain people aren’t who they say they are at all, and that some people, including herself, will do absolutely anything to get what they want.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Part 2 in a new serial. Not a stand alone. Part 3 releasing late Jan/early Feb 2015.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ONE – Gray

  TWO - Everly

  THREE - Gray

  FOUR - Everly

  FIVE - Gray

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THANK YOU

  One – GRAY

  “Her name is Eve. Why the fuck do you keep calling her Everly?” the pretty boy who’d lured me away from my hotel said, his eyes scrunched and his fidgeting body movements borderline psychotic.

  Hours before Everly was set to arrive at my hotel so we could leave town, I received a call to my room. Some guy saying he had her and that he’d only set her free in exchange for me.

  I never wanted Everly to get hurt, and I sure as hell didn’t want her involved with any of my people. Sacrificing myself wasn’t even a question.

  “Exit through the lobby. Walk to a gray SUV parked in the back of the building. Get in the back. Say nothing,” the man had carefully instructed before hanging up.

  I’d left my door cocked open on the off chance that these people didn’t really have her. Hell Valley MC was dirty and resourceful, and there were no limits as to what they’d do or say to get what they wanted. But on the off chance they really did have her, I couldn’t sit back and play a game of chicken with them.

  My heart drummed steadily in my chest as I left the lobby as instructed, and a wave of relief washed over me when I saw the gray SUV was a Land Rover. No rough and tumble hog hugger would ever be caught dead in that shit.

  I climbed in the back only to be met with three pairs of eyes belonging to the fanciest pretty boys I’d ever seen. Silk suits, shiny watches, and expensive, chromed out sunglasses mixed with a sickening combination of pricey cologne told me exactly who I was dealing with. I stifled the shit-eating grin that wanted to consume my face in that moment and kept a solemn expression.

  “Dalton. Warehouse,” the guy in the back, sitting next to me, instructed to the driver. Apparently I was seated right next to the mastermind of the operation. His voice matched the guy on the phone earlier.

  I glanced down towards his lap when a black, shiny thing caught the glint of the streetlight above. He was pointing a gun towards me, and judging by how perfect and shiny it was, he’d probably never even shot it before.

  “Mind telling me what’s going on?” I asked him.

  The man to my left held hate in his blue eyes as his jaw clenched. “Shut up. You won’t be asking the questions, fleabag.”

  A pompous chuckle from one of the guys in front instantly took me back to my younger days when I’d have clocked someone for calling me or anyone I loved some sort of name. Those three weren’t much different than the rich assholes who used to run my school until I clocked them all after school one day. They left me alone after that. I’d have clocked those dicks right then and there had the one not been pointing a peashooter at me.

  They pulled into an alley where a private entrance to the back of a warehouse stood not more than four feet away. Streetlights illuminated the alley just enough.

  The guy next to me nodded toward it and motioned with his gun as the front passenger hopped out and swiped a keycard to unlock the door. “Follow him. No sudden moves. Don’t act strange.”

  I peered around. Security cameras everywhere. These guys were nothing but a bunch of amateurs. Hell Valley MC never would’ve trusted them to handle their business. I breathed easy for a second, until I entered the building. An empty gray room with cinderblock walls and a single metal folding chair sat front and center.

  “Sit down, you piece of shit,” the guy with the gun instructed. As I stood next to him, I noted that I was a good six inches taller. I could crush him like a bug if I wanted. Choosing to stay calm for Everly’s sake, I did as I was told.

  “Dalton. Duct tape,” the guy said.

  Dalton produced a brand new roll of duct tape and began securing my feet to the legs of the chair. I pressed my heels into the metal, giving him the illusion that he was securing me well, but I had plenty of slack.

  “Hands,” Dalton said. I widened my shoulders and placed my hands in my lap, keeping my wrists together but my forearms spread wide. These guys were a fucking joke.

  “Where’s Everly?” I asked, staring at the ringleader. These rich bastards didn’t know a damn thing about how to properly kidnap someone. I couldn’t have imagined they thought all this through too well.

  “Her name,” the guy seethed, “is EVE.”

  “It’s Everly,” I said with a shrug. “Everly Conners.”

  “Who the fuck is Everly Conners?” he said, wiping his brow with the same hand that was holding the peashooter. “Her name is Eve Chadwick.”

  “Maybe you’re mixed up, son,” I said with a smirk. “Maybe we’re talking about two completely different women here.”

  The way the man looked at me told me I was about two seconds away from being pistol whipped, but that tiny thing wasn’t going to hurt. I’d been whipped worse than that before.

  The man got in my face again, his sandy blond hair falling into his eyes as he squared his menacing stare with mine. “Look, I don’t know who the fuck you are. All I know is you look like shit and you smell like leather and you’re covered in the ugliest tattooes I’ve ever seen, but you’re going to leave Eve alone. Do you understand that?”

