Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
R arity…
Jesus Christ, this was a bad idea, but I didn’t know where else to go and he was fucking bleeding .
I pulled into the driveway, relieved my grandparents were still out of town, but Mom and the boys were home. Shit .
“Listen, we’re going in the front door,” I said. “But you are immediately going in the door on the left just as soon as we get in there as quickly and as quietly as you can. Shut it and stay there. Okay?”
He eyed me and warily said, “Alright.”
“My mom is going to freak out bad enough as it is that I was even there during that mess. I need to mitigate the damage with quickness. If she knew I brought a Bastard home? Let’s just say fuck my life, I would never hear the end of it, and if I have to give her a heart attack, I try to limit it to one per day.”
He was grinning at me now and started to laugh softly.
“I mean it,” I said. “Inside, and immediately through the door on the left and not a fucking word! ”
“You got it,” he said, and we bailed out of the Jeep. We shut the doors in perfect unison, and that was just a happy accident – unless he’d done it on purpose.
We went through the front gate, and I punched in the code for the front door and pointed as we went through it. He slid inside the door to my bathroom, which was blessedly unlocked for once and cracked from where I’d come out earlier before heading to work.
“Rarity?” my mother called questioningly from the living room, where something Disney was playing.
I went around and said, “Yeah, Mom – it’s all good. I’m okay.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, going on high alert as no doubt the smell of alcohol wafted across the living room to her, a hundred times stronger than I usually smelled of it, considering I’d taken quite a few full-fledged fucking showers and baths in it since the brawl started.
“There was a biker brawl at work. Worst one I’ve ever seen. A bunch of bottles got broken, and booze everywhere. They started shooting, but I was already out, thanks to security, and on my way home before things got that bad. I just took a bath in some of the booze. I’m fine! I promise! Look!” I turned this way and that as she stared on in horror and slowly got up from the couch, untangling herself from my brothers and the nest of blankets they were in. She set her bowl of popcorn aside.
“A shooting ?” she asked, voice shaking, her tan floating on top of her skin as she paled, like an oil slick on the water.
“I’m fine!” I reiterated and went to hug her.
She was already keening with her panic and crying.
“Scared the shit out of me, too, but I’m fine. I promise!” I told her, hugging her back with bruising force.
“You stink,” she warbled, and I nodded.
“I know. Just… just let me get a shower really quick, and I’ll come back out. I promise.”
“I’ll put the boys to bed,” she said, and I nodded.
“Okay.” I agreed.
I went into my bathroom and discovered it empty… shit.
Panic rising in my breast that he’d ditched, I slipped through the door to my bedroom and found him sitting on my rumpled bed, talking low and quiet into his phone.
“Yeah, no, I’m on it,” he said. “Get you all out as soon as I can.”
He hung up and looked up at me.
“My mom is putting the boys to bed,” I said. “I’ve got to take a shower and be out there with her for a while. There’s… stuff.” I shrugged kind of lamely, and he arched a brow.
“Stuff?” he asked.
“A long story,” I murmured.
“Do what you gotta do,” he said. “I’ve got to call in the lawyers.”
I nodded and said, “Okay. Thanks for being… cool, I guess.”
“You saved my ass from getting shot back there,” he said. “I can be cool with a lot of shit after something like that.”
“Fair,” I said, slipping back into my bathroom, starting the shower.
I stripped and got in, trusting that he would be busy with whatever phone calls and that I would have enough time to get in, clean up, and get back out again in a jiff. Maybe I could let him clean up if he did it quickly, then turn off the shower, letting my mom think I just stayed in it for a while.
The shower door slid aside, and I froze.
“Chill,” he said. “I need to clean this up and figure out how bad it is. Figured you didn’t want this running too long or to stop and start it to tip off Mommy dearest.”
I scowled at him. The fact we were both naked and standing within a foot of each other was completely irrelevant with what he’d said about my mom.
“It’s not like that,” I said darkly. “She worries like a mother…” I stopped and said, “Should. Probably more since my dad died.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He just stood there, hands at his sides, and kept his eyes on mine.
“You good?” he asked.
“I’ve never showered with anybody,” I said. “It’s weird.”
He grinned. “Well hurry the fuck up and get out so it’ll be less weird,” he said, and he fought not to laugh.
“Can you even see it?” I asked.
“My dick?” he asked, and I snorted, shaking my head and closing my eyes.
“The cut ,” I said.
“Eh, I’ll manage,” he said.
“Well, I’m not looking at your dick, I promise,” I said and dropped my eyes down a well-formed chest across a nice flat stomach with just a hint of abs and to the narrow bleeding slash mark across his stomach.
“Shit, I can’t be sure, but this might need stitches.”
Okay, I looked at his dick, but mercifully, he was sorta being a gentleman, and he wasn’t hard. Still, even flaccid, he had a nice-looking peen as far as peens went… at least, I thought so anyway.
God, Rarity! I thought to myself and continued chastising my stupid brain even as my pussy gave a throb.
Thank fuck you couldn’t really tell when a woman was hot – not like a guy. His cock jumped, and so did I. He fought not to laugh.
“Made you look,” he said, and I looked up at him as he flexed his stomach or did whatever he did to make it jump the first time, except blood spilled when he did it this time.
“Ha, ha, very funny, but whatever you’re doing, stop it . You’re making yourself bleed more.”
“Noted,” he said, and I slid out of his way so he could get under the shower spray. He hissed between gritted teeth, and the water swirled with pink at his feet.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. He turned his head, cracking an eye, and looked at me.
“Got a clean washcloth?” he asked.
I slid open the shower door on its runners, just a crack, and pulled one off the bar outside the door, holding it out to him.
