Lush Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 8)

by Marysol James

“No. I – I don’t want to know the details. But I – I do know. No way he’d have been able to stay a patched-in member of the Devils unless he’d taken at least one life. I know that.” He shrugged. “That’s how these one-percenter boys play, honey. They’re thugs and criminals and the worst kind of people you can possibly ever imagine. The word ‘club’ conjures up a summer tree house, a bunch of guys playing pool and drinking beer, riding their bikes around the mountains. But that’s not the reality. These guys would kill you as soon as look at you, and my brother has been one of them for almost fifteen years – and he did it all for me. To give me the future that he thought I deserved, even as his own was taken away forever. Vic traded in a pro football career to keep me, then he traded in his own safety and sanity for me to become a doctor.”

  Annie nodded, but Sam was staring at his hands again.

  “I know that he did bad things, Annie, and I know that if I knew what they all were, I’d probably never be able to look at him the same way ever again… but make no mistake, honey. He’s my brother, and he’s the person who saved my life – over and over again, in more ways than one, from the time that I was twelve years old. So I look at him with the best eyes that I can, and if that means not seeing every single part of him or his life, well… I can choose to do that. I will do that, for him.”

  “I understand,” she said gently. “Do you worry about him? Even now that the club is going – what did you say? – going legit?”

  “Yes,” Sam said, meeting her eyes now. “Yes. Every day. Believe it or not, Vic’s actually gained some impressive and marketable work skills over the past decade. He knows all about running a bar, knows everything from negotiating contracts with suppliers to hiring and training staff to balancing the books. I want him to leave, find work at a non-MC-affiliated bar or restaurant, but he won’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s the club Vice-President. He has serious responsibilities helping Wolf Connor take the club legit and legal, and he’s needed there. Besides… those men are his family by now. He calls them his brothers, and I know that some of them really are. Connor, for example, has pulled Vic through things that I can’t even imagine, because I wasn’t there and Vic will never tell me what went down, and that makes them as close as brothers in all the ways that really matter. I respect that, I even kind of understand it… but the fact remains that the MC is a target for some huge anger.”

  “From who?”

  “Other MC’s that they’ve worked with in the past. Criminal circles that they did dirty work for. Road Devils members who hate the law, the police, the government, and who took great delight in running counter to all of those things. Wolf Connor’s decision to break ties with most other MC’s – the one-percenters ones for sure – and to end the illegal activities contracts, and to tell his guys that he’s the President and this is the direction that he’s taking the club, have all caused some serious waves.”

  “So… even if Wolf has taken the club legit, your brother is still in danger?”

  “Yes, especially now. The Devils are vulnerable to attacks, to inner rebellion and dissent, to retributive acts, to people looking to silence them. Vic and the boys have dirt on everyone, Annie, and although Wolf Connor has assured their ex-partners that nobody in the club will rat anybody out, lots of other clubs are nervous, especially since a rival club has basically imploded recently. The President of the Fallen Angels, Ace Cuddy, turned on his own brothers and turned informant, and helped to being down Kirk Jensen’s entire operation.”

  “I read about that in the papers,” Annie said. “It was a bloodbath. Weren’t most of the Fallen Angels members killed in a shoot-out or something?”

  “Yes. They had Ace Cuddy held hostage, and rescuers went in shooting. No negotiation or warning – they just opened fire and went for maximum damage. Last I heard, ninety percent of the Angels’ members were dead, most others arrested, a few on the run, with every cop in the state looking for them.” Sam hesitated. “Vic was there when it all happened. He – he and Connor were among the rescuers who went in, intent on murder and mayhem. So you see, Annie, I know my brother has killed people. I could make the argument that they weren’t very nice or good people, but I won’t do that. As a doctor, I took an oath to save every life that I could, and I make no judgment whatsoever about the value or worth of any life. I fight as hard for an MC one-percenter as I do for a newborn baby, so I just can’t justify things that Vic’s done by saying that the guys he killed were mouth-breathing scum of the earth who were just wasting oxygen. If I even started giving one life more worth than another, thinking that some people deserved to live more than others, then I’d become the kind of person and doctor that I don’t want to be.”

