DECK

It had been two weeks.

Fourteen days of Charlie in my bed.

Three hundred and thirty-six hours of fucking heaven with my woman and my daughter.

We took care of the late payments and extra money Charlie apparently owed her family. Paid in full, but Charlie didn’t let me pay it all for her. She went to a bank and took out a personal loan. However, I knew it was never going to happen. I had won a major battle in getting her to move in with me. So I let her think she’d won one, too, but I was going to pay off that debt and get her toxic family out of her life.

She had plenty of family now with the guys at the club. Plus, my parents were annoying the shit out of me to meet Charlie after a Skype session with Shiloh and Winnie. Mum wasn’t going to wait too much longer before she burst into the club and took it upon herself to meet her future daughter-in-law. Yeah, I was taking it there. I had to tackle a few other hurdles first, but the main goal was marriage.

How do you tell a woman you love her, though? Not once had I uttered those words to any female apart from Shiloh and my mum. I did love her, and the past few weeks made it a sure thing in my mind.

We shared most parts of the day together. Breakfast with Shiloh, and then I dropped them both off at school together. Then pick them up, have dinner, then Shiloh’s bath time and story time or just sitting in the main room of the compound, watching television or playing pool with the other brothers.

Charlie’s friendship with Vegas and Stella had really taken off. It made me happy she was fitting in with the others.

There was a big party on tonight, and I was enjoying the beginnings of it until my phone rang. Leaving Charlie in the company of Vegas and Darth, I excused myself to go talk to the building inspector. The call wasn’t a good one. So sitting in the war room trying to figure out the shit with the construction company was heavily reducing my state of bliss.

Just the day before, we had more trouble with the bar and grill. More customer complaints about food standards, and now my site was being harassed. Harassment was exactly what was happening with all of our businesses. The only one left alone was the gun shop and shooting range. I rubbed my hands down my face and blew out a frustrated breath.

The building inspector visited the site during one of my absences today and demanded a retaining wall built behind the new building after a soil sample deemed it too sandy and unstable to hold any potential collapses at bay.

What a load of frog shit!

I had seen the results of the soil samples before any building started, and there was no mention of sand or unstable ground then.

A retaining wall at this stage of the game was going to be on me, financially. We had already told the clients it was good to go with the samples, so changing it halfway in wasn’t going to go well in my favour.

I didn’t like the feeling of my hands being tied.

Someone was messing with me. And worse, they were messing with my club.

I had a strange and uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was like someone was stalking us. And the stalker knew how to play.

“Brother.”

I looked up and found Creed watching me from the door of the war room. His bike shop just received a notice of eviction, which was a load of shit since the club owned the building. The notice came from the town’s council stating the building’s owner had passed away and to remove all things from the building as it had been deemed derelict.

So, for Creed, he spent his day at town hall with certificates of ownership, banknotes, and God knew what else they wanted to see as proof of who was the rightful owner of the building.

Everything that had happened so far with the bars, bike shop, and strip club had been a pain in the arse stuff. Stupid time-wasting cleaning and hours lost at town hall proving shit. But now it was starting to cost real money. This retaining wall was going to cost at least ten grand, not to mention it cost two hundred and sixty dollars every time the inspector ordered another soil sample. His bill wouldn’t arrive until after everything was finished, which would add another few grand just for his bullshit time.

“Heard you had fun today, Creed.”

Creed harrumphed and came into the room to sit down across from me. His expression was normal—controlled and pissed off. An IED had gone off, killing two of our own and severely wounding Creed, Squid, and Seb. Creed had only been back with the unit a short while after a bad accident that happened during one of his visits back home to his wife. Although he hadn’t been badly injured in the motorcycle accident, his body took a beating with road rash and his chest and back still bore the scars from it. Even worse, though, was the instant death of his beautiful wife, who had found out just the day before that she was pregnant. My thoughts were all over the place about what had happened to Creed’s wife. I personally didn’t think she should have been on his bike, but I kept that thought to myself. My brother had enough to deal with without me making him feel worse.

Coming out of my memories, I passed Creed the papers I’d put together on what had happened so far.

“Something ain’t right about this fuckery, Deck.” Creed growled as he looked over the complaints. “Fucking mouldy cheese is one thing, but saying there are drugs at Body and Soul, getting eviction notices, and now fucking retaining walls and bad soil samples. Brother, this shit is deliberate.”

Nodding my head, I agreed. It felt like a vendetta. It was just too personal against not just one person but the entire club. All of us. But why?

“What the fuck, Creed? Who would have a reason to get us in shit like this?”

Creed tapped the papers with his hand. “Been thinking about it. Got a few ideas. Need to get Booth and the team in here later for a show-and-tell. Yeah?”

