Slam (The Brazen Bulls MC #3)

by Susan Fanetti

  But then, Jenny lifted her head and reached out to him. “Hey.”

  He dropped his shirt and went back to the bed, stretching out at her side. She settled at once against him, hooking her leg over his and nestling her head on his chest. He held her, as tightly as he could without hurting her, and kissed her head.

  “You can’t stay,” she sighed. Sleep had already thickened her voice, and Maverick smiled. She always fell asleep after she came.

  “I know. I won’t. But I just used my t-shirt to clean jizz off your back. Didn’t think that one through.”

  She chuckled and kissed his nipple. “Bottom drawer of the dresser.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mmm-hmm. Mav?”

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “I love you.”

  He kissed her head again, lingering in the scent of her shampoo. “That’s two.”

  ~oOo~

  For as long as he thought he could, until nearly dawn, he stayed in bed and held Jenny as she slept. He never wanted to leave. But he knew why he couldn’t stay, and he had to build her trust in him. So as the sky began to lighten, he eased himself away from the woman he loved. She sighed and drew his pillow into her arms, but she didn’t wake.

  He took a moment and watched her, her naked body sleek and perfect, her lovely face calm in her rest. Then, full of bittersweetness, a contented disappointment, he pulled on his jeans, socks, and boots. He opened her dresser drawer, and found it full of his old shirts. His Bulls shirts. All of them—t-shirts and hoodies alike. He pulled the top t-shirt out. It was a favorite, the cotton soft and worn, the bull image faded. Pulling it over his chest, he felt Jenny’s love in it. A dumb thought. Sappy. Didn’t matter. She’d kept his Bulls shirts. She’d kept his flame. She’d never given up on him, not completely.

  On his way out of the house, he stopped at Kelsey’s room and eased open the door. His little girl slept in the ball she clearly favored for sleeping. Dino was tucked under her chin.

  He glanced around her room. The furniture was mismatched, and the dated décor from when the room had been Jenny’s was still apparent in the wallpaper and curtains, but Kelsey’s flower glowed its pink glow, and the space, even in near dark, burst with color and personality.

  He remembered the weeks right before he’d been arrested, when Jenny had been big with their child, and they’d been preparing to bring a little girl into their lives. He’d often imagined exactly this, watching his daughter sleep, tucked into her own bed, loved and warm and safe.

  Never in his life had he been happier. His own family. For the first time in his life. He’d meant to do it right.

  Recalling that old happiness, Maverick sneaked out of the house his woman and child lived in, determined to have it back and make it true. To do it right.

  June 1993

  Maverick came into the apartment and hung up his kutte and kicked off his boots. “Jen?”

  “In here!” she called, and he followed her voice to their second bedroom. She was sitting on the floor, reading some kind of booklet. Her legs were stretched out wide, and her big belly sat between them.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “I think I should have asked you that question a couple of weeks ago.” She pointed at a stack of large boxes against the far wall. The top one was open but not unpacked. “You bought a crib. Among other things.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “‘Oh, right’? Really? Shouldn’t we have picked this out together?”

  As her pregnancy advanced, she was getting crabby and combative. Especially during the past couple of weeks, after he’d convinced her to quit her waitress job at The Roost early and give her swelling ankles a rest. But now she was bored, as well as crabby and combative. Their daughter could not get here soon enough. She was due in eight weeks, but it’d be okay with him if she popped out a week or two early.

  He sat down before her. “I know. But it was the perfect crib, and the store was having a sale.”

  “You went to the baby store without me. I wanted to pick out her crib together.”

  It was his shameful little secret: since Jenny had been pregnant, he’d spent some time wandering around the baby store by himself. Since they’d known she was making a little girl, he’d been there probably once a week. He liked it there. It made him happy to think of things he’d give his child. He liked imagining being her father and making a home for her like he’d never had himself. But he didn’t want to confess to being so sappy, so he only shrugged and said, “Sorry.”

  She closed the booklet—it was the assembly instructions, the cover showing a color photo of the crib he’d bought. “Mav, it’s round.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s different. Cool, right?”

