“Harper’s been taken.” This, of course, got Oliver’s full and immediate attention. Lucas had explained everything, how Flynn had appeared out of nowhere and taken me for a bargaining tool to wipe his debt clean, how I’d tried to run, but I’d been overtaken and hit on the back of the head with the butt of Flynn’s pistol. How Flynn had sworn to cut off pieces of me every hour if he didn’t hear from the club. Oliver had heard only that I was in danger, that someone was threatening to hurt me, and it didn’t matter to him that it was his father who was the enemy.
“I need you to go to your father,” Lucas had said, “and take her back.” But Oliver had already silently agreed to find me anyway, before Lucas had even asked. Oliver had started to make a list of the places he would look in his mind when Lucas added, “If you do this, then you and I? We’re even. You won’t have to fight for the Banshees anymore.”
“But what Lucas didn’t know,” Oliver said to me, pressing a kiss to the ball of my shoulder, “was that I would have gone after you anyway.” Oliver had told Lucas to gather the rest of the Banshees and get ready for a brawl. He would check all of Flynn’s usual spots and known businesses, until he could figure out where they were holding me. And when that was done, he would simply waltz in under the pretense of wanting to reconnect with dear old Dad.
He hadn’t gone immediately to the casino — no, first he’d checked the boxing gym where some of Tommy Flynn’s fighters had been training. But the casino was the second spot he’d looked. “I called Lucas when I saw how many of Tommy’s men were parked outside,” Oliver told me. “I had a hunch.”
I’d saved him the trouble of having the heart-to-heart with his father by darting out of the backroom as I had. He hadn’t even been completely certain that I was being held at the casino, but he thought it was a good bet, considering how many of my father’s men were gathered in that one location. “Plus,” he added, “I knew the old vault was a likely holding cell for someone they didn’t want slipping out of their grasp. How did you get away?” he asked. And I explained the whole thing to him, how my head had been throbbing, how my system was overrun with fear and adrenaline, and how that fear and adrenaline had been the only tools at my disposal to try to get away. I told him how I’d started to cry, and how that one man, who was probably not such a horrible man after all, had approached me, had tried to comfort me, and in return for his troubles, I’d shot him in the knee.
“Oh my God,” I said, my eyes wide as I let that reality sink in. “I shot someone. I shot three people.”
“You had to,” Oliver said, gently stroking my hair. “And you were very clever about it,” he remarked. “Though in the future, I would ask you not to grab a gun from some henchman.”
“What else would you have me do?” I demanded. “Simply sit there and wait to be rescued?”
“Maybe, yes,” he said.
“No, that’s ridiculous.”
“You could have been killed,” he countered, his tone rising.
“So could you!”
“Aye, but my life doesn’t matter as much yours does!” He shouted this at me and then we both went totally silent, staring at each other in the darkness.
I swallowed hard, turning onto my side to face him fully. “Why would you say that?” I asked.
“Because,” he stammered, “because… because you’re a mother, that’s why,” he said. “Because you have someone small who is depending on you, someone that needs you to take care of them.”
“That isn’t why you said it,” I pressed. “I don’t believe that’s why you said that.”
“Harper, let it go,” he snapped, and sat up on the mattress. I sat up next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, searching his face for the truth. He was tense beneath my touch.
“Tell me what you meant by that, Oliver,” I whispered.
“I… care for you, Harper. I have from the first instant I spoke to you. There’s just something about you…” I felt his huge shoulder rise and fall in a halfhearted shrug. “I don’t know.”
“I care for you, too,” I said quietly. “I’m so grateful for what you did for me today…”
“That’s what this was?” he asked, gesturing between us, “Gratitude?”
“No, that isn’t what I meant,” I said, but he was already on his feet and digging into his dresser to pull on a fresh pair of boxers. I sat there, naked, on his bedspread.
“I need to know something, Harper,” he said, agitated. “I need to know where you stand with Lucas.”
