Cary

by Jessica Gadziala

  “Our gym doesn’t open for another hour yet,” I told him, meaning the one owned by Cash and a couple of the club old ladies. I preferred to workout there, having the option of not only regular gym equipment, but speed and punching bags as well. And the ring for some fighting.

  The club hadn’t known a hell of a lot of peace since I joined up. I didn’t want to let my fighting skills get rusty. We never knew what kind of problem was right around the corner.

  “The only other gym in town is owned by Shane Mallick.”

  “Yeah, and?” I asked, not seeing the problem.

  “It’s disloyal, man,” Dezi claimed.

  “Disloyal to who?”

  “To Valen, man. You know him and Jase Mallick have that rivalry going on.”

  “Rivalry,” I scoffed. “They both liked the same girl a decade or something ago.”

  “Nah, Zaddy. Jase was dating her. Valen stole her. It’s some shit. We gotta be respectful.”

  “Of the decade-old shit?” I asked, shaking my head. “It’s not Jase’s gym. And Shane Mallick has always been someone our club has considered an ally from what I hear. It’s fine.”

  And the only option.

  Because, quite frankly, I didn’t want to go to the self-defense gym with Dezi.

  I damn sure didn’t want to get into a ring with him.

  Sure, the man was a food-obsessed teddy bear a fair chunk of the time. But the man could flip a switch like no one I’d ever seen. If you’d ever seen him in a fight, you’d think the man didn’t feel pain with the way he took his hits and kept coming back for more. He was a relentless fighter. And while I was fine to fight when a situation called for it, I wasn’t someone who enjoyed it like Dezi did.

  So the normal gym was the plan.

  Whether he liked it or not.

  “Hey, look at that, Zadds,” Dezi declared a couple minutes later as we made our way toward the front doors of the gym. “There is someone in the club more dedicated to their physical fitness than even you,” he said as he nodded his chin at the man coming out of the doors.

  He was a new addition to the club, still squarely stuck in the prospect phase along with Valen, who was a legacy.

  Dezi and I, we officially got our patches just a week or so after they blew into town.

  Voss had saved Valen in a fight somewhere down in Louisiana. And, for some reason, all Voss wanted in return was to get a chance to prospect with the club.

  Voss was tall and a stocky kind of strong that said he absolutely spent a good chunk of time in the gym, lifting heavy. He had a full blond beard and matching hair, but he kept it shaved up the sides, giving him a Viking appearance.

  When Dezi first met Voss, he’d referred to him as grumpy-faced, and, well, that wasn’t an inaccurate description. Part of it was the half-shaved head and all the ink, but he also had a stern, prominent brow that set his light blue eyes in shadow.

  Grumpy-voiced, too, Dezi had observed when Voss’s mouth opened, and little more than a growling sound came out.

  “Voss,” I greeted, nodding at him. “I thought the gym opened at six,” I said, though he’d clearly been there long enough to work up a heavy sweat.

  “Twenty-four, seven, if you’re willing to pay for it,” he said, shrugging, flashing his key at us.

  You didn’t exactly make much as a prospect. Really, Fallon was generous to pay us at all before we were patched. Most clubs I’d been in over the years expected you to offer your time to them with nothing in return. It was always a tense, uncertain few months—or years—when you were expected to give full-time work without an income.

  So Voss having the kind of money he would need to bribe someone like Shane Mallick into letting him have a key to the gym to come and go as he pleased sort of re-wrote the narrative I had about him being a poor, scrappy junkyard dog before he’d made his way up to Navesink Bank.

  We hadn’t really gotten a chance to get to know the guy yet.

  He and Valen took to the town damn near every night, partying, drinking, hooking up. And while Dezi and I went out a lot as well, let’s just say that Voss and Dezi were oil and water. So we would often spend time at the same bars and clubs, but separate from one another.

  Which was weird since the club was all about brotherhood.

  I was giving him the benefit of the doubt since he didn’t come from a club-type background. I figured he would come around eventually. Besides, Brooks ruled over his prospects with an iron fist. They didn’t get away with shit. He worked them day and night to instill a sense of duty and loyalty. So we didn’t get a lot of time to sit around and talk at the clubhouse most days either.

  If he lasted, the brotherhood would come.

  Well, maybe not so much between Voss and Dezi who were sharing similar “the fuck are you looking at” glares.

  “Never see you here,” Voss said, giving Dezi what could only be considered a disrespectful once-over, like he was silently saying that Dezi could use to be at the gym more.

  “It comes in phases,” Dezi said, chin lifting, getting pissed already. “I like to get my workouts with female partners, not strapped to a machine.”

  “Mmhmm,” Voss rumbled at him. “Got two of those workouts in last night before I came here,” he added, clapping a hand on Dezi’s shoulder hard enough to make Dezi go back a step.

  Luckily, though, Voss kept moving.

  Because, quite frankly, the two were going to come to blows eventually. And I didn’t want to have to be the one who got between them.

  “Take it out on the treadmill,” I suggested as Dezi turned back to look at me with a muscle ticking in his jaw.

  “That why you work out so much, Zaddy?” Dezi asked, eyes shining. “To avoid slamming your fists into our faces?”

