Patriot Read online

  Patriot

  An MC Romance

  Trent Jordan

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Patriot

  2. Kaitlyn

  3. Patriot

  4. Kaitlyn

  5. Patriot

  6. Kaitlyn

  7. Patriot

  8. Kaitlyn

  9. Patriot

  10. Kaitlyn

  11. Patriot

  12. Kaitlyn

  13. Patriot

  14. Kaitlyn

  15. Patriot

  16. Kaitlyn

  17. Patriot

  18. Kaitlyn

  19. Patriot

  20. Kaitlyn

  Epilogue

  Preview of “Axle”

  Prologue

  Free Prequel

  Also by Trent Jordan

  Prologue

  Michael “Patriot” Giordano

  After two weeks, my battle wounds in my shoulder and upper chest still hurt, but they did not leave as strong a mark as two very distinct thoughts.

  One was positive—the feeling of having defeated the Fallen Saints in battle. It took a little bit of unexpected outside help, but in battle, one could never deny Lady Luck.

  The other, though, was much less positive—the feeling of having been ambushed brought back a lot of sickeningly familiar feelings from the days in Iraq, specifically Ramadi.

  The degree to which I experienced one or the other really depended upon the type of mood I was in. If I was feeling good, man, the euphoria of knowing we had an ally led by an old face that could help us fight the Fallen Saints was better than any drug or whiskey. But if I was feeling down, there was nothing in the world that could help—not weed, not sex, not a cigar, not friends.

  For right now, though, being back in the first church meeting with my best friend and the club President, Lane, had me feeling much happier than anything else. It was never a bad day seeing our leader present, injuries be damned.

  “Good afternoon everyone,” Lane said as he took his seat. “It’s good to be back.”

  “Amen,” Axle, the club’s Vice President, and Butch, its Sergeant-in-Arms, said simultaneously.

  My buddy had come a long way from being the coward who was too scared to lead the club, let alone fight in battle, to becoming the actual hero of the club. Axle and Butch were two mean motherfuckers who didn’t reveal much and didn’t say much, making it all the more valuable when they voiced their support, however pithy it was.

  Lane, though, had some surprising news that I had kept on the tip of my tongue for several days now.

  “So,” he said. “You won’t believe who rescued my ass when I went to fight Lucius.”

  I already knew the answer to this statement. I’d faked my own death in the last battle with the Fallen Saints so I could ambush them if necessary. It wasn’t, but it had enabled me to hear who Lane had spoken to following the surprise ambush.

  “Cole Carter.”

  “What?” Axle said.

  “Impossible,” Red Raven said—and he almost never said anything. Him speaking in shock was far more surprising than anything Butch or Axle could say.

  “Are you sure battle did not make you go crazy?” Butch said.

  “I am positive,” Lane said. “I know the face of my own brother when I see it, and I can assure you that the face that I saw and the voice that I heard was that of my brother.”

  I leaned back in the chair and folded my arms. I’d gotten so used to leaning forward and trying to send messages to my best friend that I had to deliberately force this action of sitting back and relaxing. It was a nice feeling, one I could really get used to.

  “So... does that mean he is an ally of ours now?” Axle said. “I still... he came to you? You, his brother? How did he know about everything?”

  “Someone got his number and called him in,” Lane explained. This, I did not know. “Apparently, he popped up on the radar just south of here. So... your guess is as good as mine. but as far as being an ally? I don’t think that’s the case yet. He said he did this as a favor before riding off.”

  I didn’t speak up then, but Lane knew what he had to do. Apologize for all the things you said. Reach out and be a brother, not a fighter. Heal the Carter family if you want to get strong enough to attack the Fallen Saints.

  “I sure am glad he did this as a favor, though. We were dead out there without his help.”

  Dead out there without his help...

  I wasn’t someone who just randomly flashed back and zoned out. I generally controlled where my thoughts went, even the dark ones. But sometimes, as if I had a masochistic streak, after a tough battle, I liked to think about what had happened to me during the Iraq war. Maybe it was as if I was trying to atone for what went down while I was there, or maybe I felt the need to punish myself for having survived.

  But all I know is that before I was “Patriot” in the Black Reapers... before I was a guy who had the appearance of a chill, happy individual who spoke the unfiltered truth… I was Michael Giordano, enlisted private in the U.S. Army, and a man who was damn proud of that.

  More than just a man who was committed to protecting his country, though, I was committed to something else.

  Or rather, someone else.

  My wife at the time, Jennifer.

  And I threw it all away after what happened in Ramadi.

  You know. The day you went on that night raid... the night you lost your two best friends... the night...

  “Red Raven?”

  “Yay.”

  “Patriot?”

  I snapped back to attention, realizing that I had somehow missed the previous minute of conversation. This hadn’t happened in almost a year.

