Keys nodded and headed for the stairwell. “Go ahead and send Ghost up too, please.”
In the short time I waited for my dad to join me upstairs I continued watching Sweet’s interactions with the women from my club. He had his hand resting near the elbow of one of the women as he leaned over whispering in her ear. This time I was able to see his face and the fact that he was searching the crowd downstairs for something or someone while he was working his charms on the woman.
“Been saying it for years, he’s an idiot, but if it makes you feel better, he’s working down there right now, and probably searching for you.” As my father’s voice grew closer to me, Sweet’s eyes lifted to the loft. I knew he couldn’t see me where I stood watching, but he had a clear view of Ghost now and the only reason he would be up here was me. Sweet’s hand immediately dropped from the woman’s arm and he backed up a step. I smirked as I thought, ‘too late buddy, I’ve already seen that same performance on repeat for the past hour or so.’
“I don’t have feelings about it. I’m keeping track of who my security team needs to debrief and debug later.”
Ghost chuckled. “Hell, the more I get to see you here, in action, the more I’m calling myself an idiot for failing to see you properly all these years. Your momma, rest her soul, was content to be the stereotypical old lady. There was nothing she wanted more than to just be a wife and mother. I guess when you turned out to be a girl, I just figured you would be like her.” His sheepish grin and shrug made me give up the smallest of smiles. “That was the most gross underestimation of a situation I have ever made. If I’d paid half as much attention to you as I should have it would have been obvious. Hell, I get it now, why the Sweet thing bothered you so much. You always were too damn observant, and cut out for way more than just the life of an old lady.”
“Why would you stick to your guns on that anyway?” I finally asked one of the questions that had been bugging me. He stared at me blankly, not understanding. “Why continue to try to marry me off to a man who would disrespect me so blatantly by going off with a couple of whores – especially one who was just trying to play mommy to me days before – not ten minutes after you announced to the entire club we were to be together?” My eyes were narrowed on the man who just stood there shocked by my question. “Did you care so little for me? Did you hate me so much that you’d allow that level of disrespect toward your own daughter in front of the entire club, the whores, and hangers-on?” Now, Ghost took an inadvertent step back as if I had physically hit him. I still wasn’t looking at him directly though. I was taking in Sweet’s reaction to my father’s body language. His jaw ticked, eyes narrowed, fists clenched, and he looked ready to come burning up the stairs to the loft at any moment to rescue my dad from little ol’ me.
“That’s what you think? You think I did nothing about his behavior?”
“I know that when and where it counted, and might have made a difference, you did nothing.”
“It was handled. Club business…” he started with the infamous line that basically said I didn’t deserve to know.
“It wasn’t club business, Ghost! It was very personal!” My voice may have grown a little too loud then. I stepped closer to him to avoid raising it again. There was no longer any worry about watching from the shadows unseen. The person I had been observing knew I was there now. “He had no problem making his little statement a public humiliation for me. But my own father couldn’t publicly stand up for his daughter. You basically gave the green light for everyone there that night to treat me like shit any time they wanted.”
“No one ever treated you like shit, Jamie.” Ghost huffed out at me.
I laughed. “For someone who claims to be so damn observant, you sure did miss a lot. Half the whores you dragged through our house wanted to play mommy to impress you. The other half knew better though and found wonderful ways to torment me while they were there. They loved telling me how you and Sweet compared in bed for starters.” I shivered at that particular memory. “Those sort of comments came after the years where the others would taunt me with something of mom’s only to destroy it in front of me.”
“You never…”
“Don’t say I never told you. I did. I yelled at you about it. You told me it was time to let her go – to let my mom go.” He winced, clearly not remembering it. He had been drunk every time we had that conversation, but then, he was drunk a lot back then. I wasn’t surprised he didn’t remember.
“You never said they were taunting you and doing things cruelly.”
“I shouldn’t have had to! You were the parent, and I was the kid still. You shouldn’t have been dragging them through our home to begin with, let alone letting them destroy her memory, and allowing them to torment me with it, because they basically had your permission.”
