Legacy of Leather and Lace (Hell’s Handlers MC: Second Generation #1)

Prologue

BETH STARED AT the face in the mirror—the barely recognizable face with desolate eyes, wet with tears, and six raised welts in the shape of a man’s palm and fingers.

The skin burned, with heat spreading out from the handprint like a brand.

Her throat felt too tight to draw in air, and her chest too small to hold it.

A tear slid off her jaw and hit the porcelain sink, then another, and she watched it like she was witnessing someone else fall apart.

Someone else trying to process their bruised face and crumbling emotions.

Shame hit her hard as it always did, rushing over her in a wave of embarrassment that heated her skin to unbearable levels and made her want to disappear off the face of the planet. If she could crawl out of her own body and into someone else’s, she would.

She could still see sixteen-year-old Beth rolling her eyes so hard they nearly got stuck, arms crossed over her chest as Maverick and Zach flanked a nervous boy named Tyler on her parents’ front porch.

Tyler had come to pick her up for a movie, just a movie, and they’d made him stand there for ten whole minutes answering questions about his grades, his car’s safety rating, and whether he understood that Beth had approximately forty uncles who owned shovels and knew how to dig holes.

She’d called them ridiculous. Dramatic. Embarrassing.

She’d told her dad if they kept this up, they were going to scare off every guy in town, and Copper had just smiled and said, “Good.”

That Beth, the one who’d stomped her foot and told Maverick he was being a psycho, felt like a stranger now.

A girl from a movie she’d watched once and barely remembered.

That Beth had no idea how lucky she was to have men who cared enough to be psychos, and who would never in a million years leave a handprint on a woman’s face.

All she wanted was to crawl, maybe sprint, back into their comforting embraces. To let her big, crazy, outlaw family wrap her up, shield her from her mistakes, and erase the last year like it was nothing more than a bad dream.

But she lived in reality.

Going home meant admitting something she was too ashamed to acknowledge, even to herself, for more than a few seconds at a time. Saying the words out loud would make this real, and she was barely holding it together as it was.

Some nights, the humiliation of her situation was so thick she choked on it as she lay there rigid and silent, listening for every change in Jason’s breathing, every hitch in his snore that might mean he was waking up.

The sour smell of beer on his breath drifted across the pillow, mixing with the Irish Spring soap he used every night in the shower.

She used to love that scent, but now it made her stomach turn. Now it meant danger.

She’d huddle into the fetal position as close to the edge of the bed as possible without falling off, her shoulder aching, her hip going numb against the mattress.

She never rolled over, never adjusted, no matter how badly her body screamed for relief.

Movement might brush against him. Movement might wake him.

Hitting the floor would wake him.

Jason didn’t like to be woken in the middle of the night.

She’d made that mistake exactly one time. Her ribs still ached when she thought too hard about it.

Worse than failing the men who’d shown her exactly what a good man should be was the way she’d let down the women.

If the guys had been incredible, the women she’d spent her childhood worshiping had been perfect, and they were still perfect.

Each one had overcome tremendous odds and found happiness with the MC and in their relationships, including her mother.

Her mom, Shell, was the most incredible woman Beth had ever met, no exaggeration.

When her mom was only a teenager, a man named Rusty raped her, resulting in her pregnancy with Beth.

As if that wasn’t traumatic enough, Rusty, may he rot in hell, had been Copper’s brother.

Copper, the man Shell had loved since before she knew what romantic love was.

Her mom had spent years suffering in silence with a deep, unrequited love for a man she’d feared would never love her back if he discovered the truth.

Luckily, she’d been wrong. Copper was the best man ever to walk the planet.

He fell hard for both Shell and Beth, marrying her mother and becoming the best father a girl could have asked for.

Another person Beth had taken for granted.

He was her father in every way that mattered.

Beth couldn’t say her parents’ journey to each other had been an easy road, but they’d made it and had been joined at the hip for more than fifteen years.

Never once, not even for a second, had Copper treated Beth as anything other than his daughter, full stop.

