The Biker's Hidden Heiress novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: What the Road Left
Calla wakes in a biker's bed with a veil pin still in her hair; the man tending her wound shows her the ring and says he hasn't called anyone.
I woke up with a veil pin still stuck in my hair and a stranger's hand pressed against my ribs.
Pain got to me first.
It was hot and heavy, and it ran from my side down into my left thigh.
Then came my own ragged breathing, and a low sound I didn't mean to make.
It was a moan.
The hand on my ribs went still.
"Don't make that sound while I'm working," a man said.
His voice was rough and very close.
I opened my eyes.
The room was dark except for one lamp with a scarf thrown over it.
The bed was black sheets and a headboard of old iron.
The man leaning over me wore a leather vest with no shirt under it.
Ink covered both of his arms, all the way to the wrists.
His left sleeve lay on the floor in two pieces, cut away at the shoulder.
Under it, his arm was raw from shoulder to elbow, scraped red and weeping.
He had a wet cloth in one hand and my torn dress in the other.
"Where am I?" I whispered.
"Cold Iron," he said. "The old feed mill on Cutter's Gap Road."
"Who are you?"
"Rafe."
That was all.
He pressed the cloth under the edge of my ribs, and I sucked a breath through my teeth.
"Broken?" I asked.
"Cracked. Two of them. Mabel says they'll heal if you stop moving."
"Who's Mabel?"
"The woman who stitched your leg while you screamed at her."
I didn't remember that.
I didn't remember most of it.
I remembered a church.
I remembered three hundred people in the pews, and white roses on every end seat, and the organ playing my father's favorite hymn.
My father had been dead for four months.
I remembered Dorian's mouth beside my ear at the altar, warm and smiling for the cameras.
"Smile," he had whispered. "The doctor's waiting in the car. He already knows what to say."
I had looked at the front pew.
Two men in suits sat there with a folded chair between them, the kind with straps.
I had picked up my skirt and run.
"Hey." Rafe's fingers touched my chin and turned my face back to him. "Eyes on me. You're shaking."
"How did I get here?"
"I found you on the road below the Gap. White SUV through the guardrail, front end in a creek. You were still in the dress."
His eyes were gray and tired, with dark skin under them.
He hadn't slept.
"Two trucks were pulling in behind you," he said. "They left when I told them the ravine took you."
My stomach turned over.
"You told them I was dead?"
"I told them what made them go home."
Nobody drove up Cutter's Gap Road by accident, he added.
It was a dead end, ten miles of switchbacks with nothing at the top but his club.
I had picked it because it was the only road out of that church that Dorian's driver didn't know.
Through the wall, a television came on.
It was loud, and a man was talking in the smooth, sad voice I knew better than my own.
"She isn't well," Dorian said. "Calla has been grieving her father, and today it was too much for her."
I tried to sit up, and my ribs lit.
Rafe caught my shoulder and held me down with one hand.
It was gentle.
It was also not a hand that was going to let me go anywhere.
"We're offering five hundred thousand dollars," Dorian said on the screen, "to anyone who brings her home to me safe."
Rafe turned his head toward the sound.
I watched his face.
It told me nothing at all.
"That's a lot of money," I said.
"Yeah."
"You could call him."
"I could."
"Are you going to?"
He looked at me for a long moment.
I had read a lot of men in my life, in boardrooms and across dinner tables, and I couldn't read him.
That scared me more than the TV.
"What's your name?" he asked.
I had to decide in one breath.
Dorian had made sure everyone on that news channel said mine.
"Callie," I said. "Callie Ross."
"Callie Ross."
"I work at a hotel. I was a bridesmaid. I got in the wrong car."
It was a bad lie, and he let it sit there on the black sheets between us.
Then he reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled something out.
He held it up in the lamplight between two scarred fingers.
My engagement ring.
Nine carats, an old family stone Dorian had said was his grandmother's, and the setting still had a thread of my gown caught in it.
"Callie Ross wears a ring like this?" he said.
My mouth went dry.
"Ross is a nice name," he said. "It doesn't match the ring, or the veil pin, or the way you came out of that car already saying sorry to somebody."
I stared at him.
"I haven't called anyone," he said. "Not him, not the cops, not the number on the screen."
The television voice went on through the wall, saying my name again and again.
Rafe set the ring on the pillow beside my face, very carefully.
"So I'm going to ask once," he said. "Who are you really?"
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