What the hell?
“I actually got a ride here. So I can go home that way.” I use my best unaffected voice to play it off totally cool, pointing back to the church.
“Yeah, sweetheart, I’m not letting you walk out of here with him. I might not like Bennett, but I wouldn’t do that to another man.” Dom doesn’t take his eyes off Frankie as the two silently stand off against one another.
“Okay, then I go with him.” I point toward Dom. Given my choices are the head of the mob or the head of a local biker gang, I’m going to go with a biker gang. Don’t ask me why.
“Really? I thought you had better taste.” Frankie shrugs like he’s not at all irritated with my answer, but from the way the guys covering Dom widen their stances I’m not fooled.
Frankie takes two steps back and puts a hand up in a friendly wave. He turns but then stops, looking back to me. “Oh and Anessa. You and I are square, but tell Ridge he owes me twenty-five.”
Twenty-five?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Let’s go, babe,” Dom says when Frankie makes it far enough down the path he’s turned the corner and we can no longer see his back. The man stared down at least six bikers holding guns on him and then turned and walked away like he wasn’t worried. He strolled out of here without a care in the world.
Ridge is not going to like this.
Dom stalks off in the woods not looking back to make sure I’m following him. I do anyway. A woods full of bikers and mobsters is not the place I want to be after dark. I’d like to live to celebrate the Fourth of July holiday. Maybe see that reenactment.
He and a few guys who follow stop next to a small group of dirt bikes. “Something you want to tell me about?” he asks pushing up the kickstand.
“Not really.” I have a feeling I’m in enough trouble with someone already.
He shakes his head, pushing the bike a few steps ahead. “You meeting Frankie Zanetti in the woods by yourself in the middle of the night can’t be good.”
“I wasn’t alone. Tabitha and Katy were in the church.” I try to justify myself, but Dom’s face scrunches up like I’m making it worse. “Let’s not tell anyone.”
I’ll beg if needed.
He shakes his head. “Babe, trust me. They already know. Hop on.”
I haven’t ridden a bike since high school when my cousin Roy used to take me around the woods beside his house on his dirt bike. It takes some finagling but eventually I end up on the back of Dom’s bike.
He whistles and is met with a chorus of loud rumbling as the bikes around us come to life. The exhaust fumes fill the clean air in the woods.
“Are you taking me home?” I yell over the noise.
“No! And you better hold on if you don’t want to get left behind.”
I immediately wrap my arms around Dom’s middle, but I don’t latch on for dear life until he hammers the gas. He weaves in between the trees at a speed faster than I’d drive a car down a regular road. I squeeze my eyes closed and silently pray for the entire ten minutes the swerving goes on until the bike comes to stop and the engine cuts out.
“You can let go now,” he says around a chuckle.
I loosen my arms and stick my feet on the ground.
“Be careful of the exhaust pipe.”
There’s heat on my leg and I let out a little scream while jumping the rest of the way off the bike. Once my feet are safely on the ground and far enough away from the heat source, I allow myself to take in my surroundings.
The house in front of our group is gorgeous. A tall, white classic farmhouse with a huge wraparound porch. The dirt bikes stop in a wide driveway that circles around the house and ends at a tall privacy fence.
I like to think I’m not a judgmental person, but it’s safe to say I never expected a biker to live here. There are no beer cans littering the ground, only a gorgeous assortment of flowering bushes. Maybe they stole the place from a little old lady who liked to garden.
“Come on in. Gretta will want to meet you.”
Gretta? That’s definitely not a biker’s name.
