Epilogue
“Master of my fate:
Captain of my soul”
Snapper
“Hey, honey.”
Snap turned from marking the wall where he and Shy were
going to mount the cupboard to see his Rosie strolling in with Kane, better
known as Playboy since the kid, not but a few months old, was a damned flirt.
The baby was on her hip.
He was Shy and Tab’s little boy.
Tabby was following her toting a diaper bag, Tab’s eyes
going to her man, but Rosie’s eyes were on Snap.
His woman looked seriously fucking good with a baby on her
hip.
And she just looked seriously fucking good always.
Shy moved to Tab.
But Snap stood still because Rosalie was moving to him.
When she made it, he gave her a lip touch then gave Playboy
a tickle to which the kid wobbled and gurgled but mostly just hung on to Rosie
(this hanging on meaning grabbing onto her tit, freaking little flirt) and he
looked back to his woman.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She took her eyes from him and looked to the cupboards Shy
and him were installing.
It was his condo, where he lived. Or now, where he used to
live.
Before Rosie, he’d spent most of his time in his room at the
Chaos Compound, but if he felt the need to have quiet, get some space just to
himself (which was not rare), he came there.
But since he now spent all his time with Rosie, he wasn’t a
big fan of having a property that he wasn’t using that was also not doing
anything for him. Seeing as he’d moved into the place as is and didn’t do shit
to update it when he did, but the building was a nice one and he could get
decent rent if he fixed it up, he was putting in a new kitchen, new bathrooms,
painting the walls, and tiling the floors.
And he’d been able to gut it and start doing that because
the week before, he’d full-on moved in with Rosie.
Snap moving into their carriage house had been a hiccup in
their lives, something that wasn’t the same as every day before had been, but
each day wasn’t much different. Not to mention it hadn’t taken much since most
of his stuff he sold on Craig’s List because with Rosie’s stuff, and the extra
she’d bought, the crib was sweet and they didn’t need his shit messing with her
mojo.
But all in all, that was the way they were. Each day
bleeding into the next, nothing new (except a dining room table, garden
furniture and his “reading nook”—something he thought was hilarious and
cute—hilarious because the words were goofy as shit, cute because she thought
of him, even if he still read most of the time camped on the couch because she
could stretch out beside him).
But everything was solid. It was not good, but instead
golden.
Rosalie Holloway was not about adventure and excitement. She
was just about being with the people who meant something to her, dialing down
the world so all you needed to feed your soul was an hour with her quiet,
stretched out with you on the couch.
And learning that, Snapper had fallen in love with her even
more.
“They look good,” she declared, attention on the cupboards
they’d already put in.
“You’d think that you picked them,” Tabby replied to Rosalie
and looked at Snap. “They are nice. I still think you should have gone with the
cream.”
“The place is modern, cream is more traditional,” Rosalie
said.
“Cream is more neutral,” Tab returned.
Rosalie shot her a smile with her eyebrows raised. “More
neutral than white?”
Snap was not a fan of the eyebrow raise only because it took
his attention to the split in the left one.
Her scars were visible, thin white marks that ran through
her brow, along her jaw, and one that was about a half an inch down the left
side of the bridge of her nose.
Since they had the conversation now months ago, she hadn’t
mentioned them, and that was good.
But every time his attention was turned to them, he saw her
on the floor of that warehouse, and that was bad.
He’d lied to her that night he came clean about what Chaos’s
real plans were with her ex. He did not think there was anything Gerard Beck
could do to atone for what he’d done to Rosalie. He thought the guy was a
useless piece of shit and apologies after you and your brothers delivered a
beat down to a defenseless woman because you’d been caught breaking the fucking
law were worthless—if they came in words, or if they came in deeds.
But Rosie seemed mellow about it, was definitely on the path
of moving on from it and Throttle, and he wasn’t about to do anything to bite
into that.
“Need you to look at those tile samples, Rosie,” he said to
take his mind off that shit. “We need to make a decision so I can order it and
get it delivered.”
She nodded to him and moved with Playboy over to a box that
had a cupboard in it that Shy and him hadn’t taken out yet where there were a
bunch of tile samples on top.
“The black,” Tabby, having wandered over to have a look too,
decreed.
“My woman’s always got an opinion,” Shy muttered through a
smile, stripping the shrink wrap and protective covering off the cupboard they
were about to mount.
