Steele opened the laptop and powered it on. “To tell you the truth, I’m not necessarily sure just what the fuck I’ve found. I’m not sure how it fits into anything. What I did do, though, was run a search on white vans registered to people here in the city. One of them is registered to someone that just came on our radar. Raymond Tucker, principal of the middle school that Bianca taught at.”
“Same guy who keeps giving her shit too,” Jagger growled. “What does he have to do with any of this?”
“No idea. I need to check around with some of my contacts. The others are just random people, except for Dino, president of the Vojnik.”
Liam sighed. “How did I know he would be involved in this? Let’s go crazy here. He wants to make sure that I’m really interested in being the leader of this club, he’s gonna find out. Should we let them know just how serious we are?”
Nobody wanted to start a war, but everyone knew that if someone was questioning their president, there would have to be retaliation.
“Maybe we’ve been too quiet,” Tyler said, covering his mouth with his hand. “People think we’re soft now?”
“That’s a definite possibility.” Liam raised an eyebrow. “You know I’ve never been one to do something just for the shock value, but maybe that’s needed here.”
“Maybe we can kill two birds with one stone,” Jagger spoke up.
“What are you thinking?”
“Warn off Money Bags in a shocking way?”
Nobody had liked the look of the man at the club tonight, and it went without saying that he did need to take his obsession down a notch.
“Do we have anybody who’s opposed to this idea?” Liam asked as he looked at the group around him.
No one raised a hand in opposition, and Jagger couldn’t help but feel vindication for that. He wasn’t the only one who got a bad feeling when it came to this man, and it did him good to see that his brothers felt the same way.
“We’ll meet here tomorrow night and come up with a plan.”
Jagger raised a hand. “Whatever it is, it can’t come back on Bianca. That’s my only stipulation.”
“Trust me, when we’re done with him, he won’t have anything to say to anyone,” Tyler promised. Since Meredith had been violated, he didn’t take too well to men who threatened women. To say he hadn’t liked what he heard or saw was putting it mildly.
“Then agreed, we’ll meet back here tomorrow.”
Liam adjourned the meeting, and the group of them went their own separate ways.
Jagger got to his dorm room and stopped, his hand on his doorknob. He felt just the least little bit guilty. He wouldn’t be able to tell Bianca about any of this. If she didn’t know, then she wouldn’t have to lie, but it wasn’t a great feeling after all they had shared. Shaking his head, he told himself that above all he had to keep her safe, and sometimes that would mean keeping her completely in the dark.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jagger quietly let himself into his dorm, surprised to find Bianca still awake.
“What are you doin’ still up?” he asked, shutting the door behind him.
She sat in the chair facing his bed, a textbook in her lap. Grinning, she answered, “You forget that I’m a complete night owl. Usually I don’t go to bed until 2 a.m. It’s the nature of having the job I do.”
“When you actually get into a full-time teaching position, it’s gonna be rough on you,” he laughed, taking his cut and shirt off.
“Don’t I know it? How’d your meeting go?”
“Good,” he nodded, not elaborating on anything. It was best to just leave things open ended.
Bianca watched as he continued taking his clothes off and then pulled the covers of the bed back. “Are we going to bed?” she asked, her eyebrow raised.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m tired.”
She stood up and divested herself of her clothes too, leaving her naked. “Can I have a shirt?”
“You know where they are.” He pointed to his dresser and watched as she walked over and picked something out that she liked.
Putting it over her head, she sauntered over and got in next to him, cuddling up to his side. She sighed as she sank into him, feeling his arm come around her shoulders and holding her tightly against him. “You tired?” she asked.
“Why?” He couldn’t help the shit-eating grin that spread across his face.
“Not for that!” She smacked him on the arm. “I just want to talk.”
“Talk about what?” He was genuinely interested in what she had to say, but he thought that maybe this would be about him.
“I want to know about you. I feel like you know so much about me, and really all I know about is that your parents were assholes, Jagger isn’t your God-given name, and you’re part of a motorcycle club.”
“That’s really all you know about me?” he teased.
“You’re sweet as pie and fuck like a cast member of Magic Mike,” she deadpanned.
Jagger laughed. “I see what you did there. You work in a strip bar and then you paid me a compliment by saying I could be a stripper. I’m just trying to decide if I should give you what you want.”
“How do you know what I want? I just told you I want to talk.”
He sighed again. She was right, almost everything about their relationship was open – except for the past. He loved this woman, he had to trust her.
“Alright. Ask me something.”
Bianca debated. Did she really want to ask what was on the tip of her tongue or not? She didn’t want to put him out or piss him off, but she was curious, she couldn’t help it.
“What was so bad about your childhood?”
He looked at the ceiling as he obviously tried to figure out what and how to tell her. His fingers twisted in her hair, the motion seeming to soothe him. “It’s not that my childhood was bad,” he admitted.
“Then what was it?”
“Strict. No love. Trouble. God. Those are the things I remember.”
It was confusing to her – what he was talking about? “I’m not sure that I understand.”
