Foolish Riot (Riot MC Book 5)

by Karen Renee

  The plan had been to take my father with us to the baby shower, but no way was I going to make things any harder on the nursing staff at the Gardens. The things those people saw and dealt with daily made my head swim.

  Roll nodded at me. “Okay, well, Dana texted and said Mom’s riding with her and the girls. Ray’s opted out even though he could hang with me and the brothers on Cal’s patio.”

  My smile was bitter. “That might require him to open his mind to your other brothers.”

  Roll inhaled deeply. “He’s doin’ his best. Not sure, but I think he savors his time without four women in his house.”

  I fought an eye-roll. “Because your mother, his wife and daughters are so hard to deal with.”

  Roll’s eyes flashed. “Woman. I’m on day four of no nicotine. Are you really trying to rile me up?”

  I pressed my lips together and blamed my pregnancy brain for nearly making me forget Roll was finally getting with the no-smoking program. Our baby boy was due in two-and-a-half months, but was kicking like he was the next David Beckham. I think that was what finally convinced my man to give up the smokes.

  “I’m not. It’s easy for me to forget not only that you’re new to clean breathing, but that your brother is adjusting to your mother living with them instead of being on her own.”

  Roll shook his head. “We close on our new home this week, maybe she’ll come stay with us.”

  I tilted my head. “Seriously? Who’s gonna give up a house that’s relatively quiet for nights full of crying and dirty diapers?”

  “A proud grandma, that’s who, but it’s gonna be up to her. Let’s get over the Cal’s.”

  ***

  Sitting next to Mallory in her living room, I laughed when she opened a box containing a leather jacket and black boots.

  She shook her head. “He is not going to wear this, Abby.”

  It pained me to think it, but, hell if there wasn’t a pregnant pause before Abby said, “Oh, so you and Cal are having a boy? I thought you went the way of Jackie and decided not to know.”

  Mallory stared at her. “We did, but I’m not putting a baby in this.”

  “Well! You should take a page from Trixie’s book. She found out the gender, knows she’s having a boy, and she was beside herself with glee at the outfit.”

  I pressed my lips together. Truth be told, I was uncomfortable with so much attention on me. It was one of the reasons I wanted a joint baby shower ‒ to deflect some of the attention. The other reason was Mallory and I both found out we were pregnant at the same time.

  Our due dates were four days apart. When they say women unwittingly sync their cycles when they spend lots of time together, they weren’t kidding. Since Mallory had gone through pregnancy before, I found myself calling her or hanging with her frequently. She talked me down many a time because, to my secret dismay, pregnancy was freaking me right the hell out. It was part of nature and all that, but feeling another being essentially swimming around inside my body was surreal, no matter how much time I had to adjust. Plus, I could deal with the body changes, but I found myself worrying obsessively about the most minute and mundane things. God love her, Mallory found any number of ways to calm me down and divert my attention.

  I turned to Mallory, eyeing the open box on her lap. “Don’t be so sure you’re not putting a baby in it. Abby gave me that same outfit right after I told her we were having a boy. Roll showed it to Cal, Vamp and Razor. But only Cal said if you didn’t get one at your shower then he’d buy it himself.”

  Mallory sighed. “Fantastic. A baby wearing leather in Florida. Because babies aren’t little furnaces to begin with or anything.”

  From the corner of the expansive living room, Rainey chided, “Quit yer bitchin’, Mal.”

  Mallory’s eyes narrowed just a smidge. “Just you wait. You and Abby are next.”

  Rainey shook her head at Mallory, but handed a large, festively-wrapped box to me. “Two boxes arrived at the clubhouse yesterday. Vamp signed for them, so naturally we brought them. Both were addressed to you, and based on the return address, I figured they were gifts. Turned out I was right. I’m thinking you should start with the smaller box.”

  A strange feeling lodged in my throat. Ripping off the wrapping, I opened the box to find a complete set of orange and black baby pajamas, bibs, and burping blankets with the Harley-Davidson logo all over them. A thick ivory card sat in the middle. I turned it over to read:

  Congratulations, Cereal-girl. Roll and your baby boy are two very lucky men.

