by Zoey Parker
Asher put in an order at the counter for two bagel sandwiches and some coffees, then found a little table in a nook in the back for us to sit in. I quickly decided I liked the ambiance of the place. The walls were dark hardwood, finished with a nice shiny coat. There were dimmed lights with shades that looked like they were dual-toned stained glass, though they might have only been coated plastic.
The tables were small and mismatched, so the whole place looked eclectic and a little eccentric rather than overly refined like so many places here in Mount Cherry. I appreciated the warm smells and the soft, toned down feeling of the whole place, though I thought it was a little weird to come here with a biker, of all people.
“Have you been here before?” he asked, sipping his coffee.
I nursed my own, then shook my head. “No. I mean, I’ve been to the bookstore portion of it. Just to pick up things for class,” I explained quickly, not wanting him to get the wrong idea. “But I’ve never stopped at the café.”
“Not even for a coffee?” he asked, surprised.
“Nope. Not even.”
He smiled at me, a strangely sweet smile. It wasn’t filled with the same insatiable lust or the cockiness I was starting to associate with him, though I was sure those things lingered there, too. Instead, he seemed almost… sweet. Tender.
I shook the thought from my head. I was imagining things. It was just the hormones.
Taking a sip of the coffee, I turned the question back on him. “I wouldn’t really think a biker would come to a place like this.”
He laughed at that. “No, I suppose I don’t really look the part, do I?”
I shook my head. “But then you also don’t really look like you belong in Mount Cherry. What brought you here?”
He grew pensive, considering my question. He took a sip of his coffee and thought about it a while longer before finally saying, “Family.”
I blinked at him in surprise. He was from Mount Cherry? I knew he had some bad blood with my dad—well, anyone in the Anarchy’s Horsemen did—but I didn’t realize that he was actually from here. Most of the older guys in the club seemed to be out-of-towners. Some had been here for several years now, of course, but they hadn’t grown up here. Did Asher? I found myself wondering. “You have family here? Were you born here?”
He shook his head. “No, not born here. I was actually born over in Kirkland, about two hours or so from here. I moved down here when my father dumped my mother and me. She insisted on a new start and seemed to think we could have it here.”
“Wow. Sorry to hear about your dad.” I suddenly felt bad for bringing any of this up at all. “He sounds like a real ass.”
Asher stared at me for a while, then gave me a half smile. “Seems like we have that much in common.”
I let out a bark of a laugh. “Yeah, but for completely different reasons. Your dad didn’t want to deal with the responsibility. Mine doesn’t want to deal with my irresponsibility.” I winced as soon as I say it, realizing that talking about his abandoning dirtbag of a father probably wasn’t the best choice.
He stiffened momentarily but then forced his shoulders to relax. “Sometimes it’s debatable which is worse. But I know that I don’t want to be like either of them.”
I frowned a little. Sometimes I almost forgot about the baby that was slowly growing inside of me, but then something would come up that snapped me back into reality mode. I remembered that I was two months along and that it was very quickly becoming decision time. But now that I was starting to get to know Asher, I began to wonder if the reason he was so insistent that I think about what I wanted regarding this baby was because he really didn’t want to be an asshole.
Maybe he doesn’t want to be like his father, I thought suddenly, and a wash of guilt went through me. He didn’t sign up for this, but he still wanted to do right by this unborn child that might never be. Me, on the other, hand just wanted to get rid of it and go on having fun. I couldn’t help but wonder if that made me a jerk.
Deciding it might not be the wisest choice to talk about this now, but that I needed to, I clutched my coffee and asked, “Do you think I’m selfish? For… Well, you know.” I glanced around the little café furtively, suddenly aware that this was not the best place to be talking about this.
Asher looked at me in surprise. “Selfish?” he repeated, a little incredulous. “You’re, what, nineteen?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I won’t be twenty until this December.”
“And you think it’s selfish to want to go back to school? To not want to drop out to become a mother when you’re barely not a kid yourself?” He shook his head. “Maybe it was a little irresponsible of us—”
“You think?” I raised a delicate eyebrow at him.
He smirked at me. “Okay, definitely irresponsible. Irresponsible to jump in the sack without thinking things through or preparing for the consequences of it. But people make mistakes. You don’t have to pay for all of them the rest of your life just because you were young and stupid once—just like everyone else.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s the right choice for some; the wrong for others. I think the most important thing is that you’re committed to your choice and that it’s the one that you honestly, in your heart, want to make. If that’s selfish, then we should all be a little more selfish, don’t you think?”
I mulled that over in my mind, considering what he was saying. “Maybe,” I finally admitted.
Smiling softly at me, he reached across the table between us and pried one of my hands free from my coffee mug. He gripped it. “Better to be sure you want a kid to raise than to raise one you’re not sure of. Much less likely to make that kid feel like an unwanted piece of shit, you know?”
