A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2)

by Christine Michelle

  “Shit!” He shouted as the chuckling started. “Are you okay?” He was standing over me now with a very pronounced hard on protruding from his basketball shorts.

  “I’m fine,” I huffed out as I took the hand he offered to pull me up with. The jerk didn’t actually pull me all the way up. No, instead, he pulled me half way and then let go. “Wait,” he proclaimed loudly as if he’d just had the best idea ever. I could see the wheels turning behind those calculating eyes of his. “Yeah, stay right there, babe.” I was on my knees in front of him, and he was sporting major wood. My mouth formed an “o” as I realized what he meant by ‘stay right there, babe’. “Yeah, honey. Just like that, only you may need to spread those lips a little wider,” he teased. I pulled a fist back in threat like I was cocking a gun; only my fist would be aiming for his cannon.

  “Whoa now! No need for all this violence, Luce. Jesus!” He cupped his privates and stepped back. “That’s just mean.”

  I stood up – on my own, thank you very much – and then proceeded to throw the closest pillow on the bed at him. “You’re a jerk.”

  “Yeah, but you love me!”

  I turned to see a sappy look on his face then. “Yeah, that I do, baby.” It was then that I turned and noticed movement outside our window. I swiftly pulled the lacey curtain out of the way to see a head full of thick overly processed blond hair flying behind a petite little slip of a woman as she ran away from our yard. “Not again!”

  “What?” CJ asked as he came over to the window. He must have caught a glimpse of her before she ducked into her beat up Mustang, because his brows furrowed as he turned to me. “Who the hell was that?”

  “That, is the woman I told you the other day that keeps hanging around outside the house. Most of the time I only see her when Toby’s around. I think one of the club whores is stalking him.”

  “One of the what? Is what?”

  “One of your clubs whores is stalking our son. I’m sure of it. He mentioned that she shows up in a lot of places where he is as though she just happened to run into him, but he mentioned it’s been too often a thing to be coincidence at this point.”

  “Seriously?” He asked. I nodded my head vigorously. “He hasn’t said a word to me about it.”

  “Well, if you were a young man and your biggest problem was a blond with big fake tits following you around would you tell another man about it?” He gave me a sly grin and then laughed.

  “I guess I see your point there,” he finally added.

  “Something needs to be done about her.”

  “I’ll talk to T-Bone and check in at the club, see what Merc and Sandman have to say about maybe taking a vote to the table concerning ousting the whores from the clubhouse, okay?”

  “Please, don’t forget or put it off. It’s important.” He knew this though, because even though I hadn’t specifically told him about Toby’s issues prior to this we had talked about it quite a bit. The lasting problems the whores and Stiff had left in their wake way back when they caused trouble for us were the same issues that kept my man from properly loving his daughter. They were the same issues that kept him from having a decent childhood and seeing his parents happy. The access to those whores on the regular was an issue I just couldn’t move past. I did not want to see them ruin a third generation too. I had higher hopes for my children than to see them go through the crap that had such a profound affect on CJ.

  “I know babe, now go get ready. You have somewhere to be and if you keep standing around here in those itty bitty panties I’m going to have to remove them with my teeth.”

  “Oh!” I really wanted him to do that. Conflicted I glanced back and forth between CJ and my closet. He laughed at me again.

  “Shit! Go on, babe. Get your shit done. I’ll run by the club and check on the shit you asked me to, and then I’ll grab us some steaks for tonight. Anna’s staying at her friend’s house so it’ll be just the two of us. All night.”

  “All night,” I parroted with a bright smile on my face. “God, I love the sound of that.”

  “I’m sure you do. Just make sure you’re back early enough before your narcoleptic, geriatric ass taps out for the night, yeah?”

  “Charles Jason Brothers! You have called me fat, sleepy, and old in the course of fifteen minutes this morning. You sir, are going to be lucky if I let you stick your dick in an electric socket!”

  He burst out laughing. “I bet that will be electrifying!”

