Bear "You lost?" The guy behind the counter at the hardware store asked. He wore overalls without a shirt underneath, the jean material stretching over his protruding stomach.

Lost? Maybe slowly finding my way.

He looked me over, his eyes stopping on the tattoo on my good shoulder. The skull symbol of the Beach Bastards. "I don't want no trouble," The man said, holding up his hands like I was robbing him.

"Put your hands down, man. I'm not looking for trouble today," I said.

"Don't look like you're avoiding trouble," he said pointing to my freshly stitched up injury.

"That ain't none of your concern, but I meant it when I said I wasn't looking for trouble."

I had trouble. Plenty of it in the form of a pink haired girl with so much attitude it made me crazy.

And hard.

Crazy fucking hard.

The man nodded. "Been a while since The Bastards have been through these parts. I just want to let you know that nothing's changed. I'm still waving my white flag. I'm still inactive."

"Inactive?" I asked. He turned around and pointed to the huge wolf symbol on his back, clearly recognizable to me as the symbol of the WOLF WARRIORS even though parts of it were covered up with the straps from his overalls. Chop had started a fight with the Warriors years ago about gun running from Miami, I didn't know the specifics of the fight, all I knew is that Chop said we were at war so we were at war, and I'd put my share of WOLF WARRIORS to ground.

"They called me Bones back in the day, but now I just go by Ted." The man turned back around.

"You don't have anything to worry about. I'm kind of between MC's myself at the moment," I joked, pulling at the collar of the shirt I was going to take off the second I got back in the truck, because while wearing my cut used to be like wrapping myself in soft leather, the simple tank felt like it was strangling me.

Ted nodded, visibly relaxing when he finally got it through his head that what I wasn't looking to stir up a decades old war between old men over something I didn't give a shit about.

"What can I do you for?" he asked with a smile, flipping off Biker Bones and flipping on Toolman Ted.

I looked around the small store but didn't see anything I could use at first glance in the tiny three shelves of auto parts. "I don't suppose you got a bike section in here. I'm in need of some parts." I glanced out the door and spotted Thia in the store across the street, filling a red basket.

Ted shook his head. "Ain't got no bike parts on the shelves but I might be able to do you one better." He ducked under the counter and walked over to a door that was covered with keys on little hooks. I didn't even realize it was a door until he turned the knob and opened it. Ted stepped aside and waved me over. I almost fell over after seeing what was on the other side.

It was a graveyard.

A bike graveyard.

"The Mrs. don't want me to have nothing to do with bikes since I left the Warriors, so she made me move all this from the house. She thinks I threw it all away." Hundreds of feet of bikes in different stages of rust and rot. Parts hung from the ceiling and off the walls. A small footpath had been cleared on the floor but other than that it was pieces and parts stacked on top of one another.

"I'm not a solider anymore, but I never lost my love of the machine that made me want to ride in the first place," Ted said, slapping me on the back. Rival MC or not, Ted, the guy from the hardware store that dressed like he was applying for one of those BIG FAT REDNECK shows, was probably the only person on the earth who understood what I was going through.

"This room makes my fucking dick hard, Ted," I said with a straight face.

Ted laughed and walked back over to the counter. "Sort through and find what you need. We'll sort out price when I see what you come out with."

It only took me fifteen minutes to find what I needed in Ted's bike junkyard. I paid him and said my good-byes.

I dumped the parts in the bed of the truck and wiped my greasy palms off on my jeans. I looked around for Thia, but didn't spot her through the glass doors of the store. I took one step in that direction when a shrill scream pierced the air.

I reached inside the cab of the truck and grabbed my guns, running top speed toward the scream.

Toward Thia.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Thia "Get your hands off me, Buck!" I shouted. I thrashed wildly, kicking and punching him anywhere I thought I could do damage on his freakishly giant frame. My little arms and legs were no match for the Sasquatch who'd hoisted me across his shoulders like a sack of dry cement, but I thought maybe, at the very least, I could get him to stop and listen to me. "Let me down!" I ordered again.

No such luck.

Despite my best efforts, Buck still managed to make progress into the little room I was trying my hardest not to let him put me in. "Nooooooo!" I protested, reaching out to grab onto the door frame with every ounce of fight I had in me. I held on so tightly I felt as if my fingertips were going to pop off and go bouncing around the room like the shiny metal balls in a pinball game.

With one last guttural growl Buck took one more step into the room and my fingers slipped from the door frame. Before I could even be upset about losing my grip, he'd already removed me from his shoulders and tossed me into the tiny metal cell, slamming the door shut. I landed on my side on the cold concrete, but didn't stay there long, springing up from the floor. I held on to the bars as Buck hastily turned the ancient looking key in the lock, the metal of the key made a high pitched shriek as it scraped against the metal of the bars, making my jaw ache and my ears feel like they were about to bleed. "I got an appointment with the sheriff for my questioning. You can't hold me here!"

"Don't you think I know that? I'm the deputy for Christ's sake. We will come back around to what happened with your parents, but this ain't about that. This is about a certain Mr. Carson," Buck said, resting his hands on his gun belt.

