“Exactly,” I agreed. “So it’s good practice not to condemn what someone else believes in. It took me a very long time to realize that, and judging that way almost kept me from some of the greatest treasures in my life.”
“Don’t get why you stopped teaching kids,” he muttered, looking back down at the book. “You’re good at it and shit.”
I swallowed my laugh because Ares was only nine, but he did not like to be laughed at. “Thanks, babe. It was fun while it lasted, but I got King out of it, and I’d make that trade any day.”
“Yeah, he’s the shit too,” he muttered, and I couldn’t help laughing because he was right, and his admiration was adorable.
“Agreed. Besides, it’s books that I love most and opening Paradise Found excites me a lot more than teaching ever did.”
I’d grown up with the kind of parents who raised me like a marionette instead of a person. They puppeteered me through the entire first twenty-six years of my life, and it took meeting King to make me realize just how weak I’d been. Now, four years after I’d broken my mold and started an affair with my high school student, I was finally woman enough, me enough, to pursue my real goals.
Currently, I had two.
Open a bookstore in Entrance and fill it with gorgeous books, comfy chairs, and youth programs and book clubs.
Marry the love of my life.
My gaze cut back to the clubhouse where I knew King was having a chat with Zeus about club business, and I wondered for the hundredth time when King might propose.
It wasn’t that I was in a hurry, but I’d been divorced from my scumbag ex for four years, and King and I had been living together all that time.
I was ready, and more, I didn’t get why he wasn’t.
This was the same man who had spotted me across a crowded bar and demanded to take me out on a date that very moment. The same man who basically moved in with me the minute we started sleeping together, and the same man who wrote me love poems every week since that first week we went out.
He was the kind of man who took what he wanted and did what he needed without hesitation.
I stared down at my bare hand and brushed the skin over my left ringer finger.
Ares’s hand slid over mine, and when I looked over at him, his face was soft with understanding. “Wasn’t it you who told me family is in the heart, not in the blood or papers that make it so in the eyes of the fuckin’ law?”
I rolled my eyes at his curse word because he was too young to curse, but then again, he was too young for most of the trauma his young self had endured, so I didn’t chastise him for it.
“That’s smart. It does sound like me,” I agreed, just to see his small smile.
“Fuck off!” A shout suddenly tore across the asphalt.
Ares went rigid, and I was on my feet in an instant, stepping in front to obscure the view of him from the street. We didn’t know exactly what had brought Ares to Zeus’s cabin outside of Whistler last year, but we did know whatever he had run away from was the kind of bad even outlaw bikers considered bad, so we were all protective of him.
There was no need for it, though. The woman, still shouting, who had startled us was a short thing in a brief skirt with a strip of fabric across her straining breasts. Her masses of strawberry blond hair went flying as she whipped around to snarl at the man following her slowly in an old Buick.
“Fuck you, Cisco,” she screamed at him, swinging her big, slouchy purse and hitting the car. “You want me to call the fucking cops? Because I will!”
“What’re you going to tell them, slut?” he demanded coarsely. “You want to make peace with Rina, you get your ass in this car and come with me.”
“Make me,” she bit out.
But I had seen enough.
“Stay here. Things get hairy, call for the men,” I told Ares as I moved quickly across the lot to the chain-link fence.
I was through the gate and behind the girl by the time the man named Cisco reached through the open window to grab at her.
I intercepted his hand and twisted it into a fierce lock that Bat, our veteran brother, had spent years trying to teach me to master
It seemed, based on Cisco’s choked cry, that I’d finally mastered it.
“I think this girl has told you to leave one too many times,” I said with false cheer, my smile more like a sneer on my face. “It’s time you listened to her.”
“You fucking bitch,” he groaned, his surprisingly handsome face crumpled with pain and hatred. “You don’t know who the fuck you’re dealing with here.”
“No,” I disagreed politely and leaned close so he could see the resolve in my eyes. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with. This is Fallen territory, and you want to harass some girl right outside our gates, it is our problem.”
