Chapter 8
If there’s one thing pregnancy has taught me, it’s that every man in this clubhouse is one wrong sentence away from becoming roadkill.
I hear the chaos before I even make it through the back door.
Kya’s voice carries over the music and the general noise of the clubhouse in a way that would probably make a lesser man turn around and wait this shit out in the parking lot.
Dom must be in the line of fire again, which isn’t exactly surprising.
Out of the three poor bastards currently tied to pregnant women, he’s the one most likely to say something that gets his head ripped off and then stand there blinking like he can’t figure out how it happened.
I shut the door behind me and step into the kitchen with the kind of caution usually reserved for walking into a room full of explosives.
The clubhouse is busy in the way it’s been a lot lately.
With Mac, Kya, and Brooke pregnant, it feels like everybody’s landed here in waves and never really left.
There’s baby shit stacked by the wall waiting to be taken upstairs or loaded into someone’s truck.
There are blankets thrown over the backs of chairs, half-finished drinks on every counter, and enough food in the fridge to feed a small army.
The front and back doors are propped open, letting in warm spring air that does nothing to cut through the smell of grilled burgers, sugar, and whatever citrus drink somebody’s been carrying around all afternoon.
I’d been at the garage with Dad for most of the morning, moving parts, checking inventory, and listening to him explain for the fiftieth time why people who don’t rotate their own tires shouldn’t be allowed to own vehicles.
He finally sent me over here because Mom needed me to move a crib upstairs and apparently nobody else in the damn club is capable of lifting heavy furniture unless there’s a patch on their back and a woman yelling at them to hurry up.
That part isn’t surprising either.
The second I step through the doorway, I catch a familiar voice from the common room. “Baby, just take the drink.”
Logan.
I don’t even have to see him to know exactly what he looks like right now. Tense shoulders. Careful expression. That pinched look around the mouth he gets when he knows he’s walking a razor’s edge and somehow still keeps talking.
Mac answers him in the flat, dangerously calm tone that ought to have him running for cover.
“I was carrying my own drink. And then you took it out of my hand like I’m ninety.”
I bite back a grin and grab a bottle of water out of the fridge before I head for the doorway.
The common room is exactly the kind of disaster I expected.
Mac is on the far end of the sectional with one hand low on her stomach and a look on her face that says Logan’s one more sentence away from getting that tea thrown in his face.
Brooke’s on the recliner with a Chick-fil-A bag in her lap like it personally betrayed her.
Carter’s beside her looking like he hasn’t known peace in at least six months.
Kya is spread out on the loveseat by the window, visibly pregnant and visibly homicidal, with Dom close enough to get yelled at and too dumb to back up.
And right in the middle of all of it is Allison.
She’s standing near Kya with a tray in one hand and a glass of lemonade in the other, laughing at something Dom said while Kya threatens him with death over a seat cushion or a spoon or maybe just his continued existence.
Her hair is down, long and soft and a little tousled like she’s been pushing it off her shoulders all afternoon.
She’s wearing a fitted tank and jeans, simple shit, nothing flashy, but she still hit me the second I walk in.
She always does.
That’s the problem.
She shouldn’t.
She’s Uncle Torch and Aunt Tracie’s daughter.
Landon’s little sister. Ana and Shaina’s best friend.
One of ours. One of the girls who grew up underfoot around this place same as the rest of us, and somewhere along the line that should’ve made her safe in my head.
Familiar. Easy to put in the family category and leave there.
Instead I notice too much.
I notice the way she laughs, head tipping back just enough to show the line of her throat.
I notice the way she tucks her hair behind one ear when she’s listening, and the way she leans in when one of the women starts talking like whatever they’re saying matters.
I notice how natural she looks here, moving around the room with drinks in her hands, rubbing Kya’s shoulder while Kya complains, handing Brooke something to eat, fitting herself into the middle of the mess without ever looking out of place.
Domestic.
That’s the word that hits me, sharp and unwanted.
She looks domestic. She looks like she fits here too easily, like this is exactly where she’s supposed to be, in a room full of women carrying babies and men running themselves ragged trying to keep them happy.
The thought lands hard enough that I shut it down instantly.
Family. That’s the box Allison belongs in.
