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

by Christine Michelle

  Over the horrendous heaves my body manifested, I still managed to hear Tango’s tormenting call, “Whatsa matta Wabbit?” That motherfucker better be glad he was a safe distance away and my body was in full-on revolt.

  I heard a smack and then “That was mean,” from Liza. His woman or not, that girl still had my back. I’d owe her some extra cookies at the next book club meeting. I thought so anyway, until I heard her laughter too when my brother snatched my joggers back down around my knees so he could get a better picture of the tattoo Tango had inked on my ass while I was drunk. Damn, I thought she had my back. Some friend. She didn’t even warn me that was about to happen.

  I managed to yank my head out of the can long enough to call her out on being a traitor. “Thought we were friends, Liza?”

  “Oh no! You did this to yourself. I wasn’t here last night to talk you out of all the stupid decisions you made,” she told me and there seemed to be a little bit of censure in her words too. What the fuck else had I managed to get up to last night? The minute I asked myself that question, a flash of one of the BRATs bent over the pool table came to mind. No! Fuck no!

  “Yeah?” I glanced around and noticed Charlie already working behind the bar, serving Iceman a beer far too early in the day. “Where you, my bestie?” I asked as I continued to lean over the trash can, just to be sure the heaves wouldn’t start again.

  “I had to get Myra home, and honestly, after we witnessed you plowing one of the girls into the poor, defenseless pool table, neither of us were willing to stick around for any more of the show you were putting on.”

  “You witnessed?” I asked, horrified at the prospect of my best friend seeing me do that shit, but sickened for some reason as I thought about Myra being there too. “Shit!” I grumbled as my stomach flipped and I was suddenly heaving up bile and not much else. Being a naturally happy person normally, drinking had never been my thing. I didn’t do drugs for the same reason. There was simply no need for me to alter my consciousness. The one fucking time I decided to just let loose and do all the things men in a biker club were supposed to experience, I ended up letting myself down along with some other people I cared a lot about. Some that I hadn’t realized mattered to me at all. Namely, Myra.

  “Sorry, Charlie,” I finally mumbled as I was able to drag my sorry ass back out of the trash can and stumble my way to a bar stool in front of where she was working. I wasn’t stumbling because I was still drunk either. My asshole brother had left my pants around my knees as I had been puking. I’d have to kill him later, but by then, it would be too late. Everyone probably already had full color clips of my ass and balls, but more importantly of the rabbit on my ass who may or may not be fucking a goddamn top hat.

  Chapter 9 - Myra

  Cherry invited me down to breakfast, which quickly turned into a brunch when Spinner got a call to leave and go handle something at the clubhouse. Part of me wondered if he had to go clean up his brother’s mess, which led me to ask my friend stupid questions that shouldn’t even be on my mind.

  “So, Chastity must have done some number on Rabbit, huh?” We both continued to work on putting together the frittatas we were making for brunch, but Cherry was definitely slinging a little side-eye my way.

  “Yeah,” she finally lamented on a sigh. “Even I had hope that she would finally settle down and behave for a while.” She gave me a hard look then. “Spinner told me Rabbit bought her a ring, was having a house built for them, and everything. I was so happy for her. You know? My sister was finally turning into an adult, and I thought that Rabbit was good for her, and that maybe we’d be able to have a normal sibling relationship as a result.”

  “So, what happened then?”

  “Who knows?” Cherry shook her head. “I don’t think she could have found a better man than Rabbit. Something spooked her though. The first clear sign of weather we’d had in a while, and she was in some asshole’s pickup truck. That sister of mine drove off laughing and waving out the window while Rabbit stood there and watched.”

  “Ouch!” I hissed, knowing all too well what that felt like.

  “Yeah, he hasn’t been right since. He’s always been this genuinely happy, funny guy. Rabbit is the perpetual life of the party without ever drinking, doing drugs, or whoring around like a lot of the other guys in the MC life.”

