Raising Riker (Hells Saints MC)

by Paula Marinaro

  Prosper glared at his wife.

  “You talkin’ about my girl and Diego? I let them two work it out. Yeah, I supported her, but I didn’t put any pressure on D to make it right.” Prosper’s eyes shifted slightly but his growl was less certain now. “And Gia has her own damn family. Fucking Gianni’s gonna blow a goddamn gasket when he finds out she’s got one in the oven. He’ll make sure things work out for her.”

  “No Prosper. Gianni will make sure things work out for him—in the way he thinks it should be.” Dolly let out an exasperated breath.

  “Man seems to have a good head on his shoulders to me.” Prosper growled at her then he went for the money shot. “Seems like you wouldn’t have gotten into a business relationship with a man whose judgement you don’t fuckin’ trust.”

  “Once again you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, and this isn’t about my choices, it’s about Gia’s choices. It’s a young woman’s future we’re talking about here you arrogant, self-serving…” Dolly had had enough of playing nice. They had been at this for over an hour and true to his baser nature, Prosper remained unreasonable and intractable.

  “Stop it both of you!” Pinky interrupted the tirade. “Dolly, you’re not gonna get anywhere insulting a man in his own home.” Then she turned to Prosper. “And as for you, stop being so hard- headed! Can’t we find some way to help the poor girl?”

  “No!” Prosper landed a hard hand down on the dining room table and glowered at the two women. “This is none of our fucking business. Girl got herself knocked up…”

  “By one of your crew while she was on Saints property!!!” Dolly leaned in and narrowed her eyes at her brother-in-law.

  “We don’t fucking know that the kid is Riker’s!” Prosper bellowed.

  “We don’t know that it’s not!” Dolly bellowed back. “And when Gianni finds out his daughter is pregnant he is going to make her marry that …that …that odious Julian.”

  “Odi…fucking who?” Prosper narrowed his eyes.

  “Odious…it means the biggest ass-clown you can imagine, honey.” Pinky sighed. It didn’t look like her sister-in-law and her husband were going to reach an amicable conclusion any time soon. “I’m going to make some fresh coffee. Just give me a shout if you need help.”

  “I will not need help.” Dolly assured her firmly.

  “I wasn’t talking to you, sweetie.” Pinky replied. Then she gave Prosper a pointed look before she walked out the door.

  Prosper watched his woman make her exit before he continued his rant. “Never heard of this guy Julian you’re talking about, but I’m sure he’s okay. Gianni’s not gonna pull any guy out of his asshole to marry his knocked- up daughter.”

  “Gia has already turned down the man once, and without a husband and with a baby on the way Gianni is going to want her married. From what Gia tells me, this Julian is a ruthless man and would stop at nothing to marry his boss’s daughter. She would be miserable with him.” Dolly glared at Prosper. “And why do you find it necessary to be so vulgar all the time?”

  “Oh, excuse me, I didn’t realize asshole is a word that you ain’t never heard before.” Prosper snorted. “And seems to me this young woman made her own damn bed when she lied down in it!” He finished off at a shout of air-splitting decibels.

  “She didn’t get pregnant by herself, you pig-headed mule!” Dolly shrieked back.

  Pinky was back in a flash. She leaned over the table in the space that separated her sister-in- law from her husband. Then she heaped a small plateful of Prosper’s favorite cookies in front of him. “Will you both please calm down? Dolly, Prosper is right in the sense that Gia should have thought about birth control before dipping into the reproductive pool, especially with a guy like Riker who’s gonna take every advantage.”

  “Did you really just say that? You just set sisterhood back about a thousand years. Are you seriously placing the blame on the woman in this situation?” Dolly looked at Pinky incredulously.

  “Having said that,” Pinky went on as if Dolly hadn’t spoken. Then she turned with a hand on her hip towards her husband.

  “Gia went to Dolly for help, which means she went to us for help. You can look at it anyway you want to Prosper, but the fact is she’s in trouble. Plain and simple. The girl is scared and pregnant. She was raised with a family whose outdated principles and archaic sense of honor is going to place her in a position where she is going to have to marry a man she loathes. A man she has already rejected once — just to make sure that baby has a name.”

