Gracie

Excitement was making my heart race faster than it had in a long, long time. I couldn’t believe how happy I was. And I only wanted to share my happiness with one person.

Hawk Hannigan.

I bit my lip as I pulled to a stop in the bar’s parking lot. I’d never gone to see Hawk at work and he had never invited me in for a drink. For one, I didn’t like to drink. Too many memories of my father getting drunk and beating up my mother haunted me. My father’s family was full of alcoholics and I wasn’t going to dare look down that path let alone follow in it. For another, I was sure that Hawk didn’t want me to see what went on while he was at work. Too many nights he had come home from work smelling of the booze and smoke but there were nights that he came home smelling like cheap perfume too.

Those were the nights I wouldn’t let him hold me even if I did have nightmares.

Tonight I just couldn’t wait to share my news with him. I had spent the afternoon on campus with the Dean of the university’s law school and the committee that decided who got in and who didn’t. Trinity University was a small school, but it was no less prestigious than Harvard when it came to their law school. My father had gone there when it had first opened, and had been one of their first graduates from the Trinity University School of Law.

I’d had my choice of colleges, universities, and their law programs. I’d picked Trinity not only because it had been expected of me, but it was also where my mother had gone to college. That connection alone overruled the one that was to my father, a man who I still hated even though he was six feet under in the family cemetery back East. May his black soul forever burn in hell.

Opening the door to the gray 1967 Chevrolet Chevelle, I stepped out. It was one of the many classic cars that the Hannigan brothers collected, but this one was Hawk’s and he had lent it to me for when he couldn’t drive me somewhere. I’d been scared to drive the classic beauty, and I honestly wasn’t comfortable with the looks that the guys on campus gave me whenever I pulled up in it. But it drove like a dream, and I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t make me all kinds of melted inside when I heard that fudging engine revving up.

The parking lot was crowded with bikes, or as I had quickly learned from Raider, ‘hogs’ as they were all Harley Davidson motorcycles. I’d learned all kinds of new vocabulary from Hawk and his brothers over the last six weeks or so. Not all of it had been welcome knowledge either. I could have lived without knowing what a sheep or momma or sweetbutt was. All meant the same thing. All were the type of women that I was sure Hawk went for and the reason he came home smelling like a cheap whore some nights.

Opening the door to the bar I was momentarily overcome with the mixture of smoke and the scent of alcohol. The atmosphere was tense, as if everyone inside was just waiting for something to happen. I found that there were only men inside except for Willa, who was handing out drinks.

I waved at her and headed in her direction. I hadn’t seen her in a few days and Hawk had said something about her having been with Spider. I’d figured something had been up with those two a while back, and I hoped that they could work it out. Willa stopped what she was doing and blinked as if she were trying to figure out if I was real or not. “Hi,” I greeted with a smile. “Is Hawk here?”

“Umm, yeah.” She nodded over her shoulder to a booth in the back. A group of older men were sitting with Bash, Hawk, Raider, Colt and Spider. “I wouldn’t go back there yet though…” She was calling after me, but I waved again as I hurried toward Hawk. It was selfish of me to interrupt his MC time, but I was too excited to care just now.

No one noticed me right away because they were too busy listening to something that Bash was saying. I was less than three feet away when an older man’s head snapped up and all conversation at the booth abruptly stopped. I didn’t pay them any attention as my eyes zeroed in on Hawk. He looked stunned to see me and I grinned. “I got in!”

He was out of his seat in seconds and I was being twirled around and around. His laughter blended with mine and I hugged his neck tight. After nearly being raped, I’d never thought I would ever be okay with a man’s hands on me again. Hawk was different. He didn’t make me feel dirty when he touched me. Just safe. Safe and cared for. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all night, Gracie.”

A throat was cleared behind Hawk and he stopped twirling me around. My arms tightened for a second, not wanting him to let me go, before I forced myself to release him and step back. His arm remained around my waist as he turned to face the others. I glanced down at the men I knew. Spider, Colt, Raider, and Bash gave me a warm smile. Tanner and Matt Reid even nodded their heads in acknowledgement.

“Congratulations, Gracie,” Bash said, tipping his beer in my direction. “You deserve it.”

