Grill (The Wounded Sons Book 3)

by Leah Sharelle

  “Sorry, baby, what was that last part you said, I didn’t—why are you covering yourself, Addy?” His brows were knitting together, his mouth turning down in disappointment.

  “I ... I won’t be long,” I stuttered feebly, trying to close the curtain without showing more of myself than I was already.

  Gripping onto the plastic sheet harder with his fist, Marshall simply looked at me, his eyes narrowing and his face grim.

  “Right,” he clipped, releasing the curtain, then to my shock, started to remove his jeans.

  “Marsh— ekkk! What are you doing?” I managed to squeak out, just before he stepped into the shower with me, cutting off my protest by taking my mouth in a brutal passionate kiss. With his mouth making love to mine, his hands got busy roaming all over my body- my back, my bump, my hips and my breasts. Not a millimetre of skin was untouched, unexplored or neglected.

  I was in sensory overload.

  And suddenly, I felt stupid.

  Marshall was making a point in his own uniquely alpha style.

  Ending the kiss, Marshall lifted me off my feet, my hands wrapped around his shoulders desperately holding onto his slippery skin, my belly wedged uncomfortably against his impressive abs.

  “I haven’t made love to you yet because I was afraid if I did when we got home, I might have hurt you. I want you so bad I can’t trust myself not to be rough. My idea to take it slow sent you in the way wrong direction, Sweet Cheeks.”

  Despite the heat of the water, my face flamed with shame. He was right; I went there when I had no right. I basically acted like the judge and jury. I sentenced him without thinking first— who this man was, and how much he loved me, how this amazing man fought for me and waited for me to trust him. Never complaining once when I refused to let him in, encouraging me when I second-guessed myself.

  “I’m sorry honey, I guess I let my head take over and I—”

  “And you thought I didn’t find you sexy anymore?” he asked incredulously.

  “Addy, you are pregnant with my kid. The only thing sexier than that is you not pregnant,” he insisted, his eyes not letting mine stray. “Tell me you believe me, Addy, tell me you know that I crave you, love you and find you the sexiest woman alive. Tell me!”

  The water slushed over our bodies, pooling where my breasts were crushed against him, but all I could see was the truth oozing from his brown eyes.

  “I believe you,” I promised.

  Mock scowling at me, Marshall lowered me to my feet carefully.

  “You better, because this—” he swept his hands down my back to my bottom and gave it a hard squeeze, “is what my dreams are made of now.”

  Kissing me hard one more time, Marshall turned and got out of the shower, snagging a towel off the rack to wrap around his waist but not before I got a look at his stiff cock, long thick and bouncing against his stomach. Licking my lips, I clenched my thighs together, mentally visualising what he would do to me with it.

  “Addy!”

  Shaking my head, I tore my eyes from his now covered up lower body and blushed when I realised he caught me staring.

  “Huh?”

  “I promise you can do everything to me that just went on in your head when we get home, baby,” Marshall promised, winking at me.

  “Now, move that arse that belongs to me and hurry up. By the time we get there, Bastian and Kodah will have eaten all the food. Fucking gluttons.”

  Yes, sir!

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GRILL

  My blood had finally stopped boiling. I’d picked up where Addy’s thoughts were heading at home in the shower before she got over the shock of me pulling the shower curtain back.

  I had to take some of the blame, her jumping to that asinine conclusion because I didn’t make love to her the instant we stepped foot in the house together after seven weeks apart. Truth was I had a hard time not taking her in the beauty salon, and not because her two friends had been in the process of feeling her up. It was just her, my Sweet Cheeks. The second she saw me in the shop, the pulse in her neck sped up, her breath came out in shallow pants, and I swore I saw her clench her sexy thighs together. Not unlike she did in the shower only hours earlier.

  I could read her like an open book at times, and sometimes I had no idea where she was taking her inner thoughts. As if I ever wanted to stop making love to her curves, never have her nipples in my mouth, or my cock entrenched deep in her welcoming tight pussy.

