Scars of Yesterday (Sons of Templar MC Book Book 8)

by Anne Malcom

  I think I’d played my part well enough. Grieving mother, in pain but still managing to hold it together. That’s what people wanted, wasn’t it? They wanted to support you, make casseroles or what the fuck ever, feeling good about themselves and then moving on. Well, that wasn’t exactly what the women of Sons of Templar had done.

  I’d taunted myself with how each of them would act if they were in my shoes. Each of them loved their husband with a ferocity, each couple had a lifetime love. Any one of them would’ve been shattered if she lost her man. But they were also strong. The strongest women I knew. They’d crumble. They’d wallow. Then they’d figure it out. Put on heels, lipstick and find a way to face the world again.

  So why couldn’t I do that? It had been a year, yet I couldn’t even face myself. I hadn’t even been to his club. Our club. I’d hidden myself away in our home, said no to every invitation, doing my best to shut away the world.

  No, I hadn’t faced anything.

  So I sat there and drank. Tried to drown the misery, poison the pain and get all the ugly out. Tried to do all my despicable grieving in one shot so I could go home and be the Old Lady that I needed to be. The mother I needed to be.

  Unfortunately, my plan didn’t work that way.

  I didn’t open my eyes. Not for a long time. I kept them squeezed shut and the music blasting.

  Gage was sitting on a chair, regarding the pool when I pulled out my earbuds and opened my eyes.

  He wasn’t the same man who had sat in the same spot years ago. He still had the same scars, the same cut, but he was not the same man.

  There was something about the way he held himself, about his energy that was different now, his wedding ring glinting in the sunlight. He wasn’t any less dark, he would always be a dark, tortured man. But he’d become more at peace with life now. There was more substance to him, which was in large part because of his wife and son. He’d managed to move on from the terrors of his life before. To rebuild. To become more than he had been before.

  I was so glad he’d gotten that. The second chance at a life that he deserved. But I knew I wouldn’t get that. Even if I did deserve it. I wasn’t a bad person. I was a good friend—before all of this, at least. And a good mother—also before all this.

  Yes, maybe I deserved something else. But I’d never get it. Something in my bones told me that. I’d had it, one shot at love, happiness and everything else that comes with a happy marriage.. Maybe I’d had too much. That was it. We’d had too much. My allotted happiness had been depleted, all used up. Whatever love I was meant to have in my lifetime had been stretched too thin over the years, and it was now gone.

  “You come to take me back again?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Depends on if you wanna go,” he said. “Not gonna force you to do anything. You need this.”

  I raised a brow at him. “I need to sit in a shithole motel drinking vodka all day while someone else looks after my kids?”

  “You need to grieve,” he said, raking a tatted hand through his hair. “Hate that word. Always fucking hated that word. I avoided it for years. Thought that violence and pain was the way to treat my loss. To get over it. But it only prolonged it. Made me more fucked up. There’s no right way to deal with this shit. You’re facin’ it, that’s all that matters. I’ll stay with you for as long as you need.”

  He would. Gage was a man of few words, and the ones he used he meant. He would sit here all day. All night.

  We had a morbid connection, him and I. We had death between us. Darkness. He had a duty to Ranger. One he’d take seriously for the rest of his life.

  Beyond that, he was my friend.

  One who didn’t expect words, didn’t expect anything from me.

  So I just sat there with my vodka, my friend and my grief.

  Chapter 4

  I’d just finished cleaning the house top to bottom. That’s what I did on Saturdays. Every Saturday. Though I’d made it a point to make sure I was the exact opposite of my mother in almost every way, I had picked up a few habits from her that had served to be valuable. Like the fact that she’d told me I should always carry tampons, moisturize twice a day, always take off makeup before bed, make my bed as soon as you got out of it, and keep a tidy house for a tidy mind.

  Though tidy was a bit of a stretch with two kids, especially Jack who loved to explore and trek mud through the house after aforementioned exploring.

  I settled for clean in the early days, accepting that tidy was a pipe dream. Now that they were a little older and slightly more well behaved—freakishly more since their father died—they actually listened when I told them not to draw on walls with lipstick or trek mud in from the backyard.

  Routines and keeping busy were essential for me to stay sane. To prevent a repeat of the twenty-four hours I’d spent at a shitty motel drinking vodka, being a bad mother.

  As expected, neither Amy or Brock had mentioned the fact that I’d dropped my kids off and disappeared for a day, coming back sunburned and likely looking like hell. Of course they hadn’t. That’s what happened with true friends. They let you have your complete break from reality, didn’t hold it against you, didn’t ask questions and didn’t look at you any different after.

  I felt different now. Not better, but different. Did people ever really feel better after a complete breakdown? After hitting bottom? No. But there had been a release of pressure. I’d let go of something. The film covering my vision that had allowed me to pretend that I was somehow going to be able to handle life without any kind of dramatic event, that film was gone. I had needed something. And a twenty-four-hour bender at a crappy motel wasn’t nearly as dramatic as I could’ve gone.

  Turns out that after hitting rock bottom, there was a lot of climbing to do. And I’d been climbing since I’d returned, peeling my fucking fingernails off trying to get up out of this well of grief.

