by Penny Dee
“No!” I exclaimed as if the idea hadn’t been burning a hole in my head for the last two damn days. Especially last night, after he’d left my room and I lay in my bed with a body tight and hot with arousal. It’d only taken me a few minutes to bring myself to a mind-shattering orgasm with my hand.
“Are you insane? Man, I’d climb that man like a tree. Are you sure you’re not fucking him.”
I was pretty sure.
“He’s just a friend.”
“Friend? Uh-uh. The Kings aren’t friends with women. They’re either fucking them or helping them out.” Her eyes narrowed. Damn Daisy and her expertise in all things Kings of Mayhem. She folded her arms across her big bust. “If you’re not fucking him, then what is he helping you with?”
The less Daisy knew about me the better.
“Nothing. He’s just being kind.” I carried a tray of dirty dishes to the kitchen, but she followed me and sat down at the little table next to the walk-in pantry. She opened a packet of breadsticks while I started stacking the dishwasher.
“You know, you could do worse than Chance Calley,” she said.
“I’m sure that’s the case, but I’m not looking for anything.”
I avoided eye contact with her because I knew I couldn’t hide the lust in them. And it would be there. It was always there. Because every time I heard his name or thought about him, my skin tingled with heat and my head filled with crazy thoughts of kissing him until I was out of oxygen.
“Rumor has it, those boys are well endowed,” she said, biting into a breadstick.
“Like I said, I wouldn’t know.”
“I bet it’s true.” She dropped her chin to her palm, looking at me dreamily, and said, “I bet he has a big—”
“Personality,” Molly interrupted, walking into the kitchen and throwing her grand-niece a look. “If he is anything like his grandmother, then that boy is going to have a big personality.”
“You know his grandmother?” I asked, putting the last of the dishes into the dishwasher.
“Oh, darlin’, everyone in this town knows Sybil.” She smiled fondly. “I used to work for her back in the sixties. I was a trimmer at the cannabis fields they had out by the river.”
“Oh my God, Molly! You used to cut weed for a living?” I couldn’t help but sound surprised.
“I used to do a lot of things for the Calleys. I was twenty years old and they paid good money. I even babysat Griffin and Garrett Calley when they were just babes, running around butt naked out at the family cabin.”
The cabin I now called home.
There was something comforting in that.
She smiled wistfully. “Had myself a summer fling with Hank Parrish. It was the Summer of Love, and boy did that man know how to love.”
Daisy and I traded glances.
“Aunt Molly!” Daisy sounded shocked.
“What? I wasn’t always a seventy-year-old woman, you know,” she said, giving me a wink.
Daisy grimaced. “No details. Pleeeease!”
Molly ignored her and stared off dreamily out the kitchen window.
“He was little bit older than me, swept me off my feet, and gave me a summer I’d never forget.” She sighed and shook her head. “It broke my heart in a zillion pieces when he fell in love with Connie and married her not long after. Quit my job at the cannabis fields and started hitchhiking across the country. Hitched all the way to California.”
“You hitched to California?” Daisy sounded mortified. “Hello, Mr. Serial Killer. Yes, please let me climb in your car so you can murder me.”
Molly waved it off. “We weren’t worried about that kind of thing in those days. The term serial killer wasn’t even coined back then. And no one knew about co-ed killings or psychopaths killing people at random. We were all about peace and love.” She shook her head again, remembering the freedom of it all. “I hitchhiked up and down the California coast, stopping off at Woodstock along the way.”
“Um… you know the Manson murders happened around that time, right? Same state. Geez, Molly. You’re lucky you didn’t meet yourself a young buck named Charlie.”
Molly chuckled and began wiping down the benches.
“It’s a shame what happened to Chance. He was always a nice kid. A real charmer. Always wore his heart on his sleeve.” She shook her head. “Then he joined the Navy and got deployed overseas.”
“He was in the military?” I asked. I was surprised because he had never mentioned it.
“Oh yeah, he was Navy SEAL,” Daisy gushed. “And I’ve seen on the TV what they do. How hard they train. How fit they are. They’re so dangerous and manly, I get all hot and bothered just thinking about it.”
Daisy fanned herself while Molly looked at her as if she was crazy.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Got himself blown up,” Molly said. “Barely survived. Spent months in a coma, burned and broken. It was real sad.”
I knew he was injured somehow—the scar on his face was telling—but I had never asked him about it and he had never mentioned it.
When the growl of a Harley alerted us to Chance’s arrival, we all went to the window and watched him turn on the street, all six-foot-four of him roaring into the parking lot and pulling up in front of the dinner. My heart did a double flip.
“If you haven’t fucked him,” Daisy whispered as she leaned in closer, “can I suggest that you do? A man like that doesn’t cross your path more than once in a lifetime.”
Her words echoed through me as I rode back to the cabin on the back of his Harley, my arms wrapped around the wall of muscle taking me home.
Fucking him wasn’t an option.
But letting him in was.
CASSIDY
We sat on the porch. It was our second night out under the stars. Relaxing on the deck chairs, we ate leftovers from the diner while the pink dusk darkened into an indigo twilight.
