by R. J. Lewis
You fucking coward. You don’t feel this way because you really, really like her. You love her.
Tyler licked her lips and nodded back seriously. “I really, really fucking like you, Hawke.”
Yeah, she loved him too.
*
They rode for a while after. The weather was just too gorgeous to pass up a nice ride around town.
If Hawke was being honest with himself, he knew he was doing it to delay the inevitable.
Finally, he took her to a small creak near the bush in a quiet untrodden area of town. Killing his engine, they hopped off the bike and walked to the water. She slipped her shoes off and dipped her feet in it while Hawke took a seat on the green grass just ten feet from the edge.
He was covered in the shade, the heavy trees overhead providing him comfort in the heat. Meanwhile, the sun hit Tyler, making her skin glow and her dark hair shine as she cooled herself off.
“We should bring the boys out here,” she noted thoughtfully. “Would be a nice place to have a barbecue.”
Hawke nodded absently, distracted by her beauty, by the heavy weight in his chest.
Tyler moved to him then, smiling sexily at him as she threw her shirt off and collapsed in his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. She kissed him before he could think, and his hands instinctively shot to her back, keeping her to him.
Fuck.
This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
She cut the kiss and raised her head, offering her throat to him. He kissed her, knowing she loved being sucked and bitten there. Her breaths came short and fast, her thighs quaked.
“Take my bra off,” she demanded, needy.
He pulled it down instead, his mouth already sucking at one of her taut little nipples. She moaned, pressing her hands against his face to keep him there.
“Hawke,” she moaned, rocking her hips back and forth. “That feels so good.”
He grunted when her hand touched his dick through his jeans. He was fucking hard. What was new? Every sexual encounter with Tyler was better than the last, making him harder quicker.
“Shit, Tyler,” he murmured, running his palms down her body, and pulling away to watch the rise and fall of her tits. “Shit.”
Hawke wasn’t himself.
He was trying to talk his body out of doing what it wanted, but it was a bit too late.
Tyler had the ability to cloud his judgment and make him detest himself less enough that he could convince himself he could have her.
Now she was sitting in his lap, tits out, face pink, and his dick was hard as granite, yet he couldn’t get himself to do it. All he was thinking was, Jesus, what the fuck are you doing? Tell her what happened. She has the fucking right to know.
He closed his eyes, halting his movements entirely.
“Hawke?” she whispered, uncertainly. “Are you alright?”
He shook his head. “Nah, Tyler, I’m not.”
“What’s wrong?”
He opened his eyes and slowly pulled her bra back up, fixing the straps as he avoided looking into her eyes.
“I need to tell you something,” he finally said, grabbing at her shirt and handing it to her. She took it and held it to her chest, looking at him confusedly.
The silence crept in.
He wasn’t going to do it, was he?
“Hawke,” she prodded, “is it bad?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“How bad?”
“Very bad.”
“What does it have to do with me?”
He raked his teeth over his bottom lip. “Everything, Tyler,” he answered. “It has everything to do with you.”
Her entire demeanor changed. The lust in her eyes disappeared and he saw the fear in her, saw her fingers tremble around her shirt as she continued to let the seconds pass without a word uttered.
Nothing would be the same after this.
“I lied to you,” Hawke finally said, feeling his heart pick up. “About Yuri. I think I know why he wanted you, and it wasn’t because of your looks.”
Her eyes were wide. She still didn’t speak, and it made everything that much fucking harder.
“You’ve got money,” he continued carefully. “A fuck load of money sittin’ in a hidden account, ready to be accessed on your twenty first birthday.”
Her brows came together in confusion. “What are you talking about? Why wasn’t I told?”
“Only Hector knows from the club and…Borden.”
“Why?”
This was the difficult part. The part that was going to kill her soul.
“It’s the club’s money,” he let out, his chest constricting. “Millions of dollars stolen and put in your name. Word got back about the account. We know it exists, that you’re free to take it back, but we don’t know its location or how to contact the person in charge of the bank. It’s very underworld business, a banking system reserved for mobs than normal civilians.”
Her hands let go of his, and her face fell. “I’m very lost right now, Hawke. Why is there club money sitting in some hidden account for me?”
“Your father stole it. He was going to run with it.”
Tyler froze. In a flash, he saw a series of emotions: confusion, disbelief, anger. “That doesn’t make sense,” she retorted. “Why would Dad steal money from us? He wouldn’t. You’ve got it wrong –”
“He told me,” Hawke interrupted solemnly. “When he was dying, he kept saying it he took it, over and over again. Why do you think we’re doing so much dodgy shit? We’re in debt, babe. The club is struggling, and we need that money so we can pay everything off and clean the club up again.”
She looked away from him, her face pale, her lips trembling. She slid off his lap and moved away from him, her hands fisting the grass. “This doesn’t make sense,” she whispered. “Dad would never have gone. He would never have stolen from the club. It doesn’t make sense. You’re lying to me.” Her voice broke. “Please, tell me you’re lying to me.”
