by Drew Elyse
I was getting way too worked up for the situation. There was maybe a millimeter of restraint keeping me from marching across the yard, pushing her down to her knees, and getting a look at how much of that lipstick would rub off on my cock.
Did she come in that car of hers? Jesus. Her in that outfit, climbing out of that hot rod, bending over the hood…fuck, I was making a fucking porno of her in my head.
I finally looked away from her when Emmy ran across the yard again, this time toward Ember, yelling, “You look pretty!”
Kid didn’t know the half of it.
Needing to take advantage of my broken focus while I could, I walked away from the clubhouse door and over to the makeshift bar set up on a table. Like always, someone made sure the Jägermeister was there for me. Not surprising, every brother knew it was the only thing I drank. There were two bottles on the table. I didn’t bother with cups and shit, I just grabbed one of them and popped it open. A cup of anything wasn’t going to be enough with Ember wandering around looking like that.
Ace came around, grabbing a beer from one of the buckets of ice. He opened it up and took a drink before looking around the yard. When he stopped and his eyes widened, I knew exactly what the fucker was looking at.
“Holy fucking—”
“Don’t finish that fucking thought,” I warned.
His eyebrows went up at me. I’d known Ace a long time. I was the one who introduced him to the club. His brother and I met in juvie. Jason died years ago, which was how I met Ace, then known only as Jack. In some ways, he was even more a brother to me than the rest of the guys. But that didn’t change shit if he thought he was going to fuck Ember.
“You claimin’ her?” he asked
“No.”
He gave me a smug look, telling me I had no ground to stand on.
“Think you got enough women problems.” It was a low fucking blow. We both knew it.
“Asshole.” Ace left then. I didn’t blame him. What I’d said was uncalled for, but it was also true.
Tank sidled up as Ace stormed off. “Shit, what’s up his ass?”
“Nothin’,” I answered. That was Ace’s business. I knew that shit, but no one else did. I wasn’t about to go blabbing. I took a long pull on the bottle in my hand.
“Hey there, pretty lady,” Tank greeted, and I knew exactly who it would be.
“Hey, Tank,” Ember’s voice came back at him.
No way I was ready to be that close to her yet. Not with the way she looked and the smell of mangos coming off her. Fuck, she looked good enough to devour and smelled sweet as hell too.
She was testing me, but she’d regret it when she got the results.
“Hey, Jager,” she went on to greet me.
I moved my eyes to her, letting her see exactly what I thought of that get up. She read it, the promise of the punishment I’d be doling out for dressing like that, for getting me so damn hard when I couldn’t do a thing about it.
The fuck of it was, any other woman, it wouldn’t matter. I grabbed one of the club girls and pulled her off in the middle of the party, not one person would fucking care. Courtesy was, with the kids running around now, that shit waited until family time ended, but then it was fair game. Odds were, in a couple hours, Daz would be getting his dick sucked or fingering some chick out in the open.
But Ember wasn’t club pussy, she wasn’t my old lady, she was a brother’s daughter. She wasn’t fair game. Roadrunner might know about what was going on with us, but that didn’t mean I needed to advertise it to the whole club. Roadrunner wasn’t the only one who could serve up shit about that.
Walking away before I broke and took her out of there anyway, I grabbed a seat around the just-lit fire. Daz was there with Stone, Ham, Gauge and Cami, Sketch and Ash, and little Emmy, who had a marshmallow on a stick, waiting not very patiently to reach that sucker over the fire. With the bottle in my fist, I settled in, ready to make the long haul right where I was.
A couple hours later, with the booze still flowing strong, the kids and their parents gone, and the club girls descending, I was thinking settling in had been a bad call. It hadn’t taken long for Ember to grab a seat around the fire too. I should have figured that’s where she would gravitate seeing as both the women had been there, but even after they left, she had not.
