So Hot MC Boxset

by Blair Grey

  Over!

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Hailey

  Watching Lucas storm out of my bedroom, I felt numb. Cal had made it seem as if doing things this way would make things better for Lucas and I. But it hadn’t at all. It had made them worse. So much worse.

  The fact was that I had no plans at all to have sex with Cal. It was his idea to make Lucas think that I was though. He’d explained to me how it was his job as Ryder’s and Lucas’ MC brother to help Lucas and I part ways at least somewhat amicably.

  I had been against it until he told me how bad it would be on Lucas if we hadn’t severed our love affair before Ryder got to come back home. Bad things could happen to Lucas if he disrespected Ryder by continuing our relationship. And my idea about telling Ryder the truth about how I had fallen in love with Lucas was nixed right away.

  People didn’t do that sort of thing in the Iron Cobras. Cal pointed out that I was naïve about how things went in biker gangs. And love really had little to no place in them.

  Lucas was right about one thing. I wasn’t like the other women who hung out with the Iron Cobras. It was like I had come from another world. One where love, honesty, and openness occurred on a regular basis. Cal had schooled me on being the wife of a biker. But now I didn’t care to follow his rules.

  The thought of Lucas being angry with me wasn’t sitting well with me at all. Before I heard him start up his bike, I ran out of my bedroom to apologize and set the record straight.

  I could adhere to no more intimacy with Lucas. What I couldn’t take was us not being friends anymore. I caught him walking out the front door just at I came into the living room. “Lucas!”

  Cal’s hand on my shoulder stopped me from running after him. “Wait right here, Hailey. He’s mad at you right now and that’s good. You want this to end. You don’t want anything bad to happen between Lucas and Ryder.”

  “This isn’t what I wanted at all. I shouldn’t have listened to you. You don’t understand Lucas or me, Cal.” Moving away from him, I knew I couldn’t let Lucas leave this way. “Thank you for trying to help but I can’t let things end like this. You need to leave.”

  “But.” He looked at me as he shook his head. “Hailey, this might hurt right now but it’s the best way to handle this thing that both of you have let get out of hand.”

  “No, it’s not. We’re not animals. We can figure out how to end things and still stay friends.” I knew we could. Lucas and I were both level-headed people. “Bye, Cal.”

  “I hope you two can figure things out. If you can’t, then it’ll be the men you care so much about who will have it rough.” He walked out the front door and I followed him.

  Lucas hadn’t left yet. But he had opened the garage door and seemed to be looking for something. I went to the open door as Cal drove away. “We need to talk.”

  “Nope.” He pulled out the weed eater then walked back out of the garage.

  “What are you doing?” Not talking to me wasn’t acceptable. “We really need to talk. I need to explain things to you. And not the way Cal coached me to either. You and I aren’t stupid. We can work things out.”

  “I’m about to trim the grass around your house. It’s going to get noisy. And I really don’t want to talk about anything. You want to fuck other men. You want to break your spirit. You want to become a woman you were never meant to become. Get to it. Don’t let me get in your way. I’ll just be here, cleaning up the yard.” Jerking his head toward the house, he went on, “Go inside. Get yourself all gussied up so when Cal comes back you and he can hit the sheets.”

  “I’m not doing that, Lucas. It was a farce that Cal came up with.” He didn’t seem to be listening to me at all as he walked around the back of the house, looking for something to use the weed eater on. I followed him, not about to give up until he understood that I’d listened to Cal and had made a terrible mistake. “He made me realize that I don’t know a thing about how your club or gang or whatever you want to call the Iron Cobras, works.”

  With one pull of the rope, he started the machine, making a horrible noise. He pointed at his ear as he shook his head and shouted, “Can’t hear you.”

  Waiting impatiently, I watched him work furiously whacking the taller grass at the base of the house. Finally, he ran out of grass to cut, then turned off the loud contraption. “Lucas, I’m grasping at straws here at what we should do.”