“Gray,” Rosalie said.
“Gray-shmay,” Tabby returned.
“Gray’s boring.”
“It’s a rental, Tab,” Rosalie replied in that sweet, lilting
voice of hers, not upset in the slightest about Tab’s outspoken ability to
share her opinion. Then again, that was the way it was with those two, or Rosie
with anybody. She didn’t get wound up a lot. In fact, since she settled in
after what happened to her, she never got wound up. “It needs to be neutral so
people can build on it with their own things.”
“You can build on black,” Tabby said.
“And black shows everything. It’s harder to keep looking
nice,” Rosalie retorted.
Tabby had nothing to say to that because Rosalie was right.
The gray it was then.
Needless to say, the women had become friends. Outspokenly
opinionated or not, it was hard not to like Tabitha Cage. She was just good
people. And if you were a woman, she was the best kind of friend you could have
around (if often a nutcase, but since Rosalie was totally not, they evened each
other out). And straight up with everything, it was impossible not to like
Rosie.
They’d gotten close. It might have been about Rosie opening
the doors for Tab to swoop in because she was worried after what had happened
to Rosalie. Mostly it was about the fact that they all just liked each other.
History didn’t factor. It was just done in a way that there wasn’t even
awkwardness. There was just what they had now.
Furthermore, they were the generation of the brothers and
their women in the Club that were around the same ages, so with Joke and
Carrie, they hung together a lot.
Playboy reached out to his momma and Tabby took her son.
Rosie turned to Snap. “We came to check out the cupboards
and look at the samples. We also came to see if you guys wanted to take a break
and go out to lunch with us.”
“Lunch sounds good,” Shy replied,
moving to his wife and son, and when he did, his boy lost interest in Momma and
reached out to Daddy.
Shy didn’t make him want. He took his little man and pulled
him close, brushing his lips across the top of his cranium, then breathing in
deep, like the essence of his son was the elixir of life.
And it probably was, something Snap looked forward to
getting his own whiff of when the time was right.
“Joker, Carissa, and Travis are meeting us at Las Delicias
in half an hour,” Tabby told the men.
“Perfect,” Snapper said, looking to Rosie. “You on the back
of my bike, baby?”
She looked him right in the eyes.
“Absolutely.”
At her word, the way it settled down low in his gut, he
smiled.
He was that guy who’d always known his destiny. Whatever
life smacked him with, he knew he’d deal with it while he headed unerring for
one thing: keeping himself breathing while finding a woman to love and building
a family.
He didn’t give that first fuck if he did this rich or poor.
He didn’t care if he did it in Denver, where he’d grown up, or in Alaska, or on
the moon. He’d liked school but when it was done, he was done with it. He
didn’t want to play a corporate game. He didn’t want to face a life of
monotony. And he made it so he had none of that. He just wanted family, his
bike, his brothers, solid and steady.
But most important, he wanted a world where his woman looked
him in the eyes when he asked her to be close to him, close to the man who
wanted what many would consider as limits that were all of that, not riches in
the bank, not vacations in Tuscany, just whatever life led them to, and her
answer was, Absolutely.
He’d found it in Rosalie.
He had it in his home, in his bed, on the back of his bike.
It was a miracle, quiet and true and constant.
And no matter what he had to do to keep it…
He was not ever going to let it go.
“Snap?”
“Yup?”
She was lying on him.
It was after lunch at Las Delicias with their crew. After he
and Shy went back to the condo to finish with the cupboards and the women went
where women went to work off burritos (in Rosie and Tabby’s case, the mall).
After he’d come home and showered and ate dinner with Rosalie then took her out
for a ride in the early summer waning sun. After they’d returned home, got
beers and stretched out on the couch, him with his book, her with hers that
he’d noticed she was not reading, but he didn’t think much of it. When she had
a book of her own, her mind wandered often, but he could tell by the look on
her face when it did, her reflections never took her anywhere she didn’t want
to be.
“You never said what you thought of the name Hermione.”
He felt his body tense.
This happened right before it shook uncontrollably because
he burst out laughing.
When he got some control over it, if not a lot, he saw her
smiling down at him.
It was then he realized a promise he made her he was not
keeping.
He’d told her that he was going to get her to a time in her
life when she’d spend a lot of it laughing.
So far this hadn’t happened.