Fear the Beard (The Dixie Warden Rejects MC Book 2)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  The moment we were in the room, I set Tallulah onto a chair in the corner of the room and pulled out my phone, unlocking it and opening up the only somewhat child-friendly app I had on my phone before I gave it to her.

  Tallulah didn’t know how to play Angry Birds yet but she could touch the pretty birds on the screen, and the moment my phone was in her hands she squealed in delight, causing the men in the room to turn from their contemplation of the window.

  “You brought a baby to a police station?” Aaron said, looking at me like I was nuts.

  “She’s almost a year old. That’s hardly a baby. And what, exactly, was I supposed to do? Stay at home while she did this?” I asked him, indicating the swelling around one cheek bone and the bruising that was starting to appear along his jaw. “I know it’s crazy, but there was nothing I could do. It was either bring her or stay at home with her, and we both know that I wasn’t staying at home.”

  Aaron shrugged, then turned back to the window.

  “Were you able to get anything from her yet?” I asked, ignoring the sounds coming from the phone.

  I tried turning the sound off once, and Tallulah had the hissy fit to end all hissy fits.

  So, to keep her happy while I watched, I left the sound blaring, even though it hindered my ability to hear not only the conversation on the other side of the glass but also the conversation happening in the room with us.

  Nobody seemed to mind, though, leaving me to watch the interrogation closely.

  There was another woman in the room with Tally and Hadley. The police officer who had originally taken Hadley’s statement accusing me of rape.

  She looked pissed off and I wondered why.

  “What’s wrong with that officer?” I asked bluntly.

  “She’s mad that she looked stupid in front of two entire police departments for pushing Hadley’s case so hard,” Big Papa murmured. “Even when we told her the accusations were false.”

  “Hmm,” I hummed. “That’s interesting.”

  It wasn’t, not really.

  Everyone knew that the female officer was a serious bitch. She came off as a hard ass, and she was always trying to prove herself when, in actuality, she really didn’t need to prove anything at all. Hopefully one day she’d figure that shit out.

  “I hate you.”

  Hadley’s words had me turning to see what else she had to say, and her next words had my fists tensing.

  “I’ve tried to kill you thirteen times this year.”

  I looked over to Big Papa, who nodded and started writing stuff down.

  “Ms. Dunston, I’d like to remind you of your rights that have already been explained to you, namely that you have the right to have a lawyer present and that anything you say can and will be used against you.” The officer interrupted.

  I wanted to punch her in the face.

  “Shut the fuck up and let her talk, officer,” I growled.

  “Uh, uh, uh!” I looked over to see Tallulah at my legs, pulling at my shirt tail.

  I picked her up, and then settled her on my arm before turning back to Tally.

  Hadley had just finished waving her hand at the officer, and relief poured through me.

  “The first time I tried to kill you was the first night you left Tallulah with me.”

  Fear shot down my spine.

  Oh, God. How many times had these two people who owned a huge piece of my heart nearly seen their deaths at the hands of this crazy woman?

  Tally’s spine stiffened. “I thought you were my friend. What did I ever do to you?”

  Hadley studied Tally with soulless eyes.

  “You stole my life.”

  She blinked. “I might’ve done that in the end by bringing light to the fact that you were off your rocker, but I surely didn’t do it in the beginning.”

  “You had a baby when I didn’t,” she said simply. “I had to watch you with your child while mine was in the ground.”

  Tally froze.

  “You…you had a baby?” Tally whispered, taking a step forward.

  “Two weeks before you.”

  Tally look confused and then her eyes widened.

  “That’s why you gained all that weight, and then missed the last three weeks of class and had to make up the days with me?” she gasped. “I always thought it was because you caught the flu.”

  “It was because I caught the pregnancy,” she grunted. “And my baby died, while yours lived. Why couldn’t it have been your baby?”

  That’s when Hadley started crying.

  Tally started crying, too.

  When she took another step forward, Officer Stephanie held up her hand and shook her head.

  Relief poured through me.

  This might all be the truth, but even handcuffed Hadley could still harm Tally if she got too close.

  Tally nodded that she understood, and then took a seat across from her waiting for her to stop crying.

  Tallulah brought her hand up to my beard and started to sift her fingers through it, playing quietly so I let her do it.

  All the while my eyes stayed on Tally and the woman crying.

  I couldn’t imagine how that felt, but I realized rather quickly that it was likely Hadley was suffering from postpartum depression.

  Most cases only lasted a few months after childbirth while the mother’s hormone levels slowly returned to normal. But there were some extreme cases where it lasted longer, sometimes years.

  And to have lost a child on top of that would definitely push an already depressed person over the edge.

  Hadley’s depression clearly was on the very extreme end of the scale, and probably even crossed over into psychotic.

  The rest of their discussion consisted of more accusations from Hadley of non-existent wrongdoings on Tally’s part.

  Apparently, Tally lorded the fact that she had a child over Hadley’s head, purposefully making her life worse. Then Tally had the nerve to get better grades in nursing school, in some convoluted plan that existed only in Hadley’s head where Tally was trying to make Hadley’s life more difficult.

