Ride Me Hard: The Devil's Host MC, #1

By Shari Slade

“Intense, dangerous, and perfectly dirty! Ride Me Hard will leave you breathless.” New York Times Bestselling author Skye Warren

When a big scary biker shows up at Jimmy's Diner fifteen minutes before the end of my shift—covered in tattoos and looking at me like I'm on the menu—I should flip the open sign to closed.

But I don't.

I'm too used to doing what I've been told. Too used to working and struggling and surviving to do anything different. A closed sign wouldn't stop him anyway. He's here to collect a debt. And I'm the only one left to pay.

RIDE ME HARD is just the beginning. The wildly erotic journey continues with BREAK ME IN. These are short, hot reads, sure to leave you panting for more.

“Dirty, beautiful, gritty and wild. If I don't get more right now I'll die!” - New York Times Bestselling author Annika Martin

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shari Slade
• Release date: Jun 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781513087290

Shari Slade

Shari Slade is a snarky optimist. A would-be academic with big dreams and very little means. When she isn’t toiling away in the non-profit sector, she’s writing gritty stories about identity and people who make terrible choices in the name of love (or lust). Somehow, it all works out in the end. If she had a patronus it would be a platypus.

Book preview

Chapter One

Twelve hours into what should be an eight-hour shift and my new uniform still feels foreign on my body. Scratchy and wrong. Unpleasantly damp. Yesterday I’d worn jeans and a Jimmy’s Diner T-shirt. Tonight, I’m packed into a polyester dress that looks like it came from a catalog full of naughty Halloween costumes—1950s Pinup or Sexy Soda Jerk.

I tug at the powder-blue skirt barely covering my ass and adjust the ruffled apron. Who thought white aprons were a good idea in a restaurant full of ketchup, jam and gravy? Jimmy Jr. The idiot.

I wince.

Hot coals have replaced the muscles in the small of my back; that’s the only explanation for the searing pain that radiates with every wobbly step I take. My new management-issued shoes are as ridiculous and nonfunctional as the dress, strappy black Mary Janes with pointy toes, pointier heels, and some kind of no-skid treatment on the soles. Thank God for small favors.

The whole tacky getup cost eighty bucks. Cheap, but still too rich for my blood. The cherry on top of one very shitty sundae. At least they’d take it out of my check in installments, because I’d barely made a quarter of that tonight, proving once and for all that waitresses are invisible no matter what they’re wearing. Jimmy’s Diner is invisible too, now that the new bypass is finished and the truckers can barrel past town doing eighty miles per hour.

The locals coming in for early bird specials aren’t going to cut it, and no sexy gimmick will replace the volume of being on a high-traffic truck route. Short of throwing up a roadblock and diverting traffic, Jimmy is fucked.

I dip my hand into my apron pocket and stroke the tiny wad of singles, reassuring myself it’s still there. Five to shove in the coffee can I keep under the sink and then…not even enough to fill a gas tank, let alone make a dent in the weekly rent my landlord is salivating over. He’s already looking for any excuse to eject me from the little garage apartment his new wife wants to use for a craft studio.

I’m pretty fucked too.

It’s not like I’m working here by choice. If this job bottoms out…I can’t even think about that particular dead end. Instead I focus on the present…fifteen-minute increments. I can survive anything for fifteen minutes. I know that from experience.

Fifteen more minutes without a customer and I can lock the doors, kick off these torture devices, and finish the last of my side work.

I pull out the tiny funnels and the big buckets of salt and pepper to do the most boring sand art ever. That’s my life. Boring, painful, and thanks to the bypass and circumstance, cut off from the rest of the world.

I can hear my cousin Harry singing in the kitchen, and I know he’s mopping up. He always sings while he mops. Humming along with him at the end of a shift makes me feel like a part of something. Not a family exactly, but something.

I wouldn’t have this job if it weren’t for him. Not that he’d done much other than tell Jimmy I needed work. Sometimes not much is all it takes to make a difference.

Fifteen more minutes and he’ll haul the trash out to the dumpster and lock the back door behind him. If I time it right, we can leave together. I poke my head through the window where he sets the orders as they’re finished. Can you give me a ride home tonight?

I don’t know, Star. I’ve got stops to make. He twitches and wipes sweat from his neck with a bandanna before swishing