“I went to California. I couldn’t stay there. My heart hurt to see all the memories of my dad everywhere.”
“Yeah, I think we’re getting that picture, sweetheart. We realized too late that you were working out there under a stage name.”
I nodded my head into his chest, and then pulled away. “C.K. Sawyer,” I confirmed. “My initials for Charlotte Katherine, and mom’s maiden name. I used it whenever I was working on a production I thought daddy would disapprove of,” I offered sheepishly. “I guess it didn’t matter once he was gone, but old habits, and all.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” He pulled me, gently, over toward my still unmade bed and sat down on the edge of it with me. “I know this is shitty timing, but could you walk me through how you ended up married to this Cooper guy? Did your dad know him before he passed?”
I scrunched my nose up trying to remember if my dad had ever met him before. “I don’t think so. We went to high school together, he was two years ahead of me. We never dated in school, but we hung around a lot of the same people. So, when I was working on a music video in LA one of the casinos was out there scouting for dancers for an upcoming show, and Josh had come with the scout, Brighton Miller, who was his best friend. When they saw me on set, it was like a big reunion, and Brighton got me signed under contract. The rest of the next two months was like a whirlwind. I had a job that would last a few months, paid really well, and Josh was the perfect charmer.
“You have to understand, before him I was a good judge of character. I swear it. I know I had been. I was also a little lost and lonely, and not the least bit guilty for having some of my dreams come true and having the audacity to live them, and enjoy them, when my dad was gone. He was the last of my family,” I started to say before I took in the hurt look in Shame’s face. “The last that I knew of at the time,” I corrected.
I sighed and then continued. “Anyway, I was kind of starved for affection, and Josh was there to give it to me. Little did I know when he left me to go take care of business during the day he was really off screwing his long-term girlfriend from back when they went to school together. She was older so she was out of school before I started there. She was a dancer too, but a bum knee due to an injury made it so she couldn’t work anymore. At some point the two of them cooked up this scheme to take me out for the insurance money. I think they did it before I was ever with him, like I was targeted for it from the beginning.”
Shameless looked at me in surprise then. “I didn’t know when it was happening, obviously, but Bishop told me before he took off. Apparently the entire relationship, the marriage, all of it was some big sham insurance scam. They thought I made an easy target when I was signing the contracts with Brighton, and couldn’t give him a next of kin contact in case anything happened to me during production. The girl with no one to care whether she goes missing, or dies suspiciously, is always an easy target, right?” I asked rhetorically.
“Apparently not, since you’re still here,” Shame said with a smile.
“Yeah, well, I can thank Bishop for that, because I was too damn blind and stupid to save myself.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over that too much. It’s a hard thing predicting when people are being insincere. It’s in our nature to want to trust, and believe that someone else is being forthright with us. Do me a favor and let that guilt you’re carrying go, because it’s doing nothing but weighing you down needlessly. You did what you had to do when you realized you were a target. You’re still here, fighting your ass off a year later. That means something. You didn’t give up, and just breakdown. Hell, you even showed exceptional loyalty to Bishop by not going to the police and trusting him to handle it. That is a quality we can all get behind here.”
“Why do you think he lied to me?”
“Because he’s a fuck-nut psychopath?” Shameless offered completely straight-faced.
I huffed out a half-hearted laugh. “Not him. I meant my dad.”
“I wish I had a good answer for you. I can only assume he thought he was protecting you by not telling you he was part of the club, and truth be told, the past ten years of his life he wasn’t much a part of it anyway. He’d only do one or two runs with us a year. He did just enough to keep his active, nomad status, and nothing more.” Shameless heaved out a heavy sigh. “I know Lulu’s death hit him hard, especially since he lost his son too.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about. I never knew I had a brother to mourn with my mom, you know?” I sniffed back the emotion that was threatening to send new tears streaming down my face. “Why didn’t I remember she was going to have a baby?”
“You were young, sweet girl. You were five, and they’d been trying for about two years to give you another sibling, but it just wasn’t happening. Lulu kept claiming it was stress from worrying about Brazen going out on the road so much, but damn if I didn’t get the feeling there was more to it then. I even talked to your dad about it once.”
“What do you mean?”
“When your mom came to, after the accident and before the blood clot, she told us that she saw someone in a Tribe kutte that day. She kept saying, “he was coming for me. I chose wrong.” Shameless looked lost in his own thoughts for a moment. “We thought she was just confused because of the head injury, but I couldn’t let it go, even when Brazen told me to do so. I did some digging, and found she’d been sneaking around with a member of the Tribe for a quite some time. She’d been mad at your dad for not cutting back on the runs, and…” he shook his head. “I hate having to tell you one more ugly thing, but I think you need to know in order to understand.”
“Okay,” I stated while trying to absorb what he was telling me.
