I cocked my head to the side, fascinated and fine with showing it outwardly. I didn’t feel like I had to have guards up around Zane. It was strange too because we really didn’t know each other that well. Normally I was pretty cautious with what emotions I allowed to stray onto my face besides the most basic happiness unless I knew the person pretty well.
But with him? I don’t know. It was different. Good, but different.
“I’m intrigued,” I replied. “Does it involve plants? I can probably help with that.”
He laughed, and it felt like he’d needed it. Then I began to notice the signs of stress all over his body. It wasn’t that he hadn’t exhibited them before, but he’d been hiding them so well that it hadn’t been until his laugh unwrinkled them that I knew they were there. It was the absence of light in the darkness that had allowed me to see the shapes.
His jaw was just a little too set, his eyebrows a little too furrowed. They were such minor details on his face that I was surprised to even have noticed them. He must have been pretty messed up to look as stressed as he did, even if to an average person he wouldn’t have looked anything more than perhaps a little bit wary.
“What happened?” I asked quickly before he even finished laughing.
He calmed down and assessed me, his mouth picking up into a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I had a little bit of ex-girlfriend drama this morning,” he explained. “And the way to get through it is going to seem a bit strange to you.”
I chortled. “Zane, I’m not sure if you noticed, but I’m a bit strange. Whatever it is, I can probably handle it.”
He had a thing for long, drawn out silences. I hadn’t figured out yet whether it was because he was meticulously arranging the right words in his head or because he went off on some sort of internal dialogue tangent that I wasn’t privy to. Maybe he only did it with me. Maybe he did it with everyone. It was something worth investigating.
I wanted to know everything about him, I realized suddenly. I wanted to investigate this man’s soul and see what I could come up with. I was fascinated by it. By him.
“Asa has informed me that she’s pregnant with my child,” he stated simply.
I couldn’t help it; I jerked back. The surprise was so great that I felt my heart jump in response as if he’d jumped out from behind a wall and yelled, “Boo!”
“But that's...you guys…” What I wanted to say was that it couldn’t be possible because he said they hadn’t dated for years, and that she’d been dating this other guy who had died. But if that were the case, then her being pregnant with Zane’s baby meant that he had slept with her while she was with Graham.
That meant two things: Asa had cheated on Graham with Zane and Zane had lied to me yesterday. I couldn’t decide which was worse, especially since Zane had known full well that Asa and Graham were a couple, and would have entered into any illicit affair with that knowledge at the forefront of his mind. The second was bad too, though, because it meant that Zane had lied to me yesterday and was not admitting it in front of me, thinking that I was just going to roll over and be okay with it.
“Get out.” I tried to pack as much of a verbal punch into my statement as possible. I was nice, yes. But a pushover? Absolutely not. And certainly not a fool.
Zane didn’t budge. I wondered if I had enough strength to get him out of the store of my own accord. Was this something I could call the police about? Help, the man I slept with yesterday lied to me and now he’s standing in my store and won’t leave?
Is he threatening you, ma’am?
No, he’s just really big, and I think he’s blocking the light to my potted flowers.
Yeah, that would go over well.
“Did you not hear me?” I wasn’t sure if him ignoring my command was due to him flat out not hearing me, being in whatever crazy place in his head he thought this situation was okay, or because he just didn’t want to go.
“I heard you.” So it was a case of the latter.
“So…” I made a gesture of dismissal. “Go then.”
Even to me, the words didn’t sound very tough. He must have thought I was downright cuddly. Should I try hitting him with something? Was that something that I had in me?
“I need you to hear me out for a second,” he said, raising his hands in a calming gesture. “It’s not what you think.”
How could it possibly be anything other than what I thought? Had she somehow impregnated herself with his sperm while she was with her dead ex-boyfriend? Had she gotten pregnant with his baby while they were still together and had just been carrying around a very tiny fetus for the past two years? I couldn’t decide which was creepier.
“I haven’t had sex with her in nearly two years,” he rebuked.
Oh shit, it might actually have been one of my theories. I mentally debated which would be worse. The creepy toddler fetus popped immediately to mind, and I nearly crossed my fingers in the hope that it wasn’t that particular scenario. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to help in that situation other than calling an old priest and a young priest.
“How did she get pregnant then?” I challenged.
He sighed and gritted his teeth, but I knew his anger wasn’t directed at me. I don’t know how I knew, but on an instinctual level, it just seemed like I knew he wasn’t upset with me even slightly for putting him through this line of questioning.
“She apparently impregnated herself with some of my frozen sperm,” he said, clearly hating every word that passed through his lips. I would've hated it too because you just know the kind of reaction you could expect from someone once you’d told them that.
Anticipating how he expected me to react—with astonishment, a million needling questions, and probably a degree of disgust—I kept my face blank and didn’t react at all physically.
The inside of my mind was a maelstrom. She did what now? How? Why? How? And again for good measure, Why?
