The Restart and the Remedy (Aces High MC - Dakotas Book 3)

by Christine Michelle

  “I’d seen how it crushed women’s souls before. Some of my brothers should have been more grateful than they were that the women they chose had been able to look beyond those things. When I think about the trouble some of the club girls had caused Charlie early on, it made me cringe to think that I had been that same level of cunt to Cherry’s friend, Myra. A simple apology would not be enough.

  My weekend was about to kick off the right way. First, I was doing my research and getting some ideas for the night I had planned. There was something inside me, no matter how much better I wanted to be, that told me that the perfect woman and family weren’t out there waiting on me to show up in their lives. I had never lived stupidly, and it was time to change that up a bit. Well, for the weekend, anyway. Charlie’s latest romance novel had just been lying on one of the clubhouse tables, so I picked it up and skimmed to the good stuff. A pool table, huh? I glanced up at one of the pool tables we had in our clubhouse. It didn’t exactly look comfortable, but this was about doing the unexpected and stepping out of my comfort zone. I’d missed the frivolous, fun, stupid times in my twenties. I was thirty-one now and time was ticking away from me. This weekend would be my one and done, free for all, booze and bitches binge, and then I’d go back to being boring old Rabbit. Sure, I was usually everyone’s funny bunny, but I was also the safe guy in the room. Just once, I wanted to be the bad choice for someone else.

  The slight hint of peaches and sunshine wafted to my nostrils. I knew that scent, it was one I had smelled all too recently. I glanced up in time to see her smirking at the book I had in my hands.

  “It’s Charlie’s,” I called out, halting her in her tracks. “I was just making sure Rage would approve the crap she’s reading.”

  She said nothing. The infernal woman just stood there, staring at me, the smirk never leaving her face. “Fine!” I growled out. “You know what? I’m reading it for me. And I fuckin’ like it. They blow shit up in this one. Legit – use bombs and whatnot, which is cool as fuck. And they aren’t making love by candlelight either. Oh no. The hero of the story bangs her up against a wall, then on the pool table – which isn’t really smart because bitches get rug burn from that.” When she just stared at me with a slack-jawed expression, I huffed out my frustration over getting caught by this woman as I read a romance novel. I don’t know why it bothered me, as pretty much everyone here knew I picked them up periodically when Charlie left them lying around. All right, fine, I was a member of her goddamn book club too. “What? They do. Pool tables are not made for comfort when fucking, no matter how many of those books use them as a prop for just that.”

  “Rabbit?” Charlie asked cautiously after hearing my tirade toward Myra.

  “What?”

  “Maybe you should put the book down and step away from the scared pregnant woman before you scar her for life.”

  “She’s not scared,” I insisted while glancing between Charlie and Myra who was doing that slow-step, backing away thing you do when there’s a feral animal in front of you. “You’re not scared, right?” Shit! I was starting to panic a bit. This was the first time I’d seen her since I was a complete jackass. I hadn’t even managed to apologize yet, and now the woman was backing away from me like cooties were crawling from my crotch. I glanced down and took a peek. Nope. Nothing crawling. Fuck – I knew that. Maybe I was going crazy.

  The woman gulped and halted her movement mid-step.

  “FUCK!” I yelled. Then quieted my tone when her reaction was to damn near jump out of her skin. “Don’t be afraid of me.”

  “Yeah, okay,” she answered, then spun and ran to the kitchen. Literally, the girl ran away from me.

  Charlie laughed as she slapped me in the chest with her book. “Idiot!” I tried to snatch the book back from her as she left, but the little minx was too fast. Once she made it to the kitchen, I took off and stood just outside the door, with my ear plastered to the wood, listening in, like a true fucking lunatic.

  “Don’t worry,” I heard Charlie tell Myra. “He’s a little touched in the head. Just ignore him and he usually goes away.” They both laughed. At. Me.

  “No,” I hissed to myself. “Not my best friend.” I quieted when Myra started speaking and it became obvious she had been putting on a good show before. She wasn’t scared in the least bit.

