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Back in the room, I click off the bedside lamp and slide between the cheap, pilled bedsheets.
And there I lie, waiting to fall asleep. With a churning stomach and a lump in my throat.
5
ROGUE
Istick around at the Viking for a couple hours after Aurora leaves the bar, trying to blank her out of my mind. But as much as I try, it doesn’t work.
My fucking wife.
Fuck her. Fuck anything she thinks she has to say to me. Fuck her for coming back here.
When she left town, she was supposed to stay the fuck gone. She’s got the rest of the goddamn world to live in. Ironwood is off-limits. Ironwood ismine.
I clench my jaw so goddamn tight I think I’m gonna grind my teeth into dust.
Impeccable timing, she has. Just like she always did.
Building this house on the site of the new clubhouse compound was supposed to be a good new beginning for me and for the MC. These days, the club is turning a good profit, between our legitimate businesses and our under-the-table shit. The original chapter of the Lords of Carnage up in Tanner Springs is doing great. And the club just started a new chapter down in Florida. Life is good.Mylife is good.
I should have known something would come around to fuck it all up for me.
Aurora. It’s a name that’s so engrained in my past, there was a time I couldn’t remember anything before knowing her. A name I would give anything never to hear again.
Rory,she calls herself now. I let out an irritated snort. Like by changing her name she could change what she is.Whoshe is. A fucking liar. A goddamn heartless bitch.
Axel takes off, since Eden’s due back home in about half an hour. With four of us left, Mal goes to the bar and grabs a deck of cards, and he, Rourke, Matthias and I start up a game of poker. Mal, of course, can’t let go of the news that I’m married, hard as I try to make him shut the hell up.
“Hey, you think your wife needs a job here in Ironwood?” he asks between hands. “We could use another waitress around here.”
“She ain’t working at the Viking,” I growl.
“Why the hell not? Dude, she’s hot. She’d be a big hit with the regulars.”
I rise halfway up in my seat. “I swear to God, Mal. You don’t shut the hell up about her, I’m gonna lay you out flat on this floor.”
“Okay, okay. Sheesh, what a grouch.” Mal snickers, but he changes the subject. The rest of the men know enough not to bring it back up. But I can see them casting glances at me, and I know what they’re thinkin’ about.
I barely pay enough attention to the game in front of me to avoid losing my shirt. My mind keeps flashing back to Aurora. How and when I met her. Met her for real, that is. We went to the same high school, but we didn’t exactly run in the same circles. I didn’t actually have a circle — unless you count a bunch of know-nothings I used to get high with behind the bus barn a circle.
Aurora, on the other hand, was part of Ironwood’s elite. The perfect little rich girl, she breathed rarefied air. She was the type who you’d expect to get all the homecoming crowns and “most popular” yearbook designations, because her daddy had more money than God.
Even back then, she was so beautiful it could hurt your eyes even to look at her. I never paid her much attention, though. Not until that summer after our sophomore year. I was sixteen, and that was the year my dad decided it was time for me to start working for him at his landscaping jobs.
Dad’s the reason I’m a landscaper now. He learned his profession when he worked the landscaping crew in prison. It was one of the only jobs inmates could get that was outside the fence, so he took it, and found he had an aptitude for it. When he got out, no businesses would hire him. So he started hiring himself out, for cash, to whoever would take a chance on him. He was good at what he did, so even though he was an ex-con, word got around about him. Over a period of years, business slowly but surely got better, until he was making a decent living at it. Enough to keep a roof over his head, and feed himself and his teenaged son, anyway.
Somehow, the word of mouth got as far as to get him an interview with a rich dude named Richard Wilkins. Wilkins owned one of the nicest mansions in town, and he needed someone to handle his landscaping, and to clean and maintain the pool. The grounds of the Wilkins property were large enough that the work was almost a full-time job for one person, so Dad hired me on at a hair over minimum wage to help him out. I had worked with him some before, but only to fill in sometimes when he needed it. I wasn’t too pumped about having my summer vacation eaten up, but the money kept me from bitching too much.
One of the first days I worked for Dad that summer, I was trimming some hedges along the back wall of the Wilkins property while Dad was mowing and edging the front yard. I had a cheap pair of earbuds shoved into my ears, listening to old thrash metal from the eighties. So I didn’t notice the girl come out of the back door of the mansion and settle into a lounge chair poolside.
It was only when I turned to go grab a swig from the big insulated ice water thermos we kept in my dad’s landscaping van that I saw her. She was a fucking vision of curves and legs packed into a tiny red bikini. Her golden hair was splayed out behind her head. Dark glasses perched on her pert nose hid whether her eyes were open or closed as she lay there, a vision for the taking.
I almost dropped my motherfucking trimmers.
I must have made some sort of noise, because her head tilted slightly toward me. The startle of her body and the round O of her pink lips a second later told me she had seen me for the first time. She sat up, abruptly, and her mouth started to move.
I yanked my earbuds out of my ear.
