Knocking at that door any time of day meant counsel. That meant discussion, deliberation, advice and help.
Knocking at that door in the middle of the night. That meant trouble.
Prosper moved to the door and pulled aside the curtain with the tip of his nine. Whoever was out there would see that he was holding. He was hoping with all his heart that it wouldn’t be Diego at that door. Diego being at that door could not be good for Raine. Prosper had really been hoping that the happy the two of them seemed to be knee deep in would last a while. God knows they both deserved it.
He sighed and placed his piece on the sideboard. Then he turned to Pinky, but she was already headed towards the kitchen to make a strong pot of coffee.
Diego stood under the glare of the porch light, leaning heavily on the cedar shingles. A light drizzle had begun to fall and the white tee shirt he was wearing was sticking to his skin in the places that weren’t covered by his cut.
His cut.
With its worn, leather patina, large broken winged angel and the rockers that circled it, the cut was his talisman, the symbol of a brotherhood of men. The crest of his family. The family who had pulled a twelve gauge out of his mouth and knocked the fucking shit out of him for trying to blow his brains out.
These brothers were not them. Nevada had been his home then.Twenty years ago when he was just nineteen and had been patched into the band of brothers.
A year later he had been married with a baby on the way.
He had buried them together. His beautiful young wife, the love of his life and the child they had made together forever in eternity. The tiny boy laying on his mother’s chest. He had seen to all the arrangements, he had picked out the casket and the flowers. He had designed the headstone. The only thing that had been left was for him to join them. The day after he laid them to rest, he leaned against the gravestone of his wife and infant son with a shotgun shoved hard to the roof of his mouth. His finger on the trigger.
Her name had been Janey and he had loved her since they were both fourteen years old. Janey, who lived on the outskirts of the shit ghost town where he grew up in and who he would turn to when things got bad. Janey, who never ever refused him, had opened her legs and her heart to him and had never asked for a damn thing in return except for him to love her back. Janey, who had left a rich bastard of a father to run off with him when they were both eighteen. Janey, who understood why he needed the club and stood by him when he made the decision to patch in. Janey, who never looked at him as anything less than a god given gift to her. God how he had loved her.
For him it had always been Janey.
And for Janey it had always been him.
The day Diego married her was the happiest day of both their lives. They were young but they were ready and excited to start their lives together. When she got pregnant a month later that was cool too. They were madly in love and finally free to be together to live the life they had planned. Diego was patched in and deep into the club by then. Janey liked being an old lady and fit right in. Life was good.
The pregnancy had gone well. Right up to the very end things were great. Until Janey was six days past her due date. During the ultra sound they couldn’t find a heartbeat. When they induced her, they found out that the baby, Diego’s son, had died in her womb. Janey had been forced to give birth to a still born baby.
Five hours later Diego’s wife stopped breathing. Her heart stopped beating and she died.
Janey, his beautiful wife, the mother of his baby boy, was nineteen years old and dead.
The doctors told him that she had died of a rare condition called amniotic fluid embolism. Something had caused the fluid from the baby to travel in to her lungs and trigger a heart attack.
But Diego had known the truth. After holding their tiny dead baby in her arms, their perfect eight pound boy, Janey had died of a broken heart. And Diego had wanted to follow. He hadn’t even tried to live without them.
Prosper knew about Janey. But he was the only one in Crownsmount who did. The club had very strict rules about members trying to “off themselves.”
Having to worry about the mental health of a brother was not on the laundry list of things outlaw bikers wanted to do with their time. There were too many “business opportunities” happening at any given moment. Stressful, unlawful, seriously criminal activity that could cost a brother a lot of years away should a member of the crew unravel.
But the brothers had loved Janey. Everyone had. They felt for Diego. He had lost so much, they couldn’t stop him from the relief of taking his own life and then make him patch out. Diego made the decision for them and went nomad for some years after that. Then some years ago he had asked Prosper if he could patch in to the East Coast division. The vote had been taken, the deed done and he had been a member of the Crownsmount MC ever since.
And Prosper had never been sorry. Never been sorry that he had supported Diego getting patched in.
He hoped, he really hoped that whatever it was that had brought D here in the middle of the night for a sit down was not going to change that. He really fucking hoped not.
Chapter 49
Diego sat at the table with his brothers. He was leaning forward with his elbows on the scarred wood, his hands tightly wrapped around each other in a fist. He talked to them. He told them everything. Janey, the baby, the suicide attempt. The years he spent going rogue and what brought him back in. It had been a long time ago and Diego had earned the respect of the brothers and more. Fuck, most of the guys at the table hadn’t been in the brotherhood even half the time D had. But still the shit had to come clean. Prosper had ordered it and D knew it was the right thing to do.
Because Prosper claimed Raine as his family, and Diego had claimed Raine as his old lady, this was club shit. Too much emotion, too much history, too much that could make a man, or a woman lose their loyalty and decide to act on some of the hurt they were feeling. The club could not risk that.
Prosper hadn’t been happy when Diego told him what went down with Raine.