There was a flash of recognition chased hard on the heels by fear. “Fuck.”
“Fuck is right,” I agreed. “Now, fuck off.”
I held eye contact with him for a long beat, just to reinforce my threat, and then let go, stepping back immediately with my arm moving around the girl to bring her out of reach with me.
“When I find you again, you’re in deep fucking shit,” he spat at the redhead before gunning the engine and roaring off down the street.
I watched the car turn the corner before looking at the girl beside me. She was absolutely lovely. Exactly that word. Heart-shaped face with delicately winged brows, a perfectly formed mouth, and a small nose topped with large pale brown eyes the colour of sunlight on syrup. She was so beautifully feminine she almost looked like a cartoon, but the glaze to those eyes and the jitter in her thin frame made her something all too human.
A drug addict about to come down from their high.
What a tragedy.
“Hey, honey,” I started to say softly, the way one would talk to a stray cat, but she looked startled and then angry with me for addressing her like that.
“How do you know my name?” she demanded.
Her eyes cut to the garage and the emblem of The Fallen MC Nova had spray painted on the side of the clubhouse.
“Fuck me, fuck,” she cursed viciously, then took a huge step away from me as if I was infected with the plague. “Listen, bitch, you keep you and yours the hell away from me. You hear me? I don’t need to be messed up in biker drama.”
“Your name is Honey,” I said slowly, less a question that a memory dredged up from the banks of my brain.
Honey Yves was the daughter of Farrah, the ex-wife of Zeus and ex-mother of Harleigh Rose and my King.
I’d never heard of anyone else named Honey, and I very much doubted it was a common name so…
“Honey Yves?” I asked, vaguely aware of movement in my periphery.
She shivered and clutched her stained hobo bag to her chest as she started to back away from me. “You don’t know me. And listen, I didn’t need your help with Cisco, and I don’t need your help now, you get me? I’m a grown ass woman.”
Lies. She wasn’t a day over fifteen, maybe sixteen. I’d taught teenagers for enough years to be able to peg their age.
“I’m not trying to take you anywhere or force you to do anything,” I told her with my hands open to the heavens. “I just wanted to get that creep away from you.”
“Yeah, well, don’t expect a thanks or anything.”
“I don’t.” I bit my lip, warring with myself. “Listen, I’m starving, do you want to grab a bite to eat with me?”
I wasn’t hungry. I’d made Ares and me grilled cheese in the clubhouse kitchen before we went outside to read, but Honey looked frail. As if she hadn’t eaten more than a candy bar in days.
I knew she had nothing to do with King and Harleigh Rose, that they hadn’t even seen the girl since she was a baby, but I still felt compelled to do something. It was just human decency.
She peered at me suspiciously and licked her lips almost convulsively, a high tic I recognized from years ago when my own brother had partied too hard and t
oo often.
“Why?” she asked, and the one word was an accusation.
I shrugged. “I’m hungry as I said. I also believe in the sisterhood. You were basically just accosted on the street, and I’m feeling like you could use a girl friend to chat to.”
She snorted, and whatever tenuous relationship I’d been trying to form between us dissolved like sugar in water. “Yeah, right. For all I know, you and your Fallen bastards work for Cisco and the lot of them too. No way I’m going anywhere with you, bitch.”
“Wait,” I urged, reaching out to stay her with a hand on her arm.
She went berserk at my touch, whipping her bag around to knock it savagely into my chest, robbing the air from my chest.
I bent over with a loud exhalation, clutching my belly as I tried to breathe.
“Fuck,” a familiar voice exclaimed as the gate jangled open and then motorcycle boots appeared in my limited view.
A hand went to my back, slid up my spine, and cradled the back of my head before King dropped into a squat beside me. His pale blue eyes were glacial with anger as he studied me for further injury.
“Who the fuck did this to you?” he demanded.
