by Penny Dee
“No he’s not. He’s Barrett Silvermane. Daddy will just pay the right people. Just like he always has.”
Barrett smiled smugly. It was bloody and ugly, but even the sight of his broken teeth and bloodied lips weren’t enough to dampen the rage burning in my head.
Chance crouched down next to me. His voice was calm and sobering. “Killing a man is hard, Cassidy. You need to think this through.”
I had thought it through. Over and over again while he was pushing into my body and taking a little more of my soul from me. But now, kneeling before him, I paused long enough for my courage to wane.
Slowly, I removed the gun from Barrett’s chin.
“I won,” I finally said to him. “I’m going to live this amazing life with a man I couldn’t love more if I tried. I’m going to fall asleep in his arms every night and then wake up next to his warm body every morning. And then I will make love to him, over and over again because I can’t get enough of him. Of the things he does to me. Of the way he kisses me and touches me. And you… you’ll be nothing but a faded memory, one that will eventually vanish completely. I won’t be able to remember what you looked like. How you sounded. Or what it felt like trapped beneath your touch. It will all be gone. Just. Like. You.”
For the first time in my life, I saw the look of defeat cross Barrett’s face. He looked like a child who’d lost his favorite toy. He didn’t know what to do. What to think. Losing wasn’t something he ever accepted, and now that he had no choice, he didn’t know how to deal with it. I could see the mental struggle take place inside of him.
It was enough for me. I rose to my feet and looked at Chance.
“Let’s go home,” I said. “We’ll let the police take care of this.”
Chance threw his arm around my shoulder, and we began to walk away.
“It’s finally over,” I breathed with relief.
But before Chance could reply, Barrett’s blood-soaked voice reached across the distance between us.
“It will never be over,” he mocked. “You’ll always be mine.”
Rage tore through me. But it was nothing compared to the fear that he would somehow get away with this and be free to continue to torture me. Something snapped in my brain. He was right. It wasn’t over. It would never be over unless I ended it.
In that maddening moment, all the pain of what he did to me hit me like a junkie’s high. The rape. The torment. The years of looking over my shoulder. The terror that kept me running. The fear of him finding me.
One moment I was filled with terror. The next I was calmly walking toward him with the gun raised and pointed right at him.
He grinned at me with his broken teeth.
He was right. It would never be over.
He would never stop.
He would find a way to continue his evil game.
So I shot him.
I shot him dead.
CASSIDY
It was a clear case of self-defense, they said.
And to me it was.
Now that Barrett was gone, I was free to move on with my life without the haunting fear of him finding me and torturing me further.
It wasn’t revenge. It was closure.
In the lengthy investigation that followed, further assaults came to light. It seemed Barrett Silvermane wasn’t just a monster to me, he had brutalized several other women, stalking and assaulting them then torturing them with threatening messages and sinister gifts in the mail.
No one ever said a damn thing because he scared them into silence.
As a result of the investigation, Kerry Silvermane, the man who was supposed to protect me, lost his political career and found himself facing charges of his own. As more and more details came to light, the media had a field day and tore his life apart for failing to protect Baby Doe from her psychopathic foster brother.
A week after I shot Barrett, Mayor Quinn was arrested for his wife’s murder. He eventually confessed when all the evidence against him began to pile up. Chance was right. Vander Quinn was having an affair with Laurent de Havilland and was planning to leave her husband. With the mayoral election coming up, and with several business deals relying on his clean-cut, good guy image, Mayor Quinn couldn’t afford to lose his wife of thirty years to a much younger man, and a known drug dealer, so in a fit of jealous rage he killed them both.
Laurent de Havilland’s body washed up the day of Mayor Quinn’s trial. The medical examiner found a bullet in the back of his skull. Quinn had killed his wife as she tried to leave him then waited for her lover to show up so he could plant a bullet in his brain.
Quinn got two consecutive life sentences.
For me the future looked bright. And that future included one fiercely protective biker in a Kings of Mayhem cut.
He married me the following fall, and within months of him putting the crown pendant necklace around my neck, my belly swelled with his baby.