“I learned to care more about being what my parents interpreted as ‘Godly’ than care about who I was as a person. I grew to hate church and anything having to do with organized religion because it was always force-fed down my throat,” he explained, swallowing hard and tightening his arm around her shoulders.
“Was that hard for you?” She got the sense that it was.
“Yeah, because as a child, you’re groomed to believe that your parents know what’s right for you, what the right thing to do is. I was being groomed to preach. I knew the Bible back to front, front to back. When my eyes were opened to the fact that while these people were ‘Godly’ they were at the same time batshit crazy, it hurt. I floundered until I turned eighteen, and then I had no direction whatsoever until I met Tyler and Liam.”
“How did your parents take it?”
He laughed. The sound was rough and hollow. “I haven’t spoken to my parents or any other member of my family since I left on my eighteenth birthday. I got my GED and started working odd jobs. What really hurts is that I have a little sister I haven’t been able to get in contact with. I just have this vision of her, barefoot and pregnant, bowing to a man. Ya know, being a good servant because that’s all she’ll ever be. In their minds, women aren’t meant to be more than that.”
“What ruined everything for you, Jagger?”
Bianca felt like there was a piece of this missing. A big portion that he was talking around – something he didn’t want to admit to anyone because if he admitted it, it made it true.
“I seriously can’t fucking believe I’m going to tell you this.”
She rubbed his arm. “You don’t have to if it hurts too much, but you and I both know we’ve built this relationship on being honest with each other. I’ll not look at you differently if you don’t tell me, but I will be a little disappointed that you can’t be honest with me.”
That gutted him, seriously gutted him. She was right. They had built this whole relationship on being honest with each other. If he couldn’t tell her what had happened, then whom could he tell? At this point he had never uttered the words to another human being as it was. Maybe it would be the balm that his soul needed. Maybe then he could get over all his hang-ups and seek his sister out, make sure she was doing well and not under the thumb of the religious sect.
“The summer I turned 15, I was invited to do a camp with our church. It was a huge accomplishment, it really was something that I had worked very hard to get invited to. I had spent a large portion of that school year talking to the preacher and making sure that I was in good enough favor to be invited.” He took a deep breath.
Bianca slightly ran her nails along his strong forearm. She could tell that he was really struggling with this and she almost wanted to tell him to stop, but another part of her wondered if maybe he needed to get it out. Maybe that’s why it was so hard for him to talk about it.
“I went and it was amazing. I knew with everything that I had that God was calling me to preach, he had so many good things in store for me. I knew that I was going to make my family—both immediate and church—so proud.”
“What happened?” she asked, wanting him to get it out. Her stomach was rolling, wondering just what he would have a hard time telling her, this man who was always so strong.
“A couple of days before the end of the camp, I was called to the head counselor’s office. It wasn’t unusual for kids to be called there and for things to be discussed. So I went in, didn’t think anything about it just being the two of us. You have to understand,” he continued. “This was someone that I looked up to, someone that I wanted to be like. This person…he was who I modeled myself after, who I wanted to make proud.” His voice became strangled and she got a horrible feeling.
“Jagger, baby, if you don’t want to talk about this, it’s okay…”
He cut her off. “No, I need to tell someone this. I really do.”
She watched as he took a moment, rubbing his free hand over his face and struggling for the next breath. Bianca hated this, someone had hurt him.
“So I go in there, and we’re talking about me going to a seminary college when I’ve graduated. At that point, I was so set in what I was going to do that I had begun taking advanced classes. I was pretty far ahead in high school—I was looking to go into college before I even turned eighteen.” His voice dropped a couple of octaves, and she watched as his blue eyes took on a faraway look. “To this day, I don’t even know how it happened. One minute I was talking to this man who was my inspiration to be everything that I ever wanted to be. The next minute he had me pressed up against a wall and was trying to kiss me and sticking his hand down my pants.”
Bianca gasped, her hand flying over her mouth. “What?” Of everything she had thought he might tell her—this wasn’t it, at all.
“Yeah,” he choked. “I didn’t know what to do for a split second, but even though back then I was ‘Godly’, I still had my fuckin’ temper. I knew about sex too, I wasn’t a virgin. Even at that age, I knew what it was to like women and to like to fuck them. Unlike some of the people in our sect, I didn’t see sex as a sin. I liked it, and I felt like as long as I liked it, then it was fine. This man trying to make this dirty, it pissed me off.”
She could just imagine. He was such a puzzle, this man that she loved. “Did you kill him?” she asked, almost positive that was what the next line in his story would be.
He tightened his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. “No. That’s not to say I didn’t want to. I was so ready to, but a girl that I knew came storming in right as I had him on the ground just beating the shit out of him. She knew looking at the two of us what happened. Turns out, he had gotten her pregnant.”
“How old was she?” Bianca asked.
“Fourteen.” His voice was flat. “Can you believe that? These people that I had looked up to were nothing but monsters and pedophiles.”
“Did you tell your parents?”
Another bark of a laugh. “Sure did. My parents asked me what I did to encourage the devil.”
“Seriously?” That made her mad for him.