  “That’s fucking ridiculous, nobody looks at it that way anymore.” Prosper said as he took a giant bite into a cookie and leaned back in his chair.

  The change in his demeanor was immediate, and Dolly wondered for the hundredth time if the cookies Pinky made for Prosper contained more than sugar, butter, and eggs.

  Dolly sighed. “Please, Prosper, can you at least talk to Riker and see what he has to say? That’s all I’m asking, is for you to open a doorway for a conversation between them. Gia will take it from there.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Prosper muttered as he looked at the two women and knew he was defeated. “Yeah, I’ll talk to him.”

  Riker slowly opened his eyes. The strong glare of the rising sun streamed through the threadbare, dingy curtains and shot through his aching head. The bright rays threatened to combust his brains into a flaming ball of fire. His entire throbbed with a hangover to end all hangovers. The inside of his mouth tasted like an ashtray full of cigarette butts soaked in cheap tequila. When Riker swallowed back the vile taste of his own saliva, his stomach put him on notice. It grumbled out a warning for him to spit that shit out before it brought up all the nasty stuff that he had shoved down the night before.

  The night before.

  When the soft rumble of a snore sounded out beside him, Riker turned his head to the source. He winced as the muscles knotted in the back of his neck and his temple throbbed out in protest. Riker’s eyes narrowed to slits as pain stabbed through his pupils. He was lying on a lumpy couch in a room that hadn’t seen a good cleaning in…well…ever. On the floor next to him, a woman was sprawled out on a dirty mattress.

  Her name was…Janine…or Julia…or Jackie…or Jillian…or who the fuck knew and what the hell did it matter? He had met her in a bar just over the state line, where he had stopped to grab a beer and wash the road dirt down. The place was run of the mill, but it had an authentic Wurlitzer playing out some laid back country music. The lighting was low, and beer was specially priced two for one— served ice cold and with about ten varieties on tap. It had been a hell of a good time…slow and easy until…shit…one look at the swollen, cut and tender knuckles on his hands told the story for him. The specifics of this latest brawl, of course, would be different but the end result was always the same. Riker had a few brews, then someone said the wrong thing and before he knew it, chairs and fists were flying.

  There was a junkyard dog living inside Riker’s head who just loved to fight and fuck. Most times he could keep that hound on a leash but when he drank, that leash vanished along with reasonable thought and prudent action. Riker figured that if he didn’t stop the adolescent bullshit soon, he would either wind up dead or end up killing someone else.

  When the bitch drooling and snoring beside him let out a long, gassy fart, Riker felt a heave rise from his very unhappy gut. He belched up a mouth full of something that tasted like rotten eggs. Gingerly Riker rolled off the broken couch, onto his knees and immediately felt a sharp pain. He had the vague recollection of kicking a steel stool across the floor of the bar. It had quickly become air-borne and had landed hard against the mirrored wall. If Riker remembered right, the sprinkler alarm had gone off and had caused a wet web of confusion. That’s when the chick who he had been feeling up in a corner booth…Janine…yeah, that was her name…grabbed his hand and pulled him out the door. He had stuffed her into the club utility van and was just sober enough to get them to the shit hole apart
ment she called home. Once there, they had consumed a fifth of tequila and several lines of premium coke before he passed out on the couch. Yeah, it was all coming back to him now. Bitch couldn’t afford a goddamn box spring or even a cheap set of sheets for the filthy mattress, but expensive booze and cocaine, that she had plenty of.

  A round of vicious cramps hit Riker like a freight train and this time he couldn’t keep the puke from rising into his mouth. He crashed through the door to the small bathroom across the hall. Riker barely had time to lift the seat before he vomited some greenish-yellowish chunks into the already urine filled bowl. He reached for the handle of the toilet and pushed hard, only to find the bowl filling with water but no accompanying draining sound. Riker watched on in horror as the piss and the vomit began to rise until it reached the rim of the bowl. Another quarter inch and the whole mess would over- flow out onto the floor and Riker was too cramped up to move.

