Forbidden Beauty Read online

  Coffin Cheaters Motorcycle Club

  By Abriella Blake

  * * *

  A Hearts Collective Production

  Copyright © 2014 Hearts Collective

  All rights reserved. This document may not be reproduced in any way without the expressed written consent of the author. The ideas, characters, and situations presented in this story are strictly fictional, and any unintentional likeness to real people or real situations is completely coincidental.

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  Crushing Beauty (Harbingers of Sorrow MC) by Celia Loren

  Breaking Beauty (Devils Aces MC) by Celia Loren

  Wrecking Beauty (Devils Reapers MC) by Celia Loren

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  * * *

  FORBIDDEN BEAUTY

  Coffin Cheaters Motorcycle Club

  * * *

  By Abriella Blake

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Prologue

  * * *

  I wasn't designed to be anybody's “baby.”

  I didn't grow up watching Disney movies, or playing with Barbie dolls—like all the other saps in south Florida. My pre-teen years were spent learning the history of the great American motorcycles: the Marman Twin, Wild Bill's Roadog, Harley, Harley, Harley. I drank my first PBR at eleven. I first rode a motorcycle when I was nine years old. I still remember that day, too—clutching the leather vest around my father's thick middle, terrified as the wind whipped through my long red hair, seeming to pull me backwards. Getting off that Harley, I remember Pops bending low and staring into my freckly, frightened face: “You like the bike, kid? Cause there's plenty more where that came from.” Even as a young girl, I knew my life would be different—different from the confined-housewife-world of the women I sometimes peeped on the garage's TV. My life would be an adventure.

  For one thing, I only knew one other woman especially well, in my nest full of bikers: my twin sister Tatiana. Gisele and Tatiana: a couple of tanned, skinny redheads with exotic-sounding names. Pops told us that we had “fancy” names because our Ma had originally wanted to be an actress. Unfortunately, the big adventure of Liza Dunne's life was cut short by the birth of her two children. Statistically speaking, Western women rarely die in childbirth these days. That is—unless they forsake giving birth in a hospital, for legal reasons and fear of the police.

  Here's pretty much all I know about my parents: Liza Dunne was a two-bit grifter, employed occasionally as a hotel cleaner, a maid, and a convenience store cashier around the south of Florida. She liked to shoplift and pickpocket, which was how she got hooked up with my father, who was also a regular practitioner of the five finger discount. To hear him tell it, the pair of them both tried to stick up a gas station at the same time. Only instead of killing one another and making off with the drop, my parents fell in love right on the spot. Now that I'm older, I'm not sure how much of this story to believe, but it sure as hell made for a good bedtime tale. Tati and I asked a lot of questions about Ma, when we were younger. At one point, though, without even a memory to go on—our maternal shadow faded completely away.

  But it's not as if I grew up without a family—don't get me wrong. Pops is—was—a key member of the Coffin Cheaters, the most badass MC in Miami-Dade County. The group sustained by holding a monopoly on a lot of the swamplands' black market, the part of Kendall that bleeds right into the Everglades—arms-running, drugs, what have you. Pops led a crew so tough that the local newspapers were afraid to name any one of them in their stories—snitches knew bad things would happen to their families. And sure, the MC had its violent hobbies, but I stick to my own guns on this one: my Pops was not a bad man. He never hurt anybody who didn't deserve it. That's why I like to think he died a hero's death.

  On November 17th, 2004, a rival MC—the Knights of Styx (a.k.a. the yellow-bellied dumbfucks) took my father's life in a raid on our club. The Knights and the Cheaters had been rivals for years, but showdowns were rare. I was told that the other riders killed my father, and seven other good men in our club, over some kind of turf dispute. They came like cowards one night, while we slept in the clubhouse. Blew my old man's face off with a sawed-off when he wasn't even armed. T and I might have died too, that night—were it not for some cloaked stranger, yanking us from our little bunkbeds and pressing our faces into the ground. Bullets rained overhead, but we survived. I think about that mystery savior all the time.

