Phantom: An Alpha Male MC Biker Romance (Steel Knights Motorcycle Club Romance Book 1)

by Ivy Black

My smile dissipated. “What?”

  “You should go with him. You’re the only one who has the keys. I like the guy, but I ain’t stupid.”

  I tried and failed a few times to start a sentence. In truth, I didn’t know exactly how to frame my thoughts on the matter. Trips to the desert every day with Colin seemed lovely, but why all of a sudden? “Really? You don’t need me here?”

  My dad shrugged. “Nah. We’ll be all right.” I didn’t know quite how to take that. In the past, my dad had all but insisted that the VP be around frequently because my duties to and for the club were important. All of a sudden, he was okay with me being gone every day for three weeks? My dad sighed. “What, Val? I see those gears turning.”

  “Are you trying to get rid of me or something?” I asked.

  My dad recoiled a little. “What? No. You’re just the only one who I trust to make sure things are on the up and up, and I trust you to handle it yourself if things aren’t.” He leaned in a little. “I mean, I know Taylor could handle himself if shit hit the fan, but I think we all know I’m not about to send him out there.” He leaned back. “Tess, you know I think your role around here is vital. Where’s this coming from?”

  The sincerity in his eyes made me feel as if I’d jumped the gun, accusing him of anything untoward, but the fact that it still didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me kept me paused. Whether it was trust or something else, it wasn’t like I could do much about it. “Okay.”

  “Yeah, come on.” He was boisterous in a way that let me know he’d been drinking already.

  He didn’t abuse liquor like my grandad did, but on occasion, he let the guys get a little too much in him, and he suffered for it. His hangovers were not pretty. My dad put a finger in the air and nodded, and a few minutes later, Cara was back at our table with a glass of whiskey. He knocked back nearly half the glass in one shot and then slammed it back on the table.

  “So, CJ. Is the bike back up and running?” he asked.

  Colin nodded. “Yeah. It’s in the lot right now. Got some cosmetic changes to make, but that’s the easy stuff.”

  My dad snickered. “Yeah. I always hate that part. The nitty gritty, I like, but then I usually dump mine at a body shop to be bea-u-tified.” He let out a roaring laugh as if he’d told a hysterical joke, then threw back the rest of his whiskey.

  “Dad, maybe you’d better relax, or you’re gonna end up like Grandpa.”

  My dad winced. “Oof. Hit me where it hurts, why don’t you, pumpkin?” He pushed his glass away. “Fine. I’m on water for the rest of the night.”

  “And a ride home?” I replied.

  “And a ride home,” he mocked in a grumbling voice.

  “Good.” I looked at Colin. “Are you ready? I’m tired.”

  He nodded back at me. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  “Actually.” My dad tapped his fist lightly on Colin’s shoulder. “Can you hang out for a little bit longer? I’d like a chance to speak with CJ.” He narrowed his eyes. “Alone.”

  Colin and I exchanged glances, but he seemed just as lost as I was. “Um.”

  “Ah! Don’t be so clingy!” my dad barked. “Just a quick card game.”

  “We had a five-hour round trip, Dad.”

  “It’s okay,” Colin said. “I can spare a few minutes. Especially if it’s for cards.”

  My dad laughed. “I knew I liked this guy.” He stood up from his chair. “Come on. Join me in the back.”

  He didn’t wait for Colin before he started off for the bar, and after a few minutes of hesitation, Colin stood up. I watched him, but he avoided my gaze as he walked around the table, followed my dad behind the bar and through the doors, and moved out of sight. If I wasn’t already uneasy, the fact that, when I turned back around, I had an unobstructed view of a seething Taylor in the back corner of the bar was the nail in the coffin.

  Chapter Eleven

  Phantom

  He’s just a man, I told myself over and over, just another man. Yes, Nicholas Nicholas was just another man, but in my life, he was several different men. He was the boss of my current motorcycle club, the boss of my former motorcycle club’s rival, and definitely the man who would murder me if he found out who I used to run with. On top of that, he was the father of the woman I was rapidly reigniting my love for and the only man keeping his rabid dog of a son from slitting my throat for that love. Running through the multitudes of reasons why Nick would suddenly invite me back to his warehouse for a one-on-one chat, my brain refused to settle anywhere other than on the possibility that Nick had figured out who I was.

