by Penny Dee
I grinned. “Are you sure you won’t come to tonight’s thing at the clubhouse?”
She pulled a face and went rigid in my arms. “No. I’ll let you enjoy that on your own.”
I wish she had come with me to the clubhouse.
Maybe then I wouldn’t have drank too much.
Maybe then I wouldn’t have fucked up our future together.
CADE
Twelve Years Later
Now
Without a word of a lie, I woke up with some chick’s hand on my cock. I was on my bed in my room at the clubhouse, sleeping off an eight-hour ride back from Missouri. Despite a party going on in the clubhouse, I was way too tired to party and wanted nothing more than to be left the fuck alone. Yet, there she was. A brunette with great tits and an even greater ass. Pressing herself all over my body and pushing her hand down my jeans.
“Whoa …” I said, blinking awake.
A surge of pleasure streamed though me—completely involuntary because I wasn’t interested. Except according to my cock I was.
“You like that, Cade?” The brunette asked, squeezing a little tighter. My balls contracted and tightened with a surge of pleasure.
“What do you think you’re doing?” My voice was husky from being in a deep sleep.
“Waking you up.” The brunette looked up at me through thick, false lashes before pulling my jeans and boxer shorts down. She straddled me, her hand firmly gripping the base of my hard-as-fuck cock. She was wearing nothing but a g-string. It was one of those really tiny ones with the thin straps, and I could feel the gentle tickle of her pubic hair through the almost non-existent fabric. And I was wrong—her tits weren’t great—they were fucking amazing.
She started to stroke, and dear God, if she kept that up I was going to blow my load.
Using every ounce of mental strength, I pushed her hand away and she pouted. “You don’t like that, Cade?”
“Ain’t nothing I can’t do myself, sweetheart,” I said. I wanted her off me. Granted, she was hot. But I wasn’t in the mood. Which lasted all of five seconds. Because she grabbed my hand and forced it between her legs, and she was dripping wet. My cock throbbed and begged me to fuck her.
But I’d decided a while ago that I wasn’t that guy anymore. After twelve years of trying to fuck her out of my head, I realized that she wasn’t going anywhere, and no matter how many women fell into my bed, I was never going to fuck her out of my heart.
Her.
Indigo.
Her being gone didn’t make me want to fuck a hundred women to get over her anymore.
Her being gone didn’t make me want to share my bed with faceless women, night after night.
Her being gone made me mad.
Twelve years.
Twelve fucking years and not a fucking word.
I was an asshole. It was my fault she left. I broke her. I broke us. I never denied it. But she . . . she was the one who turned and ran.
I clenched my teeth.
She was the one who ended us.
The brunette rubbed herself with my hand and I swear to God there was only so much restraint a man could show when a hot babe was rubbing her pussy all over him. Maybe I’d been a bit hasty in saying I wasn’t interested. Maybe I was—
Oh God.
Juicy lips closed over the head of my cock while a wet, talented tongue sucked me into the deep cavern of her throat. Yep, no point in fighting it. No fucking point at all.
I let out a deep groan as her mouth began the slow glide down the length of me, her tongue pulling me deeper into her throat. Fuck. She had one hand curled around the base of my cock and it hit her chin as she moved up and down, up and down, slowly gaining more momentum as she expertly sucked me like a goddamn lollipop …
I gave into the pleasure stirring in my balls and sank back into the pillows. She was good. Damn good. And the little moans she made as she licked and sucked me put me on a train straight to Pleasureville.
My orgasm was rapid and it surged through me, cartwheeling across my brain. I thrust my head back into the pillow and shot into the back of her mouth. She whimpered but didn’t stop sucking as I continued to pump more and more down her throat. She lapped it up, milking me with her lips and tongue, and moaning as she emptied me of every last drop.
When she was sure I was done, she looked up and greedily licked her lips. “I love how you taste, Cade.”
