Page 101 of Girth (Marked Skulls MC 1)
“Can I have the rest of this, Mommy?” she asked with a full mouth.
“Of course. Why don’t you go get settled on the couch, and we’ll find something to enjoy on television?” I asked.
“Mommy, why aren’t you wearing pants?”
I sputtered as I buried my face in my hand. It was a logical question, especially for a six-year-old girl, but Hawk took the reigns with that one before I could find an answer to dole out.
“Because grown-ups can do that sometimes. But, I’m sure she’ll put some on soon, all right?”
“Okay. I thought maybe Mommy’s legs hurt.”
“I’m not sure. Do Mommy’s legs hurt?”
I panned my gaze slowly over to Hawk as his eyes connected with him. His stark green eyes pierced my soul, fluttering something within my gut I hadn’t felt in years. I stood there studying him while Emery continued to eat her apple, and I decided to play his little game as I drew a breath in through my nose.
“They do. A bit less than I would’ve expected with how long the ride was, but then again the body can surprise you.”
I saw a spark ricochet behind his eyes before I panned my gaze back down to Emery.
“Adults are weird,” she said, sighing.
“Don’t worry. You’re weird, too”
“In all the best ways,” she said, grinning.
“I like the confidence,” Hawk said.
“Wonder who she gets that from,” I murmured.
The smile that beamed across his face told me everything I needed to know. With them bonding the way they were and how proud he already was to have a daughter, I knew I had to tell Emery at some point in time. I watched her hunker down onto the couch while she finished her apple, and my mind began to reel with all the ways I could tell her just as Hawk planted his hand into the small of my back.
And then, I felt him press a light kiss on my cheek.
“We’ll figure all this out, all right?” he asked.
“Thank you,” I said as I turned towards him. “For everything.”
“Anytime,” he said, winking. “Anytime.”
I shook my head and pushed him as the two of us giggled alongside one another. He walked over to Emery and bent down, pressing a kiss to her head as laughter peeled from between her lips again. He walked over and grabbed his leather coat as he slung it over his shoulders, and I grabbed my pants from the pile in the corner and quickly hopped my ass into them.
“Such a beautiful sight,” Hawk said.
“Can it, bud. You’re headed to church. Such unclean thoughts aren’t welcome in those areas,” I said.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Any requests for the store?” he asked.
“Beer,” I said.
“Besides the obvious?”
“Chips and salsa?” I asked.
“Always been a tried and true with you,” he said as he opened the door. “I’ll make sure to double up.”
I watched him walk out to his motorcycle, and all the memories came flooding back. I remembered when Hawk got his first cycle. I remembered the lessons my father gave him on it. I remembered the tricks he half-killed himself trying to accomplish in order to impress everyone. I remembered the first time I’d ridden on the back of it. How my arms snaked around his waist, and the wind blew in my short-cut hair. I remembered how free I felt hanging onto him while we zoomed down the road, dodging cars and outrunning policemen so we wouldn’t have to deal with our father’s wraths if we got speeding tickets.
He situated himself on the bike before he looked back up at me, and I could’ve sworn I saw the ghost of a grin on his cheeks before he pulled his helmet down onto his head.
I stood in the doorway and watched as he drove off down the road. Many emotions began to dawn upon my mind, but the biggest one was uncertainty. How was all of this going to pan out? How in the world had yesterday come about? How could a man I’d abandoned all those years ago just simply welcome me back into his life with the massive surprise I had clutched alongside my body.
But as my eyes continued to drift along down the road, that uncertainty slowly morphed to fear.
I watched as a black sedan pulled off the corner of the street. It turned around in the middle of the road and began exiting the neighborhood, following the same path that Hawk just took. I watched it slow down, the brake lights flashing their neon red as the sedan slowed down, and for a moment I held my breath. It stopped in the middle of the road as it slowly bobbed and weaved on its platform, then it sped off into the distance with its tinted windows and solid black frame.
I didn’t spend all those years riding with The Road Rebels to turn out an idiot.
Someone had followed me all the way to Hawk’s, and I had no idea what to do about it.