  “Well, he’s certainly not that way now.”

  “Why are you so curious about him and Chastity anyway?” She asked.

  “Everyone keeps telling me what a great guy he ‘normally’ is, and I just haven’t seen yet. Obviously, I’ve seen his wicked sense of humor put to good use, but mostly, he’s been an asshole to me. Then there was last night, which totally contradicts everything you just said about him.”

  “Last night?”

  I told her about the condition Rabbit had been in when we left the clubhouse and Cherry just stood there slack-jawed and gaping at me. “Seriously? He was having sex? With one of the BRATs? In the open?” Cherry asked, each portion of her question sounding more like it’s own inquisition. “I want to say no way that was possible, but you have no reason to lie.”

  I shrugged. “Charlie was there, since she’s the one that brought me home and we had to walk through the clubhouse to see it. Curiosity got the better of me, I suppose, because the man I’ve met and known since moving here is nothing like the person everyone keeps trying to portray him as. Maybe he’s just been damaged for a longer time than you guys thought, and he’s just tired of hiding it?” I surmised.

  Cherry quickly discounted that theory. “Spinner and Rabbit don’t have a tragic history. They had a loving couple as parents who set the standards for a relationship at a pretty high bar for those boys.”

  “Had?”

  “Caught that, huh?” Cherry offered a small smile. “Their dad died in a motorcycle accident. Mom survived long enough to be diagnosed with cancer while she was in the hospital getting patched up after the wreck. She refused treatment for the cancer and joined her man in the afterlife three months later.”

  “Oh no! That’s horrible!”

  “That’s also the legacy of love their parents left them with. Spinner came home from the Army, hooked up with the MC, and Rabbit followed a year later when he graduated high school.”

  “You would think they would have been turned off of motorcycles after what happened.”

  “Nah! Their parents loved to ride and I guess the boys picked up the bug too. They’d probably both cry like little girls if you told them they couldn’t ride anymore.” Cherry laughed, obviously imagining that exact reaction as she said it.

  I groaned loudly, imagining something else entirely. “I miss riding,” I admitted.

  “How long has it been?”

  “Too long.” I had to really think about my answer though, which was disturbing in retrospect. “It was actually a couple of months before I got pregnant when I last rode.” The weird noise in the back of my throat had Cherry paying closer attention.

  “What?”

  “I should have known then. He used to love having me on the back of his bike. At least he said he did,” my mind had gone back all those months ago to how weird my boyfriend had been acting. “He wanted out then, I wish he had just manned up and told me instead of leaving me with a lifelong reminder of why people are not to be trusted.”

  “You can’t tell me you regret being pregnant?”

  “I regret that my son or daughter won’t know their family. I always pictured raising my kids in the club with a huge extended family that would have their backs, you know?”

  “It could still happen,” She tried to tell me.

  I laughed. “Oh yeah? You have a biker in mind for me?” I asked jokingly. I half-assed expected her to say Rabbit’s name, but she shocked me further when she didn’t.

  “Well, if you don’t mind sharing, there’s always Whiskey and Fox. They’re raising their kid together and I bet your little blended family would be cute as hell.” I knew she was teasing
me, but someone else obviously didn’t.

  “What the absolute fuck?” Rabbit asked as he and Spinner came into the house on the tail end of our conversation.

  Chapter 10 - Rabbit

  I couldn’t believe what I’d walked into. What the hell did Cherry think she was doing offering Myra up to Whiskey and Fox like that?

  “Calm down,” Spinner whispered to me. “It’s probably not what you think. I turned to frown at him because I knew my ears hadn’t deceived me. Besides, Cherry was laughing at my reaction, while Myra was blushing profusely.

  “What? Myra was telling me how much she missed riding and how she had once hoped to raise her kid around a club who would always have their back. I was just giving her options for how to make that happen,” Cherry tormented me while attempting to sound innocent. She kind of reminded me of her sister in that moment. I could almost smell the manipulation in the air.

