Chapter 16

When you’re feeling powerless, just remember one thing. A single one of your pubic hairs will shut down an entire restaurant.

-Fact of Life

Verity

I woke up early to cook the Motley Crew, also known as Sean (Seanshine I’d heard him called last night), Ghost (a scary man who was eerily quiet and rather intimidating), and my husband breakfast.

I was still fuming.

So, not only did he not feed me anything but cookies all night long, but he’d also given explicit orders that we were leaving for Colorado tomorrow afternoon, and we would miss the firefighters stew and auction.

Something that I’d gone to every year for the last five years. Something that I adored going to because it made me feel happy to see the excitement on the firefighters’ faces when they saw my donation check.

I’d just finished up with the last of the bacon and was cutting it into pieces to mix in with the scrambled eggs, when Truth came in.

He looked rough.

And not just the normal rough that he always looked, but an even rougher rough that made him look more caveman than man.

“Wow,” I said, eyeing his beard. “Did you at least brush your teeth?”

He bared said teeth at me, and I grinned.

Then frowned.

“Why do you smell like onions?” I asked him.

He took a seat at the kitchen table where all the food was laid out and frowned.

“After you went to bed last night, Sean went to grab us some burgers from The Warehouse. I ate two,” he said, poking the eggs with his finger. “I’m not hungry at all.”

The knife I was using to cut the bacon with hit the counter with a clash, causing him to look up.

“You what?” I said carefully, turning fully to look at him.

“I said, Sean grabbed us some burgers from The Warehouse,” he repeated, not understanding that he was in danger. “Ghost and Sean aren’t hungry either.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked. “And if you were to go out and get food, why would you not have at least offered to bring me some?”

“Because you were asleep?” he said slowly. Carefully.

I most certainly had not been asleep. In fact, I’d been watching TV when he’d come into our bedroom, and I had been meaning to ask him for hours why he smelled like onions, but I hadn’t wanted to wake him up.

Now, I realized, I shouldn’t have been so considerate. It was obvious that he wasn’t.

I gently picked up what was left of the bacon, and walked it over to the trashcan, before dumping it inside.

I’d already had a protein shake, and I’d only gone through the torture of making the most delicious smelling bacon in the world for his ass.

And now he said he didn’t want it.

Fucking wonderful.

“What the hell?” Truth asked, watching me reach for the eggs.

I took them and dumped them into the trash, too.

Eighteen eggs and twenty-five pieces of bacon, ruined.

My mother would’ve had a conniption.

And without another word, I walked out of the kitchen and to the bedroom, closing it quietly behind me before sitting on the bed and trying not to cry.

What the fuck was wrong with me? Me, Verity Ruthann Cassidy, no Verity Ruthann Reacher, crying over a goddamned hamburger, bacon and eggs?

I seriously needed to get a grip, but I couldn’t.

I continued to stay mad at him, even when he said the sweetest words I’d ever heard him say two hours later as he was preparing to leave me.

“If I only had one helmet, I would give it to you,” he told me.

I managed to hold a straight face, but just barely.

He left me with a peck on the cheek, and then he was gone.

I sat there, wondering whether I’d made a mistake.

But no answers were forthcoming.

Sighing and standing up to start packing, I busied myself with folding clothes and rearranging Truth’s sword collection in his closet so I didn’t have to think about matters of the heart.

***

“He even quoted my favorite song!” I yelled, clapping my hands twice to get the ladies attention back.

“That’s ground for divorce,” Tally said. “You should serve him papers.”

I snorted.

“I’m just kidding,” Tally sighed and picked up her own suitcase, hefting it into the back of Imogen’s SUV before shutting the hatch.

“Do you think they’ll leave us once we get to the city line?” Imogen asked, eyeing the four prospects who were idling on their bikes behind us.

“Probably not,” I muttered. “Because if they leave us, then I’m unprotected.”

“Don’t feel special. Aaron still has them follow me around periodically, too. If I don’t answer my phone fast enough, the first thing he does is send one of them in my direction, if he doesn’t come himself.” She smiled. “They’re overprotective. You’re just going to have to learn to live with it.”

I shrugged.

