Haunt (Bayonet Scars #6)

by Jc Emery

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I hiss once the bedroom door is closed.

  Wyatt either chooses to ignore my mood or plays dumb, because he hooks his arm around my waist and pulls me against him. His chest is hard, the taut muscles in his arms are hard, and his breathing is getting even harder than it was before. I suck in a deep breath and am rewarded with a low groan. His hand travels from my lower back to my ass, and he presses me against him. Not surprisingly, his dick is hard, too. His other hand cups my chin and tilts my face up toward his. I could let this happen, and I would enjoy every moment of it. But I don’t want to. I’m a mother now. I can’t do this to Zander again.

  “How am I looking at you? Am I looking at you like you just made my fucking dreams come true? Like watching you soothe our little girl to sleep is the best goddamn thing I’ve seen in my entire life? Like all I can think about when I see you with our kids is how I want to pound your pussy raw until we have another? That how you don’t want me looking at you?”

  My jaw shakes. My hands shake. Hell, my entire fucking body is alight from what he’s said. He means every single word of it. But that doesn’t mean he’ll be able to stay clean and stick around long enough to see the baby he wants so badly be born.

  So I take a deep breath and say, “Yeah. That’s exactly how I don’t want you looking at me.”

  I pull away and rush down the hallway as quietly as I can. I’m not about to wake up Piper, but I need some air. Zander passed out on the couch instead of in Mishy’s old bedroom, so I’m mindful of him as I slip out the front door and walk through the grass until I get to the tree Wyatt carved our names into.

  The trunk of the redwood is massive, as most of them are, but it’s crooked in spots, like it sprouted up wrong or something. I lean against the trunk without trying to find the carving and just breathe. I calm myself as much as I can by closing my eyes and just enjoying the peace and quiet of the moment. It won’t last, but I have it for this minute, and that’s what matters. Just as I feel my body relax, the creak of the front door alerts me to the fact that I’m not alone.

  When Wyatt’s so close that I can physically feel his presence, I open my eyes. His arms are crossed over his chest. Both are huge—the muscles in his arms defined and his chest broad. I used to love his size. I’m sure I still do. It’s just that right now I’m not feeling very loving toward him.

  “You’re fucking punishing me,” he says.

  I blow out a hostile breath and shake my head.

  “What happened at the club today?”

  “You know what happened. You were there.”

  That’s not what I mean, and he knows it.

  “I don’t want you involved in club business. I want you and our kids as far away from that shit as possible.”

  “That’s not possible, and you know it!” I’m seething. We both know how today went down. I didn’t stick my nose in where it didn’t belong. I was just there when everything spun out of control. He can’t honestly expect that telling me to stay out of it is going to work or that it’ll make everything better. As if he could fully separate his life with the club and his life with his kids. Idiot.

  “I’m cleaning up the mess. That’s all you need to know.”

  “You never used to leave me out.” It’s a truth he can’t deny, even though I can tell he wants to—desperately—in this moment.

  “You didn’t used to be a mother.” His words hang between us, taunting me. My face scrunches up in detest. How dare he. The only thing I can do is glare at him, but it does nothing to work him up. His eyes are trained on mine, and he’s so earnest it pisses me off.

  “I’m a mother—to your kids, might I add—but I’m also your old lady. I didn’t just stop being a woman when I had kids, so don’t you dare treat me like I’m fragile and can’t handle my shit.”

  “That’s not what I meant!” He’s shouting now.

  “Tell me what’s going on. You know as well as I do that keeping shit from your old lady is dangerous. I can’t help you or the club if you keep me in the dark.”

  Something I’ve said makes his jaw lock in place, his hands ball into fists at his sides, and his eyes turn dark. He’s getting angry, which is about the only thing that will get me what I want.

  “Are you my old lady? Doesn’t seem like it—you won’t even let me fucking touch you.”

