Read BULL: MC ROMANCE (Forsaken Riders MC Romance Book 6) Online
Authors: Samantha Leal
As the day turned into night and they lay together exploring each other’s bodies, Tammy knew she had found her soul mate. Everything about Lynx fit with her perfectly, and there was nothing she didn’t want to tell him.
She told him of how she longed for a family, and he agreed with her. He explained how he had always felt the same and couldn’t wait to have one of his own. He opened up about his past and his childhood, confiding in her about how he had been treated badly, abused by his guardians, and eventually fled when he was fifteen and found himself in Slate Springs without a penny to his name and not a clue of how to look after himself.
“What happened?” Tammy asked him with eager eyes.
“I met one of The Forsaken Riders,” he smiled as he ran his fingertips through her hair. “They took me in, put a roof over my head, gave me a job… They saved my life.”
Tammy had no idea how it must have felt to be so alone in the world. Even though she missed her mother dearly every day, she had always had the love and support of her father and Dean.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she whispered before she gave him a single kiss on his chest.
“I’m not anymore,” he said. “If it hadn’t of happened, I never would have wound up here with you.”
Even though he was right, she still couldn’t help but feel like a lot of his life had been either traumatic or wasted being locked up in jail.
“Who were you protecting, Lynx?” Tammy blurted the words out before she even knew she was going to say them.
He sat up and rested his forearms on the tips of his knees.
“I can’t tell you that, Tam,” he said gently as he turned to look at her.
She felt herself stiffen and she knew that if he ever wanted her to believe a word that came out of his mouth ever again, then he didn’t have the option… He was going to have to tell her.
“All you’ve been saying since the moment we met is that I have to trust you,” she said as she pulled herself up. “Now don’t you think it’s about time you trusted me?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment before he took hold of her hand.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked.
Tammy searched his face for an answer, but she would never be able to guess. She shook her head and he dropped his.
“It was Reid, babe…” he said with a sigh. “I was protecting the only man who ever really took care of me.”
Tammy felt the blood rush into her head, and she felt dizzy. Reid, Lexi’s dad, had murdered someone and Lynx had protected him and done the time.
“But why?” she asked with confusion.
“Reid was the one who took me in when I found myself here at fifteen,” he shrugged. “He’d already been away and done time, and he wasn’t well…” He stopped for a moment and Tammy could see the tears welling up behind his eyes.
“It was my fault he did it in the first place. I botched up a job, we got caught. It was either Reid shot the guy whose shop we were turning over, or we were all going down.”
Tammy shivered.
“I couldn’t let him go back inside,” Lynx said. “It would have finished the old boy off…”
“But he’s sick now?” she said, her confusion mounting.
“The cancer came back,” he nodded. “I’m glad he didn’t spend the last years of his life rotting away in some jail when it was my fault he would have been there in the first place.”
He sniffed and then smiled.
“So now you know everything,” he concluded. “But you can never tell Lexi…or King, for that matter. The code of The Forsaken Riders is one that can never be broken, and King wasn’t around when all of this went down. Okay?”
She nodded and reached out to stroke his arm once more.
For a man who had lived on the wrong side of the tracks since he was a kid, Lynx was wise and full of integrity. When he confessed his darkest secret to her, she knew why she loved him… He was just like her underneath it all. Under all of the muscles, the piercings and tattoos, and the scent of booze and smoke, he was a kind-hearted man, and he had won her over with his honesty.
She looked up at him, and he pulled her close to him. She knew her life was never going to be the same again. She had met the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with. He was going to be the father of her children, and she was never going to be looked at the same in Slate Springs ever again. Less than a week before, Tammy had barely even laid eyes on any of the The Forsaken Riders, but now she and Lexi were in deep, and they were beginning the lives they had always dreamed of in their own unique ways.
She was no longer going to be sweet, innocent good girl Tammy. She was going to be Lynx’s woman, a wild cat just like him. And she was going to make sure that they fought for each other, their family, and their right to their love over and above anything else...