My post-orgasm indifference was already kicking in and I wasn’t in the mood for small talk and lies. Pulling on my jeans I raised an eyebrow at her. Ergo, if a girl tells you she loves the taste of your cum, chances are she is lying.
I hoped she didn’t plan on hanging around. I wasn’t into small talk.
But it wasn’t small talk she was after.
She pushed me back down on to the bed and ran her palms across my abs and up my chest. “You’re so big,” she breathed. “All the girls think you’re beautiful.” Her fingertips whispered across my chest to my shoulders. “So big and strong.” She slid her legs on either side of my hips and began rubbing herself against me. “They all want to fuck you,” she moaned, getting off on the zipper bulge of my jeans. For me, nothing was going on behind it. I was done. But I was slightly intrigued by her performance. She leaned down and moaned in my ear. “I can’t wait to feel you inside me.”
When she tried kissing me, I turned my head.
I didn’t kiss. I fucked. And I fucked well.
“I want you to make me come,” she whispered in my ear as she ground her pussy against me. “And then I promise I will make you say my name—over and over again.”
That wasn’t going to happen.
I didn’t know her name.
And I didn’t want to.
A sudden pounding on the door almost sent her flying off the bed. The door flung open, and Caleb, my younger brother, filled the doorway. He didn’t flinch at the sight of a near-naked girl sprawled on my bed.
“You’ve gotta get out of here, brother,” he panted. Going by the alarm in his voice and the commotion out in the clubroom, something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
Over the muffled music I heard shouting in the bar. I flew off the bed and quickly followed Caleb out of the room and down the corridor toward the noise.
It took me all of a nanosecond to work out something had happened to one of my MC brothers. Jackie Parrish—our Vice President—was lying on the floor, his eyes closed, a look of pain etched on his face. His wife, Lady, was kneeling over him, crying, yelling, and swearing.
“What happened?” I asked, dropping to my knees next to Jackie. I turned to no one in particular and yelled, “Turn the goddamn music down!”
Red, our clubhouse cook, crouched next me. “One minute he was just sitting there laughing, the next… he bent over and fell to the floor. He was f-fine and then he w-wasn’t … cunt! Fucker!”
Red had Tourette’s.
I checked for a pulse. But Jackie’s heart had stopped and his pulse was still. I knew CPR and I wasn’t about to give up on one of my brothers.
Without hesitation, I started to work on the old man. Doing compressions. Blowing air into his whiskered and beer-drenched mouth.
But he was unresponsive. He didn’t move or open his eyes and yell at me for getting up in his face. He didn’t sit up and make some lame-ass joke about me trying to kiss him. But I kept going, knowing I was the only thing standing between him and the Reaper. It wasn’t until the paramedics turned up and took over that I sat back, utterly exhausted. I didn’t know how long I had been going because of the adrenaline thundering through my veins.
Devastated, I watched the paramedics work on him, but as the minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness, it was suddenly real that nothing more could be done for Jackie.
“He’s gone,” one of the paramedics finally said.
A ripple went through the men in the room. Lady, let out a howl.
I raked a hand down my face. “Fuck… ”
Grief settled across
the club. Lady sobbed into our prospect’s shoulder.
Jackie was dead.
Our Vice President was gone.
I sighed. “Someone had better call his daughter.”
INDY
Now
It was a stare-off.
He was trying to outstare me. Me. The Queen of Stubborn.
He had no idea he had met his match.
I folded my arms, arching one eyebrow…you know, to show that I wasn’t an amateur. We needed to get one thing straight—I was in charge.
“Be honest, Jeremy. You put it there, didn’t you?”
He shook his head.
He being Jeremy Dixon. Five years old and not nearly as terrified of my stern doctor face as he should be.
I held up the plastic bead I had just extracted from his nasal cavity. It was the fourth one this month. Any more and I could make a bracelet.
“So, how did it get in there, if you didn’t put it there?” I asked.
He shrugged, his eyes not leaving mine.