I squeezed his hand back and told myself he was right. But it didn’t do anything as far as making my decision for me. I told myself I still didn’t want the baby—but was that the truth?
Chapter Ten
Asher
I dropped her off at her car and watched as she drove away. I made sure she was out of there before turning back to go to the shop. Outside the door I found myself hesitating, part of me dreading the fall out I’d have to deal with inside.
They weren’t supposed to know about her, I thought, a spike of uncertainty that was almost fear racing through me.
It wasn’t that I was ashamed of Carol or what we’d done together. Hell, I wasn’t even worried as far as taking responsibility for the baby went. That was what it was, and if there was a man inside that building right then who didn’t know what that was all about, then they weren’t old enough to throw in on it.
Instead, it was a concern of how they would react to her—and how she would react to them. If Carol decided to get rid of the baby, I had promised I would support her, and I would. But letting her see this side of my life, and the people in it see her, could potentially cause problems. If they knew she was pregnant and then learned that she wasn’t? That probably was not going to help out with my “family man” image. And what if she stayed?
I frowned. What if she stayed? It was something I hadn’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to consider in all honesty. This was a week stint together, a crash course in living with someone else and making hasty decisions. But I still wasn’t sure what any of that meant.
Do I really want her hanging around for an extended period? I wondered, my hand hovering over the door handle.
Sure, the sex was great—hot and dirty and everything I liked—but sex alone wasn’t enough to build on. There were plenty of women I’d had a good time with in the sack. I didn’t feel like spending time outside of bed with any of them. Would Carol be any different? I had enjoyed talking with her at the café. I’d even opened up to her, which was pretty damn unusual in and of itself.
Before I had time to think any further on it, thank God, the door was jerked out of my hand as someone on the inside pulled it open.
I looked up to see Winston grinning down at me, his big beefy arms folded across his musc
led chest. “You comin’ in or just going to stand there like a damn life-size doorstop?”
Sighing, I shook my head and stepped past him into the shop. Bane looked up instantly and leaned forward eagerly. “So?” he asked.
I glanced between him and Winston, who was still standing beside me but had let the door close. “So?” I repeated with a raised eyebrow.
Winston rolled his eyes, then came forward, clapping a heavy hand on my shoulder. I felt the weight of it, the urge to sag beneath it strong, but I resisted. “C’mon, don’t hold out on us. That sexy little Carol of yours is sure a cutie. And she seems into PDA. Hard to go wrong with that.” His grin widened until I could see a silver cap towards the back of his mouth.
“Look, she’s just… staying with me for a little bit,” I muttered, not sure how to stall the inevitable train wreck her appearance was. “It’s not a big—”
“She’s staying with you?” exclaimed Bane, coming around the counter, so he was standing beside me. “Wow, I didn’t think you’d reached that point already. I mean, that’s a huge step.”
I tried to butt in and correct him—explain that this wasn’t so much of a step as it was a necessary arrangement to figure out whether or not I was going to be a father any time soon. But apparently, I wasn’t going to get the real story out, because Winston let out a belly laugh that boomed through the little room. I imagined pools of water rippling and buildings shaking, though that was a little excessive. Winston just made you think of giants whenever you saw him. He was a big boy.
“Leave it to you, Boss,” he said, teasing good-naturedly. “We tell you to go get yourself a family, and you do it while none of us are looking.” He shook his head, still grinning. “Did you knock her up, too?”
I stiffened. I did my best to keep my expression blank, clear of any telltale signs that might show that I actually had gotten her knocked up. I had a feeling she wouldn’t be thrilled about these guys knowing that piece of information. Hell, I wasn’t thrilled with the idea myself, and I knew these guys.
Despite my best efforts, however, it seemed that something had slipped through my reserve. Winston noticed it first. His hand slipped from my shoulder, and he took a step back, his eyes widening slightly and his jaw dropping just a little. He stared at me as though I’d grown a second head or something, then he let out a low whistle. “Shit, Boss. Really?”
I began to shake my head. “No, it’s not—”
Bane was glancing between the two of us, confused. “Really what? What did I miss?” he demanded, gaze still darting between the two of us. “What’s going on?”
I turned to him but didn’t get the chance to say a damn thing.
“The boss is going to be a daddy,” Winston boomed, and now I knew there wasn’t a soul in the place that didn’t know that I had knocked up that pretty little girl who had come in looking for me.
Shit. This is not going to go well.
***
I spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with questions from my men. I was right: Winston’s booming announcement had made sure everyone in the shop had heard it, including customers who were eyeing me curiously now and again. I ignored them at least. I owed them nothing.
