Stay Vertical
Book #2 in The Bare Bones MC series
by Layla Wolfe
Copyright 2014 © Layla Wolfe
Kindle Edition
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Cover art by Red Poppy Designs
Bruno photographed by Yuri Arcurs
Edited by Carol Adcock
Regarding E-book Piracy
This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.
This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
To Jan Bowles for taking this wild ride with Jeff. I miss him already, Jayla. There is no replacement on the face of this earth that will satisfy in quite the same way.
To Vella Day for helping me navigate these cold, cruel waters.
To Pat Caine and all the crew who used to jam it down the highway in their Harleys and Impalas with V8 engines while blasting Bachman Turner Overdrive. Speed, Doug, Butch, Al, Wayne, Duke and especially Dave Glasser, this one’s for you. Hang loose at Gladiator School. We’ll be there soon to pick you up. The Big Trip awaits.
Publisher’s Note:
This is Book #2 in the Bare Bones series. This book is a stand-alone and can be read out of order. However, it is advised to read THE BARE BONES first to get a complete picture of the club’s background, storylines, and setting.
Publisher’s note:
This is not your mother’s contemporary romance. Daring readers will encounter sexual assault, violence against women, general violence among men, consensual BDSM, and a HEA. It is not for the faint of heart. It’s a full length novel of 65,000 words with no cliffhanger. Recommended 18+ due to mature content.
One two three four five six seven. All good sinners go to heaven.
Peace Corps volunteer June Shellmound returns to Arizona to care for her dying mother. At the clubhouse of The Bare Bones motorcycle club, June is swept into the drama when half-breed Lytton Driving Hawk barges in and demands recognition as president Ford Illuminati’s half-brother.
Hot enough to melt steel, Lytton has forged a life apart from the reservation as a brilliant chemist, living the high times at his pot farm in the mountains. Lytton is no fortunate son, though, and the mortal secrets Ford’s been hiding about their father drive the last nail into their brotherly coffin.
Lytton turns his back on the Bare Bones and sweet bleeding heart June. Blinded by vengeance, Lytton becomes ruled by his own demons, raising hell alongside Ford’s mortal enemies, The Cutlasses. Alliances are torn apart within the club, loyalties are divided, and everyone’s true spirits are tested. When the dust clears, Lytton and June find themselves running for their lives just to…
STAY VERTICAL
Book #2 in The Bare Bones MC series
by Layla Wolfe
JUNE
I
saw a thousand fresh new beginnings in Africa—and ten thousand and one violent endings.
There would be one more casualty soon—but not if I could help it. This one was within my power to prevent. This was America, and it was my mother who was about to die. If you can’t save your own mother, well, then, what’s the point of trying to help all those other faceless, nameless people?
Having completed my original two year contract with the Peace Corps in Benin, I had returned home to Arizona only to discover I really didn’t fit into the modern, fast, flashy world. Returned Peace Corps volunteers, so they say, will always long for the crazy, unpredictable, haphazard and downright violent world of their adoptive country. They say we become accustomed to the nomadic, wild danger of third world countries, that we sort of begin to thrive on the menace and risk, like some kind of “flight or fight” reaction.
I believe it. When I came back to Cottonwood after my first tour in West Africa, I was completely lost. I didn’t even bother staying with my mother Ingrid. We’d never been close. To be honest, she was pretty much a candidate for the next Mommy Dearest award. Because she suffered from some post-traumatic agoraphobia, she would never leave the house. Due to this, she never got a job. Well, children can’t get jobs. We had no food, no clothing, and Ingrid would scream the roof down if one of us three kids so much as flushed the toilet. The water bill, you know.
So I spent most of my formative years staying at the houses of supportive friends. I thanked my lucky stars for them every day. Children are incapable of assigning blame to their parents. They turn it on themselves, believing themselves responsible for all predicaments. How can an unformed psyche look from the outside in and form a realization that “hey, my mother pretty well sucks”? It’s in our nature to trust our parents, to rely on them to do what’s right, to depend on them for nurturing.
When that doesn’t happen, we think it’s all our fault, right? I’ve spent my entire life trying to fix people—to fix myself. Sometimes it actually works.
