Mercury Falling: a Grumpy / Sunshine Opposites Attract Romance (Book 1 of Road to Romance series)

Kerry “Mercury” Dawson blinked up at the bruised Nevada sky.

It was twilight. No stars yet. No neon glow bleeding up from the Las Vegas strip.

Wait—why was he staring at the sky when he should be riding?

Oh. Right. Little old blue-hair making a left turn in front of me.

Something sharp dug into his left shoulder blade, and he turned his head.

Pavement.

He was sprawled in the middle of the road, the chopped Harley he’d been riding propped at an unnatural angle six feet away.

Even from here, he could see how bad it was. The front fender was caved in, the forks crushed inward, the wheel pinched like a broken jaw. The mini-windshield was a spiderweb of cracked fiberglass. The beautiful, painstakingly polished chrome was bent, gouged, and scraped down to raw metal in places.

The rear fender lay even farther away, torn clean off like shrapnel.

Laz is gonna be pissed I trashed his bike.

A shadow blocked the sky. “Yo, man, you okay?”

Buck’s pock-marked face hovered over him, eyes sharp.

Kerry tested himself, one limb at a time. He lifted his arms—working. Fingers—still moving. He wiggled his toes inside his boots.

“Well,” he said, voice rough but functional. “I’m not dead.”

Buck snorted and reached for him.

“Don’t!”

The sound stabbed through Kerry’s skull like an ice pick driven behind his eyes. He flinched, nausea rolling in his gut.

“He could have a head injury,” the voice continued. “Don’t move him!”

The owner of the voice pushed into the loose circle of bikers surrounding him. A woman, blonde curls barely restrained by a clip, delicate features set in fierce, no-nonsense lines.

“We take care of our own,” one of his buddies—Chaff, maybe—growled.

They had to look intimidating: leather, ink, Strikers patches, boots planted wide. And yet this woman—half their size—jammed her hands on her hips and stared them down.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

She met each biker’s gaze in turn. Didn’t blink. “Which one of you is a trained doctor? Paramedic? Nurse?”

Chaff’s jaw dropped.

Damn.

Kerry would’ve laughed—he really would have—but his ribs flared hot and tight and his shoulder throbbed with every breath.

And his head—

Fuck, my head hurts!

He heard a groan.

His groan? Yeah, definitely his.

The woman’s attention snapped back to him. She dropped to the pavement.

“I’m Lucy,” she said. “I’m an E.R. nurse. I’ve already called for an ambulance.”

“No way,” he muttered. “I’m not getting carted off like an invalid.”

“We’ll see about that.”