  That sent me into panic mode.

  Thanks to Tess distracting me, I hadn’t done a careful enough sweep of the bar’s patrons. Apart from the few women who’d been bothering me, I didn’t notice how many other club members were actually in the bar. The people who Nick was playing pool with weren’t club members, so any number of them could be waiting in the warehouse to jump me as soon as I got through the doors.

  Was there any other way out?

  We walked through the small kitchen between the warehouse and the front of the bar, and I did a scan, but there were no other doors in sight. There had to be a back door, something that led to a dumpster or alleyway. I kept my eyes on a few of the cooks, but they all threw their scraps away in trash cans scattered around the kitchen, and when one of them happened to notice that the can he was going for was full, he just found a different one to discard his items in. The reality of the situation was obvious. If a building has a warehouse, the back door was probably in it.

  So as much as my body was leaning toward the flight in fight or flight, I pressed on through the kitchen and followed Nick through the swinging door that led to the warehouse. He pushed it aside, and when I swung it out so I could walk through, I fully expected all of the Steel Knights members to come out of any shadow that could conceal them.

  But they didn’t.

  I watched in shock as Nick walked over to his table, sat down, and brandished a pack of playing cards from under it. Did he seriously just want to play cards?

  Nick motioned to a chair a couple down from him at the table. “Come on, sit.” My legs carried me forward despite the alarm bells going off in my head. Nick started dealing out a game while I pulled out the chair he’d indicated and sunk into it. “You know Gin Rummy?”

  “No.” There was a nervous, gravelly quality to my voice that had me wincing as the word fell out. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Sorry. No, I don’t.”

  We didn’t play cards a whole lot back in Rumble. Darts were Luther’s bar game of choice, and no one ever liked playing with him because he was a shitty loser, so we mostly just hung around and watched him.

  Nick chuckled. “Relax, CJ. Jeez, you’re jumpier than a bullfrog around me.”

  “Force of habit,” I replied.

  “I know what you mean. Taylor and Tess’ mom, Kelly, her dad was like a dad right out of a movie or something. Like full blown. I showed up for our first date, and he met me at the door with a shotgun. Opened the door, cocked it, pointed it at me, and told me to come in. I couldn’t move. Damn near shit my pants. Every time I was around him after that, he could click a pen, and I would jump like he was cocking that shotgun.” I forced out a laugh, thinking back on the rock and garbage can incident. “All right, here’s how you play. It’s real easy.”

  Over the next twenty or so minutes, Nick carefully explained the game, and when he was confident that I understood the rules, he shuffled the deck of cards and dealt out fresh hands. We played the entire first round in total silence. Every now and again, I would see Nick glance up over his hand and watch me with eyes that didn’t only seem to attempt to discern if I had a good hand, but when our eyes would lock, he’d take his attention back to his hand. The lack of conversation was almost worse than whatever I thought he was going to say when he got me back here. There was the faint droll of music and intermingling voices coming from the bar, but that aside, the only sound in the war
ehouse was that of cards shuffling as Nick and I played out our game.

  “I’m out,” Nick said finally, setting down the last of his cards and ending his round. He counted his points and then looked up at me. “I got one-fifteen. What’d you get?”

  I surveyed the cards still left in my hands and deducted the point totals from those I managed to get out on the table. “Sixty.”

  Nick let out a hollow whistle. “That’s not a bad first round, considering I went out first.” Nick scribbled the points down on a piece of paper and then gathered all of the cards and began to shuffle them. “You’re still nervous.”

  I wasn’t the type of person to admit to fear, but honesty was probably the best policy in the situation I’d found myself in. “I’m not entirely sure what we’re doing.”

  Nick snickered. “We’re playing cards and talking.”

