by Anne Malcom
Yes, Gage thought strangling a police officer days after he was discharged from the hospital was appropriate.
“Gage,” I murmured as Troy began to turn red. “You don’t need to be straining yourself like this.” My voice was calm and even, because I had kind of expected a version of the scenario before me.
He glanced to me, then Troy, then sighed loudly. “Fine,” he muttered, letting him go.
Troy rubbed his neck, resting the other hand on his thigh for a moment.
“I came to apologize,” he said, voice raspy.
Gage inspected him much like he would an insect I wouldn’t let him crush. “Didn’t kill you, so apology accepted. I only accept apologies once.”
And he turned on his heel and climbed the stairs.
Niles felt equally bad about employing a murderess. He was literally crying when I handed in my resignation.
“It’s not because you hired Jade,” I said. “Well, maybe it is. Because it took her almost killing me to realize that I should probably live my life. Really live it. And as much as I love you for everything you’ve done for me, I can’t live it here. Not anymore.”
He nodded through his tears. “Of course. You’ve never belonged here.” He squeezed my hand. “And that’s a good thing.”
We had moved my gallery opening to start right after our honeymoon. I was terrified.
So that meant I was doing something good.
And Gage did something that terrified him. Something that was completely and utterly good, if only it hadn’t been stained by the dirt and ugliness of the past.
He invited his parents to our wedding.
He was literally shaking when he made the call.
Gage.
Shaking.
So yeah, he’d been terrified.
And I’d been perched in his lap—because he wouldn’t let me be anywhere else—his scarred arms flexing around me with every ring of the dial tone.
By the time I heard the whisper of a voice on the other side of the phone, I was struggling to breathe, my bones protesting at Gage’s grip. But I didn’t say a thing. Because this small discomfort was nothing compared to the agony Gage was feeling right now.
And I would never let him be alone in his pain. Because he never let me be alone in mine.
Gage’s eyes were plastered to mine. His fingers were going white with the force in which he was clutching the phone. I was vaguely worried it might shatter in his hands. But I was more worried about the heart inside of the ribs of the man I loved shattering.
Because I heard the low murmur of someone on the other side of the phone, the light and soft tenor to it had me guessing it was his mom.
But Gage was silent.
He was too terrified to speak.
The man who made bombs on Sundays, who killed drug dealers without blinking, who punched police officers, who walked in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and was afraid of none of that ugliness, was afraid of the utter goodness that was his mother.
Because nothing could hurt you more than beauty.
I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his, not letting his eyes go. I didn’t speak, he didn’t need words. He needed strength.
The strongest man I’d ever met needed strength. From me.
So I gave it to him.
And he spoke.
The conversation was clipped. On his side at least. I could hear a lot from the other side of the phone.
“So you’ll come to the wedding?” Gage asked. “Meet my Lauren?”
His arms flexed around me.
My heart flexed in my chest.
So they were here, waiting to watch their son—who they thought they’d lost forever—get married.
We’d met them yesterday when they arrived.
They weren’t what I was expecting.
I guessed I expected the mammoth presence that was Gage to be sprouted from two big and burly parents, with stern expressions and hard edges.
But everything about his parents was soft.
His mom was tiny. Shorter than me and in heeled wedges.
She had been pretty once.
Before the world had ripped through all her beauty and happiness and drained it from her. Deep lines were etched into her elven face, her hair graying and piled artfully atop her head.
But it all disappeared, and the beautiful woman she once was appeared the second she glimpsed Gage and I.
His hands tightened around mine.
She came running toward us.
I expected her to yank Gage into her embrace, and I guessed he expected it too, since his entire body was taut. But it was me she yanked into her arms. And for a small woman, she had strength. I shouldn’t have been surprised. You needed strength to go through what she did and still stand. Still live.
She smelled of vanilla.
“Thank you,” she sobbed, her arms iron around me. “Thank you for bringing him back to us.”
I let her hold me for a long time, until the first wave of her tears had dried against my shirt.
Gage’s father was dry eyed when she let me go. And he was just staring at Gage in utter wonder, still, as if he were afraid he’d disappear if he moved.
“Dad,” Gage grunted, his voice throaty and uneven.
The older, smaller, graying man in front of the larger one with his eyes flinched with the single word.
And then he reached up, slow as anything and trailed his finger along Gage’s temple.
“Christian,” he murmured, cupping his face. “My boy.” He paused, looking to me with kind eyes filled with agony. “My man,” he corrected.
It wasn’t easy and soft from there. There was still a long way to go. But we had time.
And Gage’s parents were good people. They were going to wait for their son. They had waited decades already.
Gage’s terror had given way to something that would turn into a good thing.
I was terrified of this day. But that was a good thing too.
I finally picked up the phone.
“Hey,” I murmured. “I’m going to see you at the other end of an aisle in T minus ten.” I glanced at my racy lingerie in the mirror.
“Are you in your dress?” he clipped, voice rough.