  Asinine!

  “Yo, Grill, that girl of yours is eating all the vanilla slices,” Kodah complained, sitting down next to me at the bar.

  “And?” I drawled, watching my girl take a bite of the sticky custard dessert; her moan of appreciation could be heard all the way around the room. My cock sprang to attention in my pants, painfully telling me he was through waiting.

  “I want you to make her give me some. She has two on her plate and she has had one already,” he whined, sounding like a three-year-old instead of a grown man capable of snapping a person’s neck with quiet precision.

  “No. Now go away and annoy someone else for fuck’s sake. And grow the fuck up and stop picking on my pregnant fiancée,” I accused, giving him my best ‘I will shoot you between the eyes if you don’t leave me alone’ stare.

  Across the room, Booth and Ford entered, and instantly, the hairs on my arms stood on end.

  Something was wrong.

  Pushing off the barstool, I stood up to watch the two men coming over towards the bar, towards me. Both men looked grim, but Booth had a nervousness about him I had never seen before.

  “Something is up,” Kodah acknowledged, his sixth sense just as keen as mine.

  “Reckon so,” I agreed, just as Booth arrived to stand in front of me.

  “A word, Grill?”

  “Yes, sir,” my reply immediate and respectful. Booth turned on his heel and lead the way through the throng of people milling around the pool table and couches. Catching Rafe’s attention, I motioned to Addy then to him, indicating that I wanted him to keep an eye on her. Receiving a slight nod from him, I continued following Booth and Ford across the room and through a door I knew was Booth’s personal entrance to the war room.

  The room was my favourite place in the compound. I wasn’t a patched member and had limited access in here, but once in a while after a bad mission, Gabe would call us in here with the members and talk about what happened. Sometimes the original members would offer advice, not often, mostly they just listened, giving us quiet comfort.

  The huge scarred table sat in the middle of the room, and around it was Gabe and the original Wounded Souls.

  “What’s going on? Where is the rest of the team?” I asked, not understanding why only Gabe was present.

  “This doesn’t concern them unless you want to tell them yourself,” Booth explained, sitting at the head of the table, gesturing for me to sit to his left.

  “Okay, what is this about?” I sat down, but every nerve ending in my body stood to attention. Something was telling me shit was about to go down, and it had nothing to do with any mission.

  “Before you left for your last deployment, I asked Ford to look into something for me,” Booth said, looking at the tatted-up computer biker giving him a covert nod.

  Gritting my teeth, my jaw tightening, I prepared for Ford to show me bullshit crap he found on Addy. My knuckles turned white, and my fists clenched tightly on the top of the table, I looked at Booth and waited.

  “It’s not Addy if that is what you are thinking, by your ticking jaw and the fact you look like you want to throw a fist at me, I’m guessing it is.” Booth’s smirk didn’t meet his eyes, he was all serious and by the looks of him, he expected me to do exactly that and punch him.

  “Grill, stand down mate. Dad wouldn’t have Ford investigate Addy without your prior knowledge,” Gabe said quietly from his seat across from me.

  I relaxed marginally, the order from my captain was something I always listened to. It did concer
n me that Gabe looked utterly devastated, his disquiet unnerving me.

  “I had Ford dig into your background,” Booth continued to explain surprising me.

  “Look into me? Why?” I asked, not pissed off but confused. One thing I knew about Vincent Booth, he didn’t do anything without good cause. The man’s gut instincts were something you could trust. If he had his reasons, then I would wait to hear them before voicing my opinion.

  “It was something Addy said. Actually, twice she mentioned it, once in Stella’s shop and the other time at the compound barbeque.”

  I thought back to that day; Addy made a comparison between Booth and myself. I vaguely remember dismissing it as nothing much, but Booth’s reaction, however, had not been as easy to dismiss. Eventually, that all faded into the background, not feeling so important until now.

