RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance)

by Daphne Loveling

  Seton was proud. You could see that in her eyes. Her fucking gorgeous, whip-smart, defiant eyes. She didn’t want help from anyone. And she sure as hell didn’t want anyone knowing her secrets.

  Trouble was, I knew them already. And I had a few of my own.

  I knew she hated that Cal was prospecting with the Stone Kings. I knew that she barely tolerated that I was one of them. Let alone the president of the damn club.

  What would she do if she knew it was not just a member of the club who killed her father, but my uncle? What would she say, how would she react, if she knew that I was there that day? That I saw her at her most vulnerable moment, in what was probably the sharpest agony of her life?

  I shook my head and swore. There was no way this was going to turn out good between Seton and me.

  The eyes of that little girl crying over her dad’s body had haunted me for years. I knew that Clayton Greene’s death wouldn’t have affected me much if not for the memory of her eyes. Everyone in town knew Greene was a worthless piece of shit. He drank from morning till night, got in bar fights regularly, and couldn’t hold a job for longer than a few months. He was charming when sober and sloppy as hell when drunk. If not for Seton, I might have thought his death was just as well. But even though I didn’t know her, watching her sob over her father’s body — the shock of suddenly seeing Clayton Greene as a father, with people who had loved him — it stuck with me. Even now, when I sent my guys out on a run, I thought about them as family men, as sons and fathers, brothers and cousins, as well as club members. And even though I didn’t let it affect my decisions — I couldn’t — it helped me not make those decisions lightly. It helped me to take the full measure of the men I sent out into harm’s way in the name of the Stone Kings MC.

  I started to feel restless, so I left my office and called to a couple of the brothers that I was going out on a ride. I hopped on the bike and turned it toward the west side of town, out past the city limits in the direction of the mountains. As I rode, I thought about Cal. I wasn’t sure how to feel about him. His good looks and his charmer personality reminded me of his father, though he didn’t seem to have the same weakness for the drink. I even liked the kid; he made me laugh with his combination of earnestness and swaggering self-confidence.

  After what had happened with Jethro, I had to be doubly damn sure about anyone new we took into the club. I knew it was a risk that I’d be softer on him because of how I felt about Seton. I couldn’t afford that, and neither could the club. I’d have to police myself, make sure he proved himself beyond a shadow of a doubt as a prospect, or he’d have to go. The ride out into Cannibals territory would be a good first step.

  When I got to the club, I went to find Trig, who told me that the ride was planned for two days from now. “Frankenstein and Cal are both up for it. They know what the plan is, why we’re doing it, and they’re ready.”

  “Good,” I approved. “Give them both guns for the trip.”

  “Guns?” Trig repeated. “Sure, prez, but shit, they’re still doin’ beer runs and washin’ our bikes. You sure you want to ramp ‘em up this fast?”

  “I’m not ramping ‘em up,” I retorted. I took out a smoke and lit it. “I want you to see how they do with this. If they get cocky, don’t take the shit seriously, I want you to tell me about it. You know guns make men stupid as shit. I want to see what they’re like when we let them play in the big sand box.”

  “Sure thing, prez,” he said. I wasn’t sure if Trig completely agreed with me, but he didn’t argue. Trig was a VP I could count on. He was with me all the way, would carry out my orders without question. He had never openly challenged a decision I had made, but I still relied on his counsel, and I knew that when he offered a different opinion, it was damn worth considering.

  I nodded once to confirm the plan, then continued as I lit a smoke. “Make sure Repo knows they’re to be packing, too. Just in case something goes down, make sure you’ve talked through a game plan with the prospects. Make sure they know exactly what their role is, exactly what they can and cannot do. They deviate from that plan by one fucking hair, you let me know.”

  Trig nodded. “Got it.” He gave me a speculative look, and then drew a breath. “You know,” he began quietly, “no one blames you for Jethro.”

  “I blame me for Jethro,” I growled. I did not want to talk about this shit now. “I should have never sponsored that fucker in the first place.”