  “So how do you get square with it? With what Vic has done, the lives he’s taken?”

  “By telling myself that if Vic hadn’t killed those people, whoever they were, then he’d be dead instead,” Sam said quietly. “If it comes down to my brother or someone else – anyone else – then I’m always going to hope for him to see the sunrise. That’s how I sleep at night, honey, right or wrong.”

  “And how, exactly, can it be wrong to wish that a person you love stays alive?” Annie asked tartly. “I think that pretty much anyone would agree that they’d prefer their loved ones see the sunrise, instead of not seeing it?”

  “Well…” Sam faltered, his brow wrinkling in a way that she found quite adorable. “Well… yes, actually. That’s – that makes sense.”

  “Right?” She popped the rest of the spring roll in her mouth. “So you love and support your brother, and don’t want him to get hurt or get dead. Nothing wrong with that, and there never will be.”

  “True.” He suddenly looked mightily cheered, and she smiled back at him. “So, anyway… that’s where I come from. I’d say that pretty much anything really good about me is because of my brother’s sacrifice – and it’s one that I can’t ever repay or match. I know that.”

  Annie nodded, and he gazed at her across the table, admiring how blue her eyes were, how they sparkled when she smiled.

  “And where do you come from, Annie?”

  She looked down at her plate, blinked in a bit of confusion. After all, she’d gone along for three years, just assuming that Sam’s life had been totally unlike hers, totally unlike Sarah and Noah’s. She’d wrongly – due to a serious case of reverse-poverty-ism – thought that anyone who was a doctor had to have had a pretty easy start in life. At the very least, parents to kick in for an education and food and rent when things got tight.

  Not in a million years had she thought that Sam – happy, kind, confident, commanding Doctor Sam Frickin’ Innis, E.R. trauma doctor – had pulled himself out of such a howling pit of poverty, despair, hurt, and loss.

  Not in a billion years had she thought that she and Sam had anything in common whatsoever.

  But they did. More than she’d ever have been able to imagine.

  And that was when Annie looked at him differently, right there in that Chinese restaurant, over a mostly-eaten plate of food and a once-again-empty glass of wine that Sam was already quietly refilling. She saw his grit and guts; she saw his humanity and determination. She saw him as a bewildered, terrified, twelve-year-old boy watching his older brother dragged away as an explosion killed their parents, and she saw how that horrific loss had propelled him forward and on, into a profession where he saw nothing but trauma and near-death rolled into the E.R. to him, every single day.

  She’d seen how he’d fought like hell to save her daughter’s life three years ago, and she knew that he buckled down and fought just as hard for every person’s daughter, husband, mother, brother-in-law. Sam Innis knew what it was to lose someone to stupid fate, to a pointless accident, to bad timing and worse damn luck – and he’d walked away from that stupid, fateful, untimely car accident that had taken his parents right in front of him, and he�
��d walked away determined to stop anyone else knowing that devastating loss, if it was at all possible for him to do so.

  He’d become stronger in his loss, in his pain. That was something that Annie Matthews could relate to. That, and how some of the pain had come about.

  And that was when she saw him. Really, really saw him.

  That was also when she knew that they had plenty to talk about after all; maybe enough for a lifetime.

  But since she wasn’t going to get a lifetime with Sam, she knew that it was certainly enough for one date.

  The fact that she never talked about her early life made her pause, just for a few seconds, but then she realized: Sam had just shared the most heart-wrenching, devastating experience of his life with her. He’d made himself vulnerable to her, he’d shown her his heart, and how it had been hurt. He’d just handed Annie a large piece of who he was, and how he’d become that way. He’d trusted her. Was she honestly going to withhold anything from him?

  No. No, she wasn’t. She was going to show Sam her heart, too, even if that thought scared her about to death.

