by April Lust
There was a picture tucked between an empty box of cigarettes and a book that looked surprisingly well read. It was of a young Kellan, maybe nineteen or twenty, younger than she was now. His hair was still short, and still a mess of dark curls. He was a long line of teenage youth with a smile as wide as Texas on his mouth as he held up his vest, with only one patch on the bottom. The rocker, as they called it, read Prospect.
She remembered when he first came to stay with them. He had been so skinny, so underfed, and there were enough bruises on his face that she knew he had been abused. Her father had taken him in, looked on him as a son, and started him on the path to becoming a Beasts club member.
Club, she mused, a real nice word for a gang. She put the picture back and sighed. She was feeling stupid.
Little pieces of Kellan were scattered all over a messy room.
“Stupid,” she muttered to herself.
A buzzing in her hoodie pocket made her aware of her phone. She pulled it out. There were three missed messages. The first was from the school, telling her she needed to have her stuff out by Friday, the other two were from Diana, who was worried since she hadn’t heard from her.
Emma didn’t have a clue how to phrase assaulted and engaged in emojis so she just sent her a message that said Family emergency. It was close enough, especially where her family was concerned.
“Come on, pup,” she said, rubbing the last little bit of sleep out of her eyes. “Let’s go see about breakfast.”
He gave an enthusiastic woof and hopped out of the bed, wagging the entire back end of his body. He circled twice and plopped down in front of the bedroom door. Someone had closed it. She wondered who.
She tugged off her hoodie and let it join the other piles of clothing, the grunge of old rain didn’t smell any worse than unwashed male. The dark green tank top she wore underneath wasn’t much better, but it didn’t smell quite as bad.
Emma opened the door and Rocco charged out. There was a clatter followed by a shout. She smiled. Dogs made everything better.
She took a few moments to freshen up in the bathroom, wash out the taste of mid-morning. A long look in the mirror informed her that her pale pallor did nothing to hide the bruised look of lethargy beneath her eyes. Her golden hair had the luster of two-day-old fries. She easily looked the worst she ever had in her entire life.
“Good morning to you, too, beautiful,” she muttered.
With a sigh she swished some mouthwash through her teeth. Maybe she ought to take a shower before heading out to go face her estranged father, and her brand new fiancé. The rumble of her stomach decided food was more important than pride. Emma wondered if her life had ever been weirder.
“I mean it,” she heard Kellan saying when she opened the bathroom door. “I won’t touch her.”
Her father’s gruff voice came from the kitchen. “Kid, you’ve never lied to me before. Don’t start now.”
“Man, that’s your little girl.”
“Do not, under any circumstance, make me point out to you that she has grown up.”
The smell of frying eggs and toasted bread hit her. She didn’t realize how hungry she was until her mouth was watering. She peeked around the corner, thankful the hallway blocked the view of her approach. A mirror gave her the vantage of seeing a very shirtless Kellan standing over a stove. Her watering mouth went sandpaper dry.
A rag was tossed carelessly over one sun-bronzed shoulder, a rivulet of water was sneaking down the long muscular line of his back, caressing the outline of a feral-looking dog tattoo, jumping out of artistically rendered flames. They danced as his shoulders moved, flipping on egg out of a pan and unto a plate.
“We both know she’s too good for me, Mac. I mean, she’s college educated, straight and narrow, all that. It ain’t just the big blue eyes that kick you. It’s all that punch in her brain.”
Her father’s chuckle was proud. “I’m glad you know it. But if she’s gonna be your wife…”
“Man, I can’t hold her to that. She said it in the middle of the night after a shitty situation.”
“Then go propose, go make it all right.”
Emma decided it was time for her to make her presence known.
“Morning,” she said stepping out of the hallway. “Any of that for me?”
Kellan glanced up. She saw his eyes sweep over her tank top. His mouth hung open for a moment as he took in the way it clung to her chest. Even Emma had to admit she wasn’t quite the underdeveloped eighteen-year-old she had been. Mac saw it, too, because he snorted something like, “Won’t touch her. Yeah, right,” under his breath.
Emma cleared her throat in amused embarrassment. “Eggs?”
“Hmm? Yeah, eggs, toast, bacon.”
“Sounds good.”
“Trying to eat healthy,” Mac said as he plopped his own plate on his lap and wheeled to the table. “Good for me.”
Emma put a hand on his shoulder, and he put his hand over hers. They stood there for a moment. It didn’t quite heal the seven-year breech between them, but it was a step. He tilted his head and placed a kiss on her hand. She patted his cheek.
“So,” Emma said as she piled toast unto her plate. “We have a wedding to plan.”
“Aw shit,” Kellan said.
Mac laughed. “Gotta be soon.”
