by Penny Dee
“She’ll kick your ass,” came the voice behind me. “And then she’ll kick it some more.”
I knew without looking that it was Ruger. Wendy’s younger brother.
“You know it’s true. You know this isn’t what she would want.”
I closed my eyes and let the hand holding the gun drop to my side. “Go away, Ruger.”
I felt him walk up behind me. “I can’t do that, Bull.”
Rain ran down my face. I opened my eyes and looked at Wendy’s name carved into the marble tombstone, a renewed pain tightening around my heart. I raised the gun again and felt the cold, wet steel press into my skin.
“You really going to do this to me?” Ruger questioned.
Even through my mental agony, I realized it was a fucking weird thing for him to say. I turned my head but still didn’t look at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Through the corner of my eye I saw him walk around me to stand between me and his sister’s grave.
“I’m only twenty-two fucking years old. My sister just died. You’re really going to splatter my best friend’s brains all over the ground in front of me. Christ, Bull…I’ll end up a fucking basket case. And you know what, it’ll all be your damn fault.”
He crouched down so we were eye-level. And when I looked into his bright eyes, I saw his sister, and my face crumpled. I missed her. I missed our unborn baby. Bone-achingly so. And I wanted her back. Wanted them both back. I didn’t want to feel like this anymore. He had to understand that.
I narrowed my eyes as the rain continued to fall, running in rivulets down my face. “Go home, Ruger.”
But the fucker shook his head. “I can’t do that, man, and you know it.”
Too bad.
I had given him the option.
He wasn’t my responsibility. I couldn’t make him leave.
But he needed to look away.
Because I was ready.
Baby, I’m coming…
With a rush, I raised the gun to my temple and pulled the trigger.
Unfortunately, my motor skills were bourbon-soaked and unsteady, and no match for Ruger’s lightning-fast reflexes. He wrestled the gun from my hand and knocked me to the ground.
I fought back, sort of, but Ruger pushed me down and put my drunk ass to sleep with his fist.
Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t permanently.
BULL
Present Day
Fuck!
My eyes snapped open.
I wasn’t in my bed.
I had slept over.
Fuck!
I ripped the bed covers off and climbed out, walking naked across the room to where my clothes lay scattered across the floor. She had ripped them off of me the night before, piece by piece as we’d kissed ferociously on our way to her bedroom. The sex had been good. Good enough that I’d fallen into a contented asleep and ended up spending the night. Which wasn’t good. That wasn’t part of the deal. There were rules. My rules. We fucked. We talked. I left. It was a situation that suited us both fine. I couldn’t afford to be with someone who wanted anything more than a good time between the sheets, and she couldn’t afford to have anything more than a good time with a bad guy like me. The fact that my Harley had been parked in her driveway overnight was a mistake. For both of us.
I pulled on my jeans but left them unzipped as I searched for my t-shirt.
In a few weeks, her campaign for re-election as town mayor would begin, and I had no doubt our evenings in her bed would be over.
Which suited me just fine.
Because this was never going to be a long-term thing.
“You’re so fucking hot, you know that?” she said.
I looked over at her on the bed. She was sprawled naked among the sheets, giving me a serious case of fuck-me eyes.
“You’re not so bad yourself.”
She grinned. She knew she was hot. Five years older than me, she took good care of herself. Firm thighs. Tight body. A few trips to the plastic surgeon.
And she fucked like it was an addiction.
I walked shirtless toward her and she crawled across the bed. “You know, I’m announcing my candidacy to re-run for mayor this week.”
Well, there you go, that was sooner than I expected.
“I knew it was coming…” I said as she pulled me closer by the open zipper of my jeans.
“You know it means we won’t be able to fuck in secret anymore, right?”
“Pity. The secrecy thing was hot.”
“Exactly how I like it. But I can’t afford to…well, you know what this town is like. They want me all wrapped up in a tidy package… Andrew Voight asked me out on a date the other night.”
Voight was the principal of the elementary school. And a more suitable date for our town mayor than me.
“He did?”
“Yes.”
For a politician, she was surprisingly honest. She didn’t beat around the bush. She called it as she saw it. It was one of the things I admired about her.
“And what did you tell him?”
She reached into my jeans.
“I told him yes.”
She started to stroke me.
“Sounds like a smart answer,” I replied.
When I hardened in her hand, she licked her lips and heat flared in her eyes.
“I’m going to miss your cock,” she said, as she released me from my jeans.
Bending her head, she wrapped her juicy lips around the thick shaft and sucked me into her tight, wet mouth, sending a shiver through me.
“And I’m going to miss your perfect mouth…” I replied, my breath ragged because this woman was extremely good with her mouth.
She pulled away and lay back on the bed, opening her legs. “What about my pussy, are you going to miss that too?”
I grinned down at her.
Our involvement had run its course. We would go our separate ways and move on to other people. There was no heartbreak. No disappointment. No pain. Just a finality.
But for now?
What the hell.