I blinked owlishly up at him as he switched on a small lamp that cast a soft glow onto my face. He needed to examine my expression, to make sure I was telling the truth. “I… I don’t know where I stand with Lucas,” I said. And that was the truth.
“Do you love him?” he demanded.
I paused, but ultimately I couldn’t deny the truth. “Yes,” I said. “I do love him.” I could see that Oliver was crestfallen, and I rose up onto my knees, holding my hand out to him. “But not like that,” I amended.
“Then like what?”
“Like… like something that you’re used to. A favorite sweater, or… or a photograph of your senior prom.” I sighed, dropping my hands into my lap, and averted my gaze. “For better or worse, part of me will always love Lucas. Always. He was my first love, and we have a son together.”
“Aye,” Oliver mumbled, “that’s what I thought.”
“No, but just listen,” I insisted. “I left this place to get away from him. I hate the constant violence, the death, the injury, the fear… God, and this? This is the worst it’s ever been. I came home because my father was injured, due to club business. I came home to help my mother. And what happened? My father died, and his murderer kidnapped me. God, don’t you see? I can’t be a part of that. My son cannot be a part of that.”
“But none of that changes how you feel about Lucas,” he said, and I climbed off of the bed and went over to the dresser, helping myself to the biggest tee shirt I could find. If we were going to argue, I thought, I was going to be wearing something.
“No, I suppose it doesn’t change much except that it makes me not ever want to be with him.” I paused, canting my head to the side and examining him in the lamplight. “What does it even matter to you? You just met me.”
“I love you, Harper,” he said, in a tone of voice that indicated that he hated that he was saying it at all. “I love you, and I don’t know how to handle that, when I see all this… this mess of history and emotions between you and a man that I frankly cannot stand. I don’t know what to do, when we’re both tied up in the goings-on of the goddamned MC and can hardly get away. I don’t know what to do, when your son is his son. I just…” He dropped down onto the mattress then, exhausted. “I just don’t know what to do.”
“There’s nothing to do,” I said, feeling very tired myself. “Except to take me home.”
He looked up at me then, fixing his big, beautiful brown eyes on my face and looking like I’d just shot him through the heart. “Fine,” he said, “as you wish.”
“I just need to get home to my kid, is all,” I said. “I need to see my son.”
“I understand.” He rose to his feet and went back over to the dresser, where he withdrew a pair of pajama pants and handed them to me. “Your stuff is soaked — you should just wear these.” I tugged them on, grateful, and watched him as he tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt.
“I’m not asking you to make a choice,” he said as I tried to comb my fingers through my hair, avoiding the sensitive skin around the spot where, mere hours earlier, I’d been knocked in the skull with the butt of a pistol. It seemed like a lifetime ago, somehow.
“All right,” I said at length, not entirely sure how I was supposed to respond. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for him in return — perhaps even love him — but I didn’t know what to do with that love. Outside of expressing it physically, as we just had, I didn’t know what to do any more than he did. All I knew was that I needed to ch
eck on my mother, and get my son out of this godforsaken town, once and for all.
“I’m not asking you for anything.”
“Yes, you are,” I said, brushing past him to open the front door of his apartment and lead the way to the truck. “You’re asking me to love you back.”
“And don’t you?”
I stopped on the stairs just outside the front door and crossed my arms tight over my torso. Yes, I wanted to say, yes, I love you back. But I couldn’t. So I descended the steps and waited patiently for him to unlock the truck.
When he did, I climbed inside and sat silently as he turned the ignition and headed back out onto the town’s main thoroughfare. We didn’t speak at all, and I feared that there might have been a growing chasm between us. But perhaps it was for the best: I had resolved to leave this town behind, as quickly and completely as I could. Maybe it was better to have one less thing to draw me back.
It wouldn’t be too hard otherwise. I’d left once before; I could leave again. I had my job waiting for me, and Jamie would be starting preschool soon. And my life would go back to normal. No more murders or kidnappings or illegal fighting rings. Just a waitress going to night school, and her son.
