by Vivian Gray
He sagged down onto the bed next to her, his head in his hands. She reached up and rubbed his back, a little tentative in the motion until he seemed to relax into the sensation. “Hey,” she said, after a minute.
He shook off her touch, looking away from her. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She couldn’t exactly disagree with the sentiment. As gorgeous as it was seeing him spurt on her, so clearly turned on by her swollen, heavy body, it was also sticky. He poured some water onto his shirt and used it to wipe off her stomach, then clean off his cock. He pulled her into his arms and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight.
There was something about a big tough man with tattoos up and down his arms using her as a teddy bear that just felt good. Being able to comfort someone who didn’t act like they ever needed any comfort at all was... precious wasn’t quite the right word, but it felt like something special. Something to be proud of.
“What happened?” It was work to keep her voice calm, and more work than she expected. Seeing Whip tear through the bar had unsettled her. She’d cowered in a way that hadn’t felt any kind of good. It didn’t seem like he’d seen her; that was something at least. Her freeze-in-place strategy had at least had the desired effect.
“Whip thinks he has something over us. He’s wrong, but we need to find out what it is.” Jacob’s voice was just as calm and controlled as hers, and it made Laurie think that he was working just as hard to keep it that way.
“What are you going to do?”
Jacob shrugged. “George is going to tail Whip, figure out what’s going on. We’ll keep following all our leads, keep the business running the way it should. Business as usual, really. We just keep going until it starts to make sense.”
Laurie nodded into his chest, letting the fear slowly drain out of her. It didn’t go all the way though; of course it didn’t. “Does it have something to do with me?” She hated how small and delicate her voice was, like something fragile that could be shattered. That wasn’t who she was. She wasn’t allowed to be that person. She didn’t have time or energy or the space she needed to be that person. She couldn’t fall apart.
“What? No.”
He was lying. Or rather… “With the baby, then?”
He didn’t respond.
“Jacob, please. Whatever it is, tell me.”
Jacob sighed, and he sat up, rubbing his face. Laurie tried to settle herself on the pillows, but without his arms around her, it just didn’t feel right. “Whip says he’s owed a debt. That he’ll be repaid – one way or another.”
“He threatened the baby.” She fought back the tears; Jacob’s silence was its own answer.
“You and the baby are safe,” he said, and she believed him. No one could be that fierce and be wrong. It just wasn’t possible. “I will find out what’s happening, and I will deal with it. You are safe. The baby is safe.”
She took a deep breath and let it out all in a rush. “I saw my brother in town. When we were there for the OB appointment with the scan. He was the junkie I saw just when we were leaving.”
She expected to feel him getting angry, but that didn’t happen. Jacob did go incredibly still, but she didn’t get that sense of cold fury rolling off him that she sometimes saw when he was angry with the men.
“I thought it didn’t matter. I thought I could just walk away from him and make him not mean anything to me ever again. I did it once, you know? He was so terrifying when I was a kid, and I shut off every part of me that cared about that. But when he showed up at my apartment before I knew what was going to happen, I thought maybe – maybe he’d get clean. Maybe I’d get to have a family. And I haven’t quite been able to let go of that, I guess.”
She felt Jacob stiffen then, and some of that anger was shifting through him. “Maybe you’d get to have a family.” He repeated the words in a flat tone.
“Yes,” she said, trying to figure out what exactly she’d done wrong so she could backtrack. “And then when I saw him there on the street – I thought I’d turned all those feelings off again. The son of a bitch who sold me like meat is curled up on the street, either high or wishing he was high, and I’m thinking about how I could get him to rehab for real. Get my family back.”
Jacob wasn’t just still now; he was stone. “The first thing you associate with family is that junkie monster?”
Oh shit. “No, Jacob, it’s not—”
He shook his head and stood up. The bed jostled with the motion, and he didn’t look at her as he yanked his jeans back on and grabbed a clean shirt. “I have to go see what’s going on with the men,” he said, pulling the door open and leaving her behind.
Laurie felt tears burning her eyes, but she did her best to choke them back. She let herself curl up around her belly, wrapping her arms around the baby she needed to protect more than anything. She’d said the wrong thing, she’d always said the wrong thing, and she was a child again. She was nothing but a little girl who couldn’t say the right things to anyone, the things that would make them stay.
***
After that, Jacob stopped grabbing her for rough and harsh sex every time something went wrong. He didn’t say anything more about family, and he made conversation and was rough and laughing whenever they were anywhere people could see. But when she went to bed, he had something else to do. When she was up and working on the app, she’d find him in bed, sound asleep. If she tried to wake him, doing something suggestive like baring her tits or stroking him hard as he woke, he’d laugh and take her hand – but he’d push it away and have somewhere else to be.
