Burnout: A Legal Heat Novella Read online

  BURNOUT

  A Legal Heat Novella

  SARAH CASTILLE

  New York Times Bestselling Author

  BURNOUT

  A Legal Heat Novella

  Published by Sarah Castille

  Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Castille

  Kindle Edition

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9938168-3-3

  Digital ISBN: 978-0-9938168-2-6

  Cover Design by Croco Designs

  Editing by: Blue Otter Editing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means without prior written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book was previously published in the New York Times Bestselling anthology, Riding Desire: Alpha Bad Boy Bikers, ISBN 9780991916672 (no longer available for purchase), and now includes approximately 50% more content.

  Stay up to date on my new releases by subscribing to my newsletter. Visit my website at www.sarahcastille.com and fill in your details on the sidebar under “Don’t Miss a Book!” or SUBSCRIBE HERE.

  The Legal Heat Series

  Legal Heat

  Barely Undercover

  Burnout

  To Alysha, who is wild at heart.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  About the Book

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Excerpt from Barely Undercover

  Other books by Sarah

  About the Author

  She vowed to uphold the law.

  He’s determined to break it.

  Together, they just might bend the rules.

  Rookie cop, Sophie Nichols, knows the dangers of a one-night stand with a sexy stranger. Unable to resist the pull of cocky, badass biker, Ace Logan, she indulges in one steamy night of raw, unbridled passion.

  At least, that was the plan…

  As the new sergeant-at-arms for the Rogue Riders MC, Ace doesn’t need complications in his life—especially a curvy, captivating cop with a kick-ass attitude who has the power to wreak havoc on his club. So why can’t he stay away?

  When Sophie’s brother is kidnapped by a ruthless criminal gang, Ace might be her only hope to find him. But once he has the rookie in his arms, he’ll never let her go. Now, Sophie must make a choice: break the law or break her heart?

  Chapter One

  Sophie Nichols knew regret.

  It slithered through her dreams every night, tainted every relationship she had, and now, as she pushed open her brother’s front door, it whispered a warning.

  What if her move to Vancouver was nothing more than another attempt to run away? What if she couldn’t shake the past?

  But there was no going back now. She’d quit her job in Toronto, transferred to the Vancouver Police Department, sold her house, and given away everything of sentimental value. Today was the first day of her new life, and there was no better way to start than going to one of Jason’s crazy parties.

  Taking a deep breath, she walked into the small, dilapidated bungalow and closed the door behind her, shutting out the incessant hum of Main Street traffic only half a block away. Heavy metal music pounded loudly through the house and reverberated through her body. She walked the floor looking for her brother. If memory served, Jason would be in the kitchen, selling drugs to his closest friends at a hefty mark-up. He was nothing if not entrepreneurial.

  Leather, piercings, and tattoos appeared to be the style of choice for Jason’s guests, with the odd Mohawk and fluorescent-streaked hair. Not Sophie’s usual crowd, but then she hadn’t moved to Vancouver to hang out with the same conservative, law-abiding crowd she had left behind to start her new life.

  She smoothed her top down over her tight jeans and checked the laces on her knee-high boots, the three-inch heels giving her the height she so desperately craved. Not that five foot four inches was unusually short for a woman, but it just meant she had to act tougher, fight harder, and throw out a lot more attitude on the job to ensure both colleagues and criminals took her seriously.

  “Hey, Soph.” Jason waved to her from across the open-plan living space. Sophie pushed her way through the crowd, keeping her eyes on the sweep of blond hair on top of his head, and away from the curious stares. She had never been a social butterfly. Her ex, Ryan, had been the talker in their relationship, the darling of the Toronto real estate crowd. Slick talk. Sweet talk. Dirty talk. Lies. He’d say anything to get a sale. Or a wife. She’d always wondered if he’d first hooked up with her simply because of the opportunities her connection to the most prestigious real estate agency in the city had afforded his career.

  No. She refused to think about Ryan. She was never going to move on if she spent another year sitting in her apartment, wishing she could live just one night of her life over again.

  Jason swept her up in a hug, and she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him back. They didn’t see each other often, but they stayed in touch, and when he’d found out what had happened with Ryan, he was on the first plane to Toronto to help her through the trauma. Despite being blessed with charm, height and good looks, Jason had been the high-school bad boy, cutting class, smoking cigarettes or weed behind the gym, and blowing off teachers, while convincing their parents he was the perfect son. They were night and day—Jason, tall and blond; Sophie short and dark—and yet he had always been there for her. If not for Jason, she would still be sitting in her apartment in Toronto, drowning her sorrows in vodka and soap operas, letting life pass her by.

  Sophie buried her face in his shoulder and inhaled the distinctive foxy scent of marijuana.

  She might have lost her way, but Jason hadn’t changed.

  * * *

  “Who is she?”

  Ace Logan, sergeant-at-arms for the Rogue Riders MC, sipped his beer, his eyes skimming over the sweet curves of the dark-haired woman who, only moments ago, had been picking her way cautiously through the crowd.

