Shane (The Mallick Brothers Book 1)

by Jessica Gadziala

  In a sick, twisted kind of way, I almost felt like what I went through was worth it. Not that I felt I deserved it or that any woman needed to go through hell to know a good thing when they saw it, but the years I felt trapped and abused by Ross with a family that stood by and let it happen, yeah, it in an awful way led me to Shane. It led me to a man who would never hurt me. Who would, instead, do everything in his power to make sure that no one could ever hurt me again. In leading me to Shane, it also led me to the amazing parents I never really got to have. Helen was the kind of female role model every daughter needed, strong, unbending in her beliefs, but would do anything for those she loved. Charlie, while obviously softening in his age, chasing around grand babies instead of breaking kneecaps, was a strong patriarch who kept everyone in line.

  Then, of course, there were the Mallick brothers.

  Really, what could be said about them?

  As a group, they were a rowdy, headstrong, funny, unstoppable force.

  Individually, they all had something different to offer.

  Ryan, after our odd bonding that night I went to seek his help, had become my go-to when I had a problem or sometimes when I just had questions. He was the one to help me pick out Shane’s birthday present. He had gone with me when I finally saved up enough cash to get a slightly less busted-up car because I knew Shane would try to pay if brought him, stopping on the way to pick up Colton King to check it over.

  Mark was a constant figure in our house. He was there for dinner when we ordered-in. He was there for game nights. Sometimes, he was just there. I learned fast to accept the invasion like Shane did, without anger or annoyance. Because, quite frankly, Mark was an ever-amusing presence, forever picking at Shane or me, trying to get a rise out of us.

  Eli was always the first to call or text on holidays and birthdays. He was who I confided in when I was worried about Shane in the aftermath of Ross’ death. He was just a tad softer, more understanding, at the ready with great advice.

  And Hunt, well, he was equal parts crazy Mallick and settled down family man.

  Also, with the Mallick brothers, I got Fee.

  I think our friendship comforted and shocked the both of us, not because we weren’t similar in temperament, but because we had never found it easy to connect with other women before. But we connected. I couldn’t count how many afternoons I had spent in her house, drinking coffee, bullshitting, then spending time with the girls. And, when Hunt and Fee needed a break, they would show up at the warehouse with the girls and a bag, and leave them with us.

  My entire life got beautifully rebuilt out of the shambles of my ugly past, leaving me feeling almost thankful that I had gone through what I had gone through.

  So it felt wrong to sit and tell my story when I felt that way.

  But because it was an issue for Shane, I did.

  And, to maybe my surprise, but not Shane’s, my dreams slowly became less wild, made me less volatile.

  While I never became a completely still sleeper who cuddled her man the whole night, I stopped giving him bruises to laugh over every morning.

  Lea - 1 year

  What does a Mallick wedding look like, you might wonder.

  Chaos.

  It looked like chaos.

  We had tried to keep it small and casual. Really, we had.

  That was until Helen and Fee got wind of that idea.

  Suddenly, I found myself going from an easy trip to the Justice of the Peace in whatever the hell I felt like wearing, to a specific date with very definite cream-colored invitations and a black and white theme in a hall one town over from Navesink Bank in fall because, apparently, no one got married in the summer anymore.

  “What, so you can sweat through your makeup?” Fee had asked, brow raised like I was out of my mind.

  See I think it went without saying that because the Mallick family had a reach in both legitimate and illegal business ventures, that the guests they invited came from both worlds as well. Some I recognized, Shooter wearing a shirt with a tux design printed on it and black skinny jeans, giving me a wink when I peeked into the hall in my robe before I slipped into my dress. Reign, the biker who had tried to save me during the hurricane, was there with a pretty little redhead I knew nothing about as well as his brother and some giant lumberjack biker with a great beard and haunted eyes. I think every single employee that worked at all the different Mallick businesses was also in attendance, rubbing shoulders with the Grassi family, impeccably dressed in their suits, looking both refined and dangerous, as they actually were.

  Oh, and did I mention that Mark and Ryan both had dates?

  And that they weren’t of the fake variety?

  Yeah, true story.

  But not mine to tell.

  No, mine was about my simple A-line dress that had fit perfectly three weeks before at my final fitting.

  “Does Shane know yet?” Helen asked, standing behind me, looking at my reflection in the mirror. Really, the change was almost unnoticeable, the material just a tad tighter across the belly and bust. But Helen had the eyes of a hawk, I swear, and the wisdom of a woman who had been knocked up five times.

  I looked at my reflection again, eyes going down to my stomach. “I think he suspects,” I said honestly.