Laurie didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have any experience in fixing relationships that had gone awry. After she’d left the house she’d grown up in – it hadn’t ever been a home – she’d kept relationships completely casual. An occasional fuck here or there, but any sign of patterns or feelings, and she split. It was the best way to keep to her plan, and nothing else mattered but the plan. The plan was how she was going to get free.
What if Jacob decided he didn’t want her? What if he decided she was too much trouble, not worth all this effort? What if he decided that he didn’t want to be a father after all? That thought always made her curl up around her belly, holding herself and the baby as tightly as she could. If he walked out on them – or, more specifically she supposed, sent them away – what would happen to them? She couldn’t live on the street again, she absolutely couldn’t let herself fall that far again. Not with a baby. God, what if he wanted to keep the baby, but not her?
Laurie pushed the dark thoughts away as hard as she could. The solution was to do as much as she could now to prepare, just in case. It was possible that Jacob was just overwhelmed with everything happening with the club and Whip. It was possible that he was tired, or found her less attractive now that her belly was riddled with stretch marks and she’d found herself doing that waddle-walk that happened to women in the month before they gave birth. It was possible he thought she was tired, and that she was just humoring him with her attempts to initiate sex.
But just in case, she needed to have even a chance of surviving. The app for the Talons was almost done, so she started working on the medical app she’d been planning on creating during the coding class. It was saleable, she knew it was, and if she could get even a skeleton up and running for it, she could pursue funding. From there, she’d be okay. She’d be able to take care of herself and the baby just fine. Even if he was done with her.
Laurie would be a better mother than she’d had. She had to be. Part of her chuckled at that – it was setting the bar pretty low – but that also meant she’d be able to succeed. Somehow.
She could do this. She could find a way to survive. She always had before.
Chapter Fifteen
Jacob
Jacob rested his head in his hands for a moment as the men left the war room. Snake-eye sagged into a chair next to him, and his expression wasn’t much different. �
�What do you think, boss?”
Jacob shook his head. George’s report had been disconcerting. He’d followed Whip for three weeks now and had learned almost nothing. The man’s father had been in a club as well, but the story of which one had changed three times. He didn’t seem to have people who’d been affected by drugs, people who’d been particularly affected by guns. George was starting to believe that Whip’s legal name might have been changed once, or maybe more than once, and he was waiting on contacts to try and find out more about that. Whip hadn’t contacted anyone in the club directly again, but sales on the streets were starting to fall. It still wasn’t enough to impact the club severely, but profits were definitely down, and that was going to start causing problems soon. Jacob was worried.
“We need the link,” he said. There wasn’t anything else.
Snake-eye was quiet for a long moment, then sighed. It was a deep, heavy sort of sound, and it pulled Jacob’s attention up to his friend and mentor. “Look, Jacob, I have an idea. But it involves your dad.”
Something curled up tight in Jacob’s stomach. He remembered his father well enough, but he’d lost the man when Jacob was still at the height of hero worship for his dad, but when he’d least been able to tell him of his admiration. He regretted that he’d never been able to ask for his father’s advice as he became a man, and missed his father more than he liked to admit. He didn’t think his father was a saint – no one ran an MC without getting their hands dirty – but that wasn’t the same as knowing what had happened. And the look on Snake-eye’s face, he was about to learn.
“Tell me.”
“Before your dad was VP of the club, do you know what roles he held?”
Jacob shook his head.
“He worked his way up, like most of us do. He was a hitter. Specifically, he was our wetworks man. He dealt with problems, both internal and external. The other guys could be bought, but Eddie got assignments. And there were a few times... he had to deal with men in the club who weren’t doing things right. I was just a kid at the time, you understand, but there was some upset around the daughter of the president. I didn’t know the details, but word went around that one of the guys had... hadn’t taken no for an answer, and not in the fun way. The president wanted it dealt with.
“Eddie was the one who dealt with it. And he was... in a bad way about it, like any decent man would be. I heard that it wasn’t clean. That he made the bastard suffer.”
“Good,” Jacob said.
“Damn right. But I’ve been thinking… No one ever gave another thought to that guy. Hell, I don’t even remember his name; I’d have to go look it up in the damn records. We thought he was a loner, didn’t have a girl in the club, nothing. But what if we were wrong?”
Jacob’s blood ran cold. “You think Whip could be the kid of that guy you don’t even remember? The guy my dad tore up?”
Snake-eye sighed. “I don’t know. It’s possible. I didn’t want to bring it up if I didn’t need to. I don’t believe in tarnishing the memory of a good man. What Eddie did was right, and I’d have done it myself if it had been up to me. But a kid might not see it that way.”
“Especially a kid who’s grown up into a man who thinks kidnapping women and selling them like property is okay.”
“That’s where my head went, boss.”
Jacob rubbed his hand over his face and tried to get his bearings. “Who else in the club has been around long enough that they will remember this?”
Snake-eye’s good eye studied the ceiling as he clearly ran through the roster of patched members. “Just me and Buzz, I think. Even with the other older guys, this was before their time.”