Shit.

"You and I both know I was well within my legal rights, and besides, it's not like I really hurt him," I argued.

"How many times do I have to tell you to call me Deputy Douglas when I'm clocked in? Oh, and here is something you may not have thought about, NEWSFLASH, this time we aren't ten years old and you didn't get caught spray painting the Griffin's new John Deere pink. You SHOT a guy, Thia! What do you expect me to do? Look the other way while he's up at Dr. Sanderson's getting his leg put back together?" Buck plopped himself down in front of my cell on a wooden crate labeled with the Blue Mountain green bean logo, dust from the crate puffed into the air and billowed around him.

He waved it away, focusing his attention on his new prisoner.

Me.

The back room of the Stop-N-Shop doubled as the sheriff's station. Shelves lined every available inch of wall space. Several lines of discolored paint marked the place on one of the walls where a few rows of shelving had been removed to make room for the old wooden school desk where Buck and Sheriff Donaldson were supposed to write their reports.

As a past employee of the Stop-N-Shop I knew for a fact that the box of Alphabettio's soup on the shelf above the desk contained an old black and white TV that saw a lot more action than any paper work ever had.

It's not like anything happened in Jessep anyway.

The cell itself had a retractable cot that hung down on a chain and was only large enough for two small people, or one large one.

If I hadn't stocked shelves for Emma May, I would've gone through life not knowing that our little blip of a town had any sort of sheriff's station at all.

Or the cell I found myself locked inside.

"I shot him, but only in the leg!" I shouted, stomping my foot like a toddler. "He barely even screamed."

Buck rolled his eyes and removed his wide brimmed sheriff's hat, revealing his receding hair line that made him look twenty years older than his nineteen years, and a red mark around his forehead from where the hat had been squeezing his head too tightly. He wiped the sweat off his face with a handkerchief. "Either your head is getting bigger than it already is, Bucky, or that hat has shrunk. Either way, it needs a coming to Jesus, or at least a resizing before the brains you might have left in there get squeezed out through your ears."

"Deputy DOUGLAS!" Buck corrected again. This time slower, enunciating all the syllables in dramatic fashion. He sighed. "You sound real sorry about all this," he said sarcastically.

I wasn't. Not one bit.

The only thing I would change about what happened would be next time I'd take into account the slight wind from the impending storm, something I usually considered when shooting cans off the fence post, but had oddly forgotten when my target became the living, breathing, human kind. "The only thing I'm sorry about was that my aim was off." I huffed. I was being a brat, but I didn't care. I've been 'adulting' since I was fourteen. As far as I was concerned, being locked in a cell by someone who I used to share bath times with, was a perfectly good occasion to cash in some of my unused bratty time.

"Thia, you've won every shooting competition over three counties since we were kids. You nailed him square in the thigh. I'd call that pretty dead on," Buck said, leaning forward and pinching the bridge of his nose. It wasn't the first headache I'd caused him over the years.

"I wasn't aiming for his leg, I was aiming for his balls!" I shouted, crossing my arms over my chest and leaning back against the bars. I blew out a breath of frustration.

"You can't just go around shooting people," Buck said, like I was a child that needed to be scolded and taught a lesson.

That's not necessarily true I thought, my mind wandering to the pond in the middle of the grove that now held more than algae and old fishing lures.

I hated being talked down to. It had been a long time since Buck and I were real friends and a lifetime ago since he knew what I was going through or anything about my life that gave him any sort of authority to judge me or talk down to me like I was a kid. I flashed Buck my best fake southern smile. "You know as well as I do that county law states I can shoot anyone on my property for whatever damn reason I want. That law is the one and only good things about living in this backwards town. So LET. ME. OUT."

"I'm pretty sure the law doesn't say that," Buck said, putting his hat back on his head and standing up.

"I know it's not those exact words, but you know what I mean, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. Everyone around here knows that one. In the eyes of whatever hillbillies wrote that law, and whatever other hillbillies kept it on the books, I didn't do anything wrong." Instead of unlocking the cell, Buck turned and headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" I asked in a panic. "You can't keep me in here!"

Buck shook his head. "I may not be taking you to see the judge in the morning, because as much as I hate to admit it, the law is law and you're right, I can't arrest you."

"Okay so unlock this cell," I said, reaching for Buck through the bars, putting on my very best pouty-save-me-face.

"But I am going to hold you until your appointment to see the sheriff, make sure you don't go anywhere until we can get what happened up at your parents' house squared away." Buck sighed. "Why didn't you call me? I could have helped. I could have done something, but instead you ran. Where did you go?"

"I just went away. I went to..." As I tried to come up with something I absent-mindedly ran my hand over Bear's ring.

"You went to HIM didn't you?" he asked and I looked down to where he was staring and took my hand off the ring like he'd caught me doing something seedy.

"Buck," I started to explain and then I realized why Buck was really holding me in that cell.