  “Shame the good looking ones are always cheaters or crazy as hell, right?” Myra asked Charlie.

  “You think he’s hot?” Charlie countered.

  “Well, I’m pregnant, not blind. Of course he’s hot, but he’s also fucking nuts. You know I met him when he was hitchhiking naked on my first night in town, right?”

  “No way! Do tell,” was Charlie’s response.

  I groaned and walked away, not needing to hear about that night. Getting the book back from Charlie wasn’t worth reliving that particular embarrassment.

  I also knew I needed to get the new girl off my mind. Yeah, ‘new girl,’ because naming her in my head made her real. I couldn’t afford to think of anyone else as real. I’d made that mistake with Chastity. Sure, ‘new girl’ was experiencing much worse with her ex, but she was also having his baby and that made women a little crazy sometimes. No way was I going to get invested in her, only to have her flake and go back home to her baby’s daddy. Holy shit! What was I even thinking? The woman hated me, thought I was crazy, and for good reason. I’d treated her like shit. How the hell was I even considering her as an option?

  Instead of running further down that nut-job rabbit hole, I made some more absolutely shit decisions.

  Chapter 7 – Myra

  Cherry dropped me off at the clubhouse. I honestly didn’t want to be there, on the off chance that I’d run into the douchebag himself. Still, I had to learn how to run a bar from someone because there was no guarantee that I would even pass my nursing exam when the time came to take it. Charlie had apparently been running an airtight ship in the clubhouse bar, and Spinner wanted me to learn how she did inventory there because the girl he had in charge at Renegade Rosy’s had screwed it up so bad, they were having to re-inventory everything. It was a headache I did not envy Spinner for having. Considering he and his woman were doing me a solid by not only giving me a place to live, but a job, on short notice, knowing that I was pregnant… Well, I couldn’t exactly say no to the training session at the clubhouse. I was shocked to not only find Rabbit there, but to see him reading a romance novel. He seemed to be enjoying it, which I found odd. Not that there was anything at all wrong with men reading romance – more should do it. I had grown up a club princess though, and there was no way in hell any of the bikers from my father’s club would ever be caught dead with, let alone alive and enjoying, a romance novel.

  “Earth to Myra!” Charlie called out.

  “Sorry, what?”

  Charlie laughed at me. “It was the book wasn’t it? It always throws people off at first. You should have seen it when I finally got enough women together for a romance reader’s book club around here only to have Rabbit come sauntering in one evening. I didn’t know whether they were all going to duck and cover, or try to recruit him for their one-man harem. I mean, he does look like one of those guys,” she finished as she tipped her head toward the book whose cover was facing us from where it was perched on the counter. He kind of did resemble that man.

  Rabbit had what I liked to call the golden body. He was tall, probably around six feet, two inches and then he had beautifully defined muscles without being overdone. My ex had started out too scrawny, only to blow right past the perfect ‘golden’ zone into too much muscle. I swear, for every pound of muscle he put on as we got older, the idiot lost personality points. I wish he had stayed at the place where Rabbit was. It looked healthy, beautiful, and well, golden.

  “It’s not that,” I started to argue even as I was remembering what his body had looked like on that night he had hopped into my truck with nothing but a kutte on his back. Charlie gave me a look that called me out on being a liar with
out having to say a word. “Okay, not just that,” I admitted. We both ended up chuckling. “It’s a shame because the ones in that perfect body zone are always assholes.”

  Charlie frowned then. “I know he’s said some pretty crappy things to and about you, but I promise, Rabbit isn’t normally like that.”

  I shrugged my shoulders, feigning indifference. She wasn’t the only person to try to convince me of that. “Everyone keeps saying he has this great excuse for being an asshole, but to be honest, I don’t see it.” Charlie gasped, and I could tell she was about to argue with me. “Do you know my story, or at least the gist of it?” She nodded. “Have I been an asshole to anyone?” That time, she shook her head, and I watched as a frown deepened the creases on her forehead. “I don’t normally like to compare people’s pain, but if I could go through all that with my ex while my family took his side, lied for him, and continued to have his back instead of mine, and still be nice to all the people I meet…” I didn’t finish, I let the rest simmer in her own mind.