“I’m not lyin’ to you.”
Tears fell from her eyes as she looked at him in awe. “Why would he say that to you? Why would he steal, Hawke?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?!”
“No, babe, I don’t.”
Her chest rose and fell faster. “Did…did you kill him?”
“No, I found him bleeding out in his motel room. He didn’t tell me who killed him. He was dying, and he was barely making sense as it was.”
Don’t trust. The old man had repeated over and over again. Don’t trust.
“He’d been acting strange before then,” Hawke explained quietly, “and then I discovered the accounts were clean when he disappeared one night without letting us know he’d be gone. I found out where he was because he’d been with one of his favorite girls.”
Dennis could never resist a beautiful woman.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Tyler spat at him, anger fueling her words. “Why didn’t you fucking tell me, Hawke? You hid this from me, from the club, for years!”
Hawke narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you know the shit-storm that would have started if I told the club your old man had robbed us clean? Do you have any idea how angry and impulsive they would have been? Nothing would have stopped Jonny, or fuckin’ Kirk, or hell Marshall even, from bursting into your house and killin’ your mother and you for his crimes. I kept it from them to protect you, because if you haven’t noticed, Tyler, we are fuckin’ outlaws, and some of us are fucked up more than others.”
“So you’ve been burying it since!”
“What choice did I fucking have?!”
She jumped, startled by his shout. His face fell and he instantly regretted it. “Tyler,” he said contritely, “I’m sorry.”
She was shaken up, clutching at her chest like she was in physical pain. All those years she’d looked up to her father, and he hadn’t the heart to tell her what he had done.
“It doesn’t make sense,” sh
e repeated, her voice cracking. “Why would he put it in my name? Where the hell is the logic in that, Hawke?”
“He had money in his own account, enough to run for a very long time. We managed to take that back. I think he put it in your name in case he got killed, just to make sure you were looked after.”
She shook her head. “No, that can’t be it.”
“Tyler –”
“That’s not it!” she screamed, her face reddening as she glared at him. “All this time I thought you knew him! You didn’t know a damn thing about my father, Hawke.”
He shook his head, his heart slowing as he replied sadly, “Baby, I don’t think you did.”
She choked back on a sob and stood up, stumbling away from him. She paced aimlessly, her steps prodding the edge of the creak, her hands in her hair, pulling at the strands as she sobbed into the open air. She was losing it, and Hawke couldn’t sit there and watch her without wanting to do something, anything to make her feel better.
He stood up and went to her. He approached her slowly from behind and wrapped his arms around her. Tyler immediately flailed, screaming at him to let her go. He dropped his arms, but she turned around and shoved him back, her tears replaced with rage.
“I fucking hate you,” she seethed, slapping at his chest. “I fucking hate you for this!”
Hawke just nodded. “I know.”
“No, you don’t fucking know!”
“I know you’re looking for someone to hate.”
“Fuck you!” she hollered, continuing to push him back like he was fighting her, though he wasn’t. He just stood there, taking her hits and aggression, knowing she needed it out.
“I trusted you!” she continued. “I fucking trusted you!”
He didn’t know if she was talking to him, or her father.
“I hate you,” she howled. “All this time? All this time you knew and you didn’t even tell me!”
“You’ll hate me for a little while,” he quietly told her as she stepped away, her eyes narrowed and raging. “But you’ll come back to me, Tyler, when you realize I’m not the bad guy here, and I’ll be waiting.”
“Fuck you,” she repeated. “I hate you.”
“Yeah, sure you do, darlin’.”
That just pissed her off some more, and she flew at him again, smacking him across the chest, hollering some more how much she hated him. That he was a monster and a murderer.
“But you knew that already,” he replied evenly. “You knew I was all those things and you still wanted me.”
She sucked in breaths, growing quiet as his words sank in. He saw the truth in her eyes as he said it. She crumbled, that anger transitioning back to sadness.
She walked away from him and made it five steps before she collapsed to the ground and buried her face in her hands.
thirty-five
Tyler
I’d pined for Hawke for years, wanting more than anything for him to come back.
And now I wanted him gone with a fury.
I barely touched him on the ride back. I was happy to just fall off the bike during those sharp turns if it meant not touching his body.
Though I hated that I still wanted to.
The whole day had been orchestrated so he could tell me the truth. He’d taken me away from the clubhouse so I wouldn’t have lost it in there and subsequently inform everyone else of it too. It was the right thing to have done because I knew it would have torn the older members apart knowing my old man – whom they still revered – had done something so atrocious as this. Even now I wanted to protect his name.
How sad was I?
He’d ripped the club apart, would have disastrously put the Warlords name in the ground if they hadn’t resorted to doing drug deals, and I still wanted to protect him?
Love didn’t make you see right from wrong. It wanted you ignorant so you could shield not just the person you loved, but yourself too.
Like Hawke. I hated him for keeping it from me, but I didn’t really want him gone. I was just pissed. Really, really pissed at him, and I held on to that anger for days and days, moving away from his touches, never talking to him except to tell him to get out when he made to sleep next to me.
