Lucy

 

I sat at the office and tried to distract myself with phone calls and conversation with the girls, but my mind just kept going back to my parents.

 

“Is everything all right?” Amelia asked, noticing the tears welling up in my eyes.

 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied. I wiped my face. My stomach was starting to hurt, like, really hurt. I put an arm across it.

 

“No, you don’t seem like everything’s all right,” Kelly said, getting up from her desk and walking over to me just in time to catch me as I doubled over, falling out of my chair.

 

“Oh my god,” Amelia gasped.

 

“Call Robby,” Kelly said, and I could hear it in her voice. She was experienced in dealing with emergencies through him. If anyone else in the office was connected to the MC, she was the most likely candidate.

 

I gripped her arm and gritted my teeth. My stomach was killing me. It felt like someone was stabbing me and twisting the knife. But the blade was hot.

 

“My baby,” I gasped.

 

“Did you call Robby?” Kelly yelled at the other two girls.

 

I could hear one of them talking in a hurried, hushed voice. I assumed she was talking to Robby on the phone.

 

“Yeah, Hannah called.”

 

“He’s on his way.”

 

“Hey, hang in there,” Kelly said. “You’re just under a lot of stress, and that’s upsetting your baby.” She stroked my hair and rubbed my back.

 

I wanted Blade, but I didn’t know if it was all right for me to call out his name in the office around the girls. I felt like they weren’t supposed to know about the MC, or that I was involved. Robby will know to call him, I told myself, if he doesn’t call him on the way to get me.

 

The door to the office opened, and Robby’s voice asked in a concerned tone, “Where is she?” It wasn’t panic I heard. It was urgency.

 

A moment later I was in his arms. My body shook as he stepped down from the trailer and hurried me to his truck. Then, I felt the cushions of the seat around me.

 

“Hold it down. If anyone calls for me, tell them I’m on a job site and I’ll call them back,” I heard him tell the other girls.

 

The doors closed on the truck, and we were moving.

 

“Just breathe, honey,” he said. Just like his girls, I knew Robby was used to handling emergencies. There was no telling what all he’d seen over the years.

 

“It hurts,” I told him as the pain was starting to subside.

 

“Probably just stress. Blade told me about going to talk to your parents today.”

 

I tried to sit up.

 

“No, stay down,” he told me. “If you sit up, it’ll probably get bad again. We’re almost there.”

 

A moment later, the truck was stopping, and Robby was carrying me into the ER. “She’s a few months pregnant and in pain,” he told the nurse behind the desk, and I was admitted immediately.

 

I lost track of time after that. I didn’t know if I blacked out from the pain or if they gave me something to sedate me, but the next thing I knew, I was waking up in a room. I was hooked up to several machines to monitor my body. I was sore, and I was cold. The room was freezing. They had several thin blankets on me, and I pulled them up as far as I could before getting them in the way of the wires and monitors.

 

I looked around the room. It was a private room with a large window looking out over the streets downtown. I had a beautiful view of the gray parking deck next to the building I was in. I watched the cars come and go.

 

“How do you feel?” Robby asked.

 

“Good…where’s Blade?” I asked.

 

“He’s in jail, Lucy,” Robby said with a hand on my ankle.

 

“No. What happened?” I asked. Something started beeping faster as I got upset, reminding me to calm down.

 

“The cops raided the club right after he got there after dropping you off at the office,” he said. “We don’t know anything yet. Apparently they let the girls go. I talked to Molly a little while ago. She called trying to figure out what happened. They won’t let anyone back in.”

 

“What the actual fuck?” I asked.

 

“We don’t know,” he said with a chuckle.

 

“Oh, we know,” I said. “We know exactly what happened. My father happened,” I told him, listening to the beeping increasing on the machines around me.

 

“Well, calm down. There’s nothing we can do until we can get his lawyer in there and get him out,” Robby told me.

 

I took a deep breath. “Okay, I’ll try. Have the doctors said anything?” I asked.

 

“Not to me. I think they’re waiting on you to wake up. If you’re okay, I’ll go get them and make a few phone calls. I should have heard back from Blade or his lawyer by now. I need to see what’s going on.”

 

“Hurry back,” I told him as he walked out of the room. I knew why he hadn’t heard back from the lawyer. Their lawyer wasn’t going to be able to make it to see Blade. My father had already gotten to him, I was sure. He’d already convinced him not to go see Blade in jail and not to represent him. I was willing to put money on it, but it wasn’t really my place to do that.

