Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
AYDA
Spending time with Autumn for most of the afternoon had helped my weird flash of anxiety.
By the time Deeks came to get her, we were sprawled out on the huge bed laughing our asses off at nothing in particular.
She always had good stories to tell me. Being on the fringes of the club all these years, she’d experienced everything with them, and had watched a fair few of them grow up.
Drew was one of those. Happier memories were always welcome to me, and I relished in them when she decided to regale me, but it sometimes felt as though Deeks had a second nature and knew when she was telling a story about one of his indiscretions as a younger, less inhibited biker.
The one she been telling me, she’d promised to finish later, and I planned on holding her to that.
Drew hadn’t made it back to The Hut yet, so I’d found myself reverting to old habits to keep myself busy and distracted.
I had worked my way through a couple of loads of laundry and had made a chili that could be reheated for anyone looking for sustenance later.
I also managed to direct Moose in the direction of a room where he could sleep off the crate of beer he’d inhaled since we’d been allowed back inside.
I wandered around the building looking for a distraction after that, soon finding myself at the door of the club’s heart.
The War Room.
Nothing in the room matched, the chairs were all different shapes and sizes, and the reaper and hounds were etched into the surface of the table.
If you inhaled hard enough, there was still that lingering smell of Harry’s cigarette smoke in the air.
I didn’t dare enter their sacred space, so I leaned my head against the frame and stared, mentally filling the chairs around it.
My brain seemed to stutter over the seat that had always been occupied by Owen.
I wanted to wheel the damn thing into the yard and burn it, but we’d already had more fires than we could explain.
I couldn’t imagine we’d be able to make excuses for my rash decision, especially if we were trying to sell ourselves as being in mourning.
It made my skin itch to see Owen’s seat there. It also triggered another memory.
“Hey, Kenny?” I glanced over my shoulder at him and waited for a response.
“Huh?” Kenny was already behind the bar, but he was watching me.
“Did you ever mess around with one of the club’s women called Gemma?”
Sliding his beer onto the surface of the counter, he considered my question. One thing I loved about these guys was they didn’t get prudish talking about their conquests with me. I’d become another one of the guys to them.
“Oh, yeah, that little blonde with the tight ass? Once, I think, but that was before Drew got out of Huntsville. Her and Slater used to fuck frequently, I think.”
“You seen her around lately?” I asked, my body turning so I was facing him. Kenny shrugged a shoulder and swiped his beer from the bar, downing half of it and belching before replying.
“Haven’t looked for her. Why?”
“Someone mentioned her name the other day, and I couldn’t remember seeing her around.”
“I heard she’s studying beauty shit at Navarro College.”
“Beauty shit? That an official course title?”
Kenny flashed me his middle finger and a grin. I wrinkled my nose and playfully bore my teeth at him, making him shake his head in humor. Figuring I’d taken the questions about Gemma as far as I could without raising questions and suspicions, I changed lanes.
“Have you seen Libby today?”
“Last free question. I’m gonna start charging after this one.”
I made another face at him. “You do that, and I’ll start charging you for beers.”
Kenny glanced down at his hand and back up at me before he rolled his eyes and smirked at me.
“Libby’s with the kid. She came in looking for him earlier, then headed out to the bay to see him.”
“Thank you.”
Sliding his bottle along the bar until it dropped off into the trashcan, Kenny waved me off with a grunt and turned to grab another.
Things around The Hut still weren’t back to normal, and it was like an elephant sat in the corner of the room for all of us.
As much as I hated the impact Owen had on us, I knew that in time, once the distrust had passed, we would find a new normal, and we would make it work.
I still wasn’t sure whether or not Drew wanted me to talk to Libby yet, either. I knew where she was. I knew what I wanted to ask her, but waiting for a game plan while everything trembled around us felt like torture.
I had no idea what Drew was planning on doing with half the information he’d obtained, both from me about Libby and Rosie, and with all the information and evidence we’d gathered against our enemies.
But I needed to know if Libby would try and hide the meeting she’d had with Rosie Sullivan or not.
Part of me couldn’t imagine that she would.
Libby had met Rosie at Rusty’s, which was my territory as well as The Hounds favorite spot these days.