“I will. It’s just tough, because I’m not used to having someone shadow my every move. They’re with me at the grocery store. They followed me into the feminine hygiene product aisle two days ago. They even tried to come into the bathroom with me. When I opened it and showed them it was a single stall without a window, they reluctantly backed off. Though I’m sure if I’d have let them come in they would have.”

Imogen snickered.

Tally, however, turned in the front seat and looked at me.

“Tommy told me a little bit about this Elais Beckett guy.”

I swallowed, and then nodded. “Yeah?”

She twisted her fingers as she explained.

“Tommy said that Truth was in a bad place when he got home from his last mission. Shut himself in his house or his workshop, and stayed there for close to a month. It wasn’t until Stone…”

I held up my hand to stop her. “Who is Stone?”

Her face fell a little bit more. “Stone was the Dixie Warden’s old president. The cop who was killed by the gang member nearly a year ago.”

My heart fell.

“I never knew he was involved with the MC,” I whispered. “I was gone the week it happened for a wedding in New Hampshire. I heard about it on Fox News, though. I couldn’t believe something like that happened in our small town.”

Tally licked her lips then continued. “Stone forced him to think straight again. Apparently, when he found him, Truth was a mess. He’d built eight swords in a one-week span, and you know how long those take him to get done.”

Months. He had to stay up night and day to get even one done. For him to get that many done in such a short time span was likely not conducive with Truth’s health.

I started to feel worse.

“Vengeance was his answer, though, to pulling his head out of his ass. He was in a dark place, and Tommy said he was kind of scary while he was doing whatever he did during the time he was working with Elais Beckett.”

Doing whatever he was doing meant killing people.

I shuddered.

I didn’t judge the man. I knew he was just doing his job, something he believed in and thought was right. He didn’t know that Elais Beckett was giving him inaccurate information to manipulate him into doing his bidding.

“Hey, how about we go to eat?”

My head swung up, and I realized we’d left my driveway, and had gone as far as the city limits. The city limits where the fire station sat, with hundreds of cars parked around the station.

“Yes,” I said instantly. “I vote yes.”

Tally and Imogen laughed, and then Imogen swung her car into the only available spot, which, luckily enough, happened to be very close to the building.

The four bikers that were following us pulled directly in behind us and idled, wondering what we were going to do.

When we got out and started heading for the front door, and the mass of people, they jumped off their bikes and headed toward us.

“I bet we’re giving them minor heart attacks right now,” Imogen murmured quietly just before the four of them showed up at our sides.

I, of course, had two. One on each side of me.

The one on my right was on the smaller side, and he had a quick smile, especially when he saw me looking.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Fender.”

I blinked.

“Your real name is Fender, or your ‘road name’ is Fender?”

He had a really great smile.

“My road name is Fender. I was two days into pledging as a prospect when I fell and hit my head on the fender of a car. I got this exciting little scar to commemorate it. The members haven’t let me live it down yet,” he chuckled to himself.

“Watch out,” a man took my arm. The other prospect on my side.

I looked down at the large hand guiding me around a huge rut in the dirt that would’ve made me bust my ass had he not moved me, and then back up at the other prospect.

This one I didn’t know anything about, and I didn’t get the happy vibes off of him that I got off of Fender.

No, this man was scary.

Not in a ‘he’s going to kill me’ way, but in a ‘he could kill me if he wanted to’ kind of way.

His name was Jessie James, and yes, that was his real name. I’d asked Truth that in the few words I’d allowed him this morning before he’d left.

His answer had been short and sweet. “His name is Jessie James, we call him JJ for short. Please don’t tease him about his name. It brings up bad shit for him.”

“Thank you, Jessie,” I said.

“JJ,” he said deeply.

Man, he had a very deep voice.

“Y’all do realize that we’re going to get our asses kicked for this, right?” Fender asked as he opened the door to the station and ushered us inside.

“They expected us to stop,” I told him. “Or at least they should have.”

Fender gave me a wink.

“We knew you’d stop,” he said. “That’s why there are four of us.”

I refused to think that my man knew me that well…or that he was that considerate.

But by the end of the night, when we were boarding our plane to Colorado, I realized that he was very considerate.

Considerate enough to book me into first class, and considerate enough to know exactly when I was set to arrive in Colorado, and to have a freakin’ car there waiting.

Yes, I decided. I did have a good one.

I still had to teach him a few lessons about having a woman in his life, though.