  Nodding but keeping quiet, I waited for him to go on, but it was Mannix who jumped in to speak.

  “Rainn mentioned that you reminded her of someone, she told me who specifically it was and I went ahead and relayed that information to the person she named.” The cryptic statement from Mannix made no fucking sense and I found myself getting annoyed. The soldier in me shouted at me to wait for more intel, but the man wanted to rip someone’s head off.

  “Who?” I asked, looking at all of the men seated around the table, each one held eye contact with me not giving away who the person in question was.

  “Me,” Booth announced, “it appears that my brother fathered a child before his last deployment … before he was killed. His girlfriend had no idea she was carrying a baby until weeks later. She decided to keep it to herself and surprise him with the news upon his return.”

  “Only Carson didn’t make it back from Afghanistan; he died while in the worst firefight in the commando’s history,” Steel added, his grief from that day evidently still with him. I knew about that mission, the story legendary in military circles. Team Five had been overrun by the enemy, low on ammo and reinforcements too far away. Cooper Steel lost his leg that day, Mannix an eye, Creed copped a face and chest full of flying shrapnel and Booth lost his brother all to an IED. All five of them came home with a good dose of PTSD and started the Wounded Souls. All that was history-making and fucking sad, but what did it have to do with me?

  Booth abruptly stood up and walked slowly to the wall where photos of past and present members hung. Small framed photos positioned around a larger one of a massive man dressed in a leather Wounded Souls cut. He was sitting astride a black Harley with a baby girl aged no more than a few months in his arms. The girl was Shiloh, the current president of the club and the man I knew to be Darth. A member of the club who lost his life because of a raving lunatic hell-bent on hurting the women and little Shiloh. Gabe and Bastian told us about that story one night, during a particularity boring night on watch in the jungles of Borneo.

  Booth reached out and reverently plucked a framed photo of two soldiers dressed in their dress uniforms. One I recognised as Booth, only much younger, the other man … looked familiar, but somehow, I knew I had never met him. Then why does looking at him feel like I was looking in a mirror? Dread crawled up my spine; there was something very, very wrong about to go down.

  “This is my blood brother, Carson. We have different fathers, so there are differences, but the similarities are there,” Booth told me in a tormented tone. “Carson was your mother’s boyfriend, Grill. You were the baby she was pregnant with.” Booth didn’t drop a bomb on me; he dropped a weapon of mass destruction with that piece of information.

  “Say that again,” I croaked, staring at the photo brought closer for me to examine. The man next to Booth in the photo was much younger than his half-brother; his uniform looked to be brand new, suggesting this it was taken at his graduation. He looked happy and carefree, whereas Booth had the guarded look of a seasoned soldier. He also looked pissed off, not looking at the camera but off at something behind the photographer.

  “That day, I told our mother I would look after Carson and keep him safe and promised to bring him home alive. I failed. Two months later, he was dead, and I had to tell my mother that she couldn’t have an open casket because her son was in pieces.” Booth sank back into the leather chair and stared at the picture. A monitor in front of him sounded with subtle dining and his focus shifted from the photo to whatever he saw on the screen.

  “That day was the worst day of my life, or so I thought. Little did I know I still had more pain to come. A hell of a lot more,” he whispered, lifting his head and looking over at the main photo of the big man Darth.

  My mind worked hard to compute everything just laid out for me, I tried to shuffle each piece of information into categories of fact, and things I still needed more answers about. One obvious question was answered, I finally know who my dad is, and my uncle and my cousin. Looking over at Gabe, realising his devastation was due to that fact; we were related by blood, not just mateship. My captain, my commanding officer, indeed now also my younger cousin. The most mind-blowing— well, one of them was Booth. The man I held above all others, is my uncle.

  Fuck me sideways.

  Taking the frame from Booth, I studied the man that my mother loved so much she couldn’t find the strength to go on living without him. Not even I could pull her from that dark place that eventually took her six years after the love of her life died.

