Raine still felt a bit angry. He couldn’t think straight.
Cassie stepped closer to him. “What did you say to her when she told you she was carrying your child? Did you say anything at all? Or did you just stomp out of the room?”
Raine flinched as he lifted his eyes to the hallway where he could see the door to his bedroom.
“That’s what I thought.” Cassie scorned him. “All you thought about was you. Think about this big man, it would have been hard to lose her if Bane wanted her dead, but it would have been a hell of a lot harder to know he was killing your unborn child along with her. She knew that. Maybe she just didn’t want you to have to carry that memory too.” Cassie turned and walked away leaving the four men feeling like shit.
“Oh fuck what did I just do?” Raine whispered brokenly.
“You fucked up bad, boy.” Bones shook his head. “Better go see if you can fix this before she doesn’t let you even try.”
Raine took one step then another toward the door where his whole life was waiting for him behind. His heart grew heavier with every step he took. Then the door was right there in front of him. He thought for a moment about what Cassie had said. Shame weighted down his shoulders when he realized she was right. Cricket hadn’t trusted him easily but she did the right thing with Dusty. He leaned his forehead against the wooden panel of the door. And she was right about what she’d said about losing Cricket. That would have been hard enough but knowing he was losing his child too? That would have been something he never would have gotten over. That would have shattered his very soul.
He had so much to make up to her. Reaching for the door knob, he twisted it open and walked inside. He thought at first she was no longer in the room but then he found her. She was wrapped in blanket sitting in the corner of the room. She was cradling the little puppy in her arms, crying quietly.
When she heard the door close, she slowly lifted her head.
Raine could see the path the tears had made down her face and the sight just about broke his heart. Slowly, he moved toward her and when he got close to where she was sitting, he had to freeze.
Cricket watched him get just so close then she couldn’t help it, she began moving away with each step he took forward.
“Don’t run away from me,” he begged her. “I fucked this up so badly. I can’t believe it.” Raine dropped to his knees and stared at her for a long moment. “I am so sorry baby.”
* * * *
Cricket watched him without saying a word. At the moment, her mind was a complete blank. She knew her heart was beating in her chest but she couldn’t feel it. The agony of his rejection was still too fresh. Her heart was pulsing raw pain instead of blood through her veins and that’s all she could feel right now. She could hear his words and even understand them but she was frozen inside.
“Please give me a second chance. Let me make this right. Today has been a hell of a day for both of us. Our emotions have been all over the place and I fucked everything up. You will never know how sorry I am about that,” Raine told her watching her carefully. “I was only thinking about myself when I should have been thinking about you.” He smiled. “I’m going to be a daddy. We’re going to have a baby. He’ll have some of you and some of me inside him. We can watch him grow up to be the kind of man every parent wants their kid to be. Sweetness, I can’t wait to meet him.”
“It could be a little girl you know,” she whispered faintly. She watched him with suspicious eyes. Just like the day she arrived here, she didn’t know if she could trust him. She wanted to, she really did but he had betrayed her once and she didn’t know if she could trust him now. “Do you want this child?”
“Oh god, yes I want this baby. He’s going to be our child and I can’t wait for him or her to be born.” Raine told her reverently. “He or she will have a whole family waiting to welcome him or her. He or she will grow up to know he or she is welcomed by not only me and my family but the rest of the club.”
Cricket hung her head low. “Do you hate me for not telling you before now?” She waited desperately for his answer. It would break her heart to hear that he didn’t love her anymore but for the sake of her child, she would endure it. She loved her baby and would do anything to make this omission right.
“Sweetness .I could never hate you. I love you with all my heart. I need you like I need the air to breathe.” Then he reached out slowly to touch her cheek.
She flinched a bit but didn’t move away from him. His touch began to thaw her frozen heart. “I can stay then? And be your wife? Be a mother to this child?”
“Dammit.” Raine closed his eyes at the pain and the hopefulness in her voice. “I wouldn’t want you anywhere else but at my side, in my bed and as a wife and mother to my life. My life wouldn’t be worth spit if I didn’t have you beside me.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Yes, oh god yes,” Raine whispered. Tears fell down his face. “I want you so much. I love you baby.”
Cricket had never seen this man cry. She never knew a stronger man. This finally convinced her. “I love you too. I was waiting until today to tell you about the baby. I wanted the timing to mean something so I was waiting until my birthday to tell you. Then Bane came around and I thought I would save you anymore pain.”
Raine laid a finger over her mouth to stop her from talking. “Hush sweetheart. I know why you did what you did. I should have realized that from the start but I was an ass and only thought of myself.”
