by Vivian Gray
But he still felt a surge of relief when Laurie walked back into the waiting room, her bag slung over her shoulder. “Hey, babe,” he said, standing up and tugging her gently to him. Her belly was big enough now that he had to stand ever so slightly to the side to get her as close as he wanted to kiss her deeply. She laughed into his mouth and pushed him back just a little, her cheeks bright red.
“Take me home before you try that,” she said, and he chuckled. She’d always been wet and ready for him, every single time he’d taken her to bed, but since she’d gotten past the part of pregnancy where she was sick all the time, she’d been absolutely insatiable. He wasn’t complaining about a single second of it.
“Happy to,” he said, then stepped back so she could go to the receptionist and check out and schedule her next appointment. He had to laugh again; whenever they were in the office, it seemed like every nurse and office worker managed to walk through the office and sneak a peek at all his tattoos. He should get a contingent of the guys in here; these buttoned-up ladies would get all the biker their panties could stand. These girls always had kinky fantasies involving some crazy things involving bikes; people always thought that club girls were wild, but it had always been the ladies in sweater sets who’d been really kinky in his experience. Buzz and the guys could show them a night they’d never forget.
He dialed back his grinning – no need to make them think bikers could be anything other than fierce and vicious – and put his arm around Laurie as they walked out of the building.
“Want to grab lunch?” There was a little diner in town that served a particular kind of burger that Laurie swore was better than anything she’d ever eaten. He didn’t get it, but if it made his girl happy, he was on board.
As he glanced down at her, he noticed how obvious the swell of her belly was. She was more obviously pregnant now. He couldn’t tell if it was just his brain, completely overwhelmed by the knowledge that there really was a baby on its way, or if it was a kind of refresh in his vision. Either way, he was seeing her in a different way.
But Laurie wasn’t looking at him, and she didn’t seem like she’d heard his question about lunch. She was trembling a little bit against him, staring at a point in the distance. He followed the direction of her gaze; she seemed to be staring at a junkie across the street. The guy was clearly in rough shape. He was bundled up as if it was the middle of winter even though it was the beginning of summer. He looked like a crumpled scarecrow on the sidewalk where he was curled up. His face was turned vaguely in their direction, but at least from here, he couldn’t tell if the junkie was looking at them at all. Whatever he was seeing was in another world.
He didn’t know what had caught her attention. She’d grown up on her own and in darker corners of the world than this; he knew damn well that she’d seen junkies and people living rough before today. And even then, the look on her face wasn’t the kind of distant horror of someone finally realizing that the people “suffering from extreme poverty and shelter insecurity” were real people struggling to eat and stay warm enough to live. There was something personal happening, and he couldn’t understand what exactly it was.
“Laurie?” He jostled her very gently, hoping to shake her out of her reverie just a little bit. “Everything okay?”
She blinked hard and fast and turned back to him. Her lips were bent in a smile, but there wasn’t anything real about the expression. It was something she was putting on to pacify him. That didn’t feel even remotely good.
“Sure,” she said. “But no lunch today, I think. Let’s just get back. Alright?”
He didn’t know how to respond to that. No, it wasn’t alright. No, it wasn’t fine. They were in this thing together, and if something was wrong, she needed to tell him what was happening. But yelling at her or demanding that she tell him whatever was in her head wasn’t going to make whatever was happening easier. He needed to trust that she’d tell him when she could, or when she wanted to. She shared important information with him; that was how they worked. Just like he’d continued to share information with her about the Devil’s Weapons, helping her stay apprised of what was happening, and how the Talons were continuing to pursue leads and work to mitigate or stop what the Weapons were doing.
It took a lot for him to trust someone; he’d been the leader of the Talons for so much of his life. That meant understanding every piece of what was happening around him. Letting that fade away, believing that someone else would share any information he needed – it was a strange experience.
“Okay, baby,” he said, tightening his hold on her. “Let’s head back.” He walked her to the car and closed the door for her once she’d tucked herself inside. He glanced back at the junkie, whose gaze had followed their general direction. There was no moment of piercing eye contact, but he would have been a liar if he hadn’t said that the guy seemed to be watching them. But that wasn’t a crime in and of itself. His danger sense wasn’t tingling, and he didn’t feel like the guy was going to suddenly expose himself or something. He was just a creep watching the movie people. It wasn’t anything more serious than that.
If that was true, why was Laurie so clearly shaken? She huddled in the car with her arms around herself, and her eyes tightly closed. His heart lurched, but he didn’t quite know what to do, other than getting in the car and take her home like she’d asked.
He slid into the driver’s seat and rested his hands on the steering wheel for a moment, then took a deep breath. “Laurie, what’s going on?” It seemed like a terrible idea to push, but he also didn’t know what more to do. “Did that guy do something, say something? I can handle whatever you need me to, but I need to know what’s happening.”
She shook her head hard. “He didn’t do anything.”
