by Sky Winters
Finally she spilled the whole story to Kayla after making sure she swore not to tell. After she told her, she got an unexpected reaction. Kayla smiled, shaking her head. “That little bastard,” was all she said.
When Joy pushed her to elaborate, Kayla sighed, the smile still on her lips.
“It's just that...if I could have gotten away with it, I would have liked to do it myself.”
“What, kill Gordon?”
“Call it the Mama Bear in me. I protect me and mine. I guess Zak's the same way. But more macho. Because men are just like that.”
Joy stared at her sister, feeling as if something inside of her had started to thaw out and melt. She began to cry again, but for a totally different reason. Kayla smiled and stroked her gently, muttering something about how bad pregnancy hormones could be, and then sent her off to bed with a glass of tea.
She laid in bed, touching the bump where her child was growing. She loved it more than she had ever loved anything, even though they hadn't officially met yet. She sighed, crying softly as she thought about just how much she missed Zak. She had always missed him, right from the moment she left. But he couldn't come with her. He had to take care of his grandmother. He'd had it rough, it was no wonder he'd turned out to be such a hardass. But he acted from a place of care and love, and although he was rough, he had a good reason for everything he did. She couldn't think of anyone more suitable to look after her child as fiercely as she intended to. With a dad like Zak around, no harm would come to that baby.
The next morning when she woke up, she knew what she would have to do. She showered and dressed, then hopped into her car. She didn't even stop to have breakfast with Kayla and Penny. All that was on her mind was Zak.
Chapter 11
She drove quickly, parking her car in the same spot. The bikes that Gordon's gang members had were still there, at least parts of them. They'd smashed up some and salvaged the pieces. She was sure she'd find plenty at the body shop. She ducked into the motorcycle club, waiting a moment for her eyes to adjust. All activity in the room paused, and finally she could see several figures around her, each of them eyeing her curiously.
None of them seemed to recognize her, but they knew her car, and they knew that Zak told them not to mess with her if she came in again. They were supposed to get him immediately. It took about five minutes before Zak was standing in front of her. He led her past the bar, fumes of alcohol and cigarettes lingering in the air, and led her up to the apartment above the bar, where he lived.
It had the husky scent of a male bachelor, spicy and intoxicating, and surprisingly clean. If he smoked he smoked downstairs, and kept the apartment immaculate. Still, there were signs of his deviance all over the place. A pin up girl calendar on the wall, bike parts scattered here and there, weapons of several types placed proudly on the wall. She looked away from them and into his eyes.
“Are you okay? I'm glad you're here. How is the baby?”
“I'm fine,” she said, although in truth she felt like throwing up. It was a feeling she had gotten used to though, and swallowed it with finesse. “The baby is fine too. She's growing strong.”
“She,” he said, and his face glowed. She suddenly felt very ashamed of herself for keeping him out of the loop for so long. She had been afraid, yes, but having him there with her along the way would have been so much better.
“I haven't named her yet,” she said carefully. “I thought we could do that together.”
He stared at her, the meaning of the words hitting him hard. For the first time in ten years, she saw Zak weep. The first time was when she had left him in that town all alone, with nobody left to love him. Her heart went out to him now, and she touched his leathery cheek, wiping tears away and allowing him to embrace her. She almost groaned out loud, the feeling of him so near to her was powerful and perfect – everything she had been needing was right there all along.
“I couldn't fucking handle it if you left again,” he said softly. “You're all I had for so long. And then you were just gone. I think something in me snapped then. I figure if there's no love left for me, I've got no love left for anything else.”
“I know,” Joy whispered.
“But I love you,” he was saying, lifting her up gently, kissing her from the forehead to the baby bump, holding and caressing it as if it were the most sacred object on the earth. “And I love her. More than I've loved anything.”
“Me too,” she said. “And I love you. I never should have left. You're the only man I ever loved.”
And then they were kissing.
She let her hands slide up and down his body, dipping her fingers into the power over him that she knew her body had. He writhed pleasantly under her touch, grabbing her hands to kiss the fingertips and her palms, sending shivers as his soft kisses penetrated the thin, sensitive skin on her wrists. She tugged them away from him, her heart racing, and held him tightly, her palms roaming his thighs, resting over the rock-hard bulge between them, slipping in to hold it, bring it to her lips, and taste him.
And then he was on top of her, and they made love, not like the teenagers they were when they parted, but like the adults that had been through everything possible and not been broken. Their hearts were merged and their bodies knew it, elevating every sensation until they closed their eyes and came together, falling into bed and clinging tightly to the other's body, making damn sure that they would never be so far apart again.
Epilogue
“Mommy! Ella's walking!”
Penny summoned Kayla quickly, who ran into the living room. Zak and Joy were kneeling on the floor, Ella in between them. She was taking her first tentative steps toward Zak. As soon as she lost her balance, he was there, cushioning the space between Ella and the ground. He lifted her in the air, tossing her gently.
“Good job baby!” he exclaimed, kissing her on the nose. The baby laughed and clapped, and Joy grinned from ear to ear. Life had its ups and downs, but the one thing she knew for sure was that without her family, she would have nothing. But with them, she had everything.