  I flinch. I’m not that woman who mouths off and can’t take it when shit’s thrown back at her, but this hurts. It hurts because I want to let him touch me. I want to touch him. I want to fall back into that crazy, passionate couple we used to be. I want to walk into a room by his side and have every single goddamn person there know we’re a packaged deal. He is mine and I am his, and there isn’t a single thing on this earth that can change that. But he’s right. That girl who walked into a room, knowing she owns her man, wasn’t a mother. She didn’t have two kids who depend on her to make the best choices for them. Her old man was her entire world, but now he’s not. He can’t be. Not until my kids are adults and their worlds won’t fucking end because Daddy’s on a bender. I need to keep things straight with us, calm even, so that I can make sure he stays sober.

  Wyatt takes a step closer and cages me in with an arm on each side of me. A slow, devious smile breaks out on his face, and he’s got a flicker in his eyes that tells me he’s gearing up to be a real asshole. He used to get his way by out-bitching me, but that was before I went pro by having a teenager. I steel myself for the verbal assault I just know is coming.

  “You are fucking punishing me, and it’s going to stop. I fucked up, okay? I snorted shit, popped pills, lost time, lost you, our son, and everything else that fucking matters to me except for my cut. But let’s get this straight—I’m clean. Have been since I knocked you up for the second time, babe.

  “I can see that fear in your eyes, thinking I’m gonna go back to that shit once we hit a road bump, but I’m not. Don’t believe me? Ask Pops or Grady. Fuck, ask my own goddamn mother, who I’m guessing doesn’t know shit about her grandkids either. Go ahead and ask any motherfucker that’s been in my life day to day for the past three years. I. Am. Clean.”

  “I just need time, okay?” Everything he’s saying sounds so perfect, so right. I love the idea of a clean Wyatt. I love the fact that despite how much he was fucking up personally, he handled his shit with the club and made it to VP and—now that he’s clean—president. But that doesn’t mean I feel it in my heart. How the hell am I supposed to just jump back into everything we were when I’m not the same woman?

  “You’re either my old lady or you’re the mother of my children. You don’t get to pull away or run from me every time I try to touch you but then turn around and demand more from me when I’m already trying to give you everything I fucking have.”

  And there’s nothing else to say. Because as much as I want to be that woman he can fuck and then tell all his dirty secrets to, I’m terrified that she’s the reason he never stayed clean. I can’t do that to him or to my kids, and I really can’t do that to myself. I’ve lost him once already. I can’t fall into us only to lose him again.

  CHAPTER 14

  September 2015

  7 months to Mancuso’s downfall

  It’s been two weeks. Two weeks of family breakfasts and family dinners. Someone throws a fit, and someone throws food, and it’s an exhausting physical and emotional mess. On the good days, Piper’s the guilty party. On the bad days, it’s Zander. At least his fits are getting fewer and far between. I try to tell him as much as I can that Wyatt’s not going anywhere, but he gets tired of hearing it. Or maybe it’s that he’s tired of needing to hear it. Either way, it makes him bitchy. So I keep finding new ways to let him know that his dad’s here and he’s not leaving.

  But it’s us, and for the first time in forever, we’re a family. I’d never say it to my kids—because they’re my entire world—but without Wyatt here, there was always something missing. Since the day Zander was born, we’ve been a family,
just him and me. Neither of us knew what we were doing, but we knew we loved each other, and that helped us make it through that first year. I was unprepared, insane, depressed, and probably not a very good mother. But I kept the kid alive, and for a girl who was seventeen at the time, I guess that means something.

  I might not know where Wyatt and I stand, but I do know where we stand with our kids. We’re their parents. We even headed down to Fort Bragg High School as a family to register Zander. To say the kid’s thrilled about Grady’s old lady being his student advocate would be an understatement. I think he thinks he’s going to get special privileges or something. He won’t, but I guess he’s got to try. It’s such a small thing, but when Wyatt wrote himself down as Zander’s dad, my belly got all fluttery. It’s just one more thing that tells me he’s changed. Maybe one day I’ll really believe it.