Cricket tried to hang her head but Raine wouldn’t let her. “I’m a man and therefore a fool. I will do things that will make you angry, and probably make you cry but I hope never to get this close to losing you again. I’m used to taking care of only me, so I’m not used to thinking beyond myself but I’m learning. For a moment, I lost sight of what I had to do.”
“And what did you have to do?”.
“I had to think about you. I should have put you first and I didn’t do that.” He told her simply. “If I had I would have known that you didn’t set out to hurt me or cause me pain. I would have known that you were thinking about me. Instead, I was selfish and ended up hurting you.” He shook his head. “I want to ask you to forgive me for any acts of sheer stupid that I know I’ll do in the future.”
“Then maybe I should ask the same thing. I’m bound to make mistakes along the way too.”
Raine lifted her head to see her eyes. “Are you okay? Is the baby okay? I never thought to ask until now.”
Cricket shrugged. “I’m sure we’re fine. I haven’t seen a doctor yet but I think we’re ok.”
“What about the tat you got yesterday?” he asked. “Will that harm the baby?”
Cricket shook her head. “No I don’t think so. Rembrandt used a special ink. It wasn’t as harsh as regular ink would have been.”
“Thank god for that,” he whispered. “I just remembered Cassie couldn’t get any ink while she was carrying their kids.”
Cricket nodded. “She told me that. She told me why she got the ink too. To cover her scars. She’s led a hell of a life huh? And I thought I had it bad. Her life would have broken me.”
“No kid should have had that life,” he agreed with her.
“I think that’s why Redemption House is so damn important to her. It’s her way of giving back to the people who helped her when she needed it.” Cricket sighed. “I wish I could do something like that.”
Raine shifted his body and slid down the wall next to her. “Yeah? What would you do?”
“I don’t know. There wouldn’t be much I could do, I suppose. I didn’t even go to school, you know.”
Raine closed his eyes. He’d forgotten her life had been so different than his own. Wrapping his arm carefully around her shoulder he told her, “You know you can go back to school online if you want. You could do what Cassie and Peaches did and get a GED. They went to a public library to study. You could at least do it here. If you wanted to that is.”
Cricket snap
ped her head around to stare at him. “Really? I could do that? You wouldn’t mind?”
“Oh course, I wouldn’t mind! Why would I?” he frowned.
Cricket shrugged. She didn’t want to tell him about that.
Raine hesitated then cupped her chin and brought her face up. “Why do you think I would mind?” he asked her softly.
“After we moved to Maine, my dad was so lost he never noticed if we went to school or not. I know he loved us but without my mom, he had no direction. Cordy never wanted to go, so she kept me home with her so much that I never got the chance to learn anything. I mean I could barely read. I tried to argue with her but she was bigger so she always won those fights. Then after my Dad died and we took off, she told me I couldn’t go the school or I’d lose the only home I had and that was with her. Then she had Dusty and I needed to watch over him because she wasn’t going to.” She shrugged. “I guess I never thought about going to school anymore after that. I was too old for one thing. I did the best I could for Dusty, teaching him what I knew but I probably got a lot of that wrong too.”
Raine shook his head. “But you didn’t get that wrong. Gambler tells me that Dusty is such a smart kid, he’s way ahead of all the other kids in his class. What you did for Dusty was you sparked his mind to want to learn about new stuff. With all your stories and stargazing, you gave him an edge most of the kids now days don’t have.”
“Really? Wow I did not know that. I thought I was just telling him stories.” Cricket wrapped her arm around his waist and curled into his chest.
“We’re going to go see a doctor soon and get both you and the baby figured out,” Raine told her. “Then maybe we can talk to Deke about getting our own house, maybe even build one here on the compound. Would you like that?”
Cricket froze. “Do you mean that? Really, our own house? We could have our own house?”
Raine smiled. “Yeah baby, we can have our own house. If that’s what you want we can get it.” He looked around the room he’d called home for so long. “This place was all I needed when I was single but now we’re married and we need a place we can call home.”
“That sounds so nice. Home.” Cricket snuggled in closer to him. Closing her eyes, she drifted off to sleep. The worry and fuss behind her now. She was starting to feel safe again and in his arms, it felt so good.
Raine felt her relax enough to sleep and he knew she’d forgiven him. He waited a bit longer before he shifted her up into his arms and then he carried her to bed. Lying down beside her, he fell asleep wrapped in her body.
Max jumped up on the bed beside them and found a spot down by their feet and curled up and soon he was sleeping too.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They slept for a little while then got up and joined everyone else in the main room. There was some tension in the air but it wasn’t because of the situation Raine had caused earlier it was because they didn’t know what the hell Bane Jessin was up to.
When Bane had left earlier, he said he would handle the situation with Stark but no one knew exactly how he would do just that. They all knew he was a killer but that’s all they knew about his skills.
“Have you heard anything about Bane?” Cricket asked Deke at one point in the early evening as they all sat down to supper.
