Then drive home, cursing under my breath the whole time.
I carry Wren inside and into her bedroom. I tuck her in, then turn off the lights and go into my own room and shut the door.
Lying down on my bed, I stare up at the ceiling and take my raging dick in my hands, stroking my shaft with Cady’s name on my lips until I let go with a tortured groan.
Jesus. I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind. This girl’s gonna be the end of me if I’m not careful.
12
Cady
Once I’m inside the back door of the apartments, I turn and watch out the window. Tank climbs into the truck and starts the engine. He drives away into the darkness as my eyes follow his vehicle, my whole body thrumming with the memory of his body pressed against mine.
Weirdly, a couple of moments after Tank pulls away, a car in the lot next door to us turns on its lights and starts up, before taking off in the same direction a couple of seconds later.
A wave of embarrassment floods through me as I realize that whoever was in that car probably saw me practically climbing Tank like a tree just now. I can’t believe we didn’t notice there were other people around. But then again, when Tank was kissing me, the tornado sirens could have gone off all around us and I doubt I would have heard them.
As I turn down the hall toward my studio, still dizzy with lust, I tell myself that whoever was in that other car is a total stranger. They’d never have recognized either of us in the dark, anyway. Pushing away my mortification, I open the door to my apartment and go back inside, my body still in flames from Tank’s touch.
Holy shit, that kiss…
Tank was always sex on wheels, so it’s not like I haven’t been physically attracted to him from jump. I mean, that first day I saw him in the Downtown Diner, it was all I could do to not actually drool. The man is objectively hot. The only thing that helped distract me from how delicious he was, was that he was a man whore who could barely be bothered to pay attention to his own daughter.
But the more I’ve gotten to know him, the more I’ve recognized there’s more to it than that. His daddy vibe with Wren tonight had me feeling weak at the knees. Tank tried to hide it, but there were actually almost tears in his eyes as Wren sang the Name Game song for him. Her little voice nearly broke him. And the way he pulled out that medallion he gave Wren to wear, and adjusted it on her little chest… the look of love on his face practically made my ovaries do a tap dance. I’m not even sure he was aware of it, but that man has fallen hard for that little girl of his.
And then…
A thousand butterflies take flight in my stomach at the memory of Tank’s deep, intense eyes just before he lowered his lips to mine for the first time. That kiss we shared outside of his truck was explosive. Electric as a bolt of lightning, and just as all-consuming. And I know he felt it, too. When he finally pulled away from me, the tortured look on his face mirrored the way I felt, down to my core.
If we hadn’t been outside, with Wren asleep just a few feet away…
I would have done anything. I would have done everything.
Even now, I know I won’t be able to stop thinking about what it would have been like to have Tank’s hard, hot girth pushing inside me, filling me. I suppress a little moan at the thought of it, my eyes fluttering half-closed with the desire that I know won’t abate until I find a way to take care of it myself — awash in pleasure, in my bed, imagining that the magic battery-operated wand between my legs is him. It won’t be the first time I’ve had to relieve my desire for Tank by myself. But with the memories I have of the last ten minutes, it’s likely to be the most intense.
I move through my little apartment, prolonging the inevitable. I toss the beer bottles in the recycling and dispose of the pizza box. As I work, the fantasy that’s taken center stage in my brain forces me to confront something I’d rather not remember.
When Tank was kissing me, I wasn’t just thinking about what it would be like to be in bed with him.
I was fantasizing about what it would be like to be with him.
Part of his life. And Wren’s. The three of us, as a family.
A family like the one I was supposed to have with my ex-husband. Before I lost the baby, and then left my marriage.
My stomach clenches. Tears spring to my eyes for the second time that night.
“Stop it, Cady,” I hiss at myself, blinking hard.
I don’t know why the pain is still so sharp. I was never in love with my ex, even though I tried to make it work. It’s not like we really ever had a realistic hope of some sort of happy family. Even before I lost the baby.
