Rough Ride

by Kristen Ashley

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Shy made an approach. He and Tab want things settled with all of us.”

  This confused me.

  “Settled how?”

  “Shy didn’t do you right,” he began to explain. “And by extension, Tab was involved in that. They feel that and have for a while, but definitely now that you’re back in the fold. They want to make sure all is copasetic in the family.”

  “Well, I suppose we can all have a drink too, but that’s still absurd.”

  “Sorry?” he asked.

  “I dated Shy for what? A month or so? He broke it off with me, started it up with Tabby, they got married and had a baby. Sure, it hurt back then but back then was back then and I’ve moved on. It’s not like Adam chucked Eve aside for a biker princess and they have to apologize to God. People get together. They break up. They move on. It is what it is and that was what it was and we’re all someplace else now. No need to make a big thing about it.”

  “Fuck, how much more can I love you?”

  I felt every one of those words sink right through my skin and make a beeline to my heart.

  “That’s so weird,” I replied. “All the time I ask myself the same thing.”

  At my words, Snapper’s entire demeanor changed and I had a feeling they’d found their way to his heart too.

  And that made me happy.

  “Time to finish your beer, Rosie,” he declared.

  I knew it wasn’t time to finish my beer.

  It was time to go up to bed.

  Together.

  So I did something I hadn’t done since I was twenty years old.

  I chugged an almost full beer.

  Then I made out with my man in the kitchen with both of us smiling through it because Snapper clearly thought watching me chug a beer was funny and I was happy he thought I was funny.

  I tossed my bottle.

  Snap and I shut down the house.

  And we headed up to bed.

  Epilogue

  “Master of my fate:

  Captain of my soul”

  Snapper

  “Hey, honey.”

  Snap turned from marking the wall where he and Shy were going to mount the cupboard to see his Rosie strolling in with Kane, better known as Playboy since the kid, not but a few months old, was a damned flirt. The baby was on her hip.

  He was Shy and Tab’s little boy.

  Tabby was following her toting a diaper bag, Tab’s eyes going to her man, but Rosie’s eyes were on Snap.

  His woman looked seriously fucking good with a baby on her hip.

  And she just looked seriously fucking good always.

  Shy moved to Tab.

  But Snap stood still because Rosalie was moving to him.

  When she made it, he gave her a lip touch then gave Playboy a tickle to which the kid wobbled and gurgled but mostly just hung on to Rosie (this hanging on meaning grabbing onto her tit, freaking little flirt) and he looked back to his woman.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  She took her eyes from him and looked to the cupboards Shy and him were installing.

  It was his condo, where he lived. Or now, where he used to live.

  Before Rosie, he’d spent most of his time in his room at the Chaos Compound, but if he felt the need to have quiet, get some space just to himself (which was not rare), he came there.

  But since he now spent all his time with Rosie, he wasn’t a big fan of having a property that he wasn’t using that was also not doing anything for him. Seeing as he’d moved into the place as is and didn’t do shit to update it when he did, but the building was a nice one and he could get decent rent if he fixed it up, he was putting in a new kitchen, new bathrooms, painting the walls, and tiling the floors.

  And he’d been able to gut it and start doing that because the week before, he’d full-on moved in with Rosie.

  Snap moving into their carriage house had been a hiccup in their lives, something that wasn’t the same as every day before had been, but each day wasn’t much different. Not to mention it hadn’t taken much since most of his stuff he sold on Craig’s List because with Rosie’s stuff, and the extra she’d bought, the crib was sweet and they didn’t need his shit messing with her mojo.

  But all in all, that was the way they were. Each day bleeding into the next, nothing new (except a dining room table, garden furniture and his “reading nook”—something he thought was hilarious and cute—hilarious because the words were goofy as shit, cute because she thought of him, even if he still read most of the time camped on the couch because she could stretch out beside him).

  But everything was solid. It was not good, but instead golden.

  Rosalie Holloway was not about adventure and excitement. She was just about being with the people who meant something to her, dialing down the world so all you needed to feed your soul was an hour with her quiet, stretched out with you on the couch.

  And learning that, Snapper had fallen in love with her even more.

  “They look good,” she declared, attention on the cupboards they’d already put in.

  “You’d think that you picked them,” Tabby replied to Rosalie and looked at Snap. “They are nice. I still think you should have gone with the cream.”

  “The place is modern, cream is more traditional,” Rosalie said.

  “Cream is more neutral,” Tab returned.

  Rosalie shot her a smile with her eyebrows raised. “More neutral than white?”

  Snap was not a fan of the eyebrow raise only because it took his attention to the split in the left one.

  Her scars were visible, thin white marks that ran through her brow, along her jaw, and one that was about a half an inch down the left side of the bridge of her nose.

  Since they had the conversation now months ago, she hadn’t mentioned them, and that was good.

  But every time his attention was turned to them, he saw her on the floor of that warehouse, and that was bad.

