After I sat with him for longer.
After I reminded him that I loved him more than my own breath.
After I told him his sons were pains in my ass but they were the best boys on the planet, and I filled him in on their lives, telling him stuff he totally already knew.
After I got back into my car.
After I drove away wondering if I should pull over because the vision before me was wavy since I was staring at it through tears.
It was when the Denver sun broke through the clouds that I knew I had the permission I needed to finally again burn bright, tear life up, be wild . . .
And ride free.
Enforcer
Keely
Present day . . .
I stood outside Hound’s door and checked my phone again.
Three texts from me.
On my way.
Downstairs, honey.
I’m here. Everything okay?
None of them answered.
I’d gone up, even knowing he’d be pissed at me, and knocked on his door.
No sound inside. No sense of movement.
I went to Jean’s door, knocked and got the same thing.
This did not give me a good feeling because his bike was outside and so was his truck, and at this time he might not be at his place, but he would be at Jean’s.
I thought about texting Boz, finding out if for some scary-ass reason Hound needed his car for Jean, and because I was at work didn’t bother me.
Or because whatever had happened with him last night, shit was not good between us.
I wasn’t an idiot. I knew he was reacting to me being at Black’s name on his body.
But he didn’t give me a chance to finish what I was doing.
He then didn’t give me a chance to explain.
And he got so freaky cold and remote, I panicked, froze, didn’t push it.
But he didn’t lose his mind, kick me out of his bed, shout at me.
He held me tucked close. He let me lace my fingers in his.
He might have been distant and weird that morning but he’d kissed me at my car and watched me drive away like normal.
So I told myself it would be okay. I told myself maybe he understood what I was doing with his tats. I told myself maybe he was getting there too. Where I’d been guiding him. Where I needed him to be to take on the brotherhood so I could have him, he could have me, we could have Chaos and it would all be what it should be.
He was pushing back. I knew he felt he was betraying Black. I knew he felt that digging down deep. I knew it was on his mind his brothers would lose theirs if they knew what was happening, what we both wanted, how far it’d gone and how fast, and how, in the end, it needed to be.
Hound and Keely.
That was what needed to be.
The end of Black and Keely was years ago.
It wasn’t just me who had to learn that, and once I did and where I intended to go, I knew I had a long row to hoe ahead of me.
So before that, we needed to be solid. We needed to be a unit. We needed to be a team.
And that was what I set about doing.
He wasn’t making it easy. But I’d been ready for that and I intended to do whatever I had to do to see it through.
Unlike Hound, I was not worried about my boys. Dutch, I knew, remembered his daddy and missed him even if he’d lost him young.
Still, the only father he truly ever had was Hound. He felt that. He’d understand. And if I had to guess, my guess would be that he’d not only not be shocked Hound and I got together, he’d be super fucking happy.
Jagger was, sadly (all my fault, but I didn’t feel too badly about it), a momma’s boy. He was still a badass-in-the-making, what with Graham’s blood and Hound’s and Chaos’s upbringing.
But he loved Hound as the only father he ever knew.
He might have issues with it at first, but he’d come around.
It was Chaos that would be the toughest nut to crack.
They owed me and they’d paid in the ways they thought meant something.
But this was the way I wanted.
This was the something that meant everything to me.
And not only for that they were going to give it to me.
But for Hound who’d given his very soul to that Club.
That was the most important reason they were going to give this to me.
Because they were going to give it to him.
Before I tried Boz and maybe opened the lid on something, making Boz curious as to why I’d ask or why Hound had borrowed his car, first I tried the doorknob.
I didn’t expect it would open. Now that he had the stuff I’d picked for him, Hound locked his door even when he came down to get me in my car.
But the minimal pressure I put on the door expecting it not to open, opened it.
I stared at it, cold invading my veins.
He’d never leave his door open, not if he wasn’t in there.
And if he was in there, he’d answer when I knocked.
If he was in there, he’d have come down and gotten me.
As terrible thoughts rushed through my brain, I didn’t think.
I pushed open the door and walked into the dark room.
I saw him immediately, on his sectional, facing the door, feet up on the coffee table I’d picked out for him, sitting casually in the dark.
Was he sitting?
Or was he something else?
I had to go with sitting.
So why was he sitting silent, alone in the dark and not even calling out when I knocked on his door?
“Hound?” I called carefully, a frog in my throat.
“Right,” his deep voice sounded, cracking through the room like a thunderclap. “Our talk.”
I stood still in his open door.
“You played with my dick,” he stated, matter of fact, like he was reading out instructions for something. “You got your orgasms. You rode that wild wind, Keely. You did that last real good every time you did that on me. Gratitude for that. Now we’re done.”
Oh God.
He totally, totally did not read what I’d been doing with his tat.
“Shep—”
“Call me that again, I’ll rip your throat out,” he growled.
