Inflamed: A Shadow Riders MC

by Kiki Leach

As I placed my arms down on the bed and rested my hands flat on top of the mattress, I prepared for what I knew was coming. He stroked his cock a few times, releasing himself, then slid it up and down against me and groaned.

  "All of me, inside all of you?" he said.

  "All of you, inside all of me," I told him.

  And without another second ticking by, he was.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Later that morning around 6am, I heard River's phone buzzing from across the room. When I opened my eyes and rolled over in his arms to look him in the face, he was still sound asleep and softly snoring against my ear. It was unfortunate that I couldn't say much of the same for myself.

  As the buzzing continued, I slinked out of his arms and out of bed and rushed over to pick it up from the dresser. And when I looked down and read the name and number, I soured and headed back over him.

  "River," I called out. I leaned in and softly swept the back of my hand across his face and my fingers between his lips. His brows knit and he shook his head against the pillow. "River, it's Verna calling for you."

  His eyes popped open then, bloodshot as they were, and he stared up at me in confusion. "Babe?" he started, his voice scratchy. "Who'd you say?"

  I brushed his cheek again and handed him the phone. "Verna. I don't know what it's about," I told him, "but from the looks of it, she's called at least three times already and tried to send you a few 911 texts."

  "Shit." He grabbed the phone from me and sat up against his headboard. "Yeah," he said after placing it up to his ear. He rubbed his fingers across his eyes and dragged his hand down his face as a way to wake himself up. And after a few seconds of listening to what she was saying to him, her voice frantic as I heard it through the phone, he ripped the blankets from his waist and jumped out of bed. "Motherfuck!"

  "What's going on?" I sat back watching him as he anxiously grabbed a pair of jeans from his drawer, as well as fresh underwear, a shirt and socks. I had never seen anyone in my entire life get dressed so damn fast than he had in that moment. "River?" He kept his phone to his ear and shook his head while continuing to swear and fume.

  He dropped to the edge of the bed to lace up his shoes, then be bent over and rested an elbow on his knee and his head in his hand. "Jesus fuckin' Christ. Shit.... Alright," he told Verna. "Alright, just keep him on the other side of that goddamn door for as long as you fuckin' can and don't hesitate to use that goddamn gun. I’ll be down there as soon as I get the hell outta here." He hung up and slid his phone into his pocket.

  "River."

  He twisted himself around to stare at me and sighed. "Shit's goin' down at the goddamn club with Wolf. Verna said he didn't come home last night so she went down there to check on him and found all the blood around the place. The boys got rid of the Lairs' but never cleaned up the goddamn aftermath of what happened 'cause that crazy fucker sent 'em all home. So she saw all the blood everywhere and when she went to askin' him questions about it, he started swingin' on her."

  "Oh my God."

  He jumped to his feet. "Motherfucker's lost his goddamn mind for good this time. I shoulda kicked his ass yesterday when I saw him grabbin' onto my mother back there in that goddamn kitchen."

  "What?"

  "Yeah. He was grabbin' onto her like she was a goddamn man and it took every fuckin' thing I had in me not to beat him to a motherfuckin' pulp with nothin' but my fists and the butt of his own goddamn gun." He grabbed his other phone and dropped it into his back pocket.

  "Where's Verna right now?"

  "She's hidin' out in his office with the door locked and barricaded," he said. "I gotta get down there before he gets even crazier and decides to bust down the goddamn door. She's got a gun that I gave her a few years ago, but she ain't never been too goddamn keen on usin' it for any reason." He turned from me and pulled back his bedroom door.

  "Wait, River!" I jumped out of bed and hurried to the other side of the room for my robe. "River!" I called out again. I threw it on as quickly as I could and chased him down the hallway, but stopped when I reached the living room and saw him standing in the middle of it. I moved around him and found his mother sitting on the couch, smoking a cigarette and wiping her blushed face of tears.

