Clubs: Motorcycle Club Romance (Savage Saints MC Book 6)

by Hazel Parker

  But this wasn’t the handsome, sweet, blue-collar Brett I’d fallen in love with in high school.

  This was someone—from his tone, his speed of talking, and his words—that had changed drastically since.

  “Brett…” I gasped. “I didn’t think I’d find you here.”

  Brett just snorted. I felt myself coming closer, even as my rational mind told me to stay away. I didn’t think, even after everything that had transpired, that he was going to rape or assault me. He’d never done anything to me that could be construed as violent unless you counted rough sex.

  But…

  I mean…

  Was approaching a man I had abandoned really a good idea?

  “That makes two of us,” he said as he lit up a cigarette.

  Though my eyes were beginning to adjust to the night sky, his face had not come into full view. When he lit the lighter, though, I began to see some of the more rugged features on his face, features that made him hotter. His dark scowl, mustache, and the lines under his eyes… they showed a man who had experienced things that most men wouldn’t.

  He may have been thirty-three, but he looked like a man who had seen four decade’s worth of nightmares and hells. I wonder how much of that is because of me.

  All of it, probably.

  “Well, Brett…” I said. I had no idea where I wanted to go with this, nor did I have any idea what I wanted to say. I hadn’t planned on this; I figured we’d speak eventually, but did I have to speak to him on the first night like this? “I need to get going. We can catch up some, uh, some other time, and, uh, it’d be real, I mean—”

  “Why did you leave me like you did?”

  I went silent as my heart skipped a beat. He was going right to the painful part. He was getting to the thing that haunted me every day—the thing that would end my tenure at The Red Door early.

  Our shared past.

  “Brett…” I said, more of a breathy gasp than an actual, coherent word.

  I didn’t have anything to follow that. Just being in Brett’s presence made my chest tight, my spine chilled, and my mouth dry. But it also made my arms tingly, my stomach flip, and… well, and my arousal start to rise.

  To say I had mixed emotions was like saying the ocean was wet.

  “Answer the question,” he said. “Please.”

  At least he said please. He’s not going to do anything if he’s being polite to me.

  “Brett, is that something you want to get into right now?” I said. “This isn’t the time. At four in the morning, just outside The Red Door?”

  “I asked you a question,” Brett said.

  It was scary how monotone his voice was. Where was the expressive, effusive Brett? Where was the man who laughed, smiled, and kissed me like he knew no other state?

  “Brett…”

  “You made me into this, you know,” he said with a long sigh.

  I almost wanted to cry at that. But I also just wanted to hug him. He looked wounded, like a veteran who had seen too much.

  “What do you mean?” I murmured.

  I still had not brought myself to look into his eyes. At least Brett, from my peripheral vision, looked to be the same way. We were former lovers who could not look the other in the eye.

  If anything was more tragic than that, I wasn’t sure what it was.

  “A biker,” he said with a shrug. “A fighter. A quiet man. Reserved and closed off. Difficulty in trusting people.”

  I bowed my head, the tension between us unbearable—and not the good kind of tension. I knew the words that Brett had just used, if I were being honest, described me all too well. Maybe not the biker part, but otherwise…

  Fighter? I considered my life one big fight against the fact that no one, most especially my parents, accepted me.

  Quiet? Absolutely.

  Reserved and closed off? Check and check.

  Difficulty in trusting people? Yep.

  I hated that those described me. I hated that my actions were the reason those words described me. I hated that I had a chance to rectify a lot of that now, that I had a chance to at least apologize for leaving Brett as suddenly as I did…

  But I couldn’t. I was, well, too quiet, reserved, closed off, and distrusting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  I meant it, but I didn’t mean it as much as I could have. It wasn’t malicious; it was just a fact that if I really meant that I was sorry, I would have said it more strongly, looked him in the eye when I did, and said, “I’m sorry, Brett.”

