Page 11 of Auctioned to the Billionaire Bodyguard

As we approached the exit, I saw there was a skinny young guy ‘guarding’ the entrance. Wanting to appear normal, I rolled the window down. “This was great. Tell Zeke that Stone and Killer definitely want in.”

“Sure, man,” the kid said. He stared at Nadine. “That one of ours?”

“No, that’s Nadine,” I said, lamely. He seemed to accept it, though.

“Just have to check.” He leaned in like he was confiding in me. “Really, unless you’re taking Zeke’s two girls or Skeeter’s girl, no one cares if a few of the dancers go missing. They’ll all end up in Houston sooner or later, anyway. We’re always getting new girls, so it don’t matter none to me. Long as I get my cock sucked when I want it, I’m all good.”

Well, he was a disgusting specimen of human garbage. I smiled, though, and forced a chuckle. “Gotcha.”

With that, he waved us on. Once we’d been on the road for a while, I was about to tell Jess she could get off the floor when we passed one of the creepiest looking guys I’d ever seen. He was on a motorcycle. I think he was a really tanned white guy, but I wasn’t sure. He had so many tattoos it was difficult to tell. His head had been shaved, and he had the Gray Bones MC logo tattooed on his scalp.

He was cut as hell and huge. And I caught a flash of his eyes as he glanced over our vehicle, his eyes widening as he saw Nadine. Then he frowned and shook his head. This all happened in the fraction of an instant, but I’d caught a couple of things.

That had to be Skeeter, and he was scary as fuck despite having the name of an old, rich lady’s teacup Chihuahua. He’d thought Nadine was Jess for a minute. And his eyes were soulless. Pure evil.

I’d seen a lot of bad men in my life. The very worst of them had eyes that looked dead, like there was nothing human left inside them to reason with. That’s exactly what this guy looked like.

“Hey, Jess?” I asked.

“Yeah?” she called from the floor.

“I assume Zeke’s women are Camila and Lovey, right?”

“You got it.”

I asked the next question with trepidation. “Who, um, is Skeeter’s woman?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Well, that would be me.”

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

We’d just stolen the crazy, huge, evil man’s longtime girlfriend.

CHAPTER TWO

Before the Rescue

Jess

I really hated it here.

I stared out the window of my room in the clubhouse of the Gray Bones Motorcycle Club. Well, notmywindow. It was Skeeter’s window, but it had also been mine for a long time now. I’d come here thinking it was a temporary fix for a long-term problem. I’d work here long enough to save up money for me and my mom to get the hell out of Wilkins, Georgia. Or Shitty Wilkins as it was called by people in and around the area. I’d get us to West Bay, over on the coast, and save up enough money to go to college. Then I’d make something of myself and take care of her.

I’d had a full ride scholarship to West Bay University and had been so excited to go there and get started on life. But then my lazy-ass father had died, suddenly of a heart attack. Well, that had set off a chain of events that had ended with me applying to be a stripper at the only club anywhere in the Shitty Wilkins area.

My sweet mother, Lyda Walker, had been through a lot in her life. Her childhood, what she’d tell me about it, at least, was really awful. I didn’t even want to think about the parts shewasn’ttelling me about. She’d come through all of it with a smile on her face, though, and given me a good childhood. She’d beenan assistant librarian at the public library one town over. She didn’t get paid much, but it was something. And I got to spend as much time as I wanted hiding in the stacks and reading. She’d powered through her marriage, even though my dad was almost never home and helped with bills even more rarely than that. She hadn’t thought she could afford a divorce.

But then he’d died, leaving nothing but debt and a shocking secret behind him. It wasn’t the debt that had broken Mom. It was the secret. When she’d gone to make a claim on his social security survivor’s benefit, she’d gotten a rude awakening. Her marriage to Dad had never been valid since he’d never gotten divorced from his first wife. All that time she’d spent with him because she didn’t think she could afford a divorce, had felt pointless to her. She’d felt like she’d wasted twenty years of her life working her ass off to pay his bills. The truth was she could’ve walked away at any time. And she hated that I wasn’t even legitimate since they weren’t technically married.

Bad luck had followed my mom around all her life. For forty years she’d just dealt with it. But all of that with Dad broke her. One morning a couple of days after she’d found out, she just… couldn’t get up. She didn’t cry. She just laid in her bed and looked out the window. At first her job was understanding. She had tons of sick leave built up, anyway. But days became weeks and weeks became months. She quit being able to go anywhere. She’d had a panic attack in the middle of the Piggly Wiggly and a friend who saw it took her home.

Then it happened in church. And at work after she went back. It happened in the driveway when she tried to drive away from the house. Soon it had gotten so bad she could barely make it to the mailbox. The mailman, who I’d always suspected had a crush on her, brought her mail to the porch and set it on the bench outside the door each day. Her job told her whenever she got better, they’d have a place for her.

And I knew I’d have to delay my scholarship.

I couldn’t leave her like that. She had no way to pay her bills.

I’d looked around town to see what I could get as an eighteen-year-old high school graduate with very little work experience. It wasn’t pretty. There wasn’t anything that paid enough to make ends meet.