I see Sascha’s throat work when she swallows. Thick, long, black eyelashes move up and down in rapid succession and I spy a wet-looking gleam in her eyes when she returns her gaze to mine. Now, it’s my turn to swallow. My regret. It’s been happening for a while—this propensity to lash out—but she’s the first person outside my family that I’ve unleashed my asshole side on.
“Can you lift your left leg in the air for me?” Sascha tries to be all business, except the slight wobble in her voice gives her away. As punishment for my rudeness, I force my eyes down to the leg that she’s speaking of. It doesn’t look any different than it did the last time I saw it—still a ruined, disfigured mess with an atrophied calf muscle.
Closing my eyes, I lift my leg. I jump when warm hands touch my thigh, running along the outline of my thigh muscle with sure fingers. Sascha moves to my knee running her hands around my knee cap and then holds my trembling leg in the air when it begins to droop. I try my hardest to maintain the position she needs—cursing Mad Dog for making me go through with this, the entire time she’s touching me. Like before with my hands, she doesn’t hesitate to touch the scars and prod the mangled mess.
And, once again, she smiles. “I can definitely fix this.”
Sascha lowers my leg back to the ground and lifts my right limb. This one isn’t as bad; although, by a normal person’s standards, it’s pretty screwed up. She looks it over while I give up pretending that I have any strength left and flop back onto my elbows.
“Did you do any of the rehab the hospital would have recommended?”
Taking a leaf out of my sister’s book, I roll my eyes to the heavens while Sascha lets my leg fall back into place. “Nope. Wasn’t interested.”
“Joel—”
“What was it going to achieve? I tried it for a few days and each day I got worse. I’m a goddamn cripple.” I cut her off to deliver my normal explanation. Waving my hand around her examination room, I continue. “None of this shit is going to fix what’s broken, ya know?”
“Every single injury you have can be made better by following a physio’s plan. I can help you—”
“Yeah. I’ve heard all these promises before.” With a grunt, I push myself to my feet. I’m standing before the first woman to make my dick stand up and take notice wearing only my boxer-briefs and a T-shirt. You’d think I’d find it embarrassing, but I’m don’t. Technically, I’m passed embarrassed. Mortified, might be the right word to describe my current condition.
“Joel.” Sascha lays a soft hand on my forearm. I shake it off and attempt to bend down to pick up my jeans. The stubborn grabs them before I can and holds them out to me. “At least give me some time. Don’t dismiss this because of your own preconceived notions.”
Thanks to Mad Dog and the bloody Shamrocks, I’m backed into a corner anyway. It doesn’t matter how much her hollow promises piss me off, I’m stuck here until they tell me I can stop the sessions. Not that I tell Sascha this. I ignore her, not trusting myself not to snap at her worse than I already have.
Pushing my right leg into my pants, I lean on the bed and lower my left leg into my jeans as well. I know I resemble a toddler trying to dress himself for the first time. There’s nothing I can do about it. This is my life.
Slow. Awkward. Ugly.
When my fingers struggle to lift my zipper, Sascha steps closer to me. She knocks my hands out of the way, pulling my zipper into place and threading my pants button through the hole with nibble fingers. Her hands brush over my cock and I barely contain a groan.
She smirks, then does it again. This time I have to sink my teeth into my bottom lip to stop from making a noise. “I’m not asking for you to believe in me straight away. Just let me try. That’s all I want.”
I could stand here all night with her hands pressing against my junk and her pretty, flushed face right in front of me. Hell, I’m happy to spend the rest of my days in this confining room until we both perish. But, I have a Club meeting to get to and she has a date with the Shamrock assigned to tail her while she picks up her daughter from child care and makes her way safely home.
For the first time in a long time, I man the fuck up. With Timber’s words from the hospital making circles in my head, I take hold of Sascha’s wrist and push her hand away from me. “I’ll try, but we have to keep it purely platonic. I’m taken.”
When Sascha’s face turns bright, I mentally add the following addendum—taken by the need to see my brother’s killers hunted to death—and hope like hell that I haven’t just blown any chance I have with this woman. Because, if this all ends the way it’s supposed to, she’s going to be joining our family real soon.
He’s taken. My mind screams the words over and over the entire time I drive to pick up Jasmine from after-school care. They’re still echoing around my head when I push open the door and am engulfed by the racket the dozen or so kids are making as they play dodgeball.
Jasmine spots me straightaway and rushes toward me. I hold up my hand and then shoo her back to her game. After seeing Cam ride past my house this morning and then noticing a Harley trying to trail me after I left my clinic, I need to have a very awkward conversation with the manager of the centre.