But I wanted that baby so much. God, how I wanted her.
I’ve been trying to make myself think of Wren as a child like my little sister. I’ve been trying to believe that my affection for her is like that of an older sibling. That my protective feelings are because she reminds me of Cassie.
But that’s not really it. At least, not entirely.
The truth is, Wren reminds me of the little baby girl I loved so much, and then lost. Before I ever got a chance to be her mama.
I can’t deny that if I hadn’t miscarried, I’d probably still be with Kurt. And miserable, no doubt.
But even if I was miserable with Kurt, I’d still have her. I’d have my daughter.
Kurt never really wanted the baby. Hell, he never really wanted me, either. He just wanted the connection to my family. He would have been an absent, detached father. But I could have lived with that. As long as I had the baby to love, I could have accepted that life.
I remember waking up in the hospital, bruised and battered, my stomach still cramping from the pain. I knew I’d lost the baby, even before the doctor came in to tell me.
The nausea still overtakes me when I remember the looks on the faces of all the medical staff as I lied. I told them I’d been mugged and beaten by a stranger right outside my house. I told them my stepbrother had found me and taken me to the hospital.
Because I knew if I told them the truth — that it was my husband who did it — the consequences for me would be even worse. Pressing charges against Kurt — putting him in jail for what he did to me — wouldn’t be the end of it. I’d still have my family to answer to. And they’d make sure I never made such a mistake of disloyalty again.
Once it was over — once my dreams of being a mother were dashed — I couldn’t bear to have him touch me anymore. I couldn’t stand the thought of him making me pregnant again, knowing that the terror of losing another baby would have filled my every waking moment for the whole nine months.
I couldn’t tell anyone what had really happened. The only solution was to lie. Stay silent.
And leave quietly, as soon as I could.
No one in my family has tried to come after me. I haven’t tried to hide where I am, but I haven’t told them, either. I don’t have to. If they wanted to find me, they have the resources to do that. But I haven’t been in touch with them, and they haven’t with me. After all, I’m still technically married to Kurt, so really, what’s the point? That’s all my stepfather and stepbrother really cared about. In fact, it’s probably more convenient in some ways to have me gone.
Since coming here to Tanner Springs, I’ve stayed away from men completely. My independence has been too hard-won. The scars — the mental ones as well as the physical — are far too deep for me to trust anyone anymore. And until the day I met Tank at the Downtown Diner, my self-imposed celibacy has been easy to maintain.
When I first met Tank, his obvious discomfort with the little girl by his side inoculated me against the sexy biker, faster and more completely than anything else possibly could have. There was nothing he could have done, nothing he could have been, that would have made me feel more contempt for him.
But now? Now that I know I was wrong?
I’m afraid I’m about to fall down a rabbit hole that’s so deep I may never find my way back out.
I’m too unsettled to pay attention
to anything on TV after Tank leaves. Painting, of course, is out of the question. Instead, I mess around on my phone, stalling the moment I’ll go to bed. I check in on the social media profiles that I usually neglect. I read up on some current events of the day.
Then, on impulse, I pull up a browser window and type in a search that I’ve been meaning to do but keep forgetting.
I try Saint Gerard medal first. But the results just give me a bunch of different sites where I can buy one. So I click back into the search bar and try again without “medal.”
Saint Gerard.
Gerard Majella.
Popularly known as ‘The Mother’s Saint.’
The mother’s saint? “That’s odd,” I murmur to myself.
I scan through the entry about his life, then click out and read a few others. I learn that he lived in Italy in the eighteenth century, and that he trained as a tailor. At a young age, he tried to join the local Capuchins, but he was turned down twice, due to his youth and poor health.
So far, nothing seems to connect with what I know about Tank. But as I continue to read, I come across a passage that makes my heart start to race.
Once, toward the end of his short life, he was leaving the home of some family friends, and one of the daughters called to him, telling him that he had forgotten his handkerchief. Instead of taking it, he called back, “Keep it. It will be useful to you some day.”