“Jamie,” Ghost ran his hands down his face and took a seat on the lounger behind him as if he no longer had the strength to stand on his own. “Saying I’m sorry now will never be enough. I don’t know what to do in order to fix this, to fix us. I fucked up. I know that.”
“From the time mom died when I was fourteen, there were two things you never said to me again.” My dad pulled his head up out of his hands to look at me then. “I’m sorry,” I stated the first firmly for him. “And I was owed a hell of a lot of apologies over the next four years.” He only nodded. When I failed to continue he finally spoke again.
“And the other thing?”
“Sad that you have to ask that,” I laughed humorlessly, and then pinned him with a stare that let him know how serious I was. “I love you.” His face went ashen then.
“Jamie, I…” he was thinking. I could almost visibly see him shifting through memories, looking for a time when he said it. He wouldn’t find one, I would know. I’d waited, hoped, needed to see a glimmer of the old dad I had before my mom died. I needed proof that the man who used to tell me he loved me at least once a day was still with me, and hadn’t died alongside my mom. He never showed up.
“No, you didn’t. The only time I heard those words from anyone, from the time mom died until after I left, were from Aunt Kiki when I got to visit her.”
Ghost’s face was shoved harshly into the palms of his hands. I watched as his shoulders shook for a moment, and then I turned away because I knew Sweet was there now too, having traversed the steps a little earlier in the conversation. “Jamie,” my dad whispered out my name, like it pained him to do so. “I’m so sorry.”
“I hope you have a safe trip back to Cedar Falls. Let Quickshot know I’ll keep in touch with him this time.” I turned to walk away, back to my room. I was already at the door when I felt the shock of his warm, calloused fingers encircling my upper arm.
“I know your dad messed up a lot with you before you took off. I didn’t understand just how different he was before, because I only knew him after your mom passed. I’ve learned a lot about the differences since, from him. He may have fucked up royally with you, but he came here thinking he could have another chance to make things right with his daughter. The only thing you’ve managed to do is tear his damn heart out even more.”
I hissed at Sweet then, “If I’ve managed to tear his heart out with a few truths about what I went through, then what do you think it was like for me?” He flinched, but didn’t back down. “Besides that, he’s here for club business. I was a coincidental afterthought, a consolation prize at best.
“If you honestly believe that then you’re just as blind as you claim he was for all those years.”
I looked down at where Sweet still had his hand wrapped around my arm. “Making sure you’ve fondled every one of our members before you leave tomorrow?”
His hand pulled back fast like I’d burned him, then that cocky grin appeared on his overly smug face. “See sugar, that is where you let your assumptions get the best of you. If I’d fondled anyone here tonight they’d damn well know it.” He turned to walk away then, but stopped suddenly, looking back at me over his shoulder.
“Oh, and Sugar? I’m not going anywhere tomorrow, or the next day. I’m here for the duration.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
He flashed another swoon-worthy grin before heading back downstairs without a word. Ghost was still sitting on the lounger, face in his hands, and for once I felt a stirring of regret for the way I’d behaved around him since he’d come here. In trying to be the club president, and the grown ass woman I was supposed to be now, I pulled up my big girl panties and went to sit down beside him.
“I don’t know how to fix all the hurt and anger that keeps bubbling up inside me. It’s been there so damn long it’s like trying to take my middle finger away.” I snickered at my own mental image. “I use it so much, I wouldn’t know how to live without it.”
My dad looked up at me then. “Your mom would kill me, rightfully so, for how I let things go.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, I wonder if it would have been better to let you go with your grandparents.”
“What ifs are a bitch like that though. Maybe, if I had gone with them I would have been with them when they died,” I countered. They were gone a year and a half after my mom died. It had been another tragic accident in my family. My father cringed at the thought.