  “Why the hell would Whiskey and Fox be your first thought?”

  Cherry shrugged her shoulders and winked at Myra who silently pleaded with her friend to stop talking. “They’re already daddies. So, it only made sense to pair her – what would the proper term be? – trio her with them.”

  “Cherry,” Spinner called out to her, a slight hint of warning in his tone just as the oven dinged.

  “Anyway, brunch is ready,” the woman called out cheerily as she turned to pull something from the oven.

  We were sitting through one of the most awkward brunches in the world when my brother decided to use me to break the tension. “You should see the tattoo Tango put on Rabbit’s ass last night. It’s classic,” my brother chuckled before shoving another bite of frittata into his pie hole.

  Both women turned their gazes to me at once. “You got a tattoo on your ass?” Myra asked as she winced, assuming appropriately that it must have hurt.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Cherry asked at the same time.

  “In my defense, I didn’t even know it was there until your asshole husband slapped me on the ass this morning,” I admitted to Cherry, while not quite ignoring Myra.

  “How could you not know that you got a tattoo?” Cherry’s concern, at that point, was touching. I didn’t get to answer her though because my brother slipped in with the truth instead.

  “Numbnuts decided to finally tie one on last night and got drunk off his gourd.”

  Cherry glanced at Myra who only subtly shrugged one shoulder before her stuffing her face. I could see the disbelief in her eyes turn to full-blown shock. Myra must have already told her that I had been drinking and my lovely sister-in-law had most likely sung my praises and told her that was impossible. Normally, she wouldn’t have been wrong. Unfortunately, that just made the rest of our meal even more awkward and stilted than before. Once we were done eating and the table was cleared, Cherry asked to speak to my brother alone for a minute and Myra took that opportunity to attempt to slip out of their house unnoticed.

  I noticed.

  I followed, all the way to her apartment, up the stairs, and through the door before she realized I had been hot on her heels.

  “Can I help you?” Myra asked as she turned around to see why I was inviting myself into her space.

  “I, um…” Shit. I didn’t know why I’d followed her out here in the first place.

  “You, um, what?” she asked as she tapped her foot impatiently.

  “A couple things, actually. Mind if I come in?”

  “I suppose not,” she begrudgingly agreed. Once we got inside and settled, I took in the changes she had made to the place since arriving in South Dakota. It looked homey and comfortable. Honestly, it was a smaller scale version of how I’d pictured furnishing my own home with Chastity. Only, I knew I’d have to settle for a very different look because it didn’t match Chastity’s personality at all. She was all wild and colorful, whereas Myra was more sedate and down to earth.

  “You just going to sit there all day and stare at my place, or was there something you needed?”

  I hadn’t noticed that she had been scurrying around her apartment, dropping things in a bag, like she was ready to head out on an adventure.

  “Do you have somewhere to be?”

  “Doctor’s appointment in Spearfish,” she informed me.

  “Oh, well,” I said as I stood back up, “I won’t keep you then.”

  “I still have 30 minutes before I need to leave.”

  “Okay. Well, I have several apologies to make to you. When you first got here, I heard you’d left your old man and that you were hiding out. My last relationship didn’t end on a great note, and I put my issues with Chastity on you while not knowing your story. I’m sorry I said the things I did, and treated you like the second coming of the cheating whore.”

  To my shock, Myra did not react at all the way I thought she would. Where I thought she would berate me for calling one of the twins a whore, since they had been her friends back in Oregon where they were apparently from, she threw her head back and laughed. “Second coming of the cheating whore…” she repeated as she continued to laugh. “I’ve heard Chastity called a lot of horrible things over the years, usually deserved, but that was the best! Did you mean the double entendre there or was that an accidental bonus?”

  “Um?”

  “You know because she’s a whore… and second coming seems could mean she got hers twice…” When I just stared at her, she laughed again and waved her hand in the air. “Never mind. It was just me then.”

