Still dazed, I nodded. “Sure.”
He leaned forward and pressed a warm kiss to my forehead before heading out the door. Still feeling a little overwhelmed, I watched the six-foot-four wall of muscle climb on his bike and take off into the early morning with a flick of his wrist and a loud roar down the road.
That man. He was something. He was strong and capable. And oh so irresistible.
He was also the father of my baby.
The baby he still knew nothing about.
CALEB
I rode back to the clubhouse with Honey on my mind. I wanted to help her. The Kings had a lot of friends, and there wasn’t a hell of a lot that went down in this town that we didn’t know about. Outside of the club, we had a network of alliances and people who stood firmly in our camp. People who would do what we wanted. People who would tell us what we needed to know. From hookers and business owners, to town councilors, members of criminal syndicates, government employees, even a mayor. It’s what helped to keep the Kings of Mayhem the biggest and most powerful club in the south.
Finding Honey’s dick roommate—sorry, ex-roommate—wasn’t going to be a problem. What would be difficult would be holding myself back from knocking her lights out. I didn’t touch women. But I hated thieves. Scumbag low-lifes who took from others because they couldn’t be fucked working for it. And this Amy sounded like a real low-life flea. But for me, like my brothers, violence against women was never an option. I would never raise my hand to one. I was raised to treat women with respect, and as equals. In my home and in my club, if you hit a woman, you should expect her to hit you back. The Kings of Mayhem married queens. Strong, independent women who fought back. And as men, we lived the philosophies of my grandfather, Hutch Calley, the man who started it all back in the sixties. You didn’t hit women. And we didn’t tolerate men who did.
I remembered an incident when I was just a kid, when our neighbor, Jackie Parrish, laid a fist into his wife’s cheek at a club barbecue. The fallout afterwards had been massive. Sure, not much happened on the surface. But behind the scenes things were put in place, eyes were set on Jackie, and I overheard my dad telling Jackie to cool it, to get some help or lose his patch. He went easy on him because Jackie’s son had just died of leukemia, but if his wife showed up with any more bruises, he told him he was out. And when you got thrown out of the club, it hurt. A lot.
My daddy, Garrett Calley, had been a mean sonofabitch. He’d done bad things. Bad things. Lied to people. Hurt people. But he never once raised his hand to my mom—which was good for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I know my mom would’ve shot him if he did.
When I pulled into the clubhouse parking lot, I parked my bike next to the barbecue tables and shoved my sunglasses into my t-shirt. Walking toward the entrance, a gorgeous blonde in a tight pink top and a barely there denim skirt came toward me, her glossy lips giving me a bad-girl smile as she walked past in her high-heels and legs that went on forever.
“Hey, baby,” she cooed.
Her name was Tiffani. She was a club girl. She liked MC cock. And for the last few months she had been chasing mine. But I hadn’t been down that well-traveled road.
“Hey, Tiff. How you doing, darlin’? You ain’t misbehaving now, are you, sweetheart?”
She paused to give me a wicked look. “If you’re offering, baby, you know I’m keen to misbehave with you.”
I grinned and shook my head. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m already late for official club business.”
That was a lie. The official club business I was talking about was a warm shower and a cup of coffee so strong it could restart the heart of a dead man.
“Well, I could always come back later, if you like,” she offered.
But I kept walking.
“You know where to find me!” she called out.
Inside the clubhouse, the cleanup was already underway. Red, our resident cook, was walking around with a garbage bag picking up beer bottles, ashtrays, and other litter, while a couple of our club girls were wiping down tables and mopping the polished concrete floor. When I saw Tiffani, she didn’t look like she’d been helping with the cleanup so I assumed she had been leaving someone’s bedroom. And when Hawke walked in eating cereal out of the box, and with a trail of hickeys up his neck, I was pretty sure whose bedroom it was.
“Hey, Caleb.” Behind the bar, Randy our one-armed barman, was pouring Candy, the naked girl who’d passed out at the end of the stripper pole, a cup of coffee. “You want one of these?”