A Gorgeous Mess

By Layla Wolfe

Four wheels move the body. Two wheels move the soul.
ANSON: I was just a mercenary back from fighting the good fight overseas. I was on a quest for my father, my roots, looking for answers. Turk Blackburn, Bent Zealots MC Prez, ordered me on a fresh operation to prove myself, my guts, my valor. Infiltrate the Navajo Rez and find out who is claiming the Zealots’ turf, using kids to cook drugs.
My partner is the famous badge slut, Ormond Tangier, known far and wide for his mad oral skills, his subservience to anyone in uniform. Mercenaries don’t wear badges, but my dominant side soon has me all over that seductive Spanish servant. A man may as well have a few laughs while on a fatal mission. Because these things never end pleasantly.
ORMOND: I was flung into a life-or-death battle against the slimy Iceman, leader of a rival MC. Iceman is running all sorts of questionable ops on Bent Zealots land, and now Anson and I have to prove our street creds just to stake a claim in our own backyard.
I’m a friend of cops, firemen, and soldiers alike, but suddenly I only want one man ordering me around. Anson Dineyazzie, macho half-breed hired gun, has stolen more than just my heart. This was never supposed to happen.
ANSON: I swear I’m never falling for that service bottom Ormond. I’m accomplishing this op and going back to Afghanistan. But I have to wrest control of this Rez land from Iceman and the lethal hit man who has been trailing us. I’d bury anyone who got between me and Ormond. Does that mean I’m in love? God, I hope not. Don’t think I can take that again. Just need to get back onto the open road and blow the dust from my soul.
Publisher’s warning: This book is not for the faint of heart. It contains scenes of gay sex, illegal doings, violence, mild BDSM, and forced seduction roleplay. There is no cliffhanger or cheating and there is a HEA.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Layla Wolfe
• Release date: Feb 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370275922

Layla Wolfe

Layla Wolfe is a wannabe biker's Old Lady who is satisfied with a leather jacket, one bad-ass pink camo compound bow, and a vicarious outlaw lifestyle.Layla has published 25+ erotic romance titles under the name Karen Mercury.

Book preview

Four wheels move the body. Two wheels move the soul.

CHAPTER ONE

ANSON

I suppose, in retrospect, I was glad I was lying in a pool of puke on the grimy asbestos-tiled floor of that airplane hangar’s War Room. I was glad I had eyes like bowling balls and a mouth full of cotton candy. Or, I should have been, looking back. I should have been happy that apparently I’d been getting up on some club whore. I slapped my hand around in the musty polyester sleeping bags that surrounded me like a slippery nest and felt a bony female hip, barely covered in a shred of miniskirt. She snored like a camel.

If I had never come here to The Bare Bones’ clubhouse seeking more information on my father, none of the events I’m about to relate to you would’ve ever happened. It was my fortunate destiny to have driven to Pure and Easy to the airplane hangar of these wild and macho men, brothers in arms to my father. When you’re living in the middle of a turmoil so fucked mere words cannot describe the pain, it is often difficult to step back and say calmly to yourself, This too shall pass.

Eventually, it did, but it was one hell of a long hard road to walk. Sometimes vast happiness can rise out of hell, you know? This is about where I think it started, so bear with me.

When I felt the sweetbutt’s hip, I just felt vaguely nauseous. The way I’d been increasingly feeling after sexual contact with women, lately. But then it struck me.

Fuck! Is this my daughter?

My bowling ball eyes popped open. As the alcoholic contents of my stomach sped to meet my mouth, it was small comfort to realize that this gash was not related to me by blood.

Luckily I was able to crawl to a receptacle of some kind on the tiles of the darkened room. And luckily I didn’t have enough food or even booze to vomit more than the tiniest trickle, because the receptacle turned out to be the sweetbutt’s purse. Clawing like a man reanimated inside his own grave, I fought my way to consciousness—to the door.

Reeling down the hallway like a drunk on a train, I found the bathroom and splashed some water on my face, freshened up. Finger-combed my hair and replaced the rubber band around my short ponytail. Then I navigated down the hall again toward a square of sunlight at the end, as though having a near-death experience.

