by Stacey Lynn
I pushed off the bed and his hand fell from my skin to his lap, leaving my neck prickled with chill bumps. I rolled my shoulders, fighting the feeling. “Don’t be so arrogant. You don’t know everything.”
I turned to leave when his quiet, threatening voice stilled me.
“I know you love me.”
Looking back over my shoulder, I opened my mouth to deny it, but I shut my mouth when I took in his chilling glare.
“Don’t lie, Jules. Not about that.”
I swallowed. A thick lump impeded the movement, but I turned away before he could see the truth, even though he knew it. But admitting it and him assuming it were two completely different things.
“Goodbye, Jaden.”
His nose twitched and then his lips pulled into a wide grin. It stretched from ear to ear and light sparkled in his eyes as if I’d given him the greatest present in the world instead of the biggest brush-off.
“Temporary, Jules. Get your shit together, avoid me all you want, but I get my ass out of here and the first thing I’m fuckin’ doin’ is coming for you, and I won’t leave until you admit it.”
Squeezing my eyes closed, I reached for Sophie until she was safely in my arms. It gave me the semblance of protection from Jaden and his words, which I knew were completely truthful.
Jaden didn’t bullshit.
Which meant I had only a few days to prepare myself for the fight of my life.
But as I walked out of the hospital, Sophie strolling slowly next to me with my finger gripped in hers, I no longer knew if the fight was going to be running…
Or staying.
Either one risked my heart—just in completely different ways.
Weeks passed. Every day that I went to work at the salon, came home, and sat in my quiet apartment after Sophie went to sleep, I grew more on edge.
Jaden had been released from the hospital three weeks ago.
I had yet to hear from him.
Liv and Faith came to my place every week for a girls’ night that generally consisted of alcohol, but not nearly the amounts it would have taken to erase my constant thoughts of Jaden from my memory. They didn’t say much about the club, but they dropped enough guilt-inducing comments in my lap for me to know that Jaden was being an angry asshole—worse than before—but that his wounds were healing well.
Everything they said filled me with relief that he was going to be fine, and regret for not being strong enough to stand by his side and help him. A small biting voice made me question who was taking care of him instead of me. Another voice yelled at me for being stupid. A third voice—one that continued to grow quieter and quieter as the days wore on—reminded me it was no longer my business who helped Jaden… I’d given up the right to know anything about him.
All of them left me feeling crabby and cranky and tired and just… sad.
But regardless of how I felt, the stabbing pain that hit my chest at the end of every day, reminding me that another day had passed and he hadn’t even bothered trying to get me back was the most hurtful.
Not that it should have mattered. I had turned my back on him—not the other way around.
Yet, a part of me longed to hear his rough, gravel voice when he woke up in the morning. I wanted to feel his touch and be the one to make those rare half-smiles appear. But the parts I wanted weren’t enough to make me admit my mistakes and my fears directly to him, to risk the possibility that Jaden had decided I wasn’t worth the chase or the effort anymore.
So how I ended up here, sitting cross-legged on an old tattered blanket, I had no idea. When I had woken up I’d grabbed Sophie and a bag of her toys, knowing that at some point I truly did need to say goodbye to my past once and for all.
Maybe then I’d be able to see everything else more clearly.
I smiled, watching while Sophie played absent-mindedly as she ran around the trunk of a nearby tree. Her soft voice fluttered through the air, her feet crunched on the freshly fallen leaves tinged with red and yellow.
And I knew without a doubt that I had to be here, even if uncertainty still clung to me like wet dewdrops to the tips of the grass.
“I don’t know what to say to you,” I finally croaked. Closing my eyes, I slowly opened them and lifted my chin to the stone slab in front of me.
The etched name brought sadness to my eyes, but tears stayed at bay.
