After hanging up, I sighed and rolled back into Hoax.
“My mom can handle him,” I told him hopefully.
Hoax was already getting out of bed. “I know she can…but if he’s not feeling well, I want him here. Where I can keep an eye on him.”
And that, in a nutshell, described my biker thoroughly. He loved hard and made no apologies for it. He took care of what was his and went out of his way to make sure that no matter what, they knew he would always be there.
And I loved that about him.
“Drive safe,” I whispered.
He slipped his jeans on and walked toward me, bending over the bed to drop a lazy kiss on my lips. “Always.”
What’s Next?
One Chance, Fancy
Release date: 1-15-19
Prologue
I am not lazy. I’m physically conservative.
-T-shirt
Phoebe
Phoebe, Age 15
My feet dragged as I walked to my doom.
It wasn’t anything bad—at least not to most people. To me, though? Yeah, I’d rather be at home reading a book, or possibly at the lake fishing. Hell, I’d even take camping over this—a club party. A motorcycle club party.
It wasn’t anything wild. Just a thing with friends and family.
See, my grandfather was the president of the Dixie Wardens MC, Benton, Louisiana chapter. My father, Sam Mackenzie, had dragged me here.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see my grandfather—because I did. It was because I didn’t like parties. I didn’t like big crowds, and I most definitely didn’t like the loud crap they considered music. It was inevitable.
I’d be leaving the party tonight with a headache.
Then again, my mother had graced our entire family with the ability to get a headache at a moment’s notice. Honestly, it was more routine for me to have a headache at this point than to not have one.
My sisters, Piper and Pru, who were twins, easily disappeared into the crowd and started making the rounds, greeting family and friends.
I, on the other hand, wound my way around the outskirts of the party until I found my grandfather.
I would say hi, I would find a quiet spot, and then I’d pull out my Kindle and read while hoping nobody bothered me.
I found my grandfather at the far end of the large, open structure. The building we were in tonight used to be an airplane hangar, so there was more than enough room for the hundreds of people that were milling about, laughing and carrying on.
Some of those people had drinks in their hands while others had their arms wrapped around their loved ones.
I kept my eyes down, not meeting anyone’s gaze hoping that if I kept eye contact to a minimum, nobody would stop me.
I was right, it worked.
I arrived at my grandfather’s side just in time to hear him say to the man standing on the other side of him, “How’s Benson doing?”
Dixie, the man that he was talking to, was one of the oldest members of the MC, and had about thirty grandchildren.
“He’s definitely not happy that he was forced to come,” Dixie muttered, his eyes going somewhere into the darkness.
I followed his gaze, but didn’t see anything—or anyone—anywhere.
“Maybe y’all should stop forcing us introverts to come,” I suggested, walking up to my grandfather and wrapping my arms around his waist.
He wrapped me up tight and gave me a good squeeze before loosening his hold.
“Hey, girl,” my grandfather said. “Happy birthday.”
I smiled. “Usually when it’s one’s birthday, they get to do what they want. They’re not forced to come to a party.”
“Your father knew I wanted to see you,” he said, his eyes lit with humor. He knew just as well as I did how much I hated crowds. “And I wanted to give you a birthday present.”
He pulled a box out of his back pocket, and I looked at it suspiciously.
“What is it?” I asked, making no move to take it.
“Jesus, she’s harder to give presents to than Benson,” Dixie muttered, sounding amused. “I tried to give him a bike today and he told me to shove it up my ass.”
I blinked.
“Umm,” I hesitated. “That was…sweet of him.”
Dixie burst out laughing. “He was mad because I paid off the rest of the loan. He wanted to pay it off on his own. I wanted him to have a goddamn bike that didn’t break down halfway to work every day.”
“Didn’t his mother try to do that, and he refused to drive it until he could pay off the loan himself?” my grandfather, Silas, asked.
“Yes,” Dixie muttered. “But I figured if I told him it was a gift for his birthday, he’d be willing to take the bike. Let’s just say that he wasn’t.”
“He’s a proud kid,” Pops muttered. “You should’ve known that he wasn’t going to take that.”
“Maybe,” Dixie admitted. “But Jesus Christ, it’s hard watching that boy struggle. He’s going to school full-time and he’s working full-time. All the while he’s making it on his own, but only by the skin of his teeth.”
I felt like I was missing part of the story, and I wanted to know more.
It wasn’t every day that someone turned down a motorcycle because he was wanting to do it all on his own.
Hell, I hadn’t turned down the free vehicle my parents had given me.
Granted, it was my mother’s old truck, and it was twice as old as I was, but it was still in perfect condition and would suit my purposes perfectly. That, and it was my dream vehicle.
“Kid’s hell bent to make it on his own. There’s nothing wrong with that, Dixie,” Pops told him. “Not everyone can be perfect like my Phoebe.”
I snorted and pushed away from him to look at him incredulously.
“Didn’t you tell me just last week that I had a death wish and didn’t have my head screwed on straight?” I questioned.
His head tipped down to meet my gaze. The reminder of what I’d done last week being brought up again wasn’t likely the best idea.
“Since you’re reminding me of that…” he said, causing Dixie to laugh and me to wince. “Let’s talk about whether you stayed your ass out of trouble this week.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
My father, who’d somehow arrived without my knowledge, snorted. “Actually, no. I caught her sneaking out of her bedroom window this week, scaling the razor wire fence with a blanket off her bed, and stealing a car she’d stashed in the woods.” He paused. “Oh, and she had one of my pistols.”
