by Rye Hart
The man’s name was Maverick and he ended up being one of the best deputies Jared ever worked with. As he was integrated into our little town, he used his strength and size for good rather than mayhem. He turned out to be a rather mild-mannered man who loved to read and spend time with the horses. We learned so much about him in the time he stayed with us.
One of the young girls in town took an interest in him and despite his past, the two went on to get married. She was pregnant with their first child and looked like she might pop any day now. Maverick was proof to me that the Lord really did work in mysterious ways.
I smiled softly and ran my hand over my belly, tracing shapes with my fingers. I’d only found out about my own pregnancy about a month previous. I was barely showing but Jared was impressed with the tiny baby bump. He would come home every night and kiss it, offering tender, loving words. He was going to be an amazing daddy, even if he was terrified he might mess up.
When Jared started to worry about his abilities as a father, I would point out the fact that Gabriel adored him. Gabriel knew Jared as his daddy and while I wanted to tell him about Richard eventually, I thought it best to let Jared and Gabriel bond as father and son for now.
Marrying Jared didn’t mean I forgot about Richard. I’d never forget about Richard for as long as I lived. He would always be my first love, but I knew I couldn’t hold onto him forever. He wouldn’t have wanted that for me. I knew that if he could have met Jared, he would have wanted him to take care of me.
“What are you thinking about over there?” Jared called, walking over to me from the river.
He was carrying a net and Gabriel tottered along behind him, holding a small bucket that had rocks in it. I smiled and shook my head.
“Just daydreaming.”
“About what?” Jared asked, settling beside me.
I chuckled and leaned in, offering him a kiss. “You,” I hummed.
He smiled and put a hand on my belly, whispering the words that still made me blush. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Those words were so simple, but they gave me so much hope.
The End
Regency Romance Collection
Tough as Nails
Chapter One
Have you ever met someone so royally screwed up that they could lie and cheat without feeling any morsel of regret? Well, if you haven’t - allow me to introduce myself. My name is Brittney Dale and I try hard not to blame others for the way I turned out, but then again, I can’t really take all of the credit myself either.
My mother was, for lack of a better word, a whore for Chaos Theory, the local motorcycle club. She used to tell me stories from before her dark days - stories of my father. She claimed he was a fine, upstanding man with plenty of money and a big house. When I was younger I liked to live in that fantasy, but as I got older I began to realize it was all a lie.
I eventually found out who my father was. His name was Billy and he was one of my mom’s Johns. When she came to him for help after discovering her pregnancy, he drove her to a women’s shelter and that’s where she lived for the nine months she carried me. She always boasted that she stayed clean during her pregnancy, though I didn’t believe that for a second. It was a miracle I had both ears and two working arms.
After I was born, mom got kicked out of the shelter for using drugs and she started wandering from hotel to hotel, turning tricks to try and keep us off the street. For years that’s how it was. We wandered from city to city, scrounging through dumpsters and sleeping on park benches. Sometimes she managed to pool enough money to get us a hotel room for the week. I remember how much I loved that. I would sit in the hot bath water until my skin turned an angry red. It was the only time I felt clean in those days.
I never went to school because we never stayed in one place long enough for the government to catch up with mom. Whenever the local cops came knocking, we took off to another city. We spent my entire childhood bouncing around wandering through the Deep South until we eventually made it to Tennessee.
When we started living in Nashville, I was only about nine. According to my mother I was old enough to take care of myself. She would go away for days and leave me without food or money, so I did the only thing I could. I would go to the local grocery store and take what I needed. No one really suspected that a young girl was coming to their store to steal, so it was always rather easy to just walk in and grab whatever I wanted.
The day I was caught, was the day my life changed forever. One of the stores I’d been frequenting finally caught onto me and the store owner snatched my arm and called the cops. When I explained the situation to the police, they started snooping around. While they never found mom, they did discover my living situation and took me into protective custody.
I was put into the foster system immediately and that began the worst eight years of my life. And considering how the first nine years were, that’s really saying something. They never found my mother and so she never went to jail. I was left trying to navigate a system I didn’t understand with tools that weren't considered acceptable.
My mother, when she was around, never got angry when I lied or stole. There were no repercussions. Now I was suddenly living in a world with incredibly strict rules that I struggled to conform to.
All of a sudden there was dinner time, bath time, and bedtime. I couldn’t take three showers a day like I'd been used to doing, and I had to eat what the foster home made, when they made it. If I wasn't hungry at dinnertime, I didn't eat until breakfast.
Looking back on it, I understand that everyone did their best. They were trying to provide structure and discipline, but that wasn't how I understood it. You couldn't take a kid who'd spent their entire life trying to survive on their own and expect them to just assimilate. That's just wasn’t how it worked.
School was even harder. I started going to classes that I didn’t really understand. I was nine, so they put me with the rest of the nine year olds, but I hadn’t had any schooling up until that point. I read at a very basic level and math completely escaped me. Overall, I was far behind my peers and no one seemed to understand that it was because I’d never sat in a classroom before. My teachers all thought I was stupid or just a flat out bad kid. I tried for a long time, but eventually gave up.