  The asshole continued to cackle. “Buzz-worthy even,” he added.

  I decided I didn’t need this shit, and I had clothes downstairs in the drier that I hadn’t bothered to take out, fold, and put away yesterday. I left the room and headed in that direction in nothing more than a tiny little spaghetti strapped tank top and a thong.

  “Oh my God! Mom! Cover that shit up!”

  “Forgot to tell you, Toby’s here!” My husband yelled this amidst more cackling laughter. The damned hyena.

  “I hope you choke on your own tongue while your yucking it up,” I yelled back. Then I turned to my son and pointed an accusatory finger at him. “I’ll deal with you in a minute.” Then I covered my hind-parts with my hands as best I could and double-timed it to the laundry room. My son’s laughter joined with his fathers.

  “Come on, let’s dip before she comes back to yell at you too!” CJ called out to him conspiratorially. Those jerks followed through too. By the time I had my clothes on and moved back out into the living room they were both long gone. Not that I hadn’t heard their Harleys start up with the loud rumble the two of them make whenever they’re riding together. I shook my head. As much as those two could get on my nerves, it was so good to have my fun-loving, playful boys back. I don’t think any of us had realized just how hard everything had been on all of us. Ever took the brunt of the pain, but it was clear the entire family needed that reckoning in order to heal and move on with life instead of being trapped in a prison of regret, pride, and whatever else was holding them all back.

  We now knew what are family should have been like all along. Unfortunately, I was realizing that while it had come late, it also had come at a time when I only had one baby left at home with me. That’s why I made family dinner night a once a week thing. My kids were all required to be home that night and so was CJ. If there was club business that took the boys out of town for a bit, that was different, but it was basically the only exception to the rule and a rare one at that since the Charleston Chapter of the Aces High MC was now running completely clean in the eyes of the law.

  The only flaw the club still had, as I saw it, was that they still had the whores running around over there. Supposedly, only for the single men, but I knew better. Granted, I knew my man wasn’t messing around with them, but that didn’t mean I had to approve of their presence. I didn’t see why the men of the MC couldn’t just go to one of their many strip clubs or bars, pick up women there, and take them home. You know, like normal men did. I knew the line though. “Babe, we aren’t normal men!” It’s what CJ told me all the time when I asked the question. I still think that answer was a cop-out though, because if my man could be loyal and faithful to me all these years, then those men certainly could abide by different standards too.

  We rolled up to the clubhouse a little too early to catch most of the men I needed to talk to. Since I had Toby riding with me I pulled him straight to one of the couches set off to the side near the pool table where I knew we wouldn’t be interrupted. “Your mom tells me you’ve been having problems with one of the club whores?”

  Toby groaned then grinned up at me. “Listen, mom hates the fact that we have club whores so I think she’s probably blown it a little out of proportion, but yeah one of them was following me around for a bit. She made it known she wanted to be my old lady. I made it evident that shit wasn’t happening.”

  “You fuck her?”

  Toby grinned. “Yeah, before I knew she was crazy. I mean, club pussy is club pussy. I thought they all knew the
ir place.”

  I laughed at my son’s analysis. “They all start out pretending to know their place. Some of them actually do, but most are looking to land them an old man to take care of their asses. Don’t know if it’s status, the thought of having club protection, or plenty of cash to blow, but the life attracts all types, and you’d be a fool to think that none of them come in here hoping to make that shit permanent.”

  Toby shrugged. “I met someone. I’ve been seeing her on and off for a while. She, um,” my son hesitated, blushing, which was highly unlike him. “She has definitely made me work for it. She wasn’t thrilled I’m a member of the club,” he admitted.

  “Ah, well, she’s probably the best kind of woman then.”

  I watched as a dreamy expression flitted across my son’s face and I knew he had found his woman. She would be the one he put his kutte on. Hell, maybe she’d be the one giving me my first grandbaby. Lucy would be happier than hell with that. She had already been complaining about how empty the house felt all the time, and thinking that maybe we needed to start traveling more so she wouldn’t have to think about how empty the house really was.