I rolled my eyes. “I was going down to the Tally Bottoms. What did you want me to do, go down there without any protection?”
My grandfather started to shake as he suppressed his laughter.
“Laugh it up,” my father muttered. “I’m fairly sure that Amelia will learn all this fun shit from her.”
Pops looked down at me and raised an eyebrow. “You wouldn’t.”
“Of course not,” I lied.
Amelia, who was technically my aunt but in actuality was younger than me, was my grandfather’s baby. His youngest, and most spoiled.
Amelia and I got each other, and though she was a couple years younger, she was exactly like me—independent and hell bent on doing what she wanted to do, and damned the consequences.
Amelia who was currently nowhere to be seen.
“Where is Amelia?” I questioned.
“She’s with her mother over there somewhere,” he pointed in the direction of the office-like area where there was food and beer. “They made you a cake.”
I grinned. “Yeah?”
“Well, they tried. I think we ended up buying you one, too. It’s in the office. Stay away from my new helicopter.”
I was halfway across the expanse of the room before he’d called that out to me, and I jiggled my hand at him with a dismissive wave.
Pops cursed while my father laughed.
Apparently, they didn’t trust me.
I’d never…
That was a lie.
I’d totally done it before.
Not that I’d actually done anything as far as taking it for a test drive—because I wasn’t that dumb—but I was curious by nature. I did do stuff like test my boundaries, and possibly touch buttons that I shouldn’t.
My eyes scanned the area for the new helicopter and I grinned when I found it near the back of the hangar.
It was missing all the company logo stickers that the other helicopter had, and I assumed that was something that would come soon.
My grandfather owned the Life Flight company that serviced the immediate area.
Today’s party was a celebration, not for my birthday, but for the opening of the new Life Flight facility in Texas—about a half hour from where we lived. Which was kind of nice seeing as we wouldn’t have to drive the couple hours to see him as much since he was about to be spending a lot of time here getting the new business off the ground.
I looked over my shoulder and then glanced around me to see if I had anyone’s attention, and thinking that I didn’t, I moved to the door of the helicopter.
I mean, if anyone cared to come to the other side of the hangar and look, they’d see me getting inside of it, but since everyone was on the opposite side of the massive machine, I had a feeling I’d escape unscathed at least until my grandfather or father decided to come check on me.
Opening the door, my mouth dropped open at all the switches and things that I could explore.
I climbed inside and started to flip stuff open, pull stuff out, and honestly just go through things that I shouldn’t be going through.
Unfortunately, my Pops had thrown down the gauntlet when he said, ‘stay away from my helicopter.’
I mean, what the hell did he think was going to happen when he told me to stay away? I was like a moth to a flame. Tell me not to do something, and I was going to do the exact opposite.
After my exploring was finished, I buckled myself in, grinning wildly when I found that it was actually quite comfortable.
Except, I found that I couldn’t reach my Kindle that was in my back pocket.
Shit.
I started to fumble with the clips and harnesses, only to realize that I couldn’t unhook myself.
I had no idea how.
And, just when I’d decided to have a mini panic attack, hands filled my vision as they made quick work of the harness.
I looked up just in time to see a tall man who was lanky but still bulky, if that was even possible, backing away.
“Thank you,” I said, smiling.
The man didn’t say anything, giving me time to study him.
“Welcome,” he muttered. “You shouldn’t be in there.”
I laughed and pushed the straps the rest of the way off my shoulders before reaching for my Kindle. “Yeah.”
The movement caused the birthday present from my grandfather to shift, nearly falling to the ground outside the helicopter.
He caught it and handed it back to me, which I took and sat back on my right leg this time.
“What’d you get?” he asked, his eyes coming to clash with mine for all of a half second before they skittered away.
That one second was enough to allow me to see a perfect set of gray eyes.
I looked at the unopened box in front of me and shrugged. “My guess is that it’s a new phone. I broke mine last week.”
He blinked, his eyes once again flicking to mine before they moved away. “How’d you do that?”
I thought about whether I wanted to tell this man—however new to the man life he was—how I’d broken my phone and decided it really didn’t matter. Somebody like him would never give a girl like me a second look.
“I was walking to my truck and it fell out of my pocket. I stepped on it and shattered the screen,” I lied.
“You’re lying,” he muttered, walking away.
I opened my mouth to deny that, and then realized that I couldn’t. I was lying.
“Okay, so I might’ve been crawling over a razor wire fence at the time, and stepped on it by way of actually falling on it,” I called to him.
He stopped half in/half out of the shadows.
At least he was listening.
“When I peeled myself up off the ground, I realized that my phone had bitten the dust,” I admitted. “Happy now?”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
He didn’t get up and leave, though.
Nope. He stayed where he was, gazing out through the large, open bay doors, staring into nothingness.
It was when the silence went on uncomfortably long that I pulled out my Kindle and started to read. If he wasn’t going to talk, I wasn’t either. Plus, I had a new book that I wanted to finish, which was my reason for not wanting to come today.
Hushed whispers from somewhere had me looking up, and at the nose of the helicopter that I was sitting in was a younger boy that I’d never seen before—which was easy seeing as there were three clubs here right now and all of their family—and two girls. Two girls that I had seen before, but I couldn’t figure out how I knew them.
“He’s stupid,” one of the girls whispered. “And he never makes eye contact. My dad said that he was special.”
My Bad- Lani Lynn Vale Page 22