Rough Ride

  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.