Pleasure made my cheeks warm and I lowered my eyes. If there was ever a picture of male beauty it would be Bash Reid. The man was just breathtaking, but he still didn’t measure up to Hawk in my eyes. With his big jade green eyes, that shaggy blond hair, and a body that was both hard and so soft to lie against… Wetness gathered between my legs and I clenched them closed, embarrassed to have such a reaction to just thinking about a man who had been nothing but kind to me. “Thanks, Bash.”

A throat was cleared again and I turned my head to find the older man who had first met my eyes when I had reached the booth staring at me hard. I wasn’t sure if it was just the lighting of the bar but he looked pale, maybe even sickish. Hawk pulled me closer to his side. “Uncle Jack, this is Gracie Morgan. Gracie, this is Uncle Jack… That’s Razor, Uncle Chaz, Uncle George, and Uncle Ox.”

I greeted them shyly. “Hi.”

“Morgan?” Uncle Jack raised a brow, his face suddenly looking drawn. He stood and I noticed his hands were trembling. He took a step in my direction before stopping. His brown eyes darkened as he seemed to have trouble swallowing. “Are your parents’ names Craig and Shannon?”

I flinched at the sound of my parents’ names. It never failed to tear open a wound in my heart that was just now starting to scab over. My mom had been my everything, and now she was gone. Taken away by the drunken hands of a monster that I just happened to share DNA with. I blinked back the tears his innocent question had caused and offered him a small, sad smile. “My mom’s name was Shannon, yes. But she’s gone now,” I informed him, ignoring the question about my father. “Did you know her?” My mother had grown up in Trinity County, but that was all I knew. When I’d asked her years ago if she had any family left back in California she had been vague about it. I had always hoped she did, prayed that she had someone out there who loved her as much as I did. Someone who would come and save her from the evil that had invaded our house. No one ever had, so I had stopped praying.

“Gracie…” My name came out as a whisper and I was startled to see tears fill Uncle Jack’s eyes. “Oh my God… Gracie…”

“Uncle Jack?” Bash stood, putting a steadying hand on the older man’s shoulders, but Uncle Jack didn’t take his eyes off of me.

For some reason my heart started pounding and I took a longer look at the man standing in front of me. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. It was gray with just a hint of red shot through it. His face was weathered, wrinkled around the eyes and mouth telling me that he had spent many years frowning. His lips were thin, nothing remarkable about them… But his nose, I’d seen that nose every day of my life, in my mirror. On my mother’s face. And those eyes—aged bourbon, that’s what Hawk had told me just a few weeks ago when he had woken up beside me, staring deep into my eyes as if he could see my very soul.

My heart contracted and I tore my gaze from Uncle Jack to look up at Hawk. He was staring from me to his honorary uncle as if trying to figure out a complicated puzzle. “I-I’m not feeling well. I should…go…”

As if my words had snapped Jack out of his daze, he stepped forward. Strong hands caught hold of my arms and jerked me against a chest that was still hard for a man his age. His arms wrapped around me and I felt his tears on my neck as he buried his face in my hair. “You look just like your mother. Fuck, you are so pretty. So pretty. I have one picture of you…” He pulled back, sniffing loudly and unashamedly as he gave me a bright smile. “It’s a school picture. You were about five years old… Even then you looked so much like your mother it killed me to look at it.”

I heard whispers and turned my head to find the men at the booth staring at us both as if we had suddenly grown three heads. My heart was pounding… No, it was breaking! I closed my eyes and pushed away from the man still holding onto me. All of those years of hoping and praying only to give up, when my mother’s salvation had been right here. Doing. Nothing. “You’re my grandfather, a-ar-aren’t you?” I whispered, my voice breaking.

Jack nodded. “Yeah, sweetheart. I sure am.”

Without thinking about what I was doing my hand lifted and in the next moment it was connecting with the old man’s cheek. The sound of flesh smacking hard against flesh sounded more like a gunshot in the very quiet bar. My hand started to sting, but I dropped it to my side instead of holding it against my chest as I wanted to do. Angry tears blurred my vision as I glared at the only family I had in the world from my mother’s side of the family. “Where the fuck were you when my mother needed you!” I screamed at him before turning and running out of the bar.

Chairs scraped back fast. A few people moved into my path, but I pushed past them. I’d just hit one of their MC members. Of course they were all mad and wanted to stop me. Tears were blinding me and I felt a pain that went soul deep as I reached the door and pushed it open. Before I could take more than a few steps toward Hawk’s car, strong arms wrapped around my waist. I knew the moment he touched me who it was so I wasn’t scared. I could never be scared of Hawk, but still I struggled to get free. I didn’t want him to see me like this. All I wanted was to go home and hide under the covers in bed. To cry and mourn my mother all over again.

