Fast Page 5

  Dylan raised his eyebrows as he poured a cup of coffee then traded me for my empty cup. “That’s not what it looked like. She was the same girl from T-Bone’s bike reveal three months ago, right? Wasn’t she hanging all over him that night? And she was back at the clubhouse months later. Smells like an old lady to me. Playing with fire like that is dangerous. Kings don’t fuck around, Ry.”

  “She’s not with any of the Kings. I guess her dad is in the MC.”

  “Holy fuck. And you think that’s better? You think they’d be protective of an old lady? What do you think they’d do if they found out you were fucking one of their daughters?”

  “It’s not like that. I kinda got the impression they’re…I don’t know, estranged or something. Anyway, I’m not one to judge. Look at who we have for a father. Hope can’t help who she’s related to.”

  “It’s not even remotely the same thing. Just watch yourself, okay?”

  I hitched a shoulder but didn’t reply. I sure as hell wasn’t gonna spill to Dylan all that had gone down with Hope last night. I didn’t want a lecture. Least of all from him.

  “Speaking of Dad…” Dylan stared down at his coffee.

  Oh, fuck me. When it rains it pours. Kinda like my walk back to my motorcycle last night. “What’s going on?”

  “You know he was released Wednesday?”

  I nodded only because that explained so much about Dylan’s attitude this last week. Dad had become a source of contention in our family. Our older brothers, Austin and Nathan, wanted nothing to do with him. They remembered what our life was like with him. They remembered Mom and told us stories about her until she became kinda like a mythical character to me and Dylan—like Snow White or something—someone you only knew through stories who didn’t sound real. No one was that perfect.

  But to Nathan and Austin and Aunt Wendy, she was.

  Meanwhile Dylan had, unbeknownst to the rest of us, reached out to Dad in prison (because Dad had been sentenced to twenty to life for murdering our mom) and Dylan had started a relationship with the man. Leaving me in the middle. I didn’t know Mom, but I didn’t like the thought that he’d killed her and now was out of prison.

  But I loved Dylan. And he wanted to give the old man another chance—said he’d changed and wasn’t that angry man that Nathan and Austin remembered.

  I didn’t know what the fuck to say. Again.

  “I guess he’s living in a halfway house or whatever they’re called. He’s gotta report to his parole officer and find a job, so I thought maybe we could help him out with that.”

  “Dyl…” I scrubbed at the back of my head with my free hand. “You know Austin and Nate won’t hire him at the shop. They don’t want anything to do with him. You saw the paperwork.”

  Austin had hired a lawyer and did everything short of getting a restraining order (and only because his lawyer said he didn’t have grounds to file) to keep Dad away from the family and the business. Our brothers wanted us to sign some papers too, but Dylan refused because he wanted Dad in his life. And I didn’t because it felt disloyal to Dylan. He was my best friend. I didn’t want to hurt him.

  “No, I don’t mean hiring him. I’m meeting him for lunch in an hour to help him get up to speed with job hunting online. Wanna come?”

  Meet Dad? I was no longer in the middle. If I went to lunch, I would clearly be choosing sides.

  Fuck my life.

  Chapter 6

  Hope

  I woke up the next morning and stretched lazily in my bed. The muscles between my thighs twinged in protest. I caught a hint of Ryan’s musk, still clinging to my sheets, and the whole night came back to me. The bike reveal. Going home with Ryan. Goldie. The dry humping. The condom breaking.

  Oh my god, the condom broke.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  Now all I wanted was to be back in that blissfully ignorant place I’d been in when I’d first woken up. I fell back against my pillows with a groan. God, what was I going to do?

  Okay, calm down. There was a chance I wasn’t even pregnant. Maybe I wouldn’t have anything to actually worry about after all. Just don’t think about it.

  Don’t think about it.

  It became my mantra as I went about my morning ablutions—showering, brushing my teeth, blow drying my hair. Just don’t think about it.

  But it was all I could think about.