  Tati and I were thirteen the year of the skirmish. And I know what you're thinking; yes, it was hella unconventional for two little girls to be running around an MC—but my father had never figured out what to do with us after his wife died. The other men had raised hell about us as children—understandably—but Pops put off their quibbles by procrastinating. “I'll send the twins off next year,” he used to say. “When they're a little bit older.” Of course, the man never had a back-up plan, so when he died his untimely death, Tati and I continued to bop along under the club's radar. We sang for our supper, making the meals, doing the chores. We managed to amuse ourselves. We even picked up our makeshift education where our father had left off, teaching ourselves to do basic math (Tati got as far as algebra) and yanking books from the library whenever a rider would take us into the city. Some of the riders' old ladies liked to baby us, and most of the boys were friendly, but more often, we were on our own. Tati got lonely and fell in with a townie crowd when we were teenagers, but I preferred the solitude. I loved the smell of engine grease, and the feel of all those bikes underneath my fingers. I loved the way the riders made me feel both independent and like part of a family. We always had one another's backs, to the point that I never felt like an orphan.

  So despite its crazy, tragic start, I was content with my life, and peaceful, and sans mystery.

  Until I met Carter fuckin' Knox.

  Chapter One

  * * *

  Dear Gizzy,

  How the hell are you, twin? I miss your face—then again, when I get too sad about it I just look in the mirror. The road is pretty fun! St. Louis is a sweet little town. I think Cat's band could actually make it to the big time, and I wanna be here to collect when that happens. I've put too much good loving into that man already, I won't have him running off with some groupie slut. Or a different groupie slut, I should say. HA.

  But seriously—if you ever want to skip out on that smelly old bachelor's paradise, write my P.O. Box. I'll send you a ticket to wherever I am. We'll get you tuned in to the band right quick—there's a foxy, silent drummer I think you'd dig. They really are good, Gizzy. The best part of it is, it's like I've found a new family. I don't want that to hurt
your feelings, but truly—what's keeping you tied to those miserable riders? Dad's ghost isn't coming back any time soon, you know. He'd want you to be happy, I think. He'd want you to be free. Remember: you don't owe those sad bastards ANYTHING.

  Anyways. Miss you, love you, always.

  Tati.

  “Hey, shitheel,” Dog said, his breath hot in my ear. “What's the glazed look all about? You dreaming of my dick in your mouth?” Thinking fast, I curled my left hand up into a ball and socked my friend in the mouth. He spun away quick, but I still saw a thin trickle of blood rolling down his chin.

  “Nice reflexes,” Dog said, smiling crookedly. “...bitch.”

  “And nice way to say good morning, asshole.”

  Dog, a runty recent recruit, had quickly become my unlikely-best friend in the Cheaters. He was the gangliest in the group, tall and skinny like a beanpole. He'd joined the MC in the traditional fashion—his father had been a rider, and when he'd died (the previous year, of a heroin overdose) his son took his place. But despite Dog's foul mouth and womanizing ways, few riders took him seriously. He just had one of those faces you wanted to punch. Alas, despite this undeniable fact, I'd slept with the bastard.

  We got friendly the first time he tried to hit on me, sometime around my eighteenth birthday. I socked him in the gut after he smacked my ass, and mutual respect had grown between us pretty quick after that. In fact, I'd kinda sorta gifted Dog my virginity, one drunken night at the clubhouse—I'd been horny, and he'd been...there. We'd hooked up a few times after that, but let's just say the evenings were short on fireworks.

  But I digress.

  “Is that a letter from Tati?” Dog said, the joke over.

  “Sure is. She's in Missouri now.”

  “Still chasing that rock star high?”

  “Something like that.” I crumpled the letter in my fist. Though I wouldn't have admitted this to another biker, I missed my twin something fierce. She'd never loved the club the way I had, so it wasn't really a surprise how she'd skipped town with her deadbeat boyfriend just three days after we turned seventeen—but it was hard to be reminded in her letters that she'd chosen another family over me. Every day she was gone, I felt more adrift. We were turning twenty in the fall, and it was high time I made some kind of decision about my future. Yet I felt paralyzed—the only thing I knew was the life of the Cheaters. The only love I'd known had been here.