  Brett just shook his head. He knew I could have given more—or that, perhaps even worse, I wasn’t capable of giving him anything more than that.

  “You promise to stay away from me,” he growled. “And I’ll promise to stay away from you. Got it?”

  I nodded. Finally, feeling the conversation coming to a close, I lifted my head and tried to look him in the eyes.

  I only caught a brief glance of him before he turned away. But in that brief moment, in that half-second before Brett tore away to his bike… I saw the eyes of his younger self, yearning to be with me, wondering why I had left him behind. The eyes of his younger self had never gotten a clear answer, and all these years later, that’s all they wanted.

  But more than that, I also saw the handsome man I’d fallen in love with. He might have already been heading to his bike, but that didn’t mean that I was done looking at him.

  I watched the whole time as he strode over to his bike, throwing one leg over with ease, revving the engine, and buzzing away quickly and without a glance back. He had talked about his love of motorcycles a lot as a teenager, but he’d never gotten one. His parents had forbidden it until he graduated high school, and even right after, he hadn’t gotten one. It had been years, but if memory served me right, I think he didn’t want to do it immediately, as if that would somehow serve as a middle finger to his parents.

  At least you got your bike, Brett. At least you got something from your teen years you desperately wanted.

  I unlocked my car, sighed, and got in.

  It was the same car that Brett and I had made out in and had sex in just after prom.

  It was going to be a really interesting time at The Red Door.

  Chapter 3: Barber

  A week passed, and I had a major problem on my hands.

  I had thought that my surprise meeting with Cassie after her first night would have made things easier for me. I had thought it would have given me closure, or maybe it would have shown me that she had grown into an ugly human being I wouldn’t want. I had thought that it would, somehow, someway, get me to stop giving a shit about Cassie Erickson.

  But no.

  It only reminded me how much I liked her, how much I had loved her, and why I had fallen for her in the first place. Her seductive green eyes—seductive even when she wasn’t trying—her pale but beautiful white skin, her curly blonde hair… it was all so perfect. She had great breasts and a firm ass, but they weren’t the kind of thing that bordered on comedic or cartoonish. I had never understood Dom’s love for pussy that had plastic on the same body, but to each their own, I suppose.

  And, of course, her soft and quiet demeanor. I had no interest in the loud girls, the extroverts, the ones who felt they had to do kissy selfies or any of that shit. She was a true girl next door, and in high school, for as much as we hung out, that was not too far off.

  Now, though, it was all too literal, at least at The Red Door.

  At least she still had the same toughness as before. Anyone who agreed to work at The Red Door knew what they were getting into—we didn’t hide that we were a motorcycle club to anyone who got far enough in to be considered a hire. Her toughness was different than the club’s but it was there all the same.

  Problem was, it might have been that very toughness that led her to leave me.

  Seeing her didn’t just remind me of how much I’d loved her. It reminded me of how much I hated her, how much I tried to burn her memories from
my life, how much she left me depressed and miserable. It was like one day, I was doing math to see if I’d saved enough money for a ring, and the next, she wasn’t answering my calls and wasn’t at her parents’ house.

  There was never any answer. Her parents, enormous religious assholes, had no idea where she had gone, and disturbingly, they didn’t seem to care. None of her friends knew where she went, either.

  I found out sometime later that she had appeared healthy and in good order in a small town about five hours south of Phoenix, but the fact that she was in such a state only pissed me off even more. If she’d been kidnapped or killed, as tragic as that would have been, it would have given me closure and the knowledge that what I had done had had no impact on her.

  How could I not wonder how much at fault I was in such a moment, though?

  And now she was a coworker…

  The mindfuck was too much. The duality of being reminded of her amazing qualities and the pain she had caused me drove me to drink like a fucking fish on Tuesday and Wednesday. I drank so much and was so fucked in the head that I did something that I wasn’t especially proud of.

  I slept with two of Dom’s girls.