  Shane was never the subtle type and, usually, he blurted shit out when he thought it, or demanded answers when he suspected things. But this was one area where he had been unusually staid. But he did things that made me think he knew.

  After sex that had been the third sweeter, gentler type of sex that week, instead of hauling me up against his side or over his chest like he usually did, he slid down my body and rested his head on my belly. In the early afternoons when I woke up, I did so to cold coffee, not fresh like he usually made it, like he knew I shouldn’t be drinking it.

  “Charlie knew it every time I was pregnant too,” she said. “Sometimes before I even knew. I apparently looked green,” she said with an eye-roll. “You know, that’s just what a young bride wanted to hear, that her husband thought she was less than her usual gorgeousness.”

  “I’m queasy as hell. But not in the morning. It’s before bed.”

  “I would tell you it’s only a couple more months, but I was sick until the day I gave birth. Each time,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders and squeezing.

  “Are we talking pregnancy horror stories on her wedding day?” Fee asked, coming in in her perfect black dress and heels, offsetting her pale skin and blonde hair. She had Izzy on her hip and Becca trailing behind, both in white tool dresses with black polkadots.

  “My dress is tight,” I grumbled, working my hands down the seams, praying they would hold up.

  “I know. Makes the expanding ta-tas look ace,” she said with twinkling eyes. “Charlie is already in the hall, pacing. It’s sweet really,” she added, her smile warm. I knew that, like me, with Fee’s screwed up past, Charlie was the only good father she had ever known too. “He walked me down the aisle too, but he’s nervous like he will forget the cue to start.”

  I turned to face them, my lips twitching. “He’s totally going to make me do that cheesy father-daughter dance too, isn’t he?” When they shared a look, I sighed. “I blame you two for this, you know.”

  “We know, hon,” Helen said, giving my hand a squeeze. “You ready to get married?”

  I glanced down at my hand to see the big, almost obnoxious, round-cut diamond engagement ring on my finger. I smiled, like I always did. “Oh yeah,” I said with a nod, exhaling hard as they led me into the hall.

  I knew I was supposed to be nervous. Even brides who had no second-thoughts about the man they chose got nervous. Or, at least, that was how it seemed. But if anything, all I felt was a calmness, a rightness.

  Because what I was walking toward wasn’t just the man I loved, it was the feeling of home I buried in him.

  He didn’t cry, thank God, because I wouldn’t have been able to handle that.

  And it wasn’t his n
ature.

  He looked me up and down and gave me his trademark smirk, but his eyes were just a little awestruck.

  He took my hands and we faced the Justice of the Peace to repeat our vows.

  He kissed me like he always did- hard, hungry, demanding, despite the hoots and claps and whistles from our audience. He pulled me close and I finally found the right moment to tell him.

  “I’m pregnant,” I whispered in his ear.

  His arms squeezed me tight for a long second. “I know.”

  “How?” I asked, the question having been a burning one for ages.

  He pulled back, giving me my favorite little wicked smile. “Baby…”

  “What?”

  “I’m a big fan of those tits of yours. Think I wouldn’t notice when they started getting bigger?”

  Not expecting that, I let out a snorting laugh. “God, I love you,” I said, meaning it.

  “I love you too, you pain in my ass,” he said with a wink as he pulled away from me to lead me out of the room.

  The reception was full of a bunch of loud, rowdy Mallicks and all their crazy friends taking the opportunity to catch up like a bar on a Friday night.

  Becca, chasing her forever-bullied little sister, managed to slam into the table holding the cake, making the whole back of it smudge against the wall. Fee’s littlest decided to spend half the time screaming, the other half vomiting all over her dress then sleeping like she hadn’t just put her parents through hell. Charlie made me father-daughter dance with him, doing so while giving me a welcome to the family speech that made me sob like a little girl.

  And finally, when we had had enough fun, Shane grabbed my hand, told the whole of the room that he wanted to get me alone, then dragged me out of there.

  We didn’t leave Navesink Bank for a honeymoon, both of us happy to simply spend a week alone in bed.

  So that was what we did.

  Lea - 5 years

  Apparently, for me, having babies was just like losing my virginity. Once I started, I couldn’t seem to stop. Shane was convinced it was just that I liked fucking him too much, which was definitely part of it, I’m not going to lie, but once we had the first one, eight months after our wedding day, I realized nothing had ever felt more right than seeing a little, squishy baby in the arms of the man I loved.

  Jason was the spitting image of his father. And, according to Helen, every bit as difficult to bring into the world, weighing in at over nine pounds at birth. We waited with bated breath, and a bet between all of the Mallicks that had a truly obnoxious pot, to see what eye color he would end up with.