"You know Thia it hurts that you didn't come to me, but it hurts even more that you turned to a complete stranger. Spend some time in there to sit and think, might do you some good." With a tip of his hat, and the same sideways smile he used to flash me right before he sent a dodgeball sailing into my ribs, Buck was gone.

"This is bullshit!" I shouted at the closed door. "We're not in kindergarten anymore, Buck. You can't just put me in time out," I said, pounding my hands against the bars. My hands vibrated, stinging from the impact of sensitive flesh and bone against hard metal. I bent over and rubbed them together to ease the sting. When I stood up to shake them out, it sank in that Buck really wasn't coming back.

"Shit!" I said, and without thinking I hit the bar again, my right hand turning into one gigantic funny bone.

The entire situation was far from fucking funny.

What really wasn't funny was the biker who was probably tearing the town apart looking for me and what he would do to Buck if he stood in his way. "Buck!" I called again, this time not because he needed to release me but because I needed to warn him.

But it was too late.

There was a commotion on the other side of the door, followed by a bang. "Where is she, asshole?" barked a familiar deep voice.

Oh shit.

The door opened and a frightened looking Buck appeared in the doorway. His eyes wide and his palms up in surrender. Behind him, with a gun firmly pressed between his shoulder blades, was Bear. "You okay, Ti?" Bear asked through his teeth with his nose scrunched up in a snarl.

"I'm fine. Bear, This is Buck. The deputy sheriff. He's the friend I told you about. Well, I thought he was a friend until he tossed me in here," I said, wrapping my hands around the cold metal bars.

"How many times do I have to keep reminding you that you SHOT someone?" Buck yelled back. Bear nudged him with his gun and he tripped forward, grabbing onto the cell bars to keep from falling. Buck turned to look at Bear. "You got a concealed weapons permit for that thing?"

"Does it look like I'm concealing anything, motherfucker?" Bear seethed. Gesturing with his chin to the double holster he wore around his arms that he hadn't had on earlier. He must have had his holster in the truck but I hadn't seen him put it in there.

Buck raised his hands and slid to the ground on his butt, his back against the bars. "Listen, I'm just doing my job."

"No you're not, Buck. Yes, I shot him. But he was on my land and didn't leave when I asked him to. The law is the law. You got no right to keep me here because you think I need a time out! I get that you're hurt but you got to let me go."

"If she didn't break any laws I suggest you let her out of that cage right the fuck now before I break one that you won't live long enough to arrest me for," Bear warned.

Buck's hands shook as he took the key from his pocket and unlocked the cell door. Bear reached forward and grabbed me by the elbow, dragging me out of the cell and then from the room. Leaving Buck on the floor inside the room he slammed the door and locked it from the outside.

Bear's steps were long and it took me three of mine just to keep up with him. His grip tightened around my arm as he dragged me toward the truck. I was about to ask him what's wrong but something told me I didn't want to know the answer. He opened the passenger door and didn't wait for me to climb in. Grabbing onto my waist he tossed me into the cab and slammed the door.

"You were screaming," Bear said through his teeth, getting in on the driver's side and starting up the truck.

"Yeah, because Buck was being a dick," I said. "He's just hurt and trying to prove a point."

"I should go back and kill that motherfucker right now for laying his hands on you," Bear said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand while the other was white knuckling the steering wheel. He spun us out onto the road and within seconds we were clear of town.

"He wasn't going to hurt me," I assured him. I was growing worried over the fact that he wouldn't look at me. I grew more worried when he turned completely silent, the rattling of rocks bouncing off the undercarriage sounded like bullets in the quiet.

"You got history with that guy? He your boyfriend or something?" Bear asked.

"Buck? No! He used to be my friend. My only friend. Now he's just an asshole who works for the sheriff."

His jaw was set in a hard line, a muscle by his temple jumped and his throat was tight with tension. Bear suddenly pulled over to the side of the road and put the truck in park. He lunged at me, my back still smashed up against the passenger door he set his hands above my head on the window and glared down at me. "He laid his hands on you. You screamed. He didn't stop. I would kill him without blinking. I almost did." Bear's eyes darkened, gleaming with intensity. "If he ever touches you again I am going to do just that. You got me? Fully expect me to break his fucking wrists or end his fucking life, but I get to choose which. Not you. Is that understood?" I nodded, not because I agreed with him, but because I knew he meant every word. "Good girl. This shit between us? I got no clue what it is, but it's something. That's why I gave you my ring back. You know it too, and that's why you didn't hesitate to put it back on." At the mention of it, I felt for the skull ring beneath my shirt. "But, Ti, I'm dead serious when I tell you that if you need someone shot, it's me who does the fucking shooting." He ran his nose along the line of my jaw. "Is that fucking clear?" he asked, pulling away, cupping my jaw in his hand, searching my eyes for the answer.

"Yes," I whispered, lost in what it was that I was agreeing to because my thoughts were mostly on the fact that Bear was only inches away from my face.

From my lips.

Which was where his eyes went when my tongue darted out to wet them.

"Good, now fucking kiss me," Bear said, crushing his lips to mine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE.