by Nicole Fox
“I see.”
“It’s not like I loved him or anything.” No, I could never do that, no matter how relatively well Holland had treated me.
“Holland’s been out of the game for months now,” Trip said, moving the conversation on like it made him uncomfortable to think aboutme and Holland together in any sort of capacity. “His nephew, Rigger—”
“Is president right now, yeah. Holland got into a crash and went into a coma, I’m sure you know. Not a lot he can do from a hospital bed, hooked to IVs.”
“We threw a party when we heard it happened.”
“I’m sure you did. Rigger’s in charge now, and he was never happy with the fact that Holland didn’t use me as bait for you. He decided, though, since I was already a part of the family, that I ought to stay,” I said bitterly.
“He wanted you,” Trip guessed.
“Holland kept the boys off me. I wasn’t an old lady. I wasn’t a club girl, either. We had sex, but he never treated me bad, at least not after he started to take to me. Rigger is another story, and he’s not too picky when it comes to who he sleeps with or hurts to get a point across.”
There was a twitch in Trip’s jaw.
“He ever touch you?”
I didn’t answer him, which was enough of an answer.
“That son of a bitch.”
“It’s been five years, Trip,” I reminded him gently. He scoffed. Fair enough; five years didn’t make it any better, I supposed.
“He ever touch Rose?”
“Like I’d let that bastard lay a finger on my daughter.”
That, at the very least, placated him, if only a little. No … if there was one thing that I had been able to keep Rose from, it was the touches of a man and the strikes of fists. I’d have taken more and more for her if I had to.
“So, you were basically kept there … A hostage. Personal little thing for Holland until his accident and Rigger sent things all on their fucking head.”
“Being under Holland wasn’t ideal, but it was safer than trying to escape while pregnant and safer still after I had Rose. He might have treated me decent, but he made no mistake about letting me know that I wasn’t to leave. There was security and protection I wasn’t willing to risk with Rose in the picture. That security went away when Holland went under.” I’d been living in fear ever since I learned that Holland’s bike had been hit by that truck on the highway. It’d sent a fear in me that I’d never known quite so hard before and it had been … eye opening to the reality of my situation. I had gotten comfortable. I shouldn’t have. That comfort could have cost me my daughter.
“So how did you get out? Someone else take sweet to you and help you?”
I ignored the mild accusation in his tone.
“No. I escaped after a party they were throwing. Rigger’s birthday. After the partying and … the after party, he passed out drunk as a skunk. I was able to get out of the bed, get Rose, and leave. Everyone was plastered or high, so no one noticed me slip out. I’d been planning it for weeks. I caught a ride hitchhiking—”
“You hitchhiked with her?”
I raised a brow.
“It’s what I had to do. Everyone over the border is likely to give up information if the Jackals ask for it, whether it’s nicely or not. I needed to get out of there with someone that wasn’t going to be coming back.”
“… That’s fair.”
I laughed a little, despite knowing that in telling Trip all of this, I was likely putting more distance than five years already had between us. I shook my head.
“What’s so funny?”
“You’ve known you’re her father all of five minutes and you’re already overprotective.”
“I just think it’s a bad idea to hitchhike with a child.”
We lapsed into a silence again, and my fingers tugged absently against my ear. Trip eyed me a bit. “You guys got a place to stay?”
I raised my brow.
“I was going to go to Daddy’s.”
He stared at me.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
He shifted.
“Your dad left on out after you died—or, I guess, were taken. He stayed around for a while but he couldn’t stay in that house with all of that. He packed up and sold it. No one knows where he went, just that he’s not here anymore.”
My heart sank.
“No one knows where he is?”
“He didn’t leave an address, didn’t leave a phone number.”
That made my plans up until that point fall through rather hard. Where was I supposed to stay if Daddy was gone? Where would he even have gone? We didn’t have any family, and Mama wasn’t around anymore.
“You can stay here.”
I looked at him sharply in surprise. After what I had told him and his reactions?
“What?”
“I said, you can stay here.”
“Where? Back there?” I gestured to the rooms. “Trip, this isn’t the place for a child—”
“Why did you come back, then?”
I stalled.
If only I could tell him.
I stood there for a moment before I sighed.
“It can only be temporary,” I said. “I hadn’t expected. I mean I didn’t—”
“You didn’t come back here for me.”
“I came back because it’s what I needed to do for Rose.”
“Then let me help.” He stepped closer to me, into my space, but not as close as he had when he had tried to kiss me. “This is my daughter too, right? And we were something … even if it was five years ago,” he said evenly. “Even if I and everyone thought you were dead. You never stopped being a part of this family.” You never stopped being my old lady.