  He’d lied to her that night he came clean about what Chaos’s real plans were with her ex. He did not think there was anything Gerard Beck could do to atone for what he’d done to Rosalie. He thought the guy was a useless piece of shit and apologies after you and your brothers delivered a beat down to a defenseless woman because you’d been caught breaking the fucking law were worthless—if they came in words, or if they came in deeds.

  But Rosie seemed mellow about it, was definitely on the path of moving on from it and Throttle, and he wasn’t about to do anything to bite into that.

  “Need you to look at those tile samples, Rosie,” he said to take his mind off that shit. “We need to make a decision so I can order it and get it delivered.”

  She nodded to him and moved with Playboy over to a box that had a cupboard in it that Shy and him hadn’t taken out yet where there were a bunch of tile samples on top.

  “The black,” Tabby, having wandered over to have a look too, decreed.

  “My woman’s always got an opinion,” Shy muttered through a smile, stripping the shrink wrap and protective covering off the cupboard they were about to mount.

  “Gray,” Rosalie said.

  “Gray-shmay,” Tabby returned. “Gray’s boring.”

  “It’s a rental, Tab,” Rosalie replied in that sweet, lilting voice of hers, not upset in the slightest about Tab’s outspoken ability to share her opinion. Then again, that was the way it was with those two, or Rosie with anybody. She didn’t get wound up a lot. In fact, since she settled in after what happened to her, she never got wound up. “It needs to be neutral so people can build on it with their own things.”

  “You can build on black,” Tabby said.

  “And black shows everything. It’s harder to keep looking nice,” Rosalie retorted.

  Tabby had nothing to say to that because Rosalie was right.

  The gray it was then.

  Needless to say, the women had become friends. Outspokenly opinionated or not, it was hard not to like Ta
bitha Cage. She was just good people. And if you were a woman, she was the best kind of friend you could have around (if often a nutcase, but since Rosalie was totally not, they evened each other out). And straight up with everything, it was impossible not to like Rosie.

  They’d gotten close. It might have been about Rosie opening the doors for Tab to swoop in because she was worried after what had happened to Rosalie. Mostly it was about the fact that they all just liked each other. History didn’t factor. It was just done in a way that there wasn’t even awkwardness. There was just what they had now.

  Furthermore, they were the generation of the brothers and their women in the Club that were around the same ages, so with Joke and Carrie, they hung together a lot.

  Playboy reached out to his momma and Tabby took her son.

  Rosie turned to Snap. “We came to check out the cupboards and look at the samples. We also came to see if you guys wanted to take a break and go out to lunch with us.”

  “Lunch sounds good,” Shy replied, moving to his wife and son, and when he did, his boy lost interest in Momma and reached out to Daddy.

  Shy didn’t make him want. He took his little man and pulled him close, brushing his lips across the top of his cranium, then breathing in deep, like the essence of his son was the elixir of life.

  And it probably was, something Snap looked forward to getting his own whiff of when the time was right.

  “Joker, Carissa, and Travis are meeting us at Las Delicias in half an hour,” Tabby told the men.

  “Perfect,” Snapper said, looking to Rosie. “You on the back of my bike, baby?”

  She looked him right in the eyes.

  “Absolutely.”

  At her word, the way it settled down low in his gut, he smiled.

  He was that guy who’d always known his destiny. Whatever life smacked him with, he knew he’d deal with it while he headed unerring for one thing: keeping himself breathing while finding a woman to love and building a family.

  He didn’t give that first fuck if he did this rich or poor. He didn’t care if he did it in Denver, where he’d grown up, or in Alaska, or on the moon. He’d liked school but when it was done, he was done with it. He didn’t want to play a corporate game. He didn’t want to face a life of monotony. And he made it so he had none of that. He just wanted family, his bike, his brothers, solid and steady.

  But most important, he wanted a world where his woman looked him in the eyes when he asked her to be close to him, close to the man who wanted what many would consider as limits that were all of that, not riches in the bank, not vacations in Tuscany, just whatever life led them to, and her answer was, Absolutely.

  He’d found it in Rosalie.

  He had it in his home, in his bed, on the back of his bike.

  It was a miracle, quiet and true and constant.

  And no matter what he had to do to keep it…

  He was not ever going to let it go.

  * * * *

  “Snap?”

  “Yup?”

  She was lying on him.

  It was after lunch at Las Delicias with their crew. After he and Shy went back to the condo to finish with the cupboards and the women went where women went to work off burritos (in Rosie and Tabby’s case, the mall). After he’d come home and showered and ate dinner with Rosalie then took her out for a ride in the early summer waning sun. After they’d returned home, got beers and stretched out on the couch, him with his book, her with hers that he’d noticed she was not reading, but he didn’t think much of it. When she had a book of her own, her mind wandered often, but he could tell by the look on her face when it did, her reflections never took her anywhere she didn’t want to be.

  “You never said what you thought of the name Hermione.”

  He felt his body tense.

  This happened right before it shook uncontrollably because he burst out laughing.

  When he got some control over it, if not a lot, he saw her smiling down at him.

  It was then he realized a promise he made her he was not keeping.