I sucked in a shaky breath, tipped my head to find Honey long gone, and said, “Your sister.”
Cressida
* * *
“I can’t believe it,” I said, still shocked by the news hours later. “How could they have the balls to set something like that up in Entrance of all places? This is Fallen territory.”
King chuckled as he brushed a hand across my lower back, leaning over me to open the fridge and grab the butter for me. I stared at it as he pressed it into my hands and then retrieved the flour from the cupboard. It took me a moment to realize he was prompting me to make his favourite, salted caramel apple pie.
“King!” I protested, before giving in to a giggle. “Why is it that whenever I’m getting anxious, you always force me to make pie?”
He shrugged a shoulder, a lopsided grin tucked into one cheek as he hopped up onto the counter beside me. “Settles that busy, beautiful brain a beat, and I like pie. Two birds, one stone.”
I shook my head as if I was exasperated, but the truth was, I loved that he knew me that well. All the little ways we loved each other and looked after one another that no one else would notice but us. It was those small miracles and mercies of love that I thought were the most beautiful.
“Seriously, though, the gall!” I continued even as I chopped the cold butter into cubes. “They obviously don’t know who they’re messing with, even after we took down Javier’s disgusting high school drug ring.”
“Babe, you gotta start swearin’. There you are acting all biker tough like any seasoned Old Lady and then you go ‘messin’’ and ‘butts’ on it.”
I shrugged as I started to work the butter into the flour mixture. “I’m still a work in progress.”
“Aren’t we all? I mean, everyone but me seein’ as I’m perfect already.” He took a huge bite out of one of the apples I had set aside for the pie.
I rolled my eyes. “No one’s perfect, not even you.”
“Funny you say that now. I gotta distinct memory just this morning after I made you come all over my dick of you sayin’ the words, ‘King, God, you are perfect.’”
I blushed madly, feeling the heat sluice down my neck over my chest. “Actually, if I remember correctly, I said ‘King, God, your cock is perfect.’”
“Ah.” He nodded somberly as if he hadn’t been playing me the whole time just to get me to say it again. “That musta been it.”
I laughed despite myself and flicked my flour coated fingers at him. “You’re lucky I love you enough to ignore your arrogance.”
“Lucky you love me, straight up, babe,” he agreed easily in that way he had of making our love seem even more epic because he was so matter-of-fact about it. “Lucky you make sweet-ass pies too.”
“You owe me an apple. Can you go grab one for me?”
“On it,” he said, jumping off the counter and smacking my ass as he moved by me to the side door.
I watched him leave, hands covered in flour, eyes wide as I appreciated the way his form had changed in the past four years. The tall, somewhat lanky body of the eighteen-year-old student I’d fallen in love with had morphed into the body of some kind of Greek god. He spent a lot of time at the club in the gym lifting weights with the guys, and his broad shouldered, narrow hipped body was testament to that. I loved tracing the lines of his muscles under all that golden skin, my tongue sliding down the trough of his obliques to the muscles that arrowed into his groin, rippling my fingers over the symmetrical boxes in his abdominals. I knew and worshipped every inch of that body and I felt no shame in checking out his tight butt as he swaggered out the door to the apple trees he’d planted at the side of the house for me years ago.
It was one of a thousand ways King had helped me to make this little ramshackle cottage a home. When I’d bought it four years ago, it was dilapidated, to say the least, with a list of issues as long as my arm. Fixing it up had been a part of King’s courtship, wooing me by bringing the brothers by to spruce things up, and over the years, we’d made it our mission to turn the neglected house into a home.
Now, the old wood floors were sanded down and re-glazed so they gleamed in the pools of honeyed sunlight spilling in from the double paned windows lining the entire back of the house. We’ve moved out for a few months one year so the kitchen could be remodeled and now the lower cabinets were painted a warm, dark green and the open shelves were stained to match the dark wood paneling done throughout the rest of the house. I had a huge butcher block slab over my island with stools on one side and the stove in the middle and a huge dining room table to match for when we had the Garro clan or the brothers over to eat.