  Two kids who needed school drop-offs and pickups, rides to games, playdates, help with homework, distracting trips to the beach, who needed to be fed, cleaned and clothed—yeah that helped a lot. I found myself barely having a moment to actually think about what the fuck I was going to do with my life.

  Like continuing to feed and clothe the kids, for example. Ranger had made good money when the club was breaking the law, earning big from gun running and murder for hire. Enough for us to own this house with a mortgage so small we’d paid it off by the time Jack entered elementary school. Enough for me to be a stay-at-home mom, puttering away at ideas and stories that, of course, wouldn’t ever see the light of day.

  Sure, we hadn’t had enough for me to buy designer handbags like Amy and Gwen, but that was fine with me. I considered luxury to be having a home that I loved, one that my children could grow up in, and the college funds that had been accumulating throughout the years. To me, luxury was the fact that we’d never worried about bills, had two cars in addition to Ranger’s Harley, and we could even take a few vacations a year, with and without the kids.

  There were some lean years, of course, but those were time I’d budgeted for. Being an Old Lady for as long as I had been, I’d known that we’d need a little buffer. Working as an outlaw in a motorcycle club wasn’t exactly steady, reliable money.

  So through the lean years, the buffer depleted. But once the garage started earning good money and the club started to work on more legitimate ventures, the buffer got large and healthy again.

  We’d taken the kids camping and to Disneyland, though, Ranger fucking hated it. He did it for his little girl, who was obsessed with princesses, and he’d made sure to treat her like one every day.

  We’d had a trip to Hawaii planned for later this week. Of course, we weren’t going now since there was no we.

  Ranger’s funeral expenses had been covered by the club. They had funds allocated for those kinds of things. Of course they did. Not that they’d had to dip into them for a while. And then there was the fact that as a widow, I got a small cut of whatever they made. For life.
r />   They looked out for the families of their fallen members.

  I wasn’t about to turn it down—not that anyone would let me—not if it helped put my kids through college or be able to backpack through Europe if they didn’t want to go to college. Not if I could use it for all the expenses that came with having a growing girl and boy who wouldn’t have a father. No. I wasn’t about to turn down anything. My pride was cheap.

  But even with all that, covering our finances would be a stretch. Technically, I could make things work the way they were, but only if I wanted to constantly worry about money and have my kids go without things like holidays and school trips. Since they were already going to have to be without their father for the rest of their lives, I wasn’t about to deny them anything else.

  I had enough to cover what I estimated would be another year at the very most. Six months would be ideal, so I’d still have a good buffer for the worst-case scenario. I’d need to find a job.

  I was focusing on one thing at a time, though, and today I was focusing on the fact that the house was clean and my kids were happily playing in the backyard together. I’d only had to breakup one squabble, which was some kind of record. As well as Jack and Lily got along, they were still brother and sister with very different personalities.

  Eventually they’d come in, needing to be bathed and fed. But it was Saturday and one of our routines was having takeout every Saturday night. Tonight was Lily’s turn to choose, so we’d likely be having Indian. My little girl was obsessed with trying as many different foods as she could. Amber was small, but it had a surprising variety of different restaurants, consistently growing as our small corner of paradise continued to get discovered my tourists and people looking to relocate to a town in California with affordable houses.

  It was almost three in the afternoon, probably another hour until I could crack open a beer or bottle of wine and not hate myself.

  I’d limited how much I drank while the kids were awake but indulged slightly more once they were asleep. Saturday was also the night I routinely let myself get a little bit tipsy. That combined with some Valium made it so I was able to get a small amount of sleep at least once a week.

  Only Saturdays, though. I couldn’t really make a habit of getting drunk and taking mood stabilizers every night if I wanted my children to be even vaguely well adjusted.

  My friends invited me over for wine and food almost daily. Despite the fact I always said no, they kept asking.

  I wasn’t ready for that yet. To go back to the life I had inhabited before Ranger died.

  Sometimes, I craved all of that. Felt guilty for not giving my kids back some normalcy.

  But I couldn’t do it. Even for the kids. Not now, not that I was still processing my rock bottom, who I was down here.

  So, after fixing the kids a snack and throwing a ball with Jack for twenty minutes, I settled myself on the sofa with a candle burning and a cup of tea that I wished was beer. My laptop was nestled on my legs as I typed away at the document I wasn’t letting myself call a book. It was an escape. A period of time when I could imagine life was easy with happily ever afters, hot sex and romance with no bumps in the road.

  I couldn’t read romance books anymore. None of them were right. They made me mad. I couldn’t relate to anything. Couldn’t escape into anything. So I just wrote what I needed to read. Nothing else. It wouldn’t go anywhere.

  I got so into this ‘not’ book, that I lost awareness of my surroundings. Which meant that I didn’t notice someone standing in my living room, watching me for who knew who long before she cleared her throat.

  I jumped, turning to see Amy standing behind me, purse in the crook of her elbow, a smile on her face.

  “What you doing there?” she asked with faux innocence, the tone telling me she’d been peeking over my shoulder.