Scott “Scratch” Dillon
Brother, in life and in death
1989-2010
“You can’t even hear me,” I muttered, ashamed of myself that it’d taken so long to come and see him. The man I’d once I loved. The man who’d died just after finding out he was going to have a child, and I had yet to introduce them. And now that I was here, my selfish heart beat wildly against my chest.
The words I’d been holding close to me, too afraid to speak out loud, for fear that Fate would strike me again, fell from my lips, and tears began falling down my cheeks.
“I loved you, you know.” I paused, shook my head, and continued. “I loved you as much as any twenty-two-year-old could have loved another, and I don’t know if that would have been a forever kind of love or not anymore. Sometimes I wonder…” I wiped my eyes, tried to keep them trained on the headstone in front of me. My eyes kept flitting to Sophie, watching her play, completely oblivious to the current that was swirling inside of me like the eye of a hurricane. “I wonder if we would have made it. Once you got more into the club, would I have been the kind of woman who stood by and watched you do the things I know those men do?
“But I know you would have loved Sophie with everything you had,” I sobbed, my shoulders began to shake. I stopped myself. The guilt over everything I’d questioned for the last several years fell on my shoulders, and yet I was freeing myself of it at the same time. “I don’t know if we would have made it. It doesn’t mean I love you less, or that I ever loved you less, but I mourned your death. I mourned the loss of your love and the fact that Sophie would grow up without a father.
“And… I fell in love again. He’s scary and he’s mean and he’s angry almost all the time unless Sophie is on his hip—and even then his ability to be happy is questionable.” I laughed to myself, thinking of Jaden and his angry brown eyes and his scowl that he wore as if the world would end if anyone spied his teeth. “It terrifies me, how I feel about him—knowing who he is and how much you loved him. I’m terrified that he’ll end up buried next to you and I’ll have to say goodbye to another Dillon brother who has my entire heart. I feel like life is waiting to crush me again, and I don’t know if I can handle it. Or that I want to.
“I don’t know how to handle this life that I’ve always enjoyed but never fully understood the true depth of. Where men kill and are killed, women aren’t safe, and God—Scratch, what if something else happened to Sophie?”
I stopped bothering to wipe my eyes and let the tears fall freely. They wet my scarf and landed like raindrops on my denim-clad lap.
“And yet, I know that if there was anyone else out there in the entire world, that this is who you’d want for me.”
I turned my head, searching for Sophie when I didn’t hear her whispered songs filter to my ears. I squinted, tried to peer behind the large maple tree where she’d been playing. Leaning forward on the blanket, I still couldn’t see her so I stood up, momentarily forgetting where I was.
Whipping my head around, spinning on my heels, my hand flew to my mouth and I gasped.
Behind me Jaden stood, one arm in a sling, with Sophie propped on his hip and her head resting on his shoulders.
He jiggled her, his hand on her bottom bouncing her to a more comfortable position. His eyes were on me as if he wanted to set fire to my soul.
“You’re wrong.” His eyes flashed to the headstone behind me and his lips twisted. “He wouldn’t have wanted me for you. Scratch was smart enough to know I would never be good enough for you.”
“I… uh…” Jesus. I needed to get a grip. “How long have you been here?�
�� My eyes whipped around to the parking lot. I frowned when I didn’t see his truck or his bike. Not that he looked in any condition to be able to ride his bike yet.
“That’s what you want to know?” Jaden took a step forward, and then another one. With every slow movement of his, my heartbeat increased until it pounded so loudly inside my chest I was certain he could hear it from five feet away.
Four feet.
Three feet.
He stepped so close I could smell his cologne, and see his breath in the chilly morning air. It wafted from his lips and his nose into a faint plume of smoke before evaporating into the space between us.
I closed my eyes, breaking the intense heat his presence sent through me.
“Uncah Jaden hurt,” Sophie said. She pointed at his arm and frowned.
“I know.” My lips pursed. “How are you healing?”
“That’s still not the right question.”
What? My head spun. I blinked as I watched Jaden set Sophie on her feet, pat her butt, and watch her run to Scratch’s headstone, where we’d set flowers earlier.