  She glanced up when she realized I was standing beside her son, then bent over the table and smashed the cigarette into an ashtray that looked old enough to crumble from just a single touch. "I'm sorry," she said, blowing out the smoke. "I thought since Avery wasn't here--"

  "It's fine," I told her. "But, why are you sitting out here in the dark?"

  She turned her eyes to the kitchen and shook her head. "Just thinking," she said. "Between everything that happened last night and this morning--"

  "What the fuck happened to you this mornin'?" snapped River. "How'd the hell you get home?"

  "Trucker," she replied. "And he's still out there, but..." She stopped.

  "What, mother?" he snapped.

  "It's the banker," she told him. "I don't think things are going to work out with him like I was hoping they would."

  "Not as if I was too fond of this motherfucker before even meetin' him, but why the fuck would shit not work out like you had planned? Was he one of those yuppie fuckers that--?”

  "It was nothing like that."

  “Then what?”

  She sniffed and wiped her face again. "After I told him what went down at the club with the Dragons and the shootout last night, he suggested that it might be best for us to take a break for a while. AKA, the old ‘I'm not ready to be part of your world in which I could potentially get killed'’ speech that I've heard so many times over the years, I have every word of it memorized before they even say it." She dropped her eyes and crossed her legs one over the other. "This is the kind of shit that being in this life for as long as I have has cost me. Relationship after relationship doomed before they started. With one decent man right after the other who wouldn’t--"

  "Put his goddamn hands on you like he owns you just 'cause you maybe fucked him once?"

  “I was going to say ‘commit’,” she told him.

  I stared up at River and made a face, shocked as hell to realize that he seemed to know all about his mother and Wolf. "What did you just say?” I asked.

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. "Yeah. My mother had 'relations' with the Big Bad Wolf of the Shadow Riders.” He groaned. “And now I've gotta go and beat his ass to get him the fuck away from Verna." He trudged out of the room and into the kitchen for his jacket.

  Jolene jumped up from the couch and looked over at me. "What the hell is he talking about?" she asked.

  "River got a call from Verna a few minutes ago telling him that Wolf's flipped his shit. Now he wants to go and beat him to a pulp."

  "Ain't just somethin' I wanna do, darlin', though snappin' that motherfucker's neck has been a long time comin' just as much as me fuckin' up Tiny."

  Jolene dropped back. "Jesus, River. What in the hell did you do?”

  "Gave him exactly what the fucker deserved, 'specially after the shit he was spewin' at me tonight about Mia," he growled. "He’s out.”

  “What?”

  “He’s out,” he told her. “Wolf just might be next by the time I get down there. Prez or not, it’s clear that son of a bitch has gotta fuckin’ go at some point too." He slid his arms inside each sleeve and adjusted the jacket over his shoulders. When his other phone started ringing, he glanced down at the number and quickly answered, then moved across the kitchen to talk.

  I took a reluctant Jolene by the arm and dragged her off to the other side of the room. "When the hell did you tell him about you and Wolf?"

  "I didn't say anything," she replied. She tilted her head to peek at River inside the kitchen, making sure that he couldn't hear what was being said between us. "He figured it out on his own last night after seeing us together and I didn't have it in me to keep denying it."

  I lowered my voice. "If that's the case, you don't think he'll be able to figure out
just as easily as I did that Wolf is also his father?"

  "Now is not the time for that, Mia," she snapped. "You have no idea the worms that're bound to come out of that can once it's opened. There's no lid big enough to gather them all back up and stuff them back inside." She tried stepping away from me, but I wrapped a hand around her arm and dragged her right back.

  "Can or no can, your son is liable to go out and kill that man with his own bare hands, not only for what he did to you in that kitchen but for what he's doing to Verna right now. You have to tell him the truth about Wolf, otherwise he'll have his own father's blood on his hands and whether you like it or not, he’ll regret it for the rest of his life and you'll be the one to blame for that."

  She stood back and stared hard into my eyes. I couldn't tell if she wanted to slap the taste out of my mouth or tell me off or both but either way, I was willing to stand there and take whatever the hell she was bound to give.

