Talkin' Trash (The Bear Bottom Guardians MC Book 2)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  “Fine.” He dropped my hand. “I’ll leave, but only if you agree to stay with one of your friends. Don’t stay alone.”

  The thought of having to stay with one of my friends after having Linc do this to me? That sounded about as fun as shooting myself in the foot with a harpoon. Yet, I wasn’t going to argue. I had a feeling if I didn’t agree, and follow through with it, I’d be seeing him again.

  And I did not want to see him again.

  “Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get your face out of mine. I never want to see you again. What we used to have is over.”

  Linc licked his lips and would’ve said something more, but the reporters that I’d been avoiding by going the back way turned the corner and started running toward us.

  “Go,” he said.

  I didn’t stay more than a second, and I wouldn’t admit that I felt sort of bad leaving him to deal with them.

  But…the man had to reap what he sowed.

  Chapter 17

  Sometimes I feel like I need a shot of whiskey for every single person I’m forced to talk to.

  -Text from Linc to Conleigh

  Linc

  I threw up again, but this time it wasn’t because of the medicine that was in my system. This time it was due to the goddamn look on Conleigh’s face when she looked at me and told me it was over.

  “You okay, man?”

  I looked up to find the last person on earth that I wanted to see and contemplated tackling his ass to the ground and pummeling his face in until he couldn’t use that goddamn mouth of his to ruin my life anymore.

  Then thought better of it when I saw the cop standing at the front of the emergency room entrance gazing around the parking lot as if he was only waiting for a reason to exert his authority.

  I drew in a deep breath and then stood to my full height.

  “I know that you had a play in that,” I said softly. “You think I’m completely stupid? I’m not.”

  Tyson Threadgill’s brother, aka Tantor, was a dead man.

  He just didn’t know it yet.

  “I haven’t a clue what you’re referring to,” Tantor lied.

  I felt my hands once again curl into fists, and this time I wasn’t sure that I’d care if there was a cop to witness this beat down or not.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I growled, angry as hell now.

  Tantor picked himself up off the ground where he’d been passed out for the last minute and smiled at me.

  “I told you to follow the rules.” He brought his hand up to his jaw and stretched it out by opening and closing his mouth a few times.

  He had told me to follow the rules. His rules had been very straightforward: tell your friends that it’s time to find new support.

  That’d been it.

  It’d literally been thirty-two hours ago. I’d been seconds away from boarding a plane as this fool had been disembarking his. We’d passed and he’d stopped me by putting his hand on my chest.

  After uttering those words, he’d left me there, standing and wondering what in the hell that was supposed to mean.

  And let’s not forget that I had a pair of earbuds in and I only caught what he said by sheer luck.

  Some chick had been behind me and had dogged my steps all the way onto the plane, and when I’d sat down in my seat in first class, she’d sat down in the one behind me.

  After calling Bayou and relaying what I’d heard from the little piece of trash and getting confirmation that we weren’t going to let him intimidate us and agreeing, I lost track of time.

  When I’d woken up hours later, naked as a jaybird and lying next to a crinkled note that said, ‘Thanks for the good time,’ I’d had a minor freak out.

  I hadn’t been able to control my body, and I’d laid there wondering what in the hell had happened to me.

  It was only after I’d been able to get a hold of Elouise—since she’d been the last person to talk to me—that I’d gotten help.

  I’d tried to send a text message to Conleigh as I’d waited for my body to respond to commands, but even that hadn’t gone well. My hands had felt like they’d been wrapped in cotton—right along with my mouth.

  Honestly, I was surprised that Elouise had been able to understand that there was something wrong.

  The next few hours were a whirlwind.

  At some point that morning the paramedics had arrived, and after a ride to the hospital and another couple of hours on IV fluids to flush whatever I’d inadvertently ingested out of my system, I’d finally been aware enough to get back online.

  Only, not one single time had Conleigh returned my calls, and I’d gotten really worried.

  What if the same thing had happened to her that had happened to me?

  It was only when I’d checked myself out of the hospital AMA—against medical advice, and was on a private flight back to Texas, that I finally caught wind of what had happened. Of what Conleigh had likely seen—and realized that things had gone from bad to worse.

  Bayou had reported that she was fine, and at the hospital. But it was Pru who’d relayed what she had seen, and from there I realized the reasoning behind her radio silence.

  The woman had filmed us. Filmed herself touching my body.

  And then had released it to the public.

  In the span of thirty-two hours—twenty-five of which I couldn’t account for—I’d lost Conleigh. I’d lost my contract with FaithSports, and I’d lost my sense of goddamn dignity.

  I felt like trash. Like a piece of well-used, left-on-the-side-of-the-road, trash.

  And dirty.

  So goddamn dirty.

  “Let’s go.”

  I looked up to find the last person in the world I thought would’ve been there to help—Tyson.

  Tyson was standing at the side entrance to the ER, the one that Conleigh had met me at a few times as I’d picked her up over the last couple of weeks, and was staring not at his brother, but at me.

