Throttle MC: A Stepbrother Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

Randi was the old lady of a guy named Jake who belonged to the Steel Soldiers of Northern California.  Not long after I was born, things heated up between the Soldiers and a rival club, and my father was killed in a shootout. Randi took me and left, moving us out here to Cheyenne, where she started doing hair and nails at one of the local salons to make a living.
    Still, even though I had never known my father, the biker lifestyle seemed like it had been baked into me from birth. I just couldn’t stay away from motorcycles. I bought my first Harley before I was even legally able to ride, an old fixer-upper that I learned to fix even as I learned to handle it.
    When I made the decision to prospect with The Throttle, I was seventeen years old and wild as hell. The men of The Throttle became my brothers, and Lon Cooper became the father figure I never had.  When I was patched in, Lon clapped me on the back and told me I had a great future with the club.  No one had ever told me I had a great future before.  I had never been so proud, or so determined to prove someone right. 
    I had thought my ma would be totally against my prospecting with the club, given her past with my father and the way he had died. But in fact, when I told her I was going to prospect, a strange thing happened.  She looked at me with a small smile and said, “I figured you’d end up in the club someday.  Did I ever tell you why I chose to come here to Cheyenne?”
    Turns out my ma had grown up here, and she never told me. She had gone to high school with a few future members of The Throttle, Lon Cooper being one of them. They had even dated briefly back in the day. My ma implied, but didn’t say, that Lon had been her first love. All the time we’d lived in Cheyenne, and I never had the slightest idea the two of them knew each other.  But one day not long after I was patched in, Randi showed up at the clubhouse.  And Lon didn’t seem at all surprised to see her.
    It happened pretty naturally after that, and no one seemed to question it one way or another. One day, Randi was Lon’s old lady, and that was it.  They even decided to get married. “I gotta provide for your mom, in case something happens to me,” Lon said to me gruffly of their decision. They tied the knot one hot summer day, and the party the club threw that night was epic.  Long after the sun had gone down, Lon ambled up to me with a couple of shots of whiskey.  He handed me one and raised his.  “To my son,” he intoned with a twinkle in his eye.
     I nodded.  “To my father,” I grinned at him, and we drank.
    In the six years that passed, a lot of shit had gone down in the club.  We’d had some major shakeups, some bad deals gone down, and somehow, I’d ended up as the club’s VP.  Things were starting to look up lately, but there was still some major shit up ahead to be dealt with.  Some of that shit was on my mind as I walked up to my ma and sat down next to her.  I nodded at Cal behind the bar and he brought me a shot and a beer. “Hey, Randi,” I greeted her. 
    “Hey, baby,” she smiled. 
    “Gonz said you were lookin’ for me?” I grabbed the shot glass and slammed it.
    “Yeah,” she began, and as she did I noticed the crease in her brow.  “Ryker, I just wanted to give you a heads up.  You know you’ve heard that Lon has a daughter?”
    Sure, I had.  Though I’d never met her, I’d heard bits and pieces about her over the years.  Hadley, her name was.  The club members would talk about her from time to time, though not when Lon was anywhere near.  Apparently, Lon had sent her out east to live with an aunt when she was fourteen, to get her away from the club.  She had gone to high school in Connecticut or Vermont or some shit, and stayed out there for college.  I figured she would be about twenty-one or twenty-two now, from what the other brothers had said.
    Lon himself never talked about her. Apparently, Hadley had been so pissed off