THE END
Samantha Leal
Copyright ©2015 by Samantha Leal. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic of 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.
Moira looked up at the clock and watched the second hand tick, tick, tick slowly around until it rested on the twelve.
Four minutes,
she counted in her head. That’s how long she had been sitting there watching it, and that’s also how long she had left to go until she could switch off her computer, gather up her things and get the hell out of there.
It hadn’t been an easy week. Or an easy month. In fact, when Moira really thought about it, her whole year so far had been nothing but trouble and even now, on the eve of her escape to freedom for two weeks, she was sitting there completely weary and dreading the exit from the office.
She should have listened. They had all warned her about him and she had even known that she was setting herself up for a fall, but the moment Jack Tranter flashed his glistening baby blues at her, she had been sucked right in.
“He’s a player, Moira,” her colleague Erica had told her over lunch one spring afternoon as the girls sat outside their local coffee house flipping through magazines and snapping pictures of their Caesar salads.
“He’ll only hurt you,” Claire had confirmed.
“But I think I can change him,” Moira had said naïvely. “I think we have something special, and I’m pretty sure he can’t be faking.”
Erica and Claire had both looked at each other as if they didn’t have the heart to burst her bubble any more, but Moira dismissed it because she hoped she was the one who was right. After all, neither of the girls had had firsthand experience with Jack. They had just been told various bits of information from one or two other secretaries from around the office. And when Moira asked for more details, they couldn’t even tell her. For all of these reasons she was skeptical, and she and Jack were having such a great time together, she just couldn’t imagine it going any other way but up.
How she wished she would have listened.
After three months of amazing sex, deep conversations and grand plans, Jack had simply fallen off the face of the earth. When Moira finally managed to track him down, he had his arm around another woman, was cuddling up to her in plain sight for anyone to see and was nibbling her earlobe. When Moira had approached them, he looked at her as if she were a stranger and then declared at the top of his voice for everyone in a mile radius to hear, “What’s the matter with you, you psycho? We had one date. We were never exclusive.”
His companion had looked at her as if she were crazy and Moira had scuttled away, completely heartbroken and torn in two. How could he have done that to her? Less than a week earlier they had been planning on a trip over to Moira’s ancestral home of Scotland to discover a bit more about her roots and reconnect with her family’s past.
She had cried solidly for one week and then she got angry. No one was going to treat her that way. She was determined to pull herself together and move on with her life. As the sun set on a warm Sunday afternoon, she had curled up on the couch with a glass of red wine and opened her laptop.
She had never been to Scotland before, but after losing her parents several years earlier, she had felt a strange pull to go there and see what it was all about.
Her parents had always lived in the United States, but she had been told countless stories of their distant ancestors and the legends surrounding them. She had fantasized for a long time about taking the plunge and booking her flights over to Glasgow, but she had never had the nerve…
Until now.
She cradled the warm glass of wine in her palm of thought of the look on Jack’s face when he had so publically humiliated her. She was so much better than him, and now she was going to prove it. She opened up the British Airways website and booked her flight. Two weeks in Scotland and leaving as soon as possible. As she drained the rest of her glass and rested the laptop down on the couch beside her, her heart was racing and her palms were sweating. A part of her couldn’t believe that she had actually done it!
Now she was waiting for her work day to end, and finally, when she looked up at the clock again, her four minutes were up. She put on her “out of office,” closed down her workstation and slipped her jacket around her shoulders. Now all she had to do was get the hell out of there without Jack Tranter seeing her as she went.
She ducked out of her office and walked swiftly with her head down as she passed his room. She was sure she heard him call her name, but there was no way she was going to wait and find out. She pushed her way out of the shining double doors, into the sunlight and out into freedom.
She was on her way!
Back home at her apartment, Moira spent the evening ironing and folding clothes, gathering up toiletries and arranging outfits on the end of her bed. She went into her storage cupboard and wheeled out the biggest suitcase she had before hauling it up onto the bed and filling it with everything she could possibly need to see her through the next fortnight.