I climbed on the bed and took her in my arms, and kissing her fiercely, spent the next hour showing the mayor of Destiny exactly why they called me Bull, and why size really does matter.
TAYLOR
Watery blood swirled at my toes before disappearing down the drain.
I cried, tears streaming down my face as my fear and grief spiraled through me like a tornado. I held my hands out in front of me, they were shaking and the shower water mingled with the blood coating my fingers.
I did it to make him happy.
I did it because I loved him and wanted him to love me back.
But I hated every second of it.
It hurt.
It hurt right through to my soul.
My eyes dropped to the sopping wet wig laying in a pool of water on the bathroom floor and the overturned stilettos scattered beside it, and my stomach churned violently until I had no choice but to release its contents into the drain.
Sitting up, I hit the tiled wall with the back of my head and bit back my agony, reminding myself to stop being a pussy. I had been raised to be stronger than this. And this was my life now. I had to suck it up if I was to survive.
The bathroom door burst open and he walked in. Fear gunned its way through my body and I started to shake again.
This was my life now and I had nowhere to run.
But one day… one day I would run far, far away.
I sat up with a rush. Sweat soaked my skin as fear thrummed through my veins. My lungs heaved and burned, desperate for more oxygen.
I glanced out the window. It was dark. The middle of the night dark. Outside, a streetlight glowed in the blackness giving me enough light to see my surroundings, and the familiarity of them grounded me, bringing me back to Earth.
It was just a dream, Taylor.
Just a dream.
Just a distant memory.
Those days are over now.
Feeling the sudden rush of panic I always felt after the nightmares, I ripped off the bedcovers and tore down the hallway to Noah’s room. Fear knotted in my throat and my knees buckled with dread as I pushed open the door, terrified I would find my younger brother was gone. But the relief was instant when I saw him sleeping soundly in his bed, hugging his pillow and lost in a sweet slumber. I gripped the door knob, the sudden absence of fear making me weak. Sagging against the door, I heaved out the breath I had been holding onto, sucking the cool night air into my lungs and willing my heart to stop racing.
See, it was just a dream.
Those days are over now.
For seven years we’d been running.
For seven years we’d been hiding in the shadows of one new town after another.
But soon we wouldn’t have to run or hide anymore.
I looked at my eleven-year-old brother and my grip tightened on the door knob.
He was my world.
The only thing I had left.
And I would do anything to protect him.
Anything at all.
BULL
“Is that a fucking hickey?” I asked, as I walked into chapel the next morning.
Davey, our giant, perverted teddy bear, grinned proudly. “Fucking A, it is. Haven’t had one of these bad boys since I was in high school.”
“That’s because you’re supposed to be a fucking grown up,” Cool Hand said, throwing a beer bottle cap at him. “What are you, thirteen?”
But Davey couldn’t care less as he sat back in his chair, and laced his fat hands across his fat belly, looking proud of himself. “What can I say? Tiffani could suck a golf ball through a garden hose.”
“I can second that,” Hawke agreed.
“Hell, that girl could suck the chrome off my exhaust pipes,” Matlock added, ripping the cap off his beer and flicking it onto the table.
Ignoring them, I sat down. Already seated around the massive wooden slab of Carolina ash were nineteen Kings.
Nineteen mean-looking sonsofbitches who were everything to me. My brothers. My family. My responsibility.
We met in chapel once a week. More if things were happening.
And right now, things were happening.
Thanks to one piece of shit drug dealer.
Gimmel Martel.
The Kings of Mayhem number one arch nemesis.
He had arrived in our town under the guise of being a wine importer. But in reality, he had been a drug importer with a thriving cocaine business. I gave him a chance to leave quietly because this was my town, my people, my county, and I wasn’t going to let him spill his poison into the well and destroy the people my club and I protected. But my offer fell on deaf ears. And instead, he decided to send me a message. He sent someone to intimidate my niece, and when that someone put his hands all over her, well, Martel had to learn who he was dealing with.
No one touched my family and got away with it.
To drive this point home, I burned his cocaine and his vineyards to the fucking ground.
In retaliation, Gimmel Martel ordered his men to shoot up my nephew’s wedding, putting my sergeant-at-arms in the hospital with life-threatening wounds. He executed orders to inflict damage on my club. My family. But he was already gone before I could retaliate. He vanished into the bowels of a seedy underworld, his whereabouts cloaked by a dark network of criminals and organized crime.
I wanted revenge.
Hell, I wanted to tear him apart with my bare hands.
But the coward slid into the shadows like a scared little mouse because he knew I was coming for him.
I was a patient man. At some point, he would have to surface for air, and when he did, I would be waiting.
In the meantime, because I couldn’t hurt the man, I destroyed the empire.
Piece by piece.
Alliance by alliance.
One deal at a fucking time.
I used different pieces of information I found in the ashes of his burned-out vineyard to pick at the threads of his business interests, to slowly unravel his entire fucking kingdom.
And he felt it too. Right where it hurt.
His pile of cash.
He needed to learn.