  “He came highly recommended,” Trig murmured. “You trusted your uncle.”

  “Yeah, well that’s where I went wrong.” Jethro had come from my uncle Lawless’s chapter in Reno, asking to be patched over to us because his ex-wife and kid lived close to Lupine. Even though I didn’t have much of a relationship with Lawless, I let his recommendation sway me. If we hadn’t let Jethro into the club, Hammer would still be alive today, I reminded myself for the hundredth time. Family relationship or not, I had fucked up taking any man’s word for something so important. I should have tested Jethro more. He should have had to prove to me and the club that he wasn’t a goddamn coward. He should have proven he would risk his life for the club, before the club risked their lives for him.

  Those days were over, I told myself, taking another angry drag of my smoke. I was through letting emotions into my decisions. No matter how I felt about Seton Greenlee, no matter how much I knew she worried about him, Cal would have to earn his spot in the Stone Kings. The hard way.

  11

  Seton

  For the third time in three days, I was crying.

  I didn’t cry. Ever. Not since the weeks after my father had died. Only at sad movies, but that didn’t count. I never cried for myself. Not even when things got really shitty. I had a handle on my emotions. I had learned through experience that letting your emotions get the better of you would hurt you in the end.

  Carly was at the apartment when I got home, so I murmured a quick hello and made a beeline for my room before she could notice anything wrong and start questioning me. I’d been sitting on my bed quietly sobbing ever since.

  After my attempt to get Grey to push Cal out of the club ended in us having mind-bending sex on his desk, I had left the clubhouse reeling with emotions. Greyson Stone was the absolute last man in the world I should be getting involved with. Every time I was around him, I seemed to lose my damn mind, and things would go pretty much exactly the opposite of how I wanted them to.

  Not that I hadn’t wanted what had happened, I had to admit to myself. And that was the whole problem. My body flushed with heat at the memory of what he had done to me. How I had called out his name as he licked me to orgasm. How he had found his release inside me with a roar as we clung to one another. I had never felt anything even remotely like I felt when Grey Stone touched me. And now that I knew what it was like with him, I had no idea how I’d find the strength to stay away from him.

  I pulled another kleenex from the box and blew my nose. Why was the one person who had ever made me feel like a woman — a real, sexy, desirable woman — the one person in all of Lupine I should stay furthest away from?

  But that wasn’t even the main reason I was crying. How did my life turn to such complete and utter shit so quickly?

  Ever since the fight Cal and I had had the other night at dinner, I had done a lot of thinking about our family, and the ways us three kids had always been so different growing up. Reed, the oldest, had always been sullen and quiet as a kid. Cal, had always been a tow-headed charmer and a clown as a young boy. As a baby, we couldn’t take a trip to the grocery store without strangers cooing and making goofy faces at him in the checkout line. As a boy, he would get away with murder with the neighbors no matter what his childish crime. All he had to do was flash a dazzling, gap-toothed smile, and pretty soon the neighbor lady whose window he had broken was sitting him down at her kitchen table for milk and cookies. As he got older, he grew from an unusually cute child to a strikingly handsome adolescent. In teen years he would eventually rea
lize that girls would drop their panties for him at the drop of a crooked smile. The fact that he seemed to always be in some sort of trouble, for vandalizing, or smoking weed, seemed to only make him more attractive to the teen girls who fantasized about taming the sexy bad boy.

  Even my mom was more indulgent with Cal than she ever was with Reed and me. To be honest, Cal was the only one of the three of us that she seemed to care for very much. She even seemed to take his run-ins with the law relatively in stride, neglecting to punish him until eventually he wound up in juvenile court and had to serve some time in a facility for minors. Even after he came out, my mother just let him run wild, saying Cal was just being a boy, and that he’d straighten out in time.

  It would have been easy to resent Cal for that, but he wore others’ adoration of him so lightly that it was hard to begrudge him anything. But I’d be lying if I said that watching my Mom’s relative softheartedness toward Cal didn’t make my miss my dad and his the memory of his love for me even more.