“It wasn’t the first time your mom had cheated. Brazen forgave her the first time, because there was you. He had a test done to prove he was your dad,” he added quickly to make sure I knew my dad was at least who I thought he was. “But that didn’t stop the man from the Tribe she’d hooked up with back then from trying to lay claim to you in order to start a war. They wouldn’t take no for an answer. The crazy bastard swore the DNA test had to be faked or some bullshit too. I know that it wasn’t, because I was there to hold Brazen’s hand, so to speak, when he had it done. Anyway, those claims resurfaced after Lulu’s death. Everyone was pretty sure the kid she was carrying hadn’t been your dad’s, even though he was hell bent on claiming it no matter what.” Shame shook his head. “That man was loyal to his vows to a fault, I tell you.” He patted my leg then, and continued on. “With the threat of constantly having to deal with those jokers trying to lay claim to you he put in for nomad status, and hightailed it to the west coast where the Tribe had zero foothold.
“You’re dad stayed out west after that. He settled in and only came around about a year later when he could get you into a summer camp where he knew someone had eyes on you at all times.”
I laughed then. “Damn him, and here I had been begging him for those camps, and he played it like they were a burden on him,” I rolled my eyes. “That sounds just like something he’d do.”
My stomach, once again, decided to break up the party with yet another biker. “Sorry,” I grumbled after my body decided to make so much noise I could no longer ignore the hunger pangs.
“Nonsense. Let’s go get you some food.” He really took a good look at me then. “You’re too skinny. Has anyone even told you where to get meals from around this place?”
“Um, I assumed the kitchen behind the bar.”
“Fucking morons, the lot of them. No, Charlie, that’s where you can get a snack while on your break when you’re here working. We have better facilities to accommodate our large numbers in the east wing, just beyond where all the pool tables are in the commons area.”
“Oh, I haven’t really had a chance to look around,” I told him.
“Do me a favor, and don’t go exploring around here without someone like me or Rabbit by your side. I trust 95% of these guys with my life, but we ha
d a few questionable patch-overs from another club that fell apart a few years back. I still don’t know about them.”
“How did they get voted in if you still think they may be shady?”
“Well, it’s a majority vote, and I was not in the majority that time.”
“Okay, well, I’ll be careful.”
I’m an observant person. It comes with the territory when someone is out to kill you, so you better believe I took notice of Jezzie and another BRAT as we passed through the main common area of the clubhouse while headed to the kitchen. They had already been seated in a corner far from where Shameless and I were headed. So color me not so surprised when after getting our meals and settling into a little nook seating area in the kitchen I saw the two women parade into the kitchen in search of refills for coffee that was still visible in their cups.
“I’m telling you, Crystal, he rocked my world All. Night. Long.” She over emphasized the last three words, probably in the hopes that I would overhear her. I kept my face a mask of indifference as I continued eating, but I noted Shameless’ expression changed a bit. In fact, he took out his phone, and started toying with it as I continued eating.
“Oh, tell me all about it. He doesn’t often get with us BRATs. I’m still waiting to try him out,” the other girl panted breathlessly. She was acting as if just the thought of getting with Rage was about to cause her to orgasm. Nasty.
“Oh, I know, but I’ve been one of his regular go-to girls for ages, and last night just proves how he feels about me. Our fuck-fest was a slap in the face to you-know-who.”
“The new princess, sure,” the bimbo with Jezzie confirmed. Jez, for all her stupidity smacked the girl in warning.
“Anyway, so besides giving me a proper seeing-to with his fingers when we were in the common rooms, he took me back to his room last night!” She squealed giddily.
“He’s never allowed the girls in his room!” The other one squealed with her.
“I know! Obviously, the shit that went down with Tallie and that new whore really put things into perspective, you know? Plus, he had me in every position imaginable last night, and never seemed to tire of me. I think this is it. I’m moving up to old lady soon. Rage is going to be mine!”
She kept gushing, I kept shoveling food in my face, and Shameless continued to hold his phone out in front of him just bit while he looked like he was about to fracture into about a million pieces of anger incarnate. It was only a couple seconds later that what sounded like a hoard of thunderous boots came crashing into the kitchen area. In an instant it became far too crowded for the big bodies that were taking up all the space, along with all the oxygen.
One of those bodies, judging by the electrical pulses shooting off inside my own and causing gooseflesh to rise everywhere, was Rage. I still refused to look out at the nightmare that was about to go down around me. “Calm down, brother,” my buddy, Rabbit was saying. Followed up quickly by Iceman’s statement. “We’ll get this taken care of, man.”
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Rage bellowed into the room, and was greeted by an echo of his angry question. I still didn’t look up, because I was obviously eating and minding my own, so he couldn’t be talking to me. I did however note that Jezzie had a shit-eating grin on her face as she stared at me. Unfortunately for her, staring at me made her miss the fact that Rage was yelling at her until her little friend tapped her arm to get her attention. Then the smirk dropped off Jezzie’s face in quick order. “I asked you a question,” Rage demanded of her.
She finally clued in and started to look worried. “I don’t know what you mean. Crystal and I were just getting some coffee.”
“Is that so? Looks like you were already topped off before you came in. Otherwise, how would it look so light when you don’t have milk or cream out?” Iceman interjected.
