‘There’s one way,’ he murmured. ‘If you’re my old lady, you’ll have the full protection of the club and so would Annie.’
Shock held me still. I had no idea what to say—no idea what to even think.
First there was the whole issue of the club. Then there was being his old lady... He couldn’t be serious.
But he wasn’t smiling. And the look in his eyes... Shit, I knew that look. He always had it when he meant to do something and he was going to do it whether I liked it or not. He’d always been a guy who liked his own way, and he got it enough that it made him unhappy when he didn’t.
‘You’re not serious, right?’ I tried to sound normal and not like a shaky little girl.
‘Yeah, I’m serious.’
Of course he was. He was never anything but.
‘You and me will be together as long as it takes for Grant to get off your back, but it won’t be real or anything.’ He stopped all of a sudden, as if he’d meant to say something else and held himself back at the last minute. ‘We only have to make it look believable to the club.’
Make it look believable.
What the hell did that mean?
You know what it means, idiot.
Heat shot through me—a flare like a lighted match held against my skin. I tried like hell to ignore it. To concentrate on the facts instead.
‘So,’ I said carefully, busying myself with folding the cloths again. ‘Let me get this straight. You think that if you make me your old lady, the club will protect me and Annie from Justin.’
‘I don’t think. I know.’ He said it like the gospel truth, handed down from God himself.
‘I thought your president didn’t want to get on the wrong side of the police chief. If Justin comes after Annie and the club stops him...’ I let the sentence hang.
‘Checked it out with Keep this morning.’ Smoke put his hands flat on the bar. ‘He won’t lift a finger if you’re not part of the Knights. But if you’re one of us, you’ll have an army at your back. Club comes first, and the chief can go fuck himself.’
Club comes first.
Wasn’t that the lesson I’d learned all through my childhood? That the club, the brothers were the most important things in my father’s life.
My mother had learned that lesson, too, when she was still a silly socialite, falling for a badass biker with tats on his arms and a gleaming Harley. She’d thought he was going to give her the freedom from her wealthy family that she’d always craved. Instead he’d given her a one-way ticket to Junkieville.
He never married her—never made her his old lady. He got her pregnant, then left her in a shitty apartment trying to bring up his kid by herself because her family had cut her off. And the only reason she’d stayed was because he kept her in drugs.
Oh, yeah, and apparently she loved him, even though he used to hit her sometimes.
A real prince, my dad.
To this day I have no idea why he didn’t make her his old lady. It was like he thought we weren’t good enough to be part of his precious club—like it was far too special to share with us. Not that we wanted to be part of it... Or at least I didn’t.
I hated him and, because of its influence on him, I hated that club.
I hated the Knights for their influence on Smoke, too. The day he told me he was going to sign up to be a prospect I didn’t speak to him for two whole weeks. I didn’t want him to join. I didn’t want them to take him away from me.
We got over that years ago, but sometimes I still felt the betrayal of it.
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