“Hi, Jacq,” I smile as I enter her office.
“Sascha.” Jacqui, the centre manager, steeples her hands in front of her face. She seems unusually tense—almost stern. “I was hoping I’d see you today.”
Perching on the edge of the seat in front of her desk, my heart starts to pound in my chest, anxiety racing around my veins like it used to when I was called to see the principal when I was a school. “Why?”
“This afternoon we had a strange visitor.” My mouth turns dry and I sit up straighter. Please don’t let it be Cam. I pretty pray to whichever benevolent God who’ll listen for it to have been anyone other than him.
“An outlaw biker, who was very pushy in his determination to learn Jasmine’s date of birth among other things.” My heart sinks into my sneakers. I swallow in an attempt to force enough saliva into my mouth so that I can question her. Jacqui beats me to the punch, speaking again. “He seemed to think that he may be her dad. Of course, I didn’t tell him anything. Although, I’m a little confused as to why he’d think that considering you said that her father died before she was born.”
My voice cracks, then squeaks, when I answer her. “H—e did.”
My pulse sounds like crashing thunder in my ears. I have the strongest urge to take Jasmine and hide under Jacqui’s table so no one can see us. Short term solution to what is going to become a long term problem.
“I’d believe you, Sash. If his eyes weren’t absolutely identical to Jasmine’s.”
This time I gulp. There’s my confirmation that it was Cam—although, who the hell else could it realistically be? How, after all this time, did he find out about her? Why is he even interested in me enough to learn that I have a kid? The huge sigh I let out blows my hair off my forehead. I drum my hand against my thighs and shrug.
“Jasmine’s father is alive.” I hold up a hand when Jacqui starts to speak. “He doesn’t know about her and I need you to promise that you’ll help me keep it that way. I made a huge mistake when I was younger, but my daughter shouldn’t have to pay the price for that.”
Jacqui’s brows furrow, her lips pursing. I can hear the wheels turning her head as she tries to work out how to word her upcoming question. “A biker, Sascha? You’re a Koswalski. Your father is the loudest anti-biker advocate the Police have on their side.”
I close my eyes, letting out another sigh as I open them to face the woman I call my friend. “I rebelled when I went to university. Got in with a bad crowd and ended up with egg on my face when it went bad. Thankfully, Dad cleaned up my mess.”
“Lady. Fucking a biker is more than rebelling. Tell me the whole story. I’m going to need to know everything so I can work out how to proceed when he comes back. He didn’t strike me as the type to let this go if I ask nicely.”
Leaning back in t
he seat, I stare at her through blank eyes. I don’t know where to start. Finding out at eighteen that I was adopted? Learning that Thomas Taylor, a man who’d scared the crap out of me for as long as I could remember, was my real father? Looking at my little sister and my mother and realising that it didn’t matter how many people said that we looked exactly the same, I was never going to be one of them?
“I found myself drifting away from my family when I left home to start my sports science degree.” Obviously, my mind has decided to start at the middle of the story. “You know my family. Rich. Upper class. Snobby. Uni was weird for me. People treated me differently. I wasn’t a Koswalski. I was Sascha, for the first time in my life. I began to go out with my new friends. To drink. Take party drugs. I was having an awesome time. Until, I met him.”
It takes more effort than it should to say his name out aloud. “Cam. He was the nephew of the president of the Mavericks of Mayhem. He was dangerous. I knew it. Everyone around him knew it. He was being groomed to take over the Club. At that time, I found the menace that hung off him exciting.”
I run my fingers through my hair. Apart from the night that I told my dad everything so he could fix it for me, I’ve spoke of my stupidity. My innocent arrogance back then makes me sick. I thought I was showing that I wasn’t stuck-up by blessing these hicks with my mere presence.
“I thought he loved me. Turns out they were all laughing at me every time I turned up at one of the nightspots they ran protection for and followed Cam back to their Clubhouse like a lost little puppy. While I was turning our relationship into some fantasy where the love of the rich girl saved the boy from the other side of the tracks, he was fucking anything that moved. I was dumb. Naïve. But, I eventually worked out what was happening—and when I did, I left him without another word.”
“Jesus, Sash. What did he do?” Jacqui is staring like she doesn’t know me anymore. I guess she doesn’t. My life for the past five and a half years has been one of mind-numbing routine and snobbish pretence. Who would look at me, the successful, but adorably awkward dork, and think that I had a wild past?