  “Well, technically, I called you the whore, not her but…”

  She waved that thought away with her hand too as she continued to chuckle. “You know what I meant,” she told me.

  “And um, the second thing,” I decided to go on and get all the apologies out while she was apparently in a good mood. “I’m sorry if you saw me behaving like an asshole last night.” I noticed her questioning gaze.

  “Charlie told me you saw me before you left,” I pushed.

  “Yes, well, I did wonder briefly about your hypocrisy.”

  “Hypocrisy?”

  “Mmhmm. You don’t remember yelling about the overuse of pool tables in sex scenes in romance novels?” It was obviously a rhetorical question since she didn’t allow me time to answer. “Then, there you were abusing that poor table like that.” I could see the laughter she held back as her eyes twinkled with the effort.

  I stood there, taking in her words, and the fact that she was laughing all of it off like some sort of sick joke. “You’re…” I hesitated a moment before continuing, “kind of weird.”

  “Well, thanks, I guess.” She leaned down and picked a coat up off the chair. “You’re really bad at compliments.”

  “Out of practice, I guess.” What the hell else was I supposed to say? I came in here with the intent to apologize, but I honestly expected a fight about it. Maybe I had been with Chastity too long and it had seriously colored the way I saw real relationships working, whether just friendships or the romantic kind. How else could you explain why I’d thought Cherry had an ulterior motive earlier and then I expected Myra to be a complete bitch about an apology?

  “Listen, no offence, because I appreciate the gesture, and I accept your apologies by the way. Not that the last one was even necessary, because your night is your business and I was just a guest in the clubhouse. That’s your space. You don’t apologize to people for what they see when they step foot in your home. Anyway, I appreciate it, but I really do have to get going.”

  I followed her out and was about to head back to my brother’s place, since he had driven us here for breakfast, when I heard the familiar metal click, click sound and the failure of Myra’s Suburban to start. I sauntered back over and tapped on the window, to find her head down on the steering wheel as her shoulders shook.

  “Myra?” I called out when she didn’t immediately look up.

  She pulled the keys from the ignition, and motioned for me to back up. I stood there as she swung her short little legs around a
nd hopped out of the truck. Yeah, she needed some retractable steps for that beast since the damn thing didn’t even have regular running boards on it.

  “How am I supposed to take care of another human being when I can’t even get myself to a doctor appointment?”

  “Hey now!” I called out as I reached over, grabbed her shoulders, and pulled her to me. Myra was in my arms and wrapped up in a tight hug before she could even mutter a weak protest. “You’re going to do just fine when the time comes, and who says you can’t get to a doctor’s appointment? That’s what you have friends for, right?”

  She leaned back, glanced over toward Cherry and Spinner’s place, and then sighed. “I don’t want to keep bothering them. They’ve done so much for me already.”

  Well, that hurt a little bit. “I wasn’t talkin’ about them, darlin’.”

  One of her eyebrows shot up in what could only be called questioning sarcasm. Okay, I definitely remembered her fussing at me before about calling her all sorts of endearments, and if I was being honest, I did it this time just to get her riled up and mind off of the truck that wouldn’t start. “Wait here,” I told her. “Give me just a minute.” I ran to Spinner’s house, grabbed a set of keys off the hook by the door and yelled out to him. “Borrowing the truck,” before shutting the door behind me again.

  “Let’s go!” I told her as I headed toward Spinner’s truck. She stood there, unmoving.

  “You can’t just steal your brother’s truck to take me to my appointment.”

  “Borrow. I’m borrowing my brother’s truck, something I would have needed to do in order to get my ass back to the clubhouse where my ride is anyway. Don’t worry, I’ll fill his tank for him when I bring it back.”

  “Okay, well, we have enough time to stop at the clubhouse if you want to leave it there for him while you get your truck and then I can see if Charlie can give me a ride.”