I almost was. I felt like I’d died and been reborn, but into this extremely shitty, broken-down excuse of a body. Oh, I was fit, all right. In my job, you had to be. CrossFit, jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, you name it. We mercs had to stay on top of things. You couldn’t be caught unaware in the field. You wouldn’t be alive if you were. This whole drunk, lying-in-a-puddle-of-puke thing was actually kind of out of character for me. I was always one hundred percent sober when on the job. You have to understand what I’d been through lately.

I grabbed a Bare Bones patch holder by the front of his cut. Where’s my daughter?

The guy had a very heavy French accent. He shook himself loose from my unseemly grip, smoothing out his cut. I realized other bikers might’ve even laid me out flat for daring to touch their cut, but I was still pretty much drunk. And under the influence of whatever else we’d done the night before. Your daughter is Sheena, no?

No. Yes. Sheena Greyeyes. My daughter had taken her mother’s surname. I’d never married her mother, Adelaide.

The… I remembered his name. Faux Pas, false step in French. He was a longstanding patch holder, some sort of special effects makeup artist.

Pretty Navajo girl, right.

Ah! Yes, Lytton took her back to the bus stop earlier this morning. She did not want to wake you.

Son of a bitch! I nearly punched the wall, then realized it was made of cement. I had some shred of self-preservation left. I continued my rampage down the hall toward the beckoning square of holy light. Storming out onto a metal stairway, I banged down to a lower landing and took a smashed pack of Camel nons from my back jeans pocket. Slapping my pockets for a lighter, it heightened my anger to realize I had none, and I just jammed the cig behind my ear and looked out at the red plateau of the high Arizona desert.

I was a fucked-up person in general, I knew that. But the events of the past twenty-four hours had thrown everything into sharp relief and shown me the extent of my fuckedness.

Not only had I been a bad seed from birth, but evidently the people I drew into my inner circle and chose to surround myself with were rotten to the core, too. I had been sent out of Camp Black Horse near Kabul in the middle of a mission for a couple of reasons. One, news came that the mother of my daughter, Adelaide Greyeyes, had died of complications from diabetes in Gallup, New Mexico. That in and of itself was no particular big fucking deal. I hadn’t been close to Adelaide in seventeen years—since she’d lied to me that she was on The Pill and had conceived our daughter. I’d sent her money religiously, but that was all. Apparently someone in the upper echelons of my company had decided that only fine, upstanding mercs with the moral backbone of a moose could work for our company, so they’d called me into the field office to tell me I was going home.

For a few weeks. For a little R and R, to decompress.

Because apparently, mercs with a backbone like a steel girder don’t go all apeshit and bomb a fucking school, even if that’s what he was under orders to do.

So I was on an enforced fucking leave from the work I loved, the work that gave me enough purpose and order in my life to keep me waking up every morning. Believe it or not, there is a divine order in tracking down soft targets and terminating them with extreme prejudice. When you have righteousness on your side, there is a sublime thrill in taking out the enemy with efficiency and technological precision. Rescuing downed or captured Americans is just the icing on the cake. It’s all in a day’s work, really. With the might of a higher power behind me, I often felt like one of those Navajo code talkers who helped take Iwo Jima, many of whom came from my hometown in Arizona. Puffed with righteousness and morality. Until I did something like instruct a missile to take out what turned out to be a fucking language school for Afghan teens. Then I was told I had a failure to observe fundamental rules of war and was put on forced leave.

Well, you know what? I was sick to fucking death of being a hired gun. The entire armor of uprightness and honor had grown thin, tarnished, and smelly. Too many incidents such as the language school had been wearing on me over the years. Thirty-seven is old in the world of private intelligence contractors. Thirty-seven is not the new twenty-seven when you spend your day hefting a hundred pound pack, swimming in a sea of sweat, and lobbing IEDs over walls. The damage to your bones, your ligaments, well it’s probably as wearing as being an MMA fighter, who starts his march toward the grave at thirty.