Saying something bitchy to me at the bar last night had quickly rocketed down the list of crazy things I could expect from Zane’s ex-girlfriend. I wondered if my presence in the bar had been a coincidence, or if maybe it was just a line she pulled on him without actually having any baby growing in her to back it up. That seemed a lot more logical than just suddenly being pregnant from some frozen sperm that she got years ago the day after she saw her ex-boyfriend with a new woman.
I decided to voice this concern out loud. “It just seems more logical,” I explained after presenting my theory, “that she’s clearly freaked out by Graham’s death and is trying to latch on to the last piece of normalcy she had.” I gestured to him. “And you’re that normalcy. You dated just before she dated Graham. But since I was with you last night, she clearly is afraid of you slipping away too so she’s doing everything in her power to keep you.”
He grinned, which wasn’t the reaction I’d been expecting. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had expected—maybe an academic chin scratch and nod, perhaps a finger thrust into the air while yelling EUREKA!—but it hadn’t been a crooked grin and a gaze that made me feel like the most valuable woman on the planet.
“I knew you’d be perfect for this,” he said mysteriously.
Suddenly cautious of what I’d just unwittingly gotten myself into, I took a step back as if it would put more distance between me and whatever fate had cooked up for me. Or what Zane had cooked up for me, though I doubted I’d have the ability to tell him no if it meant getting to spend more time with him.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” I asked warily.
His handsome features straightened. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” he said, picking up on my expression.
I sighed. “Zane, just tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you if I can do it.”
He smiled. “I told Asa I wanted to do couple’s counseling.” He shrugged. “I remembered what you said about her seeming sad, and I thought maybe there was something I could do to help.” He grinned. “I hope you
don’t think the idea that she’d made it all up after last night didn’t cross my mind?”
I shrugged. “I tend not to assume anything, but I was hoping you hadn’t been that dense.”
He let out a bark of laughter and came around the counter, pulling me to him and planting a kiss on my lips. I’d never seen him so expressive. I melted immediately. He remembered what I had said.
Still, I wasn’t sure how this had anything to do with me. “I don’t get it,” I said, breaking away from him and looking up into his oceanic gaze. “How do I factor into this? Shouldn’t you be telling me we can’t see each other again now that you have a baby on the way?” I looked down at our embrace as if analyzing it for purpose. “But you’re kissing me… I don’t get it.”
He chuckled but took a step back. “I got ahead of myself. I just forgot how funny you are.”
I wasn’t, but I didn’t say that. I merely raised an eyebrow. If he wanted to think that, though, let him.
“Like I said, I want to help her.” His gaze darkened. “But I need to go about it in an unorthodox way or she’ll never agree.”
I didn’t, for an instant, like where this was going. “Go on,” I said slowly.
“I have to act like I’m in this for the both of us, but I don’t want anything to do with her. I was hoping that you would agree to be our fake couple’s counselor.”
I laughed. I couldn't help it. Something in his sentence struck a chord with me and I absolutely dissolved with it, my sides aching from how hard I was laughing. He wanted me, the girl obsessed with Neanderthals, to be his couple’s counselor?
“Zane,” I said, breathless. “You’re joking?!”
His face was stone cold. He didn’t need to say any words to let me know that he wasn’t. “I’ll give you anything you ask for. I have money. I have cars. I have a veritable army at my disposal. Tell me, Sasha.” He grabbed my chin and looked me deep in the eyes. I immediately stopped laughing. “What do you want?”
“You,” I wanted to say. It came to me without even having to think about it. I wanted him more than I wanted money, cars, or an army. I had no idea why, either. It might’ve been nice to have a bunch of biker guys sent into my house to do all the dusting that Mom and I had been putting off for way too long now.
“I’ll think about it,” I said instead. “In the meantime, I need you to get me some things in case I decide to agree.”
I bent over the counter and grabbed a slip of paper, writing down on it the first few things that came to mind. At the bottom, I wrote my number. “Text me so I have your number. I’ll let you know if I need anything else.”
If he was shocked by my immediate shift to a business-like attitude, he didn’t say. Like a good soldier, he simply grabbed the slip of paper from my hand and stalked off to do my bidding.
I could get used to this.
CHAPTER TEN
Zane
My plans always tended to have an edge to them that some would call crazy. When I was in my last year of high school, I was part of the crowd that hung out in the smoke pit and skipped class most of the time. When I did bother to show up, I did quite well. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to show up at all if it hadn’t been for my dad pressuring me. Pressuring me to drop out, that is. The old man got it in his head that I had a brighter future waiting for me outside the confines of institutionalized education. He encouraged me to leave the other squares behind and join him at the club full-time so he could teach me the ropes.