  Dog ruffled my hair with his greasy fingers, one of my serious pet peeves. I reached up and clenched his grip in my own, until my wormy buddy winced. The look in his eyes briefly reminded me of the way he'd looked while lurching above me, during our short-lived tryst. I was no expert on the subject, but I don't think Dog was very good in bed.

  “Well, hey. You ever get too lonely, you know where I bunk,” he said finally, dropping his hand and leering my way. I gave him a friendly cuff on the chin in reply.

  Though my friend-with-benefits and I had been cultivating our shtick for more than a year now, I could tell that he wasn't always joking about the sex stuff these days—there was some uncomfortable, creepy undercurrent to our banter. More and more often in the MC, my body was betraying me. The men who had held me when I was a baby, who'd let me run wild as a little girl around their bikes—they'd all started giving me the side-eye. Some of the old ladies and ashtrays who ran with the riders (my private nickname for the Cheaters' regular whores) had tried to warn me that this day would come, that one day my “tight little ass” and “big tits” would be a liability in a club full of horny old men—but I hadn't wanted to believe the truth. I'd kind of hoped I could be the Cheaters' little girl forever, as opposed to another one of their pieces of ass. I wasn't exactly looking to be the old lady of some rider I'd grown up calling an uncle.

  Tati, as usual, was right. I needed to come up with something new to do. Skulking away from the mailbox, I turned towards the clubhouse kitchen—because I'd recently taken to splitting my days between the stovetop and the garage. There were always girls hanging out in the kitchen, so it was a nice place to shoot the shit. The garage was reserved for the times I wanted to be alone. I'd wander around the machines, listening for the clicking and easing of engines in the humid Florida heat.

  There was a brief, swampy ditch separating our winding side street from the clubhouse entrance—mostly as a precaution, in case of a police raid. The Cheaters called this ditch “the moat,” as it acted as a natural defense; even the best riders often had to dismount when they rode up to the house. I shirked off my flip-flops and waded through the thin mud. Because fuck it—who was I trying to impress?

  In the kitchen, three of the ashtrays were leaning against the countertops, smoking cigarettes and coughing and yelling in a kind of frantic cacophony. Esse, Nunu and Rayna were all a few years older than me, so they liked to think this gave them the right to offer unsolicited advice—even though I'd been an honorary Cheater far longer than they'd been fashionable company for the riders. The ashtrays were like geishas—they didn't get the same respect that the old ladies did. Of course, during the day, the boys were sweet to Esse, Nunu and Ray...but evenings were a different story. For the same reason that I was learning to hide my body in frumpy clothes from my fellow Cheaters, I preferred to avoid the clubhouse in the evenings. Needless to say, I knew each of these women well by the sounds of their sex screams, piercing the night.

  “Look who it is!” Nunu cried, as I began to track my muddy feet across the linoleum. Nu had big hips, and mousy brown hair chopped into a severe bob. She'd been a favorite paramour of Dog's father, up until his death. “Little Lady Marmalade! How you doing this morning, sugar? Hanging out by the roadside like your auntie?”

  “You're all of two years older than me, auntie,” I said, banging around the cabinets on a fruitless quest for jam. “And your morning sounded alright—from what I could hear of it.”

  Nunu took another drag of her Kool and laughed a throaty laugh. “No need to be so prudish, Ms. Gisele. You're gonna want some of that good loving soon. Maybe you wouldn't be so uptight if you got a little D.” The other girls echoed her laughter, so the sounds seemed to zoom around the kitchen like bees in a jar. I merely shrugged. So what if I had built up a slightly chilly exterior? I wasn't like these ladies, in their grubby hand-me-down t-shirts, their make-up sliding down their faces. I wasn't quite sure who I wanted to be, but I was fast ruling out who I didn't want to be.