Deke stared at her for a moment before shaking his head at her query. “No I haven’t. Reaper and his MC are watching Stark’s compound. They figure he’s got about a dozen or so men with him there.”
“What about the rest of his men?” she asked.
“We’ve found and neutralized about nine or ten and we’re looking for more.”
Cricket glanced over at Raine before turning back to Deke. “Nine or ten?”
Deke nodded slowly. “Normally, I wouldn’t discuss club business with an old lady but you have the right to know. Stark sent three men here, another couple of men to Boston, at least two to Maine and another two or three to the Hellspawn MC. We also have heard that more than a couple of his men just took off on him. They left their colors behind but they’re gone and they don’t plan on coming back.”
Deke sat back in his chair and stared at her for a moment. “That fact explains just what kind of leader this Zeron Stark is. And it isn’t good news by any means.”
Cricket frowned. “What does it tell you that it doesn’t tell me?”
“For a man to join an MC they have to commit to that MC with his whole heart. It is a lifetime membership you know. The MC demands first place in its members lives. It’s not a commitment they take lightly. But for a man to leave his colors behind and hit the road, they are breaking that commitment. They all know they can never go back. In this case, they would face certain death if they even tried to go back. They know Stark would put a bullet in their heads without even flinching.”
“O,.” Cricket whispered as she thought of that very possibility happening.
Deke shook his head. “I don’t know if Stark was crazy before he went to prison or he got crazy inside but Pound said he came out a changed man and it wasn’t a good change. It doesn’t look as if he’s giving up on finding the woman he knows as Cricket and we all know Cordy is dead.”
The whole room was quiet now as they listened to their leader.
“To answer your earlier question, no I don’t know what Bane is going to do. He wanted twenty four hours so now we wait. We’ll give him his twenty four hours.”
“And after that? What happens after his time is up?” she asked.
“We have eyes on Stark’s compound. For now, we wait and watch. After that, we might have to gather our men and take him out. Do I want to go to war with a crazy man? Hell no, but I won’t go in alone. We have the backing of at least three other MC’s. We’ll have the manpower we need to take him and his crew out. It’s not a decision we make lightly either. They have a right to exist the same as we do. Most MC’s follow the rules. Stark isn’t playing nice with the others and for that, he needs to learn a lesson.”
Just then, Deke’s phone pinged with an incoming message. He logged in and read the message then swore a blue streak. Swiping to view a picture that was sent to him, he swore again. Then he turned to Cricket and snarled, “What in Sam’s hell is your uncle doing?” He turned his phone around to show her and Raine the picture he got.
It was Bane all dressed in black siting high in a tree. He had a pair of binoculars around his neck and more guns on his body than he would need going in to combat.
“Who sent you this?” Raine demanded.
“Reaper. He and his men are watching Stark’s compound.” Deke growled.
“He’s looking like he wants to start World War three,” Cricket whispered. “What is he doing there?” She glanced at the windows overlooking the dooryard. It was dark outside now, just as it was in Pennsylvania. What was her uncle doing at Stark’s compound?
The phone pinged again and Deke checked his messages. “Oh, fucking shit.” He swore. Looking up at Cricket he announced, “Your uncle just began a fucking war and he’s not taking any prisoners.”
Cricket rushed to her feet. The chair she was sitting on crashed backward to the floor. “He did WHAT?” she screamed.
Deke read the message Reaper sent him a few minutes ago. “Quote, “The old bastard is picking off Stark’s men one by one with a silencer attached to his fucking rifle.” Unquote.” Deke glared. “So far, he’s gotten three and the numbers are rising fast.”
“Are Reaper and his men helping?” Raine asked.
Deke shook his head. “No, they don’t want Bane to know they’re there. They don’t want to catch any crossfire or get shot accidently on purpose. Right now, they’re just watching.”
“They’re crazy if they think for one moment, Bane doesn’t know they’re there,” Cricket warned Deke. “He’s smarter than they give him credit for. He can sense a person even if he can’t see them. He knew I was in his house but he couldn’t see me.” She ran her fingers through her hair. Looking at Deke she begged, “Please tell Re
aper that. Tell him Bane knows he and his men are there. Tell them not to try and stop him.”
Deke nodded and began to type her message.
The tension in the room skyrocketed and everyone waited with bated breath for the next message to come in. It took forever for Reaper to get back to Deke.
Supper was long forgotten and Cricket had retrieved her puppy and was holding him in her arms when the next message came from Reaper. It was close to midnight and everyone was still sitting there waiting.
Deke read it then began shaking his head. He hung his head for a moment then looked over at Cricket.
Raine moved to hold her as if to prepare her for bad news.
Cricket began to shake. “What? What did Reaper say?”
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