His Property (Iron Bandits MC)

“We never—” I started, but he cut me off.

“I know, I know you say that, and you believe that, and maybe it’s true. But with a baby in the picture, you can’t know that for sure. Keith would have made damn sure to be in that boy’s life, you gotta know that. And anything might have happened. So you can’t say for certain that nothing would have ever developed between you.

“Now, since that’s not a possibility, I’m here. I’m here to be the dad that Keith can’t be to Peter. I don’t care if he calls me ‘Dad’ or ‘Uncle Jack’—just being honest here—but I will be in that boy’s life, all the way through. So things between us…we do this marriage thing, and I know you only want the six months and then you want to move along, and I get that. You don’t know me, I don’t know you. Well, barely. We’re just getting to know each other. But the sex—which, damn, babe, you know how great that was, between us. But we can’t do that again. Not now. It would mess things up too much for later, when you go.”

“Right.” I really just felt like a wet noodle now. “But Jack, you agree, right? That the six-month thing, that’s for you, too. The marriage, it’s only for the trust fund. It’s super generous of you to even agree to it—I mean, what good is it to you? It doesn’t serve you at all. So the six-month out, that’s for you, too. It’s not just about me. It’s for you.”

“Right.” And once again, we held each other’s eyes, silently acknowledging the ramifications and implications and promises of these past several minutes. It felt heavy and real. My body, which was still in raging hormonal lust for this amazingly wonderful and super hot man, was screaming at me in rage over the unfairness of it all, but this was the wisest course. I knew it, and Jack knew it. We would just have to train our bodies to know it, too.

The best I could hope for now was that Jack would begin to show some really disgusting bachelor habits that would totally turn me off.

Like walking around naked… ugh, turn-on. No.

Like not showering right after a workout, and walking around sweaty and....another turn-on. No.

Like bringing women home from the MC parties or bars…Jealousy-trigger, much? Yes. Turn-off? No.

Crap.

I was so screwed.

Chapter 13

Jack

“You made me do it once. I’ll do it again and again. For you. For us. Forever.”

I had read the note over and over so many times, I had it memorized. But I didn’t have it figured out.

I’m not sure why I hadn’t shown it to Ellie yet, or even told her about it. We’d had so much else going on, and that night when the rock got thrown, I had figured that we’d rocked each other’s worlds enough.

Speaking of…I started to get hard again, just remembering how incredible the sex was with her.

But we weren’t doing that anymore. Fuck. These six months were going to drag their asses by, second by tick-tocking second.

We now were down to just one day before the wedding. Life had whipped up around us over the past several days, and my MC brethren and their old ladies were proving their weight in gold.

Keith had also been a member of the club, and everyone understood what Peter’s appearance meant to me. The old ladies were now constantly bombarding me with hugs and gifts and soft looks, and the guys were beating me up with backslaps. Add to that, I was getting more than my share of cigars, accompanied with anecdotes of mistakes with babies. Life had definitely gone corkscrew.

Ellie was getting a dose of MC love from the old ladies as well, and I’m sure they were giving her more than she was used to—gifts and casseroles and baby supplies and what-have-you. The house was filled with boxes, tissue papers, bags, and baby stuff. Our lives had been blown into hurricane insta-family, and I can’t say that either one of us was completely comfortable with it.

Add to that, the wedding—which we weren’t talking about with the MC, but we still had to go and get the paperwork and blood tests and all the civil government crap sorted out. Thank fuck her grandmother hadn’t included a clause requiring a church wedding.

The past couple days had gotten a little weird with Ellie, though. She wasn’t talking to me much, seemed like she was trying to keep a distance. Pulling on her sleeve a lot, she seemed skittish and jittery. I figured it was just the stress of everything going down.

Hell, to be honest, I wasn’t talking much to her, either. It was like the less we spent time together, the less we had to deal with putting the kibosh on our physical attraction—which seemed not to be going away anytime soon. I couldn’t be around her—hell, I couldn’t even think about her—without wanting her. So, for the next six months, it looked like avoidance would be our mutual go-to modus operandi.