Crosshairs
Rosalie
I timed it so it worked for me.
I was now ten days out. The bruising was fading faster. I was moving around a lot easier. A new bandage was on my nose and it was a lot smaller. And the stitches were dissolving and falling out.
But I still looked like a woman who’d had her ass handed to her.
Colombo’s was being cool. They were giving me time off with pay (though that pay sucked, it was all about the tips) for two weeks and putting me behind the bar until the bandage was off my nose, my stitches were totally gone, and my ribs were such I could heft around huge pizza pies.
So it was now or it would be never.
And too much was at stake.
It couldn’t be never.
Even if the now scared the beejezus out of me.
Therefore I was sitting in the room with all the stations, chairs facing each other on either side of a wall that was half glass, partitions delineating the stations.
Phones hanging on a partition at each station.
I watched him come out, and regardless of the fact he looked about as rough as me, and then some, I remembered what I’d thought the first time I saw him in the bar Bounty hung at.
That could be mine.
And I’d made it mine.
He copped a blank look as he moved to me, his big, powerful body no less attractive in an orange jumpsuit with a white T-shirt under it.
And it was proved.
The stitched slash that carved from just below the corner of his inner left eye across his cheekbone then down to his jaw only made him look tough, hot, and cool.
Making the trek from door to sitting opposite me, Beck did not lose hold on my gaze.
Only when I did nothing but sit there, staring at his still-handsome face, did his brown eyes slide to the telephone and back to me.
Now he wanted to talk.
I looked down at my lap where my purse was.
It was a cute purse. Total biker chick chic, black leather in a saddlebag shape with lots of rivets and a fantastic, heavy silver chain as a strap.
Since I was no longer going to be a biker chick, I was probably going to have to switch out my entire purse inventory, finding hipster purses or something like that.
The problem was the very idea of hipster purses made me want to cringe and I didn’t even know what a hipster purse looked like.
The sleek clutch Lanie was carrying, I could do.
Hipster…
No.
I stopped thinking of hipster purses, which was just my way of controlling my fingers’ need to start trembling because Beck was right across from me and the last time I’d seen him had not been a celebratory occasion. I got myself together and opened my purse.
I pulled out the folded piece of paper. I unfolded the paper, turned it the way I needed it, then slapped it up against the glass off to the side so that Beck could still see my face through the glass.
His gaze went to the paper and I thought he’d keep the blank look, close me off, shut me out, or alternately, sneer.
He didn’t do either.
He looked at the color copy of the picture of me before they’d cleaned the blood off my face in the hospital but after the swelling had bloated me beyond recognition and he flinched.
Flinched.
What was that all about?
So abruptly that I jumped in my chair, his big hand came up and curled around the phone.
He yanked it out of the cradle, tapped the top against the glass, gaze back on me, and put it to his ear.
I shoved the picture back into my purse and picked up the phone even though I had meant the picture to speak for me.
That being, I already paid, leave me alone.
I put the phone to my ear.
“Rosie.”
That was all he said but I heard the tone, I saw the look in his eyes.
The tone was guttural.
The look was suffering.
He had to be kidding me.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
His features softened in that way they did when he thought I was being cute or when he wanted to have sex or when I put his favorite meal in front of him or when he wanted me to forgive him for acting like a dick or a thousand other times when I reminded him why he’d made me his old lady or he got himself in trouble with me.
This was not in trouble with me.
As phenomenal as a soft look from Gerard “Throttle” Beck could be, we were far beyond that ever working again on me.
“Rosie—”
“Keep them away from me. From Mom and from me.”
“Why did you—?”
I leaned toward the glass and interrupted him. “Too late now, Beck. Too late to ask questions.”
“Web said—” he began, I knew to explain.
Web. Spiderweb. Bounty’s president.
What I also knew was there was no explanation. Not one I would understand.
The brothers, okay, they were in an outlaw motorcycle club, I knew the risks I was taking.
Him? My man?
There was no explanation.
“Web didn’t tell you to choke me. He didn’t tell you to hit me.”
