“Couldn’t of been too much of an idiot to have all these women sleep with him. Must’ve knew what he was doin’.” This from Sneak. Which brings us back into the uncomfortable.
Brings us back into the uncomfortable because I have to ask, “Sneak, brother, do you know if Trisha had been with Logan at any time? Hate to ask, but we gotta know any potential targets, and we’d need to hide her out quick-like if she had.”
“Shit,” he mutters. “Last thing I wanna do is question my wife about other men she’s fucked. Lemme talk to her. She’s in class right now. I’ll go down at her lunch hour. Shit,” he mutters again.
“Right, then. We need to round up every brother, prospect and hanger on. Need all information about their women, and we need to talk to any piece or hot mama. Let’s hope none of the other gals let Boss’s cousin in their pants.” Duke’s final order. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
Good thing we got responsible workers in our club businesses because not one of us six will be gettin’ any work done ‘til we can solve this. Houdini’s goin’ down. Come hell or high water, he’s goin’ down.
Once I step back into the common, I stand off to the side leaning against the wall closest to the bar and watch a very pissed off Chaos already on his cell phone talking real low. Yeah, I know who’s on the receiving end of his frustration. If I’d just found out about Elise, I’d be doin’ the same. So I wait patiently until he hangs up, then walk over casually to him, dropping a hand to his shoulder. “Speak to you outside?”
He grunts and nods.
I take off, and he follows.
When I turn on him, but before I speak, he starts, “Liv and me got history.”
“Walls were thin in the condo,” I admit.
“Right. Blood, Liv and I, we grew up together. My pops wasn’t a brother, which I know you know. I tried to stay cool, but Liv is…Liv. No staying cool around that, brother. She laid it out for me, how she felt, what she wanted from me. But how uncool would it be to move in on your best friend’s sister? So I did what I thought was right, and I shut it down.”
S’ppose it’d be as uncool as movin’ in on your cousin’s girl.
Me and Chaos ain’t so different except Logan cheated and is dead, and I never slept with Elise back then, no matter how badly I wanted to.
“She was obviously hurt. Made damn sure I knew she’d met someone. I thought it was bullshit. Now I find out it wasn’t? Fuck, Boss, she gave him that? She gave that dipshit cousin of yours what should’ve been mine?” He runs an agitated hand through his hair. “Thought it was mine.” Then he begins to pace. “I lost my shit. What I knew, she’d never been with another man. I claimed that as mine.” And he stops his pacing to look me dead in the eye, his tone turns hard. “All this time, and it wasn’t mine.” At those last words, he shoves a thumb to his chest. Finally, he drops his head and his hands to his hips.
Defeated. My brother looks utterly defeated. “That was the night Tank got dead, Boss. Blood called me freaking out. I had to have his back. But to have his back meant turning mine on Liv, rolling out of her bed to do it. We got our revenge but had to move out fast. Couldn’t go back to Chicago for a while and by the time I thought I could, she wouldn’t take my calls, so I thought it best to let her get on with her life.”
“Don’t have to tell me about tryin’ to stay cool. Newly twenty, and I was willin’ to raise that dipshit’s baby as my own if it meant Elise and I could be together.”
“Houdini can’t get to her, Boss. Not a world I want to live in where Livvy isn’t breathing in it somewhere.”
“She’s safe. But we got work to do to keep her safe.”
22.
Beau
It’s been a week since the meet at the clubhouse. Early this morning, I got a call from Sneak askin’ me to come down to my house. All Sneak’s sneakin’ brought him to a lockbox inside Dave and Lenore’s home, Dave and Lenore being Logan’s parents. The lockbox had been hidden on the top shelf inside the closet in Logan’s room. I’d totally forgotten about the thing until he reminded me.
Although he wanted to just bust the thing open, the room as a whole, even inside the closet looked spotless. No dust or cobwebs, meaning Aunt Lenore frequented the space. So she’d notice a busted lock on a lockbox which hadn’t previously been busted. As I said though, I remembered that lockbox because before his world began to unravel, he’d given me the spare key to that box. A key I know ended up in my junk drawer inside my kitchen.