  He’d told her that he was going to get her to a time in her life when she’d spend a lot of it laughing.

  So far this hadn’t happened.

  Instead, she’d gotten him to a time in his life where he did that, no…she gave him that, and when she did, she just watched him, happy and smiling.

  He again vowed to himself to do what he could to give that back.

  But he had a feeling they both were totally down with the way it turned out.

  When he finally got control of his humor, he lifted his brows and asked softly, his arm around her going tight, “You thinkin’ about babies, baby?”

  “Would that freak you?” she asked back.

  “Fuck no,” he answered firmly.

  And earned another smile.

  “Two for you too, or…?” she prompted.

  “As many as you want, I’ll give you,” he replied.

  The smile he got from that was seriously sweet in ways he felt the urge to do something about it.

  “Rosie, Cotton’s up to some serious shit. You need to let me finish this,” he declared. “Then I’ll spend time finishing you.”

  She turned her gaze to his book. “I’m always losing you to Steve Berry.”

  “The man puts one book out a year,” he informed her.

  She looked back to him but dipped her head sideways to his book. “How many times have you read that one?”

  “Three.”

  And it finally came.

  Her body moving on him with her laughter.

  Still doing it, she propped her book up on his chest and ordered, “Finish your chapter.” Her attention turned to her own pages. “Then you can finish me.”

  Snap also returned his attention to his book.

  And he never read so fast in his life.

  * * * *

  Snapper was behind the bar at the Chaos Compound.

  They had three new recruits who he could press into service, as was their duty, but he was playing bartender like he often played bartender—definitely since the shit with Valenzuela started—doing it keeping an eye on his brothers.

  And now Rosalie.

  She was on the couch in the corner with Speck, a Corona in her hand, a smile on her face.

  Her mass of thick dark hair, her slim figure, her long legs, her pretty face, those warm hazel eyes, that fucking smile…

  Yeah, he’d caught hold of a miracle.

  Whatever they were talking about made Speck feel good and loose, in their own little world the only way Rosalie could give a man, though with obvious differences for Speck.

  She had this knack, brother, old lady or biker groupie. Rosie was not one to slam tequila shots, get loud, move straight to crazy, then come on strong so he had no choice but to mostly fuck her against a wall on a trajectory to his room.

  Quiet communion was where Rosie was at.

  And if she wanted his dick, all she had to do was give him that look. The one she had that had two versions. And depending on the version, Snap could gauge where it was as to where they would go with it. If it was urgent, he’d get her ass to his room in the back of the Compound so he didn’t make her wait to give her what she wanted. If it wasn’t, he’d get her ass home.

  He tore his eyes from Rosie and scanned the bar.

  Boz was sitting a stool, pounding tequila shooters. Rough count, so far he’d had seven.

  He was doing this staring at the bar and not being social in a way that wafted off him like a nasty cloud, warning everyone to stay away.

  Not a single brother or any of their women were stupid, so they stayed away.

  There were a lot of reasons for Boz’s current disposition. But in his present mood, Snapper could not make an approach to try to pry out of him which one was fucking with his head right then and driving him to get shitfaced. Or worst case, if all of them were.

  If the man wanted alone time, even if he was seeking that in a room full of people, Snap was
going to give it to him.

  So he let that go.

  Big Petey was in a huddle at the far end of the bar with Dog and Brick.

  Both Dog and Brick had left some time ago for the Western Slope to open up a new shop there. But now, both were back in Denver to help them concentrate on their troubles.

  Brick would be taking off soon, though. He needed to get back. He’d found a woman worthy of him, a feat for Brick since most the women he chose fleeced his ass or ended up making a play at leading him around by his dick. All reports, this one was neither. This one was all good. She lived in a biker town called Carnal. The wedding was imminent, and for it, the brothers would soon ride.

  Snap did not like the look of this huddle. Shit was serious and it wasn’t getting any better mostly because it wasn’t getting anything. Since Rosalie had taken her beating from Bounty months ago and Chaos rained down retribution, the only thing that had happened had been the fact that not too long ago, they got a delivery on their picnic table outside that very building.

  But that had been some nasty shit and as such had sent all the brothers, already on edge, straight to the verge. Worse, they didn’t even have enough a hold on what was happening to give it a damn good yank in an attempt to shake something loose.

  No one wanted Armageddon.

  But it was worse knowing it might be out there, waiting, and they had no choice but to wait for it to hit, a sneak attack.

  That huddle could indicate sides were being taken even if the thing they most didn’t need in the Club right then were lines being drawn. Snap felt a line had been drawn when Rosie had been pulled in then torn apart, it was just that after that had happened, in Snapper’s estimation all the men had stepped to the right side of that line.

  In its history, Chaos had splintered once. It got ugly. Right now, it could not splinter again. And even though every brother knew that to be true, with the shit going down, it seemed an inevitability.

  On the fucking verge.

  Tab and Shy were not there. Nor was Rush, Tabby’s brother by blood, Snapper’s brother of the cut. Tack and Tyra either.