Road Tripped (Satan's Devils MC Utah #1) - Manda Mellett Page 0,27

if I keep lifting stones to see what’s underneath?

Sure, on the surface, companionably drinking and chewing the fat is the same as I’d expect as a visitor to any chapter, but for all intents and purposes, I’m being kept incommunicado and a prisoner. I’ve got to remain on my guard. I’d told them I’d stay and see where they were at, Which suits my purpose and Drummer’s. So for now, I’ll go along with that plan.

“Are you really the road captain?” I ask suspiciously, narrowing my eyes.

“Me?” Piston laughs. “Yeah. That’s my job.”

He gets a bit of ribbing from Bolt about a time he got coordinates muddled up and sent them miles out of their way to the wrong location, while I just sit back, slowly sipping my drink and observing.

The evening proceeds. A few more beers are downed, by them, I’m purposefully limiting myself. I meet Duty and Honor who seem to come as a pair, but whether they’re like my brothers Joker and Lady, I have no idea nor care, I wouldn’t have any issues one way or another. I also meet Cowboy who seems serious and quiet. A couple of times I try to turn the conversation to how the club brings its money in, but the discussion either gets neatly turned back to bikes or they ask questions of me, about racing or my injuries. In the end, I’m defeated and stop bothering to pry. They are clearly not going to enlighten me, and all I’m doing is wasting my breath.

Swift challenges me to a game of pool, and I manage to best her, though it’s not an easy victory. At darts, she wins, but it’s no matter, I’m not one of those men who feels they have to prove themselves at games.

“You’re good,” I tell her, as she tells me the numbers she’s aiming for, then watch impressed as her darts landing exactly where she’s said. It’s as though she’s giving them instruction. Me? I’m just lucky if they hit the board.

“I was brought up in an English pub,” she tells me. “Played darts from the time I could hold them. Played on the pub team as soon as I was old enough.”

“I suspect they were glad you were playing with them and not against them.”

She concentrates, throws a dart and hits the bullseye. “Uh-huh. The bar was lined with trophies.”

“Your parents run it?”

“They did. But it was a country pub, and as the drink-driving laws got enforced, people stopped driving out to get a drink. Business fell off, and eventually it wasn’t profitable anymore. Of course, by then, it couldn’t be sold as a going concern as no one wanted it.” Pain flicks over her face. “The building was demolished, and a couple of houses were built there instead.”

“So your family home was gone?”

She nods. “Seems a waste, but time moves on.”

“Your folks still alive?” When she raises her chin, I ask the natural follow-on question. “They mind that you live so far away?”

“I’ve been independent since I was eighteen, so they kind of expected they wouldn’t see much of me when I grew up. I go back and see them from time to time.”

If I had parents, I think I’d visit often, or perhaps, I’d have ended up taking them for granted. Who can say? I was abandoned as a baby, put straight into the system. I’d like to say I was adopted and grew up happy, but that wasn’t how things played out. Instead, I first was fostered by a family who wanted a baby. When I started to grow, they decided I wasn’t so cute as I was, and gave me up. What followed was a chain of foster homes, some better, some worse, some downright terrible. I was no stranger to bruises and broken bones.

“Did you ever want to try to trace your birth mother?” With that sentence, she reminds me she already knows all the facts about me.

Track down the woman who made my formative years a misery when she left my future to chance? I’ve thought about it, wondering why she’d given birth to me only to give me up. More than once, there’d been times I’d wished I’d never been born.

“No.” I give her the truthful response. Even if I were to find her, what purpose would it serve to hear the sob story that led to my sorry existence? To return, not as the baby she’d given up, but the man who’d lived despite the harsh