  Lane’s recovery from his guilt and the need to pull him closer to the club had given me a mission to focus on in club meetings, but now that had been resolved, my old issues had bubbled up. I hadn’t solved my own problems, I merely shifted them to the side to focus on the greater good of the club. Perhaps I could have focused on new club problems, but I knew that I was going to have to face these emotional and mental scars of mine alone.

  “You know I got your back in whatever you do,” I said with a thumbs up and a smirk. “Yay.”

  I literally had no idea what Lane had asked about. He could have asked if we needed to do a second follow-up strike on the Fallen Saints, or he could have asked if I preferred pizza or burgers for the next Black Reapers public event. I could bullshit my way through just about anything.

  Except the fallout of what happened after Ramadi. When you came home to Jennifer and tried to tell her you were fine, except...

  Damn, man, I really needed help. If I ever wanted to have even just the potential or the possibility of loving anyone—most of all myself—I needed help. At the very least, I had a lot of introspection and reflection I needed to do.

  For now, though, I was in no position to have a relationship with anyone. If I couldn’t have made it work with my high school sweetheart, the girl I married just before shipping out at eighteen years old, I couldn’t make it work out with some stranger in Springsville. I was content to settle for sex at the club parties—it got me off, and since I was strong and didn’t need support from anyone else, it was all I needed to fulfill my needs.

  For now.

  “Alright, that concludes this weekly meeting,” Lane said. “Gentlemen, thanks for holding down the fort while I was out. Even if you bastards were the ones that held me out.”

  “Nonsense,” Axle said. “Thank you for taking the lead.”

  Lane smiled before he pounded the gavel once. Everyone slowly stood up, walking out the door, except for me. It wasn’t uncommon for me or someone else to hang back—private one-on-ones were a hallmark of Lane’s leadership style. He was brut
ally honest and upfront in these meetings, which allowed for politics to get left behind. It also ensured no one outside the doors wondered if any shit-talking was being done behind their back.

  “So, Mr. President,” I said with a smile. “I’d say you got the club in tip-top shape. You have pretty good control over them all.”

  “For now,” Lane said as he puffed on a cigar. “Care to have one? We might as well celebrate my return.”

  “Ah, hell, I’d prefer a cigarette, but alright,” I said as I took one from him and lit it up. “Thanks, man.”

  It just felt like we were celebrating a temporary victory. This battle against the Saints wasn’t going to end until Lucius fell or until we found a way to make peace. There was just too much bad blood.

  And let’s just say making peace with Lucius was about as laughable an idea as me forgiving myself.

  “By the way,” I said. “What was that all about? That club vote?”

  “Oh, just something about getting medical help on-call, but all that aside, though,” Lane said. “I do need to talk to you about something. I know you’re good for keeping secrets, Patriot, but in this case, I need you to be very, very quiet. Okay?”

  “Of course, man,” I said. “Why? What’s up?”

  Lane sighed, his heavy look second only to the expression he’d had when he thought about his deceased girlfriend, Shannon, the one he’d dated for a long time before she got killed by the Fallen Saints.

  “If I’m right,” he said. “It could very well spell the end of the club.”

  Kaitlyn Meade

  It had been a rather busy month at Springsville General Hospital, full of gunshot wounds, violence, and a few drunk driving accidents.

  At the moment, though, I was just on my break with my best friend Devon in the lunch hall of the hospital. We both had on our nursing scrubs, and instead of talking about issues of work—we had all the time to do that—we were on the topic familiar to anyone without a ring on their finger or an official social media status.

  “Telling you, girl, as soon as we can, we need to get the hell out of here and get to Los Angeles,” Devon said. “There’s absolutely no dating scene here!”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I corrected. “There are single men in town. They’re just hard to find.”

  “Oh, please, what are you going to do, date one of the biker men?” Devon said with a chuckle. “They are the only guys who are single here, and for how often they come to the hospital, we might as well.”

  I smirked but quickly interjected with a different thought, not really interested in going down that road.

  “I mean, think about the places that exist in every municipality,” I said. “Firefighters. Police. Government jobs. Surely, there are some men in their twenties and thirties. Maybe a cute cop or lawyer in town somewhere.”

  “Okay, sure, but you’re talking a dating pool of, what, a dozen men? Most of which will have a small-town mentality?”

  I sat against my chair and crossed my arms.

  “I’m just saying, Kaitlyn, for as smart a girl as you are, as badass and tough as you are, you deserve someone better than someone who’s going to talk about putting women in the kitchen and saying you need to be a stay-at-home mom as soon as your belly expands half an inch.”

  “They can’t all be that bad,” I said, even though prior experience within Springsville city limits had shown otherwise.

  “Really,” Devon said. “When was the last time one of your dates talked about a foreign country they had visited? Or climate change? Or, hell, trying a dish that wasn’t pizza or hamburgers?”

  I hated that, even if Devon had meant to say what she did as an exaggeration or a joke, she actually wasn’t kidding. I could not remember the last time those things had happened in Springsville—I had to go back to when I was in nursing school in Los Angeles.

  “Point made,” I said.