Agreeing again, I went to answer him when Ford, the human hurricane, burst into the room. His eyes searched until they landed on me.

“Brother, got some bad news and some good news.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and shook my head. Of course, he did. “What?”

“Well, the bad news is your woman ain’t got a high tolerance for alcohol.”

“She what?” I asked. What in the flying fuck was this man talking about? Charlie was out in the main room with Darth, Vegas, and Stella. I’d left her there myself not a half hour ago.

Ignoring my question, Ford pressed on. “The good news is she can dance like a fucking angel sent to us from heaven.”

His words took my mind back to the night at Gypsies. Instantly, I was up and out of my seat, pushing the grinning Ford out of the way. I vaguely heard Creed muttering behind me, “This isn’t going to end well.”

No, it was not. If Charlie was doing what I thought she was doing, I was handcuffing her to our bed for the rest of her life. Enough said.

Charlie was not going to be spending the rest of her life handcuffed to our bed—unfortunately. The soft, haunting music filled my ears as I burst into the main room and stopped dead in my tracks. My sudden stop made Creed and Ford come up short and push into my back, but it made no impact on me because the sight before me took my breath away.

There, in the middle of the room, furniture pushed against walls and out of the way, my woman was dancing. A beautiful vision in tight yoga-type pants and a tight tank top with her feet encased in pink ballet shoes, and her hair pulled up into a messy bun. She had the biggest smile on her face as she spun around and around in the same spot. A pirouette I thought was the term I had heard her use to Shiloh when they were practising for the upcoming ballet recital, where Shiloh had a lead role.

How did she not get dizzy? I was mesmerised by her, completely. The music dramatically picked up, and Charlie threw herself out of the spins and started to jump across the room, her legs moving incredibly fast, and her leaps high. But then I heard the beautiful sound of my daughter laughing and giggling, shouting out her delight as she chased her teacher around the room in her own version of the leaps Charlie was performing.

I couldn’t help but laugh at Shiloh as she tried hard to keep up, dressed in her pink tutu and her beloved black, chunky boots. Then, all of a sudden, Charlie stopped again. I was in awe of the way she could stop and change the direction or the step she was doing all with grace and poise. There was nothing clumsy about any of her movements.

Laughing aloud, Charlie turned and faced Shiloh. She then ran to the little girl, and lifting Shiloh high in her arms, Charlie began to dance again, holding Shiloh to her chest. Shiloh’s legs wrapped around Charlie’s waist as they held each other’s hands like they were doing the waltz or something.

Charlie’s hips gyrated side to side while her torso circled like a belly dancer. My daughter laughed and shrieked with so much happiness.

When I looked around, I saw my brothers also laughing and smiling at the antics of my girls.

Darth was standing behind Vegas with his arms wrapped around her middle, and both were smiling as they swayed to the music. Stella was standing beside them with Mannix and Rainn, his girl from Body and Souls who had taken over Charlie’s contract at Gypsies a few weeks ago. Rainn was not a club soul girl—or a club whore as other MC clubs called them—but she worked for Mannix, and they had a strange relationship. It seemed like both of them were content to just hook up occasionally, and Mannix was still active with the girls who came to the compound. From what I knew about Rainn, she was a nice girl—beautiful body and gorgeous long ruby-red hair. It was obviously from a box, but it suited her, and she suited Mannix, but my brother was hardened against women and relationships.

Leaning in closer to Vegas, I tapped her on the shoulder. “Ford said something about alcohol and Charlie.”

Vegas let out a laugh. “Yeah, Steel made her a shandy. At first, she had a taste of the beer but wasn’t too keen on that, so he added some lemonade to it, and it was instant love.” She laughed again.

A shandy? Really? Wow, it would seem my woman was a bit of a lightweight. Not that I cared. I had lost interest in drinking big as soon as Shiloh had been born. I never wanted to be drunk or over the limit if she needed me.

“How many did she have?”

Darth looked over at me and smirked. “Half a glass, brother,” he replied drolly.

“Got no problems with the alcohol supply with Teach around, Deck,” Steel called out from across the bar. Always the bartender, whether it be at the bar and grill or there at the club. Steel was in his element slinging drinks and enjoyed it as much as his abilities to blow shit up. His training and specialty in the unit had been bomb detonation and was a fucking genius with a block of C-4 and some detonators. He was also deadly accurate with a rifle and had been the best sniper ever to come out of the commandos.

Over on the impromptu dance floor, Charlie and Shiloh stopped dancing. Taking my cue to have my girls all to myself for the rest of the night, I decided to give the party a miss.