Chapter Twelve
Rory
IT WAS LATE BEFORE I could get Matt to come to bed. I could tell he was tired, but he couldn’t keep his eyes shut for more than a few minutes before they snapped open again. Every time, his heart would start pounding under my ear, and I knew he was thinking about his brother.
Sitting up, I put my back against the headboard. “Come here,” I urged and patted my lap for him to lay his head there.
“I’m good, baby. Just come back down here and let me hold you.”
“Please?”
The room was dark except for the soft glow of the new television that was muted. His blue eyes scanned my face for a moment then he blew out a long sigh and placed his head in my lap. I shifted to get more comfortable, then started stroking my fingers through his hair with one hand and massaged the back of his neck with the other.
My mom had done this to me when I was younger and couldn’t sleep. Every time, no matter how crazy the thoughts racing through my head, it would knock me out. Matt resisted at first, trying to keep his shoulders tense as I used my nails to softly scrape over his scalp, but he couldn’t hide the contented sigh as it flew across my bare thighs.
I bent over him, kissing his cheek. “I love you.”
“Love you,” he growled, his eyes heavy.
Leaning back against the headboard again, I continued my stroking and massaging. Ten minutes later, I was rewarded with the sound of him snoring. A sad smile lifted at my lips, but I didn’t stop what I was doing, didn’t move to lie down beside him. For hours I kept it up, and when he jerked awake at one in the morning, I was still at it.
He pulled me down beside him, his strong arms going around me as he buried his face in my chest. I didn’t hear his sobs, but I felt his tears soaking through his T-shirt I had pulled on after my shower earlier. I held him close and started stroking my fingers through his hair again. We didn’t speak, because there were zero words that could help him through what he was feeling. Words were useless when your heart was that beat-up. They held no comfort, and no matter how sincere they might be, they were still empty. I knew what he needed, and that was to feel that someone he loved was still there for him. That I wasn’t going to leave him.
It was a long while before I felt him fall back to sleep. Sleep finally pulled me under sometime around dawn, when I felt Matt finally fall into a more restful sleep.
The next time I opened my eyes, bright sun was shining through the curtains. Matt was still sound asleep, but I could hear people moving around outside the bedroom door. Fighting back a yawn, I untangled myself and reached for Matt’s phone as I started to stand. It was 1:23 in the afternoon. I groaned as I walked into the bathroom to take care of pressing business.
After a quick shower, where I moaned and groaned the entire time because my feet were definitely feeling the pain from running barefoot the day before, I went back into the bedroom and pulled on the clothes I had borrowed from Raven the previous night. I slipped my feet into a pair of flip-flops that Flick had loaned me and then went to see if I could make myself useful.
I left Matt still sleeping as I walked to the kitchen. People weren’t nearly as catatonic as they had been the day before. They all still wore grim, pale faces, but only a few were crying or raging. But that didn’t mean they weren’t still out for blood. I could see in the MC brothers’ eyes that vengeance was top of their list for how they wanted the day to end.
In the kitchen, I found Raven with Flick and Aggie. Lexa was sitting in a chair pulled up to the island beside her mother, and Max was in his high chair, both of them eating spaghetti. The three women all looked my way as I came into the room.
“Morning, sweetie,” Aggie greeted with a tiny smile. “How’s our boy doing?”
“He’s been out cold for a few hours now,” I assured her.
“That’s good. Sleep heals all things. Even a broken heart, given enough time.”
“Got any coffee?” I asked hopefully.
Flick reached behind her for a nearly full pot of strong coffee. I found a mug and let her pour me a cup. After adding a few teaspoons of sugar, I took a deep, life-giving swallow and nearly moaned. “This is the best coffee I’ve ever tasted.”
Flick laughed softly. “It is just one of many tricks I learned while I was working for the Armstrong family. Their friend Jesse has a special recipe that I’ve perfected to my own specifications. His, you would need a spoon to eat. Mine will probably save me from getting stomach cancer, unlike his.”
“Well, it’s perfect, so don’t change anything.” I glanced at Raven. “What can I do to help out today?”
She pressed her lips together for a moment before grimacing. “I think you’re going to be too busy dealing with your rat bastard of a father to want to help me out today, Rory.”
I stiffened at the mention of my father. “I don’t give a flying frig about my father. I’m where I need to be. I made my choice yesterday. Derrick Michaels can take a long walk off a short pier into shark-infested waters for all I care.”
Raven’s lips twitched with amusement for a split second before she grimaced again. “Bates showed up this morning with your father. They tried to come in to get you, but the boys wouldn’t let them past the gate. They didn’t have a warrant, and you’re an adult, so they couldn’t legally force their way onto the property. But he’ll be back, Rory. You know him better than anyone, so you know he won’t give up.”