“Hey, hey.” Hawk’s voice came out softer than I’d ever heard it as he pulled me around and wrapped his arms tightly around my waist. He kept murmuring soothing words, rocking me back and forth as I sobbed into his chest. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“He…j-j-just…l-l-left her!” I cried harder, my hands fisting in his white T-shirt under his cut. “H-he…let h-h-her…die.”

“Gracie, baby. You’re making yourself sick.” His voice sounded choked, tortured. “Don’t do this to yourself, sweetheart.”

“I-I’m s-s-s-sorry.” I held my breath, trying to force myself under control if only for him. My shoulders trembled under the force of my contained sobs and his rough hands slipped under my top, rubbing circles over my bare skin. My skin instantly prickled with delight, but my heart was too shattered to comprehend how good it felt to have Hawk rubbing my back.

After nearly a full minute Hawk pulled back and grasped my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes in the dim lighting coming from the street lights of the parking lot. “Talk to me, Gracie. What just happened back there? You’re Uncle Jack’s granddaughter?”

I nodded. “Y-yeah, I guess so. My m-m-mom…” My voice broke again and I sucked in a deep breath to steady it. “She was his daughter.”

I watched as his eyes widened and began to darken in the poor lighting. “You never talk about your mom. Why is that?”

“I-it’s too hard, H-hawk.” I hiccupped. “She was my favorite person in the world.”

Releasing my chin, he wiped a few tears away with the rough pad of his thumb. “What happened to her, baby?”

I didn’t want to talk about it. The memories were too hard to relive. But I owed Hawk so much. If there was anyone I could share this with it was the man still holding me so tenderly. “My dad beat her. Every night he drank he would beat her. Which was almost every night near the end.” I closed my eyes as the images flashed across my mind, making my stomach turn with bile. “One night he came home and he beat her so bad she could barely stand... That night she fought back. She shot him with a pistol that I didn’t even know she had… And then she died from internal bleeding because he had cracked a rib that ruptured her spleen.” It had taken the police a week to work out the events of that night. My grandfather and uncle had kept everything quiet from the press, not wanting the Morgan name dragged through the mud. Mud that was full of all kinds of ugly family secrets.

Like the fact that all the men in my family were wife beaters, and all the women were either too scared to leave their piece of shit husbands or too greedy to let go of all that prestige and money that went with being married to those Morgans. The whole thing made me sick. Which was why I’d turned my back on them all. Taking the little bit of inheritance I’d gotten when my father had died—which had been just enough to pay for one semester of Trinity University and a year of law school. I didn’t know what I was going to do when it came time to pay for the rest of school. I couldn’t touch the rest of my inheritance until I was twenty five or got married.

Either would involve me having to go to my uncle and signing a crap load of legal papers. And if I got married… Well, that would require my uncle and grandfather’s approval of the groom. No way was I going to let them pick the man who I would be chained to for years. I didn’t want another copy of all the men I’d faced in life up until now. I would figure something else out when it came time for my second year of law school. Something so that I wouldn’t have to ever deal with the Morgans ever again.

Hawk pulled me hard against his chest, kissing my hair. He probably hadn’t expected what I had just confessed to him. My parents had killed each other; one out of self-defense, and the other out of pure evilness. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

I didn’t say anything as he helped me into the passenger seat of the Chevelle. When he started the car I laid my head back and looked out the side window as he drove home. It was quiet inside the car but I didn’t consider it tense. I could feel Hawk sending me worried glances. Less than a mile from home, he grasped my hand and linked our fingers together. It was then that I realized my fingers were numb with cold. His larger, warm hand made me shiver and I turned my head to give him a weak smile that he returned.

“I’m so glad I met you,” I whispered as he pulled into the driveway.

Putting the car in park he turned to face me. Big hands cupped my face as he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to the middle of my forehead. “I’m so glad I met you too, Gracie.”

Hawk

The TV was on when I walked into the living room with Gracie tucked into my side. My mind was all jumbled up with the news I’d received tonight on top of finding out about Uncle Jack and Gracie. Gracie’s confession about her parents was only the cherry on top of the big shit sundae this night had turned into.

