Rooster spoke softly as he looked at Roni. His gaze gave nothing away, but the words and tone he used said tons. “He knew it would hurt me too. I would have to make a decision. Do I care about your feelings or my position at the sheriff’s office? Because I’m tellin’ ya now, they send that off for DNA, and you’re done, babe.”
It was weird for Roni to hear that endearment come from his lips. It had been a very long time since she’d heard it.
“Did he just call her babe?” Tyler asked a wide-eyed Jagger, his eyes equally wide.
“I think he did.”
They weren’t paying attention to the two of them, though. Rooster was still talking. “You’re not takin’ the hit for this.”
She shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “You and Liam already have. It’s why the two of you aren’t friends anymore. It’s why you’re wearing a badge and he’s wearing a cut.”
That was the crux of it, the bitch of everything. Rooster knew that he and Liam had been heading in the same direction; that night had changed three lives, but two drastically. Two had never gotten back to where they had been. “What’s done is done, and that’s not the point of any of this. The point is, we need to figure out why they want to blackmail my ass and who the fuck Steele’s harboring. I’m assuming she’s a fugitive.”
“She’s not a fugitive,” he breathed, getting pissed at Rooster for coming back to Christine.
Rooster stalked over to where Travis sat, hovering over him, towering the way he had when they were kids. “Then tell me who the fuck she is.”
“I can’t.” Travis’ tone was firm, his face impassive.
“You have to.” Rooster was just as firm, just as impassive.
Travis now stood, trying his best to go nose to nose with his cousin, but he was too short to be intimidating. Instead, he did what he’d done when they were younger, he swept the knee.
“Goddammit,” Rooster yelled as he went down, grasping his knee. “We aren’t kids anymore!”
“No we’re not, which means we aren’t close. We haven’t been for years, but I would expect you to give me the motherfucking benefit of the doubt. If I’m keeping a woman quiet from everybody, don’t you think I have a reason for that?”
“What’d she do?” Rooster demanded.
“Fuck you,” he answered. In return, he pointed at Roni. “You wanna talk about women? What the fuck did she do?”
Tyler slammed his hands hard on the table. “Stop! Everybody needs to take a step back here. There’s a lot of feelings going on in this room. We all need to sit down, take a few minutes, and chill the fuck out.”
Liam glanced over at the man he now called his best friend and nodded, even though his cheeks were still red and his blue eyes were blazing.
“We can’t help anybody unless we know the secrets the three of you seem to be harboring.” Tyler added. It pained him that Liam’s secret had been kept from even him.
“Make that four,” Layne pointed at Roni, who still stood in the doorway. “I think she has an awful lot to do with this.”
She nodded, wiping at tears that were falling profusely from her eyes. The tension was thick, and it was more than she could take.
“C’mere,” Liam told her, holding out his arms.
She gratefully collapsed into them and listened as he talked closely to her ear. “We’re gonna figure this shit out. He’s not gonna hurt either one of us again. He can say whatever the fuck he wants. We both know it’s so he can try to get out from behind those bars we have him behind. We can make whatever evidence they think they have disappear. We’ve done it before,” he soothed her, running his hands down her back.
“I thought it was over,” she hiccupped against him.
“It is,” he assured her.
Rooster laughed sharply. “The fuck it is. Apparently someone with a lot of fucking money wants whoever the hell Steele’s harboring, so we need everybody,” he looked pointedly at his cousin, “to be fucking honest here.”
Tyler couldn’t help the grin that showed on his face. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard you drop that many f-bombs, Boss.”
“Don’t fucking call me Boss. At this point, if anybody saw me comin’ out this way, I probably won’t have a job when I get back to town. Not to mention I broke no less than twenty regulations gettin’ that shit out to Old Man Sullivan’s place, but I’ll be damned if I let that piece-of-shit William Walker ruin another person’s life. Motherfucking damned.”
Chapter Eight
“It was the summer we turned sixteen,” Rooster started. “We were wild,” he pointed to Liam, “and my parents didn’t know what to do with me. Up until then, I had done whatever they told me to do, but that summer—it was all about rebellion.”
Liam couldn’t help the half-grin that spread across his face. “Hell, even old William didn’t know what to do with me. We’d both gotten a couple of piece-of-shit bikes out of the scrapyard, and we’d worked the last half of the school year putting them together. They were in good enough shape to run—not to run for a long time, but run, and that’s all we needed.”
Rooster picked up the sentiment. “We just needed the wind through our hair and the open road in front of us. The open road didn’t care what kind of grades we made, what time we came home, who we made out with behind the clubhouse.” His eyes sought out Roni and a flash of recognition showed there.
“As much as Rooster’s parents didn’t want him hangin’ out with a boy whose dad was the leader of an MC, my dad didn’t want me hangin’ out with Rooster. We were like the odd couple, but no one could keep us away from each other. We had places to be, all the time.”
Tyler shifted in his seat. “How were your parents?” he asked the deputy.
“Fuckin’ strict and hard-handed. I did something wrong, I knew about it for a few days. Get what I mean?”