It had sounded like a good idea at first, but then I’d taken a good hard look at where my dad was in life and decided that I didn't want that for myself. Maybe I wasn’t going to be one of the preppy debate school boys, but I wasn’t going to become a dropout like my dad and launch myself into a life where my only options were flipping burgers or being paid to do what my dad told me to do.
So I went to high school. I scraped by enough to pass, and when the end of the year rolled around I was ready to leave the decrepit old building, and my father, in my rearview forever. Fate had other plans. Hell, I crafted those plans. When I found out the preppy debate type boys were hosting an end of year party, all my loser friends and I crashed it. It was a roaring success. What started out as an innocent Hawaii themed luau turned into an all-night rock fest. Even the guys who we stole the party from got into it at the end. They saw how much the girls liked it.
But I’d paid for that when the cops came. I shouldn’t have mouthed them off like I did, but I was drunk and young and thought I was invincible. So they slammed me into some cuffs and locked me up for the night.
When my dad came and got me in the morning, he also picked up the bill for the massive fine I had incurred for damaging police property, among other things. It wasn’t my fault their cars were so fragile. I spent the rest of the summer paying off my dad by working in his shop, and by the time the summer was over I had already taken on too much responsibility to leave.
Or at least that was what I told myself. In truth, I got to feeling responsible for my old man. I saw how he struggled with the business and the club and wanted to help him out, even if he had been a shit dad to me. So that was where I stayed.
Taking Asa to “therapy” wasn’t quite comparable to crashing a high school party with speakers and beer, but it felt the same going into it. Either things were going to go really well, or they were going to go really bad. Only time would tell.
It was the morning after I’d told my plan to Sasha. I was surprised at how readily she’d agreed, all things considered. It only made me think higher of her. She barely knew me and yet she wanted to help me; that wasn’t something I took lightly. In my world, you got as much respect as you gave. And Sasha had given quite a lot.
She’d given a lot of other things too, and my cock would stiffen anytime I thought about it. It was stiffening right now as I made a cup of coffee and I frowned. I shouldn’t have wanted her this much still. I never wanted a woman again after having her once. But something about Sasha… It was different and strange, but good. Maybe it was the fact that she was so different to every woman I’d ever taken out before. She was a scholar, shy and sweet. She didn’t wear too much perfume or reek of bad decisions.
I was beginning to think I’d been making poor choices in women.
Like Asa. Holy fuck had that been a poor choice.
My coffee was bitter. Normally I liked it that way, but I must’ve put a few too many grinds in the pot. Ah well, I kept drinking it nonetheless. Rolling my shoulders, I headed into the living room and sat on my couch, sinking into the plush cushions. My laptop was sitting, closed, on the table in front of me, and I booted it up as I took my next bitter sip.
My email, as usual, was filled with unread messages. I usually spent the morning going through and answering emails, then in the afternoon I’d go do my shift at the shop. The club’s headquarters was a tattoo shop down in the warehouse district called Industrial Tattoo. It used to be a shoe factory, but it had gone under in the thirties and been purchased by my grandad as an investment property. None of my guys knew that I came from money originally. On my mom’s side, anyway. Grandad rented out the building to a few tenants over the years, but it was hardly the gem of his empire. He left it to my mom when he died, and she, in turn, left it to my dad. He moved his operation out there when I was a kid, and there’s been no going back since.
It was the best place to get shit done, and an ideal location for any illegal activities too. That had been my dad’s perspective, anyway. I liked to keep to legal income. The shop brought in some money, but most of the club’s income was in transport, bodyguarding, security - that kind of thing. My dad had tried gun trafficking out for a time, which was why he was in the slammer and I was in my own personal prison. Now some of the guys wanted to cut a strip of the drug scene for The Sick, but that would only lead to trouble. Even if it was where the money was. It was causing friction, to say the least.
That pissed me off probably more than all the work did. Yeah, it was
shitty being chained to a desk when all I wanted to do was ride, but I hated how much resentment I faced on a daily basis from guys in the club who wanted more money. The greedy fuckers. We made more than enough money and having them pissy at me about it when I didn’t even want to head the club in the first place was a pain in my ass.
Just like Asa.
I sighed and clicked through the rest of my morning emails, trying not to think too much about anything. Sasha kept slipping into my head, though, oddly enough. It was a welcome distraction. I thought about those long, graceful legs, and that perfect smile and the irritation began to wash off of me.
I finished early and wasn’t due at the shop for another hour or so. It was a good a time as any to practice my pool. I smiled triumphantly, closing the laptop and practically bounding to the front door. The only things that seemed to get me excited these days were pool and billiards. Or rather, I supposed, the money I got from them. Yeah, I came from money, but “daddy dearest” spent every last dime of what was supposed to be my inheritance from my mom. Who even knows what the fuck on? That man had been a complete fool with money. It was a wonder that the endless string of hookers and bad decisions hadn’t put the shop into debt. Thank fuck for that.
Wrecked by the Bad Boy: The Sick MC Page 8
