Chapter Three
Crosshairs
Rosalie
I timed it so it worked for me.
I was now ten days out. The bruising was fading faster. I
was moving around a lot easier. A new bandage was on my nose and it was a lot
smaller. And the stitches were dissolving and falling out.
But I still looked like a woman who’d had her ass handed to
her.
Colombo’s was being cool. They were giving me time off with
pay (though that pay sucked, it was all about the tips) for two weeks and
putting me behind the bar until the bandage was off my nose, my stitches were
totally gone, and my ribs were such I could heft around huge pizza pies.
So it was now or it would be never.
And too much was at stake.
It couldn’t be never.
Even if the now scared the beejezus
out of me.
Therefore I was sitting in the room with all the stations,
chairs facing each other on either side of a wall that was half glass,
partitions delineating the stations.
Phones hanging on a partition at each station.
I watched him come out, and regardless of the fact he looked
about as rough as me, and then some, I remembered what I’d thought the first
time I saw him in the bar Bounty hung at.
That could be mine.
And I’d made it mine.
He copped a blank look as he moved to me, his big, powerful
body no less attractive in an orange jumpsuit with a white T-shirt under it.
And it was proved.
The stitched slash that carved from just below the corner of
his inner left eye across his cheekbone then down to his jaw only made him look
tough, hot, and cool.
Making the trek from door to sitting opposite me, Beck did
not lose hold on my gaze.
Only when I did nothing but sit there, staring at his
still-handsome face, did his brown eyes slide to the telephone and back to me.
Now he wanted to talk.
I looked down at my lap where my purse was.
It was a cute purse. Total biker chick chic, black leather
in a saddlebag shape with lots of rivets and a fantastic, heavy silver chain as
a strap.
Since I was no longer going to be a biker chick, I was
probably going to have to switch out my entire purse inventory, finding hipster
purses or something like that.
The problem was the very idea of hipster purses made me want
to cringe and I didn’t even know what a hipster purse looked like.
The sleek clutch Lanie was carrying, I could do.
Hipster…
No.
I stopped thinking of hipster purses, which was just my way
of controlling my fingers’ need to start trembling because Beck was right
across from me and the last time I’d seen him had not been a celebratory
occasion. I got myself together and opened my purse.
I pulled out the folded piece of paper. I unfolded the
paper, turned it the way I needed it, then slapped it up against the glass off
to the side so that Beck could still see my face through the glass.
His gaze went to the paper and I thought he’d keep the blank
look, close me off, shut me out, or alternately, sneer.
He didn’t do either.
He looked at the color copy of the picture of me before
they’d cleaned the blood off my face in the hospital but after the swelling had
bloated me beyond recognition and he flinched.
Flinched.
What was that all about?
So abruptly that I jumped in my chair, his big hand came up
and curled around the phone.
He yanked it out of the cradle, tapped the top against the
glass, gaze back on me, and put it to his ear.
I shoved the picture back into my purse and picked up the
phone even though I had meant the picture to speak for me.
That being, I already paid, leave me alone.
I put the phone to my ear.
“Rosie.”
That was all he said but I heard the tone, I saw the look in
his eyes.
The tone was guttural.
The look was suffering.
He had to be kidding me.
“I hate you,” I whispered.
His features softened in that way they did when he thought I
was being cute or when he wanted to have sex or when I put his favorite meal in
front of him or when he wanted me to forgive him for acting like a dick or a
thousand other times when I reminded him why he’d made me his old lady or he
got himself in trouble with me.
This was not in trouble with me.
As phenomenal as a soft look from Gerard “Throttle” Beck
could be, we were far beyond that ever working again on me.
“Rosie—”
“Keep them away from me. From Mom and from me.”
“Why did you—?”
I leaned toward the glass and interrupted him. “Too late
now, Beck. Too late to ask questions.”
“Web said—” he began, I knew to explain.
Web. Spiderweb. Bounty’s president.
What I also knew was there was no explanation. Not one I
would understand.
The brothers, okay, they were in an outlaw motorcycle club,
I knew the risks I was taking.
Him? My man?
There was no explanation.
“Web didn’t tell you to choke me.
He didn’t tell you to hit me.”
His face started to get hard. “Baby, you ratted out the
club.”
“You did your thing. Now keep them away from Mom and from
me.”
“You shouldn’t have reported it to the cops, Rosie.”
That was what I was afraid of.
“What’d you think I’d do?” I asked.
“My deal with them was they’d leave you alive. Thought you’d
learn to keep your mouth shut,” he told me.
