No Man's Daughter: An MC Biker Romance by Kay Perry Read Free Book Online

 
    NO MAN'S DAUGHTER
     
    Lydia’s hand pushed the dingy dish towel in small, purposeless circles. It was more or less a metaphor of her life. And that bothered her more than her actual life did. Ollie’s was still. Dead, actually. Roundup ended for the time being in little old Quimby, Montana, last week. All the local hands around were whipped. Otherwise the place would be humming. Lydia had nothing to do but catch up.
     
    Only she didn’t want to do it. It was gonna pass, she told herself. It was gonna pass. The place would fill up and someone would tell her a joke. Dean the cook would buy her a beer when all was said and done and she would fall asleep once her head hit the pillow. Lydia was a sheepish woman who lived in her head, so it was often exhausted come bed time.
     
    It was Friday. The third Friday and that meant that Lydia would go home for the weekend. Home for her was a generous, empty ranch house on a thousand acres about twenty-five minutes away. Lydia went home every few weekends just to knock the dust off the place. It was ironic that when she was growing up, Lydia rarely strayed from the ranch where she lived as an only child to aged parents. As was the case with any teen, when she hit "that age" she wanted to leave. See the world. And she did. Leave, anyway.
     
    She got as far as Billings where she went to university, living on campus. She was called out of class one day to be notified that her mother and father were killed in a flash flood, drowned by a sudden creek rise on the back hundred of their spread. Lydia was so numb for such a long time after that she was pretty sure she floated all the way home, drifting in and out of consciousness as though the flood was drowning her too. Without much consideration, Lydia handed it all over to the foreman to let him run the show and she grabbed a simple job at her favorite eatery in downtown Quimby: Ollie’s. The only place her parents took her when they wanted to eat in town. Dean the cook let Lydia have the room above the diner. He thought she was nuts to live in the squalid apartment instead of the rolling mansion back home.
     
    "A knockout girl like you with everything going for you. You don’t belong here," the cook counseled her.
     
    But it was painful for Lydia to be at the ranch. Not able to stand it, she actually arranged for the sale—all done with the wave of her pen. The ranch wouldn’t be hers in 30 days. But even despite not wanting to go there on this, her designated weekend, she was having some second thoughts.
     
    Little did she know that just as she was wrapping her head around leaving at the end of her shift and heading that way, those deliberations would be put to rest. Life for Lydia Finch was finally about to get interesting. Very.
     
    ***
     
    Lydia’s T-shirt was faded but it was clean beneath the crisp white bib of her apron. The apron and the nametag were the only parts of her attire that were the eatery's official uniform. Ollie didn’t mind that she was partial to little jean skirts. She hadn’t done much to speak of to wreck it that morning and it was mid-day. Shame to ruin it now. Its soft texture, and the sweet way it made her body look—taut, firm, hot. Lydia really loved her body. She walked it, jogged it, yoga’ed it, not to mention to ran it off at work. She was a blessed human being in that department, she had determined. Dean the cook often confirmed. The sight of her exquisite frame was one of the few things that gave her joy. Fortunately, living a life of virtual solitude even amongst a dinner crowd, she didn’t have to admit that. She checked herself out a lot—someone had to—in the long mirror in the lady’s room where she ducked a little too often to steal a minute alone.
     
    Lydia delegated herself to take apart the counter and give it a thorough once-over but she stopped as soon as she started. A whir. A buzz. Faint but… what? Dean wasn’t running anything. It wasn’t a fan of any kind. It