“This your new woman?” She asked in a snide tone I didn’t much appreciate. I would have thought Phoenix, our lone-wolf nomadic brother who claimed her, would get her shit under wraps at some point but he didn’t seem to be having much luck. She still dressed like she was trying out for best club whore of the year with part of her boobs visible. I wasn’t one to judge, and maybe he liked his woman showing her body to everyone, but had Poppy been here with half her tits hanging out the bottom of her shirt I’d have her in a room, over my knee, showing her what happens to bad girls who don’t know how to behave.
The worst part of Jewel’s approach was the very visible snub she was giving Poppy by not even acknowledging her. “Poppy is my woman. She’s also Chief’s sister,” I informed her while offering up a bit of glare that told her she was treading on thin ice. “Be nice, or we’ll have problems. Don’t care who your dad or your man is now.”
Jewel was brought into the club as a whore to service the men. The problem with that was she refused to do the older guys. If they were above 38 or so, she wouldn’t touch them. All hell broke loose when the club confronted her, threatened to boot her out on her ass, and she spilled the beans. Her mother had once been a club whore for Aces High MC too back in the day. She’d managed to get herself knocked up, and instead of using it to anchor the brother to herself, she fled without telling anyone they might have become daddy. Then, her crazy-as-fuck mother sent her to work the same job in a clubhouse where her own father might end up… I shivered just thinking about it. At least her mom had been kind enough to tell her to avoid the older men at all costs. The woman was evil incarnate, using Jewel’s position to try to help clear her drug debt. Bitch ended up dead, the secret came out, and now Jewel had both a father and an old man out of the situation. Hopper drew the straw on fatherhood while Phoenix ended up seeing something in her damaged soul that appealed to him. He claimed her, and they only rarely came around the clubhouse since he was nomad and they traveled a lot.
“Don’t mind her,” Cindy – Hopper’s old lady – was telling Poppy after Jewel walked away. “That one has always had a bad attitude. She didn’t grow up in the club thanks to her no-good momma. Didn’t have much of a good influence for the same reason, so make no mind.” Cindy held out her hand. “I believe we actually met a few years ago when you came up for an event. I’m Cindy, Hopper’s old lady.”
The rest of the afternoon went pretty much the same way. People remembered Poppy, even though she hadn’t been around here much before. It seemed for those people she had interacted with previously, she managed to leave a big impression – most of all on Ghost who stole her sweet rib recipe. Sophie played nice after her, Brant, and Bender came to sit with us at a table and, finally, things were feeling good. I hated my family being at odds. I’d had that drama with my brother over the Julie situation for years. I didn’t want to live with it again. Then again, I didn’t want to lose Poppy over my sister’s inability to separate rumor, gossip, and reality.
Thankfully, that wasn’t the case and by the time we all went our separate ways that night the two had been getting along, and it seemed something Poppy had said to my sister changed how Soph saw things, even if only a little.
Chapter 6
Ghost and Leanne offered to watch Bubba for Poppy so that I could finally take her back to Pittsburgh to meet my brother. This time we were going to get more than five minutes with him before he had to run off to do whatever it was that was more important than us the last time we’d come up. At least this time, we were hanging out at his house so we wouldn’t have to deal with the puck bunnies like we had last time. My brother being in the NHL could be a pain the ass from time to time since there were always eyes on him. Everyone wanted a piece of him, and my ex had been no exception. I wondered briefly if Poppy would turn out to be the same since she was such a huge fan. I had purposely avoided telling her much about Julie and the reason we split just to see how things played out. It sounded bad, thinking about it in my head that way, but shit was what it was. I would be an idiot to say I wasn’t the tiniest bit worried.
It turned out, I had absolutely nothing to worry about. “That slapshot in the third period was a thing of beauty!” Poppy praised my brother as we all walked up to his apartment after the game.
Kent grinned at my woman before turning to me. “How the hell did you end up with the hot chick who actually knows hockey, and isn’t a fuckin’ bunny?”
I cringed inwardly knowing that he considered Julie nothing more than a puck bunny who didn’t actually know all that much about hockey and, instead, faked it with him in the hopes of getting him to accept his offer. “You get to play, brother, that’s all the reward you’re getting. Leaves time for me to snatch up Poppy for myself.”
The woman blessed me with one of her full smiles that made the skin around her eyes crinkle ever so slightly as she did. I thought I heard my brother mumble something like, “fuckin’ sap” under his breath, but I was honestly too taken in by Poppy to care.
“Of course, you did manage to eat ice right after that slapshot though,” Chief pointed out.
My brother rubbed his jaw, but grinned as he did it. “Worth it since we won though,” he chimed in. The guys continued talking about sports as Poppy and I watched one another. Every now and again, one of them would draw her into the conversation and I’d just take it all in and watch as she interacted with men I considered to be my brothers in different ways. One brother by blood, one by club, and the other one because our job was life and death and it formed the same type of bond between us. She managed to work her magic over the each of them every time she spoke. Even as she gave them all her attention, she never strayed far from me, her eyes always drifted back to check in with me and give a smile of contentment or reassurance. I wasn’t sure which, maybe a bit of both, but I liked that she thought to do it. For the first time in years, it felt good to settle into my brother’s ugly ass apartment.