  When my phone rang, I fell onto it like it was a lifeline to save my sanity.

  But I should’ve checked the screen first. Because the caller was no lifeline—she was the furthest thing from it.

  “Hello?”

  “Good morning, Hope. How is Sacramento?” The fake enthusiasm in my mom’s voice had me biting back a groan.

  “It’s good, Mom.” I rolled my eyes, glad my mom hadn’t figured out video calls. The hellfire that would rain down on me if she saw the expression I was making… “How’re things in Eureka?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual. Cal is busy with work, and your brother had a sleepover last night at one of his friend’s houses from band, so it’s just me here rambling around this big house all alone.”

  “Mmmmn,” I hummed in agreement. It was a special talent or something, but my mom always found a way—regardless of the topic—to needle me about my decision to move closer to my birth father.

  “How’s the job? Have you met any gang bangers yet?”

  I sighed. Here we go. My mom hadn’t approved of my decision to take a job in a hellhole like Sacramento—her words—especially one where I had to mix in with inner-city kids. But I swallowed down my ire and focused on her first question. “The job’s good. I get to hire a few sports counselors for the upcoming baseball and softball seasons. We got quite a few new applications, so I have to interview some of them and have a company compile background checks. I’m kinda excited.”

  As the assistant program director of a local Boys and Girls Club, this would be my first solo project. I’d shadowed the director, Paul, for the first few weeks when I was hired and somehow ended up in paperwork hell since then. I was fairly sure Paul had just given me anything he didn’t want, under the guise of it being something that’d slipped through the cracks back before I’d been hired. Honestly, it was starting to feel like I was really his glorified assistant and not an assistant program director. But this would be the first project I’d get to see through all on my own, and I couldn’t wait to get started.

  “Baseball? What do you know about baseball?”

  I sighed. “I won’t be teaching the kids, Mom. It’s my job to pick the coaches.”

  “Sounds fascinating, honey. Really. How’s dating life? Have you met any interesting men?”

  Yeah, I wasn’t touching that one with a ten-foot pole.

  But apparently my silence had damned me.

  “Oh, Hope. Please tell me you aren’t dating one of those bikers your father hangs out with.” She said the word ‘biker’ with such derision that it sent my back up. “Those men are dangerous, and no matter how attractive the whole bad boy thing is, they only want one thing. You’ll be lucky if you don’t end up in a prison cell or even worse, pregnant by one of those scumbags.”

  “Really, Mom? Wow. So sorry I ruined your life.” Tears blurred my eyes. Was I really the worst thing that had ever happened to her? And for her to say that today of all days?

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” She huffed out a breath. “You know my feelings on your father and the people he associates with. I just…really wish you were safe here at home and not there with him.”

  “Well why not, Mom? It was good enough for you, once upon a time.” I was so tired of her harping on my dad and my wanting to have a relationship with him. And really, between my job and the few times he’d let me be around the club, I only saw him once or twice a month. As far as I could see, he wasn’t as bad as she’d made him out to be. He was more of those tough, scary exterior, marshmallow interior kinda guys. Like my stepdad, Cal.

  She sighed in that way of hers,
and I felt every bit of her disappointment. “I don’t—I can’t talk about this with you now. Call me when you’re feeling less snarky, please. Love you.”

  It was hard to believe. It didn’t sound like it. And I certainly didn’t feel it. “Bye, Mom.”

  “Bye, honey.”

  The silence after she hung up thrummed through my apartment. My emotions were all over the place. But that was the norm every time my mom called me. Home hadn’t felt like a home a long time before I found that picture of my mom straddling a biker who was straddling a motorcycle. My mom—the woman who personified dignity and grace and doing the right thing—had had an affair with a biker. To say that my life had been rocked would’ve been an understatement.

  But I thought, finally, finally, maybe something in my life made sense. Maybe my suddenly alive father was the answer to who I really was. I’d come to Sacramento searching for something—anything—that felt like I belonged.

