“I met Travis once before,” she whispered, afraid that even that would be giving the other woman too much info.
Shelby’s mouth opened to ask questions, but the bell rang, signaling someone was coming into the shop. Christine whirled around and thanked God that it was a regular, and all talk of the Heaven Hill MC was gone. Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she saw that she had a missed text from Travis.
Sorry, I won’t be able to meet you for lunch today, something’s come up.
Christine tried not to let the disappointment cover her like a blanket. Just because he cancelled plans one time didn’t mean he was getting tired of her. It didn’t mean he was getting sick of her indecisiveness and her need to keep secrecy. It didn’t mean that at all.
“You wanna tell me what the fuck this is?”
As soon as Rooster had walked into the room, Liam was on the defensive. It had been a while since any of them had seen Liam get as angry as he was now, but they all knew it was coming. There was only so much stress he could take, and all this coupled with a baby that was just now starting to sleep through the night. The last year for him had been stressful, and now he was over it all.
“Calm down,” Rooster tried, wincing when Liam slammed his hand down on the table.
“Don’t tell me to calm the fuck down! I’ve got too much goin’ on in my life to be dealin’ with this bullshit right now. This was supposed to be taken care of years ago. We took the punishment; I did fucking time in juvie. Where in hell is this coming from now? And so help me God, Rooster, if you lie to me, I will kill you.”
“Are you threatening an officer of the law?” Rooster glanced pointedly at him, still willing to bring up the fact that a badge stood between their friendship.
“Fuck no, I’m threatenin’ Rooster Hancock who turned tail and ran when things got a little too real for him. I’m threatenin’ the best friend that I did everything I could to give a better life because I knew his parents gave two fucks about him and mine didn’t,” Liam finished, his chest heaving with the effort of the words.
There was silence in the room as everyone looked back and forth between the two of them. They had all known something had happened when Liam and Rooster were younger, but no one knew exactly what. Neither one of them had been at all forthcoming, and it had always been a thorn in everyone’s side.
Tyler was the first to find his voice. “I think y’all better tell us just what in the hell went down. We can’t protect anybody if we don’t know the truth.”
Rooster opened his mouth, and Tyler stopped him with the look on his face. “From the beginning and don’t leave anything out. You do, I’m liable to turn my back while Liam makes good on his promise.”
“We were stupid kids,” Rooster whispered. “Both of us were dumbasses.”
“And we thought that nothing could touch us because of how young we were,” Liam added. “It was a bad situation the whole way around.”
Travis was getting sick of them talking around in circles. He had enough of that with Christine. He wanted the straight truth, for once. “Tell us.”
The two men exchanged a look, neither one of them wanting to go into what had happened so long ago, but knowing they had to.
“You’d like that wouldn’t you?” Rooster turned on him.
“Yeah, we all would. I wanna get this shit over with.”
“That’s funny.” He walked over to where Travis sat and loomed over him. “I was threatened with something having to do with you, cuz.”
Now everyone was staring at him, questions in their eyes. What the fuck did he have to do with this?
“I was told you’re harboring someone—is that true?”
Christine. He had to be talking about Christine. How the fuck had Rooster found out about her? He’d been careful—maybe too careful. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“My boss pulled me behind closed doors today. He plopped those pictures in my hands along with a container that holds DNA that wasn’t tested way back when, and he told me that he needs the woman you’re hiding. So let me give it to you straight, I’m gonna need you to hand her over.”
Travis stood up, even though he was shorter than the deputy. “I can’t hand her over, and I won’t.”
“Somebody wants her back, and they aren’t going to stop until everybody in this room is destroyed. You got that?” His eyes flashed, more pissed than Travis had seen him in a long time.
“What do they have over you?” Travis asked again, looking back and forth between Liam and Rooster.
“It’s me.” A small voice came from the doorway.
None of them had noticed that the door had opened and that someone was standing there, so involved they had been in throwing accusations back and forth at one another.
“Roni,” Rooster warned.
She shook her head. “No, it’s time. Maybe it’s time I face up to what I did that night. The two of you have been paying for it for years.”
No one knew what to say as they watched her walk into the room. Rooster watched her with an interest that they’d never seen him show before. “William talked,” he told her softly, hoping the tone of his voice would soften the blow.
“Motherfucker,” Liam mumbled under his breath.
He got up fast, flipping the chair in his wake. It was obvious their pres was pissed. In fact, they’d never seen him so mad before. “Ya know,” he started, chest heaving. He licked his lips and started again. “I figured he’d tell on me someday about some stupid shit I did in his name, but not his own daughter. After finding out I’m really not his son, that made fuckin’ sense, but why would he want to hurt you?”
She shook her head, putting her hands to her mouth. Why, she wasn’t sure, maybe to hold back the sob that she wanted to release.
“Because I would never do that to Mandy, I would never do that to Tatum. Drew can handle himself, I see that even now, at his age, but fuck…to do that shit to my daughters? He’s lucky he’s behind bars because if I could get my hands on him.” He turned and punched the wood paneling of the wall, letting out a “fuck” that was guttural.
