Page 5 of Truth Forever
She liked to complain I realised with a start. But she had a soft spot for those men in leather. Anyone with half a brain could see there was a story there. A story I wanted to hear, but it wasn’t like I could just ask her outright.
I wasn’t that nosey.
Not with people I didn’t know anyway.
“Have you got somewhere to stay or are you driving back tonight?” Her eyes narrowed on the beer and then flicked back up to my face. She was asking me whether I planned to drink and drive.
It made me wonder if she would take my keys off of me if I had said I was going home. She didn’t have to worry, though. I wasn’t driving anywhere. My car was in the garage back home, being fixed. It was the reason I had taken the god awful bus.
“Hotel... if there is one?”
“You have booked a hotel?”
Shaking my head, I kicked at the case I had hidden by my feet under the table. “I was hoping you could recommend one?”
“Around here, sweethearts? No.” Thoughtfully she chewed on her lip. “Stay right here ok, I’ll be finished up in a few. And then we can get going.”
My eyebrows quirked upwards. “Get going?”
“Yeah, you can stay at mine tonight.”
Her words shocked me. Opening my mouth, I started to say that I couldn’t do that, but she cut me off with a glare.
“Look honey, you need a friend right now. You have nowhere to stay, and I have a couch. Us girls should stick together. So no arguing. Stay and finish your drink. You’re staying with me tonight.”
“That’s very kind of you.” It was beyond nice actually. No one back home would have offered a total stranger a place to crash for the night. “I don’t even know your name.”
“Gemma but my friends call me Gem. You?”
“Cali.” I let my hand close around the one she offered. “Thank you so much, Gem, and I promise I will be out of your hair first thing in the morning.”
She gave a shrug. “Just finish your drink roomie.”
***
“You live here?” The building in front of me didn’t look like a house. It didn’t even look like apartments. It looked like an old warehouse or factory.
Of course, it wasn’t impossible for it to be an old factory and apartments. It was the trendy thing to do, after all, converting old buildings into affordable housing. Sometimes very expensive housing.
“No.” Gem glanced at me out the corner of her eye as she pulled her beat-up red car alongside a much bigger truck, outside the chain-link fence that seemed to surround the place. “I should have told you I have to show my face at the party. We don’t have to stay long, don’t worry.”
A party? I frowned. When she had thrown my case in the back of a car, she had made it sound like we were going straight back to hers. Staying with her was risky enough. Going to a biker party was just plain stupid.
And I wasn’t stupid.
This was a bad idea.
She must have caught my look because her smile slipped. “Look, you are perfectly safe. No one will bother you… well, they will but stay close to me, and I’ll sort them out. Cali, you came all this way to meet a biker who doesn’t exist, don’t you want to meet at least a few real ones before you head home?”
Did I? My thoughts went back to the man who had walked in on me, getting a tattoo. He had been a biker too, There was no doubting it.
And he had been delicious.
If you were into the tall dark and brooding kind, which I totally was.
Gemma had a point. I had come here to live a little on the wild side. A biker party was definitely living on the wild side. “Ok, I’m not really dressed for a party though.”
“You look fine, you have clothes on which is more than most of the skanks here can say.” She laughed, leaving me to wonder what the hell she was talking about. “Come on.”
