Unattainable by Madeline Sheehan Read Free Book Online Page B

direction, hooked a quick
right, and was gone before the second bullet had left the
chamber.
    Dirty lowered his shaking hand, his
entire body trembling, his mind a mess of all-consuming scrambled
adaptations of both the past and present.
    That wasn’t him lying on the street,
that wasn’t him with his pants around his ankles, bleeding, crying,
begging.
    He tried to breathe. In and out,
slowly, faster, slow again. NOTHING WAS WORKING.
    That wasn’t fucking him, it wasn’t, it
wasn’t—
    “ D-dirt-ty…?”
    The raspy, garbled, distinctly
feminine-sounding mutation of his name caused his head to swivel
left and his eyes landed on the bloodied heap of quivering flesh
that lay no more than fifteen feet from him.
    Dirty blinked. He blinked and he
breathed and his eyes refocused.
    Shit.
    Shit, he knew her. Sort of. She
was…Emma? Erin? Ella?
    Ellie. Ellie the mulatto hottie.
Friends with Danny from way back when.
    “ P-p-please…” she
continued and her arm moved, her fingers extended. She reached for
him.
    He could do this. He just couldn’t
think about what he was doing while he was doing it. But he could
do it. He had to do it.
    Danny was the closest thing to a friend
he’d ever had, the only woman who willingly hung around him, and
this was her friend. What the fuck would he do if it were Danny
lying half-naked on the street, badly beaten?
    He moved forward, jogging quickly
toward her, bent down beside her, and froze just before his hands
could come in contact with her body.
    “ Hey,” he said hoarsely,
trying to keep himself calm. “Anything broken?”
    She blinked up at him through swollen
eyes. “No,” she whispered. “Just…m-my head…hurts.”
    “ Fuck,” he muttered as he
retracted his hands, reached inside his cut, and pulled out his
cell phone. “I got you covered, I’m calling the
cavalry.”
    “ No!” she cried as her arm
shot out and her hand gripped his wrist. The feel of her, her tight
grip on him, her skin on his skin, caused a nauseating ripple
effect throughout his body, ending with a violent
shiver.
    “ No police,” she
whispered, her grip loosening as the last of her strength faded.
“Please…no one…nobody…can know.”
    Dirty pressed his lips together. He
hadn’t been talking about the boys in blue, he didn’t roll that
way. But Ellie had said it first. No police, huh? He understood “no
cops,” it was a way of life for him and his brothers, the unspoken
code that anything that needed handling, they would take care of it
themselves.
    But a good girl like Ellie? Why the
fuck not?
    Still not wanting to touch her, he
contemplated calling Deuce for help until Ellie’s eyelids began to
flutter closed. He let loose a large breath of relief. She was out.
He could handle her unconscious. Gently, he rolled her onto her
back and tried as best he could to pull up her pants. Then, with
the trepidation of a grown man handling a baby for the very first
time, he lifted her up into his arms, cradled her against his
chest, and headed out of the alleyway.

CHAPTER THREE
    Unblinking, I stared at the desktop
monitor in front of me, at the e-mail attachment I’d just opened,
and skimmed over the title:
    “ Animal Rights Activists
Protest the Excessive Use of Leather at Biker Rally in Los
Angeles.”
    Shaking my head, I snorted softly. You
could take the girl out of the motorcycle club, but she’ll never
outrun those damn Harley pipes. It wasn’t just ZZ that was a
constant reminder, it was the loud yet sexy rumble of every passing
motorcycle. My world always seemed to stop as the beautiful machine
whooshed through my life, no matter what I was doing—eating,
talking, immersed in my smart phone—I always paused to watch as it
flew by, and stared as it disappeared. But unlike everybody else,
who might give a quick glance and then immediately go back to what
they’d been doing, unaware that they’d just witnessed the ultimate
freedom, a way to fly without wings, I would stare long after