Raven was spread out on the couch watching some crime drama show. It was after eight so I knew that Lexa was in bed. My sister raised her head, about to greet us when she saw how pale Gracie was. “What happened?” she demanded, concerned. In the six weeks or so that Gracie had been living with us, Raven had gotten attached to her. She was just as protective of Gracie as she was Lexa.

“I’ll tell you about it later, Rave,” I promised her as I urged Gracie toward the stairs. “We’re going to bed.”

Eyes identical to my own widened but she just nodded. “If you need me just shout.”

“Yeah.” I kept walking, holding Gracie against me. When we reached our room I closed and locked the door before walking her into the bathroom.

She didn’t say a word as I turned on the shower. Turning back to her I pulled her against my chest again. She looked exhausted and heartbroken. It made my entire body hurt to see her like that. My Gracie should never be heartbroken for any reason. I was going to have words with Uncle Jack first thing in the morning about all of this shit.

When the bathroom started to fill with steam, I took a step back. “Do you need help?”

Pink filled her cheeks, making my body react instantly. Damn, she was so fucking beautiful. I don’t know how I’d stayed so strong the last six weeks, keeping my hands and dick to myself with her sleeping tucked against me most nights. I wanted this female like I had never wanted anything in my life. She was special and I didn’t want to screw up what we had.

“Thanks for taking care of me, Hawk.”

I wish she would stop thanking me for doing something that seemed to come as second nature with her. She was mine and I was going to take care of her for the rest of my life. If I could get my shit together and just tell her how I felt.

“Do you need anything? I can make you some of that tea you seem to like?” I’d learned to make it a few weeks ago because it helped her sleep. Between Raven and Willa, I’d figured out how to work a kettle and tea bag. I figured that my brothers or Bash would rag on me for making that shit, but no one had said a word about it. My sister probably threatened them all with a knife. She was scary with a knife.

When Gracie smiled a bigger smile than she had given me in the last forty-five minutes, my heart contracted. Taking that as a yes I dropped a kiss on top of her head. “I’ll make you a cup while you shower, baby.”

Raven was still on the couch when I went downstairs. I headed straight for the kitchen and she followed, impatient for information. While I put the kettle on the stove I told her about Uncle Jack being Gracie’s grandfather. “Holy shit,” she whispered, glancing up at the ceiling as if she could see Gracie and was looking at her in a different light. “Now that you mention it she kind of favors him a little.”

“Yeah, I saw it too. The eyes and a few other facial features.” I added half a teaspoon of sugar to the mug and dropped the chamomile tea bag into it, waiting on the water to get hot. I wanted to tell Raven about the rest, about Gracie’s parents, but didn’t want to break her confidence like that. If Gracie had wanted my sister to know she would have told her.

But I had to tell her something else about tonight, because it involved her just as much as it did Gracie. “I don’t want you at the bar alone anymore,” I told her. She went in early some days to do our books or to just do a little extra cleaning. Before tonight I never would have thought that it would be something I would have to worry about. For one, my baby sister could take care of herself. For another, everyone who knew Angel’s Halo knew that it would only sign their death warrant if they dared mess with that bar or our sister.

Now I knew better. Someone wanted their death warrant signed, sealed and delivered. By me personally. Kevin Samson. He had tried to gang rape Gracie the night I had met her. Afterwards I had learned that it wasn’t the first time he had attempted to hurt a girl, but it was the first time he hadn’t succeeded. The next night the guys and I had burned the guy’s frat house down. Now he wanted retaliation and to finish what he had started. Retaliation by burning down something important to the MC and to get his hands on Gracie. Either would get the man only one reward.

My bullet in his brain.

After getting Raven to promise not to go into the bar without someone being with her, I took the tea up to Gracie. She was sitting on the bed with a big white robe wrapped around her and her hair dripping as she pulled a comb through the long, red tresses. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes dark and tortured. When I shut the door behind me her head snapped up and she offered me a weak smile. “Hey,” she whispered.

I offered her the tea and took the comb from her. Picking up the towel from the bed I sat behind her and finished drying her hair while she sipped her tea. When I got most of the dampness out I combed her hair and then wrapped my arms around her waist, pulling her back against my front. My body did what it always does and came to life at the feel of her against me, but I gritted my teeth until the hard-on subsided before kissing Gracie’s cheek. “Everything is going to be okay, Gracie. I have you. Nothing will hurt you as long as I have you.”