That was all before I got the call from the club though. My phone went off at the same time that Chief’s did which could only signal bad things. “Yeah?” I asked
“I know you and Chief are both off in Pittsburgh, but we need you for a while.”
“Me specifically, or the two of us because you need numbers?”
“You specifically,” Ghost informed me.
“Fire?”
“You could say that. I’m texting the address. Closer to you guys than to us. Don’t suppose any of you took a cage so that Poppy can get back on her own?”
“Sure as fuck didn’t,” I huffed out knowing what this was going to mean. I glanced over at Chief who had furrowed brows scrunched down as he read something on his phone. “I’ll figure something out,” I told him before I hung up. There was no way I could take Poppy with us, which meant Chief couldn’t either. We were about to handle club business and if they needed my skill set, that meant it was nothing good and nothing we needed to expose my woman to. I stood and moved with Chief to the other room momentarily.
“You going to be okay with her staying here without us?” I asked Chief. His face was turning a darker shade of his normal deeply tanned skin and his head was shaking back and forth in a negative response, though I wasn’t sure he was consciously doing it.
“You know I’m not. I like Kent and Shep, but that don’t mean shit. They’re both strangers to her.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do here?”
He huffed out a breath. “I don’t know. I get the fact that we don’t have much of a choice, but I don’t fuckin’ like it.”
“That makes two of us then,” I agreed. When we explained to the others that we had to go because there was a club emergency, I could have punched my brother and hugged Poppy for their responses. Despite my urging that we shouldn’t be held up too long, my brother looked both pissed and disappointed in me. Poppy was the opposite. She accepted the fact that we had club business and had to go, and she assured both Chief and me that she would be just fine, even if that
meant getting a ride back with someone else. Fuck, that woman! I didn’t think there was a better one out there for me anywhere, which made leaving her behind that much more difficult.
The absolute last thing I wanted to do was have to leave Poppy with my brother and Shep in Pittsburgh. Not that I didn’t trust any of them, but I didn’t know if Poppy would hate me for doing it. She didn’t really know either of them and there she was basically stuck, because I’d taken the bike she rode to town on. I’d actually never left a woman behind out of town like that before and it rankled that I had to do it now. Granted, there was the one exception – Julie – but when I left her, I never went back. Now I had to hope that Poppy wouldn’t decide to get home and never look back too.
It didn’t help my guilt any that Chief was beyond pissed off with me and the decision to leave her there. The only alternative was to take her with us to a situation we weren’t entirely sure about. The club called. They needed us, me and my skillset specifically, but what they didn’t need was an old lady stuck in the mix too when club business was going down.
The big club emergency was actually at a warehouse we still maintained near the northeast border of West Virginia in the little strip of the state that stood between Ohio and Pennsylvania. It only took us a little under an hour to ride from the condo my brother had near the PPG Paints Arena to get to Hancock County and the ten acre tract of land we had just on the outskirts of New Manchester. There was nothing there beyond some old barns that we’d restored only on the inside to accommodate whatever we needed. We purposely left the exterior looking rundown so that we wouldn’t have people nosing around them.
I saw the smoke long before we arrived, but hoped it wasn’t the barns. As we pulled onto the land and rode down the dirt path that served as a driveway to the barns, any hopes I’d had were dashed. Two of the three barns on the property had been engulfed and were now in the controlled burn stage. The third barn had scorch marks on the outside like someone had attempted to set fire to it, but for some reason it didn’t actually catch. I’d have to check that building thoroughly before leaving here to see what happened and why it hadn’t gone up like the other two tinderboxes had. Granted, it wasn’t what was above ground on any of the buildings that would matter. Everything of importance was held in secret bunkers we had installed beneath the structures. As long as they hadn’t been compromised prior to the fire everything should still be safe inside.
Glancing around the scene, I knew that could end up being a problem for the club since there were so many police and firefighters on the scene. “Smoke,” one of the officers tipped his head towards me as I dismounted my bike.
I glanced at the damaged, still burning buildings and shook my head. “What the hell?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” the officer stated, causing me to turn my attention back to him.
“Scott,” I replied as I tipped my chin up to the man who I’d gotten to know over the years. We spent a good deal of time up here when we were getting the place set up so we got to know a few of the locals rather well, including Jacob Scott, who I noticed was no longer simply a police officer. He appeared to be a plain clothed detective now. “You got a promotion?”
He grinned at me and answered with a nod. “Do I even want to know what you guys had going on in there?”
I lifted a shoulder suggesting my feigned indifference. “We rehabbed the insides a while back, as you know. Fitted everything out to be a clubhouse and bunkhouse,” I stated as I pointed to the two buildings that were still burning. “Then the shed for bikes and part storage over there. We just hadn’t gotten around to moving people around to start another chapter here yet.”