  And in the process, I’d alienated my mom.

  But it was just a new level of her disappointment in me. She hadn’t been happy when I quit tennis in middle school. She’d been disappointed when I came home with a C in chemistry in tenth grade. She was baffled when I majored in social work in college. And she was definitely upset when I broke up with my college boyfriend—who was on his way to law school—to move here.

  When I found out she’d been lying to me my whole life about my father, I didn’t care about being the disappointment anymore. Apparently, my entire existence had ruined her life, but that was her mistake. Not mine. She could be disappointed in me all day long; she’d been the last person I’d expected to betray me. But she had.

  I wondered what she’d think if I ended up pregnant after all. That might be the thing to make her cut me out of her life forever.

  Pregnant by the bad boy biker. History was a bitch with the whole repeating thing.

  Don’t think about it.

  * * *

  Three hours later, I was streaming a rom com movie and trying not to think about the broken condom in my bathroom trash or the appointment I’d made at the clinic for STD testing when someone knocked on my door.

  I hit pause on my remote then got up with a sigh. When I saw through the peephole who was standing on the other side of the door, I had to swallow another sigh. I don’t know why I was surprised. Nothing had gone right for me this weekend. Why should this be any different?

  Regardless, I opened my door with a fake smile. “Hey, Dad.”

  He pushed past me with grunt.

  “Come on in,” I mumbled to myself as I closed the door behind him.

  “What’s this I hear about you going home with one of those Burns boys?”

  I froze, my right hand still outstretched toward the door. “Uh, what?”

  “You heard me, girl.” My dad had always been an intimidating man, but now he was absolutely terrifying. His eyes were scary flat and his bearded face was set in disapproving lines. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  I stared back at him, wide eyed. Where was the marshmallow dad I’d known for the past couple of years? Now he felt every inch the one-percenter his leather vest proclaimed him to be.

  “If you think I’m gonna let my daughter become the fucking club whore—going home with any man who’s interested—you better rethink that fast. Keep those fucking knees together. Do you hear me?”

  Shocked, I just stared back at him.

  “DO YOU HEAR ME?” He shouted, spittle flying from his lips.

  I flinched then nodded robotically.

  He grunted before looking around my apartment. “That bastard isn’t still here, is he?”

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Just got what he came for and booked it, huh? Fucking pansy ass.”

  I folded my arms across my chest, holding them tight to my body. I didn’t know who this man standing in front of me was, but he wasn’t the man who came to my dorm five years ago and took me out to lunch on the back of his bike. He definitely wasn’t the same man who’d laughed away my protests as he’d given me the keys to this very apartment. This man was an angry, disapproving stranger who was scaring the crap out of me.

  “Stay the fuck away from him. And Goldie too.” He stabbed a finger at me. “That bitch is a cancer I’m gonna cut out of the club one way or another.”

  That sounded more like a threat than a turn of phrase. But I still I ducked my head with a nod. Anything to get him out of here. At least now I had an answer as to who’d blabbed about me and Ryan. Freaking Goldie. I should’ve known. “Okay. I, uh, have some work that I really need to catch up on…”

  I trailed off, not quite sure how to end that sentence. I just wanted him out of here and away from me. Far away from me.

  “I’ll leave when I’m done talking to you.”

  I took a step backward closer to the door. My heart pounded in my ears.

  “I know I didn’t have a hand in raising you, but I wanna make one thing crystal clear—I will not be made a fool of in my own goddamn clubhouse. I brought you to this city, gave you a fucking apartment, hooked you up with a cushy job, but all that can disappear with a snap of my fingers if I want it to. You can be back in bumfuck nowhere like that.” He stepped toward me and snapped his fingers in my face. “We clear?”

  I flinched at the snap. My whole body trembled as my fight or flight instinct went into overdrive. It took everything inside me not to run out the door behind me, but I couldn’t hold back the tremor shaking my voice or the way my voice trembled when I spoke. “Yes. Sir. Crystal clear.”

