Rough Ride (Chaos #5)(7)

So I’d used them.

But as I stood there, looking in the mirror, I knew that Beck and his brothers had concentrated on my face, thinking that they were taking the most important thing I had away from me.

Men were so stinking stupid.

In the last few days, when there wasn’t a lot to feel good about, I felt good about the fact that they hadn’t raped me.

That was my silver lining.

My boyfriend kidnapped me, delivered me to his buds, they beat the heck out of me, but they didn’t rape me.

If they’d done that to me, it would have taken away something that meant something.

But they hadn’t.

Yeah.

Awesome silver lining.

Still, for sure it was one.

But, to my way of thinking, they didn’t do any lasting damage. They didn’t break anything but nine ribs (since I had twenty-four, that could have been worse) and my nose. When Muzzle’s fist connected with my schnoz, I felt the cartilage give, and that hadn’t been fun, but it would heal. Eightball had sprained my wrist, but he didn’t snap it, and it had been tender but it was already feeling better.

I’d recover.

I could walk, talk, eat, breathe. I could definitely still deliver pizzas to diners’ tables (or would be able to in a week or two, after the bruising and swelling were gone and I had less pain due to the broken ribs).

I might even be able to learn to live with the fact that a man I trusted and thought I loved had not only brought me to that hell, he’d also delivered his share of it.

Sure, I’d broken his trust. I’d informed on him and his brothers’ activities to Chaos, setting them up to be taken down by the cops.

But let us not forget, they were able to be set up to be taken down by the cops. This meant they were doing felonious crap. That felonious crap being providing transport for illegal substances and firearms, offering this service to really bad guys.

So sure, I could see, if he found out, Beck being really freaking pissed at me. Yelling at me. Breaking it off with me. That was, if he didn’t give me the chance to explain why I’d done it in the first place, that being for him.

Well, not so much for him, I’d realized.

But I couldn’t think about that right then.

I had to think about the fact I survived. I was alive. Walking, talking, eating, breathing, and someday soon I’d again be laying pizza pies on tables for tips.

What I would not be doing was getting involved with a man, maybe ever again.

Seriously.

That might seem dramatic, but the first man I fell for, Shy Cage of the Chaos Motorcycle Club, had shown me a window to a world I wanted and the doorway I wanted to use to get to that was Shy because Shy was Shy. He was beautiful to look at and fantastic in bed, but he was also funny and sweet and protective and affectionate.

He was my dad (not that I knew about the “fantastic in bed” part with my dad, but from the time I understood the concept of sex, mom’s dreamy looks and dad’s cat-got-his-cream moods were not lost on me—gross, but not lost on me).

So Shy was all that…including having all of it on a bike.

But he dropped me like a hot brick the minute Tabitha Allen gave him indication that her doorway was open. He slammed the one on me and waltzed right through hers without a second thought.

Looking back, I knew as I fell deeper and deeper for him that he wasn’t doing the same.

That didn’t make it any better.

Now, also looking back, I knew as I got deeper and deeper into things with Beck that I was trying to find what I’d hoped to get with Shy.

They both belonged to motorcycle clubs, for one.

And Beck looked a lot like Shy for another (which, not so by the by, was a lot like my dad looked). Beefier, maybe. A bit rougher around the edges. But I definitely had a type.

And then came Snapper.

God, Snapper.

Nope.

No.

No more men for me.

Seriously.

Shy.

Then Beck? (Enough said there.)

And then there was Snap.

I closed my eyes and shook my head just as I heard a knock on the bathroom door.

“Sweetie,” Mom called through the door. “You been in there a long time. You okay?”

She was worried about me.

She would be. She was a mom. An awesome one. And when your daughter gets hospitalized due to her boyfriend and his motorcycle club stomping the crap out of her, that was definitely something that made moms worry.

But she’d been worried before that. She was part of the reason I’d made the deal with Chaos in the first place.

My dad had been a biker. He was a nomad when it came to that kind of thing (or, really, any kind of thing). He accepted being tied down by his woman and his daughter only, not anything else. Not a job. Not a mortgage. Not a membership to a club. He hung with a lot of them, including Chaos (in fact, Hammer, sadly now deceased, but one of the founding members of Chaos, had been my father’s best friend).

But he’d never hung with Bounty.

“Don’t like the feel of them,” I’d heard him mutter years ago. “If you’re an outlaw, own the outlaw. If you’re not, own that. You can’t wanna be a Gypsy Joker. You either are or you aren’t. They wanna be. But they aren’t. That shit just ain’t right and it could get dangerous.”

He’d been right.

It got dangerous.