  “It has a canopy. And an angel carved into it. With gold wings and a halo.”

  “You don’t like it.”

  He’d seen it set up in the store, part of a display like a baby’s room, all done up with wallpaper and a fake window, and a rocker and bookcase with toys and books. It was different from all the other cribs, and it had just seemed...worthy. He could imagine her sleeping in all that pretty pinkness, opening her little eyes every morning and knowing how special she was, and he could imagine checking in on her every night before he went to bed and seeing her sleeping peacefully, wrapped up like the gift she was.

  Even on sale, it had been expensive, but who the fuck cared. He couldn’t think of anything better to spend money on than his little girl.

  He’d bought out the display—rocker, bookcase, changing table, dresser, linens. And round crib with canopy. The big square box in the corner was probably the rocker. The rest, he’d have to build.

  “It’s just—I don’t know. I feel like it’s a bit much, maybe?”

  He scooted closer, between her spread legs, and picked up her hands. “Our daughter deserves the best. Right? She’s going to want for nothing and have a perfect life, and so is her mom. I’m going to make sure my girls have everything. Always. And that will be my perfect life.”

  Jenny smiled at him. “Okay. A Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous crib for our little pixie.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Jenny opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink and reached awkwardly over the door from her perch on the toilet. She blindly snagged her box of tampons and knew as soon as she lifted it that it was empty. Dammit. Well, she couldn’t blame anyone but herself; she was the only one in the house who used them.

  She got down on her knees on the fuzzy bathroom mat and dug back for her emergency stash of maxi-pads. Ugh, she hated feeling that wad between her legs, but it was better than the alternative. She’d have to run by the market first thing.

  Once she had her ‘feminine hygiene’ in order, as she washed her hands and finished her morning routine, Jenny let herself consider her feelings about getting her period. Relief, first of all. She’d been nuts to let Maverick come inside her that night at the bar. She’d been running on adrenaline and hero worship, and she hadn’t cared about anything but what the most tender part of her heart wanted—the part that still thought of the life she’d planned with Maverick all those years ago as the life she was ‘supposed to have.’

  But that was crap, and her brain knew it. No one was ‘supposed to have’ anything. Life happened. You dealt with what happened or you didn’t. For all the plans people made, nobody had any real control over anything, because nobody could control everything.

  She was coming to understand that the best chance for making a life with Maverick was if they both stopped thinking they could undo the past and started thinking about how they would do the present. What had been couldn’t be reclaimed. They needed to figure out what was, and what would be.

  So she was relieved that their heady mistake on the floor of The Wayside had not resulted in a pregnancy. They needed no new complications between them. They already had plenty.

  But she was disappointed, too, and it did her no good to deny it. If they’d been living the life they’d been plannin
g, Kelsey would likely already have had a sibling, maybe two, by now. Jenny wanted a big family, and so did Maverick. Her biological clock had been jangling at her for a couple of years now, her nesting impulse growing stronger as Kelsey grew older, and she’d always kicked it away, knowing it was hopeless to even think about more kids when she was alone and always would be. Now, though, Maverick was back, and there was hope.

  So she was disappointed that there wasn’t a baby coming, and that she hadn’t gotten recklessly pregnant and forced the two of them to reckon with their relationship.

  Which was sick and stupid. If they needed something like that to deal with their mess, then maybe that mess wasn’t worth dealing with.

  No—not true. Over the past couple of weeks, since that night at the bar, things between them had been good. He respected her need to go slow. She could see him thinking about the way he spoke to her, and managing his impulse to control everything.

  They’d had sex one more time since she’d brought him into her bed, and it had again been beautiful. So much about them was good—had been good before and was good now—that if they could fix the things that were broken, it was worth the effort. There was a good life for them in the future, if they both worked for it.

  Maverick wasn’t the only one who needed to change. Jenny recognized that she had a hair trigger now and saw him striving to take over even when he was only expressing a different opinion. She’d gone from giving in all the time when they’d been together to making all of the decisions while he’d been away, and Maverick, poor guy, had gotten caught in the middle. Since he’d once controlled her, and he’d still tried, she jumped on him too quickly when he pushed at all.