  “We haven’t done much talking.”

  Cards slid across the table as Nick dealt new hands. “True indeed, true indeed.” He lifted his cards into his hands and started to move them around. “You’re from Hoppa, right?”

  Men like Nick didn’t ask questions without intention. Thanks to my past with the Unchained Dogs, I knew better than to trust his questions for what they were, but I was also in no position to refuse to answer. “I am, but I didn’t meet Tess until high school.”

  Nick nodded as he took in the answer. “So, are you two the same age, then?”

  I furrowed my brow. “I’m a year older,” I lied. “We met at one of the football games.”

  A snicker skipped across Nick’s lips. “She always was a bit of a tomboy. Here I thought she was going to the games for the boys, so I decided to go with her one time, and she wasn’t even paying attention to the guys. They all wanted her attention, but she was just there to scream plays at the players.”

  For the first time, I smiled in Nick’s presence. “That sounds like Tess.”

  “So, you two were close?”

  “Quite.” I swallowed, opting for a moment of vulnerability, hopefully, in exchange for some trust. “I was pretty smitten.”

  “Well, she’s got her mother’s charm. Really, I can’t take much credit for Tess. She got her mama’s beauty and her mama’s brain. She got my eyes, I suppose.”

  “And your love of bikes.”

  Nick slammed his hand down on the table with a wide smile. “That’s for damn sure!” He laid down a spread of aces. “So, if you’re a year older, that makes you twenty-six, or have you not had your birthday yet? When’s your birthday?”

  I swallowed hard, quickly trying to do math in my head. “I’m twenty-six. My birthday is March twelfth.”

  In truth, I was a touch younger than Tess. Her early summer birthday was in June, whereas mine would be coming up in just a few weeks on August fourth. The hope was that if Nick was going to try and use the information I was giving him to run some sort of check on me, that he wouldn’t be able to unearth my true identity, but even as I sat there listening to him, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was up to something else altogether.

  “Ah, we missed it. Well, we’ll have to have a big celebration next year!” Nick waited while I took my turn in our card game before asking, “You got any siblings? Where are your folks?”

  Tess and her dad were close, and even though I knew she was protecting the integrity of the story I’d started, that my name was CJ and that we were friends from high school, not elementary school, I didn’t know if she would have mentioned that I had a brother. “I had a brother. He died a few years ago due to complications from an illness he had all his life.” My throat clenched as I said the words. All too often had I stared down that reality. Compared to saying those words and having them be true, I gladly took on fifty grand worth of Luther’s wrath. “Never knew my dad, and I haven’t talked to my drunk of a mom since the day my brother died.”

  “We got more in common than I thought, kid,” Nick replied. “My mom stayed away from booze, but that was probably because my dad lived on it. He used to beat the hell out of me and my older brother. Gave my brother a hemorrhage to his brain that killed him when we were just teens.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “The crazy thing is, I still find myself admiring the man. Is that dumb?” He chortled. “Beat the ever-loving shit out of us, but I still regard the day that he told me he wanted to take his place at the club someday as one of the best days of my life. When he died…” Nick’s fingers squeezed into the cards he was holding, causing them to crinkle a little. “That shit tore me up.”

  “He was your dad,” I responded. “Maybe he wasn’t the best one, but he wanted big things for you. That’s enough for a kid to love their dad.”

  Nick nodded. “I think so.” He laughed a little harder. “Listen to me, pouring out my heart to some kid I barely know.”

  It was time to throw caution to the wind. “Why are you doing that?” I held up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that you are, but what did I do?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out myself, if I’m being honest.” He laid out a couple of spreads of cards and discarded one of two remaining in his hand. He was close to winning. “I just get this feeling about you. I got it the second I laid eyes on ya. This club. It’s been in my family for generations. My grandad started it, then my dad took over, now me. It’s part of the Nicholas bloodline, but I’m at an impasse because I could never hand it over to Taylor, and I’d give my right arm to hand it over to Tess, but the boys would never go for it. I can only flex so much muscle as president. When it comes down to bylaws and votes, the odds just aren’t in her favor.”

