BENT AT THE ALTAR Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  BENT AT THE ALTAR: Broken Lions MC copyright @ 2017 by Claire St. Rose and E-Book Publishing World Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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  BENT AT THE ALTAR: Broken Lions MC

  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

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BIKER’S GIFT: Chrome Kings MC

  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

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  BIKER’S CHILD: The Saint’s Disciples MC

  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

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  OTHER BOOKS BY CLAIRE ST. ROSE

  BENT AT THE ALTAR: Broken Lions MC

  By Claire St. Rose

  I’LL DRAG HER TO THE ALTAR AND BEND HER OVER RIGHT THERE.

  The pretty doctor never asked for me to enter her life.

  But fate brought me here.

  And I’ve laid down my claim.

  This one is mine now.

  She can blame my brother for all this, if she wants to.

  He’s the one who got poisoned and ended up half-dead on her operating table.

  That’s where it all started.

  But once I got a glimpse of her sexy body in that lab coat, I knew exactly how it was going to end.

  With the doctor bent over and my ring on her finger.

  She saved my brother, so I have to thank her properly.

  And I’ve got a couple filthy ideas in mind.

  But it’s not all fun and games with me.

  It’s a dangerous world.

  And I’m a dangerous man.

  She’s gonna have to trust me if she wants to stay alive.

  But I can make one promise I’ll never, ever break:

  As long as you’re mine, baby…

  No one is gonna lay a damn finger on you.

  Because I’ll kill any man who touches my wife.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Emily

  A break in the ER was a strange phenomenon. There was always an emergency, a reason to put to use what I’d learned, a reason to be alert and prepared. In the age of modern technology and money, where drugs and alcohol were cheap, cars were fast, and children were left alone, accidents happened.

  The fact that I had time to breathe was a rarity. I actually had time to sit around and wait for an accident to come in, and when that didn’t happen, to think about getting something to eat. The break should have been welcome—I was usually dead on my feet after a shift, which could be up to fifteen hours long. No one should work that hard, people usually said.

  Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t. Every time I had time to kill, my mind wandered and I ended up right back to where all of this had started. A drunk night. A death that shouldn’t have happened. Control was a seven letter world that ruled my life because I had to face the fact that without it, I’d let someone down.

  I walked to the cafeteria and got myself a sandwich and a coffee. It wasn’t as if I was hungry. Usually, I was so busy at this time of night that I didn’t get time to eat until I clocked off at four. My body had adapted, but I had to do something, or I was going to go mad.

  “Emily? It’s nice to see you having a chance for a breather,” Liam said from the table where he was sitting. I walked to him and sat down, too. Liam Robbins was in Oncology, and I hardly ever saw him in the cafeteria. I usually never made it up to the cafeteria until my shift ended when the day physicians were all gone.

  “You’re working late,” I said. Liam was a day physician, pulling standard nine-to-five shifts.

  He shrugged. “If I know they’re not going to make it through the night, I prefer to be there, just so they don’t have to make that final journey alone,” he said. “The family can’t always make it over, or sometimes there just isn’t any.”

  “You’re a saint, Liam.” I peeled open the sandwich’s plastic packaging, and the smell of processed meat and cheese wafted out.

  He shrugged again, and I recognized the grief on his face. It was almost a personal insult not to be able to save them, even though sometimes it was out of our hands. “It’s part of the job description. Us bleeding hearts, eh?” He smiled and winked at me, then got serious again. “I hear rumors that you hold hands when the end is inevitable, too.”

  And he was right; I did do that. I took the sandwich out and looked at it. There were times when I just couldn’t save them no matter what I did. When that happened and I knew that it was the end, I put everything down, slowed down the rush until it was quiet—as quiet as an emergency room could get—and I sat down so that they didn’t have to go through it al
one.

  Dying was ultimately a lonely thing. No one could do it with you. But having someone there was important. At least, it was important to me. I couldn’t stand the thought of someone facing the end and knowing that no one was there to say goodbye, friends, family, even just a doctor or a nurse.

  “I’m glad to see your night isn’t so rough,” Liam said.