I smiled, my palms resting on the ivory lace of my corset, tight enough to push my modest bosom up and loose enough to make sure I could breathe. I had matching frilly boy-short white panties on with a matching garter belt, attached to sheer white stockings with lace trimming the top edge.
“No, I’m not in my dress,” I whispered, my stomach already dipping at the thought of what he’d do to me once he saw this.
There was nothing but a low hiss of breath on the other end of the phone, then dead air.
I blinked.
Did he just hang up on me?
Minutes before our wedding?
Now, I knew my biker was brusque and all tough guy and had to hold on to his badass card and make sure he didn’t have long and soulful conversations in public, but it was his wedding day.
Surely he could handle a “Love you, baby. See you soon, and I’ll make my life by marrying you.” Okay, he couldn’t handle that, but a clipped “I love you, babe” would’ve sufficed.
As I was about to redial and say just that, the door to the small room flew open. I expected it to be my grandmother. Amy. Lucy. Or Bex. Or Gwen. Or perhaps Mia. Or any of the crazy women who had befriended me throughout the courtship, who had been my rocks throughout the whole thing. I’d gained not only a soul mate through this but a whole girl posse.
It wasn’t my girl posse though.
It was the biker in question.
And fuck, did he look hot.
And deadly.
He was in black, head to toe. Suit—with his motorcycle boots on, obviously—tailored to perfection, black shirt underneath, open collar, his tattoos snaking up his chest, his hair fastened in a small but sleek ponytail and beard trimmed.
He paused for maybe a fraction of a second as he took
me in much the same way I was him—with pure and unadulterated hunger.
Then, like always, he recovered and slammed the door shut, the brutal sound jarring me from my perusal.
“I can’t believe you hung up on me!” I shouted, narrowing my eyes at him, then looking down and remembering what day it was and how he was supposed to see this after we exchanged our vows.
“Wait! You can’t see me,” I screeched, covering his eyes as he crossed the room in two strides to snatch me into his arms. “It’s bad luck to see the bride on her wedding day,” I groaned.
His fingers bit into my hips and immediately moved to delve into my panties—which, of course, had been soaking wet since the second he’d appeared in the doorway.
Well, the second he’d growled at me on the phone, actually.
He entered me without warning and I gasped, my hands falling from his face to reveal his carnal gaze.
“We’ve had our fair share of bad luck,” he told me, right after he’d kissed me senseless and slammed me against the wardrobe, his fingers still coaxing me to climax. “We make our own, remember, baby?” he murmured against my mouth. “You’re my luck, my fate, my destiny. And I’ll be making sure my woman is walking down the aisle with my cum inside her and the memory of my cock in her pussy.”
And forty-five minutes later—when the ceremony was supposed to start twenty minutes earlier—I did just that.
Gage
Five Months Later
Gage was on his way out for Ben & Jerry’s.
For the second time that night.
That was because the first batch he’d bought “smelled weird.” He hadn’t even blinked, merely threw the full tub of ice cream in the trash—though it smelled just fine—kissed Lauren hard on the mouth, soft on the belly and then walked out the door for more ice cream.
He wasn’t skulking into the darkness for a fix, or to kill someone. No, he was searching for ice cream that didn’t smell weird for his pregnant wife.
His beautiful, magnificent, pregnant wife, who he’d thought already carried the whole world inside her before. Now she held the whole universe.
It wasn’t easy. Descending the stairs was pure pain, fucking leaving her for a handful of minutes to get ice cream torture. A dark shadow of his mind told him to abandon the ice cream, the utter pain and terror mixed with the joy at watching Lauren grow with their child, to chase nothing.
That voice would always be there.
He’d always battle against it.
But Lauren was worth it. Every fucking second of that battle.
So he was battling when he found Anna on the doorstep. She had been in Amber for the last three months “to watch Lauren get fat,” but Gage knew better. Because the woman was terrified just like him. Of how good things were.
And he fucking liked having the crazy woman around. You never knew what would come out of her mouth, what her day brought. She’d demanded Gage show her how to blow things up two days before. “I assume you know how,” she’d said with an arched brow.
He grinned. “Oh, I fucking know how.”
So he and his wife’s eighty-year-old grandmother blew shit up while his wife lay on a sun lounger—a very comfortable distance away—reading a book and tanning.
Yeah, that was his life.
He was surprised to find her out in the shadows, as she wasn’t a woman who was built for them. Not the physical ones, at least. She was chasing the spotlight because of the shadows chasing her. He was also surprised to see the ember flickering a few inches from her mouth, flaring with her inhale, dimming with the plume of smoke she blew into the night.
He was surprised, but of course he didn’t show it. Emotion was cloaked out of habit, survival. It was a hard thing to shake. He could only manage to shift his mask with Lauren. And he suspected it would stay that way forever. Because people could change, if they met the right—or the wrong—person. If that person was the fucking stars in the sky and the oxygen in their lungs, the pain in their soul.
But even then people didn’t change much.
Cade still never smiled at anyone but his girls.
Bull barely spoke more than five words to anyone but his wife, and she didn’t let him get in the words he did speak.