“Quite a long time to just have freshly rehabbed barns sitting empty isn’t it? Seems like that would be a hefty loss if you weren’t using the place as intended.”
“Our club isn’t hurting for cash. We have many lucrative businesses all over the country, man. Having this place sit until we needed it was no big deal. Honestly, I was supposed to move up this way in order to be closer to my brother, but shit happened. A woman held me up, and turned out not to be worthy after all. You know the drill.”
He chuckled then. “Don’t I know it. My wife took off a couple months after I made detective. She’s shacked up with that asshole over there,” he tipped his chin in the direction of a firefighter on scene. I raised my brows at him. “Fucking firefighters!” He hissed out playfully as he smacked my shoulder.
“Want me to have a word with him about the code?” There wasn’t really much of a code where the woman of another cop, fire, or rescue personnel was concerned. Sure, it was a dick move to go after one, but they weren’t as tight as the MC brotherhood in that way.
“Nah, he can have her. She spent more of my money than she was worth. Besides, I wanted a family and she wasn’t interested in giving one to me.” He waved off the thought. “Better it happened now than down the road when I should be a grandparent and still looking to try to have kids with someone, you know?”
I couldn’t argue that, because the sentiment hit a little close to home for me. I had allowed Julie to take up residence too long in my life, and I might miss out on having a family of my own one day as a result. Then again, my thoughts turned to Poppy, and her desire to have children, and I smiled because it didn’t seem too late for me after all. Not that being in my thirties was too late to start with a family, but I damn sure wasn’t getting any younger.
“What do you need from us?” I finally asked him and waited as he stood around.
“Access,” he informed me.
“Well, there’s not a whole lot to gain access to now.”
He smirked at me. “Come on now, we both know better than that.” He turned to look toward the third barn that was still standing. “It’d be interesting to find out why that one wasn’t burned to the ground too, don’t you think?”
I shrugged. “Could be someone happened along the place and scared the assholes off.”
“You guys are out here in the middle of nowhere,” Scott countered.
“Okay, could be one of our guys came running out here as soon as we saw that someone was dicking around the place. We do still have security running here, as we do with all of our properties.”
“I’d like to get a hold of that footage.”
“Not saying there’s any footage to get a hold of, Scott. I’m just speculating on some theories for why one of our buildings was spared. I just got here myself, so who knows?” I shrugged my shoulders again and then wandered away from him and toward the men who were still working on putting out the fire on the first two buildings.
“Chief Jones?” I asked one of the men, looking for the fire chief.
“Not here, far as I know. Deputy Chief Womack is just over there,” he nodded his head in the direction of one of the responding engines and I moved to head that way. Deputy Chief Womack should be running the joint since Jones never bothered to show as a fire line officer to any fire event. He was also the man who had attempted numerous times to recruit me for their local station. I had been tempted. What I had told Detective Scott hadn’t been a lie. We had considered opening a small chapter here due to its proximity to Pittsburgh, but the push hadn’t been big enough at the time, so we decided to wait it out. That had been three years ago. In my mind, fate must have intervened because had I gone then, and started a chapter here, I never would have met Poppy. At least, I wouldn’t have met her in a way that would lead to whatever it was we were becoming.
By the time I located Womack, he looked fit to be tied. “Fucking idiots, I tell you. Why the hell couldn’t I convince you to come and work for me here?” I asked before he ever turned around to see that it was me standing behind him. The man had eyes in the back of his head.
“Well, if I had been here, I may have gone down with those buildings,” I suggested. He simply laughed at my theory.
“No, you fucking wouldn’t have because you’re not a dumbass. You want to tell m
e what’s really going on here?”
“No clue,” I told him honestly. “That’s what I’m here to find out. Looked like scorch marks on the third barn, but it didn’t burn. That’s probably a big clue.”
“You seriously have no idea what could have happened here tonight?” He asked as he finally turned to give me his full attention.
“None. I was over in Pittsburgh introducing my woman to Kent. Hell, I just introduced them and had to leave her there with him in order to haul ass over here to see what the hell was going on.”
“Well shit. I was hoping you’d be able to shed some light. Not that I thought it would be in an official capacity since you wear the leather, but you know I hate unsolved puzzles.”
I grinned at the man then. In another life, he probably would have made a good brother. The problem was, the man hated motorcycles. His younger brother died while messing around on one when they were kids, and he hasn’t been able to look at them the same since. It was a discussion we had when he was actively attempting to recruit me to work for him.
“No known enemies? Anyone the club pissed off lately?” He started rattling off questions. For the first time in a lot of years, I could honestly say that there wasn’t really anything like that going on. Granted, there was the issue recently with the Hell’s Hounds trying to move in on the guns our guys out of Tallahassee were running, but that was typical club shit. We didn’t store guns up here. The guns came to us out of a little town south of Chicago and we helped get them transported safely to our meet point with the Florida guys. Not once did we ever stop near this property on those runs. That couldn’t be what this had been about.
Some and the Flame Page 6