  Deep breath. In, out. Another one. In. Out. Maybe a gulp of wine. Maybe another. Good. Oh, shit, not good. That was most of the glass.

  OK… go.

  “Well… I’m from Kansas, originally,” Annie said. “Born and raised there, went to school there, left there when I was seventeen, back when I was still called ‘Anne’.” She hesitated. “Actually… ‘left’ is the wrong word.”

  “So what is the right word, honey?” he asked her gently. “If you didn’t leave, what did you do?”

  “Escaped,” she said bluntly. “Ran away. Ran for my damn life.”

  He sat back now, those brown eyes steady and calm and focused on her, totally on her. It was that look, the one that made her feel like Sam could strip her flesh right off her bones, see so deep inside her, that he saw her actual, real, true heart. The realest, truest parts of her. Maybe both the best and worst parts of her, all at once.

  She felt cradled in that gaze. Held close and cherished and valued, like a princess.

  She felt at home.

  “Escaped from what?” he asked. “Ran to what?”

  “Two big questions.” She smiled a bit shakily. “In short: I escaped from my physically abusive, alcoholic stepfather, and ran straight to my emotionally abusive, alcoholic husband.”

  “Well, shiiiiiiiit,” Sam said, drawing out the swear word in an almost-Texan drawl that made her laugh a bit. “Maybe we need to break out the hard stuff for this part of the conversation?”

  “What hard stuff?” she asked, already regretting that fourth glass of wine, sure that if she drank one more sip of anything, she’d do the world’s most inelegant face-plant onto the table in front of the world’s hottest doctor. “Whiskey?”

  “Hell, no.” He waved at the waitress. “Fortune cookies.”

  Annie laughed out loud this time. “Perfect.”

  “Right?” He grinned back at her, loving to see her happy. “See what the future holds, huh?”

  “Sure,” Annie said, though she secretly thought that she already knew what her future held, and that was more of what she already had. “Why not?”

  “So…” Sam said, circling his hand in the air. “You feel OK telling me, honey?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Her blue eyes were very serious as she stared at him. “You told me something hard.”

  “It’s not a quid pro quo arrangement. Don’t feel like you have to tell me anything that you don’t feel like talking about, just because I chose to tell you about my childhood. You tell me when you’re ready, not because you feel pressured or like you owe me.”

  “Oh, Sam,” she said, ridiculously touched, yet again, at this man’s incredible sensitivity. “It’s fine. Really.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Annie took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  Sam nodded, took a sip of green tea.

  “So.” She bit her lip. “My parents divorced when I was almost a year old, and my father disappeared immediately. Mom was left alone with me, and she just couldn’t cope as an unemployed single mother in a city as expensive as Topeka, so she moved us back to her parents in Wichita, mostly so she could have someone to take care of me while she went out job-hunting. She found a job, eventually, as a check-out girl at a grocery store. It was decent money, especially for an unmarried woman with a tiny kid, and it was clean and bright and safe. She got a discount on any food shopping, and that helped too, since she was all about saving money for us to be more independent. She started every morning at five – she even worked Saturdays – and finished at two, though she’d work a double shift if she was asked and finish at ten or eleven, after cleaning up. I never knew her to turn down overtime, not even once, and I think in sixteen years, she took exactly one day off, and that was after my stepfather threw her down some stairs and she ended up with a concussion and a broken shoulder. She staggered in the next day, barely able to focus for the double vision and the painkillers that would take out a horse, and with only one working arm that she couldn’t even lift, but she damn well did it, to hell with any of it. She was the toughest woman that I have ever known. Ever.”

  “Holy Lord,” Sam said softly, now utterly certain where Annie got her astonishing strength and compassion from. He also knew a thing or two about abused women and their injuries, and he knew that if the dickhead had thrown Annie’s Mom down some stairs, then she’d hidden plenty of injuries before then, because these things always, always escalated. Stair-throwing was rarely the starting point of abuse, though Sam had been wrong about that before. “When did she remarry?”

