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  A Cuddly Toy

  Book 5 of The Bent Zealots MC

  By

  Layla Wolfe

  Copyright © 2018 Layla Wolfe

  ARC Edition

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  ARC version. For trusted ARC readers only! Please do not copy, share, or upload this file.

  This file has been marked with a watermark unique to you.

  Cover art by Natasha Snow

  Edited by Crissy Sutcliffe

  Cover model: Jimmy Thomas

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  HE DEPENDS ON THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS.

  FREMONT: As a mining geologist, I scouted out uranium on the rez. My boss was an unstable tyrant who would tolerate no deviance from his sociopathic plan. I found uranium, all right—making the Navajo hogans glow, their corn shine green from space, their cattle keel over, twisted and deranged.

  It was a game-changer when I realized what decades of this poison was doing to the people. And a chance meeting with the white priest who had chosen his own deviance in the desert, well, my destiny was changed forever. I’ve been down, but I haven’t been out. And Father Moloney is the premier guide to assist me on this coming out journey.

  FATHER NOEL: A cancer invaded our land. My parishioners were dying at a high rate, their limbs gnarled, fingers fused together, useless. But I never expected my crisis of faith to come in the form of a built, ripped geologist.

  I dreamt of Fremont’s arrival, his backpack bristling with scientific instruments. He holds the future of my congregation in his beautiful hands. Will he go up against the powerful conglomerate, risking health and fortune to help us? More than that, he’s stolen my soul with his vulnerable, down-to-earth honesty.

  At first I saw Fremont as a fun distraction, a sort of cuddly toy to play with, to dominate and control. He’s much more than that—he pushes back and has me on my knees. I was sent here to this hellhole as punishment for toying with a subordinate on another rez. Little did they know this poisonous, gorgeous desert would be my salvation.

  Publisher’s Note: This book is not for the faint of heart. It contains scenes of graphic gay sex, age play, illegal doings, consensual bondage and discipline, daddy Dom, sadomasochism, and violence in general. It’s a full-length novel of 72,000 words rated 18+ due to possible triggers. There are no cheating or cliffhangers, and HEAs all around for all.

  Table of Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  More Books from Layla Wolfe

  You’re not the only cuddly toy that was ever enjoyed by any boy

  You’re not the only choo-choo train that was left out in the rain

  The day after Santa came

  You’re not the only cherry delight that was left out in the night

  And gave up without a fight

  You’re not the only cuddly toy that was ever enjoyed by any boy

  You’re not the kind of girl to tell your mother

  The kind of company you keep

  I never told you not to love no other

  You must of dreamed it in your sleep

  ~ Harry Nilsson

  CHAPTER ONE

  FATHER MOLONEY

  I met him the day the sun was snuffed from the desert.

  Being on the southern border of California and Arizona, we weren’t in the eclipse’s path of totality. I’d been trying to explain this to the people for weeks, we’d get an eerie, grey-green darkening of the sky, crickets might chirp as though it were night, and a great hush would fall over the land. We could look at the total solar eclipse with a few pairs of glasses I’d bought or kick it old school with the standby pinhole shoe box.

  There hadn’t been a total solar eclipse in over a hundred years, but to hear these old guys tell it, the sun had died a dozen times in their lives. Jóhonaa’éí daaztsą meant “the sun is dead,” and then would be reborn in a spiritual communique between the sun and moon. For the Diné folk on the reservation, it meant a day to avert their eyes, stay home from school. Not eat, not sleep.

  That was probably why only twenty or so had ventured out to join me on a mound by the Fisherman Intaglio, an ancient “landing strip of the gods” built by Navajo or their forebears. The stones were arranged to depict a man brandishing a spear, two fish below, a sun and serpent above. As ten o’clock approached, we sat on our rock seats while medicine men and elders chanted sacred songs. I’d only been on the rez a little over two years, but I had been picking up a lot of the language by ear. I knew this song was to strengthen the sun and reaffirm balance.

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t get more kids to come out here,” said Galileo Taliwood. Galileo was a towering, gangly, awkward half-breed from the Four Corners rez. He’d been saved from his sheepherder’s fate by a do-gooding bilagáana lady who’d taken him to Pure and Easy, let him run her dog grooming business. He was down here at the Colorado River rez visiting his brother Ogden. To me he seemed capable of much more than cutting dogs’ fur into funny shapes. What, I wasn’t sure yet. In the same musing, matter-of-fact tone, he went on. “But I guess things are always a compromise. You have to settle for the people open-minded enough to come here today. I once had relations with a woman who managed an assisted living facility just to get my aunt moved up higher on their list.”

  At first, I had thought that nothing Galileo said could shock me. Yet I was continually surprised by the shit he came up with. For a square sheepherder who had rarely left the rez, he sure had a checkered past. “Do you feel bad about it?”

  His answer was swift. “No. But am I proud of it? Not really.”

  I nodded sagely. “Why are those kids redoing their hair?”