His face started to get hard. “Baby, you ratted out the club.”
“You did your thing. Now keep them away from Mom and from me.”
“You shouldn’t have reported it to the cops, Rosie.”
That was what I was afraid of.
“What’d you think I’d do?” I asked.
“My deal with them was they’d leave you alive. Thought you’d learn to keep your mouth shut,” he told me.
“Well, thanks, Beck. So good to know you were looking out for me.”
He leaned into the glass. “Baby, Rosie, Christ. You ratted out the club.”
“I slept at your side,” I whispered.
His gaze fell then came right back up.
I kept at him.
“You could have been the father of my children.”
He winced and started, “Rosie—”
“When the club started to roll that way, I should have just left you.”
“I wouldn’t have let you go.”
“You wouldn’t have had a choice.”
“No, Rose,” he growled, “you wouldn’t have.”
That gave me a shiver but I powered through it.
“Then it’s all worked out for the best.”
That was when the sneer came. “He’s married, Rosalie. Got a fuckin’ kid. Get over it.”
What was he talking about?
“What?” I asked.
“Cage. He’s never gonna be yours. He’s gone for her and trust me, when that shit happens for a biker, it doesn’t turn around.”
He was talking about Shy. Shy and Tabby and me.
Ancient freaking history.
And trust him about that kind of thing?
He totally had to be kidding me.
“How can I trust you when you have no clue what you’re talking about?” I queried.
“Then you weren’t paying attention,” he snarled, allowing the hurt he felt at my betrayal and my supposed longing for Shy to rise to the surface.
“No, Beck, you weren’t. I’ve been over Shy since that night I rode at your back and you took me to Lookout Mountain and kissed me with the lights of Denver spread out around us.”
“Right, that’s why you handed us over to Chaos, who handed us to the fuckin’ cops.”
“No, I did it because when I made a baby with my man, I wanted that baby to know down to his bones his father was a good man in a way the day that father passed from this earth, he’d struggle to cope, but he wouldn’t struggle to come to terms with the fact this world was better with his daddy in it.”
Beck shut his mouth and did it looking stricken.
That got in there.
Finally.
But still too late.
I did not shut my mouth.
“I wanted you to see how dangerous what you were doing was. How easy it would be for your life to be wasted, the life you shared with me. I wanted you to take a good look at it and find a reason to turn yourself around. I tried to talk to you about it, you wouldn’t hear me. So I felt the need to do something to save you, save us, to save our future. And unfortunately for both of us, it got to the point where that something had to be extreme.”
Beck had nothing to say to that either.
So I kept going.
“Just to say, I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but when you refused to listen to my concerns about where the club was going and what that meant to our lives and our future, it ended with us. Long before you left me bleeding and passed out on a cement floor.”
He shook his head. “You drop the charges, Rosie, and I’ll talk to Web and the guys about letting this shit end here with you.”
I nodded my head. “You’re gonna talk to Web and the guys and you’re all gonna leave me alone.”
“You need to drop the charges, Rose.”
“If I have to sit in a box and look every one of you in the eye before I put you behind bars, I’ll do it.”
“Babe—”
I yanked the paper out of my purse and flattened it on the glass.
“My mother saw me like that, Beck.”
He turned his head away.
He loved my mom. Practically doted on her. An old lady without her biker. All of Bounty treated her like a dowager queen.
“She saw that,” I pushed. “You made her see me like that.”
He turned back to me. “Rosie, we got serious problems because of your bullshit.”
I shoved the picture back in my purse, saying, “I wasn’t caught transporting drugs. I didn’t abduct my girlfriend from her place of business and deliver her to a warehouse where me and the men I call my brothers beat her to shit. You and your brothers did that.”
“You know the code,” he bit.
“I do. My father was a biker and he taught me. Woman. Kids. Bike. Freedom. In that order. Where are you now with all of that, Beck?”
“You did it for Cage,” he clipped, not letting that stupid crap go.