  “Yeah, so when I got with her, I told the crazy club bitch that I wasn’t interested and never would be. She didn’t want to take no for an answer and tried to push it.”

  “That part of the reason you mentioned being off and on with this woman that sets your world on fire?”

  “Yeah, dad,” he answered and in his own way he set my fuckin’ world on fire with that. It was rare he called me dad since we were also club brothers. Inside the clubhouse it was almost always Double-D, a name I’d sincerely come to loathe over the years. My own wife refused to say it. She called me CJ only, something no one else did. That was hers, and hers alone.

  “Seneca tried to pull some shit early on, told my girl that we were still hot and heavy and I was just using her to make Seneca jealous so she’d commit.”

  “How’d you get her to believe you that it wasn’t the case?”

  My son laughed, though there wasn’t a whole lot of humor in it. “That was actually because the dumb bitch ran her mouth too far without thinking. Claimed I was fucking her all night long, but I’d been with my girl that night.” He winked at me. “Fucking her all night long,” he added.

  “That was good. So she knew you weren’t lying and the whore was. Seneca, you said?” He nodded. “Who the fuck is that?” I hadn’t bothered to learn any of the whore’s names since I was 18-years-old and I hadn’t been about to start for any reason other than one seemed to have set her sights on my kid.

  “Short, tiny thing with giant boobs and bleached out hair with extensions that make it look like it’s down to her ass, but in reality I pulled some of that shit out when I fucked her the one time and the real stuff is only about shoulder length.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Jesus, Toby!”

  “What? It happened. I fuckin’ freaked out. Can you imagine goin’ at a bitch and suddenly you have a palm full of hair in your hand and it ain’t attached to her head anymore? Fuckin’ hell, I lost my shit. Shoved her off of me, told her she had cancer or some shit, and completely lost my hard on. First time in my life my junk wilted on me, but that sucker shriveled up like I just jumped in an ice bath.” He gave me a pointed look and I couldn’t hold it together.

  We both sat there laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation he had found himself in. “Christ, kid,” I laughed out. “I did not need to know most of that, but damn you can’t make that shit up!”

  “No kidding. I wish I could say it wasn’t real,” he countered with a shiver. “If I could scrub any memory from mind, and I have a lot of fucked up memories I’d like to get rid of or have a re-do on, that one would be the top pick.”

  We laughed a bit more before I finally us back to a serious chat. “I need to know if you think this is a bigger problem the club should step in on. Your mom seems to think the girl was outside our house again this morning. I thought maybe she was imagining things since she said the woman was stalking you, but then it turned out you were at the house so it made sense she might have actually seen her there.”

  Toby sighed and ran his hand down the stubble along his cheek. “I didn’t notice her, but I’ll be honest, I just started tuning her out. Every now and again my girl will point her out and tell me that she thinks she followed us somewhere again, but it’s always somewhere that she honestly could have been and she appears to be invested in whatever she’s doing that has her in those places, you know? In other words, she ain’t just standing in the shadows watching and waiting.”

  “I need to know if you think this is a bigger deal,” I reiterated for him. “Your mom wants me to talk to the club again about getting rid of the whores altogether.”

  “Seriously?” My son asked in wide-eyed surprise.

  “Seriously,” I answered. “It’s not a big shocker considering our history with them.”

  “I suppose not, but you know the guys in the club would never go for that.”

  “I don’t know. We have the clubs and…”

  “Yeah, but there they have to work for it and then they have to take the time to go somewhere to fuck too. Half these guys are lazy fucks. They want to get off when they want to get off, and most of them like to do it where other people can watch. It helps with the getting off.”

  “Thanks for telling me shit I already know, T. I’ve told your mother all this, not that she also didn’t already know.”

  “If you bring it up today, I can back you with mom that it was done. What the club decides is over your head, she knows that. At least this way she’ll know you tried though.”

  I clapped my son on the shoulder and gave him a squeeze. “’Preciate that, T.”