  The six or so high schoolers we’d convinced to come out were loosening their braids, combing their slick black hair. Toby Bloodgood, son of one of the singing medicine men, had been bold enough to come out here on a no-school day instead of being thuggish and drinking Montana Gin, a fluorescent blue drink made of watered-down hairspray.

  “Oh!” said Galileo, chipper. “When man was first made, its rays turned into our hair. Leaving it loose during the eclipse shows respect. And you’re right. I have no hair to brush out.”

  I smiled warmly. Galileo could have bored a hole in himself to let the sap out, he was that corny. Yet I was genuinely fond of the former sheepherder, and he’d proven himself useful around the chapel and rectory. He was spending more time with me than with his brother.

  “Three minutes,” said Galileo excitedly, shivering like a schoolkid. Rising from the flat rock that was his seat, he went to the telescope and crouched. I’d obtained the telescope from the diocese in Phoenix. Th
ey always appreciated my efforts to educate heathens in the name of science.

  “Shades, please,” I shouted.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Galileo donned his protective sunglasses and crouched again to look through the scope.

  I leaned back on my hands and watched the medicine men go through their routine. Within the protection of an altar of stolid saguaro cacti arranged in a semicircle, the elders had made sand paintings. But now one guy, the senior Bloodgood, was stamping out part of his painting. I rose from my rock and squatted next to the junior Bloodgood.

  “Why does Joe erase part of his painting?”

  Toby said, “Well, you know the painting reflects the world. He’s changing his painting to reflect the new world as he sees it.”

  “What’s new about it?”

  “He had a dream last night that someone important was coming. He wants to make this real by painting it.”

  Now I shivered, one of those roiling waves of nerves that rushes up your spine, stiffens your nipples, turns your balls to gooseflesh. “Why is this someone important?”

  “He wasn’t sure. The person has something to do with nature. He’ll help to strengthen the Sun and restore harmony in our land.”

  I tried to laugh it off. “A pretty tall order.” Technically, it was part of my job to dissuade the pagan Diné folk from their naturalistic meanderings. In reality, I tried to mesh as many of our principles together as I could. You speak their language, they come. Even now, a new truckload of Diné was pulling up. Sure, the women shaded their heads from the eclipse with shawls. But they were there. That was a start.

  Toby shrugged. “He’s a man of science. Like you.”

  Everyone seemed to think I was a man of science because I did things like borrow a telescope or tell the story of Darwin’s discoveries. I had once sermonized about the meteor that had created the mile-wide crater out old Route 66 past Two Guns. I likened it to their deity Tsohanoai, crossing the sky with the sun on his back. From this, they deduced I was the most practical, pragmatic scientist ever sent from bilagáana land. People started asking me questions about how fish hold their breath underwater, and why does alcohol need proofs? Should we not just believe them?

  So I became Father Moloney, the science guy, and I had to surf around on elementary school websites to answer some of their questions.

  Like now. “Fa Moloney,” said a middle-aged woman as her daughter handed her a cane. She wore the typical “grandma” costume of velveteen shirt and long skirt, padded socks stuffed into shoes covered in dust. These women were fierce sheepherders, churning out thousands of tortillas while brewing mouth-watering tea. “My sheep are gathered in a knot, not eating, not sleeping. But my daughter said it’s all right to come out.”

  I reassured her, and then we had to get into viewing position. I gently shoved Galileo aside, chiding him, “Galileo. Looking at planets.”

  He saluted. “It’s what I do.”

  I grinned and removed my sunglasses from where they hung from my dog collar, donning them for safety. I was a relaxed priest, the product of my rambunctious and haphazard youth, but I always wore the traditional vestments of my station. These garments were symbolic of all I’d worked for, all I hoped to impart to parishioners. My faith had rescued my paltry life from the ghetto of despair. I hoped the same belief could at least elevate some people, comfort them in times of need.

  Through the telescope lens, the moon’s slightest outline took a bite of the sun. “First contact!” I shouted. Excitement rose in my chest, and I remembered my deep breathing.

  Maybe I was a man of science and didn’t even know it. Or I’d buried my innermost nerd back in grade school, when I took the prize as the bully of the playground.

  A clamor arose from the medicine men. Bloodgood Senior was on his knees, furiously scribbling in the sand, tossing pebbles and rearranging sticks. The others had even stopped dancing in order to gather round him. I simply had to go and see what he was up to.

  He’d created a man out of the sticks. Inch-long spines from the pencil cholla cactus bristled from the man’s back. Shriveled, overripe fruits of the prickly pear were smashed on the “horizon” in burgundy blooms all around the man. In fact, Joe Bloodgood pounded the pears into the sand with his fist almost angrily, muttering Diné oaths I didn’t understand.

  “What is it?” I asked Toby, who had removed his shades to frown at the drawing. His answer wasn’t completely unexpected. It was almost as though I had precognition what he’d say.

  “It’s the guy he saw last night. These sticks coming from his back? They’re instruments of some kind.”

  “So, an alien from space,” I said hopefully. Some of those ancient “landing strips of the gods” sure did resemble spacemen. I’d seen cave paintings where they even wore helmets and shot animals with laser guns.