She’s always gone there, even when she’s made that more difficult than she should with those big brown eyes and that mouth I’ve spent too many years pretending not to look at.
She goes there because that’s the right place for her.
Because Uncle Torch would skin me alive and Landon would help.
Because Ana would never forgive me if I touched her best friend and made a mess of it. Because I know better.
Knowing better doesn’t seem to matter to my eyes though, because my eyes still keep finding her.
“The women,” Brooke says from the recliner, “are more dangerous than all of you combined.”
“Facts,” Kya mutters.
Dom rubs his jaw like he’s already taken a beating. “I didn’t know it was your ice cream.”
“It was in my side of the freezer.”
“There are sides to the freezer now?”
“Yes.”
“Since when?”
“Since I got pregnant and apparently now I need emotional support dairy products to survive!”
That gets a laugh out of Allison.
A real one. Warm and soft and way too fucking easy.
She turns slightly toward Kya, and I catch the way her hand settles against Kya’s shoulder for a second, absent and comforting at the same time. It’s a tiny thing. Barely anything. But it does that irritating, dangerous shit to my gut anyway.
She’s good with them.
That shouldn’t surprise me. Allison’s always been good with the women.
She grew up around all the old ladies the same way Ana and Shaina did.
She knows how to hand my Mom what she needs before she asks for it and when to sit close to Aunt Tracie when she’s worried about something but trying not to show it.
She knows how Aunt Nikki likes her tea and when Aunt Jaz is close to losing patience with Uncle Cutter.
She fits into this place like she was built for it because she kind of was.
Still, seeing her with Mac, Kya, and Brooke does something in my head I don’t like.
Because she doesn’t just fit.
She belongs.
And there’s a small, dangerous part of me that sees that and thinks she looks too right around all of this. Around the chaos. Around the softness under the chaos. Around the kind of future everybody in this room is circling without even realizing it.
I shut that down too.
Logan’s still hovering in front of Mac, and he’s got that particular look in his eyes that says he knows he’s losing but hasn’t figured out how to stop digging his own grave.
“I was helping,” he says.
“You were being annoying,” Mac tells him.
“I was making sure you didn’t spill it.”
Mac arches one dark brow. “Logan, if you don’t move that tea away from my face in the next three seconds, I’m going to throw it at you and then ask why you didn’t protect the baby from the splash zone.”
I have to duck my head to hide the grin that pulls at my mouth.
Across from her, Brooke looks close to tears over a fast-food tragedy that only pregnancy hormones could make feel like a federal offense. Carter’s trying, I’ll give him that. He’s on his knees beside the recliner like a man delivering terms during wartime.
“I can go somewhere else,” he says.
“You should’ve gone somewhere else the first time,” Brooke answers.
“I know.”
“You know I don’t even really like waffle fries.”
“I know.”
“And yet here we are.”
He nods solemnly like he’s standing before a judge. “And yet here we are.”
That gets another laugh from Allison.
Goddamn it.
I’m still half in the kitchen when she turns toward the fridge, and that’s when she sees me.
The reaction is small enough most people wouldn’t catch it.
She stills for half a beat. Her fingers tighten around the ranch bottle in her hand.
Her eyes hit mine and something shifts in her face before she smooths it over.
I tell myself I imagined it.
That’s easier.
She’s grown up. She isn’t the teenage girl who used to follow Ana and Shaina around the clubhouse with a stubborn chin and more attitude than sense. She’s twenty-three now. Fully grown. Fully a woman.
That thought needs to die too.
So I smother it and lean into the doorway like I’m not doing a damn thing but grabbing a drink.
She beats me to it anyway. “Your timing’s great,” she says.
Her voice still does that thing where it catches me low, familiar enough to feel like home and sharp enough to make me aware of every inch of my own skin.
“Oh yeah?” I twist the cap off my water and lean one shoulder against the counter. “Who’s winning?”
“The women.”
“That was never in question.”
That gets a smile out of her, quick and automatic.
There it is again. That feeling. That stupid, unwanted satisfaction that comes from being the one who pulled it out of her.
From the other room, Kya calls, “If that man ate my pineapple too, I’m gonna make him sleep outside.”
I glance toward the common room and deadpan, “Sounds tense.”
Allison snorts.