“I do,” Jagger spoke up from where he sat, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
It was then that Travis wanted to ask him questions. He wanted to know what childhood had been like for Jagger and his sister. Had they been scared? Had they known what love was? Had she gone from one tyrant to another, without so much as a break to live her life? He was pretty sure he knew the answer to that last one, but he would love for someone to give voice to those answers. What he wouldn’t give for her to open up to him.
“So the two of us found ourselves hangin’ out. We were friends, but it pissed our parents off so much that it was worth it, too, ya know? Plus Roni liked to hang out with us. It was fun, we were kids,” Liam continued. The innocence they all still had had been a beautiful thing.
“One night, we were at a party—one we shouldn’t have been at,” Roni picked up the story. “The people throwing it were a few years older than me. There’s no way two sixteen-year-olds should have been there, but these two have always looked older, and everybody loved that they had bikes. It made them cool, and even though Liam was my little brother, being related to him made me cooler too. People always wanted us at their parties—they always hoped some of the members of the club would show up.”
All of them could relate. There was always some dickhead that wanted to take a picture with their bikes or a woman who wanted to hop on the back of it. To play out the fantasy of being with one of them for the night, just so they could go home and fuck their husband hard. This wasn’t roleplaying for them, though; this was their real-life.
“Liam quickly hooked up with a girl, and Roni and I had been arguing. We’d spent the summer fucking around,” Rooster chanced another glance at her.
She smiled softly. “Literally.”
That made everybody laugh and eased the tension in the room enough so that they could all lean back against their seats.
He cut his eyes at her and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “Anyway, we had spent the summer together, and that day we’d had a huge argument over something stupid. I can’t even remember what it was now, I just know that I thought it was her fault and she tho
ught it was mine. Either way, we weren’t speaking, and even that didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was revenge.”
She snorted. “No we weren’t, and as soon as we’d gotten to the party, he’d found himself a cute little piece of ass, and he’d had her up against a wall faster than I could tell any other guy what my name was.”
Looking back, Rooster realized what a mistake that had been. He’d flaunted it and thrown it in her face, made her desperate to one-up him. He hadn’t been proud of it then and he was even less proud now. Hindsight was always 20/20, and looking back on that night, his vision was crystal clear.
“I found the first guy I could who seemed the least little bit interested in me, and I threw myself at him, Rooster be damned.” She stopped then, composing herself to finish the story. “The guy took me to a room so that we could be alone, and he shut the door. It wasn’t until he locked it that I began to get scared. I’d been around men my whole life—with the club, with Liam, with everybody. When he turned around to look at me, I realized I was in deep shit. There was a look in his eye that just wasn’t right. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it gave me the chills, and I felt like he was walking over my grave.”
Tyler adjusted his seat, moving his legs back and forth; this was coming way too close to home for him, and he was dreading what he absolutely knew was coming next. He threw his head back and blew out a deep breath.
“I immediately tried to duck under his arm and unlock the door, but he was too fast. I beat on it, I screamed, I kicked, but everybody was either drunk or high, and they were ready to have a good time. It was a party, it was loud, and it was raunchy. Fuck, I’m still convinced that most people that heard me thought we were just having rough sex in that room.”
Liam looked at her, realizing that she was probably right. That night had been insane. It was the one and only night he’d ever had a threesome—and at sixteen years old. It hadn’t been until Rooster came to find him that he’d even known that anything had happened to Roni.
“He picked me up and threw me against the wall. He was a lot bigger than me, and I fought, kicked, scratched, bit, but nothing got him off of me. Finally, I just started reaching for something, anything to hit him with. That’s what they always tell women; find something to hit your attacker with. I remembered the elbow, so I clocked him in the jaw with mine, and then I picked up what was on the table next to us. It was heavy and I just meant to knock him out, I really did,” she whispered, the tears clogging her throat.
“I know you did,” Rooster soothed her from where he sat.
“When I couldn’t wake him up,” she choked out, “I rolled him over, and there was so much blood, I must have hit him three, maybe four times. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d hit an artery and he was bleeding out on me. I had no idea what to do.” Tears came again. “I knew I had to find Rooster and Liam. I knew that they would know what to do.
“We cleaned her up, sent her on her way, and set the room up,” Liam finished. “We made sure that someone walked in on it. We had our stories straight. A stupid fight that had gotten out of control. They offered Rooster a camp for wayward teens that would straighten his ass up, and they offered me juvie. My dad wasn’t as well liked as Rooster’s family. It put us on the paths that we’ve taken so far in this life.”
Liam said it so matter-of-fact that they almost missed the regret in his voice. What would have happened if their roles had been reversed? Would Liam be a sheriff’s deputy now and Rooster be a member of the club?
“I still sometimes, in the back of my head, wish I had been the one sent to juvie,” Rooster admitted. He had thought about that a lot in the first few days he had been at the camp, but after realizing no one was going to come and get him and tell him that they had made a mistake, he came to peace with the decision and tried to get his life on the straight and narrow. Now, he could admit that maybe he had been too straight and narrow. There was a piece of him that was aching to get loose, to let go, to lose control. He missed that so fucking much.
“You know that camp wouldn’t have done shit for me. I was already bad. It at least gave you direction.”