Years later, the girl, now a woman, was in danger of death during childbirth. She remembered the words of Gerard, and called for the handkerchief. Almost immediately, the danger passed and she delivered a healthy child.
A wave of nausea hits me. Instinctively, I place a hand on my stomach, thinking of the baby I lost. I sit there for a minute, breathing and trying to calm my racing pulse. When I’m able to, I keep reading.
Many miracles were attributed to him during his short life. He also bore many crosses such as when he was falsely accused by a pregnant woman of fathering her baby. He answered her charges with the same stoic silence as our Lord did when facing His accusers during His Passion.
Saint Gerard died from tuberculosis at twenty-nine years of age. His intercession is requested by Catholics for children (and unborn children in particular), childbirth, mothers, and people falsely accused.
I reread the story about the pregnant woman falsely accusing Gerard of fathering her baby. But of course, that can’t have anything to do with Wren’s mother, can it? Of everything he’s told me about how Wren came to him, he has never once denied being her father. If anything, he accepts it without question, even though he insists he used protection.
Looking up the meaning of Saint Gerard only gives me more unanswered questions to be obsessed about where Tank is concerned. As he gave the medallion to Wren in the diner that day, he said he’d been wearing it for years.
The metal has been warmed by the heat of his skin as it nestled against his hard chest. I wonder if he wore it when he slept. Or when he showered. Or when he…
A deep throb returns between my legs. I picture Tank, naked to the waist, wearing the medallion on its leather thong. The image makes my skin tingle with longing to touch him, to see how far up his arms those tattoos go. To feel the heat of him, the hardness of him…
My eyes flutter closed. In my mind’s eye, Tank reaches down to unbutton and unzip his jeans. As they drop to the floor, his stiff cock springs free. Judging from the length of him as he pressed against me earlier, Tank has been blessed by the gods in that department. Is he cut or uncut? My breathing, already shallow, begins to speed up. My lips part, as I feel his rough hands on me, his lips brushing against my neck as he pulls me to him and takes me…
My eyes fly open. Shit. This is bad. Very, very bad.
He’s probably got a tiny dick, I tell myself — and then laugh out loud, because I can’t imagine that’s true.
I try again: He’s terrible in bed. He’s got uncontrollable toxic farts. He’s a premature ejaculator. He wears a women’s flannel nightie to sleep in.
I even try to picture him as Jason Momoa in that hilarious Super Bowl commercial, where he goes home at the end of the day and takes off his muscles and wig and he’s actually a scrawny bald dude. But none of it works. My body wants what it wants. And what it wants right now is Tank.
By the time I go to bed, I admit defeat, just as I knew I would. I pull out my trusty vibrator, turn off the lights, close my eyes, and imagine it’s him in my bed, doing deliciously dirty things to me with his tongue and his cock in the darkened room. I shudder through my release, and when I’m finished, alone and panting, the last thing that escapes my lips before I fall asleep is as fervent as a prayer.
“Dammit, Tank,” I whisper. “Please go back to being a jackass.”
13
Tank
Lordy. Who knew that once this kid started talking, you wouldn’t be able to shut her up?
A week after Cady gets Wren to sing that name game song, you’d never know this child was ever silent for a minute. And with every word she speaks — every laugh I coax out of her — she seems to transform into a different little girl. She talks, sings to Snoopy, laughs out loud at her movies, talks back to the TV as she watches it.
And every single time I hear her voice, an invisible fist squeezes my cold, black heart.
And then one night, something happens that I’ll never fucking forget.
I’m putting her to bed. She’s had her bath, and I’ve read her a book, sitting beside her on a chair next to her bed. She had a pretty full day, so she’s already yawning pretty good by the time the story is done. She lies down, and I tuck her in, sliding Snoopy in next to her.
Eyes heavy with sleep, my little daughter looks up at me with a trusting expression. On impulse, I give her a kiss on the forehead.
And then, before I realize what’s happening, she puts her tiny arms around my neck in a tight hug.
