“I’m pretty sure she’s probably still in her room getting ready,” Eva smiled. Unlike me, she looked put-together and completely comfortable in a knockout dark blue dress that was the exact color of her eyes. She walked down the hall toward Zoe’s bedroom, calling her name. I heard a muffled response from the other side of the door, and a moment later, Zoe emerged.
She had on a smaller and more girlish version of the dress her mother wore. At seven years old, there were already glimpses of the great beauty that Zoe seemed destined to become. I wasn’t surprised. Her mother’s features were always evident in Zoe, and I knew that once the little girl reached adulthood, she would be knocking back boys with a stick.
Fortunately, she was also turning into quite a tough little kid, and under my influence, she was learning to defend herself quite well. Zoe would always have me to protect her if she needed me to, but the goal was for her not to need it.
“Mom,” she complained as she emerged from her room. “I can’t get this zipper up.” She turned around so that her back was facing Eva, and reached back awkwardly. “Help!”
Eva chuckled. “Here,” she said, reaching down and zipping up the dress in one smooth motion. “Now come on. We don’t want to be late. And Trig has something to give you before we go.”
Zoe turned to look down the hall, her eyes meeting mine as I stood in the living room. “Wow, you look really handsome!” she said when she saw me. “I never knew you owned a suit!”
“I only wear it on special occasions. And I can’t think of one more special than this. Plus, I had to dress up so I wouldn’t look like a slob next to my two girls.”
It was true. I hadn’t even worn this suit on my wedding day, as both Eva and I had preferred to have a casual, backyard wedding when we tied the knot. But, in a way, this day was even more important than formalizing the love between Eva and me.
On this day, I was about to become a dad.
I crouched down until I was at her eye level, my hands concealing a present behind my back. “Hey, buttercup. I’ve got something for you.”
Eva and I had planned a surprise trip with Zoe for this weekend, to celebrate what we were about to do, but I had planned this surprise all by myself.
“What is it?” Zoe cried, leaning over and trying to see behind me. Behind her, Eva furrowed her brow and cocked her head at me questioningly.
“Close your eyes and hold out your hands.” Zoe did as she was told. I dropped the object in her outstretched arms. “Okay.”
Zoe frowned as she opened her eyes and looked at the stuffed animal she was holding. “It’s Toothless,” she said in confusion. “I don’t get it. Why’s he wearing clothes?”
“Turn him over.” The stuffed dragon was decked out in a miniature sports jersey, with the number seven on it. On the back was a name.
Jackson.
“Now Toothless has the same last name as all of us will,” I explained.
Zoe threw her arms around me and squealed. “Thank you, Daddy! Can we take him with us to the adoption place?”
“Of course. We can’t leave Toothless behind,” I chuckled. I hoisted Zoe up into my arms and carried her out the door. Eva followed behind me. The three of us (well, four if you count Toothless) drove to the courthouse, Zoe chattering excitedly a mile a minute as always.
This day had been so long in coming, it was hard to believe it was actually here. I had been right in my hunch that Eva’s ex-husband David would be more than happy to terminate his parental rights and fuck off for good, in exchange for not having to pay any more child support. Naively, I thought it would have been as simple as that. But the process for me to adopt Zoe had been much more complicated than either Eva or I had anticipated. There had been documents to assemble, petitions to file, attorneys to consult. We’d had to attend a preliminary court hearing, so the judge could go over everything and make sure it was all in order. Today was the final court hearing, where she would make her final ruling and confirm my intention to adopt Zoe.
The judge had already requested to meet Zoe at the last hearing, and everything seemed like it was gonna go just fine. But I was still nervous as hell that something would trip us up. A bunch of the MC brothers and their old ladies had wanted to come to the courthouse with us, but Eva had been too nervous to jinx it, so we told them we’d meet them later at a park by our house for a celebration once everything was final.
The hearing itself was a blur. The judge asked me a bunch of questions she had asked me at the previous hearing, and I repeated the same answers. She asked Eva whether she consented to have me adopt Zoe.
Eva gazed down Zoe. “Absolutely,” she responded, looking up at me with shining eyes.
“Yay!” Zoe cried.
The judge laughed. “I guess it’s unanimous then.”
A few hazy minutes later, we were signing the final documents and being handed the file-stamped adoption order. It was done.
Zoe had been calling me Dad for the better part of a year now, so it shouldn’t have felt any different. But it did. It really did. I had a daughter. Zoe Amanda Jackson was my little girl. And nothing could ever change that now.
I texted Grey as we were leaving the courthouse and let him know that everything was done. By the time we got home and changed, then headed over to the park, it was already starting to fill up with friends and family, children and adults. Women carried platters of food, men transported coolers of drinks, and kids trailed behind them, laughing and screaming together. Zoe saw some of her friends and immediately ran off to play with them. I watched her go, smiling and happier than I could remember.
The entire MC showed up that day, with their families if they had them. But other friends and neighbors were there, too. Mrs. Hayes came a little later, and then Vanessa. Eva sat with them and some of the other women in the shade of a picnic shelter, watching the children as they cavorted about. Among them were Seton and Grey’s three year-old twins, a boy named Wyatt and a girl named Kendall. Levi and Cherish’s tiny daughter Hope was learning to walk at just over a year old, and she clung to her stroller for balance as she tottered around the shelter.