  I frowned, my head once again whirling.

  “Uhh,” I hesitated. “What?”

  Tantor started laughing and walking his brother’s way, but Tyson held up a hand. “No. Stay there.”

  And that was about when the media finally got around the police officer who’d stopped them all and sent them back to wherever he’d had them corralled to anyway.

  One of them slipped past the cop’s eye and started to make a beeline straight toward me.

  Knowing not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I slipped into the open door that Tyson held for me and breathed a sigh of relief the moment I was through, Tyson slammed it shut.

  It took me all of fifteen seconds to ask him, “Why’d you do that?”

  Tyson was staring at the metal door and drew in a large breath that made his shoulders rise, then blew it right back out.

  “My brother’s been fucking up my life for so long that I don’t know how to fix anything anymore.” He paused, finally turning to look at me. “I became a doctor just to spite him because he said I couldn’t do it. My brother’s spent his entire life making sure mine was a living hell, and the moment that he finally left me alone to live my life, I did. I went to school, worked my ass off and became a doctor. Luckily during some of that time, he went to jail, otherwise, I don’t think he’d have given me as much time away from his influence as he had, and I might not have graduated. I…”

  The metal door had something slammed against it.

  “My brother doesn’t like when he’s told no.” He flinched again when it was hit again. “God, I hate him.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  I hated him, too.

  But I had a feeling this man in front of me had more of a reason to hate him than I did, despite the fact that Tantor had practically ruined my life in one fell swoop.

  He definitely knew the easiest way to get to me that was for sure.

  The bad thing was, I had no clue whether anyt
hing was actually done to me or not.

  Sure, there was a video and multiple pictures of us together, but each agonizing minute I’d sat looking through those pictures, and watching the short clip that was uploaded, nothing but touching on top of my clothes had ever happened.

  Hell, in all honesty, I’d had my eyes closed and my mouth wide open because that was just straight up how I slept.

  Which should’ve been the first indication that I hadn’t been there willingly, seeing as when one was enjoying what a woman was doing to him, they didn’t have their hands slack at their sides, and their mouth wide open with drool coming out of the corner of their mouth.

  And hell, my clothes had still been on for the most part.

  The way she’d positioned herself, she’d been blocking my lower half from the camera that she’d set up, but if you looked closely at my thigh, you could just make out the very edge of my black boxer briefs.

  “You told my brother no, didn’t you?” he asked.

  I looked over at him in confusion.

  “What?”

  “You told my brother no,” he said. “That’s why he had my sister help him do what he did.”

  I frowned. “How do you know that your sister helped?”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pulled up a picture, then turned it around and showed me.

  “Not that I really needed to see the tattoo or anything because it looks exactly like Tara, but that confirms it to everyone else,” he explained. “That long hair is hard to miss. It’s too distinctive.”

  I looked at the hair, and the tattoo, and finally realized that I knew the woman from somewhere.

  “I don’t understand,” I finally said, leaning my back against the wall. “Are you going to help me?”

  Tyson pushed his phone back into his pocket and nodded once. “It’s time that I start fixing what he’s breaking.” He lifted his eyes to meet mine for the first time. “And if you blame anyone out of all this mess, blame my brother. Tara? She was probably forced into it just as surely as you were. He and my father have such a stranglehold on her that it’s not even funny.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, and if I was getting the man’s help to take down his brother, I definitely wasn’t going to quibble and risk pissing him off. Instead, I shrugged and hoped that it was a good enough answer to appease him.

  But, if push came to shove, the girl was going down.

  What she did was wrong, and I didn’t care how hard she was pushed. You didn’t do shit like that and get away with it.

  Chapter 18

  Stop destroying the Earth. It’s where I get my tacos.

  -T-shirt

  Linc

  “That’s Tara, my ex.” Rome narrowed his eyes and stared at the picture for a long few seconds, and then stiffened. “God, she’s really good at fucking up lives, that’s for sure.”

  It’d taken me a long time to come up with it with the way my head was so fucked up, but it’d finally come to me how I knew her, and I’d just had my suspicions confirmed.

  “That’s Tara all right,” Liner muttered. “Looks a little different, though. Skinnier. A lot skinnier. Unhealthy skinny.”

  I’d thought the same thing, too.

  I hadn’t remembered it until he’d said it, but the memory of looking into the woman’s pale, sunken eyes had been one that I was surprised I forgot.

  She looked like skin and bones.

  Hell, on the plane, I hadn’t given her more than a few stray looks because of the way she looked.

  She looked emaciated, and honestly, it was hard to look at her because she looked so frail and unhealthy.

  She wasn’t the same pretty little viper that she was when she’d been making Rome’s life hell when it came to their kid.

  No, this woman was night and day different from that woman.

  It’d been a little over a year since I’d last seen her, and time had not been kind to her.

  “I think,” Bayou started. “That until we have all this figured out, you should probably stay away from Conleigh. The media will never let this go. With both you and Rome being involved with this woman, and both of you being professional football players…yeah, it’s not going to go well.”

