A Love So Hard (Aces High MC - Charleston Book 2)
Page 31
That was it. I said my peace. I met Merc’s eyes. “You have my vote.” I started walking away, but then stopped. “You have T-Bone’s too, because he set this in motion and should still get his say.”
“You got it brother,” Merc called back to me as I continued to move through the swell of men. I felt several hands clap down on my back and shoulder as I pushed through, beyond the room into the kitchen, and then into the bedroom I’d claimed again earlier. I couldn’t sit out there while they hashed that shit out. I would kill someone. Two hours later Merc came to find me there.
As soon as the door opened my head snapped up and eyes landed on him. He moved to come sit at the end of the bed, leaving me where I was with my back against the wall at the head of the bed. “Decision is made,” he announced before turning to me. “Not without casualties though,” he went on. “Lost two of our prospects.” I shrugged. No sweat off anyone’s back there. I could probably tell him which two bugged off.
“They probably weren’t going to make it anyway.”
“You’re right,” he sighed. “We lost three brothers. One is heading nomad the other two are transfer candidates if any of the other chapters will take them in. Didn’t hear any reps from those chapters step up with offers for them though.”
“So, what was the final decision?”
“Chapter-wide only. Ghost would not agree to make it a mandate nationally. He said just as with going legit, it was up to each chapter to get there on their own. Not all of them have had the same experience ours has had with the whores. Some have a great relationship with the women who hang around there, apparently. Our chapter though will no longer house club whores here at the clubhouse. If a brother brings a woman to a function, or just back to his room to fuck if he lives here, then he has to do it in his room or a private space. He will also be held accountable for his own guests while they are on club property all the way to the point where they are escorted out and not allowed back in under any circumstance unless they sponsored in and in contact with their sponsor the entire time once again. That was the best I could do for the single men who still live here.”
I nodded. “Sounds fair.
“It also means more of our members will be hanging out any number of our clubs where they’ll start trying to pick up the dancers and whatnot. Considering you work there doing books still, I thought you should know. They’re calling for a place in at least one of the clubs where they can have what they did here.”
“They want to maintain the stable and just have it remote from the clubhouse?”
Merc nodded.
“Fuck, man. Is that really fixing anything then?”
“Fixes the fact that unless someone’s woman heads to that club they won’t have to engage or have contact with the whores at all. It fixes the fact that they can’t be here eavesdropping on club business. It also means the men who don’t want to partake in that shit won’t have it in their faces constantly too.” I could see in his eyes he was speaking for himself. Over the years, he’d been tempted a few times when he was riding out rough patches with his woman. “You gonna head back home tonight?”
I shook my head. “Ever texted earlier while you were all debating. She said that I should give Luce some space and that she would stay with her tonight to make sure she wasn’t alone. Your woman has Anna right now. Checked in with her. She says Anna’s been sleeping since the funeral, so…”
“We’ll watch over Anna and give you guys a couple days to sort your shit,” Merc agreed. I’ll make sure everyone knows your room is off limits. Deck’s buddy, the idiot whose always cracking jokes, is our only fuckin prospect at this point. I have him rolling through all the rooms gathering belongings that females have left behind. We’re not even letting them back in to collect that shit. The ban for the clubhouse starts today.”
“Thank you,” I offered up as I stared at the ceiling.
“Don’t fuckin’ thank me. I should have pushed for this shit that day I found you not breathing.” With that, he got up and left my room, locking the door behind himself so no one could disturb me in case sleep found me.
Chapter 29
(Lucy – age 44, Double-D – age 47)
I heard the rumble of pipes long before the motorcycle pulled into my driveway, and at first I nearly lost my mind to see someone on the back of Double-D’s bike. Once she dismounted and removed the helmet I realized that someone was our daughter Anna, which puzzled me because she was supposed to be down the hall in her bed right now. I tossed a robe on over my ratty sweats and tied it tight so that he wouldn’t see I’d been wearing his shirts to sleep in. It may have been six months, but some of his things still left in his closet smelled like him.
A glance at the clock before I barreled out of the room told me it was half past four in the morning. What in the hell had Anna been up to at this hour? It didn’t surprise me that she’d call her dad instead of me though. She was angry with me for not letting her father move back into the house. She didn’t understand though. My baby was gone. My first born. I loved my other children more than anything, but Toby and I had a special bond because for the first few years of his life it was him and me. I was his world and he was mine. Now, he was gone, and even when I wanted to I couldn’t stop blaming the club for that. My husband being the club too made that difficult to even look at him most days, but especially days like today when he roared up to my house on his bike, wearing his kutte that represented them.
My front door burst open just as I hit the bottom step. Double-D was the first through the door followed slowly by a sulking Anna. “What is going on?” I asked.