“Well, thanks, Beck. So good to know you were looking out
for me.”
He leaned into the glass. “Baby, Rosie, Christ. You
ratted out the club.”
“I slept at your side,” I whispered.
His gaze fell then came right back up.
I kept at him.
“You could have been the father of my children.”
He winced and started, “Rosie—”
“When the club started to roll that way, I should have just
left you.”
“I wouldn’t have let you go.”
“You wouldn’t have had a choice.”
“No, Rose,” he growled, “you wouldn’t have.”
That gave me a shiver but I powered through it.
“Then it’s all worked out for the best.”
That was when the sneer came. “He’s married, Rosalie. Got a
fuckin’ kid. Get over it.”
What was he talking about?
“What?” I asked.
“Cage. He’s never gonna be yours.
He’s gone for her and trust me, when that shit happens for a biker, it doesn’t
turn around.”
He was talking about Shy. Shy and Tabby and me.
Ancient freaking history.
And trust him about that kind of thing?
He totally had to be kidding me.
“How can I trust you when you have no clue what you’re
talking about?” I queried.
“Then you weren’t paying attention,” he snarled, allowing
the hurt he felt at my betrayal and my supposed longing for Shy to rise to the
surface.
“No, Beck, you weren’t. I’ve been over Shy since that night
I rode at your back and you took me to Lookout Mountain and kissed me with the
lights of Denver spread out around us.”
“Right, that’s why you handed us over to Chaos, who handed
us to the fuckin’ cops.”
“No, I did it because when I made a baby with my man, I
wanted that baby to know down to his bones his father was a good man in a way
the day that father passed from this earth, he’d struggle to cope, but he
wouldn’t struggle to come to terms with the fact this world was better with his
daddy in it.”
Beck shut his mouth and did it looking stricken.
That got in there.
Finally.
But still too late.
I did not shut my mouth.
“I wanted you to see how dangerous what you were doing was.
How easy it would be for your life to be wasted, the life you shared with
me. I wanted you to take a good look at it and find a reason to turn
yourself around. I tried to talk to you about it, you wouldn’t hear me. So I
felt the need to do something to save you, save us, to save our future. And
unfortunately for both of us, it got to the point where that something had to
be extreme.”
Beck had nothing to say to that either.
So I kept going.
“Just to say, I wouldn’t admit it to myself, but when you
refused to listen to my concerns about where the club was going and what that
meant to our lives and our future, it ended with us. Long before you left me
bleeding and passed out on a cement floor.”
He shook his head. “You drop the charges, Rosie, and I’ll
talk to Web and the guys about letting this shit end here with you.”
I nodded my head. “You’re gonna
talk to Web and the guys and you’re all gonna leave
me alone.”
“You need to drop the charges, Rose.”
“If I have to sit in a box and look every one of you in the
eye before I put you behind bars, I’ll do it.”
“Babe—”
I yanked the paper out of my purse and flattened it on the
glass.
“My mother saw me like that, Beck.”
He turned his head away.
He loved my mom. Practically doted on her. An old lady
without her biker. All of Bounty treated her like a dowager queen.
“She saw that,” I pushed. “You made her
see me like that.”
He turned back to me. “Rosie, we got serious problems
because of your bullshit.”
I shoved the picture back in my purse, saying, “I
wasn’t caught transporting drugs. I didn’t abduct my girlfriend from
her place of business and deliver her to a warehouse where me and the
men I call my brothers beat her to shit. You and your brothers
did that.”
“You know the code,” he bit.
“I do. My father was a biker and he taught me. Woman. Kids.
Bike. Freedom. In that order. Where are you now with all of that, Beck?”
“You did it for Cage,” he clipped, not letting that stupid
crap go.
“No. But I will say, in the beginning, I did it for you, but
in the end, I didn’t.”
His brows shot together. “What the fuck does that mean?”
I wasn’t about to explain that one.
“Leave me and Mom alone.”
“Boys’d never touch your ma,” he
muttered.
That was delivered in a mutter but I believed it.
Thank God.
I believed it.
I fought back heaving a gigantic sigh of relief and instead
demanded, “Leave me alone.”
He leaned deeper toward me and got a look on his face that
what now seemed long ago would have had me dropping to my knees or flat on my
back in a split second.
“Baby, I’m beggin’ you, drop
the charges.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“Rosalie—”
“You didn’t give me the chance to explain.”
“Rosie—”
“You choked me.”
“Rose—”
“And hit me.”
“Christ, baby—”
“And you spit on me.”
Beck shut up.
“Then you kicked me.”
Another flinch.
I stared into his eyes.