Why I stayed put, I had no idea. I wasn’t prone to masochism. Sadism, sure, but I like to inflict, not suffer. Sitting there for hours with Ember a few seats away, looking the way she did, and letting all that sass and personality that had been slowly emerging since she’d been around fly, was the purest torture.
“Alright, but I have a question,” Ember, who I was guessing had to be slightly tipsy by that point, though she wasn’t showing it, announced. Her eyes were on Daz, who’d been explaining how he’d been banned from giving prospects their road names—something he still hadn’t let go of even though it had been years.
“Shoot, beautiful,” Daz replied.
“Why do they call you Daz?” she asked.
Tank, Stone, and Ham started laughing. “Yeah, Razzle Dazzle, why do we call you that?” Ham goaded.
“Fuck you, assholes,” Daz muttered.
“Razzle Dazzle?” Ember asked.
“That’s where we get Daz from,” Tank informed her.
“Why on earth would you call him Razzle Dazzle?”
The guys looked from her to Daz.
“You want to tell it yourself or you want us to take it?” Stone asked.
When Daz didn’t answer, just gave them the finger, Ham took over. “See, Razzle Dazzle got his name years back. He’d been in lockup a few weeks. Nothing major. What was that for again?” he asked Daz, knowing damn well what the answer was.
“Drunk and disorderly,” Daz muttered.
“Oh, that’s right,” Ham went on dramatically, “you got drunk and pissed on a fuckin’ cop.”
Ember’s jaw fell open. “Are you serious?”
“I didn’t know he was a cop,” Daz defended. “I was so fucked up, I didn’t realize there was a person there.”
“Anyway,” Ham continued, “he was jonesing for some company after he got out. We threw him a little shindig, got plenty of girls for him to take his pick. Ended up picking two, took ‘em away, came back a while later.”
Ember, obviously not knowing why that was significant, prompted, “Okay…”
“When he came out again, fucker had goddamn rhinestones on his face.”
With wide eyes, Ember looked between Daz and Ham. “Why?”
“That’s what we wanted to know,” Tank answered. “Started asking him, boy clammed up on us. Swear to Christ, only time I’ve ever seen it happen.”
“Wanna tell her what you finally told us?” Stone asked Daz.
“They were on her fuckin’ pussy,” Daz spat.
“What?” Ember cried, already laughing.
“She’d bedazzled her fucking pussy,” Ham explained, laughing his ass off.
“Oh my God! Why is that even a thing?” Ember laughed.
“A better question is,” Stone added, “if you saw that shit, why the fuck would you go down on her? Rhinestones on the face aside, she was clearly fuckin’ whacked.”
“Whatever, assholes,” Daz said. “Pussy’s fucking pussy.”
Ember snorted, and added, “Even if it’s had the Liberace treatment.”
The guys roared with laughter, and even I had to grin.
She was too much.
He smiled.
I’d been half-focused all night. From the moment I arrived with Dad, every conversation, every joke, every interaction got only half of me. The other half…that belonged entirely to Jager. Since I saw him across the yard, he’d had my attention. And, if I weren’t mistaken, I’d had his.
Then, I’d made him smile.
It was incredible, the smile and the high it gave me. Jager didn’t smile. By that, I didn’t mean he did not smile often. I meant he just didn’t do it, or at least didn’t do it
with the exception of that rare, total solar eclipse, once-a-year or less occasion. I knew this not only because I had never seen him do it, but also by the way the small grin moved into his expression. It wasn’t forced, something fake he was putting there for show. It was just tight in a way that seemed like the muscles in his face weren’t one-hundred percent sure how to make it happen.
Even with that, it was the most devastatingly handsome grin I’d ever seen.
I wouldn’t let myself hope I was changing the landscape of his world. That somehow I was magically going to transform him into a man who smiled openly and frequently. I would, however, acknowledge the reality in front of me. I had, at the very least, been the cause of one of those rare smiles.
Seeing that, I couldn’t contain my own smile. Even after his faded out, his face returning to that familiar, impassive look I had come to expect, mine stayed put.