I almost wish that he’d have said it aloud, but that would have shortened the distance that I had promised I would keep between myself and the Pride. I was back because I had nowhere else to go—not because I was coming to tag along again.
“Just until I get on my feet again,” I said. “And … you can get to know Rose, if you want to.”
“I want to.”
I shouldn’t have felt warmth hearing that, but I did. There was something that I needed to know, though.
“Trip … All the club stuff. I don’t want that around Rose. I know how things are—”
“Things are different now, Misha,” he said. “We’re not … we’re not like that anymore. We’ve cleaned up. We keep the town and our own protected. That’s what we do.”
Trip left after that. I figured he was going back home—maybe back to whoever it was he’d been with before Brig had called him over.
I looked around the room.
Honestly, nothing about this had changed.
I let Rose sleep as I undressed. I wanted a shower, hadn’t had one in a while. Trip’s room had an adjoining bathroom, and though I hadn’t been here in years, there wasn’t an awkwardness in allowing myself in his space. He still had towels and everything strewn in the same places, his soaps organized in the sense that there were three different bottles of the same scent in his shower, because he never could remember if he had the right amount in what was left in his shower when he went to the store.
It made me smile in spite of myself, though I had to school it off of my face as I turned the water on, set the heat high, and started to wash. I was here for Rose, not for the nostalgia and not for Trip’s love, if it was even still there. The way he’d reacted to what I’d told him of Holland was enough to know that the thought of my being with someone else hadn’t pleased him, even in those circumstances. Pride boys were just that—prideful to a fault, and especially about their women.
But I hadn’t been his woman in a long, long time, and there were secrets enough in those five years apart that I knew would keep the distance between us.
# # #
The next morning, I woke up with the scent of Trip in my nose. My face was buried in his pillows, so soft, with the lingerin
g hit of his cologne clinging to the fabric. It was familiar, and I sighed as I buried my face further into it. I was taken by that scent, by the memory—until I realized that the tiny weight beside me that I had gone to sleep with was gone.
Rose!
The comfort vanished, followed quickly by panic as I sat bolt upright. Rose wasn’t with me, and Trip’s door was wide open.
“Fuck!”
I shot up. I paid no mind to the fact I was in the short-bottomed, no-bra tank pajamas I had put on the night before after my shower. I knew, in theory, that Rose was safe with the Pride. But mother’s worry and years of always having to worry propelled me out to the front of the bar, my daughter’s name on my lips.
“Rose?!”
“Mama!”
Her yell was a melodic tinkle, happy and unafraid. I rounded the corner from the hall up to the front. A few of the boys were around, and they looked up at me with amused faces. Rose sat up at the bar with them—literally on top of the bar—with a plate in her lap stacked full of pancakes.
I walked over. Travis waved.
“Misha! This li’l girl came out wondering and hungry, so I whipped her up some pancakes. Hope that was okay? She got a big appetite, this tiny thing.”
I sighed, relieved, and feeling a little silly myself over the reaction that I’d had.
“Yeah … Yeah it’s fine. Did you say thank you, honey?”
“Mmhm.” She nodded with a mouth full of pancake.
“She’s a polite li’l thing. What about you? You want some pancakes? Eggs? Bacon? Trip keeps the kitchen locked and loaded; we practically live here.”
I almost declined, not wanting to intrude too much. The growl at my stomach answered for me, and Travis grinned.
“Full plate coming up, cupcake.”
Breakfast came fast and hot. I hadn’t had a breakfast that tasted quite so good in years, though maybe that was because everything I’d eaten back with the Jackals had been taken with a grain of salt and didn’t have the same kind of heart that eating with the Pride did. Whatever the case, I enjoyed my food, and Rose enjoyed hers. There was a little small talk between the boys, talking a run here and there, some business they had in town. I was surprised they talked so freely in front of me.
“I can go, if you boys need to talk business,” I said. “Me and Misha can eat in the room.” After all, it wasn’t like I could forget how the club worked.
“Nah, nah,” Travis said, waving me off. “You’re Trip’s girl. I don’t think he’d care—”
“Morning.”
“Well, hell. Speak of the devil.”
I had already turned at the sound of the voice. Trip and Brig walked through the front doors of the bar, suited up in their kuttes as if they were ready to start business. Brig gave me a narrowed looked, but it was Trip that I focused on instead. When his eyes fell on me, I was reminded of the lack of clothing I was wearing; his eyes widened and roamed over me. It was odd … it’d been so long since I’d really enjoyed the gaze of a man, I didn’t know what to do with the heat that flowed through me, having Trip’s eyes on me like that.