“We were just topping off before we headed to do chores,” she gulped out trying to look as innocent and small as possible. Crystal, apparently wasn’t as stupid as I thought she was, because she started slowly distancing herself from the other woman.
“What the fuck were you just running your mouth about in here?” Rage questioned again.
“Crystal and I were just talking about what an amazing night we shared together,” she cooed as she reached over to touch his chest with a familiarity that made me cringe.
If ever I thought Rage had been about to blow his top before, I had been wrong. His face literally started changing colors. The knuckles on his balled up fists were turning white, and his chest began to heave with labored breaths as he stalked a little closer. “Yeah? Let’s clarify for everyone here what our night actually entailed, shall we?” He moved another step closer while knocking her hand off his chest as she was beginning to squirm. “I used you to make a show of something in public last night. Then I took you to my room too. It was my mistake for grabbing you for that job to begin with. But once we got to the room, what exactly took place?”
She glanced around nervously, and then threw me another vicious look. “We bonded in our own special way,” she offered up vaguely. His fist went flying, and smashed into the cabinet right beside Jezzie’s head. She screeched and flinched away.
“The fucking truth! Right now!” He ground the words out between such tightly clenched teeth that they had to be doing damage to his molars.
“You sat in a chair reading while I fell asleep,” the girl finally answered on a pout.
“Did I fucking touch you once we left the common area?” Rage asked, and I had honestly had enough of this show. I stood, quietly, and started for the kitchen door only to be blocked by Rabbit who just shook his head and motioned for me to wait.
“Well, when we firsts got upstairs before we went into the room,” she started, but cut herself off when she noted Rage’s growing impatience. “Not again until this morning,” the girl answered on a shaky voice.
“Clarify how I touched you this morning!” He spewed the words at her as if the very use were a venom she was about to become infected with.
“You shook me awake, grabbed my arm, and hauled me out of your bed while you told me I had to get gone,” she complained. The confusion, hurt, and anger at being used in the manner he was suggesting, rather than the one she tried to lead everyone else to believe, made her voice wobble with emotion.
“So, what part of any of that had me fucking you in every position all night and ready to claim you as my old lady?”
My back was turned to the fiasco, as I’d been about to make my exit through the door, but I saw her humiliation play out in the glass cabinet fixture to the right of Rabbit. “That fucking cock tease ratted me out?” She yelled. “Hey, you fucking cunt, I know you hear me talking to you!” My shoulders stiffened, but I refused to acknowledge her. Instead, I tipped my head back, glanced at Rabbit, and the look I gave him communicated efficiently that it was time for me to go before I lost it completely on everyone in this fucking room.
“She didn’t need to. You’re on probation as of last night, you stupid whore!” Shameless bellowed. “I called him up and let him listen for himself. He just happened to be with these two when the call came through.” Shame, no doubt, meant Rabbit and Iceman. “You were settled in the commons when we came through. You came in here purposely to start shit with my goddaughter,” he spat out. “Then you were lying about shit that went down between you and a brother. You think one of us wasn’t going to call that shit out?”
“I didn’t mean…” she started to say, but Iceman cut her off.
“I’ve heard more than enough already. Get your shit packed. Congratulations, I gave you a second chance, and you managed to fuck it up in less than a day. You may now enjoy the same banishment your friend Tallie earned herself last night.”
Finally, Rabbit moved out of my way so I could get the fuck out of this caustic environment. “Wait up, Charlie,” I heard Shameless call, but I couldn’t wait. I was just done with this whole thing.
“This is the shit that
keeps rolling downhill from your poor judgment last night,” I heard Iceman say from behind the closing door of the kitchen. “I let you play your stupid hand out last night, because I honestly didn’t think you’d take it as far as you did, but I hope you realize there isn’t a whole lot of coming back from the kind of damage you inflicted. That thing we talked about moments ago in the office seems a bit moot at this point.” The door closed again, effectively cutting off any response that may have come. Shameless was beside me by then, and I just couldn’t deal with another person right now.
“I’m going to go organize all the things Rabbit and I got yesterday. I’ll see you later,” I called out, as I started moving quickly to get away from my godfather.
“I’m letting this go for now, because I think you need time to yourself to process, but you know I’m here if you need me. Give me your phone real quick, Charlie.”
I stopped and huffed out an exasperated breath. “I already told Rage, I don’t have a phone. I haven’t had one for damn near a year since Bishop took mine. Who was I going to call, anyway? The only people I knew before might have gotten me killed by telling Josh they’d heard from me, and you know what? Every single one of them would have done it too. They wouldn’t have believed that the NFL star could possibly do something like that. It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m doing just fine without one.”
“Fucking Christ,” he muttered. “I’ll be up to check on you in a bit.”
“Great, can’t wait!” I snapped before storming off in the direction of the stairs that would take me to the room I’d been given to use. Sadly, I would only get a small reprieve away from everyone since I was due back to work by 8pm. Stupid weekend. Stupid bikers. Just fuck my life to hell and back already, because I was more exhausted from the past 18 hours than I had been in all my time running from my cheating, murderous, fuckwad of a husband.
Dancing With Danger Page 7