“No. But I will say, in the beginning, I did it for you, but in the end, I didn’t.”
His brows shot together. “What the fuck does that mean?”
I wasn’t about to explain that one.
“Leave me and Mom alone.”
“Boys’d never touch your ma,” he muttered.
That was delivered in a mutter but I believed it.
Thank God.
I believed it.
I fought back heaving a gigantic sigh of relief and instead demanded, “Leave me alone.”
He leaned deeper toward me and got a look on his face that what now seemed long ago would have had me dropping to my knees or flat on my back in a split second.
“Baby, I’m beggin’ you, drop the charges.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“Rosalie—”
“You didn’t give me the chance to explain.”
“Rosie—”
“You choked me.”
“Rose—”
“And hit me.”
“Christ, baby—”
“And you spit on me.”
Beck shut up.
“Then you kicked me.”
Another flinch.
I stared into his eyes.
He had amazing eyelashes.
He stared into mine.
“I loved you once,” I whispered.
Those eyelashes swept down.
Yeah.
Amazing.
“You terrify me now,” I told him.
Those eyelashes swept up to reveal tortured eyes.
I knew it then.
He’d been ordered to deliver me to Bounty.
He might also have been ordered to start the proceedings.
But it wasn’t until right then that I realized that he’d done what he’d done in the beginning, and at the end, but in the middle, it was his brothers that brought down their version of justice on me.
He’d given them their show and he didn’t come back for more because he’d done as ordered and that was all he had in him when it came to me.
The parting shots were probably because he was pissed at me, worked up from watching his brothers lay me out, thinking I was hung up on Shy, possibly all of that.
Or still toeing the line.
There were leaders and there were followers.
But even if you were a follower, it was your job to find the right thing to follow and not to follow blindly.
Beck had failed at both.
“The only reason I can be here is because there’s a cop right there and a wall between us,” I shared, jerking my head toward the officer that stood by the door into the visitation room. “If you ever cared about me, keep them away from me.”
“I love you, baby, still, no matter what, you gotta know that,” he said into the phone quietly.
“Weirdly, someone chokes me, hits me, spits on me, and kicks me, that is something I do not know.”
“Drop the charges and we’ll get through this.”
We’ll get through this?
Was he crazy?
“Leave me alone, get your brothers to leave me alone, and I might not hate you until the day I die,” I countered.
“Rosie—”
“We’re done.”
“Rosie, baby—”
“You’re one of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen,” I whispered the God’s awful truth.
He clamped his mouth shut again.
“And you made me happy, so unbelievably happy.”
His brown eyes lit and warmed.
“And then you didn’t.”
Despair flickered in his gaze before he dropped his head.
“Do you know one of the reasons why my father never joined a club?” I asked.
He lifted his head but said nothing.
“He wasn’t a man to be tied down, but that wasn’t all there was to it,” I shared something I’d told him before, but at this juncture, a reminder was deserved. “Most clubs expect you to put club before everything else, including your family, your old lady. And he just was not a man who could do that.”
“I’m not your daddy, Rosie,” he said gently.
“I know,” I replied, put the phone on the hook decisively and watched his face falter.
That was the last I gave him.
I got up, dragged the silver chain of my purse over my shoulder, and walked out.
The minute I went through the door, I stutter-stepped because there was a tall, exceptionally good-looking man built like a linebacker leaning against the wall of the hall outside. He had a badge on his belt and his whisky-brown eyes turned to me the minute I exited.
I’d never seen him in my life but I still sensed his gaze was apologetic.
The door swung closed and those whisky eyes shifted across the hall, taking mine with them, and that was when I stopped altogether.
Snap was there, hidden by the door but now revealed.
“Thanks, Nightingale,” he muttered half a second before he latched onto my hand and dragged me down the hall, turned and hauled me down another one, through reception and out the front doors.
He wasn’t done lugging me around because he then rounded on me and started forward, forcing me to walk backward, until my hips hit the railing at the side of the steps up to the station.
He then bent his neck so his face was an inch from mine and I saw his snow-blue eyes could be chilly.