  “When I was seven.” Annie smiled vaguely at the waitress as she dropped off the plate with their fortune cookies and the bill. “He was a regular customer at the grocery store, and Mom told me that he always made a point of coming through her check-out. He flirted like mad, and asked her out continuously. She said no for three years, then one day she just said yes. I think she was even more surprised than he was.”

  “They dated for a year, I guess, and then they married. We moved into his place, just a few blocks from my grandparents, so they could take care of me after school until Mom and Dick the dickhead got home.”

  “Wait – was his name actually Dick?”

  “Yep. One of those weird cases of calling a thing exactly what the hell it was.”

  Sam laughed, half-appalled, half-astounded. “No kidding.”

  “Anyway. My grandparents died when I was twelve, within a few months of each other, both from cancer. They’d begged Mom to get the hell away from Dick, but by then, she was so, so afraid. He always said that he’d find us, kill me, make her watch me die. And she believed him, Sam, and so did I. He’d get drunk and say plenty of bullshit, but when he talked about this, he meant it.”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?” she asked, a bit desperately. “You must have seen lots of abused women?”

  “Far too many.” His voice and face were grim. “And one thing that I’ve heard, over and over again, is that the women and kids knew when the abuser was telling the truth. Just like they knew when the abuse was about to start up again, they knew long before it actually happened. Even if the abuser was just sitting and watching a baseball game on TV, the victims sensed it coming – like an approaching storm. They felt it, like electro-magnetic currents in the air, or something. One woman told me that her husband’s ‘tell’ was a twitching right eyelid. Another woman knew the shit was about to hit the fan when her boyfriend started using the word ‘whore’ to refer to an inanimate object. A kid told me that he knew his Dad was going to get violent by the way his walk changed when he went between the living room and the beer fridge. These women would then do anything they could to calm the situation, or at least stop it from escalating, but it rarely worked. So then they’d just try to get out of the
way, get the kids to safety… and sacrifice themselves to the fists and violence if he was determined to hit someone, and it came down to her or her children.”

  “That’s exactly what Mom did,” Annie said quietly. “She’d do everything in the world to keep Dick from losing it, but it was like trying to hold back a coming storm rolling down from the mountains. So then she’d put me in my room and tell me to get under the bed, and she’d step between the door and Dick, just step up and into the punches. She – she got so hurt, hurt so bad, and she did it for me.”

  “She was your mother,” Sam said, reaching for her hand. “Mothers do that for their kids. They do it without question, without regret.”

  “Yeah.” Annie took a deep breath, held onto him, drawing a bit of strength. “I’d do it for my kids.”

  Sam wanted to ask her if she had done it for her kids, decided to wait and let her tell him that, if it had happened and if she wanted to. So he just stayed quiet, held her soft, small hand, loving that he was touching her at long last.

  I’ve waited three goddamn years to do this.

  “Mom died when I was seventeen,” Annie said. “Believe it to not, Dick didn’t kill her, but it sure as hell wasn’t from lack of trying.” She paused, gave Sam a gentle look. “She died in a car accident.”

  “Oh, no,” Sam muttered, fighting down the urge to enfold her in his arms. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “I know you are,” she said. “You know what it’s like to lose a parent that way.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately.”

  “So… then it was just me and – him.”

  “Oh, shit.” Sam was stunned that he hadn’t fully clued in to that horrifying little fact right from the jump. “Oh, shit… of course it was. Please don’t tell me that he turned on you. Please.”

  “Oh, it was nothing new for him to smack me around,” Annie said. “Mom wasn’t always home when he decided he felt like beating on someone, but more and more, I’d started to step between them, instead of letting Mom always be the one to take the beatings. A few times, we kind of ganged up on him to defend ourselves, but even leglessly-drunk, he was still stronger than both of us put together, and really, I think we were afraid that we’d get carried away and kill him by accident, if we sort of let ourselves go and really went for it with a bat or something.”