Hawk
I’m worried that I have to leave Gracie home alone as the time to meet with Bash and the Club draws near. I hate the thought of her all alone at my house all night long.
When Raven storms into the house looking pale with her eyes wild, I’m both relieved and hesitant to leave Gracie with her, but I have no other choice. “I have to do a few things,” I tell Gracie as I pull on my cut—a leather vest with angel wings inside of a diamond and a halo over the diamond. The wings are white while the halo looks like it was on fire. There are several patches on the front of my cut that show my position within the club, as well as a few other things that I really don’t want to explain to Gracie.
Like the patch with the black eight ball that has the number sixty-nine on it. Yeah, I don’t want her to know about me having sex with some random girl while my club watched. I’m positive she won’t like me once she learns what it means.
Gracie smiles up at me. That look of trust in her eyes sucks me in, and all I want to do is fall down on the couch beside her for the rest of the night. But I have to take care of this, have to make sure those fucking frat boys know not to mess with any female like that—and especially not my female …
Okay, what the fuck?! She isn’t my female. I have no business thinking of her like that. Gracie Morgan is too sweet, too innocent, and too fucking perfect for a fuck up like me. That doesn’t mean I don’t want her to be my female. Because, dammit, I want that girl like something fierce.
“Okay.” Gracie pulls the throw blanket I had placed over her lap earlier closer to her chest. “Be careful, okay?”
Unable to help myself, I trace a finger over one soft cheek. A soft blush fills her face, but she doesn’t look away. “I’m going to be late getting back. Don’t wait up. My room is yours as long as you need it. Promise me you’ll sleep there tonight.”
r /> “Are you sure? I can just sleep on the couch …”
“No. My bed. Okay?” My finger’s still on her cheek, and without thinking I let it trace down her slender neck. Gooseflesh pops up on her arms right before my very eyes, and my body stiffens in reaction to her response to my touch. “Raven is here, so let her know if you need anything.”
“Alright, Hawk,” she murmurs softly. “I’ll sleep in your bed.”
Reluctantly, I leave her sitting there on the couch and head out through the back door. Raven’s sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of Snapple Apple in front of her, but hasn’t so much as opened it yet. Beside the Snapple is a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. The vodka gives me pause and I stop to really look at her.
“What happened?” I demand when I see she’s on the verge of tears. Raven isn’t a crier. She rarely lets anything touch her emotionally. If she’s crying, then something heavy must have happened.
“Bash has a daughter,” she grits out, finally opening the Snapple and taking a big drink before placing it back on the table and reaching for the Grey Goose. She fills the Snapple to the top with the vodka before placing the lid back on and shaking. “She’s fucking three years old and I am just now finding out about her.”
I suck in a deep breath. Fuck! I didn’t know about Bash’s kid until a few weeks ago, when Jet had told me that he was turning everything over to Bash. We had a meeting on the whole fucking thing just the week before and told everyone that no one was supposed to say anything until Bash was ready to tell Raven himself. Looked like someone’s been running their mouth.
Now Raven is all kinds of twisted inside and I don’t have time to even hold her. Muttering a curse, I drop a kiss on top of her head. “We can talk about this later. I have to get going. Don’t do anything stupid, Rave. Go talk to Gracie. Call Flick. Don’t fucking shut yourself up in your room! Do you hear me?”
“Fuck off, Hawk.” She opens the Snapple-vodka mix and downs half of it in one gulp. “Go do what you have to do and leave me the fuck alone.”
“Call Flick. Now.” I toss the phone at her as I slam the door behind me.
Whoever had spilled the beans to Raven is now number one on my To-Be-Killed list. Because, yeah … I may have lied to Gracie earlier this morning. I have killed a few men in my time.
I arrive at the bar as the last of the sheep pile into someone’s car. I ignore their calls and go into the still crowded bar. Every member that isn’t already out on a run is present and accounted for except for the Originals. The old men aren’t going to be happy with what I’m planning, but I have Bash backing me so they can’t do anything about it.
The Originals promised the university bigwigs that we’d keep the peace with their students when they built the university twenty some years ago. As long as no one made trouble for Angel’s Halo, then the club wouldn’t cause trouble on university property. The frat house is technically their property, but my way of thinking is those fucking frat boys started it.
It doesn’t matter to me that it had only been two of those frat boys that tried to rape Gracie. No one helped her when she was screaming, so every one of those fuckers are guilty in my book.
That frat house is going to be nothing more than ash by dawn.
Chapter 14
Bash
Hawk comes into the bar looking more pissed than he’d been that morning. I figure he’s seen Raven and is gunning for me. Instead, he stands in the middle of the bar and waits until everybody else stops running their traps and faces him.
“Who told my sister?” he demands in a calm voice.
Calm voice plus wild eyes does not equal a stable Hannigan. Everyone tense. Colt comes from around the bar and whispers something in his brother’s ear, and Hawk turns that wild gaze on Moose. “You couldn’t keep your trap shut to your ol’ lady? Don’t you know by now that bitch can’t keep her mouth shut any more than she can her legs?”
I watch as Moose, a lifer that had gained a pot belly while losing his hair over the years, tenses. I could see in the older biker’s eyes that he wants to say something. Moose is smart though. He knows that to challenge Hawk on anything—especially anything that concerns Raven—will only leave him bloody and broken, if not dead.
“You keep that bitch out of my bar until I say she can come back, you feel me Moose?”