They’d have figured it out eventually and, even though they weren’t consolidated there, they’d have come for her.
The thought of Smitty sending Bones and Bullet for her, of that rat bastard laughing as she screamed for her parents’ safety, made him furious. He clenched his right hand by his side and wished he could just punch through the other man’s damn cheek bones. Derek would teach him why he was the “Grinder,” what kind of Hell there was to pay for ever thinking of hurting his girl. As it was, the palm mark was still there, a fresh reminder of his failure to save her truly when it mattered. The marred flesh was there to taunt him.
No one---not the Blacktop Sinners, not the Death’s Head crew, no one---would get a second chance to touch her.
He’d fucking scorch the earth before he allowed it.
With his other hand, he reached out and grabbed hers, letting his fingers entwine with hers in a silly, sentimental way that he would have laughed at before. He still would have if he could see himself doing it with the average sweet butt. She was better than that. Hell, now that she was back and his, Tess felt like a damn angel.
She stilled for a minute, and maybe she hadn’t been expecting the gesture.
He hadn’t expected to make it.
Tess smiled at him and continued on down the highway. “Well it won’t be long now. You can get that blade and get it back to Spike first thing in the morning, and then you all can kick some serious Death’s Head crew ass.”
The words were right, but the tone was wrong, too forced and cheery to be genuine.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“I know what I do bothers you, so don’t think about what comes after. We have to get that knife to Spike for my sake but for yours. Your instincts are correct, blondie. You do not want the Blacktop Sinners after you, and you do not want them motivated to hurt you and yours.”
“Like you’ll do to anyone who’s not me,” she said, her voice soft and sad.
It was worse than if she’d just screamed at him. As if she’d resigned herself to it, no matter how much she resented it, as if she were chained to it.
“We don’t have to figure out everything right now,” he reminded, focusing on the road and not her crestfallen expression. “Just make it simple, get the blade and get to the roadhouse again.”
She nodded, but he could tell from the way she was biting her lip to keep silent that they’d definitely be coming back to this point soon. “Alright,” Tess finally agreed.
He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. How could one blonde spitfire really control him that badly? How could he worry so much about a woman he hardly knew? Well, scratch that. He knew her biblically, but he felt like somehow he was disappointing her, that he could be better or smarter or if he just had a normal nine-to-five, then their relationship could be perfect.
All hearts and flowers.
Or some shit like that.
“So,” he asked, genuinely curious. “What actually made you come back? You were furious before, and there was no way you were happier when you had to have heard about the hospital.”
She nodded. “Yeah, Lizzy called me in from Asheville to be questioned. That’s how I met that delightful Chief Johnson.”
“He’s a dick, but he works for the right price.”
“Which is?”
“A hell of a lot of zeros,” he conceded. “Seriously, you wanted me dead last time we spoke, it just radiated off you, that rage. What changed?”
She sighed and slipped her hand out of his. He almost took offense but then noticed how tightly both hands were gripping her steering wheel. Derek could easily make out the whites of her knuckles. “I couldn’t stop remembering Jason, my brother.”
“Okay?”
“He died in a bike accident like I said, but I always thought that being so closed off, that just almost being a damn hermit like Lizzy jokes was because of that.”
“Still following,” he said, frowning back at her.
“But then I remembered one of the last fights we ever had over his damn bike.”
“Don’t knock one until you’ve tried one.”
“You’d never catch me on one.”
“They’re the ultimate rush, the perfect amount of power. I think you’d like it, if you let yourself go. Yes, people wipe out,” he said, gesturing to his toes and then to the scar on his forehead. “But you could be in a mugging or a car accident or eat something with E. Coli at a restaurant. You don’t know when your number’s up.”
“Jason’s shouldn’t have been,” she said, her teeth gritted. “But in that fight, he did tell me that I never bend. Then it was so tense that I just stopped trying to even talk to him. The three months before he died, it was like the Cold War in our house. I’d give anything if I’d not given up on him.”
“You didn’t want to give up on me?” he asked, his voice incredulous. The only two people besides her who didn’t seem to do that so far were Spike, who while upholding the law seemed to take no pleasure in it, and, as always, his brother in arms and everything else, Ron. “Why?”
She shrugged but kept her hands on the wheel. “I don’t know completely. I just know the way you make me feel, the feelings you stir up, and I can’t turn my back on that. I have no idea what it means or where we go from here, but it’s the first time I’ve felt alive since…No, screw it! This is the most alive I’ve felt ever,” Tess finished, and she looked at him for a moment, her hazel eyes bright with need, as if she were willing him to understand her.
He stared into those haunting gold flecks and licked his lips. How desperately he wanted to make her stop the car and fuck her right here. God, it was more than that. Derek needed to hold her tight, to let her know everything would be alright, that he’d never leave her.
