That came from a timid young woman decked out in jeans, boots, and a bright orange Home Depot vest.
“Yes,” I said, letting my hands smooth down lazily along my hips as not to reach out and show my husband what I could do with my fist. “I want to get these black quartz countertops with the blue flecks in them. How do we go about doing that?”
“Thank fuckin’ Christ,” Tunnel muttered under his breath.
I glared at the man, and he shut up, but his lips continued to twitch as he tried to hold his smile away.
“I can help you with that,” the woman muttered.
“Well, let’s fuckin’ hope so, honey. You do work here.”
I looked at the ceiling. “Tunnel, don’t make me come over there.”
“Come on over, baby. I’d love for you to show me what you’re workin’ with.”
“Mom!” Sienna screeched. “Come look at this room!”
I looked away from the black countertops. The same black countertops that I’d chosen for my own house, but I had never gotten because Tunnel had passed the next week.
“Coming!” I called out, my heart in my throat at the memory.
God, I miss you, Tun.
Sienna was out in the hallway jumping up and down on the tips of her toes. “Hurry!”
Then she walked into the bedroom that I assumed would be hers, and squealed. “It has a princess bed, Mom!”
My heart clenched.
“It does?” I was surprised.
“And games and toys, oh look! A doll like the one Daddy bought me!”
I looked at the doll she was holding up in her hands. It was an American Girl doll, and one of the only things I was ever able to keep nice since Sienna was rough on all of her toys.
But that had been out of necessity on my part. I wanted her to have something from her father that she could look at in twenty years and not be embarrassed to show it to anyone.
“It’s beautiful, baby,” I murmured quietly. “You’ll have to thank them for their generosity.”
She beamed at me. “I love it!”
Then she was doing something in the closet, and I chose to look at the rest of the room.
The club had gone above and beyond when it came to decorating Sienna’s room.
She had everything in here that she could ever want or need.
This was getting weirder and weirder by the minute.
First my countertops, now Sienna’s room.
I was, quite honestly, scared to look at the rest of the house.
But that wasn’t the hardest part.
No, not seeing the colors that I would’ve decorated my own house in. Not even the bathroom done up exactly how I’d spoken with Tunnel about doing ours.
The hardest part was lying in the bed later that night, smelling my husband for the first time in forever and crying my heart out. That, my friends, was the worst.
Chapter 13
Marriage: when dating goes too far.
-Meme
Mina
A knock at my door woke me up early that morning, and I shifted in the bed and looked at my daughter.
“Mom?”
I sat up all the way.
“Yeah, baby?”
“This house…it doesn’t feel right.”
My brows rose, and I looked at the alarm clock on the opposite side of the bed from where I was sleeping, and noted the time.
Six oh six in the morning.
“What do you mean, honey?”
She walked over to the edge of the bed, the side where her father used to sleep next to me, and crawled into it.
She laid her head down on the pillow and stared at me through the lightening dawn.
“This house feels like home, but it’s not.”
I knew exactly what she meant.
“I like it here, but there’s something missing.”
There it was. And I got it because I also felt that way, too.
“I know,” I agreed.
“I don’t remember him.”
I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the ceiling.
“Let me tell you about him,” I said. “We met when we were very young.”
She chuckled. “I know that part. Tell me a funny story. Tell me something that’ll make me smile.”
I swallowed thickly.
It hurt to think about him. It hurt even more to talk about him.
Here I was, all of these years later, and it still felt like I’d just lost him yesterday.
There was no moving on for me. Tunnel was my everything. He was the man who was my first and my last, and I was okay with that.
I just needed everyone else to be okay with that, too.
***
“This is the clubhouse,” Ellen said.
I looked around, noting that it wasn’t much different from Tunnel’s old chapter’s clubhouse. The place, although it looked more like a house than a huge room, was really an enormous man cave. There were huge flat screen televisions hanging on each wall, and on one wall, there were even two.
It was decorated in a muted brown that would be able to hide dirt and grime really well.
And the chairs. Yeah, those were really similar. It was like they’d all went in, sat on some couches, and bought the ones that were the most comfortable. None of them matched, and some of them were even different styles of furniture completely.
“It’s…nice,” I grinned.
And it was. It really was nice. Well, as long as you didn’t care if shit matched, which I did.
She started to chuckle, and once again I was surprised to find her there.
I’d arrived with Silas just a few minutes ago, and she’d been one of the first people I saw as I walked up the steps.
She was with her husband…who was definitely not the same man that she’d gone out with to the ballgame a week ago.
I hadn’t yet seen the other man that I saw her with at the ballgame, but for some reason, I knew he was there. It was as if I could sense him.
“Not to sound rude or anything, but when you went to that ballgame, you were with another man,” I whispered quietly. “I don’t understand.”
Her husband, who was close but not directly at her side, because he was giving us the illusion of privacy, snorted.