“Who dat?”
God, I’d failed at everything this morning. I hadn’t even told Sophie who we were here to see. With an apologetic look to Jaden, I knelt next to Sophie on the grass and ran my hand over Scratch’s name.
“This is your daddy, sweetie.”
Her eyebrows pulled in. “Dat my dad?”
I nodded. “Yes, the one in the pictures from your book. Remember I said he died, but he loved you and watched over you all the time?” I pulled in a breath when she looked at the headstone, frowned, and back to Jaden. I didn’t know if she understood, but I could see the wheels in her mind working furiously.
Slowly, she frowned at the slab of stone and shook her head. “Dat not my dad.”
“Sophie,” I gasped. “Of course he is.”
She stood up, looking much older than any almost three-year-old should look. Her blond hair, piled into two pigtails behind her ears, swung in the cold breeze and she pouted.
“You tell me daddy yuv me, and play wif me, and help us.”
I did tell her that. Every night when I showed her the book, I went through all the things Scratch would have done, would have wanted to do with Sophie and I, had he been here. But I frowned, uncertain where she was going.
When her head whipped around and she stared at Jaden, I inhaled a breath.
“Sophie,” I started. But she was on the move.
She walked the short distance to Jaden and reached for his hand. With imploring, large blue eyes, she asked, “You yuv me?”
“Yeah, half-pint, I love you.” His eyes softened and his entire face went slack when she wrapped her arms around her leg.
“You help me. You my dad.”
I gasped again; the force of her confidence rocked me on my heels.
I went to move, to correct her, but before I could, her speech and her declaration stunned me into a block of ice, and Jaden squatted down in front of her.
He winced from the movement, his good hand gripping the arm in his sling until he knelt at her level and placed his good on hand on her shoulder.
She grinned a smile full of spaces between her tiny teeth. “You can be my dad.”
“You had one, half-pint, and he was the best man I ever knew. But I love you just as much as he did. And if you want, I’ll tell you all about him.”
“Otay,” she grinned, shrugged like something monumental hadn’t just happened. Like Sophie hadn’t just thrown my world and my fears into a tailspin with her simple, clearly spoken words. “Mommy, I go play now?”
I shook my head, and as I did, seeing the love Jaden clearly had for Sophie written so plainly across his face—a look that only intensified as his eyes reached mine—my fears fell to the ground and evaporated like the dew.
“Yeah, pumpkin. Go play.”
I waited until she went back to dancing around the tree, singing her quiet songs, before I went to Jaden and offered him a hand. “Need help getting up?”
He scoffed. “No, getting up has never been my problem.” He flashed me a look and looked at his crotch before raising an eyebrow at me. A strangled laugh choked my throat. Typical.
He grabbed my hand and pulled me down to him until I was on my knees in front of him.
“But my side feels like it’s on fire, so sit with me before I have to get up again.”
I did. I sat next to Jaden on the grass in front of his dead brother’s gravesite, and wished I were anywhere else when I had to say what I had to say.
Yet somehow, it all seemed so fitting to be declaring my love for Jaden with Scratch so close, giving me the go-ahead to move on—the permission to be strong even when it scared the crap out of me.
As if he read my mind, Jaden reached out, cupped my cheek with his hand. “Scratch would know I wouldn’t be good enough for you. I meant that earlier. He also knows I wanted you back before you went to him and that I’m a selfish prick—so now that I have my shot, finally have a good shot at you, I won’t ever let you walk away from me.”
“What makes you so sure that’s what I want?”
He shot me an “oh fuckin’ please” look. It was one I’d seen often. “I heard you, babe.”
Babe. The word sent shivers to my spine. “Maybe I wasn’t talking about you.”
“I already knew you loved me, just been waiting for the words.”
I swallowed, knowing he was right but unable to admit to him. Not face to face. Not when I’d just so quickly realized the depth of my love for him myself—a love so deep that I knew I’d stand by him regardless of what he did.