“Yeah. Seriously.” He breathed deeply. “I lost my faith that day—not only in God, but in humanity. I’ve not been able to get it completely back since.”
She had a sneaking suspicion that it still bothered him, the things that he did as a member of this club. “Do the things that you do make you feel like a bad person?”
“I feel remorse, I really do. I struggle with the things I’m asked to do a lot of the time, but I love this family. I love that they’ve taken me in. I don’t feel like I’m forced to do things, but every once in a while I do have to drop to my knees and ask God for forgiveness. I still ask for forgiveness for leaving my sister. Out of everything that I’m sorry about, that’s the thing that bothers me most.”
“If you want, I can try to help you find her,” she offered softly.
He inhaled deeply, burying his mouth in her neck, pulling her tighter into his embrace. “You,” he started and then stopped, swallowing hard, “are the one thing in my life since all this happened that makes me believe in my faith again. You,” he ran his hands through her hair, cupping her face and kissing her softly on the lips, “are the closest I’ve come to God in a long time.”
She inhaled just as deeply. That was a lot of power to give someone, but she would take that on for him. She would do anything he asked her to. “Me too,” she told him, hugging his body closely to hers. They were both raw, but she had to tell him one thing before they sank into sleep.
“Jagger?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re still the hottest, most amazingly sexy specimen of a man I’ve ever seen,” she told him, running her hands up along his sides.
His breath hitched and he smiled, mischievousness glinting his eyes. “You’re not so bad yourself there, Hawks.”
She pinched his skin between her fingers and growled, laughing when he rolled them so that he stretched out on top of her, pushing her deep into the mattress.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“I love you too, and I do thank God for you—every day that you’re allowed to be in my life.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Plans were coming together for the Heaven Hill MC. Somehow they had to prove that Raymond Tucker and the Vojnik knew each other. After discussing it for hours, the decision was made to break into Raymond Tucker’s home and see what they could find. Everyone agreed that if there was something that would prove the connection Raymond would be cocky enough to have it at his home. It was obvious the way he went about things that he thought he was untouchable.
“I’m tellin’ you and Layne right now. Don’t get caught.” Liam pointed a finger at Jagger as he and Layne were getting their equipment together.
Jagger’s palms were sweaty. He wasn’t the type of person to do a B&E. He would do it though, just like he explained to Bianca the night before.
Bianca. What he wouldn’t give to still be lying in bed with her rather than preparing to do this. “This can’t come back on her,” he warned the group again.
“It’s not going to,” Tyler assured his friend. He clamped a hand on Jagger’s back. “I hate to do this, but we have got to the figure out the connection, and since it’s not staring us in the face, we’ve got to do something about it. We’ll keep her name out of this. I promise you that.”
Out of everyone in the group, Jagger did believe Tyler. The big man didn’t make it a point to lie to others. If he thought something was the truth, he straight up told you.
“I’m counting on it.”
Layne was all business as he put gloves on his hands and put a knitted cap over his hair. “How long do we have?”
Liam checked his watch and the man’s schedule that the group had managed to secure. “The two of you are going to have a fairly l
arge window—almost an hour.”
“Do we have any idea what we’re looking for?” Jagger asked as he began suiting up the same way Layne had.
“I wish we did,” Tyler said.
Jagger noted the grimace that covered his VP’s face. This was not a coveted mission, he could tell that right now. “I better not get shot again,” he muttered as he put his boots on.
One by one, the men started to snicker.
“It’s not funny.”
“It is, kind of,” Layne smiled. “You’ve had some really bad luck lately. Better make sure you’ve got that vest on again.”
He beat against his chest, letting them hear the hollow sound of the vest secured there. “I’m not takin’ any motherfucking chances right now.”
“Y’all be safe,” Tyler told them as they hopped on their bikes and roared away.
Raymond Tucker’s neighborhood wasn’t what Jagger expected. Given the way the man threw around money and wore authority like a suit, Jagger figured he lived in a very affluent section of town. It surprised him as they turned into one that was decidedly middle class. The two of them parked further down the street and got off their bikes, walking towards the home they had figured out was the principal’s.
“This isn’t what I expected at all,” Layne mentioned as they strolled down the road.
“Me neither. This is such a middle-class neighborhood. There’s hardly anyone around because most people are at work. None of the houses are brick or two-story. If there are cars, they’re in garages. Something’s a bit off with this. I figured with the money he throws around, he lived in Olde Stone or something like that.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.” Layne lifted his shoulder up in a shrug. “Maybe if he didn’t throw his money around on strippers, he’d be able to live in a neighborhood like that. I wonder what else he’s hiding. Usually if you have an affinity for strippers and you’re obviously using your money all helter-skelter like that, you’ve got other skeletons in your closet.”
Jagger knew that the other man was right. There really was no telling what they were going to find. They approached the house that was Raymond’s and went around to the back door. Once there, Layne pulled a tool kit out from underneath the hooded sweatshirt he wore and they both pulled bandanas up around their faces. Gone were the cuts they normally wore—if anyone saw them, they just looked like two men who broke into houses all the time. Within seconds, Layne had unlocked the door and they were walking into the house.
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