  After a few moments she responded. “You’re right. There’s really no justification for the way he has been acting. I’m sorry,” she tried to apologize.

  “Don’t. It’s not necessary. I’m sure you know a completely different Rabbit than the man I’ve been introduced to and have dealt with. Your perspective makes a difference. For now though, I just want to learn your system so I can get gone before any weekend shenanigans kick off around here.”

  Charlie laughed then. “That’s probably for the best. I’ll be honest, the guys aren’t near as bad as they once were, when I first got here, but I think that just has to do with most of them getting steadily older.”

  “Don’t they get fresh blood in that often?”

  “They do, but they’re also hard on recruits. More of them either drop out of prospecting or end up being slightly older and more settled themselves. The guys are picky. There are other chapters where they have some issues with a few of their guys, and I think everyone here is trying to avoid that.”

  Thinking back to my own family and the MC they ran, I had to agree. “It sucks when they start to fester from the inside. Only as strong as your weakest link,” I told her.

  “Exactly.” She grabbed a clipboard off of the wall and turned to me. “Okay, let’s get started. I’m going to show you how to keep a paper tally, but then how I transfer it all to this program we have so that the electronic records are easily accessible. That way, if Spinner is ever gone, and one of the other men has to step in, they’ll be able to figure everything out easily enough.”

  “Great! Let’s do this.”

  “I’m so sorry it took this long for me to get everything down,” I told Charlie after we finally closed out of the program. “This whole mom brain is a real thing, I think.” She just laughed at me.

  “Seriously, My, don’t sweat it. It takes however long it takes. If you want the honest truth, I’m great at making drinks, but it took forever for me to get this system in place for keeping up with what I was making. The first time one of the guys asked me what we needed to restock, I laughed and almost peed my pants.”

  “I hate to bother Cherry, but she brought me here this morning. I knew it was a bad idea. I hate being without my own ride and having to rely on others.”

  “Don’t worry about bothering her, I’ll get you home.” She glanced at her phone and frowned. “Fair warning though, I’m sure the party has already started out there.” Charlie shook her head and laughed as soon as the words left her. “What am I talking about? You were a club princess, I don’t think it will be anything you’ve never seen before. Just remember, like I said earlier, most of the guys we have now are tame, so it shouldn’t even be an issue.”

  I nodded my head in agreement, but boy was she ever wrong. While I had only ever seen the bad impression side of Rabbit, literally everyone who knew him sang his praises and talked about what an upstanding guy he was. So, imagine my surprise, and even disappointment in the man, when we moved out of the back storeroom into the clubhouse bar area, only to glance to my right and see the man himself, balls deep in a club whore he had bent over the pool table. Of all the things. I guess I now knew why he read those books. It was to get ideas for things to do with the women he was fucking. I couldn’t knock the theory, because let’s face it, I think most women wished men read more romance for that very reason. I didn’t understand the gut-clenching reaction my body had to seeing him putting those to action though.

  Charlie must have noticed where my attention had been drawn to, because as she turned her head, I heard an audible gasp. “Oh my God! That is so weird.”

  “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” I assured her. “No need to play like it’s unusual when we both know better.”

  “For anyone else, I’d agree with you. Rabbit doesn’t have sex with BRATs, and never, ever, does anything in public like that.” Charlie appeared to be getting unreasonably angry. It made me wonder if there was more between the two of them than simple friendship. She must have seen the curious look I was tossing her way because she just shook her head. “You don’t understand. I’m angry because that no-good, evil twin bitch ruined my best friend when she left him high and dry.”

