Chapter One #4
To escape what was happening at the window, I turned so my
shoulders were against the wall and looked down at the paper in my hand.
Elaine Kincaid, CEO of an advertising agency.
Hop had married a business lady.
Surprising and interesting.
And cool.
I stared at the address under it, focusing on it rather than
the fact that Snap was right outside.
Suddenly, my eyes narrowed on it.
As they did, I recollected a conversation I’d had with Snap,
one of many I shouldn’t have had when he was just supposed to be my contact
with Chaos, sharing with him what I’d heard Beck say his brothers were up to
when it came to antisocial activities, not to mention I was living with another
guy.
How many properties? I’d asked, aghast at the intel
about himself he’d shared over the course of our by then hour-long phone
conversation.
Five, no…six. But, babe, it isn’t a big deal. All the
brothers get a cut of Ride and both the store and garage do a huge turnover. It
is what it is but the way I live my life, what am I gonna
do with that kind of money? he’d answered.
I could think of a lot of things to do with that kind of
money, I’d told him.
Yeah, well, I’m not big on shoes, he’d replied. So
I buy houses.
I’d laughed.
I had to admit, I liked shoes.
What I didn’t admit was that I liked that Snapper had
noticed.
He’d listened to me laughing for a while before he’d said, I
can’t just sit on it. I got it, gotta make it work
for me.
So I guess you buy six properties and let it work,
I’d teased.
Yeah, he’d said with a smile in his voice. Comes
time, I’ll be good. My woman will be good. Our kids wanna
go to some expensive college, they’ll be good. They want big weddings, that’ll
be good. We wanna take crazy huge family vacations,
that’ll be good. Or if a shit storm hits, we’ll be covered.
I didn’t remember my reply to that, just that I’d turned the
topic of conversation.
But I remembered how what he’d said made me feel.
I stared at the address on the paper.
Tack had said the place they’d put me in was Chaos.
But I knew it wasn’t just Chaos, as such.
It was Snapper.
He had six rental properties, a couple were condos, the rest
small homes.
This was his.
He was giving this to me.
He probably had someone evicted so he could give it to me.
I drew in breath as I heard a motorcycle roar to life.
“Rosalie?” Mom called.
I shifted just enough I could see out the window and watched
Hop pull out with Lanie at his side in his truck. Tack and Tyra in their huge
SUV were already out and driving away.
I shifted more and saw the curb was empty but I knew that
already, the sound of Snap’s pipes were fading.
“Honey,” Mom murmured and I looked to her. “You okay?”
“This,” I waved the note in the air, “is Snap’s.”
“Sorry?” she asked.
“This place they moved me into without my permission or
agreement or even really acceptance. Snapper owns it.”
“Oh,” she murmured, her eyes drifting reverently to the
paper.
Yep.
Reverently.
She’d always liked Chaos too. She used to party with them
with Dad back in the day before I came along.
The thing I was worried about was that she’d start to get to
like Snapper, especially before she’d even met him.
This could happen. He was just that likable. An all-around
good guy. Easy on the eyes. Easy to talk to. Easy to be with. Sweet, smart,
thoughtful.
It was my turn to call her attention to me.
“Mom.”
She looked right into my eyes.
“Please, Rosalie, let them take care of you.”
I closed my eyes.
I opened them.
“You did the right thing with Beck and his club,” she said
when I did. “I’m proud of you. Your father would have been proud of you, though
he wouldn’t have let you do it.”
That made my lips quirk.
Then again, Dad would have been on me about being with Beck
at all. He’d let me make my own decisions, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t
have something to say about it.
“He still would have been glad you considered it,” she
carried on. “It went bad. He’s not here to keep you safe and I—”
“Mom—”
“But they can,” she finished determinedly. “I’m here to
listen, you want to talk. I’m here to hold on to, you want to let it out. I’m
here to get angry right along with you, you want to rail and scream. Whatever
you need from me, I’m here. But I can’t give you that. I can’t keep you safe. You
can’t keep you safe. But they can and…” she swallowed then pushed it out,
“Bounty is not done with you.”
I drew breath in through my nose, ticked my mom was worried,
ticked at Beck, ticked at myself, but she was and there was nothing I could do
about it so I nodded.
“We’ll go look at it soon, okay?” I offered.
“We should ask Tyra and Lanie to meet us,” she suggested.
I shook my head. “I don’t think getting deeper into that
crew is a good idea.”
To that she stated, “He’s handsome.”
She was talking about Snap.
“Yeah, he is, but—”
“He’s yours.”
I shut my mouth.
Mom didn’t.
“Standing outside in the cold, waiting for word about you,
putting you in his place so he knows you’re safe, he’s yours like Beck never
was, like that other one never was. He’s yours. He’s yours to break or he’s
yours to hold safe.”