“And you?”
Jaden laughed softly, as if it was the dumbest question in the world. He leaned in, pressed his forehead to mine, and his hand moved to the back of my neck—right where I loved it when he held me. “Wouldn’t be here if I didn’t, Jules.”
I blew out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
“I want that. Want to be the man Sophie thinks I am. I want that for you and I want it for her, but mostly, I want to be the kind of man she sees when she looks at me.”
“You already are.” My body burned for him. I couldn’t sit here so close to him and not feel the connection we’d always seemed to have—one that had quickly changed from hatred and mistrust to something so beautiful and so much deeper. “Doesn’t mean I’m not still scared, Jaden.”
“I know.” He pulled back until our eyes were inches from one another. “Club took care of Sporelli when I was out, you know.”
I nodded, because I did. Liv and Faith had filled me in—even letting me know that somehow Gunner had been a plant from the Sporelli family for years. I also knew Jaden beat the shit out of him, then they returned him to Chicago, barely alive, but alive enough that Sporelli had guaranteed there’d be no blowback on the club if they let him go. I swallowed, that thick lump in my throat appearing whenever I thought about the reality of their life—potentially my life.
“I wanted to wait to come to you until all that shit was done. But we’ve taken care of Gunner, the club’s done running drugs, and we’ve done a damn good job of cleaning up Jasper Bay. The only shit we’ll get into now is in keeping it clean, and we’ll do whatever we need to keep it a safe, clean place. Doesn’t mean shit won’t happen, but you need to trust that if a bullet in my gut and me dying two times already wasn’t enough to take me from you, that nothing will.”
I lost the fight I had in staying away from him. Everything he said was exactly what I needed to hear.
I couldn’t help it. The pull between us was real. It was intense and it was built on a lifetime of knowing one another. Maybe not always liking one another, but I knew Jaden enough to know he didn’t say shit he didn’t mean. His word was his bond. Permanently.
“I trust you,” I finally admitted, feeling emotions bubble to the surface. Before I could let them break, let him see more tears in my eyes, I leaned in and pressed my lips to his.
With a gru
nt of surprise, Jaden quickly pressed against the back of my head and took control. From my lips to my toes, everything exploded with desire and love for the man on his knees in front of me. Promising me the world.
Promising me the family I’d always wanted for Sophie.
It was so overwhelming, tears began to fall anyway. I sniffed, still reeling from the kiss when Jaden pulled back.
He wiped the tears off my cheeks and pulled me to him so my ear rested against his lips. “Love you, Jules. And Sophie. I’ll be the man you need me to be, I fuckin’ promise.”
“I know,” I choked out, my voice thick with emotion. “I know you will.”
“I’d also love nothing better than to lay down and let you ride my cock until you’re screaming my name, but the doc says I can’t do shit like that for another six weeks so we’re gonna have to find another way to make up.”
And just like that, he broke the heaviness of the moment and filled it with something else completely more powerful… something I desperately wanted. Forever.
Eight months later ~ early June
“Finish it, babe.”
Jaden’s deep, gravelly growl spurred me on. My hips shifted against his as I straddled him. His hands gripped my hips, rocking and pushing me, lifting and pulling me.
I may have been on top, but he controlled every moment I made.
In the last eight months since I’d finally let my fears go, I’d surrendered to the fact that Jaden always had to be in control.
Especially in bed.
“Jaden.” My head fell back and I moaned. His hand left my hip, fingers straight to my clit, and he rubbed. Hard. Just the way I liked it.
I exploded against him. My thighs shook. My head dropped down and my fingernails dug into his shoulders as he continued forcefully and frantically pushing inside of me like he couldn’t get enough of me.
I loved it that I brought that out it him… his loss of self-control became my undoing every single time we were in bed. Or against a wall. Or in the shower. Or on the kitchen table.