“Goodnight, Wrenny,” I whisper around the lump in my throat.
And that’s when I know it, deep in my gut.
This sensation — this happiness that hurts so bad it’s almost like pain — is what it feels like to be a father.
Nothing else I’ve ever felt is anything like it. In some ways, it’s the best feeling in the world. But it’s also… well, fuck, kind of scary. It almost hurts to look at Wren sometimes. When she’s happy, it makes me want to burst with pride. But then it reminds me of how sad she was when she showed up on my doorstep. And how sad she probably was before that.
And that just about rips me apart to think about.
Fatherhood is confusing as fuck, in other words.
The one subject Wren still shies away from is her mom. I try asking her about Jess once or twice — to see if she had any idea where she had gone — but Wren clams right up. The second time, I can’t get another word out of her for almost an hour, until I finally coax her back by telling her she’s gonna go visit Cady for the afternoon.
I do manage to get Wren to tell me her last name, though. Anderle. Which confirms that her mom is the Jess I was thinking of.
By now, it’s been about a month since Wren showed up on my doorstep. She’s still sleeping in my guest room, with cardboard boxes of spare shit stacked up against one wall. Wren doesn’t seem to mind — in fact, she’s used the crayons I got her to draw pictures on the fronts of all the boxes, like it’s her own private kid’s version of Cady’s artist’s studio. But I’m starting to feel like she deserves more than that. Something more long-term.
I talk to Cady about it one night at my place. Wren’s in bed when I get back from church at the clubhouse, and I ask Cady to hang around for a bit to talk to her about my idea. We’re in my kitchen, leaning against the counter. Cady has a glass of water next to her.
“I don’t want Wren living in a storage room anymore,” I grunt, keeping my voice low even though I know Wren’s fast asleep down the hall. “I want to give her a little girl’s room. A place of her own. But I don’t know where to start.”
&nb
sp; Cady’s eyes twinkle when she smiles at me, like she approves. “So you want me to help you figure it out? Like, pretty sheets and covers, furniture, the works?”
“Yeah, if it ain’t too much trouble. I mean, you could just tell me what to get.”
“Well,” she murmurs, cocking her head. “Her favorite color is purple, so maybe a purple theme? I don’t know if you wanna paint the walls, but at least a purple bedspread? Some purple stuff around the room?”
“How do you know her favorite color is purple?”
“Tank. Are you blind?” she asks, but her voice is teasing. “She always puts herself in a purple dress or shirt when she draws herself. Check the drawing on your fridge.”
“Huh. Okay.” Shit, I never noticed that at all.
“And oh! Here’s an idea.” Cady points a finger at me. “How about painting one wall with blackboard paint? At least from her height down? That way she could have the whole wall to draw on with chalk.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I say, impressed. “I didn’t even know they made anything like that.”
“Yep. It’s expensive relative to other paint, but you don’t need that much if you just do like the bottom four feet of the wall. My little sister…”
She trails off, and I register the note of pain in her tone.
“You okay?” I prompt gently.
She lets out the tiniest of sighs. “Yeah. Sorry. It’s just that my little sister used to have a blackboard wall in her room. That’s what gave me the idea.”
Cady and I haven’t talked at all about the kiss we shared in the parking lot behind her apartment a week ago. The first time I saw her after that was pretty fuckin’ awkward for a minute. But focusing on Wren helped, and we’ve managed to slip into an easy rhythm since then.
I don’t know whether I’m happy about that or not. Because I’m not gonna lie, I want to kiss her again. Pretty much every second I see her, it’s all I’m thinking about. And I don’t wanna stop at kissing, either. If Wren wasn’t around all the time, I probably would have made a move by now. It’s fucking frustrating, even if I tell myself it’s a blessing in disguise. Getting involved with the chick who’s taking care of my daughter is the definition of messy and complicated. And I don’t do messy and complicated with women.
TANK: Lords of Carnage MC Page 10