  “Look who we have here, if it ain’t the brothers Brothers,” Sandman called out. “You guys looking for anyone in particular?”

  “You and Merc,” I explained. Sandman waved us back to the office where we went over the same shit Toby and I had just hashed out. The best we got from the talk was that they would bring the issue of the club whores to the table at our next full-chapter meeting which was a month away. In the meantime they were suspending privileges from Seneca for causing trouble and overstepping bounds with a brother. It wasn’t exactly what Lucy had been hoping for, but it was better than the whole lot of nothing I thought I would go home with. I figured Merc must have been catching some heat from his old lady about the whores too. She had a bigger personal interest in getting rid of them since she knew her old man used to use them early on their marriage when she wasn’t around.

  Just before I left to go home and try to catch up with my wife Toby caught and stopped me. “Hey, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be bringing my girl ‘round to dinner this weekend. She’s important, and…”

  “Say no more, T. Bring her, we’ll be glad to meet her.” My son gave me a lazy grin that made me wonder if we were actually going to be meeting a stranger or if it was someone we knew. Interesting. At least with this news, Lucy would be thrilled, and maybe it would help my cause and get me into her pants even after making fun of her this morning. I found myself grinning like an idiot at the thought.

  “Gross,” T-Bone hissed out. “I don’t even want to know where your dirty old man mind just went.”

  “That’s easy!” I declared with a bit too much energy. “Your mom should be home about now and we have the house to ourselves tonight.” I hopped on my bike, cranked it up, and gave one final warning to my son. “That means stay the fuck out of he house for the next 24 hours or seeing your momma’s ass cheeks this morning is going to seem like a walk in the park that you want to remember.”

  “Fuck! I could have done without the visual reminder, asshole.”

  I just grinned, flipped my own damn son off, and got my ass out of there and headed home to my woman.

  Chapter 26

  (Lucy – age 43, Double-D – age 46)

  Something else that had changed for the b
etter since Ever’s reckoning for us had been club life. Finally, I was enjoying my club again. The vibe that had befallen us around the time of Ever’s arrival had blanketed us in negativity and it bred there within the walls for all of us to become infected with it. The night we held the tattoo reveal it was as if these walls received the cleansing they’d needed too. Then again, there was a lot of guilt to go around. The families might not have been inked, but their part in my daughter’s suffering, our family’s suffering, the club’s as well had not been hidden. They now knew it hadn’t gone unnoticed and they’d all been called out for it. Some of them took it upon themselves to literally cleanse the clubhouse in order to give us all a fresh start.

  My Lucy had an appointment with an older couple that wanted to discuss what their options were for the wife entering hospice. Lucy had gone back to school over the years and added to her degree. She was now a Hospice Care Social Worker, and while I didn’t understand how she could deal with people dying on her day in and day out, she did it with grace and those whose lives she touched at their worst moments were better for having her. Since she was consoling and counseling the couple this afternoon I had decided to come on over to the club for a bit with the guys. We were going to be having our family dinner soon.

  “Where’s T-Bone?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “He wanted to go by the house early while no one was home. Said he had a surprise for his mom he wanted to set up,” I explained to Merc as I laid down my shit hand. A fuckin’ pair of threes wasn’t going to get me anywhere.” Merc glanced over at me then.

  “A surprise? Thought he was already bringing this mystery girl home today?”

  “Yeah, he is,” I mentioned as I watched Crow chew on the straw that had come in his drink. He had been sober the past eight months. His woman convinced him he’d be a better person if he weren’t drinking constantly. In all the years I’d known Crow, been his brother, I had missed seeing that the man had indeed become an alcoholic. Sure, he was a functioning one, but only just. His personality was so much lighter now. Granted, being around him in the beginning wasn’t a chore any of us wanted to undertake. He was sick, made the word grouchy sound like rainbows and unicorns, and he lashed out like a motherfucker at anyone who touched a drop of liquor or beer where he could see them do it.