When we finished eating, Chance took our plates inside and turned on some music. Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “Texas Flood” cruised out of the speakers.
Chance reappeared on the deck with a couple of beers.
“Molly mentioned you were a SEAL,” I said, accepting a beer from him.
He sat down slowly, his dark eyebrows drawn in. For a moment he didn’t say anything, and I saw the muscle in his jaw begin to flex. This was obviously something he didn’t like talking about. He took a gulp from the bottle before he spoke.
“Yeah, I was,” he said. “Got medically discharged last year.”
I wanted to ask what happened but didn’t want to upset him. In the end, I didn’t have to ask. Before I changed the subject, Chance offered me an explanation.
“An RPG was fired into the building where my team and I were conducting a surveillance mission. I was the only survivor.” He drew on his beer. “Got me put in hospital for some time. Got me medically discharged.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly.
He looked at me, wearing his poker face, but I could see the pain in his eyes. I got it. You could mask the pain on your expression and in your body language, but in your eyes? Not a chance.
I wasn’t going to push him. Just like he didn’t push me.
Inside, Stevie Ray Vaughan changed to Katey Sagal’s “Strange Fruit.”
I put down the beer bottle. It was time to have the conversation I had avoided for days. It was time to bring down my walls and tell him everything.
“When my parents fostered me and brought me home, they let Barrett name me,” I said, drawing my knees up to my chest and looking up at the stars.
Surprised, Chance turned his head to look at me. “They did?”
I nodded. “My foster mom said later that it was to help him cope with the change. A way to include him. Unfortunately for me he didn’t see it that way. He saw it as ownership of me. Because in his warped mind, giving me my name made me his. I wasn’t his foster sister. I was his toy. His plaything.”
Chance was silent but his
face was rigid, his eyes intense as he listened.
“When I was twelve and he was fifteen, he took me to an abandoned shack in the woods. He held me down and branded me with a branding rod he made in workshop at school.” I slid the hem of my dress up so Chance could see the dark scar seared into my hip. It was in the shape of a B.
B for Barrett.
“Motherfucker.” He exhaled, his eyes black.
“Like I said, he thinks I’m his.” My heart started to thud in my neck when I thought about what came next. I paused, choosing my words carefully. “A few weeks later, just after my thirteenth birthday, he forced me to return with him to that shack. Our parents were at some charity gala in DC and had left us in the care of our elderly nanny. Later, he admitted he’d drugged her tea with something.”
Chance shifted in his chair, his energy was changing, but he didn’t say anything. He let me talk. I knew he was holding his reactions at bay because his hands were fists on his knees.
“I didn’t want to go. I begged him not to make me. But he had his father’s gun, and he said I had to do as he told me because if I didn’t, he would kill me. And I believed him. I believed him because when he branded me, when he heard my screams and could see how much pain I was in, he showed no emotion. No remorse. No fucking fear for what he was or for what he was doing. So when he said he would kill me, I knew he would.” I held my pain at bay with gritted teeth. “He made me drink some liquor. Then he forced me down onto the dusty floorboards. Even then I didn’t really know what he was going to do. Not until he ripped my underwear off. Then I knew.” I blew out a shaky breath as the memory rattled its way through me. “That was when he raped me.”
Chance stood up with a rush. His jaw flexed and his nostrils flared as he struggled to contain his rage.
“Son of a bitch!” he snarled. He shook his head and smacked his lips together, unable to hide his wrath. Wild energy poured off him. “Did they know? Your parents? Did they know what he did to you?”
I nodded and his face lit up with barely contained fury. “Fucking sons of bitches!”
“At first they didn’t believe me. They thought I was making it up. Barrett was an overachiever in school. Especially his senior year. He was good at everything he did. Sports. His classes. And boy was he popular.” I shook my head and sniffed back the cold lump of pain that had lodged in my throat. “No one could believe that Mr. Popular would rape his foster sister. They thought I made it up. That I wanted the attention. So they refused to believe it. And that’s what made it so easy for him. Because he didn’t just steal it from me once. He kept stealing it for the next three years.”
CHANCE
Rage slammed into me.
Three years.
He sexually tormented her for three fucking years.
And don’t get me started on that scar.
The sight of that scar made me want to go medieval on his ass.
I wanted to crush him. Break him. He branded her like she was cattle. Now I wanted to brand him repeatedly with my fist.
Little did I know, Cassidy was just getting revved up, filling me in on Barrett’s depravity.
“When I was sixteen, he got me pregnant.”
And just like that things got infinitely worse as she took me down to depths of despair I could only imagine.
“He knew he was in trouble. Up until then, he could charm his way out of anything. He could talk the talk. Convince you it was nighttime while you were standing in sunlight. But he knew he couldn’t talk himself out of a pregnancy because there would be some kind of investigation.” She paused. “If I had the baby, of course.”
The air exhaled from my lungs in a rush. Her story was already bad, but I could tell it was about to get substantially worse.