And Diego had told him everything.
He hadn’t left anything out. He hadn’t wanted to. It had been twelve hours after the blow up with Raine that D had knocked on Prosper’s door. In that time, Diego had a chance to think. The panic had passed and regret hung like a noose around his neck in its place. But even so, he couldn’t go back to that place. That place of dead fucking wives and tiny blue sons. He could not even conceive of taking a chance of going back there. And when Raine told him she was pregnant, that’s all he saw. Just that. Nothing else.
It was because he loved her. So fucking much. Diego loved Raine with everything he had left to give. He loved her with everything left that he was. And he had fucking knocked her up. Risked her life. Pinky had tried to tell him that it had been a lot of years since that shit had happened with Janey and that medicine had come a long way since then. But Prosper had put his hand gently on his wife’s shoulder and she had stopped talking.
Because Prosper knew. Because Prosper had loved Maggie the way Diego had loved Janey, he knew. And Prosper knew that if there was a chance, even the slimmest of chances that he would lose Pinky because of something he did, because of something that had come about as a result of the love he felt for her, he’d put a bullet in his head.
But first, god help him. He’d leave her. Because Prosper knew that he didn’t have it in him to watch another woman who he loved die.
He would leave her.
But not forever, and not for long. Prosper would never ever leave his woman to face whatever may come without him by her side.
But because he was a flawed and reckless, rough, selfish sonofabitch he would need a minute.
Prosper knew Diego would do right by Raine.
Eventually.
But in the meantime, the brothers needed to know what the fuck was going on when they saw D’s baby growing inside of Raine and D acting like he didn’t give a shit.
Complicated. Well, he had tried
to warn him.
They didn’t have much to say. The brothers just pretty much let D get it out. They had known Diego for years and none of those years together had been spent being choir boys. They considered this his personal business. No one was looking to put anyone to ground, no one was facing time, and no one was talking to the feds. So they considered this personal business.
The members knew Raine and they liked her. But she wasn’t a brother and that shit went deep with them. Were they all good with watching Raine grow big with Diego’s baby inside of her and him not wanting any part of that? Most of them honestly didn’t give a shit. As long as she kept her disappointment in her baby daddy reigned in and did not threaten the club because of that disappointment they were good. For most of them it was domestic bullshit.
For most of them.
When Diego was done spilling his guts he grabbed a bottle of Tequila and went to stoke the fire by the pit.
“You gonna drink that all by yourself brother?” Diego turned to find Crow standing next to him throwing a couple more logs on the fire.
Diego handed the bottle over to Crow who took a long pull of it.
“Sorry about that going down with your wife and your son, D.” Crow sat back on one of the low wooden chairs, lit a joint and after a long toke handed it to Diego.
“Happened a long time ago, brother.” Diego took the joint between two fingers and inhaled deeply.
“Time don’t matter the way it usually does when something that heavy goes down.” Crow shot back a deep swallow of Tequila.
“So, this is you coming out here to hand me a fucking Hallmark?” Diego took the bottle Crow offered him.
“Nah, man. This is me coming out here to tell you that I’m sorry for that shit with Raine before. I saw an in and I took it. It was a dick move and I shouldn’t a done it.” Crow meant what he said. He had been wanting to man up for a while.
Diego squinted at him with one eye as he took another toke off the joint.
“S’okay brother. I should’ve been minding the store. Woman like that. Woman like Raine don’t come around too often. Shit, situation reversed, I would’ve gone there myself.” He handed the joint back to Crow and took another hit off the bottle.
“Yeah?” Crow asked.
“Fuck yeah.” Diego nodded.
“Guess you’re right.” Crow said around the mouth of the bottle.
Diego got up to throw another log on the fire. “Don’t have to fucking guess man. Best thing that could happen to a man is to find a woman like her.”
“Yeah, she sweet and all but hey, a woman’s a woman. All got tits, all got pussy. No disrespect but after a while, it’s all the same shit. Day after day, same every day crap.” Crow was lighting another joint.
“Nah, man. Ain’t true. Maybe true some of the time.” He conceded. “Club band aids like fucking Ellie and the rest. But a woman like Raine, brother. Men like us, life we lead, the way the good citizens fucking cross the street when they see us coming, we don’t get the chance at good women, not too often anyway. And there’s nothing sweeter in this world than being inside a good woman who really fucking and truly loves you.” Diego was looking at the fire and continued,
“I was lucky to get that twice. First Janey, then Raine. A sorry, no good bastard like me, lucky enough to have had two good woman.” Diego took the joint from Crow and inhaled deeply.
Crow moved then and put his hand on Diego’s shoulder and squeezed, “My point Brother.”
Diego didn’t say anything for a while and they both sat there in silence drinking and getting high.
“Sonofabitch, I fucked it all up, didn’t I?” Diego passed the last of the tequila to Crow.
“Big time, my brother.” Then he put his arm around his friend and they both staggered inside.
Chapter 50
Three months later.