“Maybe we can just leave the past where it is, and work on building something new for the future?” His voice was tinged with hope. Before I could answer, his aqua eyes, so similar to my own, locked with mine. “I do love you, Jamie. You’re my damn world, even if I sucked at showing it for a while. You just look so much like her. It was like catching glimpses of a ghost. At least until I saw your eyes – my eyes – and it reminded me all over again that she wasn’t here anymore. Then, the pain just crippled me, and I had to find ways to numb it all. Hell, I was so far gone in my own pain it never even occurred to me that you were dealing with yours too, and my ways of coping were just causing you more. I can never apologize enough for my own blind stupidity, Jamie.”
If only he knew what I’d been through since leaving. What I’d put myself through before I pulled my own head out of my ass. I knew a thing or two about blind stupidity too. “Let’s just take things slow and try to figure this all out as we go, okay? It’s the best I can offer for now.”
“Sure, kid.” When my dad truly smiled, it lit his whole face up from within. I don’t think I’d seen one of his true, glowing smiles since before my mom died. Back then, he’d been loose and free with those smiles, and with genuine laughter. He used to let people know he loved them. It was hard to reconcile that man with the one from after her death, but there was a glimmer of him in the smile he bestowed upon me in that moment.
“What did Sweet mean when he said he wasn’t going back and that he was here for the duration?” I finally asked.
My father actually laughed. “So, he didn’t break the news to you then?”
“Obviously not.” My nerves were kicking into full gear now.
“He’s going to be sticking around. Idiot decided to run the new chapter himself since there wasn’t a good enough candidate in their crew who would step up to Peety’s spot.”
Shit, shit, shit! “I see,” was what I actually managed to grit out despite the chant of expletives swimming in my head. I stood and moved back to my place in the shadows, looking down over the bar. Ghost joined me there and we both watched as Sweet hooked his arm around the tiny waist of a big-breasted blond. She was a friend of one of the girls here, not a member. They walked toward the front door together. Sweet glanced up to the loft and winked before leaving with the woman wrapped in his arm.
“That asshole never learns,” my father hissed out.
A dry chuckle escaped me. “He’s free to do as he pleases with her. She’s not one of my girls anyway, just an occasional hang around. We wouldn’t hire her to work at Paramour, because she has issues.” I swiped at my nose to indicate to my dad she was basically a coke whore. He nodded. “Her friend, Jesamine, is one of our RC members and keeps trying to pull her in.”
“RC members?”
“Riding Club. It’s sort of an unspoken auxiliary of the MC. They ride with us, hang out sometimes, but contribute to and earn nothing from our business end. The women like her who are here for the rides and the fun get an RC patch instead of the MC patch. When they don’t work for us, they also don’t get perks here. No rooms, no real patches for their jacket or kutte other than the club name. I guess you would probably liken them to your prospects, only without all the hazing, since we sometimes pull full members up from the RC if we decide they’re worth it.”
“How the hell do you test your members then?”
“We see how they respond to things when it counts. How they treat other members when they think no one is watching. The respect they show, or lack thereof, to our patched members is a factor. We’re always watching.”
“Giving them enough rope to hang themselves or climb the damn thing like a ladder, eh?”
I smiled then. “Exactly. We see their true colors quicker because they don’t even realize they’re being tested.”
“Should have made you my VP way back when.”
I laughed at that. “I wasn’t ready then. I still had my own shit to go through to get me where I am today.” My father’s smile fell. He wasn’t naïve enough to think my life had been all roses and wonderful since I left, but he never questioned it further. He wasn’t ready to hear my story. That was okay, because I wasn’t ready to tell it just yet anyway.
“One day, I want you to sit down and tell me how you managed to do all this. I’ve had chapters under me who haven’t been able to accomplish your level of success in twenty years, never mind the seven you’ve had.”
“Four years,” I corrected him.
“Four years?” He questioned.
I nodded. “We started the club four years ago. That’s when Leanne, Tash, and I bought Paramour.
My dad looked thoughtful then. “Which one is Leanne?”