The house was quiet when Oliver pulled his truck into the drive, but I saw a light on through my mother’s bedroom window. I opened the door and was about to climb out, but Oliver caught me by the wrist and tugged me back. I turned my eyes on him, expectant, and his were full of questions. “What if I came with you, when you leave?” he asked. “I want to get the hell out of this town just as badly as you do. So, what if I left with you?”
I furrowed my brow and stared at him. “You’d… give up your life? All of it, everything, to be with me?”
“Yes,” he said, and he did not equivocate. He simply said, “Yes.” Lucas had never once offered to leave the Iron Banshees, had never offered to choose a simple, quiet life with his wife and son over the brotherhood of the club. So I guess I’d assumed all men were close to their roots. But here was one who was looking to make a new life for himself. And, if he could, he’d like to do that with me.
“I don’t know, Oliver,” I whispered. “That’s… that’s really big, and…”
“Just think about it. Would you?”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it — it was the offer I’d been waiting to hear. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”
He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to my mouth, and I clung to the collar of his sweatshirt as I kissed him back. “I’ll call you,” he said, and I smiled and said, “Okay,” before I remembered that I no longer had a cell phone, that it — and my wallet and makeup bag — were somewhere in an illegal casino, owned by a man who was, in all likelihood, already dead.
Rebel’s Tryst
(MC Fight Club: Iron Banshees: Book 5)
Juniper Leigh
Copyright 2015 Enamored Ink
Rebel’s Tryst
The backroom of The Golden Harp was just as bare as ever, fitted only with a card table and a set of folding chairs. The difference now, of course, was how the room reeked of old beer and stale cigarette smoke. Lucas Whalen sat stooped at the table, a swirl of smoke curling around his head like a halo. He ashed halfheartedly into an empty beer bottle, scattering the charred tobacco remains around its periphery. As he did so, he examined his hands: strong, callused hands that had spent years gripping the clutch of a motorcycle or the trigger of a gun. He still wore his wedding ring, could never bring himself to take it off. And he noticed that he had just a little bit of blood beneath his fingernails. He wondered then if his hands could ever really be clean.
No wonder Harper left, he thought, his mood turning somber, sour. He leaned forward, his elbows on the tabletop, and brooded silently over half a Coors Light and half a Winston. She should have stayed away. She never would have been kidnapped, attacked, if it hadn’t been for him and the goddamned Iron Banshees. No, she had to leave. There was no way she could stay. Not after all this.
His heart ached — he wanted nothing more than for Harper to stay with him, in the life he knew. He wanted to be a family, he wanted to help raise his son to be a better man than he was. But after everything that had happened…
He leaned back and let the cigarette dangle from his lips, letting the smoke get in his eyes. He raked his fingers through his mass of blond hair, heaving a sigh through his nose that scattered some ash onto his jeans. Was there a way, he wondered, that he could be the man his wife and son needed, a way for him to leave the life behind? But there wasn’t: the club, the brotherhood to which he had devoted his life, needed him more than ever. The sudden, violent death of Old Pete Harrington, the club’s erstwhile President, meant that it was time for Lucas Whalen to step up and take the helm. It was the job he’d been bred for, the job he’d practiced for all his life. He could no sooner leave the Iron Banshees than he could shed his own skin. And Harper knew that, too. Which is why she had never pressed him to leave it all behind. Good woman.
A knock at the door jerked him out of his reverie, and he flicked the cigarette to the concrete floor and crushed it under the toe of his boot. “Yeah,” he barked, and the door swung open. In walked Oliver Flynn, with Fitz and Brian close on his heels.
“Was the escort really necessary?” Oliver asked, his arms crossed in front of him. Lucas slowly rose to his feet, not liking to see Oliver tower over him as he was. They were about the same height, Lucas and Oliver, but Lucas was lithe, lean; Oliver was some kind of muscled behemoth.
“I wanted to make sure you’d come,” Lucas said, reaching into the inside pocket of his black leather vest and fishing out his cigarettes. He felt sturdier when he had one between his lips, as though he needed always to have something to do with his hands.