Wintry cold with icy fury.
“Have you…lost…your mind?”
The first words were controlled, but barely.
His last two were nearly shouted.
“Snapper,” I whispered.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” he demanded to know.
“You need to step back,” I told him.
“Oh no,” he drawled ominously, actually moving forward so his hips were pressed to my belly, his chest brushing my breasts and his frosty eyes filling my vision. “Oh no, baby. Ol’ Snap’s done with givin’ his woman some space.”
“I’m not…your woman,” I said hesitantly, like I didn’t believe my own words.
“How old am I?” he asked.
“Thirty-three,” I answered immediately and uncomprehendingly, bemused by his question in the midst of what was happening.
“My favorite color?” he pressed.
“Red.”
“How do I take my coffee?”
I’d learned that early, when he’d come into Colombo’s and have some cannoli and a cup of joe, before my informant status heated up.
“Lotsa cream, one sugar.”
“My favorite book?”
“Shutter Island.”
“You’re twenty-eight. Your favorite color is green. You take your coffee with just creamer, vanilla if it’s handy. Your favorite book is Harry Potter, the Azkaban one, and you flirted for a good long while with convincing yourself you could get away with naming your first girl Hermione.”
I shook my head, baffled where this was going. “I don’t—”
“You want two kids, because you wished you had a sister or brother, at least, and you want to start as soon as you can, because your dad was older than your mom and she wasn’t young when she had you and you lost him way too early for both of you, even though he was in his seventies.”
“I—”
“You’ve lived everywhere bikers are welcome on this side of the Mississippi but your favorite was always Denver, the three times your daddy moved you and your mom here. It was his favorite too, because he loved to ride the Rockies. And that was the only thing that gave you and your mom any relief when he passed, that you could take him up to the mountains when his time had come and he went somewhere he loved being.”
“Snap,” I said softly.
“You’re done with comic hero movies. You think Dwayne Johnson would kill in a romantic comedy. You like to vacation at beaches. Your favorite cookie is a snickerdoodle. Your favorite restaurant is Carmine’s. You’re uncertain about the death penalty seeing as you’re a conservative liberal, but in deference to your father, you’ve convinced yourself you’re a liberal conservative. And your favorite place in the whole world is riding on the back of a bike.”
Boy, I’d talked a lot during our phone conversations.
And Snap had listened closely.
He wasn’t quite finished with me.
“Only thing you don’t know about me that means anything is the way my cock feels buried inside you and only thing I don’t know about you is how sweet you’ll feel, closed tight around me.”
Oh man.
That sweet he’d feel started for me to feel tingly.
“Snapper,” I whispered.
“And you’re not my woman?”
“I—”
“You been my woman for months and I don’t give a shit that happened when you were with another man.”
It was me shutting my mouth during this conversation.
“And you just visited that man in jail, a man that delivered a beat down that put you in the goddamned hospital,” he stated infuriatedly.
“I was warning him off me,” I explained.
He dipped the half an inch he needed for the tip of his nose to brush mine (something it did).
“Rosalie, I’ll repeat, that motherfucker is not gonna touch you. Not ever a-fuckin’-gain.”
“You good, hoss?”
Snap’s head jerked around. I looked past his shoulder. And there stood two uniformed officers who weren’t real thrilled a man in a motorcycle cut with his colors stitched to the back had a woman pinned to the railing outside a police station.
“Snapper. Chaos. This is Rosalie. The woman Bounty beat to shit. She just visited Throttle to warn him off. She’s mine. I didn’t know she was up to that shit. And we’re havin’ a discussion about how that doesn’t make me happy.”
Masculine understanding dawned in both officers’ eyes. One gave Snapper a chin lift and moved toward the front door. The other gave him a look of beleaguered male camaraderie and then he moved toward the front door.
I tracked them, losing both between Snapper’s broad shoulders, getting them back only to lose them again when the men and the coffees they were carrying disappeared inside the police station.
Did that just happen?
“Rosie,” Snapper growled.