No one fucked with me and my club.
And no one, fucking no one, fucked with my family.
My anger and lust for revenge had grown into something unstoppable.
He could hide, but he couldn’t hide forever.
I would wait.
I had time.
But time made me more dangerous.
And the longer he kept me waiting, the more dangerous I would become.
I would keep pulling at the loose string of his empire—his drug distribution—until it slowly unraveled everything that meant something to him.
I was going to smoke him out.
And then I was going to kill him.
After chapel, Ruger hung back.
“How’s my niece?” I asked.
“She’s as big as a whale,” he said with a grin. When I gave him a filthy look, he held up his hands in surrender. “Hey, they’re her words, not mine.”
“But you tell her she’s wrong, right?”
“Hell, brother, I’m no fool. I value my balls.” His eyes glittered with happiness. I’d never seen Ruger look as happy as he was when he was with or talking about Chastity. “She’s getting antsy for our boy to arrive.”
“It’s a boy?”
“Found out yesterday. Actually, that’s what I want to talk to you about. She’s on her way over here.”
“What for?”
Before he could answer, Chastity walked into the club. Eight months pregnant and glowing, she looked beautiful. Pride swelled in my chest. But it was quickly followed by a surge of venom when I remembered what happened to her last summer. How one of Martel’s thugs had pulled her over on the highway pretending to be a cop. How he had put his hands on her, threatened her. It was hard to forget because Chastity meant everything to me, and I felt a wildfire of hate in my brain every time I thought about it.
She was the daughter I’d never had, and I wouldn’t think twice about putting someone in the ground for hurting her.
Her whole life, I’d been a little overprotective of her.
If having three older, biker brothers wasn’t bad enough, then having a fiercely protective uncle was a nightmare. And she wasn’t shy in telling me.
When I discovered my best friend was involved with her, I’d lost my shit. In my mind, no one was ever going to be good enough for her. Not even the man who’d stopped me from blowing my head off during the dark days following Wendy’s death.
But Ruger had proved himself to be more than fucking worthy. He worshiped Chastity. Treated her like his queen. Took three bullets for her when he’d thrown himself in front of a gunman at Cassidy and Chance’s wedding.
I couldn’t ask for more than that. And now they were about to become parents.
“Hey, Uncle Bull,” Chastity said, pressing a kiss to my cheek.
“Hey, sweet girl. You feeling okay?”
“Yeah, but the sooner this baby is out of me, the better. I’m tired of waddling like a duck and dry heaving every time I smell meat.” She rubbed her huge belly. “Can we talk?”
“This sounds serious. Should I be concerned?”
In my family, pregnancy wasn’t without risk. My mom almost died giving birth to my older sister, Veronica, and I was born by C-section after my mom’s heart stopped during labor. Thankfully, she'd pulled through. But I was the last of her children, even though she’d wanted more.
And Veronica had problems giving birth to all four of her babies. After her eldest, Chance, was born, the doctor advised her not to have anymore. It was the same advice he gave her following Cade and Caleb’s birth. And it was advice she finally listened to following Chastity’s harrowing birth.
I prayed that things went smoothly for my niece.
Her smile was beautiful.
“No. Everything is fine. Perfect, actually.”
I relaxed.
“Come on, we can talk in my office.” I led her and Ruger out of the bar.
“I hope you don’t mind but I asked Indy and Cade to join us,” Chastity said.
No sooner had we walked into my office when the door opened, and Cade walked in with his very own mini-me on his shoulders. River was almost five, and the spitting image of his father.
Indy walked in behind them, carrying little Bella in her arms. As soon as she saw me, Bella reached out her chubby arms and wriggled against her mom as if to say, give me to him. Her adorable little face broke into a big smile the moment Indy handed her over and I secured her in my arms. The kid loved me, and I was fucking crazy about her.
Her name was an homage to Mirabella, the murdered wife of a now-deceased club member. Mirabella died when a psychopath executed a campaign of revenge against the club. The same man also kidnapped Indy, but fell short of killing her because Cade put two bullets in him.
“So, what is this all about?” I asked, sitting behind my desk with Bella on my lap.
“Well, we have a favor to ask,” Chastity said, trying to get comfortable in the chair.
I gave her a nod. “Go on.”
“We’d like you to be Will’s godfather,” she said. “And we’d like Cade and Indy to be his godparents too,” she added, looking at her brother and his wife.
“If anything happened to us…we want our boy to be raised by family.” Ruger placed his hand on his wife’s belly. “By the people we know will raise him right.”
Our world was unpredictable. Life could turn on a dime.
Godfather.
It was the closest I was going to get to being a father.
I was resigned to having no children of my own. I had the club. I had my nieces and nephews, and now my grand-nephews and nieces. And while there had always been a dull ache in my chest knowing I’d never hold my own kid, I gave up the dream.
After all, my chance died in a car wreck eighteen years earlier.
And I had never come close with anyone since. There had been no close calls, of course, because when I fucked, I fucked with protection.