  “Jason’s girlfriend, maybe?” Kickstand, a junior patch member of the MC, grimaced when Ace scowled.

  “Your job is to find out everything about the people we do business with before we do business. If that is his girlfriend, you should know her name, what she does, where she lives, and how much time they spend together.”

  Ace leaned against the wall, arms crossed, as he surveyed the room, taking note of the biker brothers who had accompanied him for the meet with Jason scattered around the room. They weren’t here to party, but he’d instructed them to blend into the crowd, and so far everyone except Kickstand, who had clearly had one beer too many, was doing a bang-up job.

  “No one mentioned her when we checked him out.” Kickstand fiddled with the bottom of his cut, the leather vest worn by all serious bikers. Once a lowly prospect in Hades MC, an outlaw club based in Surrey, British Columbia, Kickstand had joined Ace and a handful of brothers w
ho’d decided to split from their mother club. Under a new president, Ryder, they’d moved to Vancouver and formed the Rogue Riders MC, a biker club that operated in the grey—not totally legit, but not committed to the outlaw life of their Hades brothers. Having grown increasingly disillusioned with the outlaw life after losing his closest friends in senseless acts of violence, Ace had welcomed the opportunity to be part of something new, and after Hades was decimated in a vicious territorial war after the split, he was glad he’d left.

  At least, until Ryder had allowed the few remaining Hades bikers to patch into his new MC.

  “Then we’ve got a problem,” Ace said. “Because any man with a dick is gonna mention a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe with long, dark hair, especially if she’s in business with Jason.”

  “You think she’s an arms dealer?” Kickstand’s eyes widened and he swayed to the side.

  “I think you’ve got two minutes to figure out who she is before I kick your ass.” Ace took another sip of his beer and let the warm, bitter liquid slide over his tongue. “Maybe she’s a reporter. Maybe she’s in the secret service. Maybe Jason’s turned rat and she’s wired. I don’t want to take any risks.”

  Patching Kickstand into the new MC as a full-patch member had been a risk that Ace was now beginning to think wasn’t going to pay off. Kickstand had only just joined Hades when the club split, and although he’d gone above and beyond to save a woman who wasn’t part of the club, he still didn’t have the street savvy that came only with the two gruelling years of training and hazing that turned a green prospect into a full-patch member of the club.

  Taking on the remnants of Hades MC had also been a risk. Although the Hades brothers had agreed with the Rogue Riders’ mandate not to get involved in heavy criminal enterprise—namely arms and drugs—old habits died hard. Despite Ryder’s best efforts, the club had slipped into outlaw territory, and the old guard managed to convince the Riders to declare as “one percenters”—the one percent of motorcyclists who were not law-abiding citizens.

  Ace hadn’t supported the motion when it was put to members. He didn’t want to go back to the outlaw life. He’d seen too much death, lost too many friends. Life was short. There had to be something more. But damned if he knew what it was. The vote went against him and since the biker pledge was for life, he was stuck with the one-percenter patch again.

  “I’m on it.” Kickstand ran a hand through his thick blond hair. “Although, I think she might be a relative. He’s hugging her the way I hug my mom and sister, and my Aunt Rose. You know, where you kinda roll your shoulders forward and suck in your chest so you don’t touch their boobs.”

  “No, I don’t know,” Ace snapped. “I spent my childhood being treated like a piece of shit by people who took me in just so they could get money to spend on booze and drugs instead of food and clothing. The only people I got close to were the girls I started fucking when I was fourteen, and back then it was all about boobs and sex.”

  Fourteen years later, and it was still about the sex. Abandoned to the child welfare system since birth, Ace had no role models for a healthy relationship, and absolutely no desire to settle down. And yet he was always searching, trying to fill a deep-seated longing for something that was always out of reach, an ache in his soul that was soothed only for the few short moments he held a woman in his arms.

  “She’s pretty damn hot,” Kickstand mused. “If she is his sister…”

  Ace watched the woman stretch to reach her arms around Jason’s neck. Her top rode up, baring the sweet curve of her back and highlighting the delicious swell of her well-rounded ass. So many damn curves he didn’t know where to look. And those boots. Christ. Nothing he liked more than a woman in lots of leather. He pictured her reaching up around his neck, his hands under her ass, her breasts rubbing against his chest. She was small enough that he’d be able to lift her easily, wrap those legs around his hips, her pussy grinding against his cock…

  “Ace.”

  Kickstand pulled him out of his fantasy, and he swatted the junior patch, clipping him behind the ear. “Don’t even think about it. If she’s not his, she’s mine. Even if she is his, she’s gonna be mine. Been a long time since I had some civilian pussy.”

  Damned if Kickstand didn’t lift an eyebrow. “Maybe she likes blonds.”

  “Maybe you don’t want to have your ass kicked so hard you wind up in the fucking U.S. of A.”

  Kickstand gave him a resigned look, his moment of rebellion quashed by the reminder of his junior status in the club. “She might turn you down, Ace. A classy girl like that…”

  “Never.”