My eyes drifted back to him.
“We need to talk,” he declared, again.
“I’m not ready for that.”
“I’m sorry, baby, but I no longer give a shit.”
Now it was me who was getting angry.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Rosalie, you just visited fuckin’ Throttle in jail.”
“Yes, to tell him to leave me and Mom alone!” I snapped.
“Right, let me explain this to you thoroughly,” he bit back. “Communication between you and any member of Bounty, especially Throttle, is done. Over. Not fucking happening. There’s a message to deliver, Chaos delivers it. If they already haven’t learned that you’ve ceased to exist, we’ll share that with them as many times as we got to until they get it. You have nothing to fear from them because every brother who’s earned the Chaos patch will go down before they hurt you again. You don’t have to do dick to make that happen, the brotherhood will bleed themselves dry for you to make you safe. Now, are you getting me?”
“I—”
He cut me off before I could say more.
“Before you get worked up any of that shit will happen, Tack has gotten word to Web that we know they got a beef, they can’t be under any impression other than the fact we feel after what they did to you that we got a beef, but how that’s gonna work out is however it works out between brothers. Women are off limits, you’ve been claimed by Chaos, and if dick happens to you, or your mom, it isn’t gonna make it a bigger beef. It’s gonna be Chaos declaring war and they’re vulnerable, so they got this shot bein’ incarcerated to get their shit together or we’ll dismantle their charter. Now you getting me?”
“Whoa,” I whispered.
“You’re getting me,” he muttered.
“How would you even do that?” I asked curiously.
“With surgical precision, considering Tack’s already reached out to other Bounty charters’ presidents sharing Chaos and its allies will not be best pleased another woman gets caught in the crosshairs and he’s gonna expect a definitive indication from the other charters they’re frowning on Bounty’s bullshit. To say Bounty, who have never been one percenters, aren’t real thrilled Web took their shit in its current direction is an understatement. Might not stop the locals but they’d have their patches stripped, and no biker who’s earned his patch doesn’t take that seriously. They’d have to start from fresh without a single ally, which is like a newborn baby taking on a full grown bear.”
“It, uh…seems you all have this in hand,” I mumbled, and that got me the fascinating show of his fabulous lips surrounded by his blond beard twitching.
“Yeah, and if you’d had coffee with me a coupla days ago, I coulda shared a few things and saved you this trip.”
Hmm.
“You gonna have coffee with me now?” he asked.
“Um…” I darted my eyes side to side, saying, “I probably should get home. Mom doesn’t know I’m here. She went to the grocery store for her weekly huge-ass shop and since this is lasting longer than I expected, she might be back before I get home and she’s a little…” I searched for a word, “troubled about all the stuff that’s swirling around me.”
“I bet she is,” he said quietly.
“So I should go home,” I reiterated.
“When you movin’ into my place?” he asked.
“I’m under the impression I’m already moved in.”
“I mean, bodily.”
There was something about Snapper saying the word “bodily” that also made parts of me tingle.
I refused to get caught up in the tingle.
“Didn’t all you just said mean I don’t really need the fullness of the protection you and Chaos are offering me?” I asked.
“You think me or any of the brothers are leavin’ dick to chance with our women, you’d be thinkin’ wrong.”
Of course.
“Snap—”
“I know you love spending time with your mom but it’d probably help her out to know you’re doin’ better in your head that you move back into your life.”
This was probably true.
I huffed out a big sigh.
He wrapped a hand around the side of my neck, thumb extended under my chin to push it up.
It was a sweet touch and a cool move.
More tingling.
Damn.
“I’ll move in tomorrow,” I said.
“Good,” he replied.
“Or the next day,” I went on.
The look in his eyes that had turned to snowy goodness shifted back to frosty annoyance.
“Rosie, tomorrow,” he ordered. “You get in, settle in, we’ll talk.”
I huffed out another big sigh.
“Face is lookin’ good,” he muttered, reading accurately from my sigh I was giving in. “How’re your ribs?”