  “Like I said, if we’re going to restrict ourselves to this town, we might as well go for the bikers. At least a lot of them are hot, and a lot of them are badass. They may be terrible to talk to, but they’re great to look at.”

  My smile faded. There was nothing hot about them. There was nothing attractive about gangsters. Whether they rode bikes or pimped-out vehicles, whether they wore cuts or bandanas, death followed them everywhere they went. Six pack abs or popping veins did absolutely nothing to overcome the nightmare that their presence could create.

  I only had to flashback a year ago to one of the worst overnight shifts I had ever done. I was dealing with a personal tragedy at that time with my older sister, and what came in around one in the morning was one of the few times I had lost my composure as a nurse.

  A beautiful young woman by the name of Shannon had come in, having suffered fatal wounds at the scene of the crime. Though she was deceased upon arrival, I was tasked with putting her downstairs so the team could conduct tests to officially give a cause of death. I tried my best to maintain my composure, but seeing another woman killed by gang violence made me break down and cry. I had managed to at least get to a bathroom and do it, but it just happened far too close to what had happened to my sister.

  It was like God had a sick sense of humor—if you could even call it humor—and wanted to remind me of how Kristina had died. At least in my sister’s death, the first time I saw her body was after being embalmed with all of the scars and ugly stuff hidden. In Shannon’s case, though, not only was she not embalmed, she had come in with her eyes wide open, as if she would forever remain aware of how her life had ended.

  We weren’t supposed to do this, but I wound up shutting her eyes for her. I couldn’t believe that no one who had brought her in had done so, and someone had to give her peace from all of the gang violence. If I hadn’t, who would have?

  All of this was to say that while I considered it my professional duty to treat whoever came through our doors, regardless of gang or group affiliation, that was a categorically different question from dating one of them.

  And even if I could look past their violent tendencies, there was also the fact that hot and attractive were two different things in my eyes. Hot was someone that would have looked great in porn or to fantasize about. Attractive was someone who I wanted to actually spend time with. The bikers were hot, sure, I guess by definition I could grant them that. Attractive?

  “Yeah, but I don’t want a badass, I want some good asses,” I cracked, causing Devon to laugh.

  This was just how the two of us operated. We’d trade dark humor, crack jokes, and ignore the seriousness of some of the other stuff. We were nurses; we had to resort to something to get through it all.

  At the tail end of my break, shortly before six in the evening, I got up and headed to my car to put my phone away. I got all the way to my vehicle, a blue Toyota Camry, before I heard the familiar sound of a motorcycle approaching. I didn’t mind the sound of a motorcycle, and I could see the appeal in riding one. I just disliked who typically rode those bikes.

  But when I turned around, I realized that the guy on the bike was approaching me. I recognized him—he was a black man with good arms and an apparent lack of emotion whom I had treated a couple of weeks ago. If memory served me right, he liked to go by Axle, although I always referred to patients by their real names, which I believed was something like LeCharles.

  I crossed my arms and stood up, not wanting to show any fear or intimidation at the sight of a biker confronting me. LeCharles pulled up right in front of me, killed his engine, and placed his helmet on his handlebars. I didn’t need to remind myself not to budge; there wasn’t anything he was going to say that was going to scare me.

  “Hi, can I help you?” I said. “If you need medical attention, you should—”

  “I don’t need it,” he said. “But we might in the future. I remember you. You helped out the doctors.”

  “I did, I’m a nurse, it’s what I do,” I said. “But I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t tell you if you’ll need treatment in t
he future, so—”

  “Yes, but if such a thing happens, we need to be able to have people help us on the spot,” LeCharles said. “We can’t be going to the hospital and drawing attention like that.”

  “So then don’t get hurt,” I said. “Look, if you came here for a conversation on this, then you can leave now. No one here is going to help you with what you’re saying, and—”

  Very subtly, LeCharles reached into his jacket for something and casually showed me a few hundred-dollar bills, held together by a rubber band.

  “How would you like to make some extra money under the table for us? At far better rates than what you’re being paid right now?”

  I looked wide-eyed at the amount of money in his jacket and then stared back at LeCharles. I knew, given that dollar amount, what my answer would be.

  Patriot

  Lane had his occasional flaw, to be sure. We all did. It’s why we were a club and not a bunch of goody two shoes in a corporate office.

  But exaggeration and hyperbole were not one of them. He sometimes oversold himself, but it was very rare for him to oversell club business. If he said there was something that could potentially cause the club serious problems down the road, that was something that I needed to pay attention to—especially if he said those problems could cause the end of the club.

  If anything, I had needed him to get more apocalyptic with club business.

  “Let me explain first why I say that and what I intend to do,” Lane said. “I let my emotions get the best of me when we went to attack the Fallen Saints’ base. I let my emotions get the best of me in a lot of ways, right? So, I’ve got to focus, now more than ever, on being logical and very cold in what I do. I need to be different than how I normally am.”