  To his credit, he swallowed his frustration with that. He was trying to be the man she needed. She and Kelsey.

  The first problem they needed to sort out was whether each of them was, in fact, the person the other truly needed, or whether they were just stuck in the past.

  Today would be a test of that. She was taking Kelsey to the Bulls’ clubhouse that afternoon for a family-friendly party. She hadn’t seen any of the old ladies since a few weeks after Kelsey was born, when Mo had descended on the house and tried to force her ‘help’ on her. That confrontation had not gone well, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was willingly going into enemy territory.

  But the club was Maverick’s family, and he was in with them much deeper than normal family ties went. There was no Maverick in her life without the Brazen Bulls. That was even more true now than it had been before. If she couldn’t get right with them, she couldn’t get right with him.

  So it was just awesome that she’d started her period, too. Yippee.

  ~oOo~

  When she’d gone to the Sinclair station just before Kelsey’s birthday, the Bulls she’d seen had approached her with open hostility, walking toward her like a united front. When she led her daughter up the front walk to the Bulls clubhouse on this day, Eight Ball stood just outside the door, talking with someone she didn’t know, someone not wearing a kutte, so a hangaround or just a neighbor; the Bulls had always been friendly with most of their neighbors.

  Eight Ball saw her and grinned. Jenny didn’t like him—he was ninety-percent asshole and treated women like sex dolls with a pulse, if they were hot enough, like servants, if they weren’t, or like nuns, if they were off limits.

  He’d glared at her the night he’d come to the bar with Rad to help deal with her attackers. Now, he stepped away from the man he’d been talking to and came toward her. “Hi, Jenny.” He turned his smile down to Kelsey, “And hello, pretty lady.”

  Apparently, she had regained nun status in his eyes. “Hi, Eight. This is Kelsey.”

  He crouched before them. “I know. We met the other day, didn’t we?” He held out his hand, palm up, and Kelsey slapped it.

  It still bugged her—a lot—that Maverick had brought Kelsey to the clubhouse without telling her first. She wasn’t sure she’d expected him to have asked permission, exactly (okay, yes, that would have been her preference), but she absolutely expected that they would have talked about it first. He knew how she felt about this place. Yes, she’d have to come to terms with the Bulls whether she and Maverick worked out or not, because this was who he was, and she wasn’t going to keep his daughter away from him. But it had been deeply shitty of him to bring Kelsey here behind her back.

  Finding out that Kelsey had met Eight, and seemed to like him, dug at Jenny more than she’d admit.

  He stood up, still grinning. “Mav’s out back. He’s in the ring with Gunner, so...” he tilted his head toward Kelsey, and Jenny understood. Maverick was fighting. Recreationally. She didn’t need his daughter to see him like that.

  “We’ll go in the clubhouse, then.”

  Sweeping his arm in a be my guest gesture, Eight Ball stepped out of the way. “The ladies are in there. Mo’s runnin’ the show, like always.”

  Mo liked Jenny no more than Jenny liked Eight Ball, and that woman could be perfectly nice and still cut an enemy down to a nub. And nobody was more of an enemy than a woman who’d hurt one of her boys.

  Jenny stiffened her spine and locked her smile into place. “Okay. C’mon, Kelsey. I think there are some people still for you to meet.”

  Sad to say, she hoped Kelsey would be a shield. How scary could Maureen Delaney be when Jenny had an adorable four-year-old standing at her side?

  ~oOo~

  Every concern Jenny had about Mo flew straight out of her mind when she came into the party room and looked at the bar.

  There weren’t many people around. A few sweetbutts tottering about in their ridiculous shoes, obviously doing Mo’s bidding. A smattering of hangarounds or neighbors—three teenagers playing on the pornographic pinball machine, a young couple—the guy not wearing colors—standing at the jukebox, a scattered few people watching a Cardinals game on the big television. The weather was good, and there would likely be meat grilling, so most people were probably outside.

