Date Published: July 24, 2026
Publisher: Changeling Press
Lennox -- I was supposed to marry a man chosen by my family. Smile for the cameras. Say the vows. Do what I was told. The wedding wasn’t about love. It was a business deal, and I was the price being paid.
So I ran. Terrified. Still wearing my wedding dress. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have anywhere to go. Then a biker named Rogue stopped beside the road and changed everything.
Rogue -- I’ve spent years handling problems for the Reckless Kings MC. Quietly. Permanently. Picking up a runaway bride wasn’t part of the plan. Neither was getting married. One look at the bruises she tried to hide and the fear she couldn’t quite mask, and I knew one thing for certain. She wasn’t going back.
Now her wealthy family, powerful ex-fiancĂ©, and anyone else stupid enough to come after her will have to deal with me first. The longer Lennox stays under my protection, the harder it becomes to remember this started as a way to keep her safe. She deserves freedom, a future, and the chance to choose her own path. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve already made my choice. She’s mine. And nobody is taking her away.
Rogue
The lot at Hadley’s sat empty -- one rusted Buick, a flickering sodium light, dead still except for the canopy buzz. I rolled the Harley under the canopy and killed the engine. The noise dropped away. The night pressed close.
I’d been on the road since nine, a pointless run Hawk sent me on to check a stretch of road south of Nashville. Two of our guys thought they’d picked up a tail last week. I’d seen nothing but dark asphalt. Now, twenty minutes from turning north for home, I was hungry, bone-tired, and needed gas. Hadley’s had it all.
I swung off the bike and stretched the road out of my shoulders. The canopy lights hummed. Inside the store, a kid in a Titans cap sat behind the counter with his face in his phone, and a country station played thin from a blown speaker mounted by the cigarette racks. I paid him cash for two gallons of regular, picked up a black coffee and a Slim Jim I wouldn’t eat, and walked back out under the buzzing light and its collected moths.
I was about to unlock the gas tank when I clocked the white.
It was a flicker, no more -- a piece of something pale catching the edge of the security light around the corner of the building, where the dumpsters sat behind a low cinder block wall the owner had built so the highway couldn’t see the trash. The Buick at the far pump still had no driver. The road was empty in both directions. The tree line beyond the lot was black. Tennessee woods in November swallowed light whole. I stayed at the pump.
I leaned against the pump, uncapped the coffee, and took a long, slow sip I didn’t want. Then I looked. The lot. The road. The tree line. I gave it two minutes. Nothing moved. The flicker of white stayed put.
I set the coffee on top of the pump and walked around the corner of the building.
She was crouched in the gravel between the cinder block wall and the back end of the second dumpster, knees up, the skirt of a dress that had cost somebody a year of salary bunched around her thighs and stained dark at the hem with whatever Hadley’s back lot had to offer. There was a veil in her hair. An actual veil. Pinned high and torn loose at the bottom edge where she’d caught it on something. Brown hair had freed itself from the pins on one side.
She was pressing her left wrist against her ribs.
The wrist was already swelling. Fresh. The skin had gone an angry red and was thinking about turning purple, the kind of mark left by a hand closing around it and yanking hard. It hadn’t happened long ago.
She heard me before she saw me.
Her head came up so fast I thought for a second, she was going to put it into the cinder block behind her. She got her feet under her in one motion. She looked around eighteen. Small. She moved with the twitchy speed of prey, getting her back against the wall, her hands flat to the block at her sides like she could push it down behind her and go through it if she had to.
I stopped several feet from her and put out my hands where she could see them. Palms open. Empty… except for the Slim Jim still in one of them, which was not the dignified detail I would have picked.
I didn’t say anything for a beat. I let her look at me. Let her clock the cut, the patches, the boots, the beard -- whatever she needed. She scanned fast, doing math on the distance between me and the road, where the gap was. She was a girl who had learned how to measure rooms.
The veil moved a little in the night air. She didn’t.
“You hurt?” I kept it short. I kept the road out of my voice -- the put-her-at-ease lilt I used on women at the bar who didn’t know me yet -- because she didn’t need a man being charming at her right now. She needed a man being quiet.
She lifted her chin.
“I’m fine.” The words came too even. Too rehearsed. “I just need a ride.”
Bruised jaw. Swollen wrist. Veil still pinned in her hair.
“Okay,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes half a degree. She’d been ready for the next question. People who looked the way she did were always ready for the next one, and the one after that, and the moment a man decided he’d earned an answer.
I tipped my head back toward the front of the building.
“Bike’s at the pump.”
I waited for the second it took her to understand that I wasn’t going to walk her to it. Then I turned and went back the way I’d come, around the corner of the building, into the buzz of the canopy lights. I topped off the tank, returned the nozzle to the pump, tightened the gas cap. I picked up the cup of coffee from the top of the pump and held it like I had reason to be standing there. I didn’t look back.
A few seconds passed. The night did its small noises. The fluorescent up by the air pump ticked through another bad cycle and gave up, then came back on.
Then I heard the gravel.
Two steps. A pause. Three more, slower, picking the path. I could hear the soft drag of a hem.