  The corner of my mouth twitched upwards. So that’s what this was about. He didn’t want to hurt me. He didn’t want to get himself in too much trouble. He just wanted to scare me.

  “I’m going to say okay,” I sighed. “I’ll leave Eve Chadwick alone. Whoever the fuck she is.”

  The man sensed my sarcasm and let out the whiniest groan I’d ever known an adult man to make. He stomped his loafer into the concrete like a petulant child, and I half expected his minions to laugh, but they didn’t.

  “What’s your name?” he asked. The man clearly hadn’t done a lick of research if he didn’t even know my name. Guessing by how poorly he
was executing everything, I figured he’d probably just had me followed.

  Amateur.

  “Name’s Gray,” I said.

  “What the fuck kind of name is Gray?” His high-pitched laugh came straight from the lips of a crazy person.

  “It’s the name my mama gave me,” I said, omitting the part where she meant to write down Gary but had transposed two letters. She always meant to have it fixed, but I guessed she never got around to it due to her other priorities. “Since we’re introducing ourselves, mind giving me yours?”

  “It’s not important,” he spat back at me.

  “Holden,” I said, recalling the caller ID on Everly’s phone the night she’d told me she dumped her fiancé. “Holden Banks.”

  Holden’s face turned a shade of pale ash at the fact that I knew his name, and I watched as he threw his buddies a look as if they hadn’t accounted for that. Dalton shrugged, as if he didn’t know what to do and Holden threw his head back and breathed loudly.

  “Things not going to plan?” I asked. While they weren’t looking, I’d been wrangling my foot out of my duct taped boot. One downward swipe of my wrists with enough outward pressure to rip the tape down the middle would be all it’d take to free myself from their pathetic handcuffs. It was all about timing though. I had to wait until the moment was right and then I’d strike like a snake. They wouldn’t know what hit ‘em by the time I was finished.

  “You. Shut the fuck up and listen to what I’m going to tell you,” Holden moaned. “I don’t know who you are or what you want or why my fiancé keeps running off to your hotel room at night, but I’m telling you now, leave her the fuck alone.”

  “Does Everly know you’re still engaged?” I smirked. “Last I knew she’d called it off on account of you being a giant douche bag. That or you’re not man enough to keep her pleased. Not really sure. She didn’t care much for talking about you.”

  The sensation of cool metal grazed my face as the little prick pistol whipped me. He really fucking did that. The sting of the blow evaporated into thin air. My skin had been toughened over the years and not just emotionally speaking. Big Nash had done a lot worse to me.

  “Fuck,” I yelled out, pretending it pained me worse than it did. I’d learned real quick in life that if you let people think they’ve got the power, you can swoop in and take it back when they least expect it.

  “You fuck her? Huh?” Holden asked, his face suddenly a couple inches from mine. I could taste his acidic breath, and it took every bone in my body not to spit in his direction.

  TWO – EVERLY

  I flew down the hall from Gray’s vacant hotel room and rode the elevator to the main floor.

  Breathless and panting, I approached the clerk at the counter. “Did you happen to see a guy leave earlier? Big guy. Dark hair. Lots of tattoos…”

  The scrawny clerk who couldn’t have been much older than nineteen shook his head. “I just got here about twenty minutes ago. Hadn’t seen anyone come through here but you, ma’am.”

  “Fuck,” I said under my breath. I turned on my heel and headed outside for my car and drove straight to Chadwick Corporation to talk to Sterling’s head of security, Alfonso Dos Santos.

  ***

  I pounded on his office door, which was unusually closed, and prayed to God he was in there. It was maybe nine at night, but Alfonso preferred to work the overnight shift. He didn’t sleep well at night anyway, he’d always said.

  “Alfonso!” I yelled, pounding until the bottom of my fist was numb. Hot tears filled my eyes but I fought them off with every ounce of courage I had. Not knowing where Gray was or who took him caused knots in my stomach and sharp pain in the back of my throat where my words and feelings tended to get stuck.

  The door flew open a few seconds later, revealing Alfonso Dos Santos in the flesh, head of security at Chadwick and Sterling’s top guy. A retired Navy SEAL who rarely smiled and could bend a lead pipe with one hand, Alfonso was one of the toughest son of a bitches I knew.

  “Everly,” he said, holding his military posture straight as a damn statue. “What are you doing here?”

  I hadn’t seen him in a good year or two, since our last family vacation. We’d gone to Dubai and Sterling insisted on taking Alfonso. People knew him there and a powerful man like him hadn’t climbed the latter of success without making a few enemies, especially in the oil and finance industries.

  I brushed past him and shut his office door. “I need a favor.”