“Well. Here I am. What do you want, Whalen?”
Lucas glanced back at Fitz and Brian, canting his chin toward them to indicate he wanted them to leave. Fitz obeyed with the easy nature of a well-trained puppy, but Brian lingered in the doorway, falling into an easy lean against the frame.
“Brian,” Lucas said, by way of urging him forward. He remained.
“This conversation concerns my family,” he said, “I’ve every intention of staying.” Brian had that same obstinate nature that Harper had, so Lucas should not have been surprised that he wanted to stay, and would not leave unless he were bodily removed.
Lucas grumbled and let it lie. “I wanted to ask you about Harper,” Lucas said to Oliver, whose expression indicated that he was in no way surprised.
“What is it you want to know?”
“What are your… intentions with her, exactly?” Lucas asked.
Oliver grinned, broad and bright, flashing his perfect white teeth. “My ‘intentions’? Lord alive, Lucas, are you her da now?”
“Just answer his fucking question,” Brian shot back, clearly made uncomfortable by the trajectory of this questioning, despite his insistence on being present for it.
“I don’t see how it’s any of your bloody business,” Oliver quipped.
“Oliver…”
“She’s his wife, asshole,” Brian retorted, gesturing pointedly toward Lucas. “And she’s my fucking sister, so, thank you very much, she is our business.”
“Fine,” Oliver acquiesced. “I love her, all right? And I told her as much. And I want her to… be with me. To choose me.”
Lucas considered him for a moment before giving a slow nod of his head. “I can’t say I blame you,” he said quietly. “I certainly know what it feels like.” Lucas locked his gaze on Oliver then, taking a long drag of his cigarette and exhaling slowly, sending a plume of smoke into the air between him. “I meant what I said before,” he continued, “that your debt is paid, that your business with the club is concluded. And you have my deep gratitude for everything you’ve done for us, helping us with your father…”
“What happened to him, by the way?” he asked, cocking his head to the side. “I mean, so long as we’re talking about
family.”
Lucas and Brian exchanged a set of nervous glances, but ultimately Lucas nodded his head. “You’re right. You have a right to know.”
“Aye.”
“We couldn’t let him live, Oliver,” Lucas said gently. Oliver knew that much, but couldn’t bring himself to say, Oh, sure, that’s all right, I get it. He’d only ever have one father, after all, even if that father was a murderous, greedy lunatic.
Brian moved more fully into the room then, allowing the door to close gently behind him. “But he died well,” he added. “He was brave. Honorable. He understood, ultimately.”
“How’d you do it?” Oliver asked.
“Oliver…,” Lucas intoned. “Don’t.”
“I want to know.” He glanced between the two men, then, examining their kuttes. These vests that proclaimed they were Iron Banshees, that Lucas was the President, that they were a gang of organized killers, criminals, businessmen, and lastly, motorcycle enthusiasts. “Tell me.” Despite the regalia, Oliver was not afraid. He would know how Tommy Flynn had met his end.
“Simple,” Lucas said, meeting his gaze. “One bullet to the head. Quick, painless, clean.”
“Who did it?”
“I did,” Brian stated, firm and confident. “He murdered my father, he kidnapped my sister. I put the old man down.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, locking his eyes on Oliver. “You can hit me, if you want to,” he offered.
Oliver furrowed his brow, trying to determine if the immediate violence would make him feel any better. He doubted very much that it would. “Nah,” he said. “Thanks for the offer.”
The three of them could not help but break into a series of sad, awkward little smiles. If nothing else, they understood each other.
“So, about Harper.”
“Aye.” Oliver relaxed a little and slid into one of the folding chairs. Lucas sat across from him; Brian lingered, leaning against the wall. “I love her. I’ve asked her to choose me. What more do you need to know?”
MC Fight Club: Iron Banshees: (Complete Series: Parts 1-5) An MC Fighter Menage Romance Page 10