It Happens (Bear Bottom Guardians MC 6)

The boy that didn’t miss a single second letting me know how much he disliked me.

A sniffle had me turning to see my mother staring at me with tears in her eyes. My father had his arm wrapped solidly around my mother’s shoulders, and he was staring at the casket I was now standing in front of.

I stared at the beautiful bouquet of roses that sat atop her coffin lid and felt my heart start to race.

Not because of my newfound heart problem this time, but because I could feel Ezekiel walking up beside me and standing there next to me.

He didn’t say a word, and neither did I.

We didn’t really have to.

Not anymore, anyway.

I knew without him saying what he was thinking.

He didn’t like me. I didn’t like him.

He hated me because Annmarie died, and I hated him because Eitan had.

Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, we’d been standing in the exact right spot.

When the lightning had struck, Ezekiel had done the unthinkable. He’d grabbed me because I was closer to him and had allowed Eitan to grab Annmarie.

That hadn’t worked out nearly as well as they’d planned it.

They were both dead now, weren’t they?

“This is your fault, you know,” Zee whispered, sounding broken.

I turned my head toward him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. In addition, I have no idea why you would think that.”

“The only reason we were all out there was because we were following you,” he growled.

I gave him the side eye. “I have no clue why you were following me. I was going home. If you want to get technical, the only reason we were all standing there in the freakin’ rain was because of you. It didn’t have to actually be done in the rain, under that big pine.”

He scoffed at my words, and it took everything inside of me not to rear back and punch him straight in the face.

That stupid, pretty, looks nothing like Eitan face.

Eitan and Ezekiel McGrew, sons of Gordon McGrew, who was also the president of the Arkansas chapter of the Dixie Wardens MC, were not replicas of him. Well, one was. Eitan. Ezekiel was not. He was fair to Gordon and Eitan’s dark. Ezekiel had blond hair and red scruff when he didn’t shave, whereas Eitan and Gordon were dark-haired.

Zee burned the moment he was in the sunlight whereas Eitan and Gordon would turn a pretty shade of tan.

Zee was the artist and Eitan and Gordon were the brutes.

Which, I supposed, had been part of the problem. Eitan, though I loved him, was much too hard on me and everyone around him. He was firm, unforgiving, and controlling.

That’d been why I’d left. Why I’d decided that maybe Eitan wasn’t the man that I thought he was. There was only so much ‘why can’t you be like your sister’ that I could take before I broke.

“Go to hell, Zee,” I said under my breath.

Leaving the flower I was holding on the coffin, I didn’t look back.Chapter 1Everything will be okay in the end. If not, there’s always beer.

-Zee’s secret thoughts

Zee

Sixteen years later

Today was my thirty-fourth birthday, and there were probably about a million people in this world that I could see. Yet I had to see him.

Baron Joy, the firefighter that had stolen my girlfriend of almost three years. The man that Zuri had chosen over me.

See, here’s the thing.

In the beginning, I would’ve let it go.

Did it suck? Yes.

Did it piss me off that she’d cheated instead of just telling me she was upset with how much I worked? Yes.

But, I was an adult. I was able to make grown-up decisions despite being hurt.

Yet, neither one of them had informed me of any involvement.

I’d taken Zuri to a Christmas party with me to the fire station last year. During the gift exchange, I’d planned on asking Zuri to move in with me. Except Baron Joy, also known as BJ by the fire department, had happened.

I hadn’t given much thought to Zuri disappearing the moment we’d arrived. She was a popular woman, and the firefighter wives had loved her to death. She’d gotten along well with all of the women, and even more, she’d fit in despite being new to a town that was so tight-knit that sometimes it was hard to tell your neighbor from your family member.

It was only after an hour or so of not seeing her that I decided to go look for her. And I’d found her all right. In the part of the station that the local ambulance service used as their living quarters while they were on shift.

There I’d walked in on them not only kissing, hugging, and fucking, but I’d also walked in on a discussion between the two of them that consisted of Baron telling Zuri he loved her, and Zuri saying it back.