“I’m going to clean this with soap and water, rinse it real good. I’m going to need you to hold on to that. When I’m done, hand it to me so I can hold pressure. Got a first-aid kit in here?”
“Yeah, under the bathroom sink,” I said.
“You done?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, and he nodded once.
“Get it out for me after you dry off.”
I slipped out of the shower, careful to keep quiet, and pulled a fresh towel off the bar, drying off briskly and thinking, whelp, he’s already seen it all, before wrapping my hair up.
“I’m going to get dressed,” I said, and before he could say anything, I ducked into my bedroom.
I pulled a clean pair of undies from my top drawer and pulled them up my legs, then picked up my leggings off the floor from the night before. I dropped onto the edge of my bed, pulled those on, and was just sliding my sweatshirt with the neckline cut out over my head when there was knocking at the front door.
I went into the bathroom, and he shut off the tap at my signal after one final swipe of his shoulder through the spray to rinse the soap he had on him off.
“Just a minute!” my mom called on the other side of my bathroom door before I heard the front door open.
“Rarity!” she immediately called.
I called back, “Two seconds! Let me get dressed!” I thrust a towel at the biker and pushed him into my room, quietly closing the door behind him, then counted slowly from one to twenty before opening my bathroom door and stepping out.
Two cops were standing in the doorway.
“Rarity Jane Mitchell?” the one asked.
“Yeah, that’s me,” I said.
“You work at the Iron Horse?” the other one asked.
“Just got home not twenty minutes ago,” I said. I gave them a look, rolled my eyes in the direction of my mom, and said, “Left right before the shooting started. I don’t get paid enough for that shit.”
“Ma’am,” one of the officers said. “Do you mind stepping out here and talking to us about what happened?”
“Not at all,” I said. I turned to my mom, my heart thundering in my chest so hard I could feel my pulse in my temples. “Mom, it’s all good. Go finish up with the boys. I’ll come help as soon as I’m done.”
“Okay,” she agreed, but I could tell she didn’t want to.
I stepped out onto the front porch and closed the door behind me.
“Some of our officers said that you were running and that you had one of the Royal Bastards with you.”
“Never saw him before tonight,” I said. “But yeah, he helped me get out.”
“He said that you both took off after you were ordered to stop.”
“Okay, yeah, that part was stupid, but I was scared out of my mind, and there were shots going off. I wasn’t stopping for no one . Just please, please, don’t tell my mom I was there when there was shooting going on. She worries enough as it is, and I don’t want her anymore freaked out than she is right now.”
“What about the man with you?” the first officer, a light-skinned, shaved-head Black man with a dimple in his chin, asked me.
“I got around the corner, and he bailed out,” I lied. “I don’t know what happened to him after that.”
The cops exchanged a look, and the second one nodded, writing something down in his notebook.
“Like I said, I’d never seen him before tonight. I didn’t even get his name.”
I swallowed, and the second cop asked, “Do you know how the fight started?”
“No,” I said. “I was behind bar number two. I heard shouting over on the other end of bar number three, and then there was something happening on the deck. Someone yelled at me and Gemma to ‘hit the deck,’ and so that’s what we did.”
I was telling the truth, except for the part where it’d been Striker telling us to get down and that he hadn’t shouted it but had gestured for us to do so.
The rest, from there on out, was all true. How dudes kept flying over the bar. How the second one had tried to hurt Gemma and how Striker had come to the rescue and enlisted two of the other Bastards to get us out.
“They got us down to the first floor, and we were—” the front door opened. I turned to look back at my mom and said, “All good, Mom. Just a few more minutes.”
She looked from me to the cops and back to me and said, “I don’t know if I like this…”
“She’s right. It’s all good, ma’am. Your daughter’s not in trouble. She’s just a witness. We’re just getting her statement.”
“Five more minutes,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She went back into the house and closed the door.
“Where were we?” I asked.
“You got down to the first floor and…”
“Right, and one of the guys in black and orange with the Scorpion on his back slashed at the Royal Bastard trying to help me and Gemma with a knife. I don’t know if he cut him or not. Then, one of the other ones in black and orange had a gun, and I hit the deck and took the guy trying to save us with me.”
“So, you saw one of the shooters?” the police officer asked.
“Yeah,” I said, hugging myself. “Anyway, we can keep that just between us?” I asked hopefully.
“Afraid not,” baldy-locks said. “You’re a witness.”
“Shit.” I sighed. “Okay, well… fuck, my mom is going to kill me.”
“I can’t say about your mom, but back to this… do you think you might be able to pick the guy with the gun out of a lineup?”
“Um, I don’t know. I could try?”
“Okay, here’s my card. Detectives will probably be by tomorrow, and we’d like to have you come down to the station and go over all this again. Have you look at some photographs and see if you can identify anyone. Would that be alright with you?” he asked.
I didn’t know what else to say except, “Sure, yeah… okay.”
I took the card and gave them my information – phone number, mailing address, email address, and sometimes that would work for me.
“We’re very sorry you had to experience what you did tonight,” the other cop said, running a hand back through his light brown hair, his light brown eyes looking me over as I huddled on my front step uncomfortably.
“Hazards of working a biker bar, I guess. You know, I’ve been there going on three years, and this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Might want to look into another line of work,” he said, and I nodded.
“Might,” I said. “But the pay is some of the best around here, and I can’t beat the tips. Still, we’ll see how much they’re going to be willing to fork over by way of a raise to keep me… because that ? I deserve a raise.”
“You’re a tough girl, Rarity,” the first cop said, and I smiled.
“Thanks,” I said.