  “Because of your charm, wit, and pretty, banged-up face?”

  Ace snorted a laugh. He had never felt self-conscious about the scars on his face, or his slightly crooked nose. They were mementos of the life he’d left behind when he joined the MC—his badges of survival.

  He clapped Kickstand on the shoulder, letting him know he was going to let the disrespect slide, because the girl was fucking hot, and if she hadn’t caught Ace’s interest, she would have been spending the night in Kickstand’s bed. With his charm and boy band good looks, Kickstand was a favourite with the ladies.

  “Because the good girls always want the bad boys, and there’s no one at this party who fits the bill better than me.”

  He was on a ride that would never end.

  * * *

  Sophie followed Jason around the house, a smile plastered on her face as he introduced her to his eclectic group of friends. It seemed that everyone at the party had at least one visible body part pierced or tatted, and they were high, stoned, or drunk. Well, except for the bikers standing in the corner. She couldn’t see them all, but the three nearest to her were clearly not here to party although they were all holding drinks. They stood alert, watchful, almost as if they were guarding someone. If those one-percent patches on their leather vests meant what she thought they meant, they weren’t just bikers—they were outlaws. The baddest of the bad. Bikers who had turned their backs on civilian law to live the life they wanted to live, the way they wanted to live it. God, to have that kind of freedom…

  She shook herself and pushed thoughts of jumping on the back of an outlaw’s bike and escaping the devastation that was her life out of her mind. Vancouver was her new beginning. New police department. New apartment. New friends. She glanced over at Jason snorting a line of coke from the crescent of a woman’s breast. The woman’s short green-spiked hair and thick black eyeliner were a stark contrast to Jason’s unassuming, innocent look. At least until he stood and wiped a few crystals of white powder off his nose.

  Same brother.

  “I gotta make a call.” Jason brushed a kiss over the woman’s cheek and winked at Sophie, as if he hadn’t just committed an indictable offence that carried with it a maximum penalty of seven years in jail. “I’ll meet you at the bar in the kitchen. Andre’s handling the booze tonight. Tell him I’ll have a vodka and seven, hold the lime. He’s the one with the piercings.”

  Sophie’s teeth rattled as she wove her way through the crowd toward the kitchen. She didn’t mind heavy metal music, but Anthrax was a little too morbid for her taste.

  “What can I get for you?”

  Rendered speechless by the bartender’s multiple facial piercings, Sophie just stared. His lips, tongue, eyebrows, eyelids, cheeks, and ears all sported tiny silver barbells, studs, or rings. Jason always had unusual friends. Too bad she wasn’t into the Frankenstein’s monster look. One year after her divorce and she hadn’t met a man who took her breath away.

  “Are you Andre?”

  “The one and only.” He stepped back and gave her a mock bow. “I assume you’re Jason’s sister. He said you’d be coming tonight, and you’re the only person here who fits the description of conservative, uptight, but sweet.”

  “He said that?” She didn’t know Jason thought she was sweet. Although Jason had always been her protector, they’d spent their childhood butt
ing heads until Jason dropped out of school and moved to Vancouver. Over the years, he’d returned to Toronto for the odd birthday or family holiday, but he’d never shared with Sophie what he did to make a living. Despite his erratic appearances, he and Sophie had become closer after he left home, staying in touch by text or email and, on the rare occasion, by phone.

  “He might have mentioned something about a stick and an ass, but I’m too much of a gentleman to repeat it.” He bent low and kissed her hand. “Andre at your service.”

  “Sophie.” A smile tugged at her lips as cool metal brushed over her skin. How did he kiss anyone? Or did the metal add a little something special?

  “Sweet Sophie. He said you were his total opposite, and he was right. What can I get you to drink? Maybe something fruity?”

  “Patron. Straight up.” Sophie had never been sweet… or girly. Much to the dismay of her very feminine mother, a successful real estate agent, she had always preferred jeans to dresses, computers to castles, and toy guns to dolls. No matter how hard she’d tried, Sophie’s mother couldn’t interest her daughter in shopping trips and visits to the spa in the few hours she had to spare between real estate deals. And although she shared an interest in motorcycles with her father, a long-haul trucker, his frequent absences meant they’d spent very little time together.

  “Didn’t peg you for a straight tequila drinker,” Andre said. “You sure you don’t want me to mix it in a margarita?”

  “That would be a waste of premium tequila.” She gestured to the table of bottles behind him. “I’ll have the Silver.”

  “I like a lady who knows her liquor.” The rasping voice behind her sent a shiver down Sophie’s spine, but the broad hand that squeezed made her scowl. “But I like a lady with a nice firm ass even better.”

  “Hands off.” She didn’t bother turning around, didn’t give a damn who he was or how he looked. She had enough information from the position of his shadow and the heat of his breath on her neck to calculate just how many degrees she would have to turn and exactly where she would need to place her hand to put the bastard in an arm lock and drive him to his knees if he didn’t remove his hand before she counted to three.