As stood off to the side under a row of trees, shooting the shit with some of the men, I found myself glancing over from time to time at my beautiful wife. Every once in a while, her hand would go involuntarily to her flat stomach, caressing it slightly. Eva had recently given me some very good news, but it was still early, so we weren’t sharing it yet. I wondered if any of the other women would notice the gesture and put two and two together. Women always seemed to have a six sense about things like that.
With the prospect of our family expanding, I realized I was going to have to get used to the possibility of buying a vehicle that would be able to hold all of us. Hell, if Eva and I kept procreating, pretty soon we’d need a minivan to hold us.
A small chuckle escaped me as I thought back to a time when I’d rather be shot dead than get around in a car.
But things changed. People changed. And life went on.
And if you were lucky, the ride was everything you’d ever hoped for. And more.
THE END
STAND
A Stone Kings MC Romance, Book 4
1
Cal
CAL
Jesus Christ, what a crush of people.
It was nine p.m. on Saturday at Hammie’s Bar in Lupine, and already, the place was jumping. The space was lined wall to wall with a mass of humanity so thick you could hardly believe that many people would fit in a bar that size. There were students from the local college, townies, and just normal folks. It was so loud in there you could barely fuckin’ hear yourself think.
Normally, this wasn’t my scene, and on any other occasion I probably wouldn’t be anywhere near Hammie’s on a weekend night. But tonight I was here at the request of my sister, Seton. Her best friend Andi Wagner was playing a big gig here with her band, The Nopes.
I’d been to Hammie’s a handful of times in the past, but usually I was o
n club business when I did show up. Like a lot of local businesses in town, Hammie’s was under the protection of the motorcycle club I belonged to, the Stone Kings MC. The need for such protection was a fact that most people in town probably didn’t know anything about. Hell, I didn’t know it myself until I started out as a prospect with the Stone Kings a couple of years ago.
One of my first duties early on as a prospect had been to run errands and shit connected with the protection of some of these places. Not long after I’d started with the Stone Kings, we’d had to run a street gang out of the community. The gang, called the Ravagers, was a bunch of punk-asses out of Denver. Apparently a guy who was originally from here in Lupine went up there, joined the Ravagers, and then brought their bullshit back down here a few years later, along with a drug trade that was mostly targeted at college students. Ever since, any business around here that catered to young people with money to spend was a target for exploitation from the gang.
The Stone Kings, always conscious of keeping our reputation as upholders of law and order intact — not to mention keeping the locals looking the other way from our own shadier activities — had generously begun providing muscle for local businesses, in exchange for financial or other remuneration. And as a result, for the last year or so the Ravagers had been pretty much a non-issue in Lupine.
As I checked out the crowd, I noticed the bar owner, Angus North, from across the room. His prematurely bald pate was just barely visible in the sea of heads. Angus gave me a slight nod and a wave. I lifted my chin at him in greeting, and scanned the room for my sister. Finally, I spied Seton sitting at one of the few tables over to one side of the stage. It was such a prime spot it had to have been reserved for her by Andi and the band. I pushed through the crush of people and made my way over just as the stage lights went on and a warm-up act walked out.
“Hey, See!” I greeted my sister, putting an arm around her in a brief hug. “How’s it going?”
“Good!” she yelled above the din. “Crazy crowd, huh?”
“Yeah, looks like they packed ‘em in tonight.” Seton was sitting in on one side of the table with two other girls: Carly, who used to be her roommate, and Cherish, who was the old lady of Levi Wolff, our Sergeant at Arms. I nodded at the two of them, and they waved and smiled back. Seton herself was married to the president of our club, Grey Stone. It had been a little weird for me when they first got together, and they had kept it pretty well hidden for a while until they were sure it was serious between them. But now seeing the two them together seemed as natural as anything. It was pretty fucking weird having the president of my club be my brother-in-law, though.
Seated across the table from Seton was Trig, the Stone Kings’ VP, and his woman Eva. Trig briefly nodded toward me in greeting, then went back to murmuring things in Eva’s ear that made her blush and laugh. The two of them were still in that fuckin’ disgusting honeymoon phase, and they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Trig had been the most notorious womanizer in the club before he’d met Eva, and it was still amazing to me that he’d found a woman who made him want to settle down. I caught Trig’s eye and shook my head in mock disbelief at the display. He frowned for a moment, then shrugged and laughed it off.
Turning to my sister, I tried to distract myself from the scene of PDA in front of me. “Hey, is Grey showing up?” I asked her as I slid into an empty seat next to her.
“I don’t know,” Seton said. She took a sip of her beverage, which I was assuming was a Coke. After over a year of trying, Seton was pregnant — with twins, no less — and she and Grey were over the goddamn moon about it. “He said he’d try to show up later.”
I nodded. I knew Grey had gone out of town on club business, to meet with a chapter of the Stone Kings out in Las Cruces. He was supposed to be back today, but I hadn’t seen him at the club when I left there.