  I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed a couple of times before lodging the food in my cheek. “It’s weird. I’m so used to running around and being drenched in blood by now I’m not sure what to do with myself. It’s freaking me out, to be honest. I’m better in high pressure situations than this idle limbo.”

  It was a lot more than that, but Liam didn’t have to know about that. No one needed to know about that. It was better to keep my driving force a secret.

  Liam tipped his coffee cup toward me. “Having a late dinner and some coffee with a colleague isn’t a bad way to go about it,” he said and took a sip. I smiled and raised my own cup to toast his statement.

  I usually worked myself to death in the ER. On an average night, I saw everything from critical cases after a car accident to burn wounds all the way to the other side where kids had broken arms and asthma patients needed more oxygen. I prayed for the calmer nights—obviously—because that meant people were safer, but the wild nights were the nights I felt alive. When I was helping people, I felt like I mattered. I felt as if those were the nights where I could make up for when I’d failed; do the right thing when I’d done the wrong one before.

  On those nights, I could almost imagine I could redo history.

  Liam finished his meal and left me to it. I ate my sandwich alone. The bread tasted like sand in my mouth and the toppings weren’t my favorite, but I’d paid for it. It seemed wrong to throw it in the bin. Besides, my body would do something with it, and considering how often I neglected my own needs to put others first, it wasn’t such a bad thing.

  I had a pet peeve about selfishness. Maybe I overdid it from time to time.

  The coffee was better. Warm and sweet, the way I needed it during a job that led most of my victims—sometimes even my staff—into shock. I got up from my empty table. There were only three other people in the cafeteria, so I made my way to the staff lounge and sat down in front of the TV. House, MD was on. It was one of my favorite shows, even though the ethics were screwed and the medical practice wasn’t always the way it was in real life. There were shows that were worse, though, so this one worked for me.

  Although…I would have liked not to watch anything hospital related at all. Why did they play medical shows in staff lounges? Was this relaxing? Didn’t we see enough of this every day?

  I looked for the television remote and couldn’t find it. It was an episode that I had actually seen before. I leaned back into the couch cushions and sipped my now lukewarm coffee. My body came to a standstill, my muscles relaxing, settling into the couch. The tiredness waved over me, and my eyes became heavy. When did I have time to just stop for a moment? This was nice.

  Doctor Faye to the Emergency Room, the intercom went off in the staff lounge. My body was awake right away. Adrenaline negated the sleepiness that had come over me and my body was in over drive. I slammed down my cup of coffee so that the last bit of brown liquid splashed onto the table for someone else to wipe up and flew out of the room, my white coat waving behind me like a hero’s cape. I should have gone back after eating, instead of wasting time in front of the television. Just the time it took me to run to the ER could be the seconds that made the difference in someone else’s life. I cursed myself all the way.

  They wheeled a gurney in from the ambulance entrance just as I reached the emergency room.

  “What have we got, Sam?” I asked the paramedic. It was bad news to see Sam. Often it meant serious injury or death. Sam’s rotations went through rough areas, and his victims were often drug related or gunshot wounds. Both of them were usually critical if not fatal. I hoped for the former. I would rather pull them back from the brink of death than see them through it.

  “Some sort of drug overdose. He’s already crashed once on the way here, but we managed to revive him. Obstructed breathing, irregular pulse, blood pressure one-seventy over one-ten. Temperature one-o-three and climbing.”

  “Jesus.”

  This was a bad one. The guy’s head lolled to the side, mouth hanging open so that a thin line of foam ran from the corner of his mouth. His eyes were heavily sunken, and his skin was pasty. If we pulled him through at all, he was going to suffer. I hoped for the best, but honestly, he looked like death warmed up.

  I didn’t understand why people would do this to themselves. The rush you got off drugs only lasted a short while. The rest of the time—the trip back down afterward, the cravings, the side effects—was all hell. It was a terrible ratio. But that was addiction for you. I’d tried that route once when I couldn’t get away from my own demons. I’d found that working to beat them was much better for everyone involved than trying to run from them.