  When I was young, I didn’t even know my dad was an alcoholic, really. I just knew that he smelled funny sometimes and liked to drink things that tasted bitter. I just knew that he loved me and called me his Little Girl, and that he always had a special smile just for me when he came home.

  Sometimes, when he was in a good mood and just wanted to stop into a bar for a drink or two, he would bring me with him, and give me money to play video games while he laughed and chatted with the other men in the bar. He would introduce me to the men, and they would call my by my name and my dad would tell them how smart I was, and I’d feel proud. I was too young to know there was anything strange about him bringing a child with him to a bar so he could drink. I only knew it was one of the only times I felt noticed and special.

  I used to blame my mother for my dad’s death, at first. A child’s thinking is mostly black and white, after all, and my dad had to be blameless in my young, lonely eyes, because he was gone and because I needed him to remain my hero. So my quiet resentment of my mother stewed in my young mind, and the distance grew between us little by little. Maggie didn’t really seem to notice, or at least didn’t make much of an effort to bridge the gap between us, until by the time I was grown she felt more like a guardian to me than a mother. So when she moved to Scottsdale with Cal after I graduated from high school, leaving me to fend for myself at college, I was only a little bit hurt, and not really surprised.

  My argument with Cal the other day hadn’t been far from my thoughts since it happened, and I had been ruminating about how much his words about my father had hurt me. At first, I was so angry I could barely contemplate ever being able to talk to Cal again. But as I worked to get my emotions under control, I had begun to think about our family, and how different all of our experiences must have been of my father’s death. Since my mom had refused to talk about Dad after he died, us kids were left to do our own individual mourning in solitude. Reed and I had never been close, so we had never confider our feelings to each other about anything, much less our father’s death. And Cal had been so young when Dad was killed, I’m not even sure he really understood what had happened. One day Daddy was there, and the next he was gone. I realized now that Cal must have had very few memories of him, if any.

  I realized, too, that Cal had a very different and in many ways better relationship to Mom than Reed and I did, even as adults. After all, she had taken Cal with her when she moved to Scottsdale. He had lived with her there for all of his high school years. Cal had had a whole chapter of his life with her in Arizona that didn’t include me at all. In a way, it was understandable that he didn’t see Dad’s death in quite the same way I did. And as much as I hated to do it, I had to admit to myself that the truth about what had happened was probably somewhere in the middle. I tried to picture what it must have been like for Maggie Greenlee, being married to an unreliable alcoholic and saddled with three kids that she must have felt she was raising all by herself. The more I tried to imagine how hard her life must have been, I came to the point where I no longer blamed her, exactly, for what had happened. The damage between her and me was done, but I could at least recognize that she was only human. And that Calvin’s memory and my memory of our childhoods would always be different.

  All of these thoughts had left me feeling raw, and in some ways even more barren and bereft than before. The history of my family that I had understood, the story that I had always told myself, was only one interpretation — mine, and mine alone. It made me feel like the ground I stood on was even shakier than before. But it was all the ground I had to stand on, and I had to accept that.

  The day after I had gone to see Grey at the clubhouse — this morning, to be exact — I decided to pay Cal a visit and try to make amends. I didn’t know what I was going to say when I got there, exactly, but I didn’t like the way we had left things. As angry as I was at him for calling our father a drunk, I regretted kicking him out of my apartment. Cal was basically my only family, given that my mother didn’t seem to care one way or another about me, and Reed was AWOL. And I didn’t want to erase any of the shaky foundation that he was trying to rebuild between us.

  Cal was out in the driveway of the house he shared with a couple of other guys, working on his motorcycle, when I pulled up to the curb. He seemed guarded as he watched me get out of the car and stride up the walk toward him. “Hey, sis,” he murmured, his expression neutral

  “Hi,” I replied. I worked to keep my voice light and friendly. “Whatcha doing?” I asked, nodding toward his bike.

