Emery
“You can sit if you’d like.” I glance from Venom to the chair at the side of the room. “I promise I won’t run out the door the second you move.”
Venom smirks when I look back at him. “I’m good here.”
“I’m sure you are.” I roll my eyes.
If I wasn’t so used to being guarded, it might bother me. But there are very few times in my life I’ve been alone apart from when I’ve been asleep. I suppose this is no different.
“Well, I’m sorry if my arrival interrupted your nap,” I tell him. “Although, I doubt your back would be happy after sleeping on a pool table all day, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Fun night?”
“Something like that.” He glances away, keeping his answers short and never looking anywhere but directly into my eyes.
Charlie begins to stir in my arms, so I stand. Her mouth searches, and when she finds nothing, she begins to cry.
“Shh.” I rock her, pacing back and forth across the room as she gets louder.
“Do you need me to get anything?” Venom asks.
I look up, surprised to find genuine worry on his face.
“Her formula is in the car.” My eyebrows pinch. “But you’re probably not supposed to leave—”
“It’s not a problem.” He pulls his phone out, bringing it to his ear. “She’s fine. They’re both fine. But the baby needs to eat, and her formula—” He listens to someone speaking on the other end of the line. “Understood.”
Venom hangs up, and my eyebrows pinch. But I don’t have time to ask what’s going on before the door to the room swings open and Hayes walks through.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I rock Charlie, but she continues to cry, drawing out a worried wrinkle between Hayes’s eyebrows. “Charlie’s fine. She just woke up hungry. It’s an hour past when she usually eats. There’s formula in my car if I can grab it.”
He shakes his head. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Okay.” My nerves skitter as he leads me out of the room.
I can’t read his solemn expression, and I have no idea where he’s been for the last thirty minutes. He might be leading me to the car so I can get formula, or he might be kicking me out. The uncertainty in his silence has me on edge.
We pass through the clubhouse, where a group of guys is gathered. Many faces I recognize from when I first arrived, but they avoid my gaze. Except for Steel, who doesn’t take his eyes off me as I walk past.
The party has cooled off since I got here. The room has emptied apart from the guys wearing patches like the ones on Hayes’s cut. Clearly, my arrival put an end to whatever they were doing this morning.
Hayes leads me outside to my car, popping open my passenger door. “Keys?”
“Where are we going?” I reach into my back pocket for the keys.
He snatches them from my hand. “To my place.”
“Oh, okay.” I thought that room was where he lived, but clearly not.
Circling to the back, I wrestle Charlie into her car seat, and she immediately starts screaming.
“Is it far?” I look up, finding Hayes watching me. “She needs to eat first if that’s the case, or your ears will be numb by the time we get there.”
He points a finger at the horizon where a group of houses sits in the middle of the desert. From the fence line, they must be within the Twisted Kings property, but I didn’t notice them when I first arrived.
“It’s a two-minute drive,” he assures me. “But if you want to sit in the back and feed her while I drive—”
“I’ve got it.” I dig through her diaper bag, and she calms when I pop her pacifier in her mouth. She coos, and I brush my fingers through the soft, fine hair on the top of her head. “There you go. Only a few minutes. I promise.”
Hayes is staring at me when I close the back door. It was easier to read him the night we met. Now, his expression is blank, even when I suspect a million thoughts are running through his head.
“That will keep her happy until we get there,” I assure him, dropping into the passenger seat.
Hayes closes my door and circles the car.
The ride is bumpy, but at least Charlie isn’t crying. Every so often, Hayes glances at her car seat in the rearview mirror. His grip on the steering wheel turns his knuckles white when she starts rustling around.
“Is she okay?”
“She’ll be fine. Don’t worry.” I reach out to him out of instinct before realizing I shouldn’t.
My hand hovers an inch above his leg before I pull it back and turn to look out the window.
It’s been ten months since I’ve seen him, and I’m as comfortable as ever. His presence is a bubble of safety. The wild side he thinks I should fear does nothing but calm me. I can’t pinpoint what it is about Hayes that has me trusting him completely, but I do.
Wringing my fingers in my lap, I watch the sagebrush fly by until we reach a cluster of houses in the middle of the desert. At the edge of the club’s compound is a neighborhood that might as well have been plucked from the Vegas suburbs and placed in the middle of the desert.
Hayes pulls to a stop in front of a house near the end that’s not nearly as well-maintained as the others. Chipped paint flakes from the siding, and a small, decorative floral piece hangs at an angle on one of the porch beams.
I’m still staring at the crack in one of the stairs leading to the front door when Hayes pops my door open, making me jump. If he notices my overreaction, he doesn’t say anything, moving to Charlie’s door next. He pops it open and starts tugging at her seat.
When it doesn’t budge, he pulls back. “I’m not sure how you work that thing.”
“It’s this button.” I lean past him and press the button that detaches the car seat from the base.
“Right.” He clears his throat, making room for me to pull her out of the car while he grabs our bags.
His eyes dart back and forth from our suitcases to Charlie, and it hits me just how much my uncle took from him. It’s more than time he’ll never get back. Hayes doesn’t know what she needs or when, how much formula she drinks, or something simple as how to work her car seat.
She’s a stranger to him, and it’s my uncle’s fault.
Or is it mine?
I’m the one who didn’t try to escape sooner.
Guilt gnaws at me as my gaze drops to the ground. “So, this is your house?”
The wooden stairs creak beneath his boots. “It was my father’s. It was passed on to me after he died, but I don’t live here.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” Stepping inside, I’m met with outdated, dusty furniture.
