Mountain Misfits MC: Complete Box Set

by Voss, Deja

  “You might want to hold that sentiment, and you’re probably going to want to chug this,” Esther says, handing me her flask. I put my hand out to decline. I am not in the mood to drink right now; all I want is to make sure that everything is going to be alright.

  “You do know my mom,” I say to her, my eyes wide. She opens the flask and presses it to my lips until I can’t refuse. I gag on the cherry-flavored stuff that burns my nostrils a little bit. “Do you know where she is? Does she still live around here?”

  “Amber, maybe you should sit down,” Micah says. “Guys? Can you give us some privacy?”

  “Do we have to?” Gavin asks. “I kind of feel like I need to see this.”

  “Come on, guys,” Esther says. “I just got a new batch of online applications for the ranch. You want to help me go through them?” She tousles my hair and kisses me on the forehead. It’s very strange to me. It makes me feel like something really bad is about to happen. Micah is pacing back and forth, his frown so dark, his forehead is completely wrinkled.

  “Amber,” Esther whispers to me. “I want you to know that I’m not mad at you for not telling me sooner. I don’t care if you don’t want to dance here anymore. I like you. I think you’re a good person, and the way that you get through to my brother… I’ve never seen that before. He really does care about you. Please don’t forget that, no matter what happens.”

  Something is definitely up. Before I have a chance to say another word, she and the rest of the guys filter out of the room, leaving just Micah and I. He won’t stop pacing. It’s making me extra anxious.

  “Can you stand still?” I ask. “Please? What in the hell is going on here?”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Amber. Any of this. But I also can’t lie to you. You know I want to be with you right?” he says, hovering over me with his hands in his pockets.

  “Of course.”

  “Only you. You’re the first woman I’ve ever felt this way about, and if I lose you, I’ll probably never feel this way again. I’m not trying to guilt you, or trap you, and if you want to go, I completely understand.”

  “Micah…” I stammer, running my hand down my face. “Why are you being so crazy right now? I’m not going anywhere.”

  He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes.

  “Ava… I mean, your mother… her and I had a complicated relationship.”

  I feel like I’m going to throw up in my mouth. It doesn’t make any sense at all, but it makes perfect sense. They’re the same age after all. I don’t like where this is going, though. I stand up from my stool, ready to just run out the door.

  “Hear me out,” he says, grabbing my wrist. “Just please hear me out.”

  I wonder if he talked to my mother like he talks to me. Not just the sexy stuff, but the sweet and loving stuff. I can’t even look at him right now.

  “I was so young back then, Amber. It was a totally different time. She was dating my dad. She was dating Brooks, too.”

  “You’re not making this any better,” I say. “You guys had some like creepy incestuous sex triangle with my mom? This is so fucking weird.”

  “Not like that. None of us knew about each other. She was working for my father, playing Brooks and I. We just found out. I swear, Amber, if I would have known, I would’ve told you sooner. It wouldn’t have changed the way I feel about you, though.”

  “Where is she now?” I shout, jerking my arm out of his grip, filling with anger. He can sweet talk me all he wants, but I know what this is all about.

  He doesn’t like me.

  He liked my mom.

  He doesn’t know anything about me.

  He is pretending I’m her.

  It’s gross and devastating at the same time.

  He just stares at me, his lips moving, but nothing coming out.

  “Where is she, Micah?” I scream.

  “She’s dead, Amber,” he says. “There’s nothing I can do to explain it that’s going to make it sound any better. She got tangled up with my dad, and he killed her.”

  I don’t know what to do. I suddenly feel really small. Really scared. I feel like I’m not in a safe place, and this man who I was so madly into just hours ago looks like a total stranger to me. A stranger, a monster, a dangerous man who was involved in the death of my mother.

  I need to be strong and just get up and get out of here, drive off into the night and never come back. Instead, my knees start to feel weak as I begin to bawl. He wraps his arms around me and hugs me to his chest, and I cry into his shoulder, trying to gather my thoughts.