  Toby shook his head slowly, dead serious. “No. Nothing that stupid. This is a real guy, Father. He says this guy has come to help us, to use these instruments somehow.”

  My stomach sank as my heart accelerated with a lurch. Was it possible for two people to dream the same thing on the same night, though they were separated by miles? Maybe it was a generic dream. Sure, that was it. Last night I’d dreamt of a dazzlingly handsome man, a dark man from a toothpaste commercial who oddly reassured me that “God speaks through poets and artists.” Whatever that meant. But nearby, at his feet, sat a backpack bristling with tools, meters of some kind.

  I tried to forget the brief dream, but I couldn’t avoid the honest truth. I wanted that dream man in the worst, most base way.

  I’d always yearned for a scientific, practical person to balance out my flighty nature. Despite all my demoralizing one-night stands, I craved a yin to my yang, where my fire was quenched by the soothing waters of another human. The dream scientist represented the impossibility of such a yearning. It was merely a dream born out of frustration, the dangling of the carrot, the display of the elusive object most out of reach for me. Like those dreams where you’re back in high school wandering the hallways late for a class whose location you can’t recall, this man was teasing me with the unattainable—him.

  “And what’re those fruits? What do they represent?”

  Toby pointed. “Poison. Areas of poison all around the rez. This stick guy is coming to stamp them out.”

  Barely breathing now, I stood tall as the warmth of the sun was wiped from the desert. The energy of the moment was palpable, almost shimmering like a curtain between us and the murky, metallic strata of the Salomé Mountains. Its jagged teeth ten miles off were the first to sink into darkness. Everyone else seemed to hold their breath as they looked up—or down into their shoe boxes or pinhole paper—but my eyes stayed fixed on the sand painting.

  I wasn’t living in that incredible moment, a total solar eclipse I might never see again. Instead I was occupied with a vivid image of this scientist padding toward me silently in the cooling sand, like a mirage behind a squiggly curtain of heat waves. His face was awash in the confidence I lacked, some tripod or other slung over his manly shoulder.

  Bloodgood Senior examined my face, almost frightening me. “You know him?” he demanded to know, pointing at his stick figure.

  “Who, me?” I fumbled about for words. I couldn’t tell him that yes, I’d seen his man in intense detail, but I desperately wanted to hump him up the ass.

  “It’s just a thin crescent!” someone yelled, prompting me to tear myself away from the skeptical Bloodgood and reattach myself to my telescope.

  It was a breathtaking sight. The slender crescent was slowly shrunk into a heat-perfect diamond ring until “Bailey’s Beads” were visible, intensely roiling plasma showing through the moon’s craters.

  “Totality,” whispered Galileo.

  As though bidden by the strange half-Yazzie sheepherder, the moon’s shadow rushed down the valley at us. Some of us jumped when it enveloped us in its eerie darkness. It was a grey-green darkness the likes of which we’d never seen, and s
ome of the older folk prostrated themselves on the ground, overwhelmed by fear. The grandma with the cane rushed back to the truck, flinging herself face down on the seat, trussing her head in her scarf. We were bathed in this supernatural darkness, while the Salomé escarpment suddenly glittered turquoise, gold, cinnabar.

  Galileo grinned crookedly at me before we glued our eyeballs to our instruments again. When we could see only a few arms of solar flares, the process began in reverse, revealing the awe-inspiring diamond ring. I felt more than saw a horse approach. Hooves made shallow, dull vibrations in the sand. Only old men, sheepherders, and a few renegade young men rode horses anymore. Oh, and one miserable old Episcopalian priest, although I’d taken my Harley to the eclipse.

  It was Klah Biakeddy, local thug and often tormentor of Toby Bloodgood. He was trotting his paint at a good pace, and it was obvious he wanted me, so I had to tear myself away from the lens as light was restored to our world and people stirred. Young men braided their hair. Women peeked out from slits in their scarves. Bloodgood Senior drew a circle around his stick man as if to protect it.

  “Father, sorry to interrupt you.” Biakeddy was always deferent to me. With my arrival two years ago, I’d like to think that Christianity had taken hold in the Salomé Valley. “But dere’s a penitent in your church.”

  “A penitent?”

  “Yeah.” Biakeddy glanced sideways at Bloodgood Junior, who made a lip fart at him. “Isn’t that what you call it when someone wants to confess? He’s pretty riled up. Maybe he murdered someone.”

  At the first mention of “murder,” Bloodgood’s crowd perked up. I shushed them with my hand.

  “Let’s not get all dramatic. I’ll go see what he wants.” I started unscrewing my telescope to pack it away.

  “Want me to come?” asked Galileo.

  “No, you’re going on your vision quest, aren’t you?”

  “Sh’yeah, vision quest,” scoffed Biakeddy. “Vision quests are for pussies.”

  My ire was raised along with my native Northside Dublin accent. “Name-calling is for pussies. Biakeddy, you come with me. I can’t trust you alone with these guys.”