Before she had time to think, it was almost 10:00 pm, and she was getting tired. She flopped down on her bed and looked at her cell phone. In horror she realized that she had a missed call from Jack an hour earlier. To see his name come up on the screen made her stomach churn. A week or so before she had wanted nothing more than for him to call her and apologize, to tell her it was all a big joke or misunderstanding. But that phone call had never came and she knew that it would all be a lie, anyway. She covered her face with her hands as her heart raced in her chest. Could she even contemplate calling him back?
Deep down she knew the answer, and so she rolled over and shoved the phone underneath her pillow. She didn’t want to or need to know what he had to say. He had done enough damage to last her a lifetime.
She got up and crossed her bedroom to her desk. She opened the top drawer and pulled out her passport and her Scottish pounds. She flipped through them with a childish smile on her face, as if she couldn’t believe it was all real. She had never thought that she would have the nerve to travel across the world on her own, with no one meeting her at the other side, but it was all so liberating.
After she dressed for bed and set her alarm for 5:00 am, she climbed underneath her duvet and hoped for a safe journey. She had never needed a break more in her entire life, but she had never been a confident traveler. As she drifted off to sleep, scenes of rolling green hills and historical castles swirled through her head. She was finally going to see what her parents and grandparents had told her so much about and she couldn’t wait.
***
At 7:00 am the following morning, she was climbing out of the taxi at the airport and walking through to the check-in desks. The buzz around the place even at that time of the morning was intense and it made her feel all the more alive.
As she handed her passport over to the girl at the desk, she looked up and saw her flight number and GLASGOW in big letters on the board above her head. Her skin tingled in anticipation, and as she left for security and departures with her boarding pass, she repressed the urge to do a little celebratory dance on the way through.
As the plane taxied down the runway and she nursed a small glass of wine to calm her nerves, a grin was fixed firmly on her face. She had never left the US before, and it felt like the beginning of something big for her. In her own way she was marking the occasion as a beginning of a new her. She was going out on her own, and she was leaving all the bullshit of her humdrum life behind.
As she plane accelerated up into the air, her stomach dipped and she turned to the woman beside her and smiled.
“This is so exciting,” she said. “I’ve never traveled alone before.”
“Me neither,” the woman said with a nervous laugh. “Maybe we should look after each other.”
“Good idea,” Moira smiled.
Throughout the rest of the flight, Moira spent her time sipping red wine, flicking through magazines and cuddling into the airline blanket. As she drifted in and out of sleep, once again her dreams were wild and vivid and a man with a shock of red hair and a tall muscular frame was with her the whole way. They were running along untamed lands, up and down rolling hills and around the outskirts of a loch as the sunlight shone on it and made it look gold. The man was strong but gentle and his voice echoed around her subconscious. His accent was deep, gruff and very sexy.
The countryside turned to darkness and he was playfully chasing her down the ancient hallways of an incredible castle. He caught up to her and pushed her gently up against the stone wall and kissed her powerfully on the lips, so hard that it made her weak at the knees and floppy in his arms. As their bodies collided, even in the dream, it was the most amazing sensation and Moira’s heartbeat thumped loudly in her ears. The man pulled back and stared at her deep in the eyes before his hand moved down between her legs and he rubbed her gently before slipping her panties to one side. Moira threw her head back and gasped, ready to give herself to him, when suddenly a loud BING brought her back to reality…
She woke with a start as the seatbelt signs illuminated and the captain announced that the plane was preparing to land. Her cheeks were flushed, her whole body tingled, and she was sure she could still taste the man on her lips. It had been so vivid and real.
“You alright, dear?” the woman next to her asked as Moira flattened down her hair and did a double take of her surroundings.
“Yes,” Moira smiled, “I was just having this crazy dream.”
“They’re usually the best,” the lady smiled.
“Yes,” said Moira. “Yes, it was.”