  This was a new low…even for him.

  At the last second there was a loud sucking noise and a small whirlpool formed. Slowly, but surely, the whole putrid, disgusting mess swirled down the toilet.

  Thank god.

  No more. I’m done. No more bars, no more fights, no more messing around with women whose names I can’t remember. No more.

  He promised whatever god might still be listening to him—for the hundredth time.

  Riker pulled open the medicine cabinet drawer and rifled through the cheap makeup, caked over tubes of toothpaste, and crumbled tissues until he found a bunch of over the counter drugs. He swallowed a half dozen ibuprofen and fought another wave of nausea as he dipped his head and drank from the faucet.

  Then Riker staggered back across the hall and stood in the doorway for a moment looking at the scene before him. The woman who brought him home last night had turned over in her sleep and her skirt had risen. She was now splayed out with her legs parted and everything showing. Last night she had looked hot with her short denim skirt and big tits spilling over the top of a sexy black bustier.

  But in the light of day, it was a whole different matter—she looked older than he initially thought. The tight lines around her mouth screamed disappointment at life and her face had the ravished look of an opioid addict. The woman was skinny to an unhealthy degree and the teeth that weren’t missing were rotted. To Riker’s profound disgust, thin razor marks ran across the tops of her thighs. He had just spent the night with a self-mutilating, decrepit junkie. Thank Christ he had passed out before he could fuck her.

  Riker tagged his wallet and keys off the table and stumbled out into a dim hallway that smelled of shit, puke and despair.

  About an hour later, Riker was back in his room in the club house doing damage control. After he washed the stink off in a steaming hot shower, he did a computer search of local and state police reports from just over the state line. There was nothing reported about a busted- up bar. Riker’s best guess was that the owner of the bar was either behind in his insurance payments or had a couple of strikes against him for serving under-aged. Whatever it was that stopped him from reporting the incident definitely worked in Riker’s favor.

  Riker leaned against the wall of the garage and took a long pull on a cold beer as he watched the scene in front of him unfold. He shook his head and grinned.

  Those two.

  Reno and Claire were nuts.

  Really… certifiably… crazy.

  They fought like cats and dogs in heat.

  Reno with his Irish temper and Claire…now she was a trip and a half. All sweetness and light, sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth, she was that nice. Until her man got her riled…then watch out. She gave as good as she got and sometimes better.

  Riker grinned deep and drew hard on his smoke as he watched Claire and Reno go out of their way to antagonize, tease and one up the other one. While their sparring words were antagonistic —she leaned and taunted, he deflected and jabbed, their eyes were telling a whole different story. The want in his, the invitation in hers…. damn. Those two were having sex right in front of him without even realizing it. But it was more than that. It was that other something. It was the way that Reno touched his woman, and the way that Claire responded to that touch.

  The way that it should be.

  And Riker knew that it wasn’t just Claire and Reno who had been lucky enough to have found that. Riker’s parents had loved and laughed and lived and fought together happily for forty years before his dad died. All his brothers and sisters were married with kids. And all of them were happier than a bunch of pigs in mud.

  But somehow, that kind of happiness had escaped Riker. He knew that there were jokes around the clubhouse, and even amongst his own family, about his bedroom having a revolving door. Riker knew that they all thought that he didn’t get what it took to make a deep commitment.

  He knew that they all thought that he didn’t understand the meaning of true love.

  But they were wrong.

  They were all wrong.

  It wasn’t that Riker didn’t understand it, it was just that he couldn’t find it.

  It was a couple of days later that Riker found himself knocking on the carved oak door of Prosper Worthington’s home.

  Riker had been summoned to Prosper’s house, which every brother knows is a very big deal. In the five years he had been in the club, Riker had known only a handful of the brothers who had been called to the house and none of them ever talked about why.