“Healing,” I muttered back.
“Glad to hear it, Rosie.”
The snowy goodness was back in his eyes and a different kind of goodness was in his voice.
I needed to be careful.
“I can’t believe those cops just let you keep me pinned to this railing,” I remarked.
“Cops aren’t big fans of a woman beat to shit by eight motherfuckers,” he educated me.
“No one really is,” I educated him.
“They’re also not big fans of those women waltzing up to one of the assholes who did that shit to have a futile conversation,” he shared.
“I didn’t know it was futile,” I told him.
“I did and they did and fortunately now so do you.”
I decided to shut up again.
“Colombo’s bein’ cool with you?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Baby?” he called.
“Mm?” I answered.
His thumb swept along my jaw. “Go home to your mom before I lose the fight I got goin’ with the urge to take you home with me.”
Man, I wanted to go home with him.
No you don’t! my mind screamed. Get it together, Rosalie!
“Maybe we should have coffee, Snapper. There might be a few things you need to get straight too.”
He shook his head, his thumb now drawing circles on the hinge of my jaw that caused reciprocal circles to be felt around both my nipples, and I started kicking myself I didn’t sprint to my car the minute he told me to go home.
“Unh-unh, coffee’s off the table,” he declared. “You’re settled in, we’re havin’ dinner.”
I then shook my head. “I’m not going out to dinner with my face like this.”
“I didn’t say we were goin’ out.”
Uh-oh.
“Snap—”
“Go home.”
“Snap!”
He bent in, pressing his lips to mine.
I felt those lips and the whiskers of his beard whispering against my skin and I smelled him and I had to clench my hands not to reach out and grab him like a child reaching to grasp hold of a candy bar that was not good for them but they had to have.
It was our first kiss.
Well, kind-of kiss, it wasn’t gung ho.
Still, it was a kiss and even not gung ho, stupid, stupid Rosalie, I wanted more.
And because he was wonderful, awesome Snapper, not pushing it outside the press that ended in a soft brush of lips and whiskers, he pulled away and whispered, “Go home to your mom, Rosie.”
I nodded because that was a really good idea.
“Talk to you later,” he said.
“Right,” I replied and nearly cleared my throat but the damage was done, it had come out husky.
He grinned, swept my jaw with his thumb the other way, then stepped back.
I started to sprint to my car but stopped myself before I got in that first rush because I didn’t want him to see me doing it.
Once I made it to the bottom of the steps, though, I should have stopped myself from looking back because badass Snapper had come to the fore. He was standing at the top of the steps with his arms crossed on his chest and his eyes on my ass.
Me being with Beck, he’d been holding back.
Now that the floodgates had been opened, he wasn’t going to do that anymore.
I thought I had problems but I had a feeling I’d been tossed out of the frying pan only to land in the fire.
I should have sprinted.
I decided to skip trot like I was semi in a hurry but hoping he thought it was because I wanted to get back to Mom before she worried.
There were two good parts to me doing that. One, it got me to my car faster and two, it didn’t hurt my ribs too much so I had indication I’d be good to go soon with carting around trays full of food and beverage.
I’d hit my car, had the key in the ignition and was about to turn it on when my phone chimed with a text.
Thinking it was Mom, home to find me gone, and worried about me, I grabbed it.
It was a number I didn’t have programmed in, local, and I didn’t have to wonder who it was because the text said, You’re so fucking cute.
Snapper and I didn’t have each other’s real phone numbers.
Now, we did.
I felt instantly that life was right again after months, no…years of feeling it was all wrong.
Yes, I had problems.
Because I’d fallen in love with a biker who’d dumped me.
Then I fell in love with a biker who went outlaw and then laid the smackdown on me.
And now I was in love with a biker who knew where another club did their wet work, was threatening war against that club, but was already at war with a baddie that set his Club to breaking the biker code and working with cops in order to use another club to take that baddie out.
I might be out of one set of crosshairs (maybe).
But everybody remotely involved with Chaos was in the other.
And that scared the hell out of me.