by Jessie Cooke
Jessie Cooke
Redline Publishing
About this Book
Edition #2: November 2019
The Skulls Books are about the Skulls clubs, its members, and non-members who influence Skulls life.
Sometimes a story will be about a specific member of the club and other times about a person who is not a patched member, but is connected in some way to the Skulls club life, and who may or may not become patched in a later story.
It’s all about giving you the Stories of the Skulls which is much more than just its patched members.
This gives me a lot more scope to write the stories that I want to share with you.
Ensuring you have the Latest Edition.
At the top of this page is the edition number for this book. You can check on my website www.jessiecooke.com to see whether you have the latest edition, and if you have an earlier edition of any book or collection, you can contact Amazon support and ask them to send you the latest version.
Why do I do this?
So you always have the opportunity to have the best version of any story, whether it has been updated for some late editing changes, or because the story details have changed slightly to clarify content that might be confusing readers.
I’m always trying to present the best reading experience and if that means updating a book, that’s what I will do.
I hope you enjoy this book,
Jessie.
Contents
Don’t Miss Out
Description
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
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Description
When you’re teased and tormented as a kid, about everything you’re not able to change about yourself, you grow up tough on the outside, but shattered in a million pieces on the inside. Steve was a poor kid, thrust into a world where people had everything he thought he wanted, but couldn’t have. He was bullied for being “different” and made to believe he was “less than” everyone else.
Ten years later, Steve is now Sledge, an enforcer for the Westside Skulls. He found a place where he could put his tough skin to use, and people weren’t constantly judging him. He loves life in the MC. He works hard and he plays harder, and he never lacks for female companionship. For once in his life he has everything he wants or needs. Well…almost everything.
Daria Ford had it all growing up. Money, looks, popularity…everything except what she really wanted, the one thing that would make her happy. Daria wanted Steve and since she was used to getting what she wanted, she was shocked when her plans went sideways, and she was left feeling embarrassed and rejected.
Ten years later Daria is still searching for fulfillment. She has a good life, but she’s not happy. She’s always felt like something was missing and when she started writing romance novels for a living, it seemed to fill the void, at least for a while. Funny thing was that all the heroes in her books looked and sounded a lot like Steve, her high school crush.
When Daria accidentally crashes head first back into Sledge’s life, will these two people come together and find what they’ve both been looking for all along? Or will Sledge’s insecurities rule his heart, and Daria’s imagination fool hers?
Prologue
New York City, 2007
“Baby, why aren’t you dressed? You’re going to be late.”
Steve sat on the edge of his bed, dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees. It was his “uniform” at home, much more comfortable than the button-down white shirt, blue tie, and blue slacks he had to wear to school five days a week. It was Friday night…homecoming…and Steve had been voted homecoming king.
“I’m not going, Mom.”
“What? You have to go! You’re homecoming king!” She beamed with so much pride that Steve was surprised she didn’t actually light up the room. It was going to break his heart to tell her…but he couldn’t have her sitting in the bleachers and watching his humiliation from the sidelines. He’d put it off as long as he could.
“Mom…I’m pretty sure it’s a joke.”
She pulled her brows together. “A joke? I don’t understand.”
“Mom…they wouldn’t have voted me homecoming king on purpose, unless it was a joke. They’re going to do something to embarrass me, and I don’t want you there, watching. I don’t want to be there. I give them enough ammo at school every day.”
His mother looked crushed and it made his heart hurt. She sat down next to him on the bed and after a few silent moments she said, “Have you been getting bullied?” Steve had been bullied since the day he started middle school. He was from a whole different world than the rest of the students at the private school he attended. The neighborhood he lived in was an old one, the houses were run-down, the yards unkempt, and most people worked two jobs, or twelve-hour shifts, to support their families and still couldn’t make ends meet. The other students lived in high-rise penthouses in Manhattan, or old mansions in Chelsea. They were kids who had never known what it felt like to want anything. Steve had grown up wanting so many things…but mostly, just to be accepted.
He wasn’t completely alone any longer. He had two really good friends and he didn’t think he could have done any better than his mother for a parent…so things weren’t all that bad. But the rich kids found some kind of sick pleasure in constantly reminding him that he didn’t fit in…and he’d managed to keep that from his mother the whole time. That was the one advantage to having to take two buses to get across town to school every morning, and having a mother who usually couldn’t take off work to come to school events. She was so proud of him for his achievements, and he wanted to keep it that way. He never wanted her to know what an outcast he was…but if she was going to find out, it wasn’t going to be by watching her son get humiliated.