  Aside from that bar fight, Riker had been on his very best behavior since the incident at the clubhouse. The night when he had invited Valentina Abruzzi and Gia Bonzini to a party at the compound was now legendary. The crowds, the smoke, the bright lights had triggered a PTSD episode in Valentina that the boys still talked about.

  Since then, Riker had done his best to be a model club member. He had even backed off from dipping into the club pussy pool for a while. Over the years with the club, Riker had worked hard at proving himself to be a good earner, a loyal brother, and a solid member of the MC. In truth, he felt bad for what went down that night. He totally blamed himself for what had happened to Valentina. And he wasn’t real happy about how things had ended with Gia either. It was just all around bad mojo.

  It had been a major fuck-up bringing Gianni’s kin on the compound, no doubt. And Riker had paid for that bad decision with a good old fashion beat down from the boss. While Riker had suffered a couple of busted ribs and a knee to the groin that made every man in the meeting room grimace and clutch their own nut sac, when it was done, it was done. Prosper had made it clear that he had considered the matter over, so Riker had no idea why he had been summoned now.

  Prosper answered the door on the second knock. With a nod of greeting, he led the way into the living room. It was a large room with high windows covered in bullet proof glass. The living space was modern and upscale. In the center of the room was an enormous glassed- in gas fireplace whose flames shot out of a bed of black granite rock. A large leather couch and two recliners sat in front of a 75-inch 4KHD television set. The lighting was reset into the tray ceiling and there was an ebony lacquered buffet table sitting regally against the north facing wall.

  There was an awkward moment of silence for Riker when Prosper gave him a look of contemplation, as if sizing him up.

  Riker cleared his throat and got nervous all over again. What the hell was going on?

  “You want something to drink?” Prosper asked him.

  “That’d be great, boss.” Riker croaked out.

  Prosper walked over to the wet bar situated in the corner of the room, opened the fridge and grabbed a couple of hard ciders. Riker raised an eyebrow at the brew.

  Prosper shrugged. “I like it. But if you want, I got beer.”

  “No, I’m good. My brother Micky buys this shit all the time. I like it too.”

  Prosper nodded and then he surprised Riker again by throwing a couple of coasters down.

  “My woman is a maniac about shit like this, she talks about wat
er stains in her sleep.” He snorted. “Usually I conduct business in my back office where I don’t give two shits about any kind of stain but blood, but this here conversation is not gonna be exactly about club business…” Prosper’s voice trailed off and then there was that look again.

  “It’s not?” Riker raised an eyebrow.

  “Regrettably fucking not.” Prosper sighed and after a pause raised his bottle in a toast. “To family.”

  Riker wondered why Prosper’s eyes shifted when he said it.

  “To family.” Riker clinked his bottle against Prosper’s and took a long pull. Then he watched in growing apprehension while Prosper drained down the whole damn thing.

  Prosper coughed a little as he wiped his hand on the back of his mouth. But still he hesitated to speak.

  Jesus.

  Now Riker was really getting worried.

  He had never seen Prosper at a loss for words. The boss was a tough, straight shooter with balls of steel and enough muscle power behind him to make just about anything happen. Or just about anything go away.

  “What’s going on, Prez?” Riker reached into his cut and pulled out a fresh pack of smokes. Not wanting to smoke in the house, he hung the unlit cigarette from his mouth.

  “The hell with it, light up brother.” Prosper leaned over and grabbed one from the pack himself and struck a match. The two men watched each other carefully over the ring of smoke that hung in the air between them.

  “So, uh, you remember the night you let the mafia bitches onto the compound?” Prosper began.

  Riker almost coughed up a lung. So, it was about this shit again. He had really hoped that that particular fuck up was all behind him now.

  Did he remember?

  Hell, yeah, he remembered.

  Not only did Riker remember, he had to make a strong and concerted effort not to clutch protectively at his balls at the boss’s mention of it.

  “I think my voice rose a couple of octaves with that knee move to my nuts. Not that I didn’t deserve it, boss.” Riker was quick to add. “Got to pay the piper and all that shit. I know what happened that night was my responsibility.”