He never got out. He slid into bed every time and wrapped his arm around me and forced me against his chest. “You don’t really want me to go,” he whispered to me once, kissing along my bare shoulder. “You want me here.”
“No, I don’t,” I seethed.
“You do, and you wanna know how I know?” He sucked at my neck. “Because you still look at me in that way, Tyler.”
I swallowed thickly, trying to resist the warmth his touch created inside my arctic chest.
“I know it hurts,” he continued, his voice softening. “And you can push me away all you want, but I know you need me just as much as I need you. I’ve given up everything right now to be here. The law is still out there, and I’m risking my neck just to have you in my bed. But I want you, Tyler. I want you so bad it hurts.”
He was right, but I wasn’t ready to admit that, so I just listened. I continued to resist his touches, but that only spurred him to try harder.
Secretly, I didn’t want him to give up.
I should have seen it from his point of view. How hard it would have been to tell me this. I was just too clouded with anger and looking to take it out on him and blame him when really it was my father who’d betrayed us. I was struggling to come to grips with it, though. My father had been so passionate about this club. He’d been so happy, so involved. I wondered a lot of things about it. Were there signs I’d missed? Had his behavior been off? Was my father angry? I couldn’t recall anything out of the ordinary.
At the end, I had to force myself to come to grips with the fact my father wasn’t the man I thought he was.
Hawke
It had been seven days of her pushing him away. Just how much longer was she going to keep doing it? She was centering all her frustrations on him and not Hector. How that asshole flew under her radar was a mystery to him.
Hawke got she was pissed and sad about it. Hell, he was too for the longest time after Dennis had died in his arms, but…fuck, he never considered what it meant to care for someone other than him. He never knew the devastation he could feel being cast aside every night.
Why did people want relationships when this was the utter bullshit that came along with it? You could easily save yourself the trouble and play the single game and fuck without caring whether you were in the good graces of whatever hole you were sticking your dick into.
Yeah, that thought lasted about two seconds because…yeah, he fucking wanted her. Didn’t care either that she currently held the power between them. The strong euphoria that shot through his veins every time he held her made all that bullshit worth it.
Throughout the day he gave her space. He couldn’t risk her going to work, so she kicked around the clubhouse, spending a lot of time with Holly and Shay and avoiding him at all costs.
Meanwhile, he spent his time making the clubhouse into a serious stronghold. He made deals and reconnected with contacts that’d been left cold for eons. Next he was looking to go over every patched member and determine how just essential they were to their role because, shit, there were too many members as it was and they were doing nothing but taking money to support their lifestyle outside the club.
It pissed Hawke off unlike anything else.
In the middle of all this was Hector, who was still sobering up and trying not to touch the drink, though Hawke could tell it was a major struggle. But he was changing, and without the drink he wasn’t angry half as much.
“Instead of waiting for her to get over it, maybe you should take her out,” he told him as they stood out front of the building, watching Jonny and Jesse drill more bars over the windows.
Hawke scoffed. “Tyler won’t let me within a foot of her.”
“It’s her birthday in a week. Take her to Ma’s. She loves it there every time I go around.
Maybe she’ll warm up to you again afterwards.”
“All Ma would talk about to her is how much of a shit I was growing up.”
Hector chuckled. “Possibly.”
“Fucking women, Hector.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, well, that’s why I don’t fall in love, man. Life’s too short to be in pain.”
Hawke smirked, nodding before replying, “Actually, the pain’s the best part.”
Hector sighed, looking at his brother peculiarly. “Fuckin’ turning into one of those sad saps now, man? You got woman bits I don’t know about?”
“Fuck you.”
“No, you want to fuck Tyler.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“The daughter of Dennis, I have to add.”
“She sure is.”
“That annoying little turd that used to drive us up the fucking wall with that squeaky fucking tricycle.”
“That would be her.”
The disbelief was still apparent in Hector’s voice as he stressed, “Tyler.”
“My Tyler.”
Just as Hawke said that, he saw Jesse’s body tense. The fucker had been listening to them, and there was a wounded look on his face he was doing his absolute best to conceal. Hector noticed too and he nudged Hawke’s shoulder, whispering, “He’ll get over it, man. It was just a mad crush.”
Jesse’s reaction didn’t fit that of a mad crush. He obviously cared for her, and maybe it would have pissed Hawke off if it was someone else, but Jesse was loyal and passionate. No matter how devastated he was, he would never cross Hawke or Tyler. It just wasn’t in his nature.
Just then the sound of an approaching vehicle interrupted them. Hawke glanced over his shoulder as a black Mercedes turned in, slowly coming to a stop in front of them.
Hawke’s eyes narrowed and he let out a long breath. “Fuck.”
The passenger door opened and a suited man stepped out, glaring at Hawke with a face as cold as ice.
“Borden,” Hawke said, his voice tight.
“We’ve got to talk,” Borden replied. “I’ve got answers.”