I went solid as the marble of my dead husband’s gravestone.
“Now turn that ass around and get the fuck outta my space,” he ordered. “And if that’s not clear, Keely, that means now and don’t come back. You want your checks, use another brother. You’re done usin’ me.”
Oh yeah.
Fuck yeah.
He totally did not read what I’d been doing with his tat.
“Using you?” I forced out past a closed throat.
“To get your biker bang,” he explained.
“That’s not what it was,” I said quickly.
“Bullshit,” he clipped out, and before I could say more, the shadow of him leaned slightly forward and he kept biting. “Now I’ll say it only once more. Get the fuck out.”
“Hound—”
He took his feet, fast as a blink, and I put a boot back in preparation to flee when he roared, “Get the fuck out!”
It hit me then, panic coursing through my system, barbed, tearing away at the insides of me.
It was past six.
But it wasn’t past eight.
“Why aren’t you over at Jean’s?” I asked.
“Get out,” he growled, his tone, as impossible as it was to believe, deteriorating.
That panic started scoring away huge chunks of me.
“Why aren’t you over at Jean’s?” I repeated.
“There’s no winning this, bitch. You played your hand. You earned your loot. The pot’s dry. Time to cut and run.”
“I—”
“Woman, I do not have the patience for this.”
He might not.
But I couldn’t give up.
Not now.
Especially not now.
Why wasn�
��t he over at Jean’s?
“I think there’s a lot we need to talk about,” I told him.
“Time when you can talk me into dick so you can play with mine is done, Keely.”
“Really, Hound, honest to God, there are things to say. Starting with why you aren’t over at Jean’s.”
That was when he came at me.
And the manner in which he did, the feel roiling off him and thundering into me, I wanted to do what he said.
Cut and run.
But this was Hound.
He was mine.
And I’d spent two months proving I was his.
If he took a goddamned breath and paid attention, he’d know that, calm the fuck down and listen to me.
So I stood my ground.
It was a mistake.
I knew that when I took his hand in my chest, a hand that slammed me so hard against the wall, my skull cracked against it.
And then I took his fist in the back of my hair and had to expend energy I did not have not to cry out in pain when he used it to jerk my head back.
Finally I saw some of his features come into focus with the weak light from the hall filtering in the door as he put his face in mine.
It was then I knew.
It was then my heart tore apart.
He didn’t even have to tell me.
But he did.
“Jean died in her sleep last night,” he spat.
No.
“Now, just in case you haven’t wrapped that stupid, fucking,” he pulled again at my hair and I failed at beating back a wince, but he was so deep in his grief and his fury, he didn’t notice it or he didn’t care, “head of yours around this, it wasn’t Black’s cock you were sucking. It wasn’t Black’s cock you were fucking. It wasn’t Black’s cock you begged to have thrust up your ass. It was mine. And I’m done. And when a man like me says he’s done bein’ used by some washed-up, washed-out, tired, old, biker groupie pussy, bitch, he . . . is . . . done.”
With that, agony tore through my scalp as he jerked me by my hair to the side but he didn’t put me out of his house.
He left me in it, stalking out his door, leaving it open, disappearing into the hallway.
I stood there a long time.
Long enough to hear his bike roaring away.
I drove into my garage, feeling like a functioning open wound.
That must have been why something that had been like a razor’s edge slicing through me for weeks, months, years, but as shit like that had a way of being, it had become part of the scenery, for the first time since that visit when I told my husband I was moving on, I saw his bike under its cover.
I switched off the ignition and sat in my car, my head turned, staring at it.
The boys both had vehicles, with Dutch now also having a bike. They also both parked in the drive in a line behind the door that led to their father’s bike. They fought and bitched at each other about who pulled in first because neither wanted to be fenced in when they were ready to take off, and I’d laid down the law that neither of them fenced me in.
So like their father.
And so like their non-biological father.
I got out of my car, went right to Black’s bike and ripped the cover off, tossing it aside.
He had a shit-hot bike.
And my man on that bike . . .
God.
Not once, in all the time together, did I not get wet the instant I saw him astride that bike.
I told him that happened to me about two weeks after we started seeing each other.
About five minutes after that, we were fucking on that bike.
It was our first time on his bike, but not our last.
I would not tell the boys that.
That fucking hideous night, he’d taken his truck to get pizza, for obvious reasons.
So it had been my man who’d backed that bike right there.
I’d put the cover on.
But other than that, that bike had never been touched.
Never been moved.
It was where Black had put it.
And now that shit had to end.
I left the cover off, walked out the back door to the garage, walked the walk that led along the back of the house and moved up the stairs to the back door to my house.
I tried not to remember the day years ago I stuck my head out that door during a huge snowstorm, when Hound was standing out on that walk at the place between detached garage and house, and he was staring at the thin line of space between both.
I failed at not remembering this and froze, staring at my hand on the handle of the storm door.