Ingrid never admitted she was agoraphobic. We probably didn’t even know the word for it back then. She would just say how being around people stressed her out, but this didn’t stop her from dealing crystal out of our suburban mid-century style Cottonwood home. It was the only possible occupation for someone who refused to leave her house.
So I stayed with friends who were better off than us—which is to say, everyone in Cottonwood—while my older sister Madison squeaked by, sleeping up in Coyote Buttes in the great outdoors, I guess. We weren’t terribly close. Nor was I close with my own twin Bobby, who just became like a dark, gothic character, hiding in his darkened bedroom. It must have been the height of mortification that we were too poor to afford internet. Bobby managed to steal a laptop somewhere, but we had no cable, so he couldn’t even play video games like any good juvenile delinquent. What can you do on a laptop with no Wi-Fi? Design spreadsheets?
In retrospect, we should have banded together. We could have helped each other out by—I don’t know, by stealing food for each other. Instead, we sort of turned against each other. The few times Madison and I were home at the same time, we’d just bump each other with our shoulders while passing in the hallway, and yell at each other to get out of the bathroom.
Because we both wore size ten shoes, once Madison must have stolen my ultra-cool hobnail boots that were as heavy as a mountain. Well, I found her wearing them and a knock-down ensued. That strong bitch wound up braining me time after time with a boot so hard I probably had the impression of the actual hobnails against my temple. Ingrid encouraged this sort of adolescent drama, yelling “Hit her harder!” from her seat on top of the dryer.
Of course I knew that most families weren’t like ours. My friends all had normal parents. My BFF Emma Flantz, her mom was even still a housekeeper.
A housekeeper
, in today’s day and age, can you imagine that? She was perfectly satisfied to go to the gym, drive her kids around, and do her charity work. In fact, from this lofty angle over a decade later, I can actually see where Emma’s mom might’ve inspired me to do well, too. “Those who can, do.”
I guess my friends were nerds too, not cooler-than-thou hipsters and delinquents like the friends of Madison and Bobby. I fell in with the science crowd at high school. We didn’t quite design yearbooks, but I was definitely a mathlete, winning both the Whitney and the Stanfield awards in my junior year. I didn’t only stay with Emma. I knew that would put a stress on her family’s finances, but I had plenty of other friends willing to shelter me. Their parents knew I was a good tutor, and hey, let’s face it, we were nerds. I had standing invitations among all the mathletes to stay at their houses and help their children out.
I felt sorry for Madison sometimes. She was a rough and tough chick who took pride in her steely exterior. She was also a slut, and I was envious of that, to tell the truth. I knew she was giving a pantload of blowjobs up there at her camping spot in Coyote Buttes. Word got around the school, but it didn’t tarnish her image. Instead, it elevated her in our dorkwad eyes. It even elevated my own status that my sister had allegedly swallowed ten guys’ swords all in a row one night while singing “Kumbaya” around her fire. Sure, she later straightened up to become an RN after running away to Flagstaff. But back then, she was the shining star of the pipe job in Cottonwood.
At sixteen, I hadn’t even kissed a boy. I wasn’t even exactly sure what a hummer was. I mean, I wouldn’t say that I
looked
like a nerd. I had Madison’s shapely hourglass figure, maybe a bit on the “ample” or “curvy” side, but I attracted attention. And I had her same cherubic, innocent face with the little doll’s button eyes. My problem was, I really
was
innocent. I mean, at sixteen I still had a Jesse McCartney cellphone case. Madison and I were as different as arsenic and strychnine.
Oh, sure, other dickweeds asked me out. These guys had been the recipients of swirlies and purple nurples since time immemorial. Their headgear and retainers had long been tossed onto the school’s roof. They took time out from their marching band and audio visual club meetings to ask me out, but I always said no. Seriously? Once I finally threw out my McCartney case, there wasn’t a live boy I was truly interested in. Once I finally started lusting for Jake Gyllenhaal, none of the guys on their way to the math Olympiads had the right sort of scruffy bed hair, lusty eyes, or something. They just didn’t cut it. The dorkwads left me cold.
For a while I was afraid I might even be gay. I’d look at myself in the mirror with my bouncy, fat boobs held up like two bowling balls in a sling. My soft auburn hair framed my angelic face. None of the rug eaters I’d ever seen looked like me. And I did like Jake Gyllenhaal. So I was safe.