  Each time Tally performed better than Hadley on a test or asked Hadley for help with Tallulah, Hadley would then try to plot her murder, luckily coming to her senses just in time.

  Luckily.

  One heart attack-inducing hour later, Tally finally made her way out of the room.

  She came out into the hallway, and immediately started towards me where I was standing with Tallulah, who still was playing with my beard—yanking, pulling, and smoothing.

  “That was bad,” she admitted the moment she was close enough.

  I nodded and pulled her into the room where I’d been.

  Tally’s eyes went to the window and she stiffened.

  “She gained weight while I was pregnant. I knew she was hiding something, but with everything I had on my plate, I just didn’t have time to examine it closer. Whatever was wrong seemed to go away when we returned to school for the second semester. She was the same old Hadley, only a little wilder. God, how could I have missed that? I was an awful friend.”

  I placed Tallulah on the chair next to us, handed her my phone once again and then turned to Tally.

  “You need to stop,” I ordered her. “You had no control over any of that. The lines of communication were open. You could’ve just as easily hidden Tallulah and your pregnancy, but you didn’t. You chose to let everyone know. She, however, didn’t and that was her choice, her decision. And unless she feels like telling you why she made the choice to keep it a secret, you’ll never know. So just stop beating yourself up about it, it isn’t help…”

  I looked over when I heard my phone hit the floor.

  Then my breathing stalled in my chest when I saw Tallulah toddling wobbly away from us.

  It was the cutest—and scariest—thing I’d ever seen.

  “Is she…”

  “She’s walking,” Tally
breathed. “Oh, my God.”

  Tallulah walked over to Big Papa and tugged on his pant leg.

  Big Papa picked her up, snuggling her against his chest, and continued the conversation he was having with the prosecutor.

  All the while Tally and I sat there stunned.

  “Oh, my God,” Tally repeated.

  A wide, proud smile overtook my face. “Always a ray of sunshine, our girl.”

  Tally’s eyes left her child and came back to me.

  “You mean that?”

  “Mean what?” I whispered.

  “That she’s your girl.”

  I nodded my head. “I love her, she’s mine just like her mother.”

  Tears instantly formed in Tally’s eyes. “That’s one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard in my life,” she admitted.

  I pulled her into the curve of my arms and dropped a kiss on her hair.

  “You’re one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. You and that little girl mean the world to me,” I whispered roughly.

  Tally’s arms tightened around me, but no more words needed to be said.

  We were both feeling them.

  And for the first time in a long time, I felt like my life was exactly where it needed to be.

  Epilogue

  Eyes off my mommy, my daddy is psycho.

  -Toddler T-shirt

  Tommy

  Year one

  “No,” I shook my head emphatically. “She’s too young to be starting gymnastics. Her asthma could flare up, and where will we be? At work, that’s where. This isn’t happening.”

  Tally gave me a considering look.

  “She’s almost two. She’s not going to be doing anything more strenuous than a toddler’s tumbling class, Tommy. It’s something that I trust her teacher to take her to, someone, I’d like to remind you, that you personally went to meet beforehand. If you don’t let her go, then she’ll be the only little girl in her class sitting there on the sideline…crying...while the others are taking the class, and you know how you get when she cries.”

  I growled in frustration.

  “Fine,” I snapped. “But I’m going to be there for the first few—or four—classes.”

  She held up her hands in acquiescence.

  I narrowed my eyes, pointed one finger at her, and snatched up my bagel.

  “Let’s go or we’re going to be late.”

  She sighed and followed me, picking up Tallulah’s lunch from the kitchen counter while I bent down and scooped up Tallulah.

  “Ready, Freddy?” I teased my girl.

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  My heart swelled, just like it did every single time she called me Daddy.

  The first time she had called me that, I’d gotten so overwhelmed that I’d had to take a breather outside.

  It hadn’t helped matters that it was her first word and she said it in the middle of a club function, either.

  “What do you want to do for her second birthday?” Tally asked as she walked with me out the door. “I need to start planning, or we’ll be running around like chickens with our heads cut off like we did last year.”

  I snorted.

  That’d been an experience.

  It’d been the first ever party that we’d had with Judge Slater and, according to him, The Band of Rejects, as he had dubbed our club. It’d been quite comical to have the judge’s snooty friends in the same room with men like Ghost and Truth, who honestly didn’t give that first fuck what anyone else thought about them.

  At least I had a hint of decorum.

  Those guys, however, did not, and they didn’t care one way or the other about it.

  “I was thinking we’d have another party out here like we did last year,” I skirted around the edge of the truck and deposited Tallulah in her car seat. “Be good, baby.”

  “Good, baby,” Tallulah chirped.

  Grinning, I tapped her nose, smothered her with a few kisses, and closed the door on her excited snickers.

  “I’ll see you after work, honey,” I murmured. “You sure you’re up to going by yourself today?”

  She nodded her head. “Positive.”