Just then, someone clapped me hard on the back. I turned around to find Levi standing there, giving me a rare, wide grin. “Hey, brother,” he shouted above the din. “Didn’t know you were showing up for this.”
“Seton made me promise,” I replied. “I figured she’d have my balls if I didn’t come support Andi.”
Seton’s powers of persuasion were well known in the club. Even when the two of us were little kids, she could have sold ice cubes to freakin’ eskimos. It was a running joke among the brothers of the Stone Kings that if the prez’s old lady asked you to do something, you were gonna do it, no matter how hard you tried to resist.
Levi threw back his head and laughed at my remark. “No, shit, brother!” He was in a good mood. I’d hardly ever seen Levi laugh like that. Never, in fact, until he’d met his old lady Cherish. Levi had always been the solemn, quiet type. When he spoke, you listened, because he hardly ever opened his mouth unless there was something really important to say. But since Cherish had come into his life, he had begun to change. He was still the same tough-as-nails motherfucker I’d known since I started hanging around the club, hoping to prospect. But there was an ease and comfort with himself in him now that I hadn’t seen back then.
I watched Levi make his way over to the other side of the table to where Cherish was sitting. As he wrapped his arms around her and murmured something in her ear, the look of devotion she gave him back was so intense I had to look away for a second. The two of them had grown up in the same small, fundamentalist LDS community across the border in Arizona. Both of them had left at different times, eventually meeting here in Lupine when Cherish escaped the community and fled here for protection. Levi and Cherish connected on a deep, almost cellular level that was obvious to anyone who spent more than a few minutes in their presence. I figured that might have something to do with the common experience of what they had both endured when they were younger. Whatever it was, though, I had never seen anything quite like it. It made me almost jealous, looking at them now, but mostly, I was just fucking happy as hell for him.
Mostly.
As the others greeted Levi, and Seton filled them all in on when Andi’s band would take the stage, I found myself turning away from our group to stare out at the crowd. Lately, I’d caught myself feeling a little restless at odd moments, like something was sort of missing from my life. It didn’t quite make sense. All I’d really ever wanted to do since I forever was to ride, fuck, and generally have a good time. I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but being here with all this evidence of happy couples now, that vague feeling of frustration I’d been trying to push away came over me again.
Frowning, I decided to take a quick breather to clear my head. “I’m gonna go grab a beer,” I said to Seton, and moved away from the table toward the bar at the back of the room.
On my way there, I took another scan of the crowd, noting that there was an exceptionally large number of young, scantily-clad coeds here tonight. Almost automatically, I started appraising them as a few glanced over my way, cocking their heads invitingly or biting their lips as they saw me checking them out. No one really stood out, yet, but hell. The night was young. Eventually, I’d settle on one, or maybe two, to take back to my place. I knew from experience that college girls were generally more than willing to take a walk on the wild side with a dangerous biker. Normally, the thought would have been enough to make me satisfied that the night was gonna end well, but tonight the idea seemed almost tedious. Still, I told myself, pussy was pussy. Once I had one of these girls on her knees with my cock in her mouth, I was pretty sure I’d manage to be interested in the outcome.
I’d finally made my way through the sea of humanity to the bar when I happened to run into Andi herself, all dressed and ready to jump up on stage for her set. She was a bartender here at Hammie’s a few nights a week, when she wasn’t doing gigs with the band she fronted. She’d known Seton for a few years, since they used to work together at The Cactus, another watering hole in town, and I’d known Andi almost as long as Seton had, since I used to go to The Cactus from time to time to see my sister.
As I st
rode up to Andi, she was just emerging from behind the bar. She was dressed in a pair of tight leather pants and a black tank-top that left not one thing to my already overactive imagination. Her short, platinum blond hair was falling into her eyes in an effortlessly sexy look, and her plump, pouty lips were painted a cherry red that made them almost impossible not to stare at against her pale, creamy skin. A few artful tattoos in strategic places around her body drew the eye to her perfect curves, practically daring you to touch. She was fuckin’ gorgeous.
She was also my sister’s best friend.
“Hey, Doll!” I greeted her above the noise of the warm-up band, who had just started another song. It was a nickname I’d always called her, part of an ongoing flirtation between us.
“Hey, Romeo,” she drawled, eyeing me saucily. “You take time out of your busy schedule just to come see me?”
“Wouldn’t miss a chance to see you flaunting your stuff up there.” I flashed her my best cheesy grin and wiggled my eyebrows. “Rocker chicks are hot.”
“You think everything in a skirt is hot,” she tossed back.
“You’re not wearing a skirt,” I pointed out.
Andi cocked her head at me and grinned. “So, you wouldn’t miss the show, eh? Like you haven’t missed every other show The Nopes have ever done?”
She had me there.
“Okay, okay. You’re right,” I admitted. “Seton invited me. She said it was a big night for your band.” Damn. She was looking good tonight. It was fucking distracting.
Andi shook her head, and gave me a quirk of those luscious red lips that made me want to grab her in my arms and kiss the smirk right off of them. “‘Invited’ you, eh?” she teased. “You sure you don’t mean ‘held a gun to your head’?”
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