  All the distant sounds completely faded out, and I just watched Nick. The game didn’t matter anymore, and when I didn’t start my turn, Nick didn’t push. “She can’t go up?”

  “Not by normal means,” Nick responded, “but, if she were, I don’t know, married to the president, and she was VP, they could run things as a team.” Nick’s eyes flew up from his hand and locked into mine. “I’ve just been waiting, CJ. Waiting for Tess to bring along someone that made me feel like they could hold her up. Give her the door she needs.”

  When I opened my mouth to respond, no words came out. We barely knew each other. How could he offer me everything he had? “Um.”

  “Now, look, I’m not telling you what to do. Shit, it’s all up to Tess at the end of the day because you and I both know she ain’t going for no patriarchal, giving-her-away bullshit.”

  “No.”

  “But if she did pick you, and you picked her, I’d be happy with that.” I didn’t move or speak. Nick waited a long time, just watching me patiently, but when I didn’t say anything else, he nudged my hand. “I’m just spit balling, kid. Don’t worry about it. It’s your turn.”

  “Why?” I finally managed to mutter out.

  Nick shrugged. “Because I think I can trust you. With my club and my kid. Whatever your relationship with those things might be.”

  “I can’t make any promises about my… involvement, but I can promise you this.” I made sure to look Nick right in his eyes as I spoke. “I promise I would never do anything to hurt the Knights or Tess.”

  Nick stabbed a finger at me. “It’s that resolve, right there. You showed it to me back when we were working on the bikes, too. That’s what got me thinkin’, ‘Maybe this kid’s the real deal.’ You seemed so sincere, and honestly, I can’t remember the last time someone made me a sincere promise.”

  Though it didn’t feel like the conversation had reached a natural conclusion, I took my turn, and Nick took his turn, and we let the conversation lay to rest. After a few hands of back and forth grabs for points, I somehow managed to win, prompting Nick to growl, “Beginner’s luck.” He waved a hand. “All right, you can go back to her. I know she’s itchin’ for you to get back.”

  “Thanks.”

  The laugh that came out of Nick at that was a mix between a grunt and a sneer. “Don’t thank me, just don’t make me regret thi
s.” There was a hint of bass behind his words that hadn’t been there up to that point.

  “I won’t squander your or Tess’ kindness.”

  “Good. Oh, and, uh, let’s keep this little chat between us, huh? I mean, I know you’re gonna have to tell her something, but save her the gory details.”

  I nodded. “Of course. She wouldn’t get any benefit from knowing them.”

  “Right.” Nick started to collect the cards and shuffle them. “All right, kid, I’ll see ya around.”

  “Yeah.”

  My mind was a haze as I turned around and left the warehouse, slightly unsure of what had just happened. Wherever it came from, or whatever feeling Nick had developed about me, it was all too complacent, and it made me sick to my stomach. Less because of what he said, and more because, as he said it, I found myself longing for it.

  I navigated the kitchen and stepped out from behind the bar, where Tess was sitting at the same table where I’d left her, drinking a beer and talking with Avery. As soon as I reached the table, Avery stood up, patted my back, and walked away, and Tess leaped up from her seat.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I’ll explain more at home.”

  Lockjaw went nuts as Tess and I crossed the threshold into her house after taking the short ride home. I scanned the room, fully expecting it to be destroyed, but apart from some manic energy, the dog was just fine, and so was the house. Go figure.

  “Okay?” Tess threw her keys and bike gloves down on the counter and then turned and leaned against it, crossing her arms as she did so. “What’d he say?”

  My heart thudded as the conversation played on repeat in my head. “I think I just had The Talk with your dad.”

  Tess’ eyes bugged out. “What?”

  “Yeah. All the parts and pieces. He likes me but isn’t afraid to kill me.” Lockjaw was relentlessly clawing at my boots, so I reached down and gave him a few scratches on the head. “He also taught me how to play rummy.”

  Tess’ head fell to one side. “Ironic, isn’t it?”