  Knowing that she wouldn’t take sympathy from me, I pulled her in for a quick kiss, which morphed into more when she lifted one leg to curl an ankle around my behind.

  I pressed her into the side of her new 4-Runner, grinding my unsurprisingly hard cock into her heat for a few long moments before I tore my mouth from hers.

  “I have to go to work, unlike you,” I told her. “And they still look for reasons to try and fire me.”

  Her mouth turned up in a quick grin.

  “That’s just too bad,” she murmured. “I’ve been trying to get you to stop working at the ER for months now. They don’t appreciate you enough there.”

  “I know,” I told her. “But they have good insurance, I make good money, and it gives me what I need.”

  Mainly the adrenaline boost I got from working cases that got my blood pumping.

  If I just worked at the clinic—like she wanted me to—then I wouldn’t get that same type of stimulation. It was the same thing, day in and out, and I didn’t like that kind of predictability. I needed a bit more spontaneity.

  “Go to work,” she whispered, tugging on my beard lightly with two fingers before pushing me away.

  I looked down at my cock that was tenting the front of my hospital scrub bottoms, and growled.

  “Have a good one.”

  I wouldn’t.

  Not knowing that Tally was going to her former best friend’s hearing to ascertain her ability to live on her own as a sane woman.

  Something I honestly didn’t think she was capable of doing.

  Last year, when she’d held that gun on Tally, she’d been on drugs.

  After being thrown into jail, she’d been forced to get clean. That was when she’d been able to convince her therapist and anyone else who would listen that she was a good, but misunderstood person, that it was the drugs that made her make bad choices and decisions.

  I saw right through it for the lie that it was.

  It hadn’t just been the drugs she’d been on that had influenced her actions like she was trying to make it seem.

  I knew it with every fiber in my being, and I hired the best lawyer I could find who would represent our interests in Hadley’s case. The woman was not well, she exhibited psychotic tendencies and she needed to be in a criminal facility that specialized in caring for someone like her.

  I didn’t need to spend my life thinking she was around every corner, waiting to point another shotgun at my woman’s face…or worse, Tallulah’s.

  “Go to work!” Tally announced on a honk as she backed out of the driveway, and then blew me a kiss.

  I waved her off, trying to control my breathing from the scare, and started to back out of the carport where I parked next to her.

  I coughed and sputtered as I drove behind her, but it was something we always did, and I always followed her all the way to our respective places of employment.

  She worked in a doctor’s office—not mine might I add—four days a week, and at my clinic on Fridays. Her hours were short, only ten to four, and I loved it.

  I liked coming home to her.

  A happy, messy house with food on the table. Sometimes that food would be homemade by one of us, and sometimes it would be from the freezer section. And there were even the times when she ordered pizza or Chinese.

  No matter what she did, I was happy. Even if she didn’t cook, and I had to bring dinner home, I was happy.

  It didn’t matter because I had her to enjoy that meal with, and I was happy.

  Something I didn’t realize I was missing until I met Tally.

  Once she turned off into the parking lot of Tallulah’s daycare, I waved and headed to the ER, pulling into my normal spot right outside the staff door, before shutting my bike off.

 
The first thing I did once I got inside was announce that I had somewhere to be from two to two forty-five, and I would not take no for an answer.

  No matter what.

  Because Tallulah was not starting that fucking tumbling class without me being there to watch over her. No ifs, ands or buts about it.

  ***

  Nine hours later, I was a freakin’ mess, but I was alive.

  “I heard about what happened,” Tally said, trying not to grin. “It was awful, I heard, from them and not you.”

  Her grin broke free, and became a full-blown smile.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I grunted.

  “You don’t want to talk about the fact that you signed Tallulah up for every single gymnastics camp, mommy and me, daddy and me and tumbling class that they offer for the unforeseeable future??”

  I stuck my tongue out at her, causing her to dissolve in a fit of giggles.

  “Well, you know how my day went. How about you tell me about yours, and why the hell you refused to tell me about what happened today until we got home?” I ordered, crowding her against the counter.

  Tally’s smile was wicked as she stared deeply into my eyes.

  She brought one hand up, running the tip of her fingernail down the ridge of my sternum before saying, “She’s going to jail.”

  I closed my eyes, relief pouring through me.

  “Thank fuck.”

  “And that’s not all,” she continued, moving her hands down so she could thread them underneath my scrub top.

  My brows rose.

  “Oh yeah?” I asked. “What else happened?”

  “I ran into someone on the way to work, and I didn’t want you to hear this from them before I had the chance to tell you myself in person. That’s why I refused to talk to you, I didn’t want to blurt it out over the phone.”

  I growled and pushed my hips in further, letting her feel the length of me.

  “Okay,” I drawled, lifting my hands up when she pushed my top up. “Where were you when you ran into them?”

  It came up over my head, and I took it from there, throwing it in the direction of the laundry room.

  She bit her lip. The way she did when she was trying to find a way to tell me something without me getting mad.

  “Tally,” I growled.