  “Stop grasping.” He didn’t look at me as he took the thing back to the garage as I followed along. “We’re over. I won’t bother you with my unwanted attention anymore.”

  “Stop it,” I hissed at him. “You’re being a baby about this.”

  With an abrupt stop, he glared at me. “A baby? You told me that you were going to fuck Cal. I think I’m handling that news rather well considering how I feel about you.”

  “Did I say that exactly?” I hadn’t thought I’d spoken that crudely.

  “Look, you want this to be over and now it is. So, leave me to the yard work and I will leave you to what the hell ever you are doing or not doing. Fuck. I don’t care anymore. I really don’t.”

  The pain in his eyes was unmistakable. “Lucas, you don’t have to act this way. And I didn’t have to act that way. We care about each other. Hell, we love each other.”

  “No! There is no such thing as love. You’ve proven that to me. I’ve always known that love was nothing more than a myth perpetuated by the need for humans to procreate.” Moving his hand back and forth as he gestured to us both, he added, “Which we won’t ever be doing. But humans aren’t like other animals who screw whenever they’re ripe and ready to get pregnant. We screw just to do it and we lie to each other, saying words like I love you to get more of that action.”

  “Lucas, you don’t really think that way. You’re hurt and so am I.” I hated what we’d become in such a short amount of time. “It’s not up to Cal to tell us what we can and can’t do. I was stupid for listening to him in the first place.”

  “But you did listen to him.” It was obvious that he was more than merely annoyed with me doing that.

  “He’s part of your club,” I pointed out. “And you sent him to watch over me, so why wouldn’t I listen to what he had to say? I don’t know all of the rules that you guys have to follow. Cal made me think that you and I had broken some of the rules of your club. So, I wanted to do whatever I needed to so that you wouldn’t get into any trouble.”

  “I can handle things with my people, Hailey. You shouldn’t even worry about that.” Moving to the garage, he put away the machine then started looking for something else to take his attention. “You have a push mower in here, don’t you?”

  “The yard doesn’t need to be mowed.” Getting in front of him, I wanted him to give me his full attention. “So, what are we going to do then?”

  “Nothing. You’ve already done it. I don’t want to be with you anymore,” his calloused words hurt more than I knew they would.

  And my tongue became sharper than I knew it would. “You act like you didn’t know that I was a married woman. You act like we had the chance to be together forever. You act like I seduced you and lied to you, trying to make you believe that I loved you when I didn’t. What did you think would happen to us one day, Lucas? Did you think I would run away with you and leave my husband?”

  “Stop being a bitch, Hailey. You know that I didn’t think we’d run off together. You know this was a total accident. I never meant to fall for you, and I know that you never meant to fall for me. You were lonely and I was taken in by your beauty and sincerity. But we were never in love.” Shrugging, he added, “Much the same way you and Ryder were never really in love. He met you and tried to make you into his princess. Then he found that he’d put you up on a thrown that put you out of his reach.”

  “You can stop now.” I didn’t want to hear his theory on why our marriage had gone downhill in the first year.

  “No, you need to understand human nature,” he kept talking. “Ry
der had only messed with girls within his reach. And then he found you and was able to actually touch you. So, he made you think that he loved you and you thought that you loved him. Only you two had nothing in common and that showed up early on, didn’t it?”

  “Now you’re just being mean.” I had no idea the man I had come to know, and love could be so mean. “I know you’re hurt, but you don’t have to be like this. If you want the truth, this is all Cal’s fault.”

  His brows raised as he looked at me with a stunned expression. “Cal’s fault? So, you don’t feel like you have anything to do with the disintegration of our once thriving relationship?”

  Oh, the shouting out Ryder’s name while in the throes of ecstasy.

  That was an inopportune time to bring my incarcerated husband to mind but it shouldn’t have upset Lucas that damn bad. We were having sex in the bed I shared with my husband after all. “Come on, Lucas. Surely you can see how that happened. It was the first night since I’d had a man in that bed since the night before he was set up.”

