Unattainable (Undeniable, #3)(10)
She should have never come back.
Pausing on the sidewalk to wipe at her wet cheeks, she glanced up. Hank’s. The only bar in Miles City and also the only establishment in town she’d never been inside of. Other than one horrible incident in college where she’d ended up with her face in a toilet bowl, she didn’t drink.
She’d never been much fun, something her old friends Anabeth and Danny had loved reminding her of only every other second. Both were blonde, skinny, fun-loving, and perky, everything Ellie wasn’t.
Aside from her blue eyes, Ellie was the dark to their light. Her skin was the color of caramel, her long black curls were tight and unruly. And she was curvy, well aware that she was carrying around a few extra pounds, that her stomach wasn’t exactly flat, her breasts were annoyingly large, her hips more pronounced than she would like them to be.
But it wasn’t just in looks that she’d differed from her two closest friends.
Danny had never left Miles City. She’d ended up in community college, then got married and saddled with a kid, all before she turned twenty-five.
And if that weren’t bad enough, she’d married a probable homicidal maniac fourteen years older than her. Ripper, a biker in her father’s criminal motorcycle club whose face and body were so badly scarred, he was terrifying to look at.
After Ellie had found out about Danny’s disturbing marriage, she’d cut off all contact with Danny but continued to receive periodic unwanted updates every time Anabeth had come back to school after her summer visits to Miles City.
Speaking of Anabeth…
Despite Ellie and Anabeth rooming together at MSU, it hadn’t taken all that long for their friendship to become strained and then eventually nonexistent. Anabeth had taken to the college party scene, pledging for a sorority and becoming the top-notch bitch Ellie had always known she’d been deep down inside.
Now Anabeth was living in Westchester, New York, in a double-gated community, married to the son of a wealthy real estate developer and pregnant with her first child.
But Ellie didn’t regret her decisions to put her education and career first or to cut people like Danny and Anabeth out of her life, women with no aspirations except to marry men who would take care of them.
Whether it be on the back of a notorious criminal’s bike, or in the back of a wealthy, spoiled man’s limousine, they’d both sold out, given up their freedom to a pair of *s and were doing nothing with their lives except birthing more * children.
They both were actively shitting on every single woman who’d worked tirelessly for years to give the female sex an equal shot in life, to obtain the vote and work side by side with men, to earn equal wages and be treated with the respect they deserved.
That would never be Ellie. She would never give up her dreams for a man, and she would never, ever end up with a man who wanted to control her life, who expected her to get on her back whenever he had a hard-on or pop out children whenever he ordered her to do so.
The loud and familiar rumbling of motorcycles snapped her out of her thoughts. Speaking of Danny…
Six men, all riding Harleys and wearing their leather Hell’s Horsemen vests, pulled up to one of the town’s few red lights and came to a stop.
She immediately recognized Deuce, Danny’s father, leading the party with a little blonde girl on the back of his bike, her arms wrapped around him. Ivy, Ellie mused, had grown quite a bit since she’d last seen her. How old was she now? Eight? Nine? Deuce must have just picked her up from school. Ellie thought back to her younger years, remembering Danny on the back of Deuce’s bike, holding tight to her father, waving happily at Ellie and Anabeth as he dropped her off at school. Anabeth had been awestruck by the motorcycles, but not Ellie. She’d been terrified and to this day had only once been on the back of a bike.
Looking over the remaining five men, Ellie realized she recognized them all: Mick, Bucket, Tap, Jase, and Dirty.
No Cage. Ellie thanked God for small favors. Cage West had been one of her three high school mistakes, occurring the summer after junior year when she’d let her hormones get the better of her.
All six of them glanced her way. Bucket’s lips split into a greasy smile and Deuce’s eyebrows shot up. Well, obviously they would recognize the only mixed-race female who’d ever lived in Miles City.
Then the light turned green, their engines revved, Deuce gave her a two-finger salute and a genuine, dimpled smile, and like a well-oiled machine, each of them in sync with the other, all six of them shot off down the street not once straying from formation.
She stared after them, disgusted, wondering why the mayor allowed a gang of bikers to run this town, had never lifted a finger to close their operations down, get them arrested, blown up their clubhouse, anything.
Greed. It all came down to greed.
This town represented everything she hated. If her parents hadn’t needed her, never again would she set foot in Miles City.
“Ellie?”
She glanced to her right, at the man walking toward her, and her jaw dropped.
“Daniel?” she asked, cocking her head to one side, making sure it was really Daniel Mooresville, a once-upon-a-time scrawny teenager with glasses and horrible acne.
That wasn’t the case anymore. Daniel had done plenty of growing up while Ellie had been away. The good kind. Clear skin, rim-free sky-blue eyes, short sandy-blond hair, and an ungodly amount of muscles stopped in front of her and gave her a wide smile.