Two months after our daughter arrived, Wyatt and his brothers found my real mother. Her name was Kate and she was living in a trailer in Joshua Tree. We met on a hot night in July, at a bar in the desert. She was fifteen when she gave birth to me. Fifteen and scared. My father was a boy she knew in school, and because her parents were terribly strict, they planned to run away together to raise me. But they were both so young. He changed his mind and instead of running away, she gave birth to me in a deserted roadside restroom then went back to her life. Her parents were none the wiser thanks to her tight ballerina stomach and bulky clothes. She explained that because they were always out at one church event after another, she was easily able to hide her pregnancy and everything that happened afterwards.
She cried when she saw the hope necklace sitting next to my crown pendant. She had given it to me because it was the only thing she could give to me. Her hope for a good life.
After a few months of back and forth, she eventually moved to Destiny to be closer. Now she was becoming more and more a part of our lives.
For Chance and me, life had taken an amazing turn. Now we were living a life filled with love and happiness in the beautiful fisherman’s cottage with our daughter down by the river.
It was a life neither of us could ever have imagined. When we met we were both so broken. So scarred. Yet somehow we’d found each other in the darkness and lifted the veil to let the light back in.
The past was gone.
Vanquished by love.
By faith.
And by hope.
CHANCE
Something jabbed into my chest.
Again.
Then again.
It was a finger.
A demanding little finger.
I held back my grin as it moved from my chest and prodded my cheek, over to my lips, and finally to the side of my nose.
It was my daughter, and she was sitting on my chest, finger-assaulting my face.
I opened my eyelids and found her big blue eyes staring down at me.
“Did I wake you?” she asked in her cute three-year-old voice.
I raised an eyebrow at her. “It was the finger in my nose. Gets me every time.”
She grinned at me, and my heart melted like it did whenever Ava smiled at me. I was a sucker for my daughter, and she had me right where she wanted me—wrapped around her finger.
“Mommy’s making pancakes. But she says I have to pick the toys up from my bedroom floor before I can have some.”
“Best you do that, then,” I said.
“But there’s so many,” she whined.
“If Mommy says you have to pick them up, then you have to pick them up.”
She hit me with her adorable dimpled pout. “But it will take for aaaaages.”
I couldn’t help it. When it came to Ava I would give her the world. But going against my wife would mean a serious case of blue balls. So Ava was going to have to do as she was told.
“I’ll tell you what, you get a head start and I’ll come and help you.”
Her little face lit u
p. “You will?”
“Of course.”
She struggled off the bed and then stood in the doorway, waiting.
“It’s not much of a head start if you stand there and wait,” I said when she didn’t move.
“That’s okay, I don’t mind,” she replied with all the logic of a three-year-old.
I couldn’t help but grin because my daughter was so damn cute. But getting out of bed right now wasn’t really doable. I had a raging morning wood I needed to calm down first.
“I’ll tell you what, you go and start picking up your toys, and I’ll pay you two dollars.”
“Five dollars.”
I laughed at my precocious daughter. “What are they teaching you at preschool? How to hustle?”
She looked at me blankly then repeated, “Five dollars.”
I couldn’t believe my daughter. I pointed toward the door. “Toys. Off the floor. Now.”
She sighed dramatically. “Ohhh-kaaaaay.”
She wandered off and I waited a few minutes, strategically thinking about my taxes in order for certain parts of my body to relax. A few minutes later, I was up and dressed and helping my adorable daughter clean up her room. Once finished, I scooped her up in my arms and we headed downstairs to the kitchen for pancakes.
Cassidy was dishing up fat, doughy pancakes sprinkled with both blueberries and chocolate, just how Ava and I loved them. My wife was the pancake queen. It was no accident my jeans fit tighter after marrying her.
The gold band on her ring finger glinted in the morning sunlight. I glanced down at the mirror image of it wrapped around my finger and felt warm with contentment. My life began when she came crashing into it, and now I couldn’t imagine a life without her.
After breakfast, I played with Ava until her eyes grew heavy, and she fell asleep at the little plastic table where we were drinking tea with Jeremy the giant teddy bear and Lexie the unicorn. I picked her up and tucked her into bed, where she rolled over and fell into a deep, restful sleep.
When I came down the stairs again, Cassidy stood at the sink doing the breakfast dishes.
She smiled at me, and just like it did with my daughter, my heart melted. Although, this time it melted because of the heat I felt stir in my belly.
My wife was a constant turn-on for me, and it was an effort to keep my hands off her.