  I was with the gurney all the way to the bed where they lifted him over before stepping back for me. The guy looked to be in his mid-twenties, and he was crashing in a bad way. He flatlined like he’d been waiting for us to get him settled, and everything fell away except the patient, my need for him to stay in this world, and the staff that became my extra hands.

  Everything slowed down, and it was crystal clear. I knew what I had to do. I prayed it would work, but if it didn’t, it would never be for lack of trying. Not on my watch.

  “I need a crash cart,” I called over my shoulder. Nurses moved behind me in a synchronized dance. The energy in the room was focused. Amid the chaos of working in the ER we had a groove that we slipped into, and I was like a peg in the middle, keeping everything together so that nothing unraveled. It was this kind of control that made me feel like I could make a difference in this world.

  “Ready,” Gomez said next to me and handed me the paddles. I rubbed them against each other to spread the gel. The charging sound made a high-pitched squeal, as I pushed it against the bare chest and then the body jerked when the paddles shocked him. I looked up at the screen and the line spiked once, then again.

  The beep came almost as an afterthought. Thank God.

  “We’ve got a pulse,” I called. We were far from safe. The patient wasn’t exactly conscious, but his body did what it needed to and showed the signs when it couldn’t. Hands flayed and scratched at his throat. Head tipped back. Mouth opened in a silent scream.

  “He can’t breathe,” I said. I opened his mouth. His throat was swollen shut. Nothing was going down there. “We need to intubate.”

  A scalpel appeared at my elbow like a godsend, and I grabbed it, making an incision just above the sternal notch, performing a tracheotomy. If it came down to saving lives, I would cut every time. Wounds healed. Death didn’t. Blood poured out of the cut and down his neck in a thick stream. Too thick, and the liquid was too dark. This guy had a lot more problems on his hands that asphyxia. The tube came and I pushed the connection in before I fastened the tube that would feed oxygen into the body. I kept my eye on the pulse. It was still irregular, but it was starting to even out. One thing was going right, at least.

  The chest rose and fell, a sign that the tube was doing its work, and the patient calmed down again, falling quiet. The eyes fluttered, and there were twitches but no more flaying.

  The body temperature still bugged me.

  “I need acetaminophen,” I said. “And a sedative. I don’t want him coming round now and freaking out on me.” The injections were quick, one for his temperature and one to make sure that he stayed under, and then we all held our breath, watching the monitors.

  Thirty seconds and I could breathe again. He was stabilized, his pulse evening out and his lungs were doing their thing now that the tube was there to help him out. Unless something really went wrong, this one was going to make it through. At least until another overdose, but that was next
time’s problem.

  “Do we know what he’s on?” I asked. Gomez punctured the skin in the crook of his elbow and drew blood. The dark liquid filled the tube, and I winced again at how dark it was.

  “We will by morning,” she said.

  I heard the doors crash open. God, a break that nearly suffocated me it was so long, and then emergencies that followed so soon after each other. I took a deep breath.

  “I need you to watch him for me,” I told a nurse, and she nodded. I pushed the curtain aside, expecting the next gurney.

  It wasn’t another emergency coming into the ER, but it should have been with all that muscle and leather. He was tall and built like a machine, and he walked into the room as if he owned it. He wore a leather vest and nothing else under it, making him look like he’d escaped from one of those Die Hard movies. And he rocked it. Everyone was looking, even the male nurses. His presence spilled into every corner of the room until the place was so full of him it was a wonder we all fit.

  And he was coming right at me. His eyes were trained on me as if I was the person he was looking for. A little thrill jolted through me, accompanied by a wave of fear that I pushed away immediately. If I could handle a punctured lung pissing blood all over the place, I could sure as shit handle some guy on a power trip.

  “Where is he?” he demanded in a tone that made me think he got his way often, if not all the time. His eyes were a piercing blue, the kind that I would have pinned as photoshopped in a magazine, but that was as far as cover-boy-pretty went with this guy. He was all muscle and malice, with stubble on his chin and a look on his face that told me he’d been there, done that, and taken names in the process. Nothing could faze this guy, no sir. And yet he looked almost panicked when he asked his question.