Jacob took a long moment. This wasn’t bad information about his father; it was just information. It was barely even surprising, and like Snake-eye said, Jacob would have done the same thing in his position. But if there was a kid, if that kid had grown up into Whip, Jacob wasn’t sure he could blame the kid for wanting revenge. Some men would write off their father as a piece of shit for that – but maybe he’d never heard the story of what happened. If he just had a mother – or worse, no one – raising him, he might have heard about how his father was unjustly murdered, and suffered while it happened. That was something Jacob knew he couldn’t have forgiven.
“Alright,” he said. “Talk to Buzz. Find out if Buzz remembers the guy, or if you can turn up his name in the records. Feed the information to George now, give him a name if you can find it. Let’s make sure that we’re right about the connection before we assume anything. But if that is the problem... it’ll at least give us a way to move forward.”
“You think Whip would believe you? If he misunderstood and you explained?”
Jacob snorted. “No, of course not. I wouldn’t believe me, in his situation. But it’s worth a try. To protect…” He stared off.
Snake-eye noticed; of course he did. “To protect Laurie and the baby,” he said.
“To protect the club.” Jacob made his voice as firm as possible, but it didn’t sound convincing, not even to him.
Snake-eye shook his head. “Boss, what happened between you two?”
“Nothing.”
The other man scoffed. “Everyone can see that something’s changed.”
“Nothing’s changed.” Jacob felt the gaze on him and refused to buckle. “Everything is fine between us.”
“I don’t know who you’re lying to, me or yourself, but you need to knock it off. We can’t afford a man whose heart is divided.”
Jacob felt rage burning through him. “My heart isn’t divided. The club has to make it through. The club is everything.”
“It isn’t,” Snake-eye argued back. “It isn’t, and it never has been. If you’ve thought it is – your father would be furious with me for letting you misunderstand so badly. The Black Talons are important, I’m not going to lie. We keep this area safer than it would be if some other club were to take over. Especially if that club were the type that follows the Devil Weapon’s model. The people in this community deserve better than protection money taken to keep their businesses from being razed, and living in fear for their girls and women, and not knowing if their kids are safe from the same things everyone experiments with as teens. So we do something very important. But we do it so we can have those things too. You have to realize that.”
“It’s not that,” Jacob said before he managed to choke back the words. He sighed; in for a penny in for a pound, after all. “I wanted her to be my family. Her and the baby. And maybe I wanted it too much. I forgot that she had a family before me.” He didn’t know how much Laurie had shared with other people in the club, and he wasn’t about to out her secret, but at the same time, he had to talk to someone.
“Of course she did,” Snake-eye said, his voice clearly indicating that he thought his boss was a complete idiot. “Even if you thought they were all dead.” Maybe Laurie had been talking to Delilah more than Jacob had assumed. She’d been so closed off with him about the subject, but that didn’t mean she was closed off with everyone. “I take it they’re not?”
“They are not.”
Snake-eye looked at the ceiling, sucking his teeth and then startling. “That’s what happened to her? Her brother was the one who put her in that warehouse?”
Jacob’s eyes snapped up, and Snake-eye shrugged.
“No, as far as I know, she hasn’t actually told anyone but you. She’s told Delilah enough that she pieced some of it together, and there’s – God help us all, it’s certainly not the first time something like that has happened. I’m fucking glad we got her, boss, and I’m fucking glad she got you.” He was quiet for another minute, then nodded again. “So the brother is still around. Coming for her?”
Jacob shook his head. “Not as far as I know, and I think she’d tell me. He scares the shit out of her, though, and I don’t think she’d try to handle him on her own.”
“So what’s got your panties in a twist?” There was a laugh in the older man’s voice,
and Jacob pushed himself to ignore it.
“She still wants to help him. After everything he put her through, she still thinks of him as family. It’s... fuck, Snake, it terrifies me. What kind of…” He trailed off, not willing to give voice to the thoughts in his head.
“Do you know I have a brother, too? Well, had one, anyway.”
“No.”
“He went down a path, similar to the one that Laurie’s brother seems to have gone down. I tried to save him for a long time, tried right up until he killed himself. No matter what it cost me. No matter what it hurt. Sometimes it’s just like that. He was my little brother, and I was supposed to look out for him. I was supposed to help. So I kept helping, even when maybe it hurt both of us.” He sighed. “Sometimes I still think of what I did wrong, what more I could have done.”
“Snake—”
“I know. When the drugs dig into someone like that, there’s nothing you can do for them. It’s on them, and my brother just couldn’t get there. Wanted to get clean, but couldn’t hold it. He wasn’t willing to do the work for the stuff that got him addicted in the first place. It was hard to watch, but there wasn’t anything else for me to do. And maybe that was harder than watching him fall apart in the first place. Being helpless ain’t a thing that feels good for anyone.”