Instead of paying attention in class, I just started slipping away and skipping school. I got in trouble for it many times, but I didn’t really care. I would go hang out with the older kids who seemed to like me well enough, though it was only because I was willing to steal candies and snacks for them.
The foster home eventually got tired of my delinquency and I started bouncing around from home to home until my mother managed to find me. I hadn’t seen her in eight years, but I couldn’t resist her offer. She would take me away from the school and away from the foster homes. It was an offer that sounded too good to be true. I was so tired of all the fighting and yelling. I was tired of feeling unwanted and stupid. So despite all of the things she’d done when I was young, I happily went with her and joined the biker gang.
It would become both the best and worst choice I’d ever make. Welcome to my life.
Chapter Two
The sun was rising and peeking through the window, warming my tanned skin. My mother was full blooded Native American and I was lucky enough to retain most of her genetics. My hair was long and black as raven’s feathers. I rarely brushed it and just left it wavy or pulled back into a pony tail. Men loved my hair. They always wanted to touch it (or pull it, depending on the situation), and they had a tendency to get lost in my eyes. They were as green as spring grass and with a flutter of my eyelashes I almost always got what I wanted.
I wasn’t alone in the bed. I never was. Just like my mother, I’d turned to selling myself for the basic necessities in life. By the time I joined the biker gang I was seventeen and considered an adult by most of the men, and as an adult I was expected to earn my keep. The convinced me that the only thing o
f value that I possessed was my body. I was scared at first. The first few times I cried, but soon enough I became numb to the physical and emotional pain and I just sucked it up.
The leader of the gang, Fang, took a particular interest in me. Since he was the highest man on the totem pole, he got his pick of women. Mom and I weren’t the only women they kept around for pleasure. There were a good ten to fifteen women who regularly came around to look for cheap or free drugs. Well, the drugs were never free, but for most of them sex was a small price to pay for crank.
I was the only one who wasn’t after drugs. I think it was one of the reasons I was in “high demand” as Fang put it. My skin wasn’t ruined and my teeth weren’t falling out of my head. That was more than most of the other women could claim. I didn’t blame them, though. Many of them had been born into situations like this. Many of them survived in utter poverty for so long that the drug induced haze they lived in was more of a defense mechanism than anything else.
I didn’t think of myself as better than them, but the men did. I was strong and “feisty”. I hated when they called me that. It made me sound like some sort of animal they were just poking with a stick. It made my skin crawl.
My eyes finally fluttered open and I sat up, running my hand through my hair. I turned and put my feet flat on the ground, looking around. Fang was naked in the bed beside me, his hairy chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. Maybe it was wrong of me, but sometimes I just wished he would stop breathing. This man made me feel trapped and I hated it. I wanted to run but I had nowhere to go. At least here I had a roof over my head and food in my stomach. It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than being homeless.
I walked over to the bathroom and hopped in the shower, wanting to wash Fang’s smell off me. I hated the way he smelled. It was an awful mixture of sweat and desperation. Despite the fact that we lived in a trailer with a shower Fang still didn’t shower nearly as often as he should.
The bathroom had always been my sanctuary and even now I found the warm water cascading along my shoulders comforting. It was like a warm embrace that I’d never been granted as a child. My mother never wrapped her arms around me or kissed my forehead. Somewhere along the line, water had replaced my mother’s affections.
I took far too long, allowing the hot water to run out; it wasn’t like Fang was going to care. Just as I reached to turn the shower off there was a banging at the door.
“Hurry it up. I have to take a shit!” Fang snapped.
I rolled my eyes and made a disgusted face at his vulgarity, but ignored him, deciding to let the water run a little longer just because I could. He wasn’t asking me to get out because he had a shred of decency and didn’t want to use the bathroom while I was in the shower. The only reason he didn’t barge in was because I’d learned to lock the door.
When I couldn’t stand the cold water anymore, I finally got out of the shower and pushed the door open, wrapped in nothing but a towel. I could feel Fang’s eyes on me as he reached out and grabbed my wrist.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m going to run to the store.” It was a lie, but it didn’t really matter. I always lied to him about where I was going.
“Who told you to run to the store?”
I rolled my eyes and yanked my arm out of his hand. “Don’t act like you can tell me what I can and can’t do.”
I saw his eyes narrow and before I could escape his hand snapped out and he gripped my jaw between his finger and thumb, staring down at me with a serious look on his face.
“Are you challenging me, girl?”
I took a step back and frowned. “I just don’t like when you’re constantly over my shoulder. I’m just going to go to the store to get stuff to make dinner.”
He pushed me forward, forcing me to back up until the back of my knees hit the bed and I sat, staring up at him, trying not to let the fear show on my face. I didn’t want him to know he was getting to me. He leaned over me and forced me into the mattress, pressing his hand against my mouth so hard I was suddenly struggling to breathe.