I hadn’t seen him. Not once. I knew he was at the club. A lot. A lot more than he ever used to be. A lot more than he had to be as far as I was concerned. I hated him being around I hated it because that meant I could not go to the kitchen house and eat Jules’s kickass French toast. I really wanted some of that French toast too.
The baby liked it. The first time that I had felt the flutter of the new life growing inside of me, I was eating that French toast. I smiled when I thought of it and put my hand on my growing baby belly. When I had told Diego, when all my hopes for a happily ever after were shattered once and for all, the little life inside me had barely begun. At eighteen weeks pregnant I was beginning to feel the baby move.
I loved being pregnant. I loved it. I loved every single minute of it. I hadn’t even minded the absolutely awful morning sickness. I just learned to avoid smells and kept crackers by my bedside to eat in the mornings before I put even one foot out of bed.
I was excited today for a few reasons. One was that I would be hearing the sound of my baby’s heartbeat on my next doctor’s visit. I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
The other reason was that my girl posse and I had just come back from my first shopping trip for maternity clothes. My waist was getting thick and my breast were getting bigger and heavier. I could no longer button my pants and my shirts were stretching across my chest. The first three months I had been so sick I had actually lost weight but that hadn’t stopped my body from ripening in all those places. My belly was hard to the touch and I could see a slight bump when I stood naked in front of the mirror.
I had a small frame so I was able to still buy my favorite tee shirts. I bought lots of them in pretty soft pastel colors. V necks, scoop necks, capped sleeved and long sleeved in increasingly large sizes. The jeans were maternity with thick soft elastic waist bands that had me sighing as they stretched over my belly. Then because they were all so pretty and I couldn’t resist I got myself five sundresses. One matched the exact color of my eyes and I couldn’t wait to wear it. I bought a couple of pairs of shoes that I could slip on rather than tie, and because I couldn’t help myself, a new pair of cowboy boots.
Dolly, Pinky, Claire and Glory came with. Between us we had a trunk load of clothes, shoes and accessories. I had never had friends to go shopping with and it had been such a fun day, I thought again of how many normal things Claire and I had missed out on. I promised myself that this baby would have that. Boy or girl, my child would have all those normal growing up experiences. I would make sure of it.
We were settling in. Claire and I and even Glory. We had the normal. It wasn’t the peanut butter and jelly on white, going to church on Sunday normal, but it was as close to normal as the three of us had ever had. It was our normal and we cherished it.
The lake house was a short drive away from Ruby Reds and I went in to work almost every day for a few hours. The club had really taken off. It was busy all the time and Claire had begun to come in with me. She waitressed, bartended and generally helped out wherever needed. Glory still stayed home unless it was absolutely necessary to go out. She was doing better but I know that she had trouble sleeping because I did too and sometimes we spent those sleepless nights drinking herbal tea together and wrapped in the silence of understanding.
Life had taken on a rhythm. A regular pulsing life affirming rhythm and mostly I was happy. Except for when I wasn’t. Except for when the bone crunching sadness sat so heavy on my chest that it had me wandering out to the edge of the dock in the stillness of the night. Sometimes Claire or Glory would join me and listen while I played long mournful songs on my little harp.
The days kept me busy and helped me to push it all away but the nights were different.
I missed him.
When I let myself, I missed him. I had learned to live with disappointment early on. I had learned to live with the heartbreak of loss, the worry of responsibility and the ache of loneliness.
You would have thought that all those experiences would have prepared me, hardened me, and even helped me deal with the fact that Diego did not want this baby.
Or me.
; Anymore.
He did not want me anymore.
But there is no way to prepare for heartache. There is just the aftermath. There is just the picking up the pieces. For me it was that way anyway. I always seemed to get blindsided. Gino, Diego and even my own father.
Prosper had come to the lake house the night after Diego’s fists had punched a hole through my wall and his words had punched a hole through my heart. Prosper told my why he had felt it was important to share this very private and hurtful situation with the entire Hell’s Saints Crownsmount MC.
I told him that I felt humiliated and unhappy that he had done that.
Then he told me the rest of it.
He told me what had happened to Diego’s wife and tiny baby boy. As I sat with my hands around a hot cup of tea and my shoulders wrapped up in a warm quilt against the cool night air, Prosper talked for a long time and I listened. He told me not only about the death of Diego’s wife and son but what had happened to Diego as a result of it. He told me everything there was to tell. Prosper told me, he said, because he thought I deserved to know.
Prosper told me because he knew Diego would not tell me himself.
It was tragic.
It was sad, and unfair and unbearably heartbreaking.
It was.
My heart bled for the young man who had lost his wife and new baby boy. It was a horrible heart wrenching ending to a beautiful love story. My cheeks were wet with tears for Janey. Now that I was carrying a child of my own, I knew the unbearable sadness she must have suffered at the loss of their child.
Going through that, going through the birth process knowing that you would deliver a still born baby could take a woman to the edge of sanity.
Game Changer (Hell's Saints Motorcycle Club) Page 22