  “Nah, Dez. Just your face,” I told him, getting a chuckle out of him as we headed toward the doors.

  We’d only made it through maybe half an hour of our workout when suddenly Voss was back, moving toward me at the free weights with a head jerk.

  “What’s up?”

  “You aren’t answering your phones.”

  “Shit. Yeah. Left them in the car,” I admitted. No one was usually up early enough to bother me before I finished my workout. “Something happening?” I asked, setting down my weights and looking around for Dezi.

  Who was supposed to be on the rowing machine.

  But was chatting up the pretty blonde at the juice bar instead.

  Really, you couldn’t take the man anywhere that women were present if you expected him to stay on task and be focused.

  “No. But there’s someone at the club asking for you.”

  “Asking for me?” I asked, taken aback.

  See, the thing is, I didn’t have people. I’d been raised by my grandparents when my mother and father decided being parents didn’t suit them. They’d been old grandparents to start with, so they’d passed the year after I finished high school. Which left me alone in the world at nineteen.

  That was when I turned to the clubs. To find brotherhood. To find family.

  So I had no one outside of the clubs.

  The last club I’d belonged to had been taken out by a rival while I’d been locked up.

  And while I was sure some of the guys had managed to get away, or recover in a hospital after the attacks, I really doubted anyone would be that keen to seek me out after so long.

  It wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities, but it just didn’t seem likely.

  “Yeah. Brooks sent me to get you,” he added, letting out a barely-there sigh, and it was right then that I realized his eyes were heavy-lidded, and he’d changed into sweats and a tee. Like he’d left the gym to go to bed after being up all night.

  But, yeah, Brooks didn’t give a shit about that.

  If he wanted someone to do something, he was calling one of the prospects. It didn’t matter if it was to run an errand or to open a jar of pickles. That was the kind of boss he was.

  And, typically, Voss took i
t with a grain of salt, doing a lot less grumbling than Valen, who’d been raised in the club, and was finding it a bit more difficult to adjust to being one of the lowest men on the totem pole after he’d been away, driving across country for years.

  Clearly, though, after two fucks and one long gym workout during an all-nighter, Voss wasn’t feeling as go-with-the-flow as usual about Brooks’s constant orders.

  “Who is it? Did he have a cut on?”

  “Not a he.”

  “What?” I asked, sure I misheard him because of his grumbly voice.

  “It’s a chick.”

  “A chick,” I repeated, mentally trying to run through any possible women who would come see me at the club. Maybe a casual one-night-stand who wanted another round? Still, that seemed kind of strange that they would show up so early in the morning.

  “Relax,” Voss, said, smirking, “she didn’t look knocked up.”

  Christ, that hadn’t even occurred to me.

  I mean, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibilities. But the idea filled me with instant dread. I had nothing against kids. I was just too old to be taking one of them on full-time. I liked being a club uncle instead. Give some wisdom, toss a ball around, let the girls paint my face and fuck with my hair, then send them right on home with their parents to disrupt their sleep and spread sticky shit all over their possessions.

  “Who’d she say she was?” I asked, all the names of my recent conquests at the ready. If there were two pink lines to think about, I hoped against hope that the mother would be one of the more sensible women I’d screwed around with, and not some random clubwhore.

  “Abs?” Voss said, face scrunching.

  Abs.

  That didn’t ring a bell.

  “What did she look like?”

  “Pretty. Thin. Dark hair cut to about here,” he said, motioning just above his shoulders. “Kinda gray eyes.”

  “I have no idea who the fuck that is,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Dunno either. But she knows you. And she said she couldn’t leave until she talked to you. For what it’s worth, chick seemed freaked the fuck out. Not in a ‘bun in the oven, the fuck am I gonna do now’ sort of way. But in a kicked-dog sort of way. Jumpy, looking over her shoulder a lot.”

  “Alright. I’ll just round up Dez…” I started, looking around, but not seeing him anywhere.

  “Juice chick took him into the back. He can hoof it home,” Voss said, already turning to walk away.

  Normally, I wouldn’t leave someone stranded without a ride. But we weren’t that far from the clubhouse. And Dezi didn’t exactly get much of a workout in, so the walk could be his punishment for fucking around.

  Besides, I was too curious to waste anymore time.

  I didn’t know who this Abs woman was, but I wanted to find out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cary

  I rolled up to the clubhouse less than ten minutes later.

  Voss was already there, parked, and gone. Likely to seek out his bed before Brooks decided to shackle him with another task.

  One look around said there were no unfamiliar cars around. So, what? She’d walked? Weird, but okay. Just another piece to the puzzle.

  I’d spent the whole ride back flipping through mental images of women I’d known over the years, but I hadn’t come up with a single woman who’d fit the description Voss had given me.

  That said, women changed up their looks all the time. So the hair could be a fluke. But gray eyes? That didn’t ring any bells. That wasn’t a color you saw every day.

  Curiosity more than piqued—even if I was dealing with a little bit of uncharacteristic anxiety about the whole possibility that she might be a pregnant former fling—I made my way out of the SUV, a little self-conscious that I hadn’t taken the extra couple of minutes for a shower, so I could look more put together.

