Fiasco (Dirty Aces MC Book 6) Read online

  Fiasco

  Dirty Aces MC

  Lane Hart

  D.B. West

  Contents

  Synopsis

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Also by Lane Hart

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  About the Authors

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue were created from the authors’ imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual people or events is coincidental.

  The authors acknowledge the copyrighted and trademarked status of various products within this work of fiction.

  © 2021 Editor's Choice Publishing

  All Rights Reserved.

  Only Amazon has permission from the publisher to sell and distribute this title.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Editor’s Choice Publishing

  P.O. Box 10024

  Greensboro, NC 27404

  Edited by Angela Snyder

  Cover by Melissa Gill Designs

  WARNING: THIS BOOK IS NOT SUITABLE FOR ANYONE UNDER 18. IT CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE, VIOLENCE, AND GRAPHIC SEX SCENES.

  Synopsis

  Fiasco has always been the guy who can’t do anything right. In fact, it’s why he was given his unfortunate nickname.

  When he takes two bullets during a shooting, Fiasco nearly loses his life. And in a way, dying may have been the easy way out.

  But once he saw Joanna’s face, the angelic nurse doing everything she could to save his life, he wanted nothing more than to live.

  Overcoming his injuries is just the first obstacle Fiasco will have to face. If he can’t get back to his construction job soon, he’ll lose everything he’s worked so hard to have, along with all the people who depend on him.

  With Joanna’s help, Fiasco begins to wonder if he could be more than the screw up of the Dirty Aces MC, right before it all comes crashing down on him yet again.

  Chapter One

  Phillip “Fiasco” Stafford

  “Come out of the woods, you stupid son of a bitch! The longer you hide, the worse it’ll hurt!”

  Chuck’s voice is angry and slurred from drinking all day as his boots stomp through the fallen leaves in the woods behind our trailer park. He’s not my father, but he acts like he is. I hate him, and I wish my mom would leave him. She’s tried to kick him out, more than once, but he’s like a cockroach that refuses to go away.

  Rosie whines underneath me, making me realize that I was holding her muzzle too tight. “Shh,” I whisper to her. If she would run away from me, I would let her go, but she’s a good dog, sweet and loyal. She never leaves my side, not since I found her in the dumpster a few months ago when she was just a puppy. I can’t afford to take her to the vet, but I think she may be pregnant.

  Tears make my eyes blur as the sound of crunching leaves grow closer and closer to where I’m hiding inside of an old refrigerator someone threw out with the other piles of junk. I should’ve kept running, but I twisted my ankle and couldn’t put any weight on it. Hiding was the best I could do. I was hoping it would get dark before he came after us, but I was wrong.

  Chuck is right about one thing. I’m so stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  I knew better than to throw the ball with Rosie in the trailer. I didn’t mean for it to bust Chuck’s new flat screen. He loved that damn thing more than anything. He loved it so much he’ll kill me for it.

  The crunching of leaves suddenly stops, and then the door to the fridge is yanked open so fast I scream like a girl.

  Chuck grabs me by my hair and drags me out with Rosie clutched in my arms.

  “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” I tell him through the sobs, glad I can’t see his face when he lets go of my long hair and it falls into my eyes. “I’ll buy you another one, I swear!”

  “You ain’t got fifty cents for lunch, much less a thousand goddamn dollars!”

  “I’ll get a job! Please,” I say, even though we both know it would take me years to earn a thousand dollars even if someone would hire a twelve-year-old idiot.

  Rosie growls at Chuck, and I rub her head to try and get her to calm down and be quiet, to let me take this punishment instead of reminding him of her.

  “I’ll be takin’ the payback out of your hide!” Chuck roars before his fist slams down on the back of my head, making me see spots when I squeeze my eyes closed. The toe of his shoe hits my stomach and grazes Rosie’s side, making her whine.

  “Wait!” I beg, desperate to stop him from hurting her again. “Rosie’s having puppies,” I blurt out. “I’ll sell them.”

  “Like anyone would pay a dollar for one of her stinkin’ mutts!”

  “I can tell people they’re bulldogs, and they’ll believe me,” I assure him.

  “I ain’t gonna have no more mouths to fucking feed!” he yells. I hear the sound of a gun cocking right before the bullet explodes so close to my ears that the world goes silent. Too silent.

  “NO!” I scream at the top of my lungs as my body jerks, pulling me out of the nightmare. I try to sit up, but there’s a burning pain inside of me, eating through me, that stops me along with someone’s hands on my shoulders. “Don’t touch me! Don’t fucking touch me!” I scream, and they thankfully let go. So, it wasn’t my mom’s old boyfriend. Nothing I said ever made him stop, so it was just that goddamn dream again…

  My eyelids are heavy, but I try to open them to figure out where the hell I am. Dark hair and a concerned face are hovering over me. I finally recognize the man.