“You’re going to shut up and listen really close, girly,” he hissed. “This isn’t a fucking game. You better realize that really quick. You think you don’t belong to me, but you do. All I’d have to do is give the order and no one in this camp would give you food or water. You’d sleep outside until I was tired of playing with you and then I’d have a bullet put in the back of your head.”
My eyes were wide now and I could feel the wetness in my eyes that I was trying so desperately to ignore and force back. He just continued staring at me. “Who do you think would miss you? Your mom? She doesn’t care about you. No one would miss you. We’d throw your body in a ditch and no one would even know you were gone.”
He finally pulled away and I turned, trying to hide the tears and the way my lips trembled. “Now, get out of here,” he snapped.
I scrambled to my feet and put as much distanced between us as possible. I pressed myself against the wall on the far side and just closed my eyes, waiting for him to go away. When I heard the bathroom door close, I took a breath and scrambled to get dressed.
I had to get out of this trailer before I broke.
Chapter Three
I had a special place that I went to in order to get away from chaos. There was a local college about an hour bus ride from the trailer park I had come to call home. I’d never been very good in school because I wasn’t ever given the chance. It wasn’t for a lack of wanting to learn. On the contrary, I loved learning, and that’s why I liked slipping into lectures from time to time.
It took me a while to figure out, but I knew where all of the big lecture halls were. They were rooms filled with well over a hundred people, furiously scribbling notes as the teachers talked. I could disappear in those rooms. I just snuck in, sat in the back, and listened intently as the teachers talked about science, math, and philosophy. I would stay for hours and pretend that I was a normal college student and a normal person. It was the only escape I had.
As the day came to an end, I filed out of the last lecture with the rest of the students, smiling softly at them and waving as they moved past. It was a stupid little game that I liked to play with myself. I liked to pretend that I was a student.
I walked to the bus stop and went straight back to the trailer park to the small bar right on the edge of the complex. I wasn’t a big drinker, but they had pool there and the bartender gave me free Cokes. I was planning on staying there until Fang passed out.
I didn’t have a place of my own and I didn’t like going to my mom’s place because she always had Johns. With as much as she worked you would think she would be rolling in cash, but the sad reality was that she was under Chaos’ thumb. She owed them more drug money than she’d ever be able to make back in a lifetime.
I couldn’t stand to see her like that so I’d sleep on Fangs couch and when I needed some extra cash, I’d sleep in his bed. It wasn’t something I was proud of, but it was something I had to do to get by.
As I stepped through the doors of the bar, I noticed that everyone was gathered around Fang. They stared at me and I felt a sudden unease come over me. I became very much aware that everyone else knew of something I didn’t.
Fang was sitting at a table against a far wall, puffing on a vanilla cigar. He let out a slow drag and smirk, his jagged teeth visible in the dim light.
“Speak of the devil.”
I rolled my eyes and walked through the bar, getting the coke Becky had waiting for me.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, if you had come to the meeting like you were supposed to you would know. Are you too good for us now?”
“I lost track of time.”
“We were talking about Damien’s group.”
Everyone knew about Damien’s group. They took out guys like Fang, and over the past few months they’d managed to get rid of some pretty big names in the community. When Fang had one too
many drinks, I’d seen him start to get nervous about Damien, somehow he knew he was next on the chopping block. I for one, relished that idea.
“And what, exactly, were you talking about?” I asked.
“Someone’s got to take them down. They’re taking out gangs left and right. If we don’t fight back, we’ll be next,” Fang said gruffly.
I settled in an empty chair and looked around at all the worried faces. My mother was in the crowd, shaking. I guessed that was more from drugs than fear. “Alright. I don’t really understand where I come in, though.”
“You’re going to be our little weasel.”
I frowned and set my drink down. “What?”
“We’re sending you in on the front lines. You’re going to infiltrate their group and help us take them down.”
“Like hell I am! Why can’t you just go in there, guns blazing? That’s how we’ve always done it in the past!” I argued.
“That shit hasn’t worked for anyone else and I want to know why the fuck not. If we go in guns blazing, my people are going to end up dead! Is that something you want on your conscious?” he snapped.
I looked away and closed my eyes. I hated Fang, but I cared deeply for some of the others in the gang. As much as my mom had screwed me over, I loved her and I didn’t want her to end up dead. I knew that Fang wasn’t asking me – he was ordering me. I had two courses of action; I could either agree, or I’d end up dead in a ditch. I really didn’t have much of an option.
I turned my head and crossed my arms over my chest, trying to look as petulant as possible. If they were going to make me agree to this, I wasn’t going to go easily.
“Fine.”
Chapter Four
My eyes were narrowed, staring straight ahead. Despite being in a biker gang, bikes had always frightened me, and so Fang normally drove me around in a beat up pickup truck. I’d seen too many men get on bikes drunk and lay them down. It was always a horrifying thing to see. We’d lost members like that and it just seemed so unnecessary. I didn’t trust anyone in the gang enough to get on a bike with them.