CHAPTER 11
FURY
Ma taught me not to stare at strangers.
Asher taught me not to stare at women.
He wasn’t my father, but he might as well have been. Father to my two best friends, Malice and Mayhem — oh, wait a minute, they’re using their given names now. I’ll get used to it eventually, but it still hasn’t stuck. They’re calling themselves Nate and Eli now — but anyway, their old man, Asher, was more of a father to me than my own old man. I hooked up with Nate and Eli the last day of the sixth grade at Chapman Hill elementary school. We were all awkward as fuck back then. All lanky limbs and pimples and big balls of confusion.
It’s painful to think about it now. I guess that’s why I latched onto their family so tightly, though, because for the first time in my short life, I felt like I needed one. At least an older guy to bounce stuff off of, you know?
Puberty and shit…
A kid has questions, you know?
I sure didn’t find any answers at home. Dad was absent entirely, and Ma might as well have not even been there, she was so checked out after he left. I mean, she tried, don’t get me wrong. But she failed, big time.
Asher was unlike anyone I’d ever known. He was a man’s man. He respected everyone, even his brother Rebel, who he later ended up shooting because Asher walked in on him attacking his girlfriend.
That was his first stroke of bad luck.
The bullet ricocheting into his girlfriend’s skull was the second.
Now, he was gone, serving life in prison for one mistake made during a rage of passion that had not only changed Asher’s life, it’d changed the life of everyone who served in the club. By that time, I was deep in it. Eli and Nate had grown up in it, they’d never known anything but the close-knit family of the Loyal Gentlemen, however unusual and untraditional it might have been to grow up in a biker family.
But it was unlike anything I’d ever known.
I didn’t care. I loved them, in fact, in all their gritty glory. The day I was patched in was the happiest of my life. I’d finally found a family and I knew nothing could ever take that away.
Boy, was I wrong.
Now, it was all gone. All of it. Everything I’d used to identify myself in the past had been ripped away from me as soon as that bullet left the barrel of Asher’s gun.
It seemed like so long ago…
Which is maybe why the good manners I’d been taught by Asher seemed to have faded to a distant spot in the back of my mind, because here I was, in a rundown greasy spoon in some tiny ass town and my eyes were so firmly glued to the vixen waiting on us, that I felt like I was in a trance.
I wasn’t Fury anymore.
I wasn’t here to help out the people who’d so graciously given us a chance at redemption. The Gods have given us an opportunity to rebuild everything we’ve lost. Grace and Ryder sat across from me, but I barely saw them right then.
Instead, I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the way this beautiful woman’s shiny black hair brushed back and forth against her back, couldn’t stop looking at the way it cascaded down to her sweetly swaying ass. I couldn’t stop running my eyes all the way down her endless legs and then snap back up to literally the most beautiful face I’d ever seen.
I mean, listen — she was prettier than the Mona Lisa, prettier than Elizabeth Taylor in A Date With Judy, prettier than Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, even prettier than my very first girlfriend, Wednesday Reynolds in the ninth grade, and Wednesday was — until today — the first place winner of the 'Prettiest Girl I’d Ever Seen’ trophy that lives in my head.
I wasn’t completely lost. I mean, I tried to snap out of it a few times, turn my attention away from the waitress, but then she’d just sashay up to the table, all lavender perfume and velvety skin, with a voice that was sweeter than honey — and it was like getting run over by a train each time.
That’s what she was like — a beautiful train wreck that I couldn’t look away from. Perhaps that’s not the most attractive metaphor, I know. And I wasn’t sure if I was a passenger on the train or standing on the tracks about to get blown to smithereens, but either way, there was no way in hell I could look away because she was just so there.
You know?
It was as if she was followed around by a spotlight, a dancer in her own one-woman ballet. Gracefully, she wove through the tables, a serene smile on her bewitching face, animated and lively, radiating pure sunlight onto each customer.
It was downright mesmerizing.
And that fact that I’d been struck so strongly by her rattled me, fascinated me.
This shit never happened.
I’m a grown-ass man, not some hormone-ridden preteen.
I’m a gentleman.
I’m also a fucking professional, I forced myself to remember.
And this was a job, not an opportunity to find out what that little diamond looked like after a long night in my bed. When she finally brought the check to the table, I was disappointed yet grateful, because I knew that getting out of there was going to be the only thing to keep me from making a complete fool of myself.
I was pretty damned sure we’d given these small town folks enough of a show already, considering the constant questioning glances we’d endured throughout our meal.
If I laid a passionate, sudden kiss on the waitress they’d probably have one big, collective, small-town heart attack.