Chapter 5
Hawk
I cruised down the road and bypassed the church. I had no intentions of stopping there, nor had I ever stepped foot into one. With Sydney being in trouble like she was, the less she knew about where I was going, the better off she would be. I cruised down the road with the wind whipping against my body as I headed for the mechanic shop. It sat out front of the lodge mine, and Sydney’s father had built. When you passed it on the main stretch of highway, it was nothing but a mechanic shop. But around back, it had a nice lodge with a few offices where The Road Rebels held their meetings and shit.
Down the street, a half mile from the mechanic shop was the bar we owned. Gearbox, it was called. We got it up and running about a year after The Devil Saints tore through town and mowed us all down. We dedicated each table to a fallen rider and used the proceeds from the bar to pay the families back for their burial expenses. There were two things The Road Rebels always placed above everything else: we took care of our own, and we never hurt women and children.
We lived and died by those two rules.
Every Sunday, the core of the group would meet at the mechanic shop to talk. We’d work on overflow cars and take inventory while discussing things that pertained to the club. Our current president was Mac, and he’d been headin’ us up since The Devil Saints roared into town six years ago. He was the one that single-handedly pieced the entire group back together during their anger and grief, and every year it was always unanimous who would stay our President. Mac was headstrong, took no shit, and had a new tattoo every fucking time I turned around. He was close to my father’s age, but he would never let any of us admit that.
“Glad you finally showed,” Mac said.
“Had some shit drop at my door yesterday,” I said.
“You good?” Fox asked.
“Yeah. Gettin’ it situated.”
Fox was our Vice President. A hard position for him to take over since my father did such a damn good job with it. I had to help him out after he came under scrutiny for never doing things the way my father had done them for years. I just kept telling him to tell everyone to piss off. Everyone did the job a little differently when they were elected, and he had to simply understand that the group was grieving in their own way.
Fox had a stable head on his shoulders until he got to drinking. He loved going on all the road trips we would set up for the group, and if there was ever a get together at the bar he was the first one there and the last one out. He let the good times roll when they happened, but he was also the best in a time of crisis. He balanced out Mac well. Not because Mac panicked, but because Mac wasn’t emotionally rooted. Mac was stoic and dead-eyed, but Fox could empathize when necessary.
It was a good dynamic with the group.
“Got a bitch you couldn’t get outta your bed?” Snake asked.
“You’d love that problem, wouldn’t you?” I asked as I grabbed the inventory clipboard.
“If that sweet pussy didn’t wanna get outta my bed, I’d just tie her to the headboard and tell her to keep her legs s
pread. I’d dip in whenever I wanted to, and she’d never want for nothing,” Snake said.
You could always count on Snake to be crude as fuck. He was rough around the edges and loved the trashiest of women. Put the biggest girl in some daisy dukes and a shirt three sizes too small and you could practically see the imprint of his dick in his pants. He was a weird one, but oddly enough numbers his thing. It took us awhile to find someone to fill the position of Treasurer after Sydney’s father had been gunned down, but Snake stepped up and had held the position ever since.
Then, there was Talon-- our road captain. Unapologetically protective and oddly silent, he only spoke when it was necessary. He was a pro with cars and was the only reason our mechanic’s shop could take on the schedule it did.
He was also the one that did inventory on the drugs we pushed through the shop once the money filtered through the bar and wiped itself clean a bit.
“Talon. This inventory sheet’s already filled out. You do this?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“Looks like we’re three short on the crates of oil,” I said. The crates of oil were weed. Even though recreational and medicinal marijuana were legal in Nevada, we did not own a dispensary. We didn’t want the government getting involved in our shit. So we always bought specific strains in large quantities from Colorado.
“Looking into it,” Talon said.
Mondays were used for actual inventory of the bar and the shop. Sundays inventory was for the guns. We shipped them in and cleaned the money by distributing it through the bar. Investing it and placing it into as many different avenues as we could was the quickest way to clean money trails we left, and Snake was a pro with that shit. He could take half a million dollars of profit and make any trace of it routed back to us disappear within forty-eight hours. It was fucking magnificent.