“Listen, we still gotta talk about that.”
She leveled a gaze at him, plucking a piece of bacon up. “Does marrying you keep me safe?”
Kellan turned his eyes on Mac.
Mac held up his hands in surrender, clearly passing this over to the younger man. “She’s your fiancée. Answer the lady’s question.”
“Yes,” he finally said. “Safer, at least.”
“Does it give me a place to stay while all of this blows over?” She took a bite and slowly chewed it as she kept her eyes on him. She could see his brow furrow as he looked for a point to argue from.
“Emma, you’d have that anyway. If not here, then with Leon, or one of the others. The club wouldn’t just throw you to the wolves for this.” He jerked the pan off the stove and loaded the last plate with food.
“Fair enough, but does marrying you help pay off my student loans? Get me my last semester at college?”
“Uh…” He scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know.”
“Well, if you get married, then you get your inheritance from me, that should see you through college and a nest egg.”
Kellan gave his president a look. “Are you serious? That’s shady.”
“A man is allowed to be as shady as he wants when his kid’s safety is concerned.”
“Shit.” Kellan gave a snort. “Fine, fine. Yes, I guess marrying me gets you some cash flow.”
“Then I guess we are getting married.”
Mac laughed. “That’s my little girl.”
Kellan looked her over for a second time, but this time her tank top had nothing to do with it. “That’s a big turnaround from what you were saying last night.”
“I said I’d marry you last night.” She made a sandwich with her breakfast and took a bite. “Not that big of a jump to planning a wedding.”
“This is stupid.”
Emma jerked her arm in a one shouldered shrug, “If you think you can do better than me, go right on ahead. Maybe one of those little biker bunnies. I mean, I’m sure they’d be willing to jump right on you if you waggled a finger.”
“I don’t want a biker bunny.” His tone was relentless and cold as steel.
“Well, good. Because I’m not one,” she snapped back, her eyes filling with indignant fire.
“Why do you want to marry me?” He surged forward, covering what little ground was between them in the span of two steps. His hand slapped against the table, his other gripped the back of her chair.
She didn’t move; she barely blinked. She just stared up at him with fire filled eyes. “Why are you being so damn difficult?”
He glared at her, she stared back.
&n
bsp; His lip quirked suddenly into a shadow of a smile. “You’ve got some balls, you know that?”
“Well, no,” she said, grabbing her plate and making for the bedroom again. “But I’m sure you’ll find that out soon enough.”
Chapter 5
A lot of girls spent a lot of time planning a wedding. They rooted through those shiny magazines at grocery store checkout lines, they pulled together every available woman from the prospective families and asked for their opinions on dresses and shoes and all kinds of frippery. Emma, so far as Kellan could tell, did none of that.
She got out a legal pad, plopped herself down on his bed, and started a list of everything that needed to be done while a mutt who had stars in his eyes tried to woo her by plopping his favorite chew toy at her bare feet. Her hair, still damp from a recent shower, fell down her back and put a wet line on the loose t-shirt she had borrowed from her father’s stuff. The pajama pants were Kellan’s, and they looked like they were swallowing her.
“Your dad sent Leon and Joe down to pick up the stuff from your apartment. You should have your own clothes back by tonight.”
“Joe?” She looked up. Her eyes weren’t just blue, they were like crystal, bright and shinning and hard to look away from.
“He’s our prospect, I think his real name is like Frohpenapple or something like that. But he’s like…second generation Swedish. Big dude, blond, and too pretty for his own good. Looks like a walking talking G.I. Joe so…”
“Ah, that’s cute,” she said, turning her gaze back to the list in front of her. Her pen scratched along the surface, leaving behind neat writing. “Do you have your birth certificate on hand?”
“Huh? Yeah, I do. Somewhere back at my place. Why?” He took a step inside and cleared off one chair of his pile of dirty clothes. He made a note to clean something up. If she were going to be staying here, he could at least make it look better than some piss-poor frat house.
“We can go down to the justice of the peace tomorrow morning and get a marriage license. We’ll need a priest to sign off. Do you know if dad is still good with the local Mennonite church?”
“As far as I know. Emma, listen—” He tried to put his hand over the list she was writing. She slid it out of his way. The dog barked.
“We can have a reception here, maybe do a BBQ, pot luck kind of thing. We don’t have time for a caterer, or one of those DJs, and that kind of thing wouldn’t really jive with most of the club anyway.” She cut him off so easily, like he hadn’t even been talking. They only other person who did that was Mac. He didn’t know if he was annoyed or amused. Probably both.
“Wait, reception?” he asked.
She looked up at him, her big blue eyes had filled with that cold fire. She had given him the same look in the kitchen. “Would you rather go from the justice to a cheap motel room? I mean, I’ve been told I’m hot, but at least give me the courtesy of a little pomp and circumstance before you jump me.”