  Heat crept up my neck, and a little annoyance. This writing and this not book were private. It wasn’t even something I’d talked to Ranger about. He’d see me on my laptop typing things, but he hadn’t asked about it. Not because he didn’t care, but because he knew if I wanted him to know what I was doing I would’ve talked to him about it. We shared almost everything, he supported me in whatever made me happy. I wasn’t sure writing my stories made me happy. They made me... feel whole. It was nice to have something that didn’t have anything to do with being a mother or an Old Lady. Something that was just mine.

  And right now, I needed something just mine more than ever.

  “Nothing,” I said to Amy, slamming the laptop shut. “What are you doing here?”

  She moved to sit on the chair opposite me, placing her purse down beside her and crossing her legs. Every movement was graceful, elegant, sexy down to her snakeskin boots that I would’ve stolen right off her feet if we were the same size. Unfortunately we weren’t. But both her and Gwen knew my weakness for shoes—and Ranger’s liking for them—so every year, for my birthday and Christmas, they bought me shoes that were far too expensive, physically forcing me to take them.

  “Jack let me in,” Amy said. “Him and Lily are getting ready, so you should probably stop doing ‘nothing’ and get ready too. You’re totally hot in any outfit, but I don’t know if that shirt with all the holes is the look you want for the party.”

  Being Saturday night, the only party she could’ve been talking about was the weekly barbeque the club hosted. Friday nights were party nights, too, but not the child friendly kind. Although I would hazard a guess and say more than a few children were conceived on those nights.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I’m not going to a party. Neither are the kids. And I don’t appreciate you telling them they were without talking to me.”

  Amy didn’t even blink at my tone, which was rather practiced at being sharp. I was an Old Lady, after all. But the problem was, so was Amy. Beyond that, she’d grown up in upper class social circles that I had come to understand had made her all but immune to any kind of bitchy tone. And somewhat of an expert in them.

  “Babe, I’d totally be respecting that concept if I didn’t know better,” she explained crossing her arms. “The time on your self-induced club isolation is up. I get you wanting to hide forever. I do. Well, kind of. I don’t think I’ll ever really get it because I’m not you. Not inside your head. Not in your shoes. But I get losing someone you love. Someone you’ll always love. I understand that pain. The need to shut out the entire world and just linger in your pain because you don’t know what else to do. Maybe being too scared to do anything to distract yourself from that pain because that might take you even further away from him...” she trailed off, her voice softer and more vulnerable now.

  I knew she was thinking about Gwen’s brother, Ian, the man she’d been in love with when she moved here. The one who had died and broken both of their hearts.

  She still wore that, her grief for him. Still palpable and fresh even though it had been years. Even though she was madly in love with her husband, had a family, a beautiful life.

  That scared the shit out of me. Especially since I didn’t have a husband or a beautiful life right now. So how would I look in a few years? Would sorrow and pain be etched into me like carvings in stone?

  “You’re going to come to the party,” she stated, her tone a little more familiar and commanding. “You can totally be mad at me for turning up here and forcing you to go. I can handle it. I’ll actually respect it. But I think you know how stubborn I can be. If I can convince my biker husband to engage in a four-step skincare routine, I can get you to this party.” She raised her brow, inviting me to even try to challenge her.

  I was tempted.

  Very fricking tempted.

  In any other situation, there was no way I would go head to head with Amy Abrams. Only a few people in the world were brave enough to do so, one of those people being her husband, the next her best friend. And... okay, there were actually only two people I could think of. Which was saying something considering all the badasses in cuts that we knew.
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  But this was not just any situation, and I didn’t really have enough self-preservation to fear going head to head with her. I wasn’t afraid of anything anymore, and if I was honest with myself, I was unconsciously trying to sabotage the life I’d had before and any relationships I’d had in that life. If I pushed away the Sons of Templar and everyone connected to them, I’d have less reminders of my husband and that I’d lost him.

  So yeah, I was tempted to fight Amy on it. To get ugly. But then I thought of my kids getting ready to go to the club, both of them likely excited about the prospect of seeing people I hadn’t let into their lives for months. People who loved them. Who only wanted to protect them.

  Fuck.

  I got up from the sofa. “You can be a real bitch, you know?”

  She smiled sweetly. “I’m well aware. Do you need me to pick you out an outfit while you do your makeup?”

  I scowled. “Yes,” I snapped, wishing I could deny her, but the bitch had impeccable style. If I was going to go to this fucking party, I was going to do it looking good.

  Chapter 5

  It wasn’t great.

  Being at the club again. Being around everyone. Being the sad, lonely widow and not the content, in love Old Lady. Despite the fact that no one made me feel like the widow.

  I didn’t need anyone to make me feel like the widow. That’s who I was. What I was now. It was all but tattooed on my forehead, etched into my soul.

  That fact was all the more prevalent at the party because Ranger wasn’t there, shooting me looks every now and then. Grilling with Jack. Catching me leaving the bathroom and pushing me against the wall for a make out session. Getting me drunk while staying sober, driving us home, carrying our sleeping kids to their beds and then fucking me on the kitchen counter.