But my guys were a bit more difficult to fend off. They were equal parts suspicious—Horton’s faction within the club was following him over the whole family thing in the first place—and thrilled by the idea of me and Carol together. I thought it was strange, but Winston spoke of her like she was the perfect angel.
“She’s fucking cute,” he told Adam, who was tattooing a big burly man who was in a suit but had taken off the top half except for the wife beater beneath it. He was listening curiously, but not rudely so. He just couldn’t help overhearing the conversation given that he was sitting right in the middle of it. “And sexy, too, but fucking cute, you know? She’s got one of those faces, like a damn angel, and she’s so petite. Looks perfect next to the boss.”
Adam was nodding, looking the part of bored, but I could tell that he was listening attentively. He was interested in what was going on, and it was then that I really realized that having a woman at my side was going to be an important part of my role as leader.
“And she’s nice, too,” Bane chimed in. “She was really polite when she came in today.”
I rolled my eyes. Bane was easily charmed by the fairer sex, though he preferred older women. Now that I thought about it, though, that probably had a lot to do with the politeness he’d just accused Carol of. I wanted to tell him she wasn’t so polite in bed, though she said please a lot, but I refrained. What happened between Carol and me in the sack was between us.
“How long you guys been together?” asked Cameron, a middle-aged man who had a growing bald spot in the middle of his head. It made him prone to wearing hats, and he had about a dozen of them, mostly faded Yankees caps.
I opened my mouth to answer, but Winston headed me off. “Long enough for her to move in with him.” He winked at me as Cameron’s eyebrows shot through the roof.
“Damn, I didn’t think it was that serious!”
I was about to tell him it wasn’t, but what came out of my mouth ended up being a little different instead. “She only just moved in. Yesterday. It’s a new arrangement for both of us.” What I’d intended to say was that this was a temporary arrangement and that we hadn’t been together long, that we weren’t technically together at all. But I didn’t say that, and I didn’t correct myself either.
Cameron whistled. “Quite the commitment. She must be something special for old hard heart here to cave.”
I frowned at that. Hard heart? I hadn’t considered what my bachelor lifestyle said about me before, not until very recently. And when I did, I had arrived at the conclusion that it had made me look strong, tough. Now, I wasn’t so sure. I might have commented on it, but Cameron was just teasing, his tone light and even affectionate. I wasn’t really close to him like I was some of the guys, but at that moment, I felt as though he was fully on my side.
And that was something I needed these days.
“What can I say?” I answered, smiling cockily. “Can’t let some other asshole swoop in and snatch her up.”
My words brought out the desired reaction in not only Cameron but everyone else, too. The guys laughed and offered their agreement. They started talking and joking amongst themselves, talking about their own partners or kids, blunders and first loves. Mostly it was joking around, but I could see by the satisfied look in Winston’s eye that he’d known this was going to be the result. He’d played this out perfectly, I realized, and his booming announcement in the front hadn’t been as accidental as I might have initially thought.
You sly dog, I thought, but couldn’t really make myself be mad about it.
In one afternoon, I’d started to win guys over, and all it had taken was one woman with full hips and a sweet, sultry smile. Who would have guessed?
***
When I finally got home, I felt lighter than I had in a long time. Since taking over the Anarchy’s Horsemen, as a matter of fact. It was a lot more work than it seemed from the outside looking in and it took its toll on me. I had never been the sort of man who dealt with things softly, with a subtle hand. If there was resentment, I responded to it with a heavy hand of violence. If I felt like there was dissension, I beat it down with my fist.
Which was half the reason I was in this mess with Horton to begin with. I had called on my lieutenants, and they had offered me advice. Advice I hadn’t thought myself capable of taking.
But now?
I shrugged off my jacket and threw it onto the back of one of the armchairs in the living room adjacent from the door. “Carol?” I called, wondering if she was around. I saw her car parked out front, but she could have gone for a walk to explore the area, or she might have been taking a nap. I winced when I thought of that and decided to keep my mouth shut until I knew for sure. No sense waking her up; she was pregnant after all.
But as I walked tow
ards the stairs to see if she was asleep in my room rather than the guest room I’d offered her—call it wishful thinking—I noticed a savory smell wafting in from the kitchen on my right. I poked my head in and was surprised to see Carol was there. She had an apron thrown over her blouse, and I noticed immediately that she wasn’t wearing pants. Only a thong. My gaze lingered on her round, perky ass and I felt myself instantly grow hard.
Oh, the things she does to me, I thought, wondering if I could get her in the mood right here in the kitchen.
She glanced over her shoulder then, tossing her messy, wild blonde hair out of the way as she did so. A smile bloomed on her lips. “Hey, honey, how was your day?” She said it in a low, sultry tone and was clearly teasing.