“Nothing,” I answer, with a nonchalant shrug that is 100% fake. “He didn’t have a chance to try to contact me. Dad used his connection with the Police Commissioner and the information that I told him about the Mavericks, to launch the anti-biker laws. I’m guessing that Cam was so busy trying to stay out of jail that he forgot about me.”
“Woman. You know that’s not the truth. A blind man can see that your dad kept him away.” Jacqui refuses to let me live in ignorant bliss. Shaking her head, she lifts her eyebrows at me. “Why the hell is he back now?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”
“What took you so fucking long?”
Mad Dog is fine form when Kyle and I walk into my house—currently our house, clubhouse, and makeshift war room. They have reams of paper scattered from one end of the dining table to the other, with a dozen big men clustered around it. It they didn’t look so furious, I’d laugh.
“Don’t ask me,” Kyle defends himself, quickly. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder at me. “I was waiting for him. Fuck knows what he was doing in there for so long.”
Timber grunts, eyeing me with little welcome on his face. “Kid, we have a list of shit for you to find out for us.”
Kyle carries his electronics everywhere with him. The strap of the satchel that contains his laptop is slung over his shoulder so he slips it off and finds a seat at the breakfast bar next to Maddi, who’s leafing through a pile of paperwork herself. She pats his shoulder, then leans over and whispers something in his ear. He turns back to me with slyness on his face, then nods at her. My sister lets out an inelegant snort, then bursts into laughter that has everyone around the table lifting their heads to look at her.
“Something amusing, Angel?” Mad Dog doesn’t seem impressed by her display.
She jams her hand against her mouth, tears running down her cheeks while she continues to fight her amusement. “No. Nothing.”
“You sure?” Her husband quirks an eyebrow, rolling his injured shoulder while he waits for her to regain control. The weight he lost in hospital is clear to see, adding a sharpness to his face that makes him appear angrier than usual. There’s a sharpness to his features that tells me he’s in more pain than he’s letting on.
While we wait for Maddi to answer him, I check out the state of everyone else. Timber doesn’t look in much better shape than Mad Dog and the rest of the Club seems to be aware of the fact that their leaders should probably still be in hospital—not in the dining room plotting out the Shamrocks next moves in this war.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kylie Hillman is an Australian author.
Wife to a Harley-riding, boating and fishing, four-wheel driving, underground mining, quintessential Aussie bloke.
Mum to two crazy, adorable, and original kids.
Crohn's Disease sufferer and awareness campaigner.
She’s also an avid tea drinker, a connoisseur of 80s/90s rock music, and is known for lacing everything she says with sarcasm and inappropriate innuendo.
Formerly working in finance, she was forced to re-evaluate her plans for her life when severe Crohn's Disease brought her corporate career to a screeching halt. Restarting her childhood hobbies of writing and reading to alleviate the monotony of being sick and house bound, she found her calling and is enjoying life to the max. A typical day is now spent in the “real” world where she hangs out with her awesome family and “book” world where she gets to chill with her fictional characters.
Kylie writes the books she wants to read. A lover of strong men who aren't perfect and aren't afraid to admit it, straight talking women who embrace their vulnerabilities, and real life gritty stories, she hopes these themes shine through her writing. An avid reader of all genres, Kylie hopes to release books that keep the reader on the edge of their seat—be it with suspense, heart-stopping thrills, or laughter.
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OTHER TITLES BY KYLIE
BLACK SHAMROCKS MC
Seizing Control, Black Shamrocks MC #1
Soothing Suffering, Black Shamrocks MC #1.5 novella
Making Choices, Black Shamrocks MC #2
Seeking Redemption, Black Shamrocks MC #3
Conquering Circumstances, Black Shamrocks MC #3.5 novella
Tempting Fate, Black Shamrocks MC #4
Finding Nirvana, Black Shamrocks MC #5
Complete series is OUT NOW
STANDALONES
Brawl, an MMA romance
OUT NOW
COMING SOON
Amnesia, a medical thriller
DECEMBER 6, 2016
Beast, Black Shamrocks MC: First Generation #1 novella
JANUARY 17, 2017
Bouncing Betty, Hitting the Wall #1
FEBRUARY, 2017
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Also by Kylie Hillman
Black Shamrocks MC
Seizing Control
Making Choices
Seeking Redemption
Tempting Fate
Finding Nirvana (Coming Soon)
Conquering Circumstances
Soothing Suffering (Coming Soon)
Standalone
Brawl
eading books on Archive.
Finding Nirvana (Black Shamrocks MC, #5) Page 7