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“Were you?”
“Good chance,” he murmured again.
“And now?”
He glanced up from the picture she held as if it was the last connection she had with her father and looked at her.
Really fucking looked at her.
Fuck.
It made sense now. Why the fuck didn’t he put two and two together long before now?
The man’s road name was Ham.
Her father’s last name was Graham.
He was a dumb motherfucker.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
What kind of fucking karma was being served right now?
Not to Shay, but to him.
How could the woman in his bed, the woman he was hoping would stick around, be the daughter of…
Him.
The fucking bastard who killed his mother.
The fucking bastard Ozzy killed in retribution.
Christ.
What a tangled motherfuckin’ web we weave…
Deception then.
Deception now.
Maybe always.
The fingers of the hand he still held against his chest curled and took a hold of his shirt. “How did my mother not know?”
Shit. He didn’t want to be the one to upset Shay by telling her her mother most likely knew, but he could hint at it so she didn’t think her father was deceiving both of them. That her parent’s secret was to protect Shay, not hurt her. “Who said she didn’t?”
“Then they both hid it very well.”
He gave her hand a squeeze. Even at thirty-eight, for her, the pain of the past still remained. “Sweetheart, back then it was typical for the Originals to have a family they shielded from the club, then a side piece he’d call his ol’ lady in the club. That’s old school biker shit. Especially the way the Fury was. If you had a family you wanted to protect, you kept that life separate. It wasn’t out of the ordinary.”
“Does that still happen?”
“Sure. In some clubs. Happened a lot when I was part of the Thirty-Eight Calibers.”
“Never heard of them.”
Of course she hadn’t. Her father might have been a biker, but she never lived the life. She wouldn’t know shit about other clubs. And, for fuck’s sake, he never would’ve heard of the Thirty-Eight Calibers, either, if he hadn’t been out there wandering like the nomad he was at the time. He’d come across them by accident. “Better that way. Bad fuckin’ news.”
“Were they what you’d call an outlaw club?”
“Yeah. One percenters. Ran drugs, guns, did all that shit.”
“Did the Fury?”
“Yeah. We did a lot of shit, too.” The Calibers were just as crooked as the original Fury.
“Did you ever hurt anyone?”
Christ. “Only when I had to.”
“So, no longer?”
He didn’t want to hide shit from her, but she was leaving him no choice.
“The Fury don’t run guns or drugs anymore. Don’t even sell them. Trip runs a tight fuckin’ ship. He don’t wanna lose the few members we got ‘cause they’re thrown back inside. That’ll weaken the club since it’s stronger with numbers.”
“Back inside,” she repeated. “Were you ever in jail?”
“Yeah. A few times. Short stints, luckily. Mostly for minor shit. ’Til that last time. Thirty-Eight Calibers were runnin’ guns for the mother club and I got caught up in that shit. Hate it inside, so once I got out, I hit the road to scrape that shit off me.” No reason to mention how his woman at the time was doing his club brothers while he was doing time. By then, she was strung the fuck out on smack and they were all passing her around like a fuck toy. Worse, she was letting them.
“So, you don’t do anything illegal now?”
They were going down a dangerous road. A route he didn’t want to take. “Shay…”
She slipped the hand free he had pinned under his, pushed the shoebox out of the way and got up on her knees to face him.
Her dark brown eyes held his.
At her age, she was far from innocent, but she had to be the most innocent woman he’d ever been with. By looking directly into her eyes he could see her insecure teenage self. It had left a mark that still remained. The same with the loss of her father.
She had been a child who grew up into a woman who let things deeply affect her. Both then and now.
“Just tell me,” she whispered, causing his chest to tighten.
That wasn’t going to happen. She might have spent the last two weeks in his bed but she was still an outsider. It didn’t matter that she was Ham’s daughter. She had zero loyalty to the club right now. And might never have it.
“We protect what’s fuckin’ ours. We protect our women, our children, our businesses. Our brotherhood. We do what we gotta do to get that done.”
She didn’t need to know details. Especially with all the shit that had gone down with the Shirleys in the past three years. Because he wanted to protect her, too.
“Just know all of us do our fuckin’ best to stay on this side of a fence topped with razor wire. That said, the fuck if we’ll let anyone destroy what we have here, what we’ve built. We also won’t let anyone take what belongs to us.”