She was right. My father, the rat bastard that Raven had so aptly called him, was persistent as hell. I knew there was no way he was going to leave me—and the MC by proxy—alone until I at least talked to him. Until I told him to take his threats, and the money he thought he was using to hold me to him, and shove it up his ass. The only reason I hadn’t made my renewed relationship with Matt public outside the MC before now was because I was worried my father would still be able to arrest Matt and throw him in prison.
I was done playing around.
“You’re right. He won’t stop until I see him.” I took another swallow of my coffee before reluctantly pouring out the rest and rinsing the mug. “Can I borrow a car so I can go over to his office and talk to him?”
“Maybe you should wait for Matt to take you,” Flick suggested, a worried frown puckering her brow.
I snorted at that. “Yeah, that’s not going to work. I need to talk to my father, and with those two in the same room together, all that’s going to happen is a hell of a lot of yelling.”
Raven grabbed a set of keys off the counter near the fridge. “Take my car,” she offered as she pulled a key fob off the ring and handed it over. “I have the SUV here too, so I won’t be without. Not that I’ll be going anywhere. Bash wasn’t playing around about being on complete lockdown. I can’t even leave the yard without two of the boys shadowing me.”
“Thanks. I’m hoping I can get this sorted and be back before Matt gets up. But if I’m not, try to cover for me.”
Raven nodded and gave me a ghost of a smile. “Just be careful. Matt is like Bash in more than just looks. It just takes more for him to hulk out.”
“Hulk smash!” Max said with a laugh as he pounded his fists into the tray of his high chair, causing noodles and spaghetti sauce to splash across the kitchen floor. “Hulk smash!”
Flick and Aggie laughed, while Raven groaned and reached for the roll of paper towels. While they were busy cleaning up the mess, I went out through the kitchen exit and found Raven’s black Dodge Challenger. This was the car I would have wanted if I’d been given the option. Well, at least something like it. Something with American-made power under the hood, built like a tank, unlike the little sports car my father had given me that would have turned into a tuna can if it so much as got tapped by the wrong vehicle.
The engine purred to life as I turned it on and drove around the side of the clubhouse to the gate. I had to open the door and show the guys up on the wall that it was me and not Raven behind the wheel before they would open it for me. She hadn’t been kidding about Bash putting her on complete lockdown.
It took twenty minutes to get to the mayor’s office, and during that time, I thought of what I was going to say to my father. I knew he wasn’t going to make it easy on me; he had never shown me special treatment for anything unless it was to get his own way. There were times when I was growing up that I had questioned if he actually loved me.
Now, I knew the truth. He didn’t love me. He only loved what I could do for him. The smiling, pretty face that voters saw when he was running for mayor. The money my mother had left me…
Which reminded me that I had to stop by Mr. Jenkins’s office to sign papers for my mother’s will. I made a mental note to stop there afterward so I wouldn’t have to make a second trip into town in the next few days. I didn’t want to have to put that off on Matt too. Not when he had so much else to deal with.
I parked outside my father’s building and calmly walked into the mayor’s office. His secretary was behind her desk when I entered, and she barely lifted one of her fake lashes when she realized it was me. The woman was professionally dressed, her hair always expertly styled, but her makeup looked like a YouTube tutorial fail. Someone needed to tell her that less was more at times.
“He’s been expecting you,” she said with a snide smile, surprising me when her face didn’t crack under the weight of her makeup. “Go on in.”
Nervousness tightened in my stomach, and for a split second, I wished I had waited for Matt to come with me. But that would have been pure chaos. Gathering my courage, I opened the door to his office and stepped inside. My eyes went straight to the desk where Derrick Michaels always sat. His office chair was like his throne, where he felt like he was at his most powerful. He wanted to rule all of Creswell Springs, and then once he had it exactly the way he wanted it, he planned on running for governor.
Which was exactly what California needed.
Not.
“Hey, Aurora,” a voice I hadn’t been expecting greeted, pulling my gaze from my father to the small leather sofa across the room. “How have you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks.”
I was taken aback when I saw Steph Campbell sitting there, her father right beside her looking smug and like even more of a creeper than ever. I swung the door shut and turned my eyes back to my father, ignoring the presence of the Campbells for the moment. “I heard you wanted to see me.”
“I told you not to go near that boy again,” Dad said in a calm voice.
Calm, always so calm and collected whenever he had an audience. More often than not at home as well, but there were rare occasions when he had terrified me with his rage. Finding out my mother had left him without so much as a dime of her money had been one such occasion. But I wasn’t scared of him now, and I had promised myself a long time ago that I would never be scared of him again.