“Chaos men are unbreakable,” I informed her.
“If your father lived to see his daughter in that hospital
bed like I saw her, he’d have shattered,” she retorted.
And that’s when the tears started to sting my eyes.
“Men are breakable, Rosalie,” she said in her calm, serene
voice. “They just hide the cracks better than we women do.”
“I thought he was going to kill me,” I whispered.
She stood solid and held my gaze, hers suddenly bright like
mine was, filled with wet, knowing I was now talking about Beck.
“He’d kissed that neck he’d nearly squeezed the life from so
many times, I couldn’t count them,” I told her.
My mom stood there and kept hold of me, warm and safe, using
nothing but her gaze.
“Do you think I want to jump into another situation with
another biker?” I asked.
“Your father was a biker,” she reminded me.
“My father was one of a kind,” I reminded her.
“He died and you went searching,” she stated.
This, I couldn’t handle. I knew it. I understood it. I was
coming to terms with the mistakes I’d made.
But hearing it come from my mother’s lips, I couldn’t deal
with it.
So I looked out the window at our dead winter lawn, our
empty driveway, the curb bare.
“You found that Chaos boy, the first one, as a replacement,”
she said, careful, gentle, sweet.
I swallowed.
She was right.
Dad had died.
I’d been lost.
Then I found Shy.
“He wouldn’t keep you, you went reeling,” she kept on.
I saw nothing but clear, hot waves rippling before my eyes.
“Then you latched on to the next thing that reminded you of
what you lost,” she said.
I’d done that for sure.
My voice was trembling when I replied, “I messed up.”
“You were grieving.”
I turned to her, shaking my head fiercely to shake the tears
from my eyes, and repeated, “I messed up.”
“Okay, that wasn’t what I was trying to get through to you,
I was simply trying to guide your way to understanding the path you’ve been on.
But if you have to look at it that way, sure, okay, you messed up,” she agreed
half-heartedly. “Though it burns me that any woman takes responsibility for the
callous brutality a man can inflict, that burn runs deeper I hear that come
from my own daughter’s mouth, but for now, I’ll let that be and just say, my
beautiful girl, don’t mess up again.”
“Life is not about finding a man,” I told her.
“Life is about finding happy,” she told me. “So don’t,” she
jerked her head to the window, “mess up.”
“They all went at me, Mom.” Now I was talking about Bounty.
She’d pulled it together.
With that, it killed, but the water hit her eyes and she
couldn’t contain it.
It started leaking down her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I shouldn’t lay that on you. Not
you.”
“Rosalie, honeypot,” she began, lifting her hands to brush
away the tears, “pray to God you learn, and when you do, trust me, you’ll learn
that as difficult as it is to take, as heavy as any burden might be, when a
woman becomes a mother, she can bear anything for her child. So lay it on me.”
“I’m scared,” I told her.
“Of course,” she told me.
“I can’t think of another guy right now,” I shared.
“That’s understandable,” she replied.
“I just have to get through today.”
“Then we’ll get you through it.”
“I loved him before,” I whispered the admission. “Before
what happened happened to me.”
“What?” she whispered back.
“I wanted to make Beck into Snap.”
“Oh, Rosie,” she breathed, finally coming toward me, and if
I wasn’t wrong, there was a grin playing at her lips.
“Mom, it was stupid,” I said as she lifted both hands and
held my jaw carefully.
She tipped her head toward me, eye to identical eye.
“I just need to get through today,” I restated.
“How can I help with that?” she asked.
“Do you have Tillamook salted butterscotch ice cream?”
“Is my little girl in the vicinity?”
My grin was shaky and my nod in her hands was jerky.
“Spoons and the container and a marathon of Jason Bourne?”
she proposed.
My grin got less shaky and my nod was far more definite.
“You’re on TV duty, I’ll get the ice cream,” she decreed.
She then came in, brushing her cheek against mine before she
let me go and moved toward the kitchen.
“Mom?” I called.
She turned to me.
“I’m sorry you have to go through this with me,” I said.
“Something else you’ll learn, I pray, my beauty, is the
good, the bad, the ugly, a mother is never sorry. Their baby needs them,
there’s no other place they would be.”
Yes, oh yes.
I’d never manage without her.
“I love you,” I told her.
“And there it is,” she replied simply.
Then she went to get the ice cream.
I watched her go, knowing she was right.
There it was.
That was us. Our family. Our life.
We’d never had a mortgage (Mom still rented). We’d never had
roots.
But we’d had each other.
And love.
And that was all that was needed.
So life sucked right then, it was uncertain and scary, both
of those things in the extreme.
But I had my mom.
And that was all that was needed.
On that thought, I moved to the TV.