What else would I do, though? Some coworkers had gone into the private sector as bodyguards for thugs, the rich and famous, and, well, the cartel. That was only slightly less draining because you replaced the broiling oven of Afghanistan with the broiling jungle of Florida. And in Florida you maybe got to sip a mint julep, or whatever the hell they drank down there. In Hollywood you might be looking at some chiseled actor with so much plastic surgery he looks like a Korean dictator instead of some war-weary, stubbled co-worker. Some had gone into the Secret Service where the suicide rate was through the roof. But at the end of the day, it’s all the same. You’re still a hired gun for someone with questionable morals and goals. And how could I keep working for someone I had no respect for?

Mr. Dineyazzie.

The cultured, syrupy tones of Ford Illuminati came from the top of the stairs. With the late morning sun behind him creating a halo of laser flowers around his exalted silhouette, the Bare Bones Prez dazzled like the MC god everyone knew him to be east of the Colorado River. The Illuminati brothers controlled all the territory from the Grand Canyon down to Tucson, the valuable corridor from Sonora and Sinaloa up to the great interstate highways that linked all markets to the east coast. I had known about The Bare Bones since hitch-hiking to Pure and Easy when I was fifteen. I’d been in touch with them off and on since then. Back then, their clubhouse was located in The Bum Steer bar and grill downtown.

Now Ford loped down the rickety stairs with a fatherly aura. He’d taken over the presidency of the club not long ago after his father Cropper had met his maker in a storyline straight out of one of my own overseas escapades. There was something so tragic, dashing, and Shakespearean about the drama in the desert near Nogales. All that was known for sure was that many men, including a truckload of immigrant Mexicans, had gone into that desert. Only Ford, his Veep Turk, and my father Riker had walked out.

That was why I’d come here yesterday. To get more details. Where did they think Riker was now? What sort of man was he? Could they give me any humorous anecdotes? Little stories I could treasure in my heart? But last night, everyone had just acted so damned mysterious and close-mouthed, I’d drunk more beer and whiskey until it all became a happy, hazy blur. The last thing I recall before passing out was vowing with a vengeance to throttle my information out of everyone if it was the last thing I did. I wasn’t about to let a pack of bikers get the best of me.

My man Anson. Ford clapped me on the shoulder. We were both half-breeds—the Illuminati brothers both having different Apache mothers—but Ford had never known more than a few words of his language, and I had not practiced mine in twenty years. We stuck with good ole boy headbanger lingo. Let’s take a walk.

That was code for either I have something uncomfortable to discuss with you, or I am about to bless you, then bury you. I was prepared to face either.

We walked around the back of the airplane hangar. This had been an army airfield in the last century, and runways and revetments crisscrossed the mesa. Red sandstone spires undulated like peaks of cake frosting, like we were walking through a Martian landscape. Of course, there were no more jets. The hollow shells of them had been mothballed years ago. Now it was a parking lot for Ford’s Illuminati Equipment rental business, loaders, backhoes, scrapers.

Your daughter Sheena, Ford started out. We paused so he could light his cigarette with a monogrammed refillable lighter. She’s a hard one to figure out.

I snorted smoke after lighting my own cig. I’ll say. You know I don’t know her well, her having grown up in Gallup, and me living in Winslow. I had driven Sheena from Adelaide’s memorial service to Pure and Easy, riding one up on my Panhead, the goal in mind to have some sort of roots-finding revelation that would cleanse us of all impurities, give us knowledge about our clans. By learning more about a guy I only knew as Stuart Grillo, aka Riker, we could solidify our hold on our ancestry. Or some such bullshit. All we’d done was drink and yell at each other. I knew she held me responsible for her entire apparently miserable life and predicament, but I’d always assumed it was just teenage angst.

Ford went on. I knew a lot of kids like her, growing up. I’m not even saying it’s necessarily a Native American thing, all that drama and turmoil. He chuckled. "Although that does play a big part."

I raised one eyebrow. "Then what are you saying?"

Ford’s eyes were veiled, as if steeling himself for an impact. I’m saying it’s a thing of neglected kids. I heard her screaming at you last night. Now, don’t get all in a fucking uproar.