 

A moment later, after Robby left the room, the door opened. I expected the doctor to come in, but the face that came around the corner was someone else. It was a young banker I hadn’t seen in months, but I would have recognized that brown hair and those brown eyes anywhere.

 

“What are you doing here?” I asked. The beeping started to pick up again as I scooted back on the back, trying to get away from the man approaching me.

 

“I’ve come to talk to you about us,” Dylan said.

 

I narrowed my eyes at him. My father had been busy after I left the house just a couple of hours ago, I guess. “What about us?” I snapped at him. “There is no us. You turned your back on me.”

 

“Well, not about us, really.” He sat on the edge of the bed, and I could see that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band anymore. There was a light spot on his ring finger where it should have been.

 

My heart skipped a beat. I had wanted to see that for so long. I wondered what had happened in the meantime to make them actually split. Knowing how cowardly he was, she’d probably left him, not the other way around.

 

“I want custody of our child when it’s born,” he said without looking at me. He was still too chicken shit to own up to anything. He couldn’t even look me in the eye while demanding custody of our baby.

 

“Not a chance,” I told him. “My fiancé is already going to adopt him.”

 

“Oh, that biker? Blade,” he said, spitting his name out. “I’m willing to fight you in court if need be, Lucy, and you know I’ll win. No one is going to side with a single woman living with a thug who has a history of gang violence and drugs. Oh, and he’s in jail again, from what I hear. I can’t wait to see what it’s for this time. The suspense is killing me.”

 

While I watched him, I wondered what I’d ever seen in him. And, honestly, watching his mannerisms, it was a miracle he’d even had sex with me to begin with. I was starting to wonder if I had even been his type or if he’d just been faking it for so long he didn’t know how to stop at the time.

 

“Did you think you were going to be able to raise this child in a motorcycle gang, Lucy? Did you really? You had to have known that going to your dad was the worst decision you could have made for yourself. You had to have known that he was going to call me and tell me what you were doing. You had to know he wasn’t going to let your new little boyfriend walk around a free man with so much going on around his little strip club. It’s a shame I never got to see that sweet little ass of yours onstage, though. I would have given you more than just a few dollars in your G-string.” He rubbed my thigh and slid his hand up a little too high for comfort.

 

“Look, there are guys from the MC here right now. If they catch you in here, you’re not going to be able to claim custody of our child when it’s born, so I suggest you leave,” I told him.

 

“Fine, but think about it. I want what’s mine.” He got up and walked out of the room, leaving me in there alone.

 

He was right. He had a good, respectable job. Chances were, even going through a divorce, he was still doing well for himself. He had so much more to offer than I did. I was in a bad situation to try to keep my baby. If I wanted to keep it, I was probably going to have to leave Blade and the MC behind, especially with Blade going back to jail.

 

I had to wonder what else he’d been in for. It was time to air everything out. I needed to know what was going on, what had gone on before. My whole world was crumbling again. I didn’t know what to do.

 

The beeping increased, and something else started beeping loudly. I was alone and no one was coming in.

 

A moment later, a couple of nurses came in to check on me. Robby followed them, and I looked to him for help.

 

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

 

The nurses, thinking he was talking to them, told him I was just excited and needed to relax. They hit me with another dose of whatever was keeping the pain at bay, and I felt myself starting to mellow out almost immediately.

 

“Is that safe for the baby?” he asked.

 

“Yeah, we’re giving her small doses of a very light sedative so we don’t harm the baby,” one of the nurses said.

 

I ignored her. I didn’t want to think about any drugs that could have been harmful to my baby. My baby. Mine and Blade’s baby, not Dylan’s.

 

After the nurses left, Robby came to my side. “Look, is everything all right?” he asked in a very serious tone. His voice was that of someone who would have hurt anyone who tried to hurt me. I could hear it in there.

 

“Dylan, the baby’s father,” I said.

 

“Was he here?”

 

I nodded.

 

“When?”

 

“Right before the beeping.” I was so tired I could barely talk.

 

“You rest,” Robby told me. “I’ll get some guys up here so you’re not alone. We’ll take care of you.”

 

He patted me on my shoulder and walked away across the room. I closed my eyes and listened as his voice drifted off. He was on the phone. The beeping had come back in, but it was the light, rhythmic beeping of my heart. It matched my breathing. I didn’t think they would have given me much for pain with a baby, but I trusted they knew what they were doing. If there had been any real emergency, the doctor would have already been in to see me.