Checkmate With Bishop: A Hellions MC Novel

  Checkmate With Bishop – A Hellion MC Novel

  By

  J. A. Hornbuckle

  *.*.*.*.*

  Copyright © 2015 by J.A. Hornbuckle

  Edited by: Laura Kingsley

  Cover Design by: Brandi Doane McCann

  License Notes

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this novel with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please buy an additional copy for each recipient.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information story and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of J.A. Hornbuckle or her authorized representatives.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction and is not a reflection or representation of any person living or dead. Any similarity is of pure coincidence.

  Although, if you recognize yourself in any character represented, maybe we need to talk…

  EPub Edition: March 2015

  Chapter One

  “Naw man,” So Cal countered derisively. “Not fuckin’ raspberry. More like a soft, dusky kind of pink.”

  Bishop accepted his renewed glass of sparkling water with lime from the bartender before turning his eyes to the dancer who was the current topic of discussion. Glancing at the bright, blonde girl, he turned his hazel eyes, which were more green than brown back to the other Hellions who bracketed his barstool. “I’d go with dusky. Check out her fucking eyebrows. That chick ain’t no natural blonde, dig?”

  Chuckie turned back to his drink with a shrug of his shoulders. “Didn’t know that was a clue.”

  “Fuck! Me neither.” So Cal raised two fingers to capture the bartender’s attention and pointed to his empty beer bottle. “So eyebrows reveal the truth?”

  “That and the color of her lips when they’re not coated in that greasy, colored shit.” Bishop almost doubled over as a sharp pang zipped through his stomach and his whole body clenched in reaction. As it passed, he was left almost dizzy as the stabbing feeling settled into a burning ache. Trying to play down the heavy throb of pain that settled around his navel area, he set his tumbler carefully back on the bar with trembling fingers, its contents untasted. “You pussies are seriously in need of my ‘Titties 101’ class.”

  His statement, offered through tight compressed lips, made the other two men laugh, relieving him of their attention. But Bishop could feel the sharp prickles of sweat that were forming around his hairline, armpits and groin as part of the aftermath of the darting agony that had become a part of his daily existence.

  There was no denying the pain was getting worse.

  More frequent and centralized.

  He was already so fucking tired of battling it, of constantly feeling like shit and trying to hide it from everyone. Nothing seemed to fucking help anymore: not the over-the-counter meds, the weed or even the Percocet he’d scored in a sneaky solo run to Red Deer.

  The toll it was taking, the battle within his body was becoming evident. Unmistakably apparent in not only his appearance but his demeanor as well. Bishop wasn’t a vain guy so the loss of weight didn’t bother him all that much. The sallow color of his skin, the dullness and thinness of his hair didn’t give him pause.

  Not in the whole of it. Of the way his disease had overtaken him.

  It was the way his mind worked, or rather, didn’t. It hadn’t been that long ago that he was able to have several different thoughts going at one timebe chewing on one problem while he was working on another had always been his style. Up until the pain started and had gradually consumed his life.

  And he’d somehow been losing his ability to laugh. His ability to find and participate in humor had been slowly disappearing over the course of the last couple of months and he mourned it’s loss almost more than anything else.

  “Hey now,” Chuckie growled admiringly on a long, slow deep breath. “Check it. Finally some new meat.”

  Bishop shot his eyes to his Hellion brother to see the man turning his barstool back towards the stage. Glancing in the direction the former recruit’s eyes were trained towards, Bishop saw a pert redhead step onto one of the stages decorated with nothing more than a large, brass pole. As the strains of the next hard-driving song started, his eyes were glued to the tall redhead whose features were shadowed by the harsh spotlight above her.

  Bishop was a complete and utter sucker for redheads.

  Twisting his seat around in order to better check out the beauty before him, Bishop found himself mesmerized. Albeit not so much on the girl who was working the pole as if it contained guaranteed answers to her heartfelt prayers of the physical, nasty variety. But on the images her body caused his mind to toss up. The ones of his Dory, that beautiful redhead he’d married right after high school and found himself divorced from just five short years later.

  A brief marriage that had left a long memory.

  One that had been fucking flashing at him intermittently throughout the years, but was becoming more and more insistent over the last few months.

  Ever since the pains started.

  “Man, I’d love me a piece of that!” So Cal’s voice broke the trail of Bishop’s thoughts, bringing him back to the then and now. The beauty was doing her dance, climbing the brass pole with firm, fleshy thighs only to do a twirling slide down its length using only her hands and strong arms. Practiced alluring moves performed in a tiny thong and bikini top guaranteed to entice the roomful of men.

  Both Hellions on either side of him shifted on their seats and Bishop saw Chuckie trying to stealthily adjust himself in his jeans. Turning his gaze back to the stage, Bishop wasn’t surprised by the lack of his body’s response. His dick had not responded to much of anything since his sickness had insinuated itself in his life: not to porn, the exotic dancers at any of the strip clubs he frequented nor even to the pretty Honeys at the HMC clubhouse.