Bex only let Lucky touch her for a prolonged amount of time.
In their lifestyle, as with most things, more was more.
But in those particular aspects, less was everything.
“Didn’t know you smoked,” he said, leaning against the cool brick, inhaling the salt air that he associated with Lauren. Fuck, he associated everything with her.
Anna let out a choked cackle. “I don’t.”
Gage didn’t say anything, didn’t even look pointedly at the flaming stick proving her wrong. He just looked toward the ocean.
“Want one?” she offered after a companionable silence. She was a woman who knew how to talk. She also knew when to shut up.
“Gave up,” he grunted in answer.
She gave him a sideways look. “Ah, Lauren?” she guessed.
He nodded once.
“With some women, it’s not what you’d do for them. It’s what you’d give up for them.” She smiled. “My granddaughter can recite all the risks of dying, but she didn’t seem to grasp the concept of living. Actively shied away from it, in fact. Until recently.”
She let the silence hang.
“You know, happiness is a farce,” she said, inhaling deeply. “Heartbreak isn’t rare. Or special. It’s wretchedly common, actually. I would hazard a guess that there’re more broken humans wandering around this world with their shattered dreams encased in a blacked heart.” She took an inhale. “Present company included. Love isn’t rare. It’s also wretchedly common. That’s why heartbreak is, you see. It rarely ever works. We’re flawed, mortal. We die easily. Lie even easier. Life happens, destroys beautiful things. Or then we destroy the same beautiful things because we’re sure life’s going to anyway and we want to be first in. But you know what’s rare? Decidedly uncommon?” She nodded to the door. “What you have with her. I’m not going to call it beautiful, because I’m an old lady who’s seen enough of the world to know that kind of love isn’t beautiful. But it is the rarest thing on the planet. I think now, after everything, even the way life has showed you how it destroys beauty, you’ll make sure it doesn’t destroy that. And then make sure you don’t destroy it either. Because then I’d have to kill you.”
And then she walked back into the house.
Gage had had a lot of death threats in his life. A few had even tried to make good on those threats. He’d buried every one of those people.
Not once did he hear one as convincing as the one from his woman’s eighty-year-old grandmother.
It was only two days later that Gage found out Anna was not just there to witness miracles and dole out death threats.
No, she was there to live out the last of her life.
He found out because he came home early to pick up the “normal-smelling ice cream” from the freezer while she was at a barbeque at the club.
Not one single man said a word at the fact that he jumped at her request.
They couldn’t.
They’d all done the exact same thing.
They were all fucking whipped.
And fucking happy.
So that’s when he found Anna laying a note on the kitchen island. To her credit, she didn’t try to hide it, didn’t try to cover up.
“Fuck,” she sighed. “I always wanted to do the cool thing and disappear like they do in the movies, but I guess I’m sprung.”
She handed the note to Gage.
He read it, then crumpled it in his hands.
“You can’t just disappear,” he growled, the first time he’d ever gotten like that with Anna. “It’d kill Lauren.” He shook with the knowledge of just how much it would hurt her.
“Oh, but I can,” Anna said. “Because I know it won’t kill her. I’m looking at the man who’ll make sure of t
hat. Who, in fact, is proof that pain doesn’t kill my beautiful and strong granddaughter.”
He clenched his fists. “You’d be that selfish?” he spat, not locking it down even if he was in front of a dying woman. The good guy might. Gage was not that. “Deny her a goodbye?”
Anna smiled with twinkling eyes. “Ah, but that’s what you get to do when you’re dying. Be selfish.”
Gage narrowed his eyes. “We’re all fucking dying,” he hissed.
She nodded. “True. But I’m just unable to escape the fact. And I’m not denying her a goodbye. I’m denying myself the ugliness of my demise. I don’t fear leaving this world. Just the people in it.”
She walked forward to cup Gage’s face. “But I know you’ll keep her wild. And she’ll keep you safe. And that beautiful great-grandchild of mine will bring all sorts of chaos and pain, but most of all, beauty.”
And then she stepped away and walked out the door.
Gage didn’t see her again.
Not alive, at least.
And he didn’t utter a word of the conversation to Lauren. The only secret in the world he’d ever keep from her.
Lauren
Three Months Later
I stared at the slab of rock accusing me with its ugly truth.
A tear rolled down my cheek.
It was quickly brushed away by the man holding me in his arms.
One scarred arm was resting on the swell of my belly, as it was almost constantly, the other trying to wipe away my pain.
“She couldn’t have held on long enough to meet her great-grandchild?” I choked. “We’re supposed to hold on for that. Death is supposed to wait for that.”
Gage kissed my temple. “She held on longer than she was supposed to, with all that pain she was carrying around, Will,” he murmured. “And death doesn’t wait for anyone.”
His words weren’t light, full of lies to try to cover up the ugliness of my grief. No, they were harsh but gentle.
Painful.
Exactly what I needed.
I gazed down at the stone.
Anna Garden.
She loved life.
It loved her back.
She was also a stone-cold fox.
And she was Mick’s.