She was clearly lying; her eyes were still squeezed shut, and as she spoke the words, her hands got even tighter on her arms. Maybe he’d gestured at her or grabbed himself; he’d certainly seen stuff like that be incredibly disturbing, especially for a woman who had a history like Laurie had described.
If that had happened, she certainly had the right to manage her own feelings. He could wish that she’d share with him, but he couldn’t make her. Even though it made his stomach twist up just a little, he couldn’t demand something like that from her.
“Okay,” he said and turned the ignition on the car.
***
Laurie
Laurie huddled in the passenger seat of Jacob’s car, trying for everything she was worth not to look like she was about to burst into tears or panic or both. For years, she’d seen her brother everywhere, in every junkie’s eyes, a specter that was going to haunt her for the rest of her life. She’d finally shaken that out of her head, and then Brian had walked back into her life. No matter how good things were for her now, he’d still caused one of the most terrifying episodes of her life. He’d sold her for drug money, and anything could have happened to her. She was flat-out lucky that Jacob had taken her, that he had been a decent man who listened when he finally realized what was going on. She was flat-out lucky that she hadn’t been killed. Even another man in the club might not have reacted the way Jacob did.
For a moment, the pile of bones in denim and a worn-out jacket had been just another bum on the street, but then he turned his head, and it had been Brian, all the way through. There was no mistaking her brother. If it had been a year ago, she would have assumed that she was just misremembering his face – since it had been years since she saw him. But the look on his face as she was thrown into that van, the sheer hunger for the drugs being pressed into his hand. It was an expression she knew all too well and had seen far too many times.
She’d memorized that expression, and she’d seen it on his face from across the street. That was her brother, and he was still hungry. Whatever he’d gotten hadn’t lasted him – because, of course, it hadn’t, because it wasn’t enough and couldn’t ever be enough – and it made her heart ache to think of it. She hadn’t had that ache i
n a very long time, and after what he’d done to her, she couldn’t understand why she still had it now.
But she did, and so she’d watched him for a minute longer than she should have, wondering about what she could do to help this poor scarecrow of a man with whom she shared genetic material. And then he’d turned towards her, his eyes hollow and shaken. His gaze had fixed on her face, laser-tight, and then had scrolled down her body like a robot. When he’d taken in the roundness of her belly, though, something had changed. He’d lit up like a pinball machine, his eyes racing from the clear and obvious pregnant belly to Jacob – who had to be recognizable as the leader of the Black Talons. What that would mean, she didn’t know, but she knew that she didn’t like the look in his eyes. At all.
Jacob asked her several times what was going on, but she couldn’t bring herself to answer the question. What was going on was that her broken family wouldn’t leave her behind, and how could she possible start over, create something new, with that agony still in her past? But how could she make peace with dead parents and a brother who was willing to sacrifice her to his drug habit?
So she kept insisting she was fine, and she did her best to hide her tears when they started. When Jacob took her to bed that night, she asked him to make it rougher and rougher. She was sure it was exactly what she deserved.
Chapter Twelve
Laurie
Laurie pushed back from her desk and put her head in her hands. It had been a long, long day, and she was more than a little tired. The app was getting close, but it still wasn’t behaving quite like she wanted it to. She had the front end up and running, but it wasn’t properly communicating to the alert system that would tell someone to prep and send an order. Without that, the app was useless.
She had to be able to get it up and running, and she knew she could, she just couldn’t figure out the bug that was keeping the two halves of her programming from working together. She’d stared at the code until her eyes crossed, and she still wasn’t getting it out.
Her belly was rumbling, both from the baby spinning and kicking in there and her hunger. She’d forgotten to eat again, and she was lightheaded. Eating was going to make her feel sick, but not eating was going to be worse. And Jacob hadn’t come by to grab her and eat lunch. Or the other things they often did after lunch. That made her stomach curl up with fear, just a little bit. He didn’t often break that sort of pattern, not without a very serious reason.
What had happened outside of her tiny office without her noticing?
She heaved herself up onto her feet. She’d started to notice her heavy belly throwing off her balance here and there. It was uncomfortable, but it was also manageable. She did not look forward to the part where she’d be waddling around, not able to put her legs close together again. That said, the sex just kept getting better. Jacob was absolutely dedicated to finding different ways to fuck her until they were both howling. He’d found ways to prop her up with pillows, put her on her hands and knees, work her clit until she was screaming. He was dedicated, even when he was so forceful. Sometimes more so when he was forceful. And every bit of it just made her want him even more.
She flipped her laptop shut, knowing it would need a password before it would reopen, and stepped out of her office. She tried not to look like a hermit stepping out of a cave, but it was a little hard not to feel that way. She’d always been able to fall into a zone while she was programming, but it seemed like ages since she’d gotten a really good night of sleep, and focusing was harder than it had been before. She ended up hyper-focusing to focus at all, and then time passed in a weird, distracted way that was hard to understand after it had happened.