  I wonder if he hugged my mom like this.

  The thought gives me chills.

  “I need to go,” I say, squirming away from him. “I need to go now.”

  “How do I make this right?” he asks.

  “I don’t know, maybe you can stop by projecting your feelings for my dead mother onto me? That would be a nice start.”

  I bolt to the door and swing it open, running out into the cold rainy night air.

  “I’m not,” he says. “I swear to God. First of all, aside from the way you look, you are absolutely nothing like your mother. Not even kind of.”

  “Well I’m so sorry to disappoint you,” I snap, sprinting to my car.

  “Not like that,” he says, reaching for my shoulder as I open my car door. “Amber, you are an amazing woman. You’re a good woman, and a kind woman. You’re nothing like your mother was. Hell, you’re nothing like any woman I’ve ever met. You are your own person, and that’s what I love about you.”

  “Fuck off,” I say, slamming the car door in his face. He’s right about one thing; there’s nothing he can say and no way to explain this that’s going to make anything sound any better. This is a whole bunch of crazy, and I cannot participate in it. He raps on the window of my car, but I have nothing more to say. I need to get out of here right now.

  I pull out of the gravel parking lot, my eyes blurry with tears. It’s not every day that someone gets to mourn the death of their mother and grandmother on the same day, but that’s just the kind of cards I always get dealt. There’s nowhere in the world I want to be right now. My apartment sounds lonely, Aunt June’s house sounds lonely, and I’m definitely not going back to that crazy place ever again. Driving all night doesn’t sound like such a bad idea; at least I can just exist for a little bit, except for the fact that I can barely keep my eyes open.

  The potholes on the mountain road snap me in and out of a state of half-awake. I’m being really stupid. It’s nearly one in the morning, and I’ve been awake since 5 a.m. Combine that with the kind of day today was, and there’s no way I should be operating a motor vehicle. All it would take is one rogue deer and I’d definitely end up in bad shape.

  I pull off to the side of the road. I’m pretty sure not many people are going to be coming this way tonight. I set my alarm on my phone for two hours from now and triple-check that my doors are locked as I recline my seat and try and get comfortable. Power nap, and then it’s off to face the future, or maybe just drive all night with no purpose. Either way, when I close my eyes, all I can see is black.

  There’s no room in my head for sweet dreams tonight.

  Chapter 34

  Micah:

  I can’t let her run off like this. There’s so much I need to tell her.

  I take off running through the clubhouse, down to that basement apartment, and grab the journal from the nightstand. This might be a last-ditch effort, but she needs to see it. She needs to understand that I wasn’t just some creep who watched her mother die and am now looking for my redemption with her.

  I grab my cell phone, too, and see that there are a bunch of missed calls from her. I forgot to grab it in my panic to figure out where that picture came from. I wonder why she showed up here in the first place tonight? She probably needed me, and I wasn’t there for her, too busy chasing down ghosts.

  I definitely don’t deserve her, but she deserves an explanation. She als
o deserves a safe ride home. The thought of her driving around these back roads in that piece of shit car of hers in the middle of the night doesn’t sit right with me.

  “I see that went over well,” Brooks shouts after me as I run through the house.

  I shoot him a middle finger. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’m going to make sure she gets home safe.”

  “You got this, brother,” he shouts. “You’re going to be great.”

  I pull out of the garage on my bike like a bat out of hell, hoping that she didn’t get too far yet, that she didn’t make it to the highway, where I would certainly lose her. The road is cut with potholes and puddles. I used to remember where each one of them was back when I lived here. Now, not so much. I’m driving dangerously fast, but I don’t care. I need to get to Amber.

  My heart nearly stops when I see the car pulled over on the side of the road. What if she hit a deer? What if she got held up? All the bad things that could possibly happen to her race through my head, and knowing that this is all my fault makes me feel even worse. I barely come to a dead stop before I’m off running.