Ellen turned to look at him. “Jessie,” she indicated to the man who hadn’t let her out of his sight. “That’s my husband. The other man I was with was Ghost. He’s another one of the brothers here, and he didn’t want to go to the game by himself. I was the only one free, even though I’m sure he would’ve preferred to go with anyone other than me. Apparently, I’m a talkative person, and I annoy people while they watch baseball games.”
She said that last part staring a hole into the side of her husband’s head, and I had to pinch my lips together to keep from laughing.
This couple, I could see. Ellen and that other man? No. No way in hell. He’d been too intense. Too masculine. Too scary.
I couldn’t see why anybody would want to be with him. Well, except me. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
And then, as if he sensed my thoughts, he appeared on the back porch; the only thing that lit his way was a small green light outside. It’d been a light I’d asked about when I’d gotten here.
Apparently, green lights were for veterans. According to Ellen, they kept a green light burning here all day, every day, in support of veterans everywhere.
I’d never been a veteran, and neither had Tunnel, but we’d both known many veterans, and a few were important people in our lives. Hence the reason I thoroughly approved of this gesture, as I made a mental note to get a green light bulb for my house as soon as I found the nearest Wal-Mart.
“Ghost is here,” I murmured to no one in particular.
But both Jessie, the man Jessie was talking to, and Ellen all turned.
A hush came over the room after that, and the m
oment that Ghost came inside, all eyes were on him.
“What?” he rasped.
And yes, I do mean rasped. He had a smoker’s voice. One that said he smoked and smoked a lot.
Which kind of disheartened me a little bit. I didn’t like smokers. My father had been one, and even the faintest whiff of smoke reminded me of the man who loved to beat the shit out of my mother, often while he had a cigarette dangling from his mouth.
A big man that had been introduced to me as ‘Big Papa’ earlier, walked toward him and said a few words.
I saw the moment Ghost realized that I was in the room.
His eyes swept over the room, stopping on me, before he quickly looked away.
He turned back to Big Papa as he pulled a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and slipped them on, causing me to slump a bit in disappointment.
I wanted to see his eyes. Badly.
But with him all the way across the room, that obviously wasn’t going to happen, especially considering that I had really poor eyesight.
It was my heart, though, that grabbed my attention with the way that it was beating out of control. With just that one single sweep of the room, his gaze briefly locking on me, and I was nearly shaking in my pretty, new boots.
“I really like those leggings,” Ellen broke into my contemplation. “I wouldn’t have thought that the octopus print would’ve been very cute, but they are adorable. I sell leggings at my store. I’ll have to see if I can order any like that.”
I looked down at my leggings.
They were my primary wardrobe choice now after a woman from work got me my first pair for my birthday. Every time a pop-up sale would show up in my Facebook news feed—I followed over ten leggings sale pages—I would buy at least one pair. Most of the time, it was more like two or three pairs.
Now, I owned more than fifty-five pairs, and I probably would’ve owned even more than that had I not given away a few pairs to friends as birthday presents over the last year.
Yes, I was addicted to leggings.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I didn’t think they’d be all that cute either, to be honest. I originally ordered these for a friend for her birthday, but when I saw them after I got them, I couldn’t give them away like I’d originally intended. This is one of my favorite pairs.”
She nodded. “I tried to wear leggings out of the house once, and my husband told me I needed to go change. I’d love to have some, but they wouldn’t be practical.”
“That’s a good thing, Elle,” Jessie offered his two cents, not bothering to act like he wasn’t listening to our conversation any longer. “Because I’d seriously have to spank your ass, and those leggings wouldn’t offer much in the way of protection.”
I grinned. He was, of course, correct.
“I don’t have a husband to tell me no.”
I heard something crunch behind me, and saw that Ghost was standing there, next to the food table, holding a beer can in his hand that he’d somehow crushed.
I looked up to see his eyes, but was caught with the glare of the glasses covering them.
He stared, but that gaze was too intense for me, so I looked away.
And I felt him there, for at least twenty minutes, while he spoke quietly to another member of the club, this man was huge and bulky with kind eyes and had been introduced to me earlier as Sunshine…or something similar to that.
I felt like my skin was about to burst into flames.
“Can you give me a drink, Mister?”
I turned at the sound of my child’s voice, and I saw that she was standing in front of Ghost, pointing to a pitcher of tea.
Normally, she would’ve just gotten it herself, but the pitcher was completely filled to the brim, and she didn’t have the arm strength yet to lift it up and hold it without spilling.
“Yeah, Sugar Girl. I can get you a drink,” Ghost said, picking up the pitcher as easily as he would lift his own hand. “You got a cup?”
My entire body locked.
Sugar Girl.
It could’ve been a coincidence. Sure, it could. It had to be.
No one else would know to call her that but my husband. It had to be a coincidence!