  On such nights, I typically either went back with a girl that I knew from before or just stayed above the action. Dom loved to bring in strippers, porn stars: the kind of girls that you’d be more likely to find on PornHub than you would on the streets of Vegas and Los Angeles. They never appealed to me, but maybe the idea was that if I fucked the complete opposite of Cassie, I would realize that she meant nothing to me.

  Turned out, that backfired pretty bad.

  Tuesdays was some girl named Diamond. She was very tanned, very brunette, from Tennessee, and loved to use her tits on my body. It should have been great… but I was so drunk and kept thinking about Cassie; she had to give me a hand job to finish. I wasn’t very proud of that.

  Wednesday was even worse. It was an Asian girl who never gave me her name, and she was the opposite of Diamond; she liked to move really slow and seductive to get me going, but I never could. I got hard, but I never stayed hard; after half an hour, I pretended I needed to throw up to get out of it.

  Neither girl was dumb enough to tell Dom or anyone else in the club what had happened, but what had happened was embarrassing enough. I never had performance issues in bed, but then again, I had never had the only girl I’d ever loved in my life suddenly walk back in without warning. How the fuck was I supposed to handle that?

  If I were frank with myself… I wanted Cassie back.

  But I didn’t want this iteration of Cassie, the person capable of walking out of my life without warning. I didn’t want the Cassie who found herself dancing because, presumably, being a lawyer had failed. I didn’t want the thirty-something Cassie who was single and alone in Las Vegas.

  I wanted the sixteen-year-old Cassie, the innocent but tough girl, the one who made me one of the happiest boys in my high school class. I wanted the Cassie who said she loved me and who dreamed of our wedding day with me. I wanted the Cassie that I could envision spending a lifetime with.

  This Cassie sucked. And even if, by some miracle, I wound up with her, it wasn’t going to be for a lifetime; at best, a third of my life had gone, a good half of it spent wallowing in pity and grief over lost potential. There was nothing to be had.

  And that didn’t even account for what was happening in my business world.

  I sat in the meeting room alone: a first for me. I was usually one of the last ones in, but today, I didn’t want to risk bumping into Cassie en route by showing up late. I just wanted to get to the hall, and if I got there too early, I’d go back to my room and take a power nap.

  No such thing was needed, though. A few minutes later, Mama and Richard walked in. They laughed in continuation of their conversation, ignoring whatever grief or pouting look I had on my face. I didn’t much care; I didn’t need their sympathy.

  “Barber,” Mama said.

  “Yes?” I said, perking back up.

  “Ya look like shit, honey,” she said, drawing a smirk from Richard. “Do I need to get you another Diamond in the rough?”

  “Who are you, Dom?” I said, but even I had to give a slight smile at what Mama had said.

  “God no, fuck no, eww,” she said, drawing chuckles from both Richard and me. “Compare me to that asshole ever again, and I’ll slap your skull so hard it’ll look like a spinning top.”

  “Which asshole?” Dom said as he walked in with a smirk. He then put both of his hands on my shoulders, squeezed, and gave a solid rub. “Back-to-back nights over here! Barber: the newest pimp of the club. Ya like Diamond and Tiger?”

  “Tiger?”

  “I dunno, I just teasingly call her Crouching Tiger,” Dom said with a snort.

  “That’s not offensive,” Mama said with an eye-roll.

  “Oh, hush, it’s easier to remember than Lu,” Dom said. “In any case, let’s not miss the point here, which is that Barber got some hair cut this week if you know what I mean.”

  We all looked at Dom, absolutely befuddled.

  “Dom, we love you, but that was fucking terrible,” Mama said.

  “Not with—”

  “Don’t even get me started, Pork,” Mama said without turning around as the last member of the club walked in.

  “Yes, don’t get started, Pork, cuz I got more,” Dom said.

  I may have felt in some sort of funk from everything going on, I may have felt disturbed and bothered by what was happening, but being back in the club in its cheerful, bullshitting and trash talking state had a way of making me feel better, at least for a bit.