  No, it wouldn’t.

  “That works seeing as she wants nothing to do with me,” I admitted. “I think she’s gone as far as to change her number.”

  My phone rang again, this time with another local number, and I hit ignore.

  “Who keeps calling you?” Rome asked, looking just as annoyed as I was, but likely not for the same reasons.

  “Lisa from a credit approval department.” I paused. “They’re calling from local numbers now and making it supremely hard for me to answer the phone. It’s so annoying.”

  Mostly because every time my phone rang, I prayed that it was Conleigh calling and not goddamn Lisa.

  “Well, our first order of business.” Bayou sat down and stretched his feet out under the table that we used to have all of our discussions that pertained to the club at. “Is to find Tara. Our second is to do damage control—Linc, that’s you calling your publicist. Third, it’s to find Tantor, and figure out what, exactly, he wants. Then make sure to act like we’re playing his game while we find his weak link.”

  And none of those things included making Conleigh forgive me.

  Son of a bitch.

  I looked down at my hands and scowled hard at my phone when it once again started to buzz in my hands.

  This time I sent it straight to voicemail without waiting for the ringer to sound.

  Thirty seconds later, the phone vibrated with a voicemail.

  I tapped on it to get the notification to go away and shoved the phone back into my pocket where it stayed for the rest of the meeting.

  Not once did I think about sending Conleigh a text message.

  Nope. Not me.

  Chapter 19

  One day I was born. Then everything bothered me. The end.

  -Conleigh to Steel

  Conleigh

  Two months later

  I couldn’t tell you why I was watching the game.

  Hell, it was the last thing on this earth that I wanted to do, yet there I was, doing it anyway.

  And I was crying.

  Why was I crying?

  Because I had no self-control.

  I’d seen Linc come out on the field and had completely lost it.

  He didn’t take his helmet off, didn’t show his face like the other players, and when he was introduced as one of the new team captains for this year’s NFL season, he’d only nodded his chin in recognition.

  A sound had me turning my head to stare at the door to my new place, and I glared.

  I better not have visitors.

  I didn’t have time for visitors.

  There was a game on, and I wasn’t missing it.

  And, sure enough, ten seconds after I’d heard the first sound, another bang followed, signaling a car door closing.

  Shit.

  I got up and looked through the blinds, barely cracking them so that nobody would be able to tell that I was home just in case I could get out of answering the door.

  But when I saw who it was, I knew I wasn’t going to get out of anything.

  Steel was at my door, and behind Steel was my not-so-little-anymore brother, Cody.

  I opened the door and didn’t bother to conceal the tears that were still falling.

  Now, not only were they for Linc, but they were also because I hadn’t seen my brother in so long that he was now taller than me.

  “What are y’all doing here?” I cried out, throwing my arms around my brother.

  Ganglier, yes. Taller, double yes. Grown? Not even close.

  He was twelve and still had another six years to go before he was technically fully grown.

  “We came here to set your head on straight,” my brother informed me, squeezing me tighter.
“You’re being dumb, and we’re tired of it. Sean kept Stone so we could leave fast to deal with your crap.”

  I blinked, then turned to my mother, who I hadn’t realized was there until I felt her soft palm on my face.

  “Mom!” I cried, throwing my hands around her, while never letting go of my brother.

  Cody made a gagging sound as I practically choked him in my haste to get to my mother.

  My mom was smaller than me, but her hugs were harder. Almost as if she’d had way more practice at hugging—which she did.

  I loved my mother more than I loved anyone on this planet, and I’d missed her. I hadn’t realized how much until right that second.

  “You’re getting Cheeto dust on me, Conleigh! And you’re messing up my perfectly-styled hair!” Cody moaned.

  I hugged him tighter but made sure to curl my fingers around his face so that I could run my Cheeto-dust covered fingers over his face for good measure.

  “Ack!” he cried out, dropping like a stone.

  I let him go and moved both of my arms around my mom.

  Then I started to cry.

  My mom squeezed me tighter for a few long seconds, and eventually, I felt my brother sigh and throw his arms back around both of us.

  He squeezed us harder than we ever squeezed him, and I was hit once again with how big he’d gotten.

  “When did you start to get so strong, Booger?” I sniffled.

  “When you used to sit on me and put makeup on me when I made you mad, I realized that I had to start lifting weights and get ready for a war,” he teased. “I’ve been doing CrossFit. I’m a badass.”

  “Your badass brother can barely lift the goddamn bar, but he’s getting better,” Steel muttered, coming out of my kitchen with a beer in his hand and sitting down on the couch to watch the game.

  The game!

  I gasped and let both of them go, hurrying to my previous spot where my snacks were all strategically placed and waiting for me to imbibe while I watched my man—my ex-man—play.

  “I missed them score?” I cried out.

  Steel grunted. “He who shall remain nameless scored by running the ball ten yards when none of his receivers were open.”