  Occasionally, he’d find himself with morning wood but even that faded away quickly.

  The only thing that brought him to completion anymore were wet dreams, those goddamn nighttime reveries of him and Dory back in the day, done when he was asleep. Like some kind of fourteen year old kid with more fucking balls than good sense, he’d empty himself against the sheets only to cuss a blue streak at having to change them the next morning.

  In his mind, it was just another fucking symptom of what was eating him alive from the inside out.

  Just as much as having Dory constantly in his thoughts. And the regrets that plagued him about how they’d ended it so many years ago.

  Without a thought and without another glance towards the stage, Bishop pulled his cellphone from his back pocket to scroll through his contacts. It hadn’t taken him all that long to find the number for her, although he had been surprised the area code was for Wyoming. As far as he remembered, Dory had no reason to be thereno friends or family that he knew of in that particular area of the country.

  His thumb remained poised over the green button as he played the ‘should he or shouldn’t he’ game for the fourth fucking time that day.

  Would she answer?

  What would he say if she did?

  Could he confide to her what he hadn’t yet even told his Hellion brothers?

  Bishop’s eyes remained steadily on the screen of his phon
e, his surroundings forgotten. His thoughts swirled as he imagined her voice. Of how all a person had to do was listen closely when Dory spoke to figure out what she was feeling. Because Dory’s vocal sounds had always held the fucking secrets to whatever she had going on inside. Whether it was holding the edge of laughter as she teased, smoky with heat as she mewled in physical delight or iced over with cold when she was pissed, just the thought of his ex-wife’s voice still made his knees weak.

  She’d often told him that he was the only one she’d ever met who’d ‘got’ her, that completely understood her when she didn’t sometimes understand herself. He’d never told her his secret, preferring to let her think it was just another connection between them.

  Her goddamn melodic, sexy as hell voice that had him spellbound with just the memory of it even thirteen years later.

  The idea of never hearing it again was simply motherfucking unacceptable on every level.

  Pushing himself off the barstool, Bishop gave only the smallest of chin lifts to the other two men as he left the club and made his way to his bike, cellphone still in hand. Straddling the big machine, he reactivated the screen and pushed the green button next to her name, only idly noting the renewed tremble in his fingers.

  It was only seconds and he could hear the phone ringing.

  The sound was much, much slower than his heartbeat.

  *.*.*.*.*

  I don’t really know how much time I spent looking at the screen of my cellphone. It had to have been a while since the call had gone to voicemail and even the screen had faded to black.

  But still I stared, my heart thundering unevenly in my chest.

  I didn’t know the number but I’d recognized the area code straightaway.

  Montana.

  There was only one person in Montana who would be looking for me and could’ve tracked down my number. A person from my heart’s ‘long-ago’ and one I had no desire to speak to, about…or even with.

  I blinked and that movement finally allowed me to move, to escape my statue state and begin to close up the shop. But I did it mechanically, by roteturning off the electricity to the sign, setting the front door’s deadbolt and flipping the switches over the reception and stations. All done and accompanied by the flittering of what felt like electricity moving through my body.

  Stan.

  Stan was calling.

  Stan was calling me after thirteen years.

  My feet came to a halt and I couldn’t help my eyes as they moved downward as if to view my candy-apple red heels as if to ask, ‘why’d we stop?’ But I didn’t take another step in spite of what my mind told me to do.

  Stan had called.

  Stan had called and left a voicemail.

  I closed my eyes. It was almost too much to take in and I needed a moment to process that information.

  Why?

  Why had he contacted me?

  And what was so important that he needed to leave a voicemail?

  By allowing the questions in my head and heart to break through, I found I could move again. Stepping to the small office that I shared with Joy, my best friend and co-owner, I quickly sank into the desk chair. But my eyes didn’t take in the different piles of paper or the fancy laptop that was sitting at an angle in the farthest corner of the desk.

  No. My eyes were turned inward, pulling his face up from my memory. And at the viewing, my brain produced other images of his body, the way he moved and the sound of his voice. It was the last that found me shivering.

  Stan’s voice was like nothing a woman could ever imagine. Deep, gruff and sexy even if he was just reading aloud from a newspaper. The kind of noise that echoed and scratched inside you, demanding action even if it was with nothing but a soft kiss to the corner of his mouth.

  To thank him for allowing you to simply hear it.

  And I could, after all those years, hear it just one more time because he’d left me a goddamn voicemail.

  My eyes dropped to the cellphone I still held in quaking hands and winced at the clatter it made as I dropped it to the desktop. Without thinking, I ran my fingers through my short hair, skimming my scalp while eyeing the rectangular piece of electronics as if it was the deadliest of snakes. As if it and it alone had the power to hurt me.

  Maybe it did.