King had helped Eugene make some custom furniture for our sunken living room so that everything felt rustic and mismatched in a way that worked with the space.
From the bookshelves taking up every spare inch of wall space in the small home to the painting Nova had done for us of a girl holding an apple falling into a waiting palm and the massive print we had hanging in the hallway of King and me on our trip to Graceland, this home screamed us.
And I loved it more than I could ever say.
I’d been married to a man for seven years before I’d met King. We’d lived in a big, expensive house in Vancouver next to other big, expensive houses filled with beautiful, expensive things, and I’d never once felt at home there the way I did in Shamble Wood Cottage with King.
It made me understand in a way I never could have before that it was people who made a home.
I was a girl living a dream she’d never before thought possible to dream, and I didn’t feel any shame in glorying in it.
Softly, I sang along with Elvis as he crooned over the speakers, swaying my hips as I put the dough to chill in the fridge and started in on making the caramel sauce. I smiled when the door opened quietly, but quickly stilled when the air didn’t charge with King’s presence.
Trying to be discreet, I carefully moved my hand along the counter to grip the handle of the butcher’s knife I’d used to cut through the apples and called out easily, “Thanks, honey. Did you get them, okay?”
The old wood floors creaked behind me. Before I could even monitor my thoughts, I was dipping low and sweeping in a circle to bring up the knife to the groin of the unknown assailant. Less than a second later, a gun pointed at my temple, a cold, hard kiss of metal with a deadly mouth.
We froze, suspended in a stalemate for one long breath.
Then the man relaxed his grip on his gun and chuckled. “Fuck me, Cress. That how you always greet visitors?”
I peered up through my dishevelled hair to see Wrath grinning down at me from his awesome height. The adrenaline flooding my system ebbed and was replaced with hyper relief.
I laughed as I dropped the knife, and he offered me a huge, tattooed hand to help me stand.
I brushed the flour off the handle and dropped the weapon to the counter before I wrapped the biker in my arms.
“Priest,” I explained into his rock-hard torso, used to hugging men who seemed like slabs of marble. “He and King made it their mission to educate me in the finer arts of brutality should I ever need them.”
He patted my back, a bit too hard even though I knew he tried to temper his strength. “Glad to hear it. How’s it hangin’, Queenie?”
“Like you care,” I teased as I pulled away. “You just want to know how Kylie is.”
His smile was beautiful because everything about Wrath was beauty incarnate. If I wasn’t so head over heels in love with my own biker, I might’ve been struck dumb by the perfection of Wrath Marsden’s features. Combined with his looming height and quilted abundance of muscles, he had to be one of the most intimidating men I’d ever seen.
Yet I couldn’t think of him as anything but a great big teddy bear after seeing the lengths he went to in order to protect the woman he loved. The smile carved into his face, lighting his luminescent blue-grey eyes and creasing his bearded cheeks was a prime example of that.
“She good?” he asked, instead of protesting my comment.
Nothing meant more to him than Kylie.
I wiped my hands on a tea towel and stirred the melting sugar in the pot on the stove. “She misses you and her mum, but whenever I see her, she seems good. I think Eugene’s got a soft spot for her, and she’s made great friends with Lila.”
“Good,” he grunted, leaning his six-foot-six frame against the counter. “Called ’im and they’re on their way now. I’ll take her out for a bit, bring her back, and then we can all grab some grub together?”
“Don’t worry about us. If you want that time with her, take it.”
“We don’t got a lotta people we can be ourselves with…It’d be nice to hang with you and King,” he admitted.
If he’d been anyone else, I would have hugged him again. Wrath had brought his girlfriend Kylie to us a few weeks ago to protect her from, of all people, her father, Reaper Holt, the MC President of the Berserkers, who would rather see her killed than see her with any of his brothers.
After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4 Page 4