  Be well.

  - H

  For once in this tumultuous pregnancy I was grateful for my raging hormones, because I could blame them for the tears in my eyes. But I knew it was more than my hormones making me teary-eyed. Har was a class act, no doubt.

  “So? Who’s it from?” Abby asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ll tell you after we open the second box.”

  That gift was humongous, and when I ripped the first piece of paper free, I laughed my ass off at the box beneath.

  “Ohmigod! I didn’t even know they made something like that. Trixie, you have to get professional photos of your boy on this, wearing his leather!” Abby cried.

  I uncovered the box fully, and Cathy, Patch’s Ol’ Lady, doubled over with her throaty cackle. “Talk about startin’ ‘em young. I love it.”

  “Now, tell us who sent it!” Rainey demanded.

  “The Biloxi brothers sent it,” I said.

  “Collectively?” she asked.

  The look I gave her asked her to shut up.

  “Because there was a name on the return address,” she added.

  “Then I don’t need to tell you, now do I, Nosy Nancy?”

  Jackie’s daughter was just over a year old and starting to walk. She teetered over to the box and beat on it with her tiny fists.

  “Bye. Bye!” she hollered.

  “You cannot be serious. My daughter’s trying to say the word ‘bike’. Volt! No more taking her out to the garage while you tinker with your Harley!”

  The men were all on the patio, but Volt ambled inside when he heard his name. “What did you say, Jacqueline?”

  “No more Daddy-daughter time in the garage. She’s banging on this box and trying to say ‘bike’.”

  Roll, Vamp, Razor, and Cal had followed Volt inside. All of them were grinning.

  “That’s a problem, how?” Cal asked.

  Jackie narrowed her eyes. “She does not need to be bitten by the bug this early.”

  “That for you, Mal?” Roll asked.

  She shook her head, and I bit the bullet. “It’s for us. From Har.”

  Roll had made his way to me, saw the card on top of the pajama set. I looked up to him expecting to see a hardened jaw and anger in his eyes, but I was wrong. His face was gentle, his eyes reflective. “Well, he’s damn sure got good taste. And, he’s right. Rafferty and I are the luckiest men around because we belong to the best woman around.”

  THE END

  SNEAK PEEK AT RESPECTABLE RIOT

  CHAPTER ONE

  I could not finish a yawn. My body was relatively tired, my brain was one-hundred-percent exhausted, and here I was, suffering from the inability to finish yawning. Could that be a real thing? Yawn dysfunction? Like men with erectile dysfunction, would I need some pill to help me complete the act of yawning? I had YD instead of ED. I needed to stop over-analyzing things. However, it was beyond frustrating to open my mouth so wide, taking in a deep breath and be right at the cusp of the descent into relaxation, only to be unable to exhale fully. It was hard to say if it was the craziness of this feeling or the fact that I knew I was dead-tired, but it urged me to cry. I was so, so tired of crying. It seemed like I had been crying for months now. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t cry about the baby I miscarried ten weeks ago. Telling myself, willing myself not to cry again, frustrated me and it angered me. None of those feelings were conducive to me getting a decent night of sleep because they led to nothing but
tension.

  An arm settled on the curve of my hip and waist.

  That arm made me even tenser. I wished, God how I wished, that I lived in one of the many crazy romance books I read. Alpha men didn’t let their little ladies lay awake at night not-sleeping.

  My relief from the arm lifting off of me was short-lived because the hand attached to that arm suddenly clamped onto my shoulder.

  “Geez, you are tense, Janie,” Trent, my soon to be ex-husband, said into the darkness. His sausage-like fingers tried to knead my muscles, but it was not working, and for that matter absolutely would not work.

  Worse yet, Trent was sexist. My best friend Andrea was a massage therapist. Not only did she never squeeze that hard in the areas he was squeezing, she stroked rather than squeezed. I had told Trent this in the past, but he couldn’t fathom that a woman, any woman, could know something he did not.