  “Anything,” Alfonso said. The man was loyal to Sterling to a fault and that fortunately trickled down to me as well.

  “Something has happened to someone I care about.” My voice trembled. Saying the words out loud made them much more real.

  Alfonso squinted his eyes in my direction, studying my face. “Holden?”

  “No,” I sighed. “God, no. I don’t care about him.”

  Alfonso’s eyebrows raised as if he were surprised to hear me say that, but he said nothing.

  “An old friend of mine recently came back into my life,” I said with a fond smile that left my face after only a moment. “We were going to leave town for a while. I went to his hotel room tonight and the door was open. All his stuff was there. His bike was in the parking lot. But he was gone.”

  His arms crossed his chest and he squared his hips. “Who’s this old friend?”

  I drew in a deep breath. “Remember when we were in Dubai a couple years ago, and we stayed up late talking that one night?”

  Three weeks in a foreign country with your parents and no one to talk to would leave a girl vulnerable and desperate for a meaningful conversation with anyone who would listen. Alfonso was a quiet man, but he was a good listener. That night I’d told him about my past. About Everly Conners. I swore him to secrecy and he promised he’d never tell a soul.

  Alfonso didn’t have the greatest childhood either. He grew up with a single mom in a dangerous neighborhood in Bronx, New York. He’d enlisted in the Navy the day he turned eighteen and he pretty much made life his bitch.

  “I remember,” he said, his dark brown eyes kind and reminiscent of a sort of friendship we’d forged that had quietly remained in the background of our lives since then.

  “This friend of mine, he’s from my former life. The one I told you about,” I said. “He was my older brother. He always took care of me. Protected me.” My voice faded as my hand clutched at my aching heart. I wanted to know where he was and if he was safe. “There are some men who think he killed someone, but he didn’t. Trust me, Alfonso, he would never kill anyone. He’s a good man. He didn’t do this.”

  “I believe you, Eve,” he said, clearing his throat. “Everly.”

  “I think they took him,” I said. “This motorcycle gang. We can’t involve the police.”

  Alfonso’s face didn’t flinch. Nothing scared him. He reached over for his keys and jingled them in his hand as if he were going to go run an errand. “Let’s retrace his steps. I’d like to take a look at his hotel room too if we can.”

  ***

  I stayed in the background as Alfonso paced Gray’s empty hotel room, opening drawers, walking backwards, and glancing out windows. I didn’t ask what he was doing. I let him do his thing. When he was finished we headed down to the lobby where the same clerk from earlier in the night was working.

  Alfonso pulled out his wallet and slapped a small stack of hundred dollar bills on the counter as his eyes danced over to a security camera pointed towards the front door. “Where do you keep your security footage?”

  The scrawny kid let out an audible gulp.

  “You the only one on the nightshift tonight?” Alfonso asked, his eyes like focused arrows pointed at the kid.

  The kid nodded. “Me and one housekeeper.”

  He slid the cash in the kid’s direction. “Point me in the right direction.”

  The kid grabbed his eyes and opened a room marked “Hotel Manager” and let us in, shaking the mouse on the computer to wake it up.
Four screens filled the monitor in real time.

  “I want to see what happened in the last couple hours,” he said.

  The kid gave him a quick tutorial on the system and Alfonso seemed to figure out the rest. We scoured footage until we saw Gray walk across the lobby around eight o’clock. Alfonso switched to the parking lot camera, which showed Gray entering the back of a gray Range Rover.

  “Dalton.” My hand flew to my mouth. “That looks like Holden’s friend’s car.”

  Alfonso threw me a look. “You’re absolutely sure.”

  I nodded. “It has to be. Yes. Yes. That’s him. That’s Dalton’s car. Holden is behind this. Not the motorcycle gang.”

  Alfonso’s head fell back and then snapped forward as he let out a raspy moan. “I hate that fucking punk. Let’s get him.”

  “Y-you hate Holden?” I asked, pleasantly surprised. He always seemed so nice to him whenever I was around, though I supposed he probably did it for Sterling’s sake.

  “With a passion.” His words were slow and drawn out, as if there were more to the story than I knew. “Let’s get him.”

  I hopped into Alfonso’s truck and we sped across town, towards Holden’s apartment.

  “I don’t know where else he would’ve taken him,” I said. “We can start there.”

  Twenty painfully long minutes later, we’d arrived to an empty condo. Holden was nowhere to be found.

  “Everly, can you think of a way to lure Holden here?” Alfonso asked.

  I nodded. “I broke up with him. I know he was upset. I could tell him I want to get back with him?”

  “Perfect.”

  I reached into the depths of my purse and retrieved my phone, my fingers trembling as I cleared my throat and dialed my ex.

  THREE – GRAY