  “Anyway, now that we are all here,” Richard said, trying to command the attention of the misbehaving club members, “it’s time to turn our attention to club business.”

  Ah, yes. The part where we get my job undercut from me.

  “Before we get to the big shit, Mama, how are the girls?”

  “Good as ever,” she said. “Our newest member is doing quite well, and I think she’s going to be a great asset to the team.”

  I found it interesting that she didn’t use Cassie’s name. Usually, she was willing to say who the newest dancers were… maybe she just forgot the name in the moment? No, it wasn’t that; Mama defended and protected those girls like they were her daughters.

  Maybe she’s protecting someone else. Maybe she’s protecting you.

  “Is she hot?” Dom said. “Is she single? Oh, wait, that doesn’t matter with me, because—”

  But to everyone’s shock, Mama turned right and slapped Dom. Hard. Way harder than she normally slapped us. Too hard for it to not mean something.

  “How many goddamn times do I have to tell you to leave my girls alone?” Mama said.

  “Damn,” Dom muttered, rubbing his cheek.

  “None of you assholes ever listen to me, and I keep telling you: you sleep with our girls, drama happens, and when drama happens, girls quit. And if girls quit, business suffers. And if business suffers, guess who pays the brunt of it? The five of us assholes in here. So if you wanna fuck one of the girls, you might as well fuck yourself in the ass while you’re at it, because that’s what you’re doing.”

  The mood in the room swung drastically. That wasn’t unusual, but for these particular circumstances, it was unexpected. I wasn’t that bothered by Dom asking if she was hot and single. Cassie was a single woman—I presumed, I actually didn’t know—and she was an adult. If she wanted to hook up with the manwhore of the group…

  OK, maybe that would bother me a little bit.

  No, no, it wouldn’t. The younger Cassie hooking up with Dom would have pissed me off. But that Cassie is dead and gone.

  Maybe, though, that was exactly why Mama had spoken as strongly as she had. She wanted to quell any chance of Dom hooking up with Cassie before he even thought about it.

  But why so strongly?

  … she knows. That’s why. She knows something happened between Cassie and m
e.

  Goddamnit.

  “We good?” Richard said.

  “Yeah, Mama’s got some force,” Dom said with a smirk.

  “That’s up to him,” Mama said, nodding toward Dom.

  The smirk remained, but as a shield against showing fear. We all had a healthy respect for Mama and what she was capable of.

  “Got it,” Richard said. “Dom, how’s the recruiting trail?”

  “Working on getting a senator in here when he comes to Vegas,” Dom said, still rubbing his cheek and shooting Mama glances. “The Raiders are moving here in a year or so. Have been reaching out to a few of those guys to see if they want to become regulars. They’re so concerned with getting caught coming here that most are being cautious, but that’s an easy thing to get over.”

  “Definitely,” Richard said. “Alright, anything else before we get to the main course?”

  God, how I wished I had something. How I wished I could talk about something that wasn’t the California Saints coming in to do my job. How I wished I could raise a topic that would stretch up to the point of running over poker, tabling the discussion of bringing outside help for another day.

  But nope.

  I had nothing.

  And in any case, it was inevitable that Richard was going to discuss it, so the sooner I got over myself, the better I could do my job and help the club.

  “Very well,” Richard said. “In the past week, I’ve continued to discuss matters with my niece and her husband, Trace. I’ve taken a diplomatic approach on matters, speaking to the couple frequently and expressing my apologies. I believe they recognize that while we have a lot of issues and things to talk about, we’re on the same page in terms of the Degenerate Sinners. So, with that in mind, Trace has agreed to send a representative.”

  I bit my lip to avoid expressing anything too overt. Maybe it would just be a member or someone. I knew that was false hope; a club member wasn’t important enough. But I could hold out hope that it was someone who wasn’t important enough to take my job.