  "That was Meathead," said River as he walked out of the kitchen. He dropped his phone back into his pocket and looked between us. "The girls' will be in Montana with Bullet in just a few hours. Meghan'll call you and let you know when they all get out to the house. I gotta get down to the club--"

  "Maybe we should call the police for Wolf and have them meet you out there," said Jolene; her voice rattled as she responded to him. "With as crazy as he's been since yesterday, there's a chance he might go after you the minute he sees you back there again, and I can't handle that."

  He turned to her and grimaced. "Mother. The club looks like a goddamn crime scene straight outta that fuckin' 48 hours marathon bullshit you’re always watchin’. We call those pigs in blue and they'll be haulin' us BOTH in for shit and sittin' us in adjacent cells. Fuck that. If I need backup, I'll call one of my boys." He turned to the door and grabbed onto the knob.

  "Jacob." Her voice became stern, stopping him dead in his tracks.

  He looked right into her eyes as a puzzled expression crossed his face. "You only call me that when you've got some shit to say and want me to fuckin' hear it loud and goddamn clear."

  "I do," she told him. "And I know that this is probably the worst time in the world for you to find out about it, but, I can't let you go after Wolf like you're wanting to. Not like this with you ready to murder him for what he's done."

  He threw his hand toward the door. "He could be fuckin' up Verna as we speak, so you better have a good goddamn reason for tryin' to keep me back from kickin' his ass--"

  "How about the fact that he's your father?" she blurted. "Is that a good enough reason?"

  I looked into River's eyes and from the blank yet confused expression that had overtaken the rest of him now, it was clear that he felt as if the wind had just been knocked out of his lungs. His breathing became uneven and his eyes twitched. He glared at his mother, and arched, then narrowed his brows. "What the fuck did you just say to me?"

  Jolene nervously brought her hands up to her face and gulped. "He didn't find me on the side of the road that day. He didn't have to because he knew I'd be there. And he knew I'd be there, Jacob, because he planned for it."

  "What the fuck kinda shit are you talkin' about? You said that he fuckin' found you out there--"

  "I lied," she told him. "I lied to spare you the truth about what really happened and why, but... He set me up to be out there that day, baby -- he set me up to find me out there on the side of that road." Tears rolled down her cheeks and she stepped over to him. She placed her hands on his arms and he braced himself. "I met him when I was sixteen," she said, "and in the same way you met Courtney--"

  "At a goddamn fuckin' pussy party?" His face turned bright red; his nostrils flared as he seethed with anger. "What the fuck were you doin' at a place like that at six fuckin' teen years old?"

  "I had much older friends back then; friends who liked to party with much older bikers." She swallowed again and lowered her hands to her sides, then wrapped them around herself as if they were some kind of security blanket. "I met Wolf the first night I was there and we hit it off really well. He knew how old I was and physically, he stayed away--"

  "Not for too goddamn fuckin' long if the shit you're tellin' me about him bein' the man who got you knocked up with me is a fuckin’ fact. When the fuck did you learn about Verna?"

  "That same night," she replied. "But I knew about her before he even told me. She wasn't there, but she didn't have to be. Her presence seemed to loom over the place like a dark cloud or some kind of ghost that he just couldn’t seem to shake." She paused to smile though it was clear she had hoped to portray a strong front for them both. "I knew that getting involved with him meant that I was bound for being in over my head. And I knew that he never planned on leaving her no matter what he told me and no matter how much I wanted to believe it or how much I tried to believe it. But I was determined to have him for myself."

  "Jesus. Christ." He wrapped his hands around his waist and breathed in and out a few times. I got the feeling that he wanted to put his fist through something and that something was sitting drunk and belligerent across town.

  "A few months after I turned seventeen, we slept together for the first time."

  "If you were seventeen," he told her, "that made him what?”

  "Twenty-one," she answered.

  He shook his head. "Motherfucker was no better than Tiny."