  “Calm down, Fiasco,” Nash says. “You’re going to be okay.”

  The tension in my body eases up seeing my MC brother and hearing his calming voice. “Where…am…I?” I ask, wincing with each word thanks to the pain in my side and down my lower leg.

  “We’re, ah, at a friend’s house. You were shot.”

  “Sh…shot?” I say. “No. His bullet didn’t hit me…”

  “You were shot in the side and in the leg outside the Knights of Wrath bar,” Nash assures me, giving me too much information at one time. My brain feels like it’s working even slower than usual as I repeat his words in my head a few times until they start to make sense.

  Knights of Wrath is a familiar term. Those were the guys we were patching over. There was a party. We were all drinking and fucking… Oh yeah, I remember now. I was fucking one of their club girls from behind while she made out with another chick against the brick wall in the alley. Then a car pulled up, tires squealing. I turned my head to see who it was, not giving a shit if they watched us fuck when there was a sudden burning in my side and in my lower leg that dropped me to my knees.

  “Fiasco, can you hear me?” Nash asks, his voice muffled more than before.

  “Take it easy on him. I just gave him more pain meds, and they’r
e trying to pull him under so they can do their job,” a woman says before her face appears above me. She looks like a beautiful, dark-haired angel.

  “I think he was having a nightmare,” Nash tells her.

  “The meds can put you in a deep sleep,” the angel says. Then she smiles down at me warmly and says, “Sweet dreams.”

  My eyes close as if on command, doing exactly what she said. I hope to have sweet dreams instead of my usual nightmares. I bet I will, since she’s there with me keeping the bad dreams away.

  Chapter Two

  Joanna Patton

  There’s a big, muscular blond man in my bed, taking up more than half of the queen size mattress, naked other than a pair of boxer briefs.

  He’s the first I’ve slept with since my divorce, and he is much easier on the eyes than the man I was married to. Bill was fifteen years older than me, barely two inches taller than me at five foot-seven and was missing most of the brown hair that was meant to cover the crown of his head. I used to look at the thick, curly forest of hair growing from his chest and think that it must have gotten lost and detoured on its way north.

  Despite his below-average looks, I thought I was in love with him when we first met. My adoptive parents had both recently died; I had just made the decision to sell the family home and farm to pay for medical bills and the funeral. I think I just wanted someone to take care of me for a little while, and that’s what Bill did. At first.

  But after about three months of living together as husband and wife, I quickly grew tired of him and his odd fetishes. It wasn’t your normal run-of-the-mill foot fetish or even a little bondage. No, Bill got excited for…my hair. While most guys prefer oral sex, Bill usually only wanted to wrap my long, straight, dark brown hair around his dick and come in it, which was so disturbing and gross. The first time he wanted to do it, I agreed, thinking that once he had done it, he would get over the unusual urge. Instead, it only made him want to do it again and again until hair sex was the only type of sex in our marriage. No orgasms for me, thank you very much. I suggested he go to therapy or that we go to therapy as a couple. He refused, so I asked for a divorce. After a certain point of realizing he preferred my hair to the rest of me, I knew I wasn’t in love with him either. He was just there when I needed someone, and I grabbed on to him.

  Until now, I don’t think I ever understood Bill’s strange obsession. But wouldn’t you know, my first thought when I was left alone with the injured biker, looking like a fallen statue of Adonis, was that he looks good enough to eat and that I wanted to run my fingers through his straight, floppy blond hair. I immediately hate myself for the inappropriate thought about a stranger, like I had crossed some horrible ethics line. Never in the four years that I’ve been a registered nurse have I looked at a patient and thought about them in such a lustful way.

  Fiasco.

  That’s what Nash, Wirth and Malcolm, his so-called friends, call him. Although, to me, it sounds like an awful insult.

  Sitting beside his large, muscular frame on the bed, I reach over to check his forehead and cheek for a temperature with my palm, wishing I had one of those instant, infrared thermometers. My touch causes him to stir, and then his big, hazy, brown eyes are open and looking right at me. I finally use that as an excuse to push his hair out of his eyes. It’s just as soft and silky as it looks.

  “You’re…still…here,” he says, and then the corners of his lips try and go up into a smile before he groans in pain.

  “Sorry I woke you up,” I whisper to him.

  “Where’s…everyone?” he tries to sit up and then falls right back down to the mattress.

  “Nash and the guys just left. Go back to sleep…” I start to call him Fiasco like they all did, but it just sounds too cruel. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Fiasco,” he answers automatically.

  “No, your real one.”

  “Oh. It’s…Phillip,” he says softly.

  “I’ll be here, Phillip. Just sleep and give your body time to heal.”