  Andrea had worked my tension out for me last week, but it would be a never-ending cycle until this divorce got rolling. Trent was supposed to be served this week, assuming no delays.

  “Trent, just leave it,” I muttered. “You have a big day tomorrow. I’ll get to sleep soon, and I’m sure the tension will go away after some rest.”

  “’Kay,” he said, and rolled over.

  Yeah, a love story this was not. Even the men in romance novels who didn’t get the girl at least rubbed her back, gently, in order to offer her some amount of soothing. They did not come at her like their hand was an extension of the Jaws of Life in an effort to tear her trapezius muscle.

  I woke up, startled, because the doorbell rang and I was stunned I had fallen back asleep after Trent left for the gym at five-thirty in the morning. The bell rang again, followed by a pounding on the door. We lived in the Orange Park Country Club and normally the front gate guard called about guests.

  I rolled out of bed, wrapped my robe around my body and went to the foyer. The front door had a panel of glass and I made out my father’s profile.

  “Dad,” I exclaimed opening the door. “What is the prob—”

  He cut me off by putting a hand to my waist and forcing me into the formal living room to the right.

  “Jane N. Ramos,” he growled and I knew I was in trouble. My mother insisted that her maiden name should be my middle name, and when my father was the height of ticked-off, he shortened it to the letter ‘N’.

  The door slammed behind him and alarm filled me. My father, a certified public accountant, was gentle by nature and rarely lost his temper…and he certainly didn’t slam doors.

  When we both sat on the less-than-comfortable sofa in the formal living room he started.

  “Why did your mother— your mother— know you had a miscarriage and I didn’t?” His eyes were pained. “Honey, you can share anything with me.”

  I sighed. “Dad, I just thought—”

  “No, I don’t think you thought anything, the way your mother tells it,” he interrupted.

  Oh boy! “He wanted me to ‘get rid of it.’ When I told him no, he got pissed and left for six days.”

  I thought that would explain it, but Dad’s face shut down. His eyes closed and his lips pressed together. When he looked at me again his green eyes ‒ same as mine ‒ glittered angrily. “Did he change parties? He’s a Republican, and he—”

  “I reminded him of that before he left. Might be why he was gone for so long. Wouldn’t do to be an overt hypocrite.”

  “He tell you where he was for six days?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t ask?” His tone was disbelieving and a little disgusted.

  “Dad, he came back, saw the sonogram, and lost it.”

  “There’s a sonogram?” His eyes were shiny.

  I nodded. “Don’t get emotional, Daddy, or I will too.”

  His voice was horse. “Hard not to, honey, with you goin’ through this alone.”

  “Not entirely. Andrea—”

  His eyes held my gaze. “Was she at the sonogram appointment?”

  “No.”

  “You were alone. That is not right.”

  I couldn’t argue that. Had Trent been in the room to hear the whooshing of our baby’s heartbeat maybe he’d have opened his own damn heart. God knew, the moment I saw my little peanut, my mind and my heart changed.

  “He saw that picture and still wanted you to—”

  “Yeah. Accused me of getting pregnant on purpose.”

  Dad looked stunned for a moment. “Takes two to tango.”

  I was getting a little uncomfortable. “You remember I got the flu? My birth control was weakened by the Z-Pac of antibiotics. He wouldn’t use a prophylactic.”

  My father stared at the wall for a moment. “So, he knocked you up. Blamed you and wanted you to terminate the pregnancy. I got that right?”

  My gentle father had a way of ‘using tone’ when he was angry. This tone was the harshest I’d ever heard, though. I was too leery to speak, so I nodded. Dad leaned forward, elbows to his knees, hung his head, and clasped the back of his scalp. His defeated posture worried me.

  “Dad?”

  “Gimme a minute, Punky. I want to put my fist through a wall right now.”