Some time had passed, the guys who had been around the fire with me dissipating into the party one by one, when a voice came to me from my right.
“This seat taken?”
I looked up and saw Ace standing there, beer in hand, strictly friendly grin on his face. Unlike Daz, most of the guys smiled at me that way, but I felt most at ease with Ace. Maybe it was because he’d been there that first day I’d ventured out of my room. Maybe it was just his nature. I couldn’t say.
“Nope,” I replied, and he sat in the chair next to me.
He started up a conversation about my car. How long I’d had it, what mods Dad and I had given her—the same line of questions I usually got from car people about my baby. I gave him the whole story, even some of the tale he hadn’t specifically asked about, but my head wasn’t entirely in it.
No, part of me couldn’t let go of that damn smile, and the man who had given it was across the yard now, that high of what I’d caused in him still lasting in the slight upturn to my lips.
“It serious?” Ace asked after talk about my hot rod had run its course and we’d gone quiet.
My eyes had been on Jager, so I swung my head around to him. “What?”
He lifted his beer, motioning with the lip of the bottle in the direction I’d just been looking. I didn’t have to glance that way again to know what he was saying.
“No,” I replied in all honesty.
One of his eyebrows arched. “Sure about that?”
I focused on the fire still burning bright in front of us. “Certain. Neither of us is going there.”
He didn’t argue, just made a “hmmm” sound as a response.
I kept my eyes on the flames, trying to get the image of Jager’s smile out of my head. Neither of us is going there. That wasn’t a line of crap I was feeding Ace. That was true. Jager was not a relationship guy, I knew that. And me? I might have been a relationship girl, but not anytime soon—not when my head was still a mess and my life here was barely settled.
No, what we had was absolutely just incredible sex.
Any smiles aside.
Ace chuckled low and my attention went to him, ready to defend myself. He wasn’t looking at me or Jager, though. His eyes were settled on the other end of the yard, where Sketch was leading Ash around the corner of the building.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
He grinned at me. “Those two think they keep that shit on the down low, but they suck at it.”
“What shit?”
He took a pull from his beer before he answered, “That they’re disappearing over there to fuck.”
“What?” I gasped. That didn’t seem like Ash at all.
Ace chuckled again and the sound made me a bit tingly in a way Ace shouldn’t have been causing. I couldn’t help it. That deep, warm sound would affect any woman with a pulse.
“No one talks about it, but they do a pretty shit job of keeping that secret. It seems the two of them have a thing for PDA at the highest level,” he informed me, and my mouth hung open. “Not like they’re gonna start a show here for everyone to see, but they won’t be far around that corner before they go at it. Guess having us all nearby does it for them.”
Wow.
I never would have guessed that.
Okay, maybe I could see it with Sketch. The man was hot, and he seemed to emanate sex appeal. But Ash? No way.
“Have I scandalized you?” Ace laughed.
“A little bit,” I returned. “I never would have guessed that from Ash. She’s so quiet.”
Ace’s grin looked far less platonic when he said, “We’ve all got things that get us off.”
I wondered if he knew about Jager’s sexual tastes, if he surmised I shared those since I was in Jager’s bed. For the sake of not dying from embarrassment right there, I didn’t ask. I just gave a noncommittal, “Mmmhmmm,” and let it rest.
A while later, my phone—another thing I’d gotten back when Dad grabbed my stuff—buzzed in my pocket. I was hesitant to check it. For all the convenience the thing offered, it also had the very distinct drawback of reconnecting me to the life I’d been stolen from—a life I had then decided not to return to without warning.
Dad had, in the time since I’d arrived, fielded calls from both of my bosses. He’d been listed as my emergency contact at the bar and gym, and they eventually called when I’d missed work several days in a row. He didn’t go into detail about what those calls entailed, but he made it clear it was handled. Of course, “handled” meant I was out of work entirely. Regardless of how much he chose to divulge about my sudden departure, it didn’t change the fact that I wasn’t going back.