  “Any more word from that pretty sister of yours?” Esse ventured. This was another running joke with the club—this notion that Tatiana, despite being my identical twin, had somehow gotten the better half of the gene pool. It was true that she was the “girlier” of the two of us—she wore dresses, she applied the right potions and lotions to her skin and hair—but I found this joke particularly irksome. I guess 'cause it rang a little true.

  “Got a just letter today,” I said, pulling a jar of peanut butter down from a top shelf. “She's still on the road and loving it.”

  “Such a sweetheart!” Rayna called. Rayna's voice was the worst: loud and soprano and grating as nails on a chalkboard. Suddenly, I wanted to be alone again. I yanked a slice of waiting bread from the toaster and turned my back on the harpies.

  “Wait! You know we're just playing, Miss Gisele,” Nunu said, in her Slightly More Serious voice. She blew a thin line of smoke in my direction. “We know you've been antsy lately. You let your ladies know if you need anything. Y'hear?”

  “I hear you, auntie,” I said, cracking. These women claimed to have my interests at heart, after all. They wanted the best for me, in their weird, totally warped way. Moving towards the garage, I allowed myself a half-smile. Didn't I need to let people in, just a little bit more?

  “And don't forget what we said! About the D! Everybody needs some, sometimes!” called Rayna. I listened to them chuckle at my retreating back, and turned scowling towards my sandwich. Unbidden, I felt hot tears coming to my eyes. Because here's the thing: I didn't want to be a shrew, I didn't want to b
e a burden—but I also couldn't stand the thought of being anyone's whore. For the first time in a while, I missed my father so much my breath caught in my chest. I let myself feel ugly and petty for a minute more, then I shook the tears away.

  Something was going to have to change, alright. I let my gaze dance over to my favorite bike of the moment: a 2012 Street Bob, fully pimped out with a brand new LED headlight and some bitchin' Dyna forward controls. I needed a breather, was all. I'd head into the city.

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  The Coffin Cheaters made camp about an hour and a half inland from Miami proper—far enough away that the law didn't know where to knock, but close enough that town was easy to get to on a racer. I shirked my billowy flannel gear for a sleek pair of leather pants and a white wifebeater, because I liked to feel the air ripping across my bare skin. My long hair was secured in a ponytail, then bound up in a helmet. Successfully hopping the moat—not exactly the safest choice, but I was in the mood to be reckless—I landed on the firm open road and instantly felt better. Fuck the ashtrays, I thought to myself. Fuck my sister. Fuck Dog and his terrible jokes, his pencil dick. I was an independent woman who could ride a motorcycle. I didn't have a degree, let alone a birth certificate—I was about as free as one could be. Ostensibly, I could keep going along this winding country road until I ran out of gas, just living by my wits.

  I clicked along the road a few notches above the speed limit, enjoying the feel of the cold wind on my body. After gaining the highway, I allowed my thoughts to drift back to some of the morning's chit-chat.

  Okay, so it wasn't exactly true that I'd never craved a “D” (as the snaggle-toothed Esse had so crudely put it). I remembered hearing Tati explain the joys of sex with her lech-y rockstar boyfriend, how “alive” he'd made her feel. I'd let my midnight mind wander towards love before, but for some reason I could never conjure a man in my imagination who wasn't a member of my MC. That night in the clubhouse with Dog, after three or four jack and cokes, I'd flirted with the idea of finding a serious partner—but there was nothing sexy about the way my friend had panted his way through a full three minutes of what he referred to later as “love-making.” We'd only hooked up a few times after that night because I'd been bored, not because I'd been shaken to the core or anything. And sure, I'd let one or two of Tati's townie friends kiss my breasts and slip an amateur finger below the waistband of my jeans at creepy after-parties at rock shows, but aside from that—I had starkly little and a highly unexciting sexual history to report. Yet another thing to be frustrated about, perhaps—but as I said, I wasn't designed to be anyone's “baby.”