  Wyatt’s growing into the dad role really well, and if I’m being honest, it kind of scares me. We’ve had two weeks of perfect. I know that fucked up is right around the corner, and that makes me uneasy and on guard when he’s around. He knows it, too. At first, he was calling me on it, but then he stopped, and I was grateful until I started to worry that it meant he doesn’t care if I let him in or not. The two times I tried to talk to him, he blew me off for Piper. I’d be a shitty mom if I got mad about that, so I just kept my mouth shut and walked away.

  It’s a good thing, I tell myself. It really is. Pip’s been buddying up to her dad the way I always imagined she would. It was slow going at first, but now she seeks him out. He’s never made it to the house before she has gotten up, but she still wakes up looking for him. The closest he came to seeing her wake up was the morning after she’d been up all night and we’d fallen asleep on the couch. I almost suggested he just stay over after he told me that it kills him that he’s never even seen her wake up. And fuck if that didn’t just kill me, too. I can’t just invite him over to my dad’s house, though. Especially not if I don’t want him sleeping in my bed. I don’t think he’d want to anyway, because he’s never invited us to his place. I don’t even know where he lives.

  It doesn’t matter.

  It really doesn’t matter.

  All that matters is that I have a free hour to nap while Piper is asleep, and I’m wasting it thinking about Wyatt and worrying about the severe disconnect between us. For the first time since I was eighteen, I’m unemployed and have nothing to do but raise kids. And that means I can take naps—well, when the baby takes a nap I can—but it doesn’t fucking matter if I don’t actually sleep during naptime.

  Several deep breaths, a few calming chants, and some major determination to fall asleep later, and I’m dosing off. And it’s glorious. I’m right at the place where everything is slowly getting fuzzy and my thought processes are slower than normal, and I don’t make sense even in my own brain. Sleep is like a drug when you’ve got kids. I swear, if a dealer sold it on a corner, I’d be like a goddamn junkie looking for my next fix.

  I slowly slip into a quiet, thoughtless abyss.

  A loud, obnoxious banging sounds from the other side of the front door. I don’t know if I’ve been asleep for a minute or an hour, but suddenly I’m not asleep anymore. I’m wide awake and fixing to beat somebody’s ass. I pull my tired body up from the couch and practically crawl to the front door. My eyes are heavy, my head hurts, my body is worn, and my right index finger twitches to pull the trigger on a gun I’m not even holding. I might not have a gun in hand, but I could go for an old-fashioned ass whooping right about now. So help me God, today is not the day to go to jail. I’ve got shit to do.

  I pull the door open without even thinking about it being someone dangerous. By the time I realize it could’ve been a threat, it’s too late. My vision is fuzzy from my being half-asleep, so I close one eye to better focus only to wish I hadn’t. Ryan Stone, Wyatt’s new sergeant-at-arms, is standing in the doorway with a pissed-off look on his face. I’ve known Ryan for most of my life, and he’s not only an asshole, but he’s a cocky asshole to boot. He’s moody, irrational, and, last I checked, a fucking child half the time. I like his dad, Jim, a lot, so I should probably avoid choking his son.

  Still, it’s a fantasy.

  “Moving truck’s here,” he says shoving past me and into the house. I breathe a sigh of relief and look outside only to find Ruby’s red Suburban. The moving truck is nowhere in sight.

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Yeah, what I meant to say was the moving truck is at your new house. Your shit will fit in the Suburban, right?”

  “New house? Excuse me?”

  Just when I’m about to lay into him, a few men I recognize walk through the door. First in is Bear—whose name I only remember because he’s one hairy motherfucker—and then Jeremy, who I have on good authority is everybody’s favorite prospect. Except for Grady’s, of course. The kid reminds me a lot of Wyatt before he got into the drugs and women. He’s handsome as hell. No wonder Grady’s daughter fell in love with him.