“He waited for a night our parents were out. We lived on a big property just out of Sacramento. There was large pond on it. With reeds and lily pads. When I ran from him that night, he caught up with me right by that pond, and that’s where he attacked me again. And while he was brutalizing me, he was laughing. He got off on the struggle. And that night I struggled more than I ever had struggled before. Because I knew what he was going to do before he even dragged me to the edge of that pond and tried to drown me.”
Red-hot rage hit my brain like a shot of dope. And for a moment it blinded me.
What she had been through. What he had done.
I wanted to end him.
My hands curled into a fist at my side, and I could barely breathe. I had never wanted to end anybody as much as I wanted to end him.
“He would’ve killed me, if it wasn’t for our parents arriving home when they did. He panicked and let me go.” Tears swam in her eyes and her chin quivered. “I remember my foster mom calling out to me in the darkness. I remember climbing out of that pond covered in mud and reeds, staggering toward her voice. I remember the taste of pond water in my mouth as I stood in front of her, watery blood saturating my nightgown—”
“Cassidy—”
“I lost the baby.” Tears dropped down her cheeks. “Finally, they listened to me. They couldn’t live in denial and sweep his behavior under the rug anymore. They had no choice but to act. After all, we were the prominent Silvermane family. It wouldn’t do well for Kerry Silvermane’s son to be convicted of raping his foster sister. The one they made a big media circus about fostering. So they sent him away. Told me it was to some medical facility in Switzerland where they treated behavioral disorders. It wasn’t until years later I learned there was no such place. That the medical facility they told me about was actually an exclusive college where rich boys got to enjoy the finest in away-from-home learning. He enjoyed his status. Wealthy friends. Trips to the Alps in winter and the French Riviera in summer. While I struggled and dragged myself out of the fire pit he threw me into when I was just a girl, he was living it up in Europe. He was never punished. My parents had too much money and social status. They couldn’t afford the scandal. So they did what they did to protect themselves. They swept it all under the rug.”
“I don’t understand how they let him get away with it,” I shook my head. Every inch of me was on fire with rage.
“My foster father was a very powerful man. He had access to the best spin doctors around. He knew how to avoid a scandal. Knew who to pay off or intimidate. He had a political career to protect. He couldn’t let it get out that his son raped his foster daughter. And he was prepared to do anything to stop that from happening.”
I couldn’t stand what I was hearing. “So you ran away?”
She shook her head. “I graduated high school and went to college while Barrett continued to live his fabulous life overseas. After college, my foster father summoned me home. He was starting a new political campaign and wanted to sell himself as a family-orientated man. He needed Barrett and me to do that. He thought the time overseas had changed his son for the better, so he called us both back. That was when I learned the truth about Barrett—that he hadn’t received any treatment, that he had been at college and not a medical facility.” She swallowed thickly. “The moment I saw him, I knew he hadn’t changed. Knew he was the same monster he was six years earlier.”
She looked at the scar on her palm through the tears welling in her eyes. When she lifted her face, they spilled down her cheeks.
“He pushed me up against the wall that night. Told me he had been waiting six years to touch me again. So I ran. And I’ve been running ever since.”
I pulled her into my arms and held her to my chest as she sobbed. I squeezed my eyes shut, feeling her agony as if it was my own.
“He won’t touch you again.” My voice was like glass on gravel. “You have my word.”
“You don’t know him,” she murmured into the warmth of my neck. She pulled back to look up at me. “The moment he found out where I was hiding was the moment he started to plan what he was going to do to me once he found me. And don’t doubt it, Chance. He will find me.”
I cupped her face in my hands. “I wo
n’t let that happen.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
“That’s the thing… you can.” I wiped a lone tear from her cheek. “Because once he’s in my scope, he’s a dead man.”
CHANCE
Seventeen Years Ago
The door to my bedroom opened. My eyes snapped open just as the covers were ripped off me and a pair of hands hauled me out of bed.
It was my father.
“Get up. We’ve got somewhere to be.”
A quick glance at the clock by the bed told me it was 11:27 pm.
“Where are we going?” I asked, now fully awake thanks to the dread pooling in my stomach. My father getting me out of bed at that late an hour told me nothing good was about to happen.
“Gotta take care of some business. Its time you get a taste for what it takes to run the biggest fucking motorcycle club in the south.”
My mouth went dry and my skin heated, despite the cold whip of night air as he hustled me outside to where his pickup truck sat in the driveway.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled up at a deserted warehouse on the far side of town. Fear coiled like a cobra in my stomach as we made our way through chain-link fencing and along the back of the building. A roller door went up, and two men in Kings of Mayhem cuts greeted my father, both clearly surprised by my presence.
“You sure this is a good idea, Prez?” the older biker with the beard asked.
“Kid’s got to learn what it takes to lead,” my dad replied.
We stepped inside and the roller door came down behind us. As we walked past the bearded biker, my father stopped. “And if you ever question me in front of my son again, I’ll kill you.”
His tone sent chills down my spine. I didn’t doubt he meant it. And going by the look the two bikers exchanged, neither did they.
I followed my father down a poorly lit corridor that opened up to a large room. Massive industrial lights hung from the high ceiling, but they were off and the room was covered in shadow except for one small patch of light. And sitting under this dull light was a man gagged and bound to a chair.