If this kept up, she’d have to stock the office with snacks or something. She was really off-kilter. Still, making it to the bar was doable, and someone would have something for her.
Sherri was in fact at the bar and grill. She passed Laurie a bowl of pretzels and a seltzer water without saying a word, then got to work on a burger. Laurie’s obsession with burgers hadn’t faded, and Sherri had somehow bullied the owner of the diner near her OB’s office into giving up his secret technique that made his burgers so incredible. She wouldn’t tell Laurie, but Laurie didn’t much care. She could have one of those incredible burgers every day, and she didn’t have to cook it herself. This was the biggest win she’d ever had.
Laurie noticed that the main common area was mostly empty, as she took a big bite of her burger. A few of the girls she didn’t know as well were hanging out in the corners, doting on one of the newest pledges. The guy looked like a total idiot, decked out in leather chaps and a cowboy hat. If he stuck around, he’d get some – well, was it really fashion sense? Probably not. His foolish looking style of dressing would get beaten out of him, one way or another. He wasn’t a bad guy, he’d just watched too many TV shows about bikers and hadn’t spent enough time actually riding.
She laughed to herself; she wouldn’t have known better a year ago.
“Where is everyone,” she asked Sherri, then took a long sip of the seltzer water. Laurie had gotten used to it when she was first pregnant and sick all the time, and now she preferred it to tap. Weird how things happened like that.
Sherri looked surprised, though she seemed to choke the expression back fairly quickly. “Oh,” she said, “I just assumed you knew.”
Well, that was always a great start. “I don’t know,” Laurie said. She heard the note of total annoyance in her voice and dialed it back as hard as she could. “I’ve been in my office all day long, trying to get around a corner in the app.” Everyone knew what she was working on, but few of them seemed to get how hard it was. From their point of view, you pushed a few buttons, and then Candy Crush fell out, what was all the drama? After all, there was nothing more disconcerting and adorable than a dozen bikers shouting tips back and forth about a tough level in the latest match-3 game. But everyone seemed to think that she spent her day being walking porn for their president. Okay, there were days where that wasn’t far from the truth, but not all the days. “Can you tell me what’s happening?”
Sherri leaned over the bar like she was whispering a secret. “The Weapons finally sent a representative.”
Laurie’s heart slammed in her chest for a moment, and she had to work to catch her breath. “What?”
“Whip. He’s the – I’m not doing that bastard the courtesy of calling him the president of anything, he’s the leader of the Weapons, I guess. He came here to try and talk to the Talons about something, and they’re all in the war room. Packed in there, I guess. I’ll be half surprised if Whip comes out of there alive.”
Laurie couldn’t breathe. She hadn’t seen the man since the night he’d leaned over her in a dim room packed with terrified women, and she’d somehow decided that she’d never see him again. That Jacob would – what, make him go away? Make him not a problem anymore? God, what had she actually managed to learn in her life. No one else handled your problems, that was what made them yours. She needed to run. She needed to get away from here. She needed to be safe, and safe was away from anything that bastard was touching.
No. No, that wasn’t how this was going to go. She’d spent more than enough of her life running, even if she’d mostly stayed in the same city, the same town, the same place. She’d run from Brian and from herself and from anything that hinted of the life of her childhood. Those were understandable choices, but they hadn’t been critical ones. She hadn’t thought through the choices she was making; she’d just fled. She’d left behind parts of herself without considering whether or not they were parts she wanted. Making choices in pain and fear wasn’t ever going to work out well, even if they ended up being positive choices in the long run.
Laurie kept her ass planted on the barstool, with her burger, and promised herself that she’d stay put until the son of a bitch left. She’d talk to Jacob, find out what was going on, and then she’d make whatever the right choice was.
Chapter Thirteen
; Jacob
Jacob stared across the table and forced himself not to climb over the wood surface and beat Whip’s smug fucking face until he bled. He pushed his lips up into something that approximated a smile and tried to breathe. “I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing here,” Jacob said.
Whip didn’t stop grinning. “We know you’ve been trying to track our operation,” he said. He was completely calm and cool, not at all the picture of a man who was surrounded by a dozen men who’d like nothing more than to kill him just for existing. If Whip hadn’t shown up under a peace flag, Jacob wasn’t sure what he would have done already. “We know you can’t get a handle on us. We also know that you’re losing customers.”
It wasn’t true. Not really. None of their real customers had gone anywhere, the ones who had been trusting their product for a long time. The more casual customers, though, the ones who came in just occasionally, or who had just a random need for something to mellow out a party to take the edge off a long week? Those customers had been quieter. It wasn’t affecting business enough to worry about, but it was frustrating. Over time it could cause problems. More importantly, though, it could destroy the club’s reputation over time. There was a lot of buzz out in the world about how a club lived or died by its rep, and that might be true; for the kinds of product they moved, however, it was essential that they stand for something. They charged premium prices for a premium product, and to do that, they needed a premium reputation.