“Hound! It’s half a blizzard out here! The bad half!” I’d shouted. “What in hell are you doing?”
He’d been wearing his Chaos cut, like always. The black leather jacket beat up with use, the Chaos insignia patch stitched to the back, small rectangular patches stitched where a breast pocket would be, one said Hound, the one under it said Enforcer.
Hound’s cut still said Enforcer. But back then Tack had the patch that said President (and still did), Dog’s said VP, Brick’s said Sgt at Arms, under which was another one that said Road Captain. Hop’s jacket had Tail-Gunner.
There was a secretary and treasurer who at that time of the snowstorm I no longer knew (and still didn’t, though I knew Hop was now VP and Tack’s son-in-law, Shy, was Sergeant at Arms). The rest had Member or Prospect (even though Chaos verbally called them “recruits” because the founders not only were all ex-military and that felt natural, they also felt like bucking even MC traditions—they didn’t name their club “Chaos” for nothing).
I just knew after Tack took over and cleaned up the Club, Big Petey had been given the patch that said, Chaplain.
“Behind this wall is your laundry room!” he’d shouted back.
I knew that. He knew that. I just hadn’t known why he was shouting it through a snowstorm.
“Yeah!” I’d yelled.
“Need to attach your garage!” he’d yelled back. “Gonna get the boys here to see to that.”
In the end, he’d never done it, mostly because I’d pitched one holy hell of a fit at the thought of a bunch of bikers pounding a hole in my wall to attach my garage.
To see that didn’t happen, I’d talked to Dog, who was one of the more level-headed ones (though not when it came to me, but still, he was more level-headed generally) and convinced him I was going to see to that as part of all the work I was doing, dedicated to giving my boys the home Graham and I had promised each other we’d make for them.
I never did it.
But right then, I remembered Hound standing outside in the snow, staring at that space, and I knew then (but buried it) like I knew now he didn’t like me to walk through snow.
That could have been when the tears came.
It wasn’t.
I had shit to do.
And that shit was opening my door, walking in and unraveling my scarf from around my neck. Tossing it and my purse and my jacket on my kitchen table. Running up my stairs.
And, after I turned on the light by the bed, going straight to my closet.
In the early days, as a form of self-torture, I’d hung it on a hook at the back of my closet door so every time I opened it, he’d be right there, the smell of leather, the hint of my man waving at me.
Eventually I’d torn our bedroom apart to usurp another room, “To give you the bedroom of your dreams, baby,” Black had said. “To build a bedroom and big closet and kickass bathroom for the biker queen you are.”
Before the workers had started tearing down walls, I’d folded it carefully, put it in a flat plastic crate, and tucked it away safely.
Now, I found that crate in the big-ass closet I’d had to give myself, took it out, moved to my bed with it and set it down.
I crawled in, pulled the box deeper into bed with me, and sat there, cross-legged, staring at it.
It took a second but finally I flipped the lid on it.
> I’d put it in, not like a brother would do, back—and Chaos insignia—up.
I’d put it in like an old lady would do.
Front, the patch that said Black, the one under it that said Secretary, and the one under that that said Road Captain up.
Graham’s cut.
It took a second before I could reach out and touch the tips of my fingers on the Black.
And just like always, just like it always would be, even if I’d been able to win Hound, the tingle of love and memories, and laughter and loss coursed over my fingers, up my arm, across my chest and straight to my heart.
They’d cleaned it.
Or Tack had given it to Boz so Bev could do it.
Probably paid a mint, cleaning that leather.
And I’d hated them for it. All of them, even Bev.
I’d railed and screamed and even went at Tack with nails bared (not surprisingly it had been Hound that had pulled me back) when they took his cut and had it cleaned.
But it was covered in his blood.
I wanted that blood and the scent of him. Even if one of his goddamned hairs was there, I wanted it.
They’d cleaned it, taking all that from me.
A Chaos brother’s cut was buried with him.
I refused to allow that.
And Chaos allowed me to refuse.
Now I knew why.
They probably knew it before.
Because a time would come that I’d be giving it to one of my boys, and when I did it’d need to be as it was, not have the life blood of their father crusted into the leather and threads of the patches that meant everything to him.
Absolutely everything.
And that time was now.
I gathered up my husband’s cut, put the lid on the box, nabbed it and walked down to the kitchen.
I shoved the stuff I’d thrown there aside, put the cut on the table, spreading it out carefully, then walked the box out to the trash and dumped it.
Only when I was back inside, locked up tight, did I go back to my room, turn out the light, lie in bed and stare at my dark ceiling.
Jean Gruenberg had died last night.
And Hound was done with me.
The first wave came like a hiccup.
The second made me sound like I was strangling.
So I turned to my side when the sobs overwhelmed me.
The back door opened the next morning when I was at the stove.
Wild Like the Wind Page 19