His heart was picking up speed inside of his chest. Being annoyed was definitely winning out. How could little Emma talk so easily about jumping into bed together? Not that she wasn’t hot enough to want to jump. Suddenly it was all too easy to picture pushing her back against his sheets and seeing if those long legs could wrap around his hips. “Jesus, Emma, Jesus. Just stop, stop for a second. Have you seen me?”
She took a deep breath and placed the pen on her notepad. Her long fingers laced on top of the yellow paper. She squared her slender shoulders as if in preparation for war. With who, he wondered. Him?
“Kellan, I never thought you were a bad person. You have always been a little, I dunno, brash? Yes, I think brash works just fine. But brash doesn’t mean bad. I never thought you were oblivious, though.” She unlaced her fingers and dragged them down the list, pausing to trace some of the letters.
“Wait, what?” He felt like he had stepped into the middle of a conversation in another language.
“God, you still don’t know.” She pushed the pad to the side with enough force to send the pen rolling. Rocco let out a cheerful yip and chased the pen across the bed. She snatched it up before he could chomp on it.
“Don’t know what, woman?” He decided she was definitely speaking another language. She was speaking annoyed female, and he was not fluent.
She blinked at him with the solemnity of an owl. Her big blue eyes opened and closed twice. When she started speaking again she was using that firm and educated voice of a teacher, or the upper class. “Kellan, I’ve been looking at you since my dad first brought you through those doors.”
He followed the line of her hand towards the front of the house. His brain ground to a halt. “You what?”
“Due to that ‘smacked in the face by a pan’ look you are sporting, pretty sure you heard me.”
“Wait, what do you mean you’ve been looking at me?”
She went up to her feet. Even though she was half a foot shorter she managed to look down her nose at him. “What do you think it means? There you were all dark-haired and grumpy and my poor little teenage heart just couldn’t handle it.”
“You aren’t a teenager now, Emma. You’re a grown woman.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I am. And this grown woman wants a reception for her wedding.”
He wasn’t even sure where she would come from next. He felt like an idiot for not knowing about her feelings, and an idiot for not realizing that some quick stop at a federal building wouldn’t be good enough for her. She wasn’t some biker bunny who wanted the thrill of riding someone who wore the patches.
She was a good woman, he told himself. She was a good woman who was just working out some old feelings. That’s what all this was. He couldn’t hold those against her, but he could hold her acting out whatever teen fantasy was messing with her otherwise logical mind.
“Emma, you need to understand. This is temporary. We are both doing this to keep you safe, and keep your dad happy. And that’s fine by me, you know, whatever. But once this all blows over it’ll be the end of it, it’ll be done. You will go off and be the woman you are supposed to be, and I’ll go back to doing my thing.”
She fixed him with that steady gaze of hers. “That’s all well and good, Kellan, but do you think my dad is going to make it through all that?”
“Probably not.” He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like where she was going to go with all of this.
“So, as someone who isn’t a complete and total jerk, could you give me the opportunity to walk down the aisle with my dad?”
He knew he had lost the fight. She had asked it so softly and so gently that he almost didn’t hear the soft quaver in her voice. “Damnit, Emma.”
“So, is a BBQ all right with you, then?” She sat back down on the bed, and Rocco curled up by her legs.
“Can there at least be those little meatball things?”
She smiled, and her eyes melted from ice into jewels. “Yeah, there can be little meatball things.”
Kellan thought he might do a lot to get Emma to look at him like that again.
# # #
The dress had been her mother’s, and it fit better than Emma would have expected. It wasn’t white, but that creamy champagne color that worked well when your skin was too pale to get away with real white. A neckline of beads shimmered over her collarbone, and the skirt, crafted from layers of light fabric, floated around her like a dream.
It was, she had to admit, exactly the kind of dress she would have picked out for herself. She took a turn in front of the full-length mirror and watched the fabric move.
“Good god,” her father whispered. “You look just like her.”
Emma ran her hands over the hips of her gown, settling it back into place. “It’s surprisingly perfect.”
Her father wheeled into the room, flanked by two men she didn’t recognize, at least not immediately. One was so tall and golden that he had to be Joe. The other was just a few years older than herself, and there was a familiar twinkle in his eye.
“Rudy?” she asked.
“Hey there, little sister.” He opened his arms and swept her into a hug. Rudy wasn’t really her brother, but he was Leon’s one and only son. He had been the boy who actually took her to prom when her date had stood her up. There had been a very short time when the two of them had tried to date. It had lasted as long as their first kiss. Calling it awkward would have been a deep understatement.
“How are you, how have you been?” she asked.