  "He was better than Tiny. At least I thought he was for a time back then...." She sat down on the coffee table and leaned back. "After a few months of sleeping together, I found out that I was pregnant with you. I knew that there was no chance for anyone else to be the father, because he was the only man that I had ever been with, and he knew that too. He really wanted to be a part of your life, because he had told me that Verna was unable to have kids, and I wanted to give him that. I wanted to give him the family that I knew she couldn't. But I didn't want it to be inside the club. I knew what being in that life meant, and I wanted him to get out of it, to choose me and us and to leave that life behind. But his loyalty remained with the club and his brothers, just as it always had. And more than that, his loyalty remained with Verna, no matter if she was able to give him children or not." She wrapped her arms even tighter around her waist and bent forward. "When I realized that all he wanted was to keep me around as ‘an established club whore’, as the mother of his child that he got to sleep with whenever the hell he wanted, I knew that I couldn't stay. Nothing was going to change between us and I didn't want to be stuck in this cycle with him and his wife for the rest of my life. And so I told him that I was leaving, which was one big mistake. Because that's when I realized just how nasty and how evil he could actually be."

  "What the fuck did he do to you?" asked River, his voice tense and hard as he stared down at her.

  "The day before I was supposed to give birth to you, he called me at work to let me know that he planned to show up at the hospital whether I wanted him to be there for me or not. He said there was no way in hell that I was stopping him from seeing his child and I lost it, River, I just lost it on him." She moved a hand across her mouth and crossed her arm over her stomach. "A few hours later, when I was on my way home, two black men drove up in a car, offering me a ride. When I declined, the car stopped and one of them jumped out. I told him that I didn't have any money, I didn't have any credit cards or anything else worth stealing from me, but he didn't care. All he wanted to do was hurt me and that's exactly what he did.” She exhaled and momentarily shut her eyes. “Those men were sent to me by your father, Jacob," she told him.

  "Oh my God." I dropped down to the couch on the opposite side and stared up at an incensed River.

  “He knew the exact route I took every day to get home from work,” Jolene continued, “and he knew that my car was in the shop that week and that I didn’t take rides from anyone else.”

  River violently shook his head. “You're not fuckin' with me," he said.

  "No," she reassured him. "He sent them there to attack me so that he cou
ld seem like some kind of savior when he found me. He wanted to prove to me that I couldn't raise you alone because there would be people out there like that who could hurt me. People like that who knew that I was connected to him and the club. It wasn't until after you were a few years old that he confessed the truth to me and only because he was drunk. But I was already in too deep. There was no way out of this life at that point and by then, he was determined as hell to raise you up into his own image--"

  "That's why he wanted me to be in the club so goddamn bad," he said. "Even when I did every fuckin’ thing in my goddamn power to become a fighter?"

  She nodded. "He was willing to do anything, absolutely anything to get you out of that world and into his for good."

  "You're sayin' that shit like it’s exactly what the fuck he did,” he spat between his teeth.

  She paused and looked up at him. "Wolf paid Rodrigo to set you up for the fight that almost got you sent to jail."

  He dipped his head and bugged his eyes in a rage. "What?!"

  "The boy with the broken neck already had a sprain from a previous fight. Rodrigo assured him that he would get paid double to take a fall from you, so he did. He just wasn’t expecting for you to attack him like that.”

  "That son of a bitch told me to go after that kid, like--!" He swiped his hand across his mouth and locked his jaw. "Jesus. Son of a fuckin' bitch. All these goddamn years, I thought I had fucked up that motherfucker, thought I had fucked up my career because of that bullshit he fed me about his fuckin’ daughter, and it was all because of this asshole?! This asshole who you fucked a few times, who seemed to fuckin' think that he owned us both because of it?!" He shook his head at her and traipsed back over to the door. "Fuck this shit."

  "River," I called out, but he slammed the door behind him. I waited a few seconds and looked over at a panicked and now blubbering Jolene, then jumped up from the couch and raced outside. "River!" I screamed out. He looked over at Trucker just as he was about to get on top of his bike, then turned back to me.