I couldn’t imagine her thinking that it would stay a secret.
There were so many other places the two of them could have met had they been in cahoots with each other.
I wasn’t sure what I planned on asking her as I headed out the door and onto the porch, but it all became a moot point the moment I heard the bike pull off the main road and into the yard.
My attention was immediately diverted to the president of The Hounds rolling to a stop in his usual spot, and pulling off his sunglasses with a sexy flip of his wrist.
Hopping down the porch steps, I pushed my hands into the pockets of my jeans as I approached him.
“Any luck?” I asked after he’d killed the engine and glanced up at me.
Drew’s small yet confident smile was his answer as he swung his leg off the bike and slowly closed the distance between us. When we met in the middle, with only a few inches between us, Drew glanced over my head at The Hut before he focused back on me.
“I need to keep that father of mine on a leash.”
I grabbed the front edges of his cut and pushed to my toes, pressing a kiss to his chin. “Wouldn’t that be like keeping an alligator on a leash?”
Drew’s hands slid around the lower part of my back. “He’s too controlled to be an alligator. Despite it hurting to admit this again, he’s a quiet genius, and I’ve been stupid to underestimate him since he came back to Babylon.”
“I think it’s safe to say that we all underestimated him.”
Metaphorically speaking, Eric was the lone wolf.
Being pack animals at heart, they all understood that they had to look after one another, but having imposed himself to isolation after being ingrained with that pack mentality for most of his life, it had forced Eric to become smarter.
This wasn’t something you thought much about in terms of humans and their interactions, but Autumn had alluded to that little fact when she’d talked about Deeks and Eric in the past, and it made sense now.
“People tend to do that when your last name is Tucker. You sure you want to marry into that?”
I couldn’t help the grin that flashed at the thought of marrying this man. It had been one of the first thoughts every morning since he’d put the ring on my finger. “It can’t happen soon enough.”
“Let’s get you inside. It’s getting late. I need a shower, and we need to talk.”
Rocking back onto my heels, I nodded in agreement. The thought of seeing Drew in the shower never hurt. Sweeping his hand up in mine, I backtracked toward the porch and through the bar, where Kenny was no longer alone.
“You want me to grab a bottle and meet you in the room?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“Sure thing, darlin’.”
I watched him saunter away for a moment before heading to the bar where Kenny already had a bottle and two glasses waiting. The crazy eyebrows of his were high on his forehead as he smirked at me.
“You want me to tell Libby you were looking for her?”
“Nah, I’ll find her later.”
“She won’t be difficult to find.”
I sent Kenny a glare. His tone had filled in the blanks. I hadn’t needed the mental image of my brother and his girlfriend, but Kenny lived to torture me.
“Kind of like Sloane and you then?”
“Ouch. Was that supposed to hurt?” He chuckled and shook his head.
“You know I could be much meaner, but it’s not in my nature.”
There was a cough at the other end of the bar that I ignored as I picked up the bottle and glasses. With a dramatic roll of my eyes, I headed back to my room and followed the sound of running water to the bathroom, where Drew was already under the steaming flow of water.
I admired him for a moment.
It was hard not to.
Drew had one of those bodies that demanded your attention.
His skin was scarred, inked, and stretched over muscles that always rippled under the surface as he ran his hands through his hair.
I never got used to seeing him like this, and I didn’t think I would ever lose appreciation for my good fortune.
I knew what that body felt like under the palms of my hands, knew the heat that bled from his flesh when he wrapped himself around me.
I had memorized that iron grip of his and the feeling of safety it always afforded me.
When he turned to grab the soap, and I got a glance at his ass, my decision to join him was made.
Sliding the bottle of whiskey onto the vanity, I stripped out of the clothes I was wearing and into the shower behind him, my hand covering his as he worked the soap over his chest, the other rested against his shoulder, absorbing his body heat.
“You talk, I’ll scrub,” I whispered, brushing my lips over his back.
Drew filled me in on everything Eric had alluded to, his eyes closing as temporary peace drifted over him under my care. The bitter edge to his voice when he spoke about Eric had disappeared, and in its place was a slight air of admiration and surprise.