  “Just got done checking the air filter.” He eyed me curiously and grabbed a rag that was sitting on the seat of his bike to wipe his hands. “Nothing major.”

  “I see,” I said. I glanced at the bike. “It’s looking good.”

  “Thanks.” He stuffed the rag in his pocket and looked at me. “So. What’s up?”

  I sighed and sat down on the front stoop. “I wanted to apologize for the other night, Cal. I was out of line.”

  Cal raised one eyebrow. “That’s a surprise.”

  I looked down, embarrassed. “I know. I’m sure you thought I was expecting one from you.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, pretty much. Honestly, See, I shouldn’t have said what I did about Dad. I know you were close to him.”

  I looked at him in disbelief.

  “Yeah. I do,” he continued. “I was pretty young when he died, so I don’t remember much about him. But I remember how sad you were. I remember how much you changed. How serious you got. I know it’s because you missed him.”

  My eyes filled with tears, and I brushed at them with the back of my hand. “Yeah. I… I still miss him so much, Cal.” I took a deep breath and let it out. “But I don’t want this…” I motioned to the bike, “to come between us. You’re basically the only family I have left.”

  He sat down beside me on the stoop. “There’s Mom. And Reed… sort of,” he trailed off.

  “You know as well as I do Mom doesn’t really care about me. And we may never see Reed again.”

  Cal opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. “Mom does care about you,” he finally managed. “She just… doesn’t know how to express it.”

  I scoffed. “Well, when she figures it out, I’ll be right here, waiting.”

  Cal looked down at his hands. “I’m sorry, See. I know you and mom… well.” He broke off, embarrassed. “And I know I haven’t been a very good brother.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I reassured him. “It’s just… I’m worried about you. And I guess I don’t know how not to be. The club… it scares me. And not just because of what happened to Dad.”

  “What happened to Dad wasn’t because of the club,” Cal retorted. He glanced at me, a look of apology in his eyes, then continued more gently. “It wasn’t the club that killed him, See. It was a man. He’s not even in the club anymore. I heard he’s somewhere in Nevada. Reno, I think.” He turned to me then, his expression firm, his square jaw set. “Look, Seton, I
know you think I’m still five years old, but I’m an adult. I’m a man. It’s time for me to make my own choices. I know you don’t like some of them, but you’ll just have to live with that.”

  He stood then, and without waiting for my response grabbed the leather cut that was lying beside him on the stoop. Putting it on, he turned to me. “I have to go,” he said. His tone was calm, but firm. “Thank you for coming over, See. Really.” He looked me in the eye. “I mean it. I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

  “Okay,” I whispered. He straddled the bike and fired it up. He pulled the used rag out of his back pocket and threw it on the lawn beside him, and as he did, I caught a glimpse of the gun stuck in the waistband of his jeans.

  I watched him drive away to whatever awaited him, wondering whether the club that had taken away my father was about to take my brother as well.

  12

  Grey

  Trig and Repo took the prospects on a ride north into Cannibals territory the next day. They had armed them both with a couple of Walther P99s and spent the afternoon before making sure that both Frankenstein and Cal knew at least the basics of how to use them. Trig told me that Frankenstein could barely hit the side of a barn with a handgun, but he was much better with a shotgun. Cal, he said, had obviously shot before and showed some promise with the Walther.

  I spent that day trying to keep my thoughts on the club and off of Seton. I knew that I had to keep her and her brother totally separate in my mind, but frankly, I was doing a piss poor job of it. But what was worse, it damn near killed me to think about what I was pretty sure was inevitable: that sooner or later, she would find out about my family’s role in her father’s death. Once she figured it out, or once I told her myself, I was sure that would be it between us. Hell, if I had any balls at all, I would just come right out with it and tell her. Rip the bandaid off and be done with it. After all, I told myself, this thing between us wasn’t anything permanent. We both knew it couldn’t last. Better to just accept it and move on.