“Don’t be. He deserved it.”
My eyebrows pinch, but he doesn’t elaborate. Clearly, Hayes was not close with his father, and the stiffness in his shoulders tells me now isn’t the time to ask him why.
I look around, noting that there’s no sense of Hayes in this house. Pictures have been removed from the frames, and the surfaces are bare. Wallpaper is peeling. The furniture is outdated—the style is at least a few decades old.
It’s more of a mausoleum than a home.
“I never stay here,” he says when he catches me staring at the dusty living room. “Sorry it’s a mess.”
“It’s fine.”
After all, anything is better than the cage I’ve spent the past ten months locked up in. Opulence means nothing when it’s masking a prison. I’ll take dust and old furniture over that nightmare any day.
Charlie wiggles as I lift her out of her car seat, and she immediately spits out her pacifier, searching for her bottle.
“I can go in the other room if you want privacy feeding her,” Hayes offers, watching her squirm.
“It’s okay, she drinks formula. I tried breastfeeding, but she wouldn’t latch on, and I wasn’t producing enough milk.
Between her colic and my blocked ducts, we really struggled those first four weeks.
She was losing weight and supplementing turned into a full-time thing…
” I stop myself, realizing I’m rambling about breastfeeding struggles.
“Sorry, you probably don’t want to know all that. ”
His ridiculously beautiful eyes still make me nervous to the point that I can’t stop talking.
“Hey.” He walks over, lifting my chin with the gentlest touch. “I do want to hear about it. I’m not going to lie and tell you I know what I’m doing with any of this, because I don’t. But I’m willing to learn. For you and for her. And the only way I’m going to do that is to hear about everything.”
I swallow hard as he pulls his hand back, and I believe he actually means it. “Okay… Well, breastfeeding didn’t work for me, and I know people say that it’s what’s best for the baby, but Charlie started losing too much weight, so I switched.”
“As long as she’s eating now, that’s all that matters.”
No judgment. No questioning me.
Unlike my uncle, who said I was a failure of a mother who couldn’t even properly care for my own child.
Should have taken care of this problem before it got to this, is what he said. As if it were his choice, not mine. As if my body is simply an extension of his possessions to bargain, sell, or do with as he pleases.
Tears sting my eyes, so I look away before he can catch me crying. I swear my hormones are even worse now than they were when I was pregnant.
Thankfully, Hayes is unbothered by my quick change of mood.
He digs into the diaper bag for bottles, and he follows my directions on which ones have purified water and how to mix the formula for me.
My heart clenches when he screws on the top and smiles, proud to have done something for his daughter.
“Thank you.” It comes out raw as he hands me the bottle.
Charlie is chewing her fingers until I tap her lips, and she frantically latches on. She settles, gripping my hand as her big, beautiful eyes stare up at me.
Hayes steps closer, his breath catching. “She has green eyes.”
“She has your eyes.” I rock her. “I love those sounds she makes when she’s eating.”
Hayes hums, not taking his eyes off her. He’s stepped closer but still keeps a foot of distance between us.
This is so different from the night we spent together. The comfortable familiarity still exists, even as we try to figure out this new situation. We’re walking on eggshells, but I’m not the least bit nervous with his presence.
I wasn’t sure if I remembered him right after all these months. Looking up at him now, he’s exactly as I remembered him.
Wild.
Exciting.
Chaotic.
He’s a man who grabs life and lives it to the fullest. It’s exhilarating.
I would lie in bed at night and hold onto that feeling of being around him.
I’d remind myself what it was like to embrace life instead of fearing it.
I’d imagine his green eyes lighting up when he watched me experience something new.
Like he wanted to show me the world, not shield me from it. Like I meant something to him.
Those same intense eyes watch our daughter now. He just met her, and he already looks at her like she’s the center of his world.
Hayes might hate me for running out on him on New Year’s. Or for not finding a way to tell him about Charlie sooner. But he cares about Charlie. He’ll protect her, no matter what he thinks of me.
His phone rings, cutting through the moment, and he steps away to answer the call.
I give him his space, staying in the kitchen and feeding Charlie. Like the rest of the house, the kitchen is outdated. The stove is dull and rusted, caked in old splatters of food. One corner of the counter is chipped.
It’s odd that he keeps the house if he’s just going to let it sit abandoned.
“I need to go take care of something.” Hayes walks back into the kitchen. “The room at the top of the stairs was cleaned last week because people occasionally crash here, so there’s fresh sheets if you’re tired.”
My eyebrows scrunch as I look up at him. “Are you going into the city?”
“Don’t know yet. Won’t know until I meet up with the guys.”
“My uncle probably knows where I am by now.” Which means Hayes isn’t safe.
“He does,” Hayes confirms, and my stomach sinks. “But don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere alone. I’ll be with my brothers, and we’ve got each other’s backs.”
“Will you be back?” I try to bury the worry in my voice but fail. “Or do you stay at the clubhouse? I feel bad we’re taking up your space.”
“Don’t.” He shakes his head. “And yeah, usually I crash at the clubhouse, but I’ll be back here to check on you two when I’m done. Try not to get into too much trouble while I’m gone, freckles.”
That nickname.
That smile—small and devious.
It lightens a weight from my shoulders. There’s something about him that puts me at ease, even in a situation like this.
Hayes turns to leave, but I stop him at the last second. “Please be safe.”
He glances over his shoulder with an unreadable expression on his face.
“Or, as safe as you can be. I hate to think what might happen because of what I’ve done.”
“I’ll be back, Emery. I promise. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
I wish that were true with my whole heart.