Rooster spoke softly as he looked at Roni. His gaze gave nothing away, but the words and tone he used said tons. “He knew it would hurt me too. I would have to make a decision. Do I care about your feelings or my position at the sheriff’s office? Because I’m tellin’ ya now, they send that off for DNA, and you’re done, babe.”
It was weird for Roni to hear that endearment come from his lips. It had been a very long time since she’d heard it.
“Did he just call her babe?” Tyler asked a wide-eyed Jagger, his eyes equally wide.
“I think he did.”
They weren’t paying attention to the two of them, though. Rooster was still talking. “You’re not takin’ the hit for this.”
She shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “You and Liam already have. It’s why the two of you aren’t friends anymore. It’s why you’re wearing a badge and he’s wearing a cut.”
That was the crux of it, the bitch of everything. Rooster knew that he and Liam had been heading in the same direction; that night had changed three lives, but two drastically. Two had never gotten back to where they had been. “What’s done is done, and that’s not the point of any of this. The point is, we need to figure out why they want to blackmail my ass and who the fuck Steele’s harboring. I’m assuming she’s a fugitive.”
“She’s not a fugitive,” he breathed, getting pissed at Rooster for coming back to Christine.
Rooster stalked over to where Travis sat, hovering over him, towering the way he had when they were kids. “Then tell me who the fuck she is.”
“I can’t.” Travis’ tone was firm, his face impassive.
“You have to.” Rooster was just as firm, just as impassive.
Travis now stood, trying his best to go nose to nose with his cousin, but he was too short to be intimidating. Instead, he did what he’d done when they were younger, he swept the
knee.
“Goddammit,” Rooster yelled as he went down, grasping his knee. “We aren’t kids anymore!”
“No we’re not, which means we aren’t close. We haven’t been for years, but I would expect you to give me the motherfucking benefit of the doubt. If I’m keeping a woman quiet from everybody, don’t you think I have a reason for that?”
“What’d she do?” Rooster demanded.
“Fuck you,” he answered. In return, he pointed at Roni. “You wanna talk about women? What the fuck did she do?”
Tyler slammed his hands hard on the table. “Stop! Everybody needs to take a step back here. There’s a lot of feelings going on in this room. We all need to sit down, take a few minutes, and chill the fuck out.”
Liam glanced over at the man he now called his best friend and nodded, even though his cheeks were still red and his blue eyes were blazing.
“We can’t help anybody unless we know the secrets the three of you seem to be harboring.” Tyler added. It pained him that Liam’s secret had been kept from even him.
“Make that four,” Layne pointed at Roni, who still stood in the doorway. “I think she has an awful lot to do with this.”
She nodded, wiping at tears that were falling profusely from her eyes. The tension was thick, and it was more than she could take.
“C’mere,” Liam told her, holding out his arms.
She gratefully collapsed into them and listened as he talked closely to her ear. “We’re gonna figure this shit out. He’s not gonna hurt either one of us again. He can say whatever the fuck he wants. We both know it’s so he can try to get out from behind those bars we have him behind. We can make whatever evidence they think they have disappear. We’ve done it before,” he soothed her, running his hands down her back.
“I thought it was over,” she hiccupped against him.
“It is,” he assured her.
Rooster laughed sharply. “The fuck it is. Apparently someone with a lot of fucking money wants whoever the hell Steele’s harboring, so we need everybody,” he looked pointedly at his cousin, “to be fucking honest here.”
Tyler couldn’t help the grin that showed on his face. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard you drop that many f-bombs, Boss.”
“Don’t fucking call me Boss. At this point, if anybody saw me comin’ out this way, I probably won’t have a job when I get back to town. Not to mention I broke no less than twenty regulations gettin’ that shit out to Old Man Sullivan’s place, but I’ll be damned if I let that piece-of-shit William Walker ruin another person’s life. Motherfucking damned.”
Chapter Eight
“It was the summer we turned sixteen,” Rooster started. “We were wild,” he pointed to Liam, “and my parents didn’t know what to do with me. Up until then, I had done whatever they told me to do, but that summer—it was all about rebellion.”
Liam couldn’t help the half-grin that spread across his face. “Hell, even old William didn’t know what to do with me. We’d both gotten a couple of piece-of-shit bikes out of the scrapyard, and we’d worked the last half of the school year putting them together. They were in good enough shape to run—not to run for a long time, but run, and that’s all we needed.”
Rooster picked up the sentiment. “We just needed the wind through our hair and the open road in front of us. The open road didn’t care what kind of grades we made, what time we came home, who we made out with behind the clubhouse.” His eyes sought out Roni and a flash of recognition showed there.
“As much as Rooster’s parents didn’t want him hangin’ out with a boy whose dad was the leader of an MC, my dad didn’t want me hangin’ out with Rooster. We were like the odd couple, but no one could keep us away from each other. We had places to be, all the time.”
Tyler shifted in his seat. “How were your parents?” he asked the deputy.
“Fuckin’ strict and hard-handed. I did something wrong, I knew about it for a few days. Get what I mean?”