That they were family now, kindred.
“Well I can take that. I know what it’s like to have someone special like that in family. Ron and I, we’d been in foster home and juvie together, like I said.”
“Yeah, and at least for part of it, you had someone. If Jason and I couldn’t cling to each other until the Everharts, then I don’t know what I would have done,” she admitted.
“Ditto, so I get ‘brothers.’ They can annoy you like no other.”
“Oh Jason was a master at it, loved practical jokes and ones that involved fake spiders or rubber snakes were his favorites. I ran out naked of the bathroom more than once ‘cause I thought a giant tarantula or wolf spider or whatever was in the drain.”
He chuckled.
Note to self.
“I think I would have liked your house growing up.”
She chuckled even as she lightly slapped his left shoulder. “I bet. The point is that if I’d bent before, maybe things would have ended different. Or better. I’m trying to bend, but I’m just not sure yet how far I can go.”
“Because I’m a criminal,” he said hollowly.
“Yes, but we just have to play it by ear, see how everything works out,” Tess admitted.
“Then, in the spirit of playing it by ear,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “I have something I think you’re going to be glad for.”
“What?” He loved watching the smile spread across her face when she spied the silver St. Christopher medal glinting in his grasp. Bright white teeth gleamed back at him, and her cheeks had the slightest flush in her excitement. “Where did you find it?”
“I’m a man of many surprises.”
“Then we can both agree on that,” she huffed.
He didn’t quite like the double entendre there.
***
Tess knocked on the door of her parents’ home and was beyond nervous. Dan and Barbara Everhart were about as clean cut as they came. He’d been a civil engineer and her mom had her own career as well. They went to church every Sunday and always paid their taxes on time, and she couldn’t remember any time in the past twenty years when her parents had so much as had a parking ticket. They weren’t just
law-abiding. Her whole family was completely sold on being on the straight and narrow, no doubt.
So she had no idea how she’d explain a giant biker, no not just that but an enforcer who specialized in making other bikers suffer, to them. It wasn’t that he was wearing his jacket or screamed obviously that he was a felon. After all, he’d fooled both her and Liz, hadn’t he? Of course, she’d never brought home six and a half feet of rippling biceps, stubbly beard, and black on black wardrobe. The barbed wire tattoo around his large left arm just served to highlight it wasn’t just any intern or doctor she’d brought home this time.
Taking in a deep breath and also gaining comfort from his hand in hers, Tess waited until her parents showed up. Her dad was in a truly appalling Hawaiian shirt (a joy of retirement, honey), and her mom still had her reading glasses perched on the top of her head. To their credit, when they spied Derek, they didn’t act rude. She caught the hesitation on their faces but it was barely a few seconds. After a pause, her dad was shaking Derek’s massive hand and beaming back at him.
“Tess, you said you were bringing back company, but we assumed Lizzy,” her dad said first.
Her mother smirked, her eyes twinkling and crow’s feet pulled tightly across her cheeks with the gesture. Was it Tess’s imagination or was her mother blushing? Hell, even the tips of her ears looked pink. “This is certainly a pleasant surprise.”
“Uh, Mom, Dad, this is Derek Allanson. Derek, my parents, Barbara and Dan.”
He surprised her then by finishing up the handshake with her father and then taking up her mom’s hand and kissing the back of it. “Charmed, Mrs. Everhart.”
Her mom had gone fire hydrant levels of red. “Call me, Barbara, please.”
Her dad just rolled his eyes. “Well, maybe I have some competition here.”
Tess laughed and hugged him and then pulled playfully on his beard. “Dad, it’s fine. Derek’s the blind date that Lizzy set me up with and, well, we might have patched things up a lot.”
Derek smiled at that, and she was glad he had. Despite what he did, most of her was happy to have him back in her life, to know that such a gorgeous, passionate man was hers. “Yes so what’s for dinner, and how may I help?”
Tess hoped her parents had already been turned as they led Derek to the kitchen because her jaw was dropped. That was not at all how she expected the surly, in charge biker to act in such a domestic setting. Again, a small voice niggled at the back of her mind. Who was he really? Which Derek was the real one---the biker, the lover, or even this surprisingly warm gentleman? Could they all three be him or was it an act that would leave her more wrecked than when she’d first found out what “in security” actually meant?
Sighing, Tess steadied herself and followed her family into the kitchen. There was going to be a lot of play acting tonight, and she’d need to be at the top of her game to convince her mother of so many things.
After all, she’d learned how to ferret clues together from somewhere, hadn’t she?
Chapter Twenty Seven
“Derek, honey, you don’t have to carry that heavy roast all the way to the table,” Barbara said. “That’s what Tess’s dad is for.”