  “Okay,” he agrees, the word trailing off into a gentle snore as he drifts away, his consciousness turned off as quickly as a lightbulb.

  Over the next few hours, I stay by Phillip’s side, dozing occasionally on my little sliver of bed, while Casey, my friend and fellow coworker, tends to Hunt, the other injured biker they left behind to heal. Hunt was incredibly lucky that a bullet just grazed the side of his head and part of his ear, or he would be a dead man.

  More than once I’ve wanted to ask what happened, where they were and why people were shooting at them, but I kept my mouth shut. The less I know about the MC’s business, the better off I probably am. Maybe I should’ve turned them away when the group of strange men showed up at my door. I couldn’t, though; not if it meant someone dying who I could’ve tried to save. I’m certain they would not have wanted to show up at a hospital to have police start asking questions.

  The doorbell rings late that afternoon, and I have a feeling I know who it will be. I wait and listen to see if Casey will get the door. When she doesn’t, I go into the living room, surprised that neither Hunt nor Casey is in there where I left them earlier, when he was recovering on the sofa. Maybe they left without saying goodbye. There’s a cup of coffee on the kitchen table, and the pillow and blanket are still draped across the sofa.

  I open the door and see Nash on the other side of the glass.

  “Hey.” I unlock and open the storm door, then move aside for him to come in.

  “Hey. Sorry to just drop in on you. How are the patients?” he asks, looking hesitant as he steps inside and glances around at the empty living room.

  “I thought maybe you had heard from Hunt since he disappeared while I was with Phillip.”

  “Phillip?” He furrows his handsome face in confusion. There’s something…familiar about him, although I’m not sure what it is. Maybe I’ve seen him around town before.

  “Fiasco,” I clarify. “He said his real name is Phillip.”

  “I didn’t know that. How is he?”

  “He’s mostly sleeping, but I think he’s doing okay so far. He was awake and alert long enough to tell me his name, so that’s a good sign. You can come see him…”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  I turn and start down the hallway with Nash behind me. We’re about to go into the bedroom when I notice the light is on in the hall bathroom, the door shut. Then I hear soft voices coming from inside followed by a loud gasp and then what is definitely a moan.

  “I think we found Hunt and Casey,” Nash whispers from behind me. My cheeks go up in flames because I’ve never been one for casual sex or even around anyone else having sex. And the loud, noisy kind is not the type I’ve ever encountered in the bedroom, sad but true. I even jump when something or someone hits the bathroom door hard enough to shake it, then the sounds really grow louder.

  “We can, ah, go on in here,” I tell Nash, urging him into the bedroom ahead of me so I can close the door behind us to try and drown out the noise.

  “Sorry about that,” he says.

  “Why are you apologizing? They’re both adults,” I remark.

  “Yes, but that’s not why I brought him here,” he says.

  “It’s…fine.”

  We both pretend we don’t hear the muffled grunts and groans when we move closer to the bed where Phillip is sleeping. I press my palm to his forehead, and his skin is noticeably warmer. “I think he has a fever.”

  “Shit,” Nash says.

  “I’m already giving him what antibiotics I had here, but we may need something stronger, along with more morphine.”

  In order to get the stronger medicines, I may have to call in a favor from a new friend in the hospital pharmacy and ask them to do something I didn’t think I would ever do – steal medicine from the hospital. Thankfully, it’s a small community hospital where everyone knows and trusts everyone else, even if they shouldn’t. While a prescription is needed for all patients, I don’t think
anyone actually compares the number of prescriptions to the number of drugs that go out.

  I make the call, and then Nash volunteers to go meet and pay my friend for his help.

  While he’s gone, Fiasco jerks in his sleep and groans as his temperature keeps climbing. I try and cool him down with a wet rag on his face, neck and chest, but it only seems to make him more uncomfortable.

  “Shh, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m going to take care of you.”

  Talking to him seems to calm him down, so I keep at it until Nash returns, coming right to the bedroom without knocking as if he knows how urgent it is for us to get more antibiotics in his friend.

  “Did you get it?” I ask, and he holds up what looks like a reusable lunch bag.

  “Yes. I know how risky this is to you and your friend. Like I told him, if anything happens, I told him to say I threatened his life at gunpoint to make him steal.”

  “Hopefully no one will notice they’re missing,” I say as I take the bag from him, glad to see Thomas put some syringes in here too.

  Once I get everything measured out, I push the liquid into the IV I started on Phillip and wait to see if they help.

  I’ve just sat back down on the empty side of the bed when Casey comes into the room. Her auburn hair is pulled up in a messy bun like mine, although much messier after sex. She’s practically glowing, face flushed like a heavy coat of blush has been applied perfectly. The blissed out look on her face falls just a little when she sees Nash standing there. “Oh, sorry. I would’ve knocked if I knew you had company.”