I took another sip of the now-cold coffee, and I waited.
She came up on my left, two feet of clearance between us, and stopped at the back end of the bike like she’d been told once, a long time ago, that you didn’t walk up on a man’s machine without permission and she’d never quite let go of the lesson. The dress dragged on the concrete behind her. There was gravel pressed into the white of it in a stripe across the hip. Up close, under the canopy lights, the bruise on her wrist had gone the dirty red of something the next hour was going to make worse.
I’d kept my attention on the road for the last forty seconds because something had started pulling at the inside of my chest before my thinking brain caught up, and a man in my line of work learned to pay attention to that pull or learned to bleed.
That was when the first set of headlights came up out of the dark to the south.
They came slow. Slow enough that I had time to set the coffee down on top of the pump. Slow enough that I had time to read the shape of the vehicle before I clocked the speed of it -- square, high, blacked-out, the kind of SUV nobody bought in this county to haul kids to school. It turned in off the county road without indicating, and the second one came in behind it without indicating either. They didn’t roll up to a pump. They rolled past the pumps. They stopped twenty yards from the front doors of the store, in the open part of the lot where they could see everything, and sat there with their engines running and their windows up.
I felt her go still beside me.
She didn’t make a sound or move. She froze with the instinct of someone who’d learned motion could get her hurt.
I unhooked the helmet from the handlebar.
I held it out to her without looking at her. Sideways, low, between our hips, where the bulk of my body was between it and the SUVs.
“Take it.”
She took it. Both hands. The bruised wrist came out from her ribs and caught the light, and she tightened her fingers around the foam at the helmet’s edge hard enough that the skin across her knuckles pulled flat and colorless.
The driver’s door of the front SUV opened.
A man stepped out. Dark jacket. No coat for the weather, which meant he didn’t plan to be outside long. He didn’t walk toward the store. He stood in the open door of his vehicle with one hand on the frame and the other hand down at his hip where I couldn’t see it, and he scanned the lot -- left to right, slow, taking inventory.
He took clocked the Buick, my bike, and even me.
I threw a leg over the bike.
“Get on.”
She followed the softly spoken command. She didn’t ask which side. She didn’t ask where to put her hands. She scrambled on, hiking the dress up with a clumsy heave. She swung a leg over the seat, her heel scraping against the pipe before her foot found the peg. The helmet bumped once against the back of my shoulder as she settled, grabbing for purchase.
Her fingers dug into my shirt as she held on.
It wasn’t the loose grip of a girl who’d been on the back of a bike before and remembered the etiquette. Both of her hands closed in the front of my jacket like the leather was a railing and she was a half-step from going over, and both fists pressed into my stomach through the cut.
The man in the dark jacket lifted his hand off the SUV’s frame.
I was already moving.
I twisted the throttle. The rear tire spat a plume of gravel, the back end sliding for a split second before it caught traction. We shot out from under the canopy, and I leaned hard into the turn onto the county road. She moved with me instead of fighting it. On a first ride, that was the only thing that kept you upright.
Behind us, a door slammed. Then a second door. The high beams of the second SUV swept across the front of the store, across the pumps and the spot we’d been parked in three seconds ago, and then they swung wide toward the road.
I opened the throttle the rest of the way.
The county highway south of Nashville at eleven-thirty on a weeknight was a black river with a yellow line down the middle of it, and the bike ate it. The tree line on either side blurred into something you couldn’t look at without your eyes watering. Cold came up off the asphalt, through my jeans, through the cuffs of my jacket, and somewhere behind us, in the mirror, the SUV headlights came around onto the road in a wide, scrambling arc and started after us.
They were big vehicles. They were fast on a straight. They were not fast through curves, and I knew every curve on this stretch of road between Hadley’s and the county line by the time I was twenty.
I took the first one without braking.
Her hands clamped tighter. I felt the second fistful of jacket bunch under my ribs. She made a small sound, not quite a word, swallowed almost before it started. She put her helmet against the back of my shoulder and pressed it there. That was all.
I checked the mirror.
The headlights clung to us through the first curves, too bright in my mirror. I knew a feeder road up ahead they wouldn’t expect. I took the turn hard, the tires screaming. I saw their brake lights flare red as they overshot the turn-in. They’d be back, but I’d bought us thirty seconds. It would have to be enough. I didn’t slow down.
The next exit north was a county road. From there, I could hit a web of back roads leading to the woods south of the compound. A man on a bike could get lost in those trees. The men in the SUVs would have to be born in them to follow. I pointed the bike at the exit.
Harley Wylde is an accomplished author known for her captivating MC Romances. With an unwavering commitment to sensual storytelling, Wylde immerses her readers in an exciting world of fierce men and irresistible women. Her works exude passion, danger, and gritty realism, while still managing to end on a satisfying note each time.
When not crafting her tales, Wylde spends her time brainstorming new plotlines, indulging in a hot cup of Starbucks, or delving into a good book. She has a particular affinity for supernatural horror literature and movies. Visit Wylde's website to learn more about her works and upcoming events, and don't forget to sign up for her newsletter to receive exclusive discounts and other exciting perks.
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