He chuckled and looked into the living room from the adjoining kitchen. Tess and her father were wrapped up watching the Atlanta Braves on TV and firing off stats at each other with Rain Man like speed. “I think they might be busy.”
Barbara shook her head and used a ladle to add extra au jus to the roast even as he carried it to the dining room table. “I think they might be spoiled. I never should have trained them that way. Maybe I channeled my inner June Cleaver too much. To this day, Sarah and Tess always leave their room a mess after they visit. I advise if you ever have little ones to be more disciplined.”
Derek coughed and almost dropped the roast the extra couple feet to the table. That was about the scariest thought he’d ever heard out of someone’s mouth. Him? The Grinder for the Blacktop Sinners with rugrats? Hell, he was a foster brat and didn’t know a damn thing about taking care of himself, let alone kids. However, as he was standing up, his mind flashed to the image of beautiful blonde girls with Tess’s gold-flecked, hazel eyes, and his tension eased.
Would it be so bad?
Barbara channeled her mother’s intuition and chuckled as they went back to the kitchen to get the side dishes in tandem. “I wasn’t implying anything. I hardly try and rope blind dates into wooing my daughters.”
“Oh,” he said, as he set down the green beans and mashed potatoes. “That’s right. Tess mentioned she had a sister too.”
“Sarah’s upstairs, borrowing the relative quiet of the house for a few weeks in the middle of a crazy summer.”
“I see.”
“Yes, but it’s always welcome to have more guests,” she said, setting her own plates down. Rubbing her hands on her apron, she then cupped them in front of her face and yelled out to her family. “Tess, text your sister, and Dan, get your big butt over here, slop’s on.”
Derek decided right then that he liked Tess’s mom quite a bit, and he could see where Tess’s fire and outspokenness had been learned from. Maybe it was just the style of the Everhart household. He smiled politely as Tess and Dan came in first. They all sat, and a few seconds later, like a stampeding herd of elephants, her sister raced down stairs. Sarah Everhart was tall and lanky and every bit as strawberry blonde as her mother.
Right, the biological child.
He waved and then took Tess’s hand as they all joined together to pray around the table. All of this felt like some strange journey to him or student exchange program, even if he was well grown. He’d heard of this---normal families, real families---but he’d just never lived that. He thought moms that made everything from scratch and saying a quick blessing before chowing down were things that literally only existed on The Hallmark Channel. After they were done, they started to dig in, and that was when he decided he liked Dan as well, in all his cheesy dad glory.
“Mhmmm, mhm, mhm, dang!” Dan shouted and then leaned over and kissed his wife’s cheek. “You’ve done it again, honey. I swear these green beans are the finest ever.”
She chuckled and gestured to him. “It was all Derek, he added some onion flakes and garlic, and it has so much more kick.”
Tess eyed him, and he shrugged. As he did it, his left sleeve rode up and it exposed his tattoo a bit, which just made Sarah’s eyes go wide in response. “I’m not exactly a cook, but we didn’t have much growing up.” Understatement. “And I learned to make friends with the spice cabinet. People have a ton of sh…stuff lying around that you can improvise with. You eat the same boring food over on a loop because it’s affordable, you start praising paprika and all the others.”
“Handy then,” Dan nodded. “So, that’s about all we know so far, son. That and her friend Lizzy helped set you up.”
He whistled. “Well, I can say that Lizzy’s got attitude, very piss and vinegar.”
Tess kicked him under the table, and he swore that Sarah was going to pick her jaw up off the floor. He just arched an eyebrow back at her. He could play nice some, but he wasn’t a crew cut saint or a doctor who owned clothes with polo ponies on them for the weekend. If she didn’t like that, Tess needed to say so now.
Barbara surprised him by chuckling too. “She’s definitely feisty.”
“You know she loves to live up to the spicy Latina image,” Tess said, still glaring at him with laser focus. “But yes, we had a mutual hospital love connection.”
“Was he a patient?” Sarah said, nearly choking on her roast beef.
Tess blushed, and he might like her an awful lot, but his potential old lady was a shit liar. “Not exactly.”
“What does that mean, honey?” her dad asked, stroking his snowy white beard.
“It means that he was discharged before Lizzy made a love connection.”
“So, then,” Sarah asked, as she leaned in closer across the table. “What do you actually do then? When T
ess dates, it’s usually someone in health care.”
He shrugged and worked with the same line he always gave; the best lies were always those based partially in fact after all. It was a belief and practice that had saved his ass on more than one occasion. “Security. I’m not a rent a cop, but I do work to keep certain places in Boone locked down.”
“Are you a bar bouncer then,” Sarah probed.
Corrupted: A Motorcycle Club Romance (Blacktop Sinners MC) Page 15