What they hadn’t discussed was her staying in Manning Grove. She guessed he was waiting to team up with Sig to help convince her.
He didn’t have to say it, she could feel it. He already acted as though she would settle in and stay. Even if that happened eventually, she had a daughter to think about and there was no way they could live in a studio apartment above a bar.
She and Maya would need to get their own place somewhere. Her daughter would need to go to school.
Syn also needed to have a serious conversation with her band members. Everything she decided would affect them, too. They’d been with her for years and she would never turn her back on them.
Even though she’d been singing ever since she could remember, it wasn’t until she started piano lessons that she discovered her intense love of music and how naturally it came to her. She was told she had an “ear” for it and a voice to make audiences sit up and pay attention.
Those piano lessons quickly stopped because they ended up being too expensive for her adoptive parents. But by then she’d learned the basics, including how to read music. It wasn’t until she hooked up with Eddie, Rex and Nico, a fledging band searching for a lead singer, that she learned to play guitar and drums. Nico had also taught her more about the keyboard than her piano teacher ever had.
Because they didn’t have enough money to do anything, in their downtime or in the skoolie while traveling between gigs, Syn absorbed everything her bandmates taught her. While on the road, she practiced constantly and became decent with every instrument packed away under the bus.
She owed them so much for that, too, and another reason why she owed them her loyalty.
She twisted under Dodge’s heavy arm to study the club colors tattooed onto his back, wondering if her brother had the same thing done to his.
To do something so permanently, Dodge had to be serious about belonging to the Fury. People didn’t mark their bodies like that for something that was a fleeting hobby.
It proved the club was a huge part of his life.
The MC was a huge part of Sig’s life, too. But then it turned out that Sig had a brother unrelated to Syn, the Fury’s very own president.
In one of their long phone conversations in the middle of the night, Dodge had told her the story about how he became a part of the club after his last stint in prison and also why Trip resurrected an MC that had previously been obliterated.
Trip’s reason for rebuilding wasn’t to revisit the past, but to fix its mistakes. To help and connect the people who were affected by those mistakes. To make something whole from all those broken pieces.
Syn understood that. She wanted that, too.
To fix and strengthen her relationship with Sig.
To get her daughter.
And to finally live her life the way she wanted to live it.
Even live that life with Dodge.
He seemed to want that, but she couldn’t wrap her head around why, since they hadn’t spent a lot of time together. At least not long enough to make any decisions about a possible “forever.”
It was way too soon for that, wasn’t it?
She slipped from under his arm and moved to straddle his waist. He had a nice back. Strong and lean. Though, it now bore scratches in several places.
If she pulled the sheet off from where it had caught on his ass, she’d find her scratches marking him there, too. If he rolled over, she’d see her handiwork on his chest and neck. Down his belly and over his hips.
His hellcat.
That was what he’d called her several times in the past two days.
My hellcat was what he’d whisper in her ear.
He made it clear she was his.
She belonged to him.
At first she thought it was just something he was saying, some sort of turn-on for him, then she realized he truly believed it.
He was claiming her. He wanted to totally possess her.
Well, if he was doing that, she was doing the same.
Dodge now belonged to her, too. He was hers.
She’d made many mistakes in her twenty-three years, she only hoped she wasn’t making another one with Dodge. The problem with mistakes was that you usually didn’t know you were making one until it was too late…
Like when she thought leaving her adoptive parents’ house and establishing her own would be a good thing. Instead, it backfired. It handed control of Maya over to her “parents” and took it away from Syn. Opposite of her intentions.
Now here she was again, letting Dodge take control.
Only this time if things went wrong, she hoped she’d have Sig and maybe even Trip at her back.
She leaned over and slowly traced each line and curve of his huge Fury tattoo with the tip of her tongue. The snoring stopped, his breathing changed and his muscles twitched along her path. When she was done, she planted a kiss in the middle of the club’s colors, right in the center of the skull.