“She’s not here. She’s visiting family out west right now.” I paused a moment trying to decide how much to share with the man beside me. I was conflicted because I never knew if I was talking to the Aces High Prez or my dad. “Leanne saved me. She’s been sort of a surrogate mom to both Tash and me for a lot of years. I’m really not sure I would have made it through...” I stopped myself from walking off that particular cliff of memory lane. I’d met Leanne my freshman year of college. She had been my nurse in an emergency, and she’d become a friend soon after.
“She’s very important to me,” I finally finished while my dad looked on with concern obvious in his features.
“In that case, I hope I get to meet her soon. Anyone who managed to do what I failed to do – take care of my baby girl – has my instant respect.” With that he stepped closer and pulled me into a crushing hug. “I have to get going.” His voice reverberated through me as he continued to hold me close. “I’ve missed you so much, Jamie. Please, don’t be a stranger anymore. I promise, I’ll do better too.” His voice was gruff and thick with emotion as he spoke. I nodded and hugged him back just as fiercely before he kissed the top of my head and pulled away.
“Don’t take any shit off of Sweet. If he becomes too much to handle, you let me know.” I didn’t bother saying anything, because we both knew I’d never willingly admit to that particular weakness. “Quickshot’s gonna be sticking around awhile too. Don’t think it’s permanent though. He laughed then, as he looked down on the man in question. “Then again, it seems I may lose him too.” He tipped his head toward where Quickshot was staring. “He’s pretty smitten with your redhead, already warned the local chapter guys away from her.”
“I wish him all the luck with that. Keys swore off men almost before she ever even started dating.”
My dad eyed me curiously.
“She has daddy issues too, just a different kind. Then there were the two she attempted to date who cheated,” I informed him.
“Idiots,” my father huffed out. “Never know a good thing when they
see it these days.” I just smiled at his response. He and my mom had been high school sweethearts. He’d once told me he knew the first moment he saw her that she was his future. He never looked back after she told him yes to that first date, and from the stories my mom used to tell me, neither did she. My mom and my aunt were both lucky in love. I was beginning to think that kind of love skipped a generation or something though.
“Well, kiddo, I have to get going. Long ride in the morning, and I ain’t gettin’ any younger.” He winked at me.
I laughed and playfully punched his arm. “Shut up. You’re not that old.”
“I’m 45 kid,” he looked shocked by his own admission. “Damn, it just sounds worse and worse every year.” He was laughing now though. “Stay in touch. Any problems with the new chapter, you call. I mean it. No more stubborn bullshit. You have an issue, you let me help.”
“Need I remind you my club took out Winter’s Renegades? We’re capable of more than baking and blow jobs.”
My father blanched and cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Yeah, well, you’re not too old to turn over my knee, so watch that mouth around me, kid.” I laughed, he didn’t. “And I know how you handled the WRs, but I’d like our clubs to remain allies instead, so call if there’s a problem I can help work out.” With that he gave me one more hug and then took off.
Chapter 5
It was a solid week after Ghost left when I heard from the local Aces High Chapter, aside from a few random personal texts from Quickshot.
“Keep your guard up,” Legs called out to me. We were in the gym on the mats. JoJo and I were sparring. I always held back with her because she was such a tiny little thing, and I worried that I would hurt her. As a result she often kicked my ass out of spite.
“Stop going easy on me because I’m short, Angel.” JoJo huffed the words out as she shot down low, sweeping with her foot to take my own out from under me. I jumped and gave up a little ground, but remained on my feet going in for a left jab just as she came back up to fighting stance. I winced as she let out an, “ompf.” That would probably leave a mark. Still, JoJo grinned at me. “Finally in the game, huh?” She taunted as she shifted back and forth on the balls of her feet. I feigned left, and then came in with a right hook as JoJo twisted that way. It was a solid punch to the ribs. It didn’t drop her though. Instead she countered immediately with a kick to my thigh that landed solidly before I could maneuver out of the way. It hurt like a bitch too. She may be small, but she was mighty.
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