She gazed lovingly at her sister, who had allowed herself to warm up to Zak once again and opened her home up to her sister and her family. Penny adored her Uncle Zak, and loved Ella even more. And although life was chaotic and crazy at the MC, there was nowhere to go but up. They would do what it took to protect Ella and keep the town a safe place for her to grow. That's all there was to it.
THE END
MC ROMANCE: Valentine Biker
“That’s right,” Summer Jones intoned as she watched him leave. “Go crawling back to your high school- aged skank. See if something lasting comes out of that.” She slammed the door, not bothering to look as her now ex-husband Tom drove away from her in his red pick-up truck. She swiftly removed her wedding ring and her engagement ring from her finger, and slammed them down on the table before crumpling up into one of the chairs.
She finally allowed herself to cry. Her husband of five years had left her. She’d suspected that he’d been cheating on her, and he informed her that he had. “She’s twenty-five, and she can provide something for me that you can’t,” he’d told Summer shortly before ditching her and the life they’d made together.
This was an insult to Summer for a number of reasons. She was twenty-nine; she wasn’t exactly old yet by any stretch of the word. The ‘something’ he’d mentioned was children. Summer had been told by at least three separate doctors that she was not going to be able to conceive. Her body just did not release enough eggs. Some crap like that. She had gotten past it somehow, but apparently Tom had not.
Sobbing in her kitchen, Summer didn’t know what to do. At last, she called up her best friend Rose. She cried into the phone and could barely get any words out, but finally she was able to say, “He left me.”
“Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” her friend said. “Did he say why?”
Thinking about his reasoning didn’t exactly help. “He said he wanted to be with someone who cou
ld have his kids. As if anyone would want to have kids with him!”
The truth was that she had wanted that.
She could hear Rose sigh. “Do you want to do something tonight? I’ll buy you a milkshake at the Shake Shack…”
Summer shook her head even though Rose couldn’t see that through the phone. “No, thanks, though. I’ve got work.”
“Work?” Rose asked, surprised. “No, no no. You cannot go to work. It’s Valentine’s Day and your husband is an asshole. You should not make your day worse by serving customers. No.”
Despite how much pain she was in, Summer laughed a little at that. “I have to go to work,” she said. “I’m not going to be able to pay for myself if I don’t keep working for myself.”
She told herself that Valentine’s Day didn’t mean anything to her. It was just some dumb holiday invented by both the greeting card and the candy companies. It didn’t hold any significance at all for her. Nope.
When she arrived at her place of work – a restaurant that also served as a small music-slash-poetry venue, and also housed a bookstore – Summer groaned when she saw the decorations that had been strung up, laid out and stuck to nearly every surface in the place that wasn’t going to be used for cooking. Pink, red and white were everywhere. She had never noticed before how evil the concept of Cupid was.
“Happy Valentine’s Day!” her manager Megan greeted her, giving her an uncharacteristic big hug. She was tall with wavy brown hair and blond highlights. She was about forty years old, and that was part of why Summer was both confused and chagrined at her boss’s enthusiasm for the holiday.
“I didn’t know you were so into Valentine’s Day,” Summer said, shrugging away from the hug as soon as possible. Maybe Rose had been right.
Megan let out a laugh. “I didn’t used to be, but now I’m engaged!” she practically shouted. She showed off the large, diamond ring on her finger, grinning from ear to ear.
Okay, now it seemed as though the world was playing a cruel trick on Summer. “Yay,” she said softly.
“Yay,” Megan agreed. “Okay, so, there are appropriate shirts for the evening for you to pick out and put on in the back. There’s a Valentine’s Day concert scheduled for seven-thirty. I’m going to have you start in the bookstore and then move on to being a waitress during the show. Does that sound good?”
None of it sounded particularly good to Summer, but she didn’t want to be alone on Valentine’s Day, thinking about the husband she had lost and feeling sorry for herself. The past five years hadn’t all been wonderful, especially not the last year of it, when Tom had been cheating on her and not even trying so hard to hide it.
With a slight nod, she went to the back and chose a red shirt. Red could be taken for something other than romantic. Red was the color of blood, of fire, of anger. Only when she put it on did she realize that it had a pink heart on it, right over where her body’s actual heart belonged.
She could deal with it, though. At least it didn’t have any words on it. As she looked at her reflection, she marveled at the fact that, aside from looking a little tired, it was hard to tell that her heart was actually broken. Her short, reddish-brown hair still curled up on one side and curled under on the other side, making her look lopsided in a way that she liked. She still had a solar system of freckles on her face and neck. She seemed no worse for wear. She was still Summer Jones, and she could pretend to be completely unscathed. Her blue eyes with flecks of gold looked sad, but their sadness could easily be mistaken for fatigue.
“The bookstore won’t be so bad,” she told herself under her breath. “It’s not like everyone is going to buy books about romance today. We have a lot of different kinds of books…”
After telling herself that, Summer gave her reflection a nod and went out to the sales floor again, ready to go ahead and stand at the check-out podium, pretending to be enthusiastic about the selection at Cabbages and Kings. It was a tourist sort of place, but it paid the bills and it kept her out of Mopeville.