My little bungalow, the one I’d painstakin’ly restored with my own two hands, remains a bombed out, third-world massacre as we ain’t had time since gettin’ the okay to start renovations to actually find a contractor to renovate. With Elise here now, I ain’t gonna bother with the repairs. I need a real home for my woman, and I need it fast. We’re lucky the bulk of the damage stayed to the front portions of the house—the living, dining, and master bedrooms.
So now we’re at Dave and Lenore’s home inside Logan’s old room while they’re at work. We went in through the back. And as I spent most of my life comin’ and goin’ from this place, I actually knew exactly where they keep the spare key. Nice to not have to break in.
Sneak pulls the box down handing it off to me. As I twist the key in the lock, Sneak shoots me a look, one that I know means he’s hoping as much as I am that there are some answers locked inside to help Elise, Liv and any other woman who might have crossed paths with my cousin.
Logan wasn’t always the asshole he’d become. As I open the box, the first thing we see is compartments. In the top compartments, he’d kept mementoes reminding me of that time before he became the supreme asshole when we were best friends, and had our whole lives ahead of us. I didn’t have it in me to look too closely at those memories. The second thing we see, well, it means my cousin was seriously fucked up. I realize it just as Sneak realizes it, when we pull out a bag with probably two grams of coke, a rolled bill, straight blade, and a mirror.
He had a full ride to UK, why would he have risked it by gettin’ into this shit? And that ain’t the worst of it. Sneak’s look—like he’s not sure if he wants to punch someone or vomit—says the same as mine, that he wishes it had been the worst of it, too. But no, the worst comes in the form of pictures, at least fifty or sixty pictures of naked women who seem completely unaware they were having naked pictures taken.
The coke could stay, the pictures, unfortunately, have to make their way back to the compound with us. While I stack them into a more manageable pile, Sneak closes and locks the lockbox, placin’ it back up to its home inside the closet. Then we turn to leave.
After we lock up and walk back to my bungalow where we kept our bikes parked, only then do I turn to Sneak, rub my had down my face and mutter, “Sheeit.”
Sneak doesn’t reply. There is no reply. He throws his leg over his bike, and I do the same with mine. We head back to the compound.
Once Sneak and I have returned to Lords soil, we walk in wearing matching grim faces as I send him to round up the boys while I unload on Duke.
Duke predictably leans his head out of his office. “Brothers, rally.”
Some clubs call it church. We don’t hold church, we rally to discuss club business. When the club president calls rally, you don’t hesitate to rally. Which is why as I turn to head into the rally room, I see Blood shovin’ some piece from his crotch where she’d previously had his cock, suckin’ him off just moments before. He might not be happy about it, but he don’t complain either. It’s just the way it is.
When we’re all seated inside the rally room, me to his right and Chaos to his left, Duke calls the group to order. “They found some shit.”
My brothers understandably grumble.
Still he continues, “We’re giving Boss the chance to look first, seeing as his old lady might be in one of these.”
They wait somewhat less than patiently as I move through the stack, flippin’ each one over as I pass it until they hear my first low grumble. I’m s
ure they expect me to stop lookin’. I’m sure they expect it to be Elise.
It ain’t Elise.
Who it is, is Livvy. A very naked, unaware Livvy. Chaos’ll lose his shit when he sees, so I make sure he don’t see, not yet.
I continue turnin’ pictures over until my growl fills the room, then they know. There’s my Elise, probably the last time they were together, her face as troubled as she was naked. And she was extremely naked. That picture, I slip into my jean pocket then flip the rest of the pictures naked women side up along the table for the rest of my brothers to see. All forty-eight of them (there had been fifty).
“Apparently when my shithead, and surprisingly cokehead cousin decided to cheat on Elise, he went all out. We collected these pictures from the bottom of a lockbox in Logan’s room. Not one of these women look to know they’ve been made in print. Look closely brothers, it’s worse than we thought. But…” I look to Sneak. “Trisha thankfully ain’t one of ‘em.”
