His Property (Iron Bandits MC)

But finally—finally—I saw the site. Brian had a grey camo tent set up, a firepit built, and two camping recliner chairs set up. He had a cooler outside, a blanket spread out, and a dry-line hung for laundry. How long had he been here?

…Never mind. The thought had occurred, but I didn’t care about the answer. All that mattered was Peter, who I still did not see. I figured he had to be inside the tent, and as I approached it, I found this to be true.

Without looking behind me, I dove in without grace, but carefully enough so I wouldn’t trip over my baby if he was right there at the entrance flap.

He wasn’t. He was tucked up in a bunch of blankets, on his back, wedged in so he couldn’t go anywhere.

Well. At least Brian had had enough sense to secure him in one place, so he couldn’t roll around and hurt himself. That was something.

Peter’s color looked okay, but he had sweated through his onesie. This might be a bad sign, with regard to his heart. Or it could just be a natural outcome of more than a day spent in terrible conditions in a tent in southern Arizona. Hard to tell.

The smell in the tent was horrible, and I figured his diaper hadn’t been changed the whole time he had been away from me. My poor baby. I mentally cursed Brian in as many ways as my mind could come up with.

When Peter first saw me, I think I shocked him. He stopped crying for a minute, and just watched me with his big beautiful eyes. Then, assured that it was indeed his momma, he really let loose with the wails, as if to let me know how unhappy he was about my neglect. It made me want to cry, too. But I had a priorities list now, and crying was not on it.

First things first. I plucked a diaper, some wipes, and a fresh onesie from my bag—the ladies had packed it for me yesterday, and made sure I had it when I left the house in such a rush and without all my brain neurons firing. Thank God for the ladies!

Once Peter was clean, I took him outside with me and settled us on one of the camping chairs. Brian had waited outside—surely avoiding the odiferousness of the tent interior—and now watched me with greedy eyes. I did my best to ignore him.

With a blanket over my shoulder to shield his view, I settled Peter down and felt him latch on to a swollen nipple. My overly-swollen breasts were painfully ready to unload, and it was a great relief when Petey began to suckle. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. No more wailing, no more nasty diaper smell, and the promise of total relief of the mammaries to come. Peace, of a kind.

“Why are you covering yourself? I want to watch. I want to see.”

He was whining like a child. Seriously, dude?

“Brian, I don’t know if you are aware, but we are in the middle of the desert in southern Arizona. The sun is brutal, and Peter’s skin—not to mention my own—is not prepared for it. I need to cover us both up for safety.”

It was the first excuse that popped into my head, but it was also true, and it worked. Score one, for me.

“It’s okay. I’ll get to watch later. I can wait. We can make an occasion of it. Baby’s last meal! Ha ha ha!”

Fuck. I had to think of something, fast. No way would we be hanging around long enough for him to hurt my baby. This had just turned into a deadly stand-off.

I decided that the MC guys only had as long as it took me to finish feeding Peter to intervene. If they took any longer than that, I wasn’t going to wait. I was going to shoot Brian myself, with that gun Jack had hooked me up with. And I would do it without any hesitation.

Thank God for Jack, and that beautiful handgun.

Chapter 23

Jack

The whole time I’d been following Ellie on the trail, I had plenty of time to do some thinking.

I loved her. I wanted her—not just for the sex, which was obviously excellent. But more, everything about her blew me away. She was beautiful, smart, strong, funny, kind—an amazing woman and mother. I knew I would never meet another like her, not in this life. And I knew, in my heart, that she was mine.

Just like Peter was mine. He may have been born of my brother’s seed, but the way things had played out, there was no other man alive who could ever feel for that boy what I did. So he was mine, too.

It drove me crazy that Ellie was up there, ahead of me by only minutes, with that fucking psycho. I willed her to be smart—I really didn’t have to worry much about that, she was smart—so that we could end this awful day on a high note. A ton of scenarios flitted through my mind, and to each I conjured take-downs that ended with McAfee a bloody mess, and Ellie and Peter in my arms.