Maybe it’s because it’s him. You never stopped loving him. Never stopped wanting him. That heat was something that I knew all too well and it was only something that Trip had ever been able to draw from me, make pool low between my legs with that uncontrollable need—
But I didn’t need to be having those thoughts. Not about him, not anymore.
Before Trip could come over, I stood, gathering my food and Rose’s . I had a good excuse that would make for a quick escape. Let Trip try to keep me there, I dared him.
“Come on, sweetie. Let’s let them talk, okay?”
“Aw, but Mama, Travis was gonna tell me about his eye!”
“Another time, baby. Come on.”
If I hadn’t known any better, there seemed to be a disappointed flicker in Trip’s eyes as I took Rose by the hand and led her away.
# # #
I kept my eyes on her, until she was gone. I frowned watching after her; why the hell had she gone? And that little girl … fuck. Made me feel some type of way just getting another look at her.
“Aye, lover boy.” I looked over at Travis, who was, for some reason, waving a piece of bacon in my face. “You gonna eat before we get into work, or nah?” I grumbled at him.
“Shut up. Meet me out front and round up everyone. We got work to do.”
Work that day was simple. There were some thugs harassing Big Mama up at the diner that needed cleaning out, and rumors of a drug den somewhere in the backroads. Shit that the cops were legally responsible for, but tended to not be able to legally handle on the radar.
So, that fell to us.
I hadn’t lied when I told Misha things weren’t the way they were when we were kids. The violence, the showmanship—back then it had just been to see whose dick was bigger. We were no better than a gang, really. Now, we had a purpose. I had made sure of that after Misha was killed, or after I thought Misha had been killed.
If you couldn’t protect your own with the power you had, what was the point of having the power?
We rolled up to the diner at noon, about when Trixie said that the assholes usually showed up. Their bikes were parked out front, but they weren’t an MC like the Pride. The Pride wouldn’t invite themselves to sit at other people’s tables and eat their food, grope their girls, and use fear to keep people from saying shit and doing shit about it.
There were five of them. Not a lot. We had three extra guys on them. There was one, a big guy I figured was the leader because all his little goons sat around him while he had his arm around some woman that didn’t look like she was all too willing to have him touching her.
“What say you, sweet cheeks, huh? You hop on my bike and I show you a good time?”
“I—I don’t think that’s what I want—”
“Come on, ain’t you ever heard of me? Roy Jackson, I’m pretty big around here—”
“Please, I was just here to eat—”
“Is there a problem here?”
I walked over, flanked by Travis and Brig. The others moved around, placing themselves near the other fuckers there in the diner, making a nuisance of themselves and getting into people’s business where they didn’t belong. The big one looked up at me and scoffed.
“What do you want, whippersnapper? Can’t you see I’m busy here?”
“Can’t you see you’re not welcome here?”
The man’s lip twitched beneath an impressive mustache.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Rather than tell, I decided to show. I walked up to him, took that big dumb meaty head of his in my hand, and slammed it against the table. His boys tried to stand but mine kept them at bay. The man was too slow to react, and I did it again, and again, spraying his food over his table from the force of everything.
“I said, you’re not welcome here. Get the fuck out and don’t show your face again here, or there’s more Pride you’re gonna be dealing with, asshole.”
The man tumbled out of the booth, sputtering, but he wasn’t fighting back, either. He and his guys left in a scramble, and we watched and made sure that they were long good and gone. When they were, a voice called to us from the kitchen.
“Y’all done made another mess, ain’t cha?”
I turned and saw Big Mama come around. She was a huge woman, almost as tall as me, but with a lot more meat than I had stuck up on her bones. She was intimidating to a lot of people but she was a good woman, and I appreciated her. She always had good gossip and always knew where to point us in the direction of trouble when it was headed toward the town.
She lumbered over and eyed the mess on the table, and the shaken woman that had been victim to that fat-fuck’s harassment.
“And y’all done shook up one of my customers! You all right, cupcake?”
The woman nodded.
“Y-yeah. I just didn’t want that man sitting with me. He kept trying to get me
to leave with me to do … stuff.” She turned her head up at me with a bit of a teary-eyed smile. “Thank you, though. I don’t know if I’d have been able to tell him no.”
“Aye, don’t worry about it.” I was already fishing into my wallet, pulling out a decent handful of bills. I handed them over to Big Mama. “For the trouble—”
“Boy, now you know I don’t want or need none of your damn money. It’s enough you cleared those wannabes out of here. Now go on, git, before I changed my mind.”