I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist, the palms of my hand rolling over her huge belly. Any day now, our second daughter would be here, and the sound of a newborn would fill our home once again. I nuzzled the back of her neck, my morning wood returning as I inhaled the subtle scent of her.
“Someone is happy to see me,” she laughed.
“Wanna see how happy?” I ran my hands up her bare arms. “Ava, is sound asleep, and I have got a serious need to fuck my wife.”
“How do you still want to fuck me? I don’t understand. I’m as big as a whale.”
“But you’re my whale,” I joked, earning me a direct punch to my right bicep. She grinned, even though she tried not to, because she knew she was the sexiest woman in the world to me.
“I’m serious, Chance. I’m so big I don’t even know what my toenails look like. I’m wondering if your second daughter is ever going to come.”
Cassidy was just over forty weeks. Her due date was two days ago.
“You know they say sex can bring on labor,” I said, running my hands over her peachy ass.
She looked over her shoulder and cocked a sexy eyebrow at me. “You seriously wanna try?”
It was all I needed. I ran my hands down to her hips and pulled them toward me. The move made her bend over, raising her ass and flattening her arms against the counter top. I pushed her dress up to her waist and grinned when I saw she wasn’t wearing any underwear.
“I like a woman who is prepared,” I said.
She chuckled softly. “Putting underwear on seemed like a wasted effort. It’s been two days since you’ve fucked me; I knew you wouldn’t go a third day without it at some point.”
“You thought right,” I rasped, easing her feet apart.
I slid one hand between her parted thighs, and she gasped when my fingers brushed through her bush and across the lips of her warm, wet pussy. She was creamy and swollen, so I knew it wasn’t going to take her long to come. I wasn’t the only one who was missing sex.
“I’m sorry I haven’t taken care of down there,” she said, moaning as I rubbed little circles into her clit. “I was going to wax but—” She let out a loud moan as I slid a finger into her.
“I like it,” I said, kissing along her shoulders. “With or without, I’ll take your pussy any way I can get it.”
My cock ached to be inside her. But I wanted my queen ready for me. I wanted her to come so she was sated when I pushed my cock into her, and going by her little whimpers as my finger rubbed her clit, she was almost there.
“Give me your cock,” she moaned. “I’m going to come.”
What my queen wanted, my queen got.
She leaned down further so her ass titled higher, and with one smooth thrust, I was inside her. She moaned and licked her lips as her beautiful pussy pulsated hungrily around me with the beginnings of an intense orgasm. I pushed in deeper, pulling her ass against me and grinding hard into her. She cried out and gripped the edge of the counter as she came with violent convulsions.
I would like to say I lasted, but feeling her tight pussy throbbing around me was too much and I came like I had ten seconds to live. I gripped her beautiful ass and thrust into her, one, two, three more times before filling her with a release that burst out from my core.
Pulling out of her juicy body, I helped her straighten and put her dress back into place before turning her around and kissing her. I cupped her beautiful face and savored the feel of her sweet lips on mine.
“I love you,” I whispered.
She grinned against my lips. “You might have to love me a few more times tonight to coax this baby of yours out of my body.”
It was my turn to grin. “Only too happy to oblige, darlin’.”
True to my word, I made love to my queen later that night, and again in the early hours of the following morning. But still our little princess took her time in arriving.
She finally showed up two days later, just before midnight.
When she was ready.
And when she came into the world, Anjelica Sasse Calley arrived screaming.
Later the next morning, I stood in the doorway of Cassidy’s hospital room and watched my wife with our two beautiful daughters, my heart overflowing with gratitude for everything I had in my life. I didn’t regret a thing because everything I’d done and everything I’d been through—all the good and all the bad—led me to this one amazing life where I was a father and a husband, and so fucking happy it almost seemed unreal. The past was gone. Buried behind me where it belonged. Now these beautiful females were my world. My life. My heart. And until I took my last breath, I would give my all, my everything, to the most important thing in the world to me.
My family.
Kings of Mayhem MC Series
Kings of Mayhem Book 1
Brothers in Arms Book 2
Biker Baby Book 3
Hell on Wheels Book 4
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Penny Dee writes contemporary romance about rockstars, bikers, hockey players and everyone in-between. She believes true love never runs smoothly, and her characters realize this too, with a boatload of drama and a whole lot of steam.
She found her happily ever after in Australia where she lives with her husband, daughter and a dog named Bindi.