At least, not for myself.
Matt was a different matter. Matt was everything, and I wasn’t going to let my father touch him.
I lifted a shoulder in a careless half shrug. “I’m almost twenty-one, Dad. I really don’t give a fuck what you tell me. I make my own choices.”
“He’s a dangerous gang member.” His eyes were shooting fire at me, but his tone was still calm, if a little colder now. “Your mother and I raised you to respect yourself more than to want to be with some gutter trash like that Reid boy.”
Anger boiled in my veins, and I held up a finger. “Number one, don’t call him that. Your hands are dirtier than his, so just shut your damn mouth about him. Number two, my mother raised me. Not your lazy ass. Never you.” I lifted a third finger. “And number three, don’t bring Mom into this. She’s gone, but before she died, she approved of Matt. He treats me the way she always wished a guy would treat me.”
“By fucking your friend the minute your back was turned?” Dad shot back, and I had to lock my knees, because that question threw me completely off-balance. “I doubt your mother would have approved of that, little girl.”
“What are you talking about? What friend? I have no friends, thanks to you.” But something was already churning in my gut. That jealousy I’d fought down the first night I’d gotten Matt back tried to poke its ugly head into my mind as doubts and insecurities flooded back like a tsunami.
“That hurts, Aurora,” Steph murmured, sounding like I had actually hurt her feelings. But when I glanced at her again, I could see the malice in her eyes. “I thought we were besties.”
A picture of Matt with Steph flicked through my mind, and I had to swallow the bile that filled my throat. No. It wasn’t true. I didn’t believe it. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. He wouldn’t have done that to me. He wouldn’t have…
Right?
But with the malice, I saw the truth shining back at me from her face. That pleased look as she remembered her time with him. As she thought of how he had touched her.
The same way he touched me.
I made my face go blank as I turned my gaze back to my father, not giving him the satisfaction of knowing he had just scored a point off me. He might have made a direct hit, but it didn’t have the power to make me come back to his house. It didn’t have the mojo to kill what I felt for Matt. Even if it did feel like being stung to death by a swarm of angry wasps.
“That was in the past,” I said in a voice devoid of all emotions. I gave a careless shrug. “It’s none of my business.”
So what if Matt had said that, to him, it was like we were never separated, that the time apart meant nothing? That I had always been his and he had always—always, damn it—been mine.
So what if I was slowly bleeding to death thinking of him with Steph while I was gone. Was she the only one? I knew what kind of kink the other girl was into. She and her friend Casandra loved threesomes. Oh fuck, had Matt had them both? Together?
I gave myself a mental bitch slap. Stop it, Rory. Just stop it.
My father’s hands balled into fists on top of his desk, the knuckles turning white. “I’ll have the boy arrested for rape, Rory.”
I rolled my eyes at the same old threat he had always held over me. “You have no proof. Not even the judges that are in your pocket will be willing to let a case that has no DNA or witnesses go to trial. Because I’m sure as hell not going to testify against him.”
Before my eyes, his face relaxed into a beaming smile, and everything inside of me turned to ice in a flash. “Who said I was going to have him charged with rape of you, my darling daughter? Stephanie here has been waiting years to come forward about her own experience with Matt Reid.”
“That’s a lie.”
“I have pictures of her from where she was beaten.” Royce Campbell spoke up for the first time, his tone almost gloating. “She and Casandra will both testify that he raped them both then beat them bloody and had one of his gang brothers drop them off in front of my house as a warning to back off his thug friends.”
“It’s a lie!” I snarled at him, but inside I didn’t know what to believe.
“Is it, though?” He grinned, enjoying having me right where he and my father wanted me. “How do you know for sure?”
“Because I know Matt. He would never hurt a woman. Never raise a hand to her and never, not ever, violate her.”
“But a judge and jury won’t see him as anything but a criminal. A loser who doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but his gang,” the district attorney taunted.
“You can’t do that. I won’t let you.” But my voice was weak, because I knew he could. He would charge, try, and convict Matt. Steph was an apt liar and could come across as a sweet and innocent little rich girl if she wanted to. The jury would believe her, and those who didn’t could be paid off.
Royce only chuckled, and I bit the inside of my bottom lip as I let my head fall back and glared up at the ceiling, fighting tears. “What will it take for you to not go through with that?” Holding back the tears, I met my father’s gaze boldly. “What do you want from me?”
“Break it off with him,” Dad commanded. “You are never to see him again. Ever. Because if you so much as look at that boy again, I’ll have everyone in this town thinking he deserves the death penalty for what he did to Stephanie Campbell.”