  I sighed, knowing how that kind of an abrupt end could leave you reeling, but I still saw it as a cop out for bad behavior. Part of me began to wonder if all of the people in Rabbit’s life really knew him at all. Maybe he had just been really good at hiding his wild side previously, and there came a point when it was too daunting to try to keep it all secret any longer.

  “Honestly?” I asked Charlie who nodded in response. “If I weren’t pregnant, I might go out and make some devilishly stupid mistakes too. Instead, the only outlet I had was uprooting my life, driving half way across the country, and hiding from my family. Maybe, you guys should cut him a little slack and let him work his issues out of his system.”

  Charlie watched me for a long moment as I fiddled with the zipper on my coat in order to keep from turning back to watch the action taking place on the pool table. I wasn’t normally a voyeur, but curiosity – she was a bitch!

  “I guess he’s entitled to go a little nuts,” she agreed after a few minutes. The knot of unease at seeing Rabbit go ‘a little nuts’, or maybe a better term would be ‘nuts deep’, still had me feeling a little rattled. Despite the way he’d treated me, and all of his assholish tendencies, I’d found Rabbit to be highly entertaining and worth a laugh now and then. That, coupled with everyone I knew trying to put the man back up on the pedestal, were the only reasons I was feeling particularly queasy about what he was doing.

  I shook that thought off as Charlie and I walked out of the security access door that always freaked me out when I visited the clubhouse. I had weird dreams where the door refused to let me out and I called my dad to come get me. Yeah, I know, that made me seem truly fucked up in the head. It made me wish I could drink and fuck it all away like Rabbit.

  “He’ll hate himself for that in the morning. He’s a really private person and that BRAT will be preening and thinking she’s his next old lady for weeks as a result.”

  “Really?” I asked, wrinkling my nose in distaste.

  “Yeah, I told you, he never hooks up with them. They’ll all assume it meant more.”

  “That’s kind of scary. You’d think they’d get a better caliber of women in these places.”

  Charlie laughed. “Sadly, there seems to be a shortage of women who aren’t batshit crazy and still want to be a sex toy for a group of burly biker men.”

  “I don’t know, I guess I can see the appeal after what I just went though. At least you know exactly where you stand with them. No one tells them lies because they don’t have to. There’s a simplicity to their exchange that I envy.”

  The look of pity on Charlie’s face had me closing my mouth for the rest of the short trip home.

  Chapter 8 – Rabbit

  “Wakey, wakey, baby brother!” I heard Spinner’s voice about two se
conds before stinging, hot pain shot through my ass cheek. I immediately yanked the jogging pants, I had apparently fallen asleep in, down off my ass and craned my head around to take a look at the damage. Before I could catch a glimpse, Spinner’s loud guffaw caught my attention. What the hell had I done last night? I thought about it a moment before I turned to look again. Bits and pieces were coming back to me. I got hammered, something I never really did that often. I tried to jog my own memory as I turned just enough to catch sight of the fiery red patch of skin on my ass and the… ink? that was there.

  “Is that a…?”

  “I’m thinking it ain’t the greatest idea for you to ever get drunk without supervision, Bro.” There was a tattoo on my ass of a rabbit pulling his own dick out of a hat, and it was on my left butt cheek. “Is he pulling out, or stroking in, I wonder?”

  “Fuck!” I hissed just as I heard the click of a phone camera taking a picture. I quickly pulled the joggers back up over the offending ink and glanced up in time to see Tango across the room, laughing so hard, tears were running down his face. That motherfucker!

  “What the fuck did you get up to last night, Rabbit?” My brother asked as I continued to give a narrow-eyed stare to Tango, that promised swift retribution. The evil bastard just continued laughing until he was doubled over, holding onto his ribs like they hurt from the effort. It was a small comfort, but I’d take it. Nah! Fuck that, I was gonna go take that bastard out!

  I jumped up to do just that and immediately regretted the rash decision. The world spun, my stomach rolled, and the nearest trash can seemed too far away. I managed to make it only because a prospect standing nearby kicked the can toward me and the solid hunk of metal and I met in the middle.