“Funny,” Double-D snapped out acidly. “I was about to ask you the same fuckin’ thing. Let me guess, you had no clue where our daughter was tonight?”
“I,” I glanced at Anna who looked beside herself with guilt for what was about to go down and I didn’t think she felt badly because she had been caught, but because she was about to be the cause of another fight between her dad and me. “Maybe we should talk about this privately?”
“Oh, no fuckin’ way. Not after how I found her this morning.”
I glanced back from the furious face of the man to the now weeping face of the girl. “You were supposed to be upstairs in bed,” I told her. Then I felt the weight of everything bend my back and sag my shoulders. I was just depleted. I moved over to the small chair in the entryway where I used to make the men take off their boots before coming inside the house any further. “I actually managed to fall asleep for a little while tonight and you’re telling me that you took advantage of that and snuck out?” My voice was low and tired. I watched as my daughter’s shoulders shrunk in on themselves.
“I’m sorry, momma. I just… I um,”
“She was at the clubhouse fucking one of my brothers when I found her,” Double-D spat out and those words shook me to the core.
“You were where?” I asked Anna in complete surprise then turned my eyes back to Double-D, because there was no way Anna was with a brother in his club and something wasn’t going to be done about it. She might have been legal to consent in South Carolina now since she was 17, but she definitely was not legal in the eyes of the club. Who knew that better than me? It was the reason I couldn’t be with Double-D the first time we met.
“I know you don’t want me there, but Momma, they’re family. I missed everyone. So, I was still going to the club parties. Most of the time daddy wasn’t there, so no one told me I had to leave.” I shook my head. “Then I met him, and,” my daughter stopped there, her eyes glazed over in dreamy satisfaction. Then she met him? He had to be someone new then. At least that might save his damn life.
“Annalise!” I snapped, because this wasn’t the time for one of her daydreaming trips. She startled then glanced between her father and me.
“Sorry,” she huffed. “I went to meet him tonight. He wanted me to come to the party. Dad’s been staying at Merc’s most nights, so I figured it would be cool for me to swing by.”
“Why would they tell you?” His words were clipped. “You made it clear you wanted nothing to do with any of them, myself included.”
“And you?”
“They won’t tell me dick about it, because they don’t want me know they’re having parties and some of the rules are being bent about the women they bring around there when Merc isn’t there to babysit them. Technically, there aren’t anymore club whores. Don’t mean they can’t bring them in on a night to night basis as “their date” for an event or for the night.”
I knew about that little loophole they’d thrown in for the men, even understood it. The single men still needed to be able to bring their dates back to their bed at night. I never thought that would include my daughter in the scenario though. “This is a new man?”
“Yes and no,” Double-D answered. “We took him on shortly after,” he hesitated then. I knew what he meant. Shortly after our son died. They lost brothers and prospects in the aftermath. I knew this. “Still a fuckin’ prospect, though he’s about to be patched in. One of Deck’s Army buddies.”
“Deck’s?” I asked glancing between my daughter and Double-D. “How old is he? Deck’s 26.”
“He’s twenty-fuckin-five,” Double-D spit out.
“Why the hell would a prospect risk being with a princess who is underage by club standards?”
“Gee, thanks mom. I guess I’m not worth it, huh?” Anna snapped back at me for the first time ever.
“Anna!” I warned.
“Maybe because he was calling her ‘Lis and informed me that she was 20 years old.”
“What?” My eyes bugged out as I turned back to my daughter. The guilt was there on her face again.
“I never told him I was 20. I just told him I wasn’t quite legal to drink and he asked when my birthday was. I told him it was in a few weeks. I guess he assumed I meant I’d be 21 then.”
“You let him believe it though.” It wasn’t a question. She knew damn well what she did. “And your name? You have never gone by ‘Lis.”
“How would you know?” She asked, voice rising. “How would either of y’all know? Nobody’s paid much attention to me for years. Toby was the first born. He was the boy. He was the club prospect. Ever was all moody and emo with her drama bullshit. The only person who paid me much attention was dad, and he stopped when he finally made up with Ever, because he had to be up her ass all the time. Now Toby’s gone and you,” she spat looking directly at me, “are too busy with his ghost and refusing to let our family be a family to even notice if I’m here or not.”
The room grew completely still and quiet for several ticks of a heartbeat and then holy hell reigned down on my daughter coming straight at her from her father.
“You spoiled little shit! You got every bit of my attention, rides on my bike – as you pointed out – when your sister didn’t, shopping time with your mom, and anything you’ve ever asked for. That includes the car you used to sneak out of the house tonight. A car, I’ll remind you, that no longer belongs to you. Ever, the sister you just took a shit on, never got that. She got to borrow your mom’s car, because I was a complete asshole to her. She deserves every single minute of my time I can give her now. She deserves to get some of yours too, but you’ve been too stubborn and jealous to give it. And look at your mother! She looks like a half-dead fuckin’ zombie. She’s lost so much weight, her face is sunken in, she’s a fuckin’ mess and instead of helping her try to heal and get better you’re running to the one place that’s been the cause of her distress and fuckin a man you couldn’t even be honest with.”