  “Good. It would be for the best if you made yourself scarce around the club for a while. Give the boys a chance to forget about this shit. I’ll tell you when you’re welcome back.”

  “Okay.” I stepped to the side as he moved closer to me.

  He grumbled something under his breath then opened the door and said, “Keep your nose clean and your knees together for fuck’s sake.”

  I didn’t look up from my toes as the door slammed shut behind him.

  Oh my god. Oh my god.

  I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying and failing to whisk some warmth into me. Everything felt cold. The floor beneath my bare feet. The air around me. My heart.

  Did I really piss my mom and stepfather off and disappoint my little brother to move closer to that man?

  My stepfather, Cal, was an all-bark no-bite guy—the man I’d thought my father was. But I’d known Cal for fifteen years and he’d never scared me even an ounce as much as my dad just had. Hell, Cal was the reason my dad had felt so familiar despite his scary biker exterior.

  But now?

  I felt like I’d just stared into the face of the devil.

  I wanted to call someone, but I didn’t have anyone I could lean on. The rest of my family would be full of I-told-you-so-s, my friends back home thought I was just as crazy to move here, and everyone I knew here was through my job or the club. No one from work knew anything about my private life, and I knew better than to call anyone from the club about this. Club loyalty first and last.

  Maybe I should call Ryan? Warn him about my father’s wrath? I cast a glance toward the pad of paper in my kitchen where Ryan had left his number in a big, masculine scrawl.

  But suddenly talking to him on the phone felt like a Herculean task. And so freaking awkward.

  Fuck my life.

  I’d text him. Later.

  Instead I locked my door, wrapped myself in a quilt my mom had made me, and huddled on the couch with the rom com playing in the background.

  My mom was right.

  Maybe moving here was a mistake.

  Chapter 7

  Ryan

  Fuck, this might be the most awkward breakfast I’d ever had to sit through in my life. And considering my family, that was saying something.

  I don’t know what I’d been expecting. He was a stranger to me. I’d seen the old man from afar when we’d testified at his first parole hearing. He’d been wearing w
hat looked like blue scrubs with the yellow letters CDCR Prisoner emblazoned on the back, a white undershirt, and a haggard expression. Every time I glanced at him he’d had tears welling in his eyes. The few times I’d caught him looking at us, I looked away. It felt like I was betraying Aunt Wendy and my other brothers or something.

  I’d grown up hearing stories about my wonderful mom and wicked father to the point it felt like a fairytale—none of it was real to me. But Aunt Wendy was real. She’d been my mom as long as I could remember. She’d helped me with my homework and kissed my scraped knees when I fell. Aunt Wendy was everything to me.

  This man had upended my whole life, but I didn’t remember any of before.

  I didn’t know the man from Adam. I was only here for Dylan.

  The awkwardness had started while I was waiting outside for our table to be ready. Dylan had gone in to put our name down, and I was busy holding up a post when he came up to me.

  “Nathan?”

  I straightened from my slouch and couldn’t keep the scowl off my face. If I had a dollar for every person who thought I was one of my brothers, and for it to come from him of all people? “No, I’m Ryan. The middle one.”

  He snorted. “The middle one? There’s four of you. What kinda math is that?”

  “Sabrina is the fifth. Our cousin. You know, Wendy’s daughter. Wendy, the woman who raised us?” I stared back at him, not impressed or charmed in the slightest. “Because that’s the family I have now. Sabrina makes five, so I’m the middle.”

  The older man in front of me blinked then nodded slowly. “Right. Sorry.” He reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck in a movement all my brothers—and myself—had done so many times. “I, uh, I’m George. Your father.”

  “I know. I remember you from your first parole hearing.” I don’t know why I said it. Like some part deep inside me wanted to needle the man with the tired eyes and somehow familiar face in front of me. But I didn’t want to examine that too closely. I was here for Dylan. And maybe because a part of me was curious—and apparently another part was pissed off.