“Did it crawl in there by itself?
“Maybe.”
“Really? Because I don’t see a pair of legs on this sucker.”
“They fell off.”
“Of course, they did.” I dropped the bead into the plastic basin in my hand. “Do you think anymore of them are going to grow legs and take a tour through your nasal cavity, Jeremy? Or are we done with this? See, the way I see it, that’s four times now and every single time the same thing happens. You shove it up your nose and your mama has to bring you in here so I can pull it out of your nostril. Be honest …” I picked out a lollipop from my coat pocket. “…is it for the candy?”
His big brown eyes grew round at the sight of the lollipop.
Just then, one of the ER nurses ducked her head into the cubicle. “We have a GSW on its way in. ETA less than five minutes. We’re going to need you.”
I nodded and turned back to Jeremy, and held up the lollipop.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Jeremy. I’ll give you this here piece of candy on one condition. No more burying any beads up your nose. Got it?”
He nodded and I smiled. Bribery. It was the perfect deal sealer.
I pulled the lollipop away, just long enough to reaffirm our understanding. “We’ve got a deal?”
He nodded again, and I grinned at him as I handed him the candy.
Two minutes later I met the ambulance at the front of the hospital. I heard them before I saw them, thanks to the violent vocals of the burly patient on the gurney.
Showtime!
Snapping on my gloves, I absorbed the image unfolding in front of me. The man on the gurney was about six foot seven, covered in tattoos and apparently well educated in the art of swearing. He clutched his belly and cussed at the EMTs as they tried to do their job. Blood soaked into the white sheet beneath him.
Here we go.
“Okay, what have we got?” I asked one of the paramedics who was struggling with the patient.
“Gunshot wound to the belly. No exit wound. We’ve given him morphine for the pain and managed to slow the bleeding.”
I ignored the abuse of the patient who appeared to also be an expert with terms of endearment such as cunt, motherfucker, and my personal favorite, motherfucking cunt. I ignored his abuse because I was good at shutting shit out. I had years of experience. It was like my superpower.
When I pressed down on his belly, he grabbed my wrist, and with a roar yanked me to him. “I’ve been fucking shot, you cunt…!”
I neither flinched nor looked concerned, and I didn’t care that his face was so close to mine, apart from his retched breath. Because I was the perfect distraction while my colleagues got ready to fill his veins with enough sedative to knock down a horse.
“I hate to break it to you, sunshine, but if you knew where I came from then you wouldn’t even bother with this intimidation shit,” I said, making sure I held his attention. To my left, one of the paramedics was able to get a line in and anesthetize him with some serious knock-out juice, and less than ten seconds later, Prince Charming was down for the count and being prepped for surgery.
On my way to wash up, Karen, one of the ER nurses, stopped me. “Dr. Parrish, you have a phone call. Line three.”
“I’m just heading into surgery.”
“They say it’s urgent.”
I nodded at her and thanked her. Thinking I could make it quick, I made my way toward the administration station where my best friend Trinity caught up with me.
“Hey, are we still on for tonight?” she asked, rushing by, one hand full of patient files, while the other held a half-eaten, iced donut.
“Of course. What do you want to do?” I asked as I headed toward the nearest phone. “Quiet drinks somewhere, or is this going to be an all-night thing?”
Trinity pulled a face. “Honey, I gave up the all-night thing back when Bieber didn’t need to shave. Let’s just grab a few quiet drinks and see what happens.”
I laughed. “Sounds like a plan,” and then picking up the phone, said, “Doctor Parrish.”
There was a bit of a pause, and for a moment I wondered if the call had dropped out. But then I heard her—the familiar voice of my mom.
And she was crying.
My body stiffened. “Mom, what’s wrong?”
“It’s your father, Indy,” she sobbed. “He goddamn went and died on us.”
