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That wasn’t even a question.
“Will look for a house mouse in the meantime.”
“A house mouse,” she muttered. A young girl without any parenting skills. Most likely someone irresponsible who only would agree to be Cage’s house mouse to get closer to the club.
A foot in the door.
Maybe even her ass in his bed.
She remembered what a house mouse was. One had lived with them for a short while to help around the house and to take care of Jemma when she was a baby. Jemma had been too young to remember her well, but Judge told her later that Trixie had knifed her after finding her in their bed with Ox. Not enough to kill her, but enough to scar her face so “no other man would ever want her.”
Judge had no idea what happened to her after that. Their parents never talked about it, of course.
“Yeah, like Saylor. She does good with Daisy.”
“Daisy isn’t an infant.” A teenager shouldn’t raise a child. They were only children themselves.
“Jem... The way I’m hurtin’, it’ll kill me right now, but if I gotta, I’ll get down on my fuckin’ knees and beg.”
She ripped her gaze from him and glanced around the trailer. Anything to avoid the desperation in his eyes.
She spotted the stuffed monkey on the couch and squeezed her eyes shut.
“Jem, please...”
She opened them. She would regret this...
“Okay.”
Chapter Eight
Jemma blinked her eyes open. Like a cold glass of water to the face, it hit her where she was.
The trailer.
She had left Cage and Dyna yesterday and went out for a couple of drinks at Crazy Pete’s to clear her mind. While there, she chatted with Dodge, Trip and Stella for a while. Actually, Dodge flirted with her for most of the night and she flirted back to try to scrape Cage out of her head.
That weirdness.
Whatever it was.
It had to be because she had a soft spot for men who were good fathers. Since she’d had such a shitty one.
That had to be it. Nothing more.
Cage had been thrown a hard ball and maybe, just maybe, she could help him knock this fatherhood stuff out of the park.
Stella and Trip didn’t talk about the Fury’s past with her, but instead, the club’s future and what they hoped to achieve.
Family and financial security were two main goals.
One thing in their favor was the club’s president and his ol’ lady were strong people apart and even more powerful together. If anyone could make the club successful, it would be those two. However, they were trying to sell it to the wrong person, because she wasn’t buying it.
While it sounded good on the surface, Jemma had a hard time not looking back at the past. She only hoped they weren’t hitching their star on a bunch of false hope.
Ozzy had also stopped in—with some woman hanging all over him—to talk to Trip for a bit. Then he—and the girl stuck to him like glue-paper—left to go drink at The Barn. Jemma didn’t feel comfortable doing the same since she wasn’t a part of the club.
Ozzy didn’t remember her, but then he was barely eighteen when the Fury detonated from the inside out. He mentioned he lied about his age when he became a prospect. And what seventeen-year-old boy remembered a five-year-old girl who had the perfect hiding spot at the warehouse when her mother would drag her there?
Jemma had hated the yelling and fighting, the noise, the smell, everything about being around the club and its members. At the time she didn’t know better, but now she knew what went on. The violence, the drinking, the drugs, the shakedowns, the gang bangs, the rapes, and treating women like shit. And that wasn’t everything.
All of it, now that she understood what it was, left a bitter taste in her mouth.
When she asked Trixie once why a woman had been forced to her knees, even though she cried and begged to be let go, her mother told her to keep her mouth shut and mind her own business. It didn’t concern her.
So, she’d hide in her secret spot with Annie, the dirty doll one of her father’s “brothers” had given her, but not until she agreed to pretend he was Santa and sit on his lap. She didn’t stay there long because he held her too tightly and his lap wasn’t comfortable. He had smelled and breathed funny, too.
She and Annie would have pretend tea parties and sleepovers. Jemma would tell her doll all kinds of stories and sing songs to her just to drown out what went on outside her secret hideaway. Eventually, she’d fall asleep and Judd would come find her and carry her home.
When she asked her brother why some women who visited the warehouse laughed and some cried, Judd wouldn’t explain it. He’d simply say, “I don’t know.”