“Yeah, I talked to her. Good to not see the proof, though.”
Nodding, I wholeheartedly agree with him as it sure as shit would’ve been good not to see the proof of Elise and that jackhole together.
“Cokehead?” Chaos asks.
“We found the shit in the box,” I respond.
He scowls. Grunts of disapproval move around the table because the Lords ain’t down with that shit. That shit would be the reason Duke found all his brothers dead, and thus being thrust into the presidency, havin’ to take on newly patched in men and recruits patched in early at his back as his lieutenants. Some of the brothers might like to partake in the ganja every-so-often, and not a one of us here don’t love his booze, but you touch any harder, you’re out. Just like that, no warnin’. We take your cut, black out your tat and send you on your way.
Back to the task at hand, Shayla’s picture becomes the first to be singled out. Next as we feared, Hadley did have a fling with Logan, the naked, hard-nippled proof stares back at us. We also single out Candy, one of our hot mamas, a couple of pieces who’ve been hanging around for years, and at least one wife of one of our hanger-ons. The rest of the women we couldn’t identify yet.
“Round ‘em up,” Duke orders.
Chairs scrape across the floor as the men take off to hunt down the newly identified potential victims.
“Chaos, a word.” I pull him to my side but wait for Duke to leave before startin’ back up. Instead of talkin’ right away, I reach inside my pocket to pull the picture of Liv out. “You didn’t ask but…” I hand him the photo.
He closes his eyes and sucks in a long breath. Temper in check, then he grabs it and chances a look. “When you didn’t say anything…was really hoping she wasn’t in there, you know?”
“Didn’t say anything because I knew Blood would want the picture to keep the other brothers from seein’ his baby sister naked. But it ain’t right for Blood to be seein’ his baby sister naked, either. Not when, well, you know. Anyway, didn’t want you blowin’ it in front of him. Too much work to do. We ain’t got time for that drama.”
“You’re being cool about the Livvy situation. Don’t think it’s a betrayal?”
“She’s not a brother’s old lady. That I’d beat the shit outta you for. But this. Can’t help who you fall in love with. Not a brother’s sister or say…your cousin’s girl. Make me kind of a hypocrite, don’t ya think?”
“She won’t have me.”
“Gonna let that stop you? Don’t think I haven’t noticed your lack of female company since you reconnected in Chicago. This woman means somethin’ to you, you do what ya gotta do to see it through. Yeah?”
Chaos crumples the picture in his hand. “Yeah, brother. Yeah.”
“Good. Let’s go catch this fucker so you can get on that.”
23.
Elise
“You gonna tell him?” Liv surprises me, showing up in the bathroom so early in the morning. She’s on her knees behind me with my hair gathered to a ponytail in one hand while rubbing the other over my back in a comforting, reassuring show of friendship.
Am I gonna tell him? The badass biker in his faded, worn jeans, tight T-shirts, scuffed motorcycle boots and black leather Lords cut is all I’ve been able to think about for the past six weeks.
Six weeks since he held me in his arms for the last time. But as beautiful as his deep brown eyes or his peanut butter hair tied back in that sexy bun are to me, they’re not what I’m missing with my head bent over the toilet. Heaving nothing more than stomach acid now that I’d already emptied out everything else earlier, tears form in my eyes from the force of my retching and being hunched over for so long. No. What’s on my mind is how much I miss his sense of humor. He’s the kind of man who would help me through this by making me laugh so hard I’d completely forget about the nausea.
“It’s just the flu,” I tell her.
“Honey, you don’t have the flu. What you’ve got is a parasite. A parasite you caught when a river of Beau Hollister emptied into your reservoir.” She leans away, taking her hand from my back to open the cupboard under the sink, pulling out a long thin box. “Here.” She places the box in my hand and begins rubbing my back again. “Pee on this. Once we have confirmation, we’ll get you set up with an OB.”
I don’t have to pee on a stick for confirmation. I’ve been through this before. But I push up off the floor and wipe the sweat from my brow with the hem of my nightshirt.