  Jenny saw all the people in the party room at a glance. When her eyes made it to the bar, she froze. Three women sat in a row, sipping drinks, and she knew them all. None of them was Mo.

  Joanna, Dane’s old lady. Maddie, Ox’s.

  And Willa.

  Willa. The nurse who’d helped her deliver Kelsey.

  Jenny would never, ever forget her. Even in jeans and a t-shirt, even sitting in profile, even sitting at the end of the bar in the Brazen Bulls’ party room, the woman was as perfectly familiar as if she’d been her own flesh and blood.

  “Willa?”

  Willa turned and smiled—not an expression of recognition but of acknowledgement. “Yes? Hi?”

  Of course she wouldn’t remember Jenny. Willa probably helped deliver dozens of babies a week, and Kelsey had been born four years ago. That was a lot of babies, and a lot of moms. Jenny had had only one. One baby. One nurse. One life changed.

  She strode up to the bar so quickly that she could feel Kelsey trying to keep up. She held out her hand. “I know you don’t remember me, but I love you.”

  Willa laughed and shook her hand. Joanna and Maddie laughed, too, but Jenny had no attention for them. “Okay? Wow.” Her eyes then drifted down, and her smile warmed and grew with understanding. “Hi, honey.” She met Jenny’s adoring gaze again. “Did I maybe meet this little sweetheart early on?”

  It occurred to Jenny that Willa had likely made a lasting impression on more women than she alone, and she was a little crestfallen at that. It seemed too important a bond to be shared. “Yes. Yes. I was alone when she came, and I was pretty much losing my mind. You stayed with me, and you got me through. You stayed even after your shift was over, and you were back checking on me the next day. You took her first picture and you...” Jenny was going to cry. “You just...you...” Yep, she was totally crying. “Everything was falling apart around me, and I didn’t think I could do it, but you helped me see that I could.” She finally released Willa’s hand, and she bent down
and picked up her daughter. “I’m Jenny. This is Kelsey. Kelsey Marie.”

  At that, Willa’s eyes widened. She remembered. “I do remember. Oh my God. Well, hi!” She held out her arms, and Jenny brought her daughter into them and held on.

  Kelsey squirmed uncomfortably. “Mommy, why are you sad?”

  Jenny stepped back and gave her a comforting squeeze. “I’m not, pixie. I’m just so happy it’s leaking out of my eyes. Miss Willa here helped me have you. She was with me when you came out of my belly. She’s a very special lady.” To Willa, she said, “I’m sorry I’m blubbering. I just...I’m surprised.”

  “So am I. How’d you find me here, of all places?”

  “I don’t think she was looking for you, Will,” Maddie answered, casting one artfully shaped eyebrow high and giving them both a droll look. “Jenny is Mav’s old lady. This is who we’ve been talkin’ about.”

  More than wonder regarding what they’d been talking about, Jenny felt shock that Willa apparently belonged here. If she was sitting with Joanna and Maddie like this, talking like this, in the clubhouse, then she, too, was an old lady. These women observed the club hierarchy like it was a religion, and they were devout. “Wait—are you an old lady?”

  Willa smiled. “Yeah. I’m with Rad. For about two and a half years now.”

  “Rad?”

  All three women facing her, even Willa, laughed hard at that. But Jenny was truly stunned. She could not picture her hero, this pretty, sweet blonde, with that gruff, short-tempered jerk. The old lady she’d known—Dahlia—had been more his style. She’d been loud and dramatic, all big tits and dyed red hair. Brassy with a streak of mean. Jenny had been around for a few of their blowouts. The amused way the Bulls watched the show had been one of the things she thought shitty about the whole club. Other people’s problems should not be entertainment.

  “Yeah, Rad. He’s softer than he looks.”

  Jenny didn’t bother to point out that she’d actually known the man, a little, and no, he was not softer. But maybe Willa had softened him. She could see that. So she smiled and gave her head a conceding little wiggle. “I heard he had a kid—so that must be yours?”