Throughout her life, Beth had witnessed not only healthy, enviable relationships but also people who maintained their individuality while being part of a tremendously close pairing. Everyone she’d grown up with was complete ‘couple goals.’

Why on earth had she turned her back and walked away from it all as though better existed somewhere in the world and she could find it? Was it young, dumb hubris, or did she have something fundamentally wrong inside her?

She wasn’t happy with her life and hadn’t been for a long time. The realization sat heavy in her chest, like a stone she couldn’t cough up.

“Yo, B, where the fuck’s the beer I bought last night?”

Right in the fridge, where you watched me put it yesterday, you piece of shit.

Her shoulders slumped, and her skin paled in the mirror.

Even expecting it, the sound of his voice still made her muscles clench, and her hands tremble.

She gripped the edge of the sink to still them.

As much as she might want to, she’d never sass Jason out loud.

Not unless she wanted a night of screaming, berating, and possibly another handprint on her cheek.

Though when he hit her, the fighting typically ended.

A few times, she’d been tempted to goad him into getting physical to stop the screaming.

Wow, that’s the saddest thought you’ve ever had.

This was what her life had become.

She’d need a mountain of therapy to undo the twisted mess this relationship had caused to her psyche. Of course, she’d have to attend therapy first, and that meant admitting out loud that she had a serious problem. That she was the kind of woman who stayed.

For the past week, a statistic she’d stumbled across in some magazine at the dentist’s office had been eating her alive. On average, women went back to their abusers seven times before finally leaving for good.

Seven times.

She’d done the math on herself more times than she could count.

Had she already ‘left’ when she’d slept at Megan’s for three days after Jason shoved her into the wall?

Did it count as leaving if she’d only thought about it, really, seriously thought about it, while he was at work?

How many of her seven had she already used up?

And what kind of person needed seven tries to save her own life?

Yet there she stood, rubbing the tears away and rushing out of the bathroom to appease a man who didn’t act like he gave a shit about her. A man who’d humiliated her, fucked with her mind, and hit her more than once.

“They’re in the refrigerator. I’ll grab one for you, Jase,” she called, forcing brightness into her voice as she hustled into the kitchen and found him standing in front of the open refrigerator, scowling.

“Right here.” She slipped under his thick arm and grabbed a bottle of his favorite beer from the top shelf of the refrigerator.

How he couldn’t find anything would always remain a mystery, but one she’d never asked him to solve.

Asking why, even about something small, could be the wrong move on the wrong day.

Back at home, she could and would have teased the hell out of her dad’s MC brothers if they’d been unable to find something practically staring them in the face, which, to be fair, would probably happen.

The difference was that they’d shrug off her teasing and join her in laughing.

Those guys had always been able to laugh at themselves.

It was a quality she’d never fully appreciated until Jason.

Around the club members, she didn’t have to measure her words or tiptoe around a volatile temper.

She didn’t have to catalog tone, expression, and the number of beers someone consumed and run it through some twisted internal safety calculator before she opened her mouth.

And if they ever saw her acting like a timid mouse around a boyfriend, well, the boyfriend wouldn’t be breathing for long, and that wasn’t a hyperbole.

“Don’t fucking hide my shit next time,” he grumbled as he snatched the bottle from her hand.

Or, you know… you could open your damn eyes.

She clamped down on her tongue as she nodded. Her throat ached from all the words she swallowed each day.

Jase twisted off the top, then took a long drink that had more than half the bottle disappearing. Looked like tonight would be a multi-drink night, and her nerves fluttered. Drunk Jason could go either way, sleepy and lazy or mean and destructive.

“Grant and Benny are on their way over. We’re gonna play some GTA. I’m hungry. Make us some of those spicy cheese fuckers we like.”

“Jalapeno poppers?” she asked, even though she knew exactly what he meant.

He snapped and pointed at her with a grin she used to find sexy. “That’s it.”

Oh, of course. Let me drop everything and deep-fry appetizers for you and your mouth-breathing buddies while you shoot hookers in a video game. Would you like me to fan you with a palm leaf while I’m at it? Rub your feet? Maybe I should crawl on all fours and bark on command.