While I do that, Liv takes the box again, pries open the top and pulls the test out. She stands close as I drop my undies and sit, then she shoves the uncapped stick at me, and I shove it in the urine stream.
“Says results can take up to three minutes to show, depending on how much pregnancy hormones are in your system.” Liv reads the directions from the back of the box.
The test doesn’t take three minutes. Or two minutes. Or even one minute. When I pull the test back to look at it there’s a giant pink plus sign staring at me. A pink plus sign. A plus sign. Giant. No. Not giant, this dwarfs giant, carrying the entirety of my life on its pretty pink points.
What am I going to do?
“You gonna tell him?” she asks again.
What am I going to do? I know what I’m not going to do. “No,” I reply. “Not now. He’s got too much on his plate to worry about this, too.”
“I think that’s a mistake.”
“Duly noted.” I continue to stare down at my hand, at the first test I ever wish I’d flunked.
“Serious, Elise. He needs to know.”
“Serious, Liv. I haven’t heard from him in six weeks. I’m sure he’s kept silent thinking he’s keeping me safe, but that shit’s not cool. And if things are so bad that he can’t pick up a damn phone to talk to me, well then he doesn’t need to bear the weight of this.”
Liv leaves so I can finish up and wash my hands, then I head back to my bed and pull the pillow over my head to block out the early morning light streaming in between the slats on my blinds. She’s a good friend, to show up sometime later with hot tea and toast.
“Love you,” I say, because I really do. I was never blessed with a sister, what I was blessed with is Liv. And to think I avoided her for so long. I was an idiot.
“Love you, too.” She drops a cell and a torn piece of paper with a number written on it on the bed next to me. “This is the number to my gynecologist’s office, obviously they provide obstetric services as well. I didn’t know who you went to.”
“If I call that makes it real.”
“Sorry honey, the puking and pink plus sign made it real. That’s whether or not you call. Calling will just ensure you’re both healthy. Maybe in the future, avoid unprotected sex with your sexy biker to keep from any repeats. ”
I take a bite of lightly buttered toast. “I know. I’m being ridiculous, it’s just that—” then I swallow my bite and sip my tea. “I’ve been through this before. And it didn’t end well so.” I shove the rest of the slice in my mouth, clearly avoiding her eyes.
“You’re scared. I get it. Chaos filled me in on some of yours and Boss’s history. But honey, Boss won’t turn his back on you. He wants it all. A home. A family. You’re giving the man his dream. So let’s take care of that dream, so we can see it to fruition.”
There’d been a time when Beau told me he wanted what’s on offer. But six weeks of zero contact, when I know he’s talked with Crass. I’m beginning to think he’s had a change of heart. What man in his right mind wants to give up his freedom to be tied down with a woman and baby, especially when that woman has a killer after her?
It takes me several minutes after Liv leaves my room to go take another call from some horny loser who can’t sex up the real thing, to get out of my own head. Then I press the number she brought me onto the keypad to call. After ten minutes, the sweet sounding receptionist on the other end has me set up with an appointment for next week. Thursday.
24.
Elise
Next week. Thursday…
Liv stands next to my head, snickering under her breath at me. No. Strike that, her laugh is not at me per se, more at how uncomfortable I am—the squirming clued her in to that—to have to lay on an exam table wearing nothing but a paper gown. Or it could be from the way my eyes just about pop out of my head because, with my feet up in stirrups, Dr. Coty, as she introduced herself, rolls a condom on a thick wand and bends down to insert it up my who-ha for an internal ultrasound.
A regular ultrasound wouldn’t do? Uh yeah, I asked.
“It will, but an internal ultrasound will give us a better picture and with your history. We want to make sure everything is good.”
How could I argue with that? I can’t, and brace as she does exactly what she explained she’d do. Even wrapped in a condom, the wand feels cold. It’s a shock to the system, and I shudder. Not one of my better Thursday afternoons.
Lady Sings the Blues (Brimstone Lord MC Book 1) Page 22