Memories of the first day that Tunnel called our child ‘Sugar Girl’ assaulted me.
“Go give Daddy a kiss, baby,” I patted my daughter’s diapered bottom.
She toddled over to her daddy, who was in his chair in front of the TV, still in his police uniform, and tried to pull herself up.
Automatically, Tunnel hooked an arm under her diaper-clad butt and pulled her into the chair.
She did the rest of the work and scrambled up his chest to get to his face.
Then she started laying kisses on his face. Except they weren’t normal kisses. They were open-mouthed kisses with lots of slobber and a little bit of tongue.
“Ohh, thank you, Sugar Girl.” Tunnel said laughingly. “I love you, too.”
Sienna gave him a gummy smile, her lone white tooth glinting along the bottom of her mouth, and then fell face forward into his chest.
And, just like she always did, she was out like a light a few seconds later.
“I wish I had your superpowers,” I murmured.
He grinned, then lifted his forearm to wipe the drool from his face.
“One day you’ll be her everything, baby. So, right now, just let me enjoy our Sugar Girl.”
He had no clue how right he was. He’d enjoyed the best of Sienna’s baby years and had died right before she’d turned two.
A lump formed in my throat at those thoughts.
My husband had a name problem. He never once called any of us by the same name. Sometimes he would cycle through about four names. For our daughter it was Sienna, Dee, a shortened version of her middle name, Sugar Girl, or See. For me, it was Mina, Minnie, Philly, a shortened version of my actual name, Philomina, or Min. I never knew what would come out of my husband’s mouth, so we really had to be ready to answer to any of them.
“You okay, girl?” Ellen asked.
I nodded.
“Would you like to meet the rest of the girl squad?” she asked. “They’re all in the family room, or they would’ve been out here to greet you by now.”
No, no I did not. Because doing that would require my leaving this spot, and I liked this spot. The man, Ghost, was like a wall of fire at my back. Even though he wasn’t touching me, I could feel his heat practically seeping into me.
“How’s work going for you?” I heard asked behind me.
“Good and bad,” came Ghost’s reply.
I froze at that raspy voice.
“Mina?”
I was frozen in between leaving and staying, and I couldn’t get my feet to move.
I turned to look over my shoulder at the man at my back and was unsurprised to find his eyes on me.
What was it about this man that made me act like this?
Ellen touched my arm, and the connection between us was severed.
I took a step away from Ghost. Then another, and another, until I was all the way across the room.
“Where to?” I asked breathlessly.
***
Ghost
I watched her go, feeling like a piece of my heart was walking away from me.
“You’re going to either have her back in a matter of days, or you’re going to have her so mad at you that everyone within a two-mile radius will hear everything that has ever happened between the two of y’all when she starts screaming it at you because she’s so pissed off at you,” Sean pointed out helpfully.
I turned my glare to him.
My heart wasn’t beating right. It felt like it was skipping way too many beats to be considered safe.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I told him.
Sean grinned.
“So, Sugar Girl?” Sean teased.
I blew out a breath.
“Did you see her freeze when y
ou said that to her daughter?” Sean continued.
I gritted my teeth.
“And your daughter. Man, she’s fuckin’ adorable. She looks just like you,” Sean continued. “Those eyes.”
Yeah, those eyes. Those were all mine.
I was happy that her eyes had stayed green.
“How long is this going to go on before you make a move?” Sean asked, this time really expecting an answer.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I never planned to do anything, but it’s getting harder and harder to stay away.”
My gaze turned to zero in on my daughter, who was standing across the room staring at the other kids. She was standing off to the side, silently taking everything in, and I realized that my eye color wasn’t the only thing she’d gotten.
She was watchful and observant like me, too.
Chapter 14
If you don’t have anything nice to say, say it anyway. Sometimes motherfuckers need to hear the truth.
-Ghost’s secret thoughts
Ghost
Day five of Mina and Sienna being in Mooresville
I watched her live in my house, and I knew that this would have to be taken care of quickly. I couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t watch her cry in my bed. Couldn’t watch her walking around looking so lost and sad. Couldn’t stay away from her another minute when all I wanted to do was wrap my arms around her and never, ever let her go.
“You know, one of these days, she’s going to find you standing out here.”
I grunted.
“You’re creepy as fuck standing here, too,” Sean offered his two cents.
I’d heard the two men arrive, of course.
I just hadn’t acknowledged them because I didn’t feel like talking. Obviously, they weren’t taking my subtle hints.
“I’m standing in my home, Sean.”
“No,” he disagreed. “You’re standing in a RV. And ignoring everyone and everything so you can watch the woman that you won’t claim as your woman.”
I shot him the finger. “Fuck off.”
“Someone’s pulling up.”
My head whipped around and I saw Loki, one of my old club brothers who also thought I was dead, pulling up with his wife, and children in tow.
Beard Up Page 8