  I gave him that, as a sad smile pulled my lips. ‘Punky’ was the nickname Gramps, Dad’s dad, gave me. Dad called me Punkin’, but when I was three or four I told Gramps I was “Punky.” The fact Gramps discovered Bob Marley and weed nearly a decade after Vietnam didn’t hurt, either. He thought it was a great name for me, and we would dance around to “Punky Reggae Party” when it was just me and him.

  Dad straightened. “Your mother said you miscarried, though.”

  “Yeah. I’ll never know if it was what nature intended and would’ve happened anyway, or if it was the extreme stress of Trent and his displeasure, but that happened.”

  “What are you hiding now?”

  I exhaled. “Dad, it’s been ten weeks. I’m healing so let’s just—”

  “How did you miscarry?”

  I had thought things were uncomfortable before. I was wrong. Now things were uncomfortable, and awkward.

  “You know that ‘Black-and-White‘ Republican Women’s luncheon a few months ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Trent insisted I wear my white dress pants. When I refused he got nasty. Said it wasn’t like I was having my period, and he liked me in those.”

  My father’s face turned slightly. “What does this have to do with anything?”

  I nodded. “Foolishly, I asked if that meant he was coming around to the idea of a baby. He said some extremely nasty things. I put on a dress, but he dragged me back to—”

  “He got physical with you?” Dad growled his question.

  With my mistake in word choices, I grimaced. “Not exactly.”

  “Janie. Was he abusive?”

  “No, but he was …forceful… about what I wore to that event because the Governor’s wife would be there. Sometimes, it’s just easier to go along with him.”

  He repeated my last sentence in a whisper. Then he muttered, “I thought we raised you to be stronger than that.” Even in a mutter, his words were laced with regret and guilt. Maybe even a little unintentional poison, too, because my stomach felt sour.

  “I’d like to think you did, Dad. I’m strong enough and smart enough to pick the right battles.”

  Dad shook his head at me, but I continued.

  “Anyway, I wore white, but midway through the lunch, I doubled over in pain. When I stood up, there was a dark red stain on my pants. I left early, went to the Emergency Room. They determined the fetus was in distress. So, to answer your question, that’s how I miscarried.”

  Dad hugged me, holding me tight longer than usual. He pulled back, keeping hands on my shoulders. “I don’t want to know, but I have to know. Where was Trent during all of this?”

  I shrugged. “Here, I believe. I called Andi and she took me from the emergency room to her place. I stayed there for almost a week.”

  �
�Is he cheating on you?”

  My eyes shifted as far to the left as possible as I thought about it, but they reflexively went back to him. “I don’t know, and Dad, I don’t care. I’ve got a lawyer and I’ve filed for divorce.”

  Dad’s chin dipped low in agreement. “About time you gave me some kind of good news.” He paused. “Well, my dear. As I always try to tell you, there’s a bright side to this. At least you aren’t getting what Bloomberg calls a ‘gray divorce.’ If you were over fifty, your income would decline by upwards of forty-five percent. You’re young and can still support yourself.”

  My father! I loved him, no two ways about it, but only he would sit there and quote a Bloomberg article right now.

  OTHER BOOKS BY KAREN RENEE

  The Riot MC Series

  Unforeseen Riot

  Inciting a Riot

  Into the Riot

  Calming the Riot

  Foolish Riot

  Respectable Riot (Coming December 2019)

  Starting the Riot

  The Beta Series

  Beta Test

  Beta Sites (Coming Soon)

  Beta Baby (Coming in 2020)

  ABOUT KAREN RENEE

  Karen Renee is the author of Unforeseen Riot, Inciting a Riot, and Into the Riot. She has recently launched the Beta series, the first book being Beta Test. She has been writing since she was a teen, but has only recently brought her dream to life. Karen spent years working in the wonderful world of advertising, banking, and local television media research. She is a proud wife and mother, and a Jacksonville native. When she’s not at the soccer field or cooking, you can find her at her local library, the grocery store, in her car jamming out to some tunes, or hibernating while she writes and/or reads books.