  Next in is Diesel. I smile to myself, but it falls when I see the black and purple bruises around his left eye and the bridge of his nose and the large cut on his bottom lip.

  “You look a little rough around the edges,” I say. He lifts his uninjured eyebrow and grimaces. This ass-beating is obviously fresh. The bruises from when he told Wyatt about what went down with Rig had finally started to fade just a few days ago. And now this. I’m normally of the mindset that brothers fight and sometimes they get some nasty merit badges for their efforts. But this is different. Wyatt’s anger is misplaced. He’s angry with Rig and himself and even me. Not Diesel. I just hope this fresh set of bruises is from something else.

  “Talk to your old man.”

  Well, there goes that hope. I’m just going to have to talk to Wyatt about laying his anger on Diesel.

  “Asshole’s got a temper,” I say and give him a sad smile. Wyatt losing his shit on him the first time made sense—he’d given him some seriously bad news. And it happened right after Wyatt found out about Zander. But this? This is bullshit.

  “Where’s Wyatt?” My hands are on my hips, and I’m getting more irritated by the second. Diesel shrugs and wanders into the kitchen where he starts disassembling the highchair with ease. My head falls to the side in wonderment. He’s done in half a minute and has moved on to the cupboard where I keep Piper’s plastic dishes.

  “Up until about a month ago, Chel, Xavier, and I were roommates. Ain’t my business how you run your shit, babe, but you should call your sister. She misses you. Needs you now. Your sister and my woman don’t get along, and it’s driving me fucking crazy—but they both love you.” My stomach drops. I haven’t seen her since that first day back. I’m such an asshole. So caught up in my own shit, I totally blew her off. It wasn’t on purpose, there’s just been so much going on and . . . I don’t have an excuse. I just suck at being a good sister. I’m an even worse aunt. I’ve never met Xavier, but apparently Diesel’s stepped up for the kid.

  I nod and leave him to the kitchen, deciding that the last thing I want to talk about is Chel. I love her. She’s my sister. I just don’t understand her, and it makes me feel judgmental, and I hate feeling that way. In the living room, Bear is tossing toys in a trash bag. I remind myself that I could fight this whole moving-to-a-place-I-don’t-know thing. It won’t do any good, though, and I know that, so I just take a deep breath and go with the flow. If I pitch a fit, Wyatt will show up and threaten to tan my hide in front of the boys. Then Zander will get pissed when he finds out and pick a fight with his dad over it—and he will find out even if it’s not from me, because he’s nosy like that—and that’s two relationships that really can’t handle the strain. So I bite my tongue and thank God my boy is at school right now.

  Heading down the hallway, I note that Dad’s bedroom door is open, and thank God he’s off doing something I’d rather not think about. Not that he’d interfere with club shit—and this is definitely club shit whether I like it or not—but h
e’s a grouchy motherfucker, and I don’t have the patience to deal with his commentary right now. He’d tell me to be grateful that Wyatt’s trying and not to fight with him about this moving stuff. It doesn’t matter that I came to that decision on my own. I don’t want my father telling me to do it. Piper’s and my room is at the end of the hall, with Zander’s bedroom door just a few feet from it on the right. He hasn’t done anything with his room, even though I told him to get comfortable. I realize that, for once, it’s a good thing he rarely listens to me as I watch Jeremy take his two duffel bags out of the room with ease and toss them in the living room.

  A loud, high-pitched scream comes from my bedroom. I pick up the pace and rush through the open bedroom door at the end of the hall to find the issue. Piper is standing up in her Pack ’n Play with tears falling down her face like a waterfall, holding on to the railing, and screaming at the top of her lungs. My attention shifts to Ryan, who’s in the corner of the room frozen in place. One eye is bigger than the other, and he’s staring at my kid like she’s a two-headed monster—which she sometimes imitates—and holding her favorite stuffed dog in his hand. I weigh my options and decide to make this a teaching moment.