For a moment, I said nothing. I hadn’t been expecting the phone call and I certainly hadn’t been expecting the news. Actually, that wasn’t exactly true. My father was on the wrong side of fifty, overweight, and he smoked and drank like he was a goddamn immortal. It was only a matter of time before his stupid-ass lifestyle took him out.
I nodded silently and fiddled with the phone cord in my hands.
Damn it, Daddy.
CADE—Aged 5
Then
“Why do I have to play with her? She’s a stupid girl!”
I smashed the two toy trucks together because I was so mad.
“Because I am your mama, and you do what your mama says,” my mama said, putting her hands on her hips and fixing me with one of her looks.
“But—”
“No buts, Cade Calley.”
I smashed my toy trucks together again. Angry. I didn’t want to play with our new neighbor’s little girl. But this morning mama told me we were looking after her because her parents had to go to work, or something. Her mama baked cakes for money and her daddy was in the same motorcycle club my daddy was in, The Kings of Mayhem. That meant I didn’t get to go with daddy’s friend, Freebird, to his family farm out near Walton Grove. He helped out there during the week, looking after the animals and stuff. And on Mondays I got to go with him. I got to play with the goats and baby pigs, and sometimes Freebird would let me feed the horses, too, and let me ride with him on the quad bike when he had to fix some of the fences down by the creek. Mondays were my favorite because I loved the farm. But now we had to look after the stupid new girl next door and I couldn’t go.
Mama knelt down next to me. She’s real pretty, but when she gets mad she gets a fire in her eyes and a look on her face that is still pretty, but scary at the same time. Our daddy was a big, powerful man, but our mama, she could stop a train with one look.
“Now, Cade, you need to be nice to little Indigo Blue,” she said. “She is new to town. She doesn’t know anyone. And she’ll be starting school with you next week, so it will be nice for her to have a friend when she does.”
Mama said our neighbors had moved here from Humphrey, which is the next town over. It’s bigger than Destiny.
“You could be her best friend,” she explained. Mama’s eyes were real blue. Like bright blue stones. “Everyone needs a best friend.”
“What’s a best friend?”
My mama thought for a moment.
“It’s that one friend you can always rely on to be there for you. The bestest of all your friends.”
“Like Batman and
Robin?”
Batman was a superhero. Robin was his friend who helped him.
Mama pointed to my Batman bedspread and winked. “Just like Batman.”
When my young brother Caleb started wailing in his crib, Mama gave me another wink before she walked out of the room.
I frowned and glanced out my bedroom window. It looked out onto our new neighbor’s house and my bedroom window looked straight into the little girl’s room, but I had only caught a glimpse of her since she moved in last week. My frown pulled back in surprise when I saw the window lift up and a small leg swing out, followed quickly by the other one. I straightened my back. The little girl from next door was climbing out her window.
I watched as she settled on the window ledge with her legs dangling over the side.
“Indigo Blue, where are you?” I heard her mama call out to her from inside the house.
The little girl glanced over her shoulder, her face scrunched up into a frown. “I ain’t no baby, and I don’t need no babysitter,” she hollered.
She eyed the patch of grass below her window.
“Indigo? Where in the blue blazes are you, child?” Her mama called out again.
“I told you. I ain’t going,” she yelled back through the window. “And you can’t make me!”
Next thing I knew, the little girl jumped out of the window and tumbled onto the grass below. I stood up. She had landed badly and I would bet all my baseball cards she had twisted her ankle. I watched her face fold and her chin begin to wiggle as she fought the need to cry.
She was hurt. And even though I was mad at her, I knew I had to help her. I quickly climbed out of my window, and jumped onto the grassy patch below, landing solidly on my two feet.
I knew how to do it properly because I had done it a thousand, trillion times before.
The little girl looked up and her pretty face went from sad to surprised.
I stopped.
Pretty?
Uh. Uh.
She wasn’t pretty. She was ugly! An ugly, stupid girl who made me miss going to Freebird’s family farm and I hated her.
“You can’t just jump,” I said, annoyed.