  The “kids” teased me about the fact that I made sure I was presentable. While Dezi’s ‘don’t give a fuck/ I forgot to put a shirt on under my cut’ look was charming for his age, I didn’t think that shit would be quite as accepted on me. So I shaped up my beard. I slicked back my hair. I put a little time and care into my outfits.

  I figured older could just be older, or it could be distinguished.

  I chose distinguished.

  There was nothing to be done about my workout pants and black ribbed tank right then, though, so I just went with it. Though I maybe made sure to rake my hair back away from my forehead before I reached for the doorknob.

  The door was silent, so the woman who was standing with her back to me didn’t immediately know I had moved inside, giving me a chance to look her over.

  Voss was right; she didn’t look pregnant.

  In fact, she looked so rail fucking thin that her body probably couldn’t support a pregnancy. It was a little cold still in Jersey for her shorts, and they put these long, spindly legs on display. So small, in fact, that her kneecaps jutted out on the insides and her thighs didn’t meet anywhere.

  I was not a super picky man when it came to women’s body types. I liked someone I could connect with, have some fun with, before it got physical. Which was always more important than just being some physical “ideal.” But I couldn’t say I’d ever been with a woman who looked like she was starving herself. That wasn’t a turn on at all.

  Taking a deep breath as the mystery got more and more interesting, I closed the door behind me.

  Again, like Voss said, she was jumpy.

  And not even just ‘I’m in an outlaw biker compound’ jumpy.

  Her whole body jolted as she whipped around to face me, her hands immediately wrapping around herself.

  Jumpy like a kicked-dog.

  That was accurate.

  I didn’t know the situation, of course, but if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on her having some sort of abusive ex-hole in her past.

  “Oh, wow,” she said, shaking her head a little as she looked at me. Almost as if I wasn’t what she’d been expecting. Which was weird since she’d sought me out. “It’s you,” she added in her honey-sweet voice.

  And I had nothing.

  Not even being face-to-face with her.

  I was coming up blank.

  I was almost certain I’d never laid eyes on the woman before in my life.

  I was sure I would remember.

  She was fucking drop-dead gorgeous with her soft, rounded face, her big gray eyes that tipped down at the sides, giving her an almost sleepy appearance, and her abundance of freckles. There were traces of makeup left on her face—smudged under her eyes, still staining her lips slightly—but otherwise was fresh-faced.

  If she maybe got a couple more pounds on her, she would go from sickly to damn near perfect.

  “I wish I could share the same wonder, love, but I have no fucking idea who you are.”

  To that, she sent me a sweet smile, her eyes searching the floor for a second before lifting up again.

  “You’ve never actually seen me,” she admitted, shrugging those sharp juts she called shoulders.

  “I’ve never seen you, but you came here to talk to me.”

  “To ask for your help, actually,” she told me, sucking in a deep breath, almost as if she was bracing herself for a let-down.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “How about we grab some coffee while you tell me why I would help out a complete stranger with some unknown problem,” I said, inviting her toward the kitchen even if she looked jittery enough without the caffeine.

  “Sure,” she agreed, following behind me, a ghost of a woman at my heels.

  In the kitchen, I noticed she’d situated herself with her back against a wall and close to the exit. So no one could sneak up on her. So she could get away in a pinch.

  Yeah, it definitely seemed like she was a woman in need of some sort of help.

  The jury was still out on whether I wanted to be the hero in her story, though. It wasn’t exactly a title that fit me—a lifelong biker with a lon
g-ass rap sheet.

  “How do you take it?” I asked. At her strange, high-pitched, momentary laugh, I turned, confused, finding her pink across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

  “Sorry. Ah, cream and sugar, if you have it,” she said, voice small.

  “Have the sugar here,” I said, gesturing with the shaker. “Check for the cream,” I invited, nodding toward the fridge. Finding it, she brought it over to me, putting it down when she was out of arm’s length, and pushing it forward with just the tips of her fingers. “Who are you?” I asked, not having meant to do so.

  “Abs. Abigail,” she clarified, and suddenly a memory started to niggle at me.

  But no.

  No, that made no sense.

  There were millions of Abigails in the world, after all.

  Any one of them would be more likely than the one who first came to mind.

  “I’ve heard that, love,” I said, passing the sugar toward her with her mug, and watching as she made it. And while she did it, she kept casting nervous glances at me. Like she thought I’d judge her for the abundance of additives she put in her coffee. Like I hadn’t watched Dezi pour a giant helping of chocolate syrup in then top it with a tower of whipped cream.

  When she was done, I went on, “But it’s not ringing any bells.”

  “Oh,” she said, face falling. “I… um… I thought you might remember me,” she admitted.

  “You just said we never met,” I reminded her.

  “We haven’t. You know, face to face. But we know each other.”

  No.

  No, it couldn’t be.

  “I wrote you in prison for years.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Abigail

  He was almost unbelievably good-looking.

  I mean, I’d known that, to an extent.

  Back when I first started writing to him, I’d looked him up online. It hadn’t exactly taken a lot of work to pull up his numerous mugshots from over the years.

  He’d always been handsome.

  But I guess the years had only served to recommend him.