  The car is off, the lights are out, and nothing looks like it’s damaged. I still don’t feel like we’re in the clear yet, and I peek in the driver’s side window, relieved to see her there, passed out, snoring away.

  I don’t want to frighten her, but I need to wake her up. It’s not safe for her to be hanging out here all alone. Even with the doors locked, you never know who might be coming up on this mountain to cause trouble.

  “Amber,” I shout, wrapping on the window. “Amber, it’s me, Micah.”

  Her eyes snap open and she sits up and grips the steering wheel before looking over at me with terror in her eyes. I never want her to look at me like that. I never want her to think I’d hurt her.

  “Amber, please,” I say. “You can’t sleep here. It’s just not a good idea.”

  She turns her keys in the ignition, starting up the car, and rolls down the window.

  “I’m fine,” she snaps. “Go away, Micah.”

  “You’re not,” I say. “Please, Amber, let me drive you home. You can sleep in the back. I won’t say a word if you don’t want to talk. Just let me make sure you get home safe. After that, you don’t ever have to talk to me again.”

  I can tell she’s considering it, the way she’s biting her lip and staring right through me. She doesn’t really have a choice. Unless she wants to run me over with her car, I’m not letting her drive tonight.

  “Fine,” she says, “but how do I know you’re ok to drive?”

  “I just am,” I say. “I stopped drinking hours ago. I know you think I’m a psycho, but there’s one thing I would never do, and that’s put you in danger. Now get in the back seat, please.”

  I pull open the door for her and she stumbles a little as she gets out. As I catch her with my hand, she looks up at me like she knows she made the smart decision, like she’s disappointed in herself. I don’t blame her for running away in a rush. Hell, I did the same thing myself years ago.

  She hops in the back seat, and I pull the journal out of my pocket and hand it to her.

  “What’s that?” she asks.

  “You don’t have to read it now,” I say. “You can if you want. It was your mother’s.”

  She grabs it with trembling hands, bringing it to her nose and smelling it. She starts to cry and she clutches it tight in her fist. I shut the car door behind her and get in the driver’s seat.

  “Are you cold? Warm? What do you need?”

  She doesn’t say anything, but I see the flashlight on her phone turn on in the back seat.

  “You gotta at least tell me where I’m going, Amber. I honestly have no idea where you live, girl.” Just that it’s about three hours away and south. We really are a couple of strangers with a really strange common link.

  “Get on 219 and head south for about an hour and a half,” she says. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “That’s me she’s talking about.”

  I am dreading for her sake when she gets to the part where Ava finds out she’s pregnant and refers to her as the biggest mistake of her life that she can’t wait to redeem with her and Moses’ new baby. Maybe giving that to her wasn’t the best idea. She’s going to be heartbroken.

  She needs to see it, though. She deserves closure more than I ever did. She needs to know that her life was better off without this woman.

  “You know my grandmother died today,” she finally says after what seems like forever. “Growing up, I always thought she was my mother.”

  “I’m sorry, Amber. That sucks.”

  “She’s been sick for so long, so sick. By the time I was in seventh grade, she was already having problems remembering stuff. By the time I was sixteen, she could hardly care for herself anymore. My aunt June and I did everything for her. I never minded, because in my mind, she was my mother, and I knew that she took care of me when I was a baby, and made sure that I was safe and loved, and I wanted her to feel the same way.”

  “That’s one of the reasons why you’re such an amazing girl, Amber. You really do care about others.”

  She sighs. “Turn left here,” she says when we reach a fork in the road.

  “I’m not, though, Micah,” she says, “because even though, on the outside, I took care of her with a smile on my face, part of me always hated her for what she did to Ava. I know when you’re a kid you don’t really understand everything, and maybe you read into things a little bit, but I always thought she was really hard on Ava. I also thought that Ava was my big sister, though, so what do I know? I thought she kicked her out and told her to never come back again, and that’s why she left us. I blamed my grandmother for ruining my life and I prayed every day that Ava would come back to us. I put her on a pedestal.”