Ouch. Not that my daughter didn’t deserve his tirade, but that hurt for me to hear. I glanced down at myself. I guess I had lost some weight. I just kept pulling the strings on my sweats tighter when needed. I looked like a zombie? Really? God! He was right, and so was my daughter. I’d been living with ghosts and was half way to making myself one too.
“You’re grounded,” I called out.
“What? I’ve never been grounded before!”
“There’s a first time for everything, honey. You will go to school, come home, go to your room and do your homework. Then you’re going to come downstairs and help make dinner. We’re going to eat together, and then you’re gong to help with the cleanup. When that’s done, you’re going to go get ready for bed.” I held out my hand. “Phone, now!”
“Momma!” She whined.
“Now!” She reached into her back pocket and pulled the phone out then smacked it down into my hand.
“This isn’t fair,” she whined again.
“Oh, well, honey it’s about to get less fair, because you’ll also not have access to the Internet or computers of any kind in this house. If you need to do a school assignment I’ll sit with you while you use it.”
“I’m seventeen!” She yelled.
“Maybe you should have thought more about being seventeen when you were pretending to be twenty. That is your dad’s clubhouse! If you didn’t think it would get back to him eventually, you’re crazy. Not to mention, do you care for that man at all? The one you were seeing,” I clarified.
“Of course, I love him!” She screamed at me. I had to fight from rolling my eyes.
“First of all, Anna, you do not turn yourself into a lie for the person you love. Second, you do not put that person’s life, their livelihood, or their position with the club that is their family at risk because you failed to tell the truth. He can be removed from the club now. Did you know that? He’s a prospect, not a full patched brother. It’s a whole lot easier. Even if he was fully patched, they could make him transfer to another chapter, and that would be after the ass whoopin’ they put on him. Do you want that for a man you supposedly love?”
Her eyes grew wide with each consequence she just heaped on the poor guy. “You can’t do that!” She hissed to her dad. “The club’s all he has. His brother died over there, and that’s all he has. Their parents died when they were kids and… Oh God! Please, he didn’t know! Don’t send him away. I, I’ll stay away from him if that’s what it takes. Just, don’t take his family away from him. I know he’s always telling jokes and stuff to make people laugh, but it’s just so they don’t see all the sadness he has. Everyone has died on him.”
Suddenly, I was seeing what had bonded them. She had lost her brother too. She may not have let on that the brother she’d lost was Toby, but I was realizing how this had all come to pass. “Anna,” I spoke softly. “I’m sure the fact that he didn’t know will be taking into consideration. Go on up to bed now, and stay there this time. I’ll be up to check on you soon.”
As soon as she was gone Double-D scrubbed his hands down the short stubble on his jaw. He had trimmed his beard to the point it almost didn’t exist anymore and that made me a little sad. So did the fact that it was solidly gray now whereas it had still had some darker hair interspersed before. It marked the passage of time when we weren’t together. Time gone since…
“Jesus!” He sighed. “Never knew raising kids would be such an epic adventure,” he muttered.
“You as their father, and you thought it’d be easy?” I teased, and suddenly startled myself because it was the first time I’d cracked a smile in God only knew how long.
“Luce.” My name on his lips in a whisper like that nearly had me rethinking our separation. Nearly. He shook off whatever made him speak my name so reverently. “I don’t know what to do here. Sounds to me like she actually loves him,” he finally said. “I know she’s young, but we were young too, and if…”
“No what ifs,” I reminded him. “We can’t change the past,” I told him.
“No, but we can make sure the future isn’t as fucked for her.”
I nodded my head. That was true. Talk to him. Tell him he can’t see her until after her birthday. If he’s willing to wait for her after the way she deceived him then so be it. If he doesn’t ta
ke her deception well,” I hesitated to finish, because I didn’t want that kind of heartbreak for my baby girl. I couldn’t stop it from happening either though. “If he doesn’t take it well that something she’s going to have to live with and learn from.”
“Okay,” he said as he moved toward the front door. He paused a moment there with his hand on the door frame. This time, when he asked to stay, I didn’t think I would have it in me to tell him no anymore. Only, he didn’t ask this time. For the first time in six months he just simply walked out the door without asking if I’d changed my mind, and I was too stunned by his lack of doing so to get up off my ass and beg him to stay. Maybe my daughter wouldn’t be the only one dealing with heartbreak of her own making.