This was one of the many things Dad had handled for me I knew I ought to take care of myself, but didn’t.
Now, with my things—including my phone—in my possession again, it was time to start changing that.
It could have been anyone on the phone. I didn’t have a lot of close, good friends, but I was friendly with plenty of people at both my jobs. My complete disappearance was going to raise eyebrows, and some of them would reach out. Several, I’d seen when Dad had given me my phone, already had. I was going to need to decide what to divulge and to whom, and get to setting minds at ease.
Unfortunately, of all the names I could have seen on the display, of all the calls I could have started the process with, I had to see the one I was least prepared to handle.
My mother.
I took a few steps away from the fire and groups of people standing around before I answered.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” Mom snapped. “Hello? Your father tells me ages ago you were kidnapped, he won’t let me speak to you because he says you aren’t ready to talk to your own mother after something like that, and then I finally get ahold of you myself and you say hello?”
One thing I may have missed mentioning about my mother, she was all about drama. I wasn’t even sure it was intentional, or that she was aware of how she came off. What I did know was she consistently blew things out of proportion, particularly the specific facts of how any given situation impacted her.
“It is how people generally answer the phone, Mom,” I replied, not even sure where to start with the rest.
“Ember Justine, do you have any idea how out of my mind I’ve been? You were kidnapped and I couldn’t even speak to you!”
Alright, I would give her that. Her distress sounded genuine and not just about herself. For all her faults, my mom did love me. It wasn’t always the most functional love, but it was there, nonetheless. I should have reached out to her. It had been selfish not to think of it.
Though, for the sake of saying it, I didn’t actually know she knew anything about it.
“I’m sorry, Mom. Really. I’ve just been…” How did I put it into words without upsetting her more?
“I had no idea what was going on at first. I was so overwhelmed. And then, I don’t know, it was just easier to go along and pretend none of it happened and everything was perfectly normal,” I tried.
“I’ve been worried sick,” she replied, her voice making that clea
r.
“I know, I’m sorry,” I said again.
She sighed and I let her have a moment to collect herself.
“Are you alright?” she asked after a bit.
“I’m okay. I’m safe here. Dad’s taking care of me.”
“When will you be home? I’ll come up to Seattle to see you.”
Well, here went nothing.
“I’m not going back to Seattle.”
“What?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m not going back. Dad went up the other day and got everything out of my apartment, gave the key back to the landlord. I’m paying to break my lease early—if Dad doesn’t blow up and insist on doing it himself. I just…I couldn’t go back there.”
“Oh, honey,” she said in a sad voice. We both let that hang for a minute before she asked, “Where are you staying now?”
“With Dad,” I answered. “I was at the clubhouse until he got my stuff, then we moved me into my room at his house.”
“The clubhouse?” she inquired in a strained voice that made it clear it wasn’t a question of where or what that was.
“Yes, the Disciples’ clubhouse.”
I let my eyes move around the yard while I waited for what I knew was coming. I saw Dad standing with Stone, beers in their hands and smiles on their faces. Daz was flirting with some half-naked woman. I knew he was actually being charming, but I couldn’t help but want to laugh at him now that I knew the reason behind his nickname. I saw Jager, his eyes on me across the fire, not looking away as he brought the bottle to his lips.
I saw all of it and none of it. Instead, I took in what was beneath the sight. Brotherhood, happiness, family, protection. It was all right there, and the club as a whole had offered it up to me, each brother in their own way. This was home. I’d known it when I told Dad I wanted to stay and knew it just as acutely right then.
“He’s had you there, with those men, after what you’ve been through?”
I didn’t want to fight with her. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I did. I wanted to demand the answers Dad couldn’t give about why she kept this from me my whole life. I wanted to scream that she’d threatened Dad’s ability to see me as a child until I was hoarse. But knowing she did love me—even if she had a demented way of going about it—I didn’t want to do all of that then. I wanted to assure her I was alright and end it there.