  Because I’d disengaged myself from him years ago. Had fled Missoula and his damn motorcycle club that had destroyed our marriage, running away to Casper in order to create a new life just for myself, one that was normal and of the kind that regular people lived. One that didn’t include drugs or guns or scantily clad girls that would screw anything that moved as long as it was encased in a Hellion vest. A life where I could live by my rules, making my own decisions and learn from my mistakes without receiving a truckload of shit about it.

  I’d put my old existence away, keeping a tight rein on the memories so I could move forward. And I had, for the most part, been successful in sloughing off the old and creating the new. But by the trepidation, the almost fear that was bubbling inside me at just the glimpse of a Montana phone number, maybe I hadn’t resolved that old life at all. Perhaps all I’d done was to pretend those years were over and done with, telling myself lies in order to move forward.

  Because right at that moment, at the thought of hearing Stan’s voice, I didn’t feel like I’d settled anything from that earlier time. Not one damn thing if the idea of my old life intruding on my new one scared me so badly.

  You don’t have to listen to it, I told myself as I propped my chin in my hand, still staring at the stupid phone that I, at that moment, considered to be arch-enemy number one. With two, no three, swipes of my finger the voice, his goddamn sexy-as-sin vocal sounds could be erased and out of my consciousness. Which would have been fine and dandy except…I was curious as hell.

  And the thing of it was, my inquisitiveness was quickly outpacing my feelings of panic from before.

  Drumming my fingers on my teeth, I tried to justify the ‘need to know’ that my brain seemed to insist on. Who wouldn’t be questioning why their ex-husband was calling them after so many years of no contact? What could have gone on that required him to call me, especially after the speech he’d given moments before I’d climbed into my car and left without a backward glance.

  The one where he told me that if I left, I could consider myself dead to both him and the club. A speech delivered with such total and complete seriousness, I’d known he was speaking a truth from the core of his being.

  So why was he trying to reach someone who was, and had been, dead to him for so very, very long?

  I took in a deep breath and held it as I again picked up the phone. My fingers only shook a little as I turned the device on and pressed the pad to access my voicemail. Realizing I didn’t want the intimacy of having Stan’s voice in my ear, I made sure the speakerphone was engaged before pressing the green key to listen to his message.

  “Dory? Hey, it’s Bishop. I mean, Stan. It’s been a long time, huh? Are you surprised to hear from me? Listen, I’ve got…” his sigh, one of the deep variety, came through loud and clear. As did the clearing of his throat before he resumed speaking. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about. It’s important. Can you call me back, babe?”

  He listed a series of numbers but I wasn’t paying a damn bit of attention. Mainly because my heart had done a damn double bump at hearing the endearment he’d used, at what he’d always called me back in the day.

  I was hoping he’d said it from something along the lines of ‘force of habit’ so that my body’s reaction to both it and his voice could be categorized as the same.

  “I’ll look forward to hearing back from you, Dory. The sooner, the better, babe. Okay?” The message came to an end and I pushed the replay button to listen to it again just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Something I told myself was okay because sometimes a person needed to replay a message in order to get it right.

  But I couldn’t use that same reasoning when I list
ened to it the next eight times, soaking up his voice, picking apart his wordsall the while having my heart stutter at the sound of ‘babe’ whenever it was spoken.

  “Enough,” I whispered, saving his voicemail and dropping the phone back onto the desktop and reaching for the stack of invoices that needed to be entered into the system. They were, after all, one of the reasons I stayed late on Thursdays. Not to sit and listen to my ex-husband’s frustratingly cryptic voicemail again and again!

  As one of the co-owners of Luscious, Casper’s premier hair salon, the paperwork portion was my responsibility while Joy handled the merchandising and displays. And since Thursday was the only night of the week we stayed open until seven, it just made sense for me to take an hour or so afterward to make the entries and do the ordering.

  But my mind wasn’t on the paperwork even as my fingers flew over the keys of the laptop. It was still running in circles, parsing Stan’s voicemail and comparing it to the man I’d left behind. He wouldn’t know that I was a hairdresser with her own successful salon just as I hadn’t a clue about whatever career he was involved in.

  Stan couldn’t have any idea about the struggle it had taken to get where I was, about the life I’d made for myself and my son. It was bad enough he’d somehow discovered my number. He didn’t need to know any of the rest of it.

  Completing the entries, I quickly filed the stack away before pulling my purse from one of the desk drawers. Reaching for my cellphone in order to stow it in my bag, my hand stilled.

  I still had a few minutes before I was expected home.

  And maybe listening to his voicemail a few more times would give me more information as to why he had called.

  Or maybe I just needed the privacy the closed shop provided to once again hear Stan’s voice call me ‘babe’.

  Chapter Two

  Bishop opened his eyes and stared blearily at the clock on the nightstand, surprised to note he still had a couple of hours before the alarm was due to go off. And for the first time in a long while, he hadn’t woken up in pain. Although he knew it was coming. Knew that the agony was waiting, preparing itself to strike, to double him over and have his body trying to empty itself in wave after wave of tortuous hurt.