“I do,” Jagger spoke up from where he sat, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
It was then that Travis wanted to ask him questions. He wanted to know what childhood had been like for Jagger and his sister. Had they been scared? Had they known what love was? Had she gone from one tyrant to another, without so much as a break to live her life? He was pretty sure he knew the answer to that last one, but he would love for someone to give voice to those answers. What he wouldn’t give for her to open up to him.
“So the two of us found ourselves hangin’ out. We were friends, but it pissed our parents off so much that it was worth it, too, ya know? Plus Roni liked to hang out with us. It was fun, we were kids,” Liam continued. The innocence they all still had had been a beautiful thing.
“One night, we were at a party—one we shouldn’t have been at,” Roni picked up the story. “The people throwing it were a few years older than me. There’s no way two sixteen-year-olds should have been there, but these two have always looked older, and everybody loved that they had bikes. It made them cool, and even though Liam was my little brother, being related to him made me cooler too. People always wanted us at their parties—they always hoped some of the members of the club would show up.”
All of them could relate. There was always some dickhead that wanted to take a picture with their bikes or a woman who wanted to hop on the back of it. To play out the fantasy of being with one of them for the night, just so they could go home and fuck their husband hard. This wasn’t roleplaying for them, though; this was their real-life.
“Liam quickly hooked up with a girl, and Roni and I had been arguing. We’d spent the summer fucking around,” Rooster chanced another glance at her.
She smiled softly. “Literally.”
That made everybody laugh and eased the tension in the room enough so that they could all lean back against their seats.
He cut his eyes at her and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “Anyway, we had spent the summer together, and that day we’d had a huge argument over something stupid. I can’t even remember what it was now, I just know that I thought it was her fault and she thought it was mine. Either way, we weren’t speaking, and even that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was revenge.”
She snorted. “No we weren’t, and as soon as we’d gotten to the party, he’d found himself a cute little piece of ass, and he’d had her up against a wall faster than I could tell any other guy what my name was.”
Looking back, Rooster realized what a mistake that had been. He’d flaunted it and thrown it in her face, made her desperate to one-up him. He hadn’t been proud of it then and he was even less proud now. Hindsight was always 20/20, and looking back on that night, his vision was crystal clear.
“I found the first guy I could who seemed the least little bit interested in me, and I threw myself at him, Rooster be damned.” She stopped then, composing herself to finish the story. “The guy took me to a room so that we could be alone, and he shut the door. It wasn’t until he locked it that I began to get scared. I’d been around men my whole life—with the club, with Liam, with everybody. When he turned around to look at me, I realized I was in deep shit. There was a look in his eye that just wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it gave me the chills, and I felt like he was walking over my grave.”
Tyler adjusted his seat, moving his legs back and forth; this was coming way too close to home for him, and he was dreading what he absolutely knew was coming next. He threw his head back and blew out a deep breath.
“I immediately tried to duck under his arm and unlock the door, but he was too fast. I beat on it, I screamed, I kicked, but everybody was either drunk or high, and they were ready to have a good time. It was a party, it was loud, and it was raunchy. Fuck, I’m still convinced that most people that heard me thought we were just having rough sex in that room.”
Liam looked at her, realizing that she was probably right. That night had been insane. It was the one and only night he’d ever had a thre
esome—and at sixteen years old. It hadn’t been until Rooster came to find him that he’d even known that anything had happened to Roni.
“He picked me up and threw me against the wall. He was a lot bigger than me, and I fought, kicked, scratched, bit, but nothing got him off of me. Finally, I just started reaching for something, anything to hit him with. That’s what they always tell women; find something to hit your attacker with. I remembered the elbow, so I clocked him in the jaw with mine, and then I picked up what was on the table next to us. It was heavy and I just meant to knock him out, I really did,” she whispered, the tears clogging her throat.
“I know you did,” Rooster soothed her from where he sat.
“When I couldn’t wake him up,” she choked out, “I rolled him over, and there was so much blood, I must have hit him three, maybe four times. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d hit an artery and he was bleeding out on me. I had no idea what to do.” Tears came again. “I knew I had to find Rooster and Liam. I knew that they would know what to do.
“We cleaned her up, sent her on her way, and set the room up,” Liam finished. “We made sure that someone walked in on it. We had our stories straight. A stupid fight that had gotten out of control. They offered Rooster a camp for wayward teens that would straighten his ass up, and they offered me juvie. My dad wasn’t as well liked as Rooster’s family. It put us on the paths that we’ve taken so far in this life.”
Liam said it so matter-of-fact that they almost missed the regret in his voice. What would have happened if their roles had been reversed? Would Liam be a sheriff’s deputy now and Rooster be a member of the club?
“I still sometimes, in the back of my head, wish I had been the one sent to juvie,” Rooster admitted. He had thought about that a lot in the first few days he had been at the camp, but after realizing no one was going to come and get him and tell him that they had made a mistake, he came to peace with the decision and tried to get his life on the straight and narrow. Now, he could admit that maybe he had been too straight and narrow. There was a piece of him that was aching to get loose, to let go, to lose control. He missed that so fucking much.
Dirty Little Secret Page 5