  I looked a lot like him; the same chin and nose. Addy had been right, making the comparison between Booth and myself. Even with different dads, Car— my dad and Booth looked very similar.

  Swallowing the lump in my throat, the emotions of thirty-six years of not knowing my father or my correct last name very much a shock.

  “Who are you looking at here?” I asked, pointing at Booth’s image.

  “Carson’s father. A man I thought for many years to be my dad too. Turns out, I lucked out, and my biological father was someone else.”

  “Lucked out?” The confusion was back, despite the turmoil running around in my head, I needed to know everything.

  Booth hung his head, and it was Gabe that delivered the answer to my question.

  “Remember the story, Ammo, and I told you about Rogue? The man who nearly killed mum, Charlotte and Squirt, and did kill Darth and his girlfriend, Vegas?”

  I nodded slowly, worried where this explanation was going.

  “Rogue blamed dad and the club for Carson’s death, he went after the people they cared about the most in nearly a yearlong hysterical rampage of revenge,” Deck added, taking over from Gabe. The look from Gabe, Booth and the rest of the men in the room gave me a sinking feeling the worst was yet to come. Sitting up straight, I prepared myself for another hit.

  “And this has something to do with me because?”

  “Rogue was Carson’s dad,” Booth said, in a ravaged croak. Then he delivered the final punch to my gut.

  “Your grandfather.”

  Motherfucker.

  ***

  My feet moved one in front of the other, eating up the distance as I walked swiftly down the hallway. I didn’t go out of the entrance I came through, instead opting to go the quickest way to the main room.

  I needed to leave and figure out what the hell just happened. One minute I was thinking about being inside my girl after seven weeks without her, and the next, my mind was whirling with the question– who the hell was I?

  My dad is dead; my uncle is a hero and legend; my cousin is my commanding officer and the biggest head spin of them all. My grandfather, a crazed killer.

  Entering the noisy room, my search for Addy took no more than a few seconds. I had a sixth, seventh and eighth sense when it came to my beautiful girl. Stalking to the small nook in a quiet corner on the entrance side of the room, I found her sitting with her feet propped up on a footstool, her champions Rainn and Stella. Schooling my features from the stupor going on in my head to hopefully a neutral expression, using all my sniper training to appear calm.

  Moving around the table, I knelt d
own in front of my girl and took her hands in mine.

  “What’s wrong?” Her immediate reaction not surprising me one bit, the only non-surprise in the last half hour. Addy and I were so compatible, our wavelengths in sync; there was no hiding anything from her. I liked she knew me well.

  “Baby, would you mind taking the ute home tonight? I … I just need to get out and … be by myself,” I stammered like an idiot, not at all making sense and more than likely worrying her more than I should.

  “Of course, but why? You just got home, baby.” Her hand coming out to cup my jaw. Leaning into her touch, I kissed the inside of her soft hand.

  “Later, baby, I promise I will tell you everything soon. I hate doing this after just arriving home, but I am asking you to trust me, Sweet Cheeks.” I implored her with my pleading eyes to understand and not continue to question me in front of our audience. I had no idea if Stella knew anything as yet, the fact that the meeting happened without her told me no, she didn’t. Stella supported Booth without hesitation, and she stood by him in everything. Had she known Booth’s connection to me, and that she is my aunt, I was sure she would have been sitting by his side supporting her husband.

  Addy searched my face, and I saw her worry and concern for me in her gorgeous hazel eyes. After a few more moments, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to mine. My mouth took over and kissed her frantically. Without this woman to come back to, I don’t think I would be as calm as I was now, at least on the outside I felt calm. My head was another story; all my life, all I desired was to have a family and find out who my dad was. I definitely got both, one fucking awesome and one totally fucked up.

  Addy sensed my urgency for her touch because her hands left my face and curled around my neck holding me close.

  “Go do what you need to, baby, then come home to me,” she whispered to me.