“No, Mom, they don’t bully me,” he lied. “Look at me, I’m huge. They’d be stupid to start anything with me.”
She put her hand on his big arm. He was huge. He was a senior in high school and already six-foot-three and over two hundred pounds of muscle. A lot of his time was spent working out with some old weights his brother’d left in the basement. It helped clear his head and it was how he got rid of the aggression that built up throughout the day. “But you’d never hurt anyone, and they can probably sense that. Steve, please talk to me.”
“I am talking to you, Mom. Things are okay. Mostly they leave me alone, but I’m different from them, you know that. I’m not even a little bit popular. I know this is a joke and I’d rather just stay home and skip the humiliation, okay?”
She nodded. “Of course. I’d never want to see you hurt like that. But please promise me you’ll let me know if there’s more going on, okay? I just get the feeling…”
“Nothing more is going on, Mom
, really.” The phone began to ring, and he was relieved when his mom got up to answer it. They had a home phone and she had a cell phone, but Steve didn’t have one now. He had…he’d had a phone that his mother probably worked forty hours of overtime to buy for him. It had been tossed in the toilet at school by some of those kids who “didn’t” bully him. His best friend had kicked the guy’s ass and gotten suspended from school for three days because of it. Steve was called a coward by everyone else for not fighting for himself. He wasn’t a coward. He was afraid, though. He was afraid that if he threw that first punch, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He was afraid of killing someone.
His mother appeared in the doorway a few seconds later and said, “That was the school principal, Mr. Gamble.”
“What did he want?” Gamble was old money and he looked down on Steve as much as the other kids did. As part of his scholarship agreement, Steve had to work in the school office ten hours a week. Between that and the two-hour bus ride each way, he wasn’t even able to get a job after school and help his mother out. He couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of that school and out of New York, away from all the hateful, snobby people.
She sat down next to him again and she looked like she was going to cry. Laying her head over on his big shoulder she said, “You are so good. You know that? No matter what anyone tells you, you’re pure goodness, and if they treat you badly it’s because they’re jealous of your intelligence and your heart…”
“Mom, I love that you’re trying not to hurt me, but I’m a big boy. Just give it to me straight…what did he say?”
“The girl…the one who was supposed to be homecoming queen…she told the principal that you’ve made inappropriate advances toward her, and she wasn’t comfortable being queen to your kind.” Before Steve could say anything she quickly said, “I know it’s a lie. I told him, that’s not you. He said that without proof he couldn’t really punish you in any way…it’s a ‘he said, she said’ situation. But in light of what she did say, he had to disqualify you from being homecoming king.”
Steve’s chest burned with…hate, maybe? He wasn’t sure what the feeling was. For the longest time, he thought he was in love with one of his best friends, but when he figured out his two best friends were in love with each other, he promised himself he’d never do anything about that. Then, all of a sudden one of the prettiest, smartest girls at school started paying attention to him. He’d been suspicious at first, but she’d hung out with him and his friends more than once, and he had begun to believe she was serious about wanting to date him. Surprisingly, she invited him to her sister’s wedding. It was a huge affair that made him sick to his stomach, but at the same time he couldn’t remember ever being happier…because he was with Daria.
Also, surprisingly however, Daria drank at her sister’s wedding…a lot. No one seemed to notice the seventeen-year-old girl finishing off everyone’s wine, or champagne, or even their hard liquor except for Steve. He didn’t want to lecture her on their first date, however, so he kept his mouth shut too…until she took him up to her room on the floor that the entire family had rented in the hotel for the occasion. She started kissing him, and it was amazing. His teenage hormones were raging, and he wanted nothing more than to have sex with the beautiful girl. But she was drunk, and he knew that would be wrong. He’d never want to take advantage of her. When she started undressing and he told her to stop…she freaked out. She even threw things at him and told him he would be sorry. How dare a guy like him turn down a girl like her?
In the past, she had never been one of the group of kids who picked on him. But after that night, she was true to her word…and it was another reason why he was sure the homecoming king thing was a joke. They probably knew he wouldn’t show up. He was smarter than that…so this had been their back-up plan. She made him look like a predator when all he’d been trying to do was conserve her dignity. So yeah, maybe it was hate he was feeling…or maybe it was love, flowing out of his heart and turning into acid in his veins. Maybe love was going to be as elusive to him as it had always been for his poor mother. Maybe he was just that unlovable.
1
“You’re almost thirty years old.”
“Really?” Daria laughed. “Thanks for letting me know. Believe it or not, however, I do know how old I am.”