  “You didn’t know any better, Amber. You were just a kid. How you felt wasn’t your fault.”

  There’s a long silence, until she yawns loudly.

  “You read it all?” I ask.

  “I read enough,” she says. “For now.”

  “Why don’t you go to sleep?” I suggest. “It sounds like you had a really long day. I’ll be fine. Just tell me where we need to end up.”

  “Maybe if your cell phone wasn’t from 1984, it could do this,” she says, laughing a little bit for the first time all night. She passes me her phone, the map lit up with directions to her place. 168 Main Street, apartment 108. Easy enough. “Thank you, Micah,” she whispers softly.

  “It’s nothing, Amber,” I say. “I’d do anything for you.”

  I don’t know if she even heard me. I look back in the rearview mirror and she’s already passed out, snoring away, sprawled out across the back seat. She looks so peaceful, I don’t want to wake her. The girl has had a hell of a day, some of it thanks to me. The least I can do for her is let her sleep it off.

  Chapter 35

  Amber:

  I wake up in my bed, fully clothed except for my shoes, my blankets pulled up over me. I don’t remember walking up the steps. I don’t remember getting my keys out of my purse. I don’t remember much of anything after I handed over my phone to Micah and closed my eyes. My bedroom door is shut, and I wonder if he’s already found a ride back to the mountain.

  The journal sits on my nightstand. Just looking at that vile piece of trash pisses me off.

  I spent my whole life idolizing a woman who never even wanted me, who called me the greatest mistake of her life. I wasted so much time praying for her, missing her, trying to remember every detail and every conversation we ever had.

  I pick it up and start ripping out pages, crumbling them up and throwing them in my trash can. It might be petty, but it feels good. I don’t have any tears left in me today, I’m all dried up, but I feel sadder than I’ve felt in a long time.

  Sadder and more confused than I have in my whole life. I probably let the only person who tried to be honest with me, the only person who didn’t sugarcoat anything, just came at me with noth
ing but truth, slip through my fingers in my haze. I was so nasty to him. I was so mean, and all he wanted to do was help me.

  I sneak out of bed and slowly crack open the door, looking out into my living room. My heart beats faster and I feel a sense of relief wash over me as I spot him sitting there on my couch, a blanket pulled up to his chin. His eyes are half open, and he smiles at me sadly in the moonlit room when he sees me standing there.

  “Come lay with me?” I ask as sweetly as possible. I don’t want to fight any more tonight. I don’t want to talk anymore. I don’t want anything but to feel him next to me, even if it’s for the very last time.

  “Okay,” he nods, following me back to my bedroom. I pull back the covers and climb in next to him, still fully clothed, and he wraps his arm around me and hugs me tight to his body as we both drift off.

  ***

  “Good morning, Amber,” he says. I can smell the coffee before I open my eyes, and the sound of his voice puts a smile on my face.

  “Hey,” I say softly, my voice hoarse from all the crying and yelling. “Thank you so much, Micah. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “It’s fine,” he says, sitting down on the bed next to me. “What’s on the agenda for today?”

  “I gotta meet up with my aunt June and help her shop and prep. We’re having a little memorial service for my grandma tonight, nothing fancy, just a quiet dinner at her house.” I take a sip of the coffee, perfectly sugared, just the way I like it.

  “Am I going to need a suit for this dinner?” he asks, running his hand up and down my back.

  “Oh Micah, you don’t have to,” I say. “You’ve done plenty. Seriously. Don’t feel obligated.”

  “I don’t,” he says. “I want to come, though, if you’ll have me. If we’re going to make this work, I want to be there for everything, Amber. Not just the fun stuff and the easy stuff. I don’t want to sneak around with you and be your sometimes boyfriend. I want to be your man.”