“Direction I’m not gonna have for very much longer. Covering this shit up, it’s gonna cost me my job this time.” He couldn’t decide if he was upset about that. A few years ago and he would have done whatever he could to keep his job, but now, he wondered what would happen if he left it. Where would he go? His whole life and the open road were completely ahead of him.
“You don’t have to,” Roni said from where she sat. “It’s high time I pay for my own mistakes. If they want to run DNA on it and they find out it was me, I’ll turn myself in.”
“The fuck you will.” Rooster pointed at her. “I didn’t spend almost two years in that camp so that you can go to jail!”
“And I didn’t almost get killed in juvie for you to be paying for this years later,” Liam added. “Why the fuck is this coming up now?”
“Someone found out about us covering it up, probably from William. And that brings us back to Travis. They want the woman that you have. Who is she and what does she know? Why are they willing to reopen an almost sixteen-year-old murder case?”
“Can I talk to you, in private?” Travis asked his pres. If anyone would understand why he wanted to keep this a secret, it would be Liam. He had a sister that he had just gone out of his way to protect. He was also scared of what would happen if Jagger found out. It wasn’t too hard to imagine how pissed off he would be.
“Tyler comes with me.” Liam made it a point to hardly ever make decisions without his right-hand man to help guide him. It was something they had settled on informally, but it had worked to the advantage of the entire club. There was never any one-sided decision made.
Travis drew in a deep breath. Tyler had already warned him once about being shady, and he was afraid that was coming again. At some point, being shady with this group would mean being dead, and that’s not what he wanted at all. “Okay,” he answered, nodding his head.
“Can I come?” Rooster pointedly asked his cousin.
“No.”
“I’m gonna figure out who it is,” he taunted. “You can’t continue to keep this woman a secret anymore. You’ve got to let her go.”
“You’ve got to shut the fuck up.”
Emotions were running high, and Rooster stood to his full height, hitching his chin up, a look coming to his eyes that hadn’t been there since he was a smart-ass teenager. “You wanna make me?”
“I could. I just put your ass down a few minutes ago.”
They were walking slowly towards each other. Tyler made a move to stand in between the two of them. “Stop, both of you. Damn, we have serious shit goin’ on here.” Tyler took the moment to do something that he’d wanted to do for a very long time. He shoved Rooster in the chest, making him scramble to get his ass in the chair that sat behind him.
“Asshole,” Rooster mumbled.
“Pig.”
Liam grabbed Travis by the elbow. “C’mon we’ll take this into the office.”
The three of them walked the short distance, none of them speaking. There, however, was a lot of tension in the air. Travis knew that Liam wanted to ask him what the fuck was going on and Tyler wanted to ask him why he was being shady. When they got to the office and the door was shut, that changed.
It had been a while since Liam had exerted authority, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t rock it. He leaned against the desk, folding his arms over his chest, and leveled Travis with a glare. His mouth was set in a firm line, and for the first time in a long time, Travis was a little intimidated by his pres. “I want to know what the fuck is goin’ on, and I want to know yesterday, so you better talk fast.”
Tyler stood next to Liam, offering him silent backup. Travis wasn’t fooled by the nonchalant posture Tyler had adopted; he could spring at any moment, and then they’d all be fucked.
“I want you to hear me out,” Travis started.
/>
“You might want to hurry this up. My patience runs thin these days.”
“Months ago, I met a woman at Wet Wanda’s. You could tell by looking at her that she didn’t belong there. I befriended her, and I’ve helped her along the way.”
“That’s all fine.” Liam took a deep breath. “But who is she? Why is someone trying to hold this over you?”
He swallowed roughly. This was not going to go well. “She’s Jagger’s sister.”
“No fuckin’ way.” Tyler came off the desk. “He will tear you apart if he finds that out.”
“I know,” Travis shushed them. “It’s a difficult situation, but I need you to trust that I would never do anything to put the club at risk. I need you to trust that I am the guy I’ve always been.”
“See, that’s not exactly true,” Liam laughed. “The Travis Steele I know wouldn’t have kept this shit to himself. He would have come to his brothers for help.”
“The way you came to us for help with Denise?”
He knew as soon as he said the words; they were the wrong words to say. “Don’t bring my woman into this shit. You know that her situation isn’t this situation.”
“It’s not, I agree.”
“What exactly do you want us to do?” Tyler asked.
“Give me twenty-four hours. I haven’t been able to convince Christine to let me tell Jagger about her yet, and I don’t know why. She’s not real forthcoming.”
Tyler’s mind was working a hundred miles a minute. “We gotta think about why that is. Is she hiding something?”
“She is; I know that much. She ran away from someone that she only calls ‘a bad man’. I haven’t been able to get her to tell me who it is yet,” Travis admitted. It hurt—to tell the people that he most loved in the world—that he may have given his heart to a woman who wasn’t telling him the truth. No matter what he said to other people, there was always that place in the back of his head that wondered if she told him the truth. Was this a scheme? Was she playing him? Before, he’d been content to let it sit, let her come to him, but now his back was against the wall, people were questioning his loyalties. His brothers were questioning his loyalties.
Heaven Hill Series - Complete Series Page 85