  Rubbing his temples, he seemed agitated along with angry. “Can we just stop talking about this?” He looked at me with a tight jaw. “Can we just stop talking altogether?”

  “We can stop talking if you will tell me that you forgive me for all the dumb shit I’ve said in the last two days.” It was worth a shot to try to get this ugliness put behind us so we could actually enjoy our last month together.

  “Forgiven,” he said quickly.

  Too quickly.

  “Let me guess,” I mused. “Forgiven but not forgotten.”

  “Yep. There’s no reason to go back to playing house and happy couple. Being one half of a farce of a relationship isn’t a thing I want to be any longer.” Pulling the push mower out of a remote corner of the garage that I then realized was rather messy, he pushed it out into the sunny afternoon.

  For him to say that our relationship had been a farce further agitated me. “So you never loved me?” I thought turning it around on him might get him to stop being stupid.

  He didn’t say a thing as he pushed the lawnmower toward the front yard. Leaning over, he pumped the primer then pulled the rope to start the mower. It sputtered but didn’t turn on. “Fuck. Out of gas.”

  As was I. “Can we forget last night and today happened?”

  “Sure, forget about it. I already have. Plus, I’ve forgotten about all the rest too. I think it’s best that way.” Another hard pull and the engine roared to life, only to die within seconds.

  Lucas had told me some about how his mother was a narcissist and now I finally saw it in him. He had to have seen her acting the same way he was now. He had to have been scared so deeply by her that he didn’t believe in love. “Lucas, I’ve learned one thing about love in my life. It’s messy and imperfect. It’s brilliant at times and dull at others. It’s something that gives you strength, but it can also bring you to your knees in weakness. Love isn’t the same every day. But it is a thing that doesn’t go away in a day, a week, a month, or even a year.”

  Pushing the mower back to the garage, he only shook his head. “You’re wrong. Love is a word and nothing more than that. People use it to get what they want from others. People use it to describe things that feel good, taste good, look good. Love is nothing more than a word. And the thing I know about words is that they only have as much power as the listener gives them. And I am no longer going to give that word any power.”

  Throwing my hands in the air, I had no idea what else to say. Lucas needed time was the only thing I could think of. But I had one more thing to say before I left him alone. “We’ve gotten ourselves into a mess. But we got into this together and we can get out of it together too.”

  Even though I heard him mumbling, “Together? We can’t do shit together anymore, baby.”

  He’s talking like we have a choice.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Lucas

  The sound of a car slowing down as it passed by took my attention. Scanning the inside of the car, I found a young woman with dark hair driving. Another young woman with cornrows and a tattoo of a red rose on her cheek sat on the passenger side of the old, black Chevy Nova. She nodded as they both looked at me. The driver’s fingers moved in a wave motion without leaving the steering wheel.

  Hailey didn’t seem to notice the car at all as she called out, “I’ll give you some space to get your head straight, leather. We’re not quite done yet. Another month of this, remember?”

  I didn’t answer her as I kept my eyes on the woman in the passenger seat. When her eyes moved to look at Hailey a smile curved her ruby red lips as she nodded slowly.

  “Honeysuckle, get in the house, now,” I said with an even tone so as not to incite panic.

  Finally, Hailey noticed the car that went from slow-moving to taking off like a shot, wheels squealing as it took a sharp left. “What the hell is that about?”

  “Get inside.” Coming up behind her, I took her by the hand, pulling her inside with me. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “So that’s why you called my honeysuckle instead of my name. Damn, for a second there I thought you’d gotten over all my stupidity.” She still couldn’t seem to think about anything but our fucking argument.

  But I’d moved on from that like a flash of lightning. “Get over that. I already have.”

  “You were mad not more than a minute ago.” With a huff, she shook her head, seemingly confused. “Lucas, what the hell?”