With a heavy sigh, Daria’s sister Liza, the supermodel, folded her arms across her ample chest and eyed her little sister with her big, round hazel orbs. “You know what I mean, Daria. You have been dating losers since you were sixteen years old. You’ve never even come close to a serious relationship. Sometimes I think you live for the drama these assholes stir up in your life. You’re killing Mother and Father…”
“Oh, please! Mom and Dad expect me to fail. They’ve expected it since I was a little girl. You are their success story. You’re a cover girl with her own clothing line and a full line of skin care products. You have the two most beautiful kids on the planet and a husband that walked right out of the pages of a fairy tale. They’ll live forever just on all of that. I’m an afterthought to them and not anywhere near important enough to ‘kill them.’ Trust me, I’m a blip on their screen.”
“Daria, that’s not true. They love you and you’re as important to them as I am. But you’ve been terrorizing them since high school. Case in point…the date you brought to my wedding.” Daria felt a sharp stab of pain and regret in her heart when she thought about Steve. It was something she never admitted out loud, to anyone. Liza was still talking. “He was wearing blue jeans and a blazer that looked like he bought it at the Goodwill store…”
“It was all he could afford,” she said, defending him for the first time in a decade. Something she should have done back then and something she’d never forgive herself for not doing. “You know, being poor doesn’t make a person a loser.”
Liza folded her arms and raised a perfectly shaped eyebrow as she said, “Asher Bennett IV was in town for his father’s funeral a few months ago. Allison says Asher is part of a motorcycle gang now…and that Steve is the one that got him into it. Supposedly he told everyone he got a scholarship out there and it turns out he just moved out there and joined a gang. He was a loser, and he still is. I sometimes wonder if your problems with men didn’t all start with him. It was after my wedding that you got all weird and stopped dating anyone who wasn’t on the verge of being arrested…or overdosing, or God knows what all else.”
“Steve wasn’t a loser. He was really smart, actually. He was so smart that he got a scholarship to go to our school in the first place…”
“Case in point, he wasn’t ever one of us. That’s what attracted you, right? You’re so intent on not being who you were born to be. Our father has worked his entire life to give us everything, and you show your gratitude for that by bringing home men that spend the evening casing the joint.”
Daria laughed at that. Liza was being dramatic, as usual. She’d never brought home a man that would steal from her parents. She dated a few of them, but those she’d kept away from her family. Liza shouldn’t put Steve in a group with any of those other men, however. He was a good kid, and like she said, really smart. He had the potential to become anything he wanted to be. If he did turn out to have joined a gang, that made Daria sad. Hopefully that was just gossip. Allison Bennett was a terrible woman and Daria wouldn’t put it past her to spread rumors about anyone, especially someone like Steve.
Poor Steve had never been good enough for anyone. He was a scholarship student in an exclusive, private high school in Manhattan. He was bigger than everyone in the school…some of the kids called him “the Hulk” behind his back. He was poor and even his uniforms looked worn, tattered, and occasionally stained. He might as well have worn a target on his back with a sign that said, “Bully me, please.” She’d felt terrible for him, but feeling sorry for him wasn’t why Daria had wanted to date him. She wouldn’t have ever admitted it to her friends back then, but she was incredibly attracted to him. His hair was always sha
ggy, and he had way too much stubble for a teenage kid…but in Daria’s active mind that spoke of his manliness…that, and the sound of his voice. His voice was deep, and almost gravelly already, and even though some of the kids called him “Froggy” because of it, she loved it. It sent tingles down her spine every time she heard it. He always spoke so softly but even in low tones, it came out as a manly growl. Daria wanted him to be her first…and she was beginning to not care what the other kids thought. She had worked out a big, romantic scenario in her head where they would end up together and everyone else would realize they’d been wrong about him all along, and maybe even a little bit jealous of her for landing him. She had it all planned out…she just needed to get Steve to cooperate.
She spent weeks pursuing him, hanging out with his friends because at first he was suspicious of her intentions. She didn’t blame him. He had two friends and they were the only ones who were nice to him, or even gave him the time of day. It took her a lot of effort, but she’d finally gotten him to agree to go to her sister’s wedding with her. He was a nervous wreck, but she found that sweet and endearing, especially compared to the overly confident rich boys she was used to. She thought they’d had a good time at the wedding…of course she’d been sneaking alcohol all night and maybe her memory of it was slightly skewed. Somehow, she did manage to get him up to her room when the reception was almost over. In hindsight, that was probably only because he was too sweet to leave a drunk girl to find her own way.