The Philadelphia tourist trap was not exactly popping at five in the afternoon, however. So far, she and her coworkers, and the crew that set up the stage for concerts and poetry readings, were the only people in the place.
Suddenly, Summer heard the sound of a motorcycle outside. It wasn’t that rare to see and hear them in the city, but it wasn’t often that someone who rode a motorcycle decided to come into Cabbages and Kings. People who rode motorcycles were stereotypically ‘cool’ and ‘fearless.’ The people who went to Summer’s place of work were decidedly not those things. It was a restaurant devoted to nerds.
The front door opened and she peeked around the wall as it jutted out and obscured a large portion of the bookstore from the rest of the venue’s view. She could hear as the rider’s leather boots stomped towards her, however. The rider came into the bookstore before even asking about a table, which she did not understand.
He was dressed in a typical biker outfit. Besides the black leather boots, he wore blue jeans and a black leather jacket with more than a few chains jutting out of it. He carried a black helmet under his arm, but so far all she’d been able to make out of his face was that he had sandy, slightly curly hair.
“Please let me know if I can help you,” Summer said to him, keeping her voice bright even though she was curious and surprised by this customer.
Scanning the shelves, he appeared to be jumpy and in a hurry, and she thought that he would just ignore her like nearly all of the other customers she greeted. He kept his back to her and she gave up any hopes of having a brief conversation with him. Her mind drifted back to her husband – ex-husband – and what he was most likely doing for his Valentine’s Day…
Two police cars drove past the building, sirens blaring and lights flashing. As soon as they were gone, the biker guy turned towards her. He gave her a look of relief. His eyes were as brown as Valentine’s chocolates. She hated herself for making that connection. He was younger than she had expected. Most of the bikers she saw around town were middle-aged.
“I am looking for a present for someone really picky,” he said. His voice was much gentler than Summer had anticipated, too.
She smiled at him. “You’ve come to the right person, then,” she said. “I’m probably the pickiest person here. What sort of things are you thinking?”
He pulled a book by Neil Gaiman off the shelf. “She loves Douglas Adams,” he explained. “I’ve heard good things about this author. Would you say they’re similar?”
Summer smiled and put her hands behind her back so this handsome biker wouldn’t see that she was fidgeting with her fingers a little bit. She picked at her nails when she was nervous. Right now, she was nervously excited. She loved to discuss books with people, which was why she had chosen this geeky job in the first place.
“That depends,” she said. “That’s a little bit more macabre than Hitchhiker’s… I would go for this one.” She snatched up a different book, one that was co-written by Terry Pratchett. “This book is golden. It’s funny; it’s metaphysical but not really in such a sinister way. Though it is about Armageddon.” Summer smirked at him. “But if she likes Douglas Adams, she probably likes books about that.”
This attractive biker was frantically shopping for a female on Valentine’s Day. Summer couldn’t help but feel somewhat disappointed. She couldn’t even flirt with a stranger today! The oxymoronic mixture of his biker attire and cherubic face intrigued her.
“Hey, thanks,” the guy said. He put back the book he’d been holding, and took the one she offered. He was taking her suggestion. At least Summer could count that as a small victory.
Once she’d led him over to her podium and he’d paid for the book with cash, he looked at her as if for the first time. “Are you doing anything tonight?”
Oh no, she thought. The last thing she needed was yet another cheater in her life. “But you just bought a present for…”
“For my little sister,” he finished for her. He flashed
a grin and Summer held onto the podium, doing her best to make it seem like a normal thing to do and not something that was necessary in order to keep her legs from giving out.
Whoa, but he had a gorgeous smile!
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I’m here the rest of the night.”
He leaned in a little so that only she could hear him. “Can you not be?”
Summer looked around, blushing. No one else was even near them or paying attention. Some people had started to come in and be seated in the restaurant, so the staff would be busier over there. She knew that she had a waitress shift later during the concert. She also knew that Megan was so very into the emotions of the day this year, so there happened to be a chance that she could leave, if she gave the appropriate excuse…
“Tell me your name first,” she said, watching him as he tucked the brown-bagged book into his back pocket and put his helmet back on his head. “I don’t want to spend Valentine’s Day with a guy if I don’t even know his name.”
There was that smile again. He looked her straight in the eye. “Eric,” he said, keeping his already velvety voice soft and secretive as though his name was something that mere mortals weren’t supposed to know.
She kept her eyes on his and swallowed nervous-excitedly. “Summer,” she said. “Like the season.”
CHAPTER TWO
Heroes Just For One Day
As expected, Megan squealed when Summer asked to have the night off for an impromptu date. She called in someone else to cover for her, but it turned out that there were more than enough people working there as it was and they would be able to handle the crowd that Megan had imagined would come for the show. Summer wasn’t really worried about that; she just hoped losing out on a night of tips for this Eric guy was going to be worth it.