“Sure.” The word tasted like ash. Hopefully, she had all the ingredients, so she wouldn’t have to run to the store and make him wait for his snack.

He didn’t like to wait.

He didn’t like so many things.

He really was a good-looking guy, with deep blue eyes, light brown hair, and a muscular physique that women drooled over.

On his most recent barber trip, he’d cut his hair shorter than she preferred.

Jase liked his hair buzzed, whereas it had been longer when they’d met.

Back then, in the beginning of their relationship, she’d loved running her fingers through the soft strands.

Back when, for a short time, he’d made her feel special and safe.

When he’d told her she was pretty, intelligent, and precisely what he wanted in a girlfriend.

How stupid she’d been to fall for his lip service.

As she turned to preheat the oven, Jase caught her arm and spun her back to face him with a rough tug. Her pulse spiked. The movement was so fast her brain didn’t have time to catch up.

“Everything okay?” she asked, staring up at him.

He had eight inches on the five-foot-three stature she’d inherited from her mom.

For one second, she thought she might get a kind word.

A thank you for retrieving the beer and cooking for his dickhead friends.

Maybe it was nice to know she wasn’t so completely jaded that she automatically expected something hateful to fall from his lips, but thinking positively only made the reality of his cutting comments sting more.

“Cover that shit up.”

She blinked. “What?”

He huffed and rolled his eyes, giving her a none-too-gentle shake. “Your face. Go put some goddamn makeup on. Fuck’s sake, Beth, you tryna make me look bad in front of my friends?”

Her stomach soured as her hand went to her cheek, fingers brushing the tender spot his palm had already found once today. “What? N-no, of course not. I didn’t have anywhere to go today, so I didn’t bother with makeup. And I had no idea the guys were coming over. I’m s-sorry.”

She’d forever hate the way her voice wavered.

She used to be the girl who flipped off Gator when he teased her about a bad haircut and told him his beard looked like a ferret had died on his face.

The girl who’d once called Screw an ‘overprotective Neanderthal’ to his face and made everyone at the table laugh, including him.

Where had that girl gone?

Jason shoved her away with a grunt of disgust. “Well, get moving. They’ll be here soon, and I’m fucking hungry.”

As she skittered past him, he cracked her on the ass with an open palm. It hurt, and she bit her lip to keep from yelping, though she couldn’t hide the way her body reacted. Her muscles automatically tensed for another hit.

This wasn’t a playful light ass smack or a lead-in to a consensual sexy spanking, but a warning.

Stay in line tonight or else.

She gritted her teeth and forced herself not to snap at him. He wouldn’t appreciate it if she fired back or flipped him off like she wanted.

And there it was.

She’d become conditioned to act and react as he wanted. Trained, like one of the dogs she groomed at work.

And she hated it.

She hated him.

She hated living like this.

She hated herself.

But most of all, she hated that she’d walked away from something good because she’d been too young and stupid to recognize it.

She’d had everything, including love, safety, people who would die for her, and she’d thrown it away like it wasn’t enough.

Like she deserved better. Like better even existed.

And look what she’d found instead.

The average woman went back to her abuser seven times before leaving.

Seven times.

She could break the cycle. She could come in below the average. She could tell him to fuck off and walk out of the apartment forever. She could make everyone she knew proud and dig into the strength she’d always thought she possessed.

She could…

Go home.

For one second, she let herself imagine it.

Her hand on the front door. The click of the lock.

The night air on her face as she walked to her car in her pajamas with nothing but her keys and her phone.

Driving until Jason was a speck in her rearview mirror.

Driving until she couldn’t smell Irish Spring anymore.

So why did she walk back into the bathroom and retrieve her makeup bag?

Why did she feel paralyzed by her own life?

Why, with her heart pounding and palms sweating, did staying feel easier than leaving?

Maybe because leaving meant admitting she’d failed.

Maybe because starting over felt like climbing a mountain with broken legs.

Maybe because some sick, twisted part of her still hoped tomorrow would be different, and that the Jason she’d fallen for would come back, and this version would disappear like a bad dream.

Or maybe she was just tired.

So goddamn tired.