I’m not in any fucking uproar. I really wasn’t. The entire airplane hangar had heard Sheena scream at me. You’re just telling it like it is, man.

I know better than to take everything a teenager says as solid gold. But from what little I know of Adelaide, and the down-and-out lifestyle most people live in Gallup, well…

I snorted again and closed my eyes with patience. Yeah. Adelaide was a decent girl when I was close to her. But what she became after moving to Gallup, well, I never really wanted to know. That’s one reason I stayed far away, I think. Too depressing to go into those flop houses full of those seedy dope boys and goons.

"Yeah. Hell, I grew up with enough goons."

That was a good in to ask about my father again. Maybe Ford realized this, and he cut my question off at the pass.

"See, that’s the thing about Sheena. The way she was shrieking at you, saying you were responsible for everything, while it’s seventeen years of pent-up rage and angst, it’s also a thing of drug-addicted neglected kids."

Now I narrowed my eyes at my old friend. What exactly are you saying?

Ford sighed heavily. I’m saying it’s obvious Sheena is addicted to meth. Hell, meth is the new crack. It’s a cheaper, faster high. But like you just saw with Adelaide, the life expectancy for a meth head is seven years.

Fury flooded my being. Like a lava lamp being filled, it was going to explode out the top of my head if I didn’t take the cap off. I could feel my jaw clenching, my nostrils flaring, my fists clenching—in short, I was twitching like a hillbilly in a nest of yellow jackets. I had to let off some steam. In a measured tone, I seethed, We don’t know that for a fucking fact, Ford. Just because she grew up with Adelaide doesn’t mean she’s an addict too.

Anson. Now Ford was talking down to me? Didn’t I know my own fucking daughter? How could he pretend to know her better than her own father did? Last night she asked a few guys if they were holding. You were playing pool or something, or maybe you were down in the hangar in Bellamy’s mechanic’s shed.

I think I was down with Bellamy and Knoxie, I said, eager to change the subject, talking about her four-speed box with a suicide shift. That was one of her Panhead engines. Knoxie’s old lady was quite handy with the scoots.

But Ford was like a dog with a bone, determined to talk about this. "Anson, if you want to get closer to Sheena like you say you do, you’ll hear me out. She asked Faux Pas first, and of course he said no, even if he did know where to find some. Then she asked a few other guys. It wasn’t just the word of one man, Anson. It was the word of about four."

I exhaled. Even I had to fucking admit that Sheena had the sunken, dull eyes of the meth head, her face scabbed from scratching imaginary bugs. She hadn’t had those hollowed cheekbones the last time I’d seen her two years before. Did anyone give her any?

Of course not. But she sure was adamant about finding some. Anson…

Oh, fuck me dry. What else was Ford about to lay on me? I gritted my teeth.

She told Wild Man she’d, ah, sleep with him if he had any.

Rage blinded me. I literally could not see.

I knew I was walking around in little circles. I knew I was tossing up my hands, reaching for the nine-millimeter Ruger I kept shoved into the back waistband of my 501s.

Was I going to shoot Ford? I had been slipping lately. My boss had referred to some cheese sliding off my cracker when he’d told me to go for R and R. This was a common thing in the world of private intelligence contractors. A guy would start to lose it, get battle fatigue, begin jumping at shadows. The worst was if a guy got trigger-happy and couldn’t be trusted with a piece. I hadn’t nearly gotten to that stage yet, but they sent me stateside anyway.

The next thing I remember, Lytton and Knoxie came running out from the hangar bellowing, Hey! Hey! I felt the heft of my iron in my hand, but I was well aware I was aiming it at the sky. I remember also thinking about that guy in Echo Park about ten years ago on New Year’s Eve. Out of sheer exuberance, he shot into the air. The bullet came down three miles away, piercing some twatwaffle’s shoulder and jugular, killing him.

So I didn’t shoot. I know I didn’t. But suddenly guys were yelling Hey! Hey! and Whoa! Whoa! and I blinked several times to clear the haze of thick, red rage from my line of vision. I remember shouting, "Wild Man! Where’s Wild Man? I’m gonna fucking give him a piece of my