  “That car.” I went to the bag I’d brought with me from home that I’d dropped in the dining room. Pulling out my other Glock, I checked to make sure the magazine was fully loaded.

  “There were just girls in that old clunker, Lucas.” She sat on the sofa, her eyes on the big window that looked out over the front lawn. “What could they possibly do?”

  “Alert their men.” Putting the gun down on the dining room table, I got the Glock out of the holster at my back to make sure it was ready to go. “I hope to hell that I’m wrong. But everything in me tells me we’re about to have some trouble.”

  “From a couple of punk girls?” Hailey was oblivious to the facts.

  “Not from them. From the Angry Hogs, baby.” The way my body tingled as every sensory organ in my body had sprung to high alert told me that I wasn’t being dramatic about this.

  “Can’t we just go get in your car and leave?” She got up and stood beside the window, peering out of it as she kept her back to the wall. “Running makes more sense than staying and becoming part of a massacre. There are only two of us and way more of them. Can’t you call your guys for help or something? We can’t just sit here like sitting ducks.”

  Getting my cell phone out of my pocket, I tossed it to her. “Carl is the man you need to send a message to if you see something coming our way. You know, Harleys or cars or hear gunfire. I don’t want to bother my brothers if this is a false alarm. I have been kind of pissed off, so my senses might be off a bit.”

  Holding my cell in her hand, she looked at me with wide eyes as I went to move the sofa. “What are you doing?”

  “Blocking the window with this. You’re going to get behind it. If bullets do start flying, this thing might save you from getting hit by any of them.” Moving it so that the back of it was on the floor, I had the meatier part of the furniture up so it could protect Hailey better.

  Slipping to the floor with the upturned couch at her back, I saw reality begin to infiltrate her. “Lucas, is this for real?” She shook her head. “I’m not ready for this. I will never be ready for this.”

  Kneeling on one knee in front of her, I took her hand and held her palm against my chest. “You feel that?”

  “Your heart?” She nodded. “It’s beating normally. Mine is all over the place.”

  “Make yours meet my pace. Bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump. Nice and stable. We are in control. We are going to be okay. We are going to win.” I’d learned long ago that when facing more than one man, confidence
was key.

  Nodding, she whispered, “We will win. We will be okay. I trust you. I have faith in you.”

  Pulling her hand to my lips, I kissed it softly. “And I have faith in you, honeysuckle. Now stay put. Stay low. And stay strong.” The faintest sound of motorcycles filtered into my ears. “They’re coming. Send a message to Carl that says, send in the troops. He’ll know what that means.”

  “Lucas?” her voice faltered as she held back a sob.

  “No reason to cry, baby. I got this.” Leaning in, I kissed her lips. “I love you, you know.”

  “Yeah, I know. I love you too.” Placing her hands on either side of my face, she smiled. “You come back to me with this handsome face so I can lavish it with kisses. Promise me.”

  “Sure, baby. I promise.” I found it interesting how quickly we could go from being over to being okay again. I supposed life and death situations put things into perspective. “This will be over soon. I’m not letting this go on even one more day.”

  Fear filled her pretty face. “Lucas, be careful. Don’t be a hero. Hide, run if you have to. But don’t let them hurt you. Not over me. Please.”

  She had no idea how much that was not in my DNA. “You do as I’ve told you to.” The sounds of the engines of the powerful bikes got closer. “Make that text, honeysuckle. Don’t let me down and I won’t let you down.” With one more kiss, I got up and left her.

  This ends now.

  Little houses lined both sides of the street. I scanned them all to make sure no one was outside in the afternoon sun. Thankfully, I saw no one – not one child – not one woman – not one person, dog, cat, bird. As if every creature knew what was about to happen, they’d all hidden, staying as safe as they could before the Armageddon began.

  This wasn’t the first nor the last time I would be outnumbered by an enemy. I’d grown up with my own mother as the enemy in our home. My father played sentry most times, but he couldn’t protect us all the time.