Page 9 of Enforce This

“Get down!” Eric threw me into a thick shrub and pulled out his pistol.

He fired two quick rounds that left me flopping like a damn fish. I’d never heard a gun go off at close range. It was a brutal sound that left a scream lodged in my throat. It escaped in an ugly, awkward fashion and I hesitantly shifted on the prickly shrub.

I sat up with a struggle and glanced between Eric and the men who were hurrying back into the car.

“Move. Now!” Eric barked, jerking me out of the shrub by the arm as the men drove off.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the pistol in his other hand. There was no orange tip. The blasts had been so loud my ears were still ringing a little. This was definitely real. He hadn’t even hesitated before squeezing that trigger and didn’t seem at all concerned about any damage he might have done.

All of these stupid thoughts distracted me as I allowed Eric to haul me by the arm toward his motorcycle.

Chapter Five

Eric

“Get on the bike.” I flung her toward it, and quickly climbed on.

“I…” She stammered and froze beside me, looking in the direction of the approaching sirens.

Her eyes were wide with adrenaline and her chest was heaving. The sirens were getting louder. Rochester was bigger than Swanwick. That meant more cops. They’d be here faster. The fact that it was a college wasn’t lost on me. They probably had their own security that would be here first.

“Listen, that was the fucking mafia. The mob. You understand? The cops can’t help you now, but I can…” I tried to reason with her, the last thing I wanted was to knock her out and take her by force, she was Mark’s daughter, for fuck’s sake.

She glanced at the gun in my hand, and I didn’t think, I just raised it and pointed it at her.

“Get. On.” I ground out as the color drained from her face.

She roughly hopped on the back of my bike and struck me in the back with both hands hard enough to force the air from my lungs.

“You done?” I growled, turning just enough to glare into her eyes.

“Fuck you!” she snapped, and hesitantly set her hands on either side of my waist.

I kicked off and she shot both hands up to grip my shoulders and squealed.

“Be easy,” she frantically pleaded as I shot across the parking lot and through a patch of grass. I rolled one shoulder and then the other, trying to encourage her hands down my back.

She finally relaxed a little, placing a hand over each side of my hips. I could see the hint of lights in my mirrors. The law was focused on responding to the building that had called the incident in, giving me plenty of time to get down the highway, which was just what I intended to do.

I didn’t bother with the long lane that connected the parking lot to the highway, I cut across the damn baseball field leaving a cloud of dust behind me so no one could see which direction I turned.

Her legs squeezed and loosened around my own as she nervously tried not to touch me, only to panic and grip me for a few moments each time we hit a bump.

As we drew near the highway, I glanced left and right. There were no police lights or fancy sedans. The traffic was thin. I confidently sped up. I thought it was going well until I began to negotiate the curve. The bike naturally leaned toward the road as I navigated the bend the way I always did. Rather than being still, and acting like luggage, or keeping her body close to mine, Feloni panicked. She squealed and jerked her body away from the road, sending the bike back up and forcing me to straighten the wheel. The bike swerved violently as I fought to correct it and we shot into oncoming traffic, narrowly avoiding the front bumper of a jeep. I reached back and clutched her upper thigh, keeping her pinned in place as we dove down the ditch and swerved.

I was trying not to kill us both, and worried about her. It was obvious she had never ridden before. Everything was happening so fast. She was like an octopus, her limbs scrambling around me as she flailed and screamed. When I looked up there was a mailbox.

Right. There.

The choices were nil. I could eat the mailbox, wreck, and possibly end up in jail or dead, or… I let go of her thigh, shot my hand out and hit the damn thing hard enough to send it off its post. The bike weaved a little bit, but I was getting used to that by now.

Feloni’s face was buried in my back and my gut hurt from how hard she was squeezing me. Once we were out of the ditch and down the road a few miles, I tapped her knuckles with the pistol, and she jerked her hands away from me.

I slowed down to a more natural speed and damn near walked it around the curve when I had to turn onto the country road that led toward my house. Mark hadn’t said where to take her, but it was the safest spot I could think of. No one except a few of the brothers could find my house because of how deep in the sticks it really was.

It wasn’t much, but it was private, and when I came home from Afghanistan, that was exactly what I had needed.

Peace. Quiet. And a whole lot of privacy to sort out my demons.

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