  “I knew it,” I told Shane after the pediatrician appointment where the doc confirmed that enough time had passed, the eyes were going to stay blue.

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” Mark grumbled, handing over the money. “I bet the next one will be a girl.”

  He was wrong.

  The next one ended up being two and both were boys.

  The last one though, after everyone had given up hope (and bets) ended up being the little girl that Shane was never going to let date. She, like all of her brothers, had her father’s (and uncles’ and grandfather’s) eyes. Really, you couldn’t see a bit of me in any of them but little Sam who had my nose and hair and absolutely no plans on kowtowing to all the big boys around her.

  I walked into the warehouse to find absolute chaos.

  I understood Fee’s belief that her kids were part-demon half the time because mine did nothing but create messes and paint the walls and make each other cry, and try to get away with things that they knew they never would. So when I stepped into the living space to find Jason sitting on his brother, Jake, whose little face was getting beet red in anger as he let out a wail that pierced through my brain like a migraine. Jake’s twin in every way but personality, Joey, was off in the corner with a pen that he must have found in the God damn junk drawer with the child lock, drawing an elaborate mural on the wall.

  Shane was in the kitchen, a sleeping Sam propped up on his shoulder as he mixed something on a pot on the stove.

  He looked around the room, shaking his head in typical daddy-fashion, before his eyes landed on me and he gave me a small smile and a ‘what can ya’ do’ shrug.

  And it didn’t matter that my walls would need to be Magic Eraser’d for the tenth time that week or that once Jake got up, he was going to do his damnedest to make his bully big brother bleed, or that Sam was taking a nap at a time that was decidedly not nap time which meant she would be up half the night.

  All that stress fell away as I felt the sensation course through me, strong as ever, even after the years.

  Comfort.

  Rightness.

  Home.

  “Hey baby,” Shane said as I crossed over toward him, reaching up with his free hand and grabbing the back of my skull to kiss me hard and deep, until I felt it down to my toes.

  “Blech!” Jason yelled. “Daddy is kissing Mommy again!”

  “I’d worry less about that and more about…” Shane started, but it was too late. Jake had gotten his feet and took his brother down from behind, his smaller, younger body somehow much more compact and strong than his older brother’s. “What?” Shane asked when I gave him a raised brow. “They gotta get it out of their systems. No use stepping in. They’ll just start again in ten minutes if we do.”

  That was the Mallick way of childrearing.

  And I learned pretty quickly to give into it.

  “Alright alright,” I said when afterward there were tears and a bruise that, in all Jason’s five-year old dramatics, required emergent medical attention. “Go downstairs and blow off some steam,” I demanded, making them all jump up to do just that.

  “Have we thanked Hunter yet today for the idea of a play floor?” Shane asked, handing me Sam so I could go put her in her playpen in the living space that once used to be Shane’s bedroom.

  “Come here,” Shane demanded, his tone a firm demand full of promise and I felt my sex clench as I straightened and turned.

  “The kids could come up at any minute,” I said with a brow raise.

  “Then we’ll have to be quick,” he said, grabbing me as soon as I stepped into the kitchen. “Come on, give me a proper hello.”

  So then I hiked up my skirt and did just that, right there in the kitchen, with a multitude of crashing sounds coming from the floor below and a baby asleep in a crib, all the stresses of modern life and parenthood doing absolutely nothing to lessen our need for each other when the mood struck.

  I was pulling my panties back up when Shane suddenly turned and said, “Oh, did you hear about Eli?”

  “No,” I said, my heart constricting at the mention of him, that being the only sore spot in our, and all his families’ stories. But it was looking up, I reminded myself. “What happened?” I asked, praying it was something positive. He could use it.

  “Well, it’s the damnedest thing,” Shane said, smirk and eyes wicked. “Seems he’s met a girl…”

  xx

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jessica Gadziala is a full-time writer, parrot enthusiast, and coffee drinker from New Jersey. She enjoys short rides to the book store, sad songs, and cold weather.

  She is very active on Goodreads, Facebook, as well as her personal groups on those sites. Join in. She’s friendly.

  ALSO BY JESSICA GADZIALA

  Read Fee and Hunter’s story in

  For A Good Time, Call…

  The Henchmen MC

  Reign

  Cash

  Wolf

  Repo

  The Savages

  Monster

  Killer

  Savior

  —

  DEBT

  The
Sex Surrogate

  Dr. Chase Hudson

  Dissent

  Into The Green

  What The Heart Needs

  What The Heart Wants

  What The Heart Finds

  What The Heart Knows

  The Stars Landing Deviant

  Dark Mysteries

  STALK HER!

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  <3/ Jessica