Ruined (The MC Motorcycle Club Romance Series - Book #1) by Alycia Taylor Page A

my mother was there, all of the guys had toned down on
the making out with biker babes and were just talking, laughing, dancing,
drinking and having an all-around good time.
    Terrance and Olivia were there too, but I did my
best to act like I didn’t notice. I had actually
enjoyed talking to her the other day, but it was hard to look at her lips and
not want to kiss them. It was hard to think about Terrance kissing them and not
punch him in the mouth.
    “Hey, boy, wanna throw a
dart or two?” It was Buster Balls. I looked at his swollen knuckles curled
around a dart and I wondered if we should clear the place out first. He could have
likely taken out someone’s eye.
    “Sure, Buster. Don’t hustle me though.”
    The old man cackled. Sometimes I wondered how old he
really was. He told me sixty-nine when I asked, but he had been saying that
since I was fourteen at least. He hadn’t been able to hold on to the handlebars
and operate the hand brakes and clutch on his bike for years because of his
arthritis. I was surprised to see that with the darts, his aim really wasn’t
half bad.
    We took a break for another beer and I opened his
and handed it to him.
    He thanked me and said, “You know, I did some time I
didn’t have coming once…a long time ago.”
    That simple statement was huge to me. It was the
first acknowledgment from anyone besides me that I was serving someone else’s
time.
    I threw my dart. I looked at him and said, “What did
you do time for, Buster?”
    “Same thing you did,” he said, tossing his dart. It
barely stuck to the outside circle of the target. “Drug
trafficking and possession with intent. I did five years, but that was
almost twenty years ago and they were tougher on drug crimes back then.”
    Interested, I asked him, “So when you say you did
someone else’s time you mean you weren’t guilty of the crime you got charged
with?”
    “Yep, that’s exactly it. I was set up, like you.”
    “Who set you up?” I asked him.
    “The old club president, the one
before your daddy. His name was Raymond Winkle. He was a
tough old bastard.”
    “Why would your own club set you up?”
    “You’ve heard how the inner city gangs use kids to
do their killings and their drug running, right? Well, I wasn’t a kid. I was
twenty-one at the time, but I was squeaky clean. I didn’t have a record and I
was the only one of them who didn’t. I thought we were goin ’
for a ride. But I found out when the State police stopped us that we were
moving a few kilos of coke and we were movin ’ ’ em in my saddle bags. I had no idea them drugs was there,
but since I refused to roll on anyone else, I took the fall.”
    It sounded eerily like my situation. I had spent two
years thinking that maybe the shit was put in my bags
at the bar we had stopped at in Barstow. I always knew I was set up, obviously,
but I thought or at least I hoped that it was by a rival club; one that had a
grudge against my dad for whatever reason. Buster had me thinking differently.
What if my own father had set me up? That would just clinch him for father of
the year, that’s for sure.  
    I had been in college at the time. My dad and the
other guys in the club used to bug me all the time about taking over the bar.
Bartending at The Smoke Joint wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t like anyone popped in and ordered a Sex on the Beach. It was straight up beer, vodka
or whisky. They thought I could do that until I finished school and then when I
had a business degree I could take it over, make improvements. I told them all,
more than once, that once I finished school I was getting as far away from the club
as I could. The only thing that would bring me back would be my mom, but she had
been the first one to understand me leaving and she encouraged me my whole life
to do so.
    Would my father go to such an extreme to keep me in
the club? With two felonies on my record no one was going to hire me. But that
was ridiculous; my father couldn’t