There was no other way to explain it. Uncle Jack, Uncle Chaz, Uncle George, Uncle Ox, even Razor. They had always been my honorary uncles. They were old, yeah, but still s
cary as hell to the younger generation. I was one of the few outside of the Club who called them Uncle. They loved me just as much as they did Raven.
They must have found out I was pregnant and were forcing Jet to marry me. Those men wouldn’t be happy with Jet just making me his ol’ lady. They would want him to wife me. The look on Jet’s face right then told me all I needed to know. The laugh that bubbled up right then held very little humor and was full of all the hurt I wanted to hide from him—and myself.
“Figures,” I muttered to myself and shook my head at the man standing before me. “Let’s get this straight right now, Jet. Any chance that I wanted to marry you flew out the window about six weeks ago. Right now, I can’t even look at you. I don’t know how you’re still the MC’s president.” Pissed off to my very soul, I got into the Jeep and slammed the door. Starting the engine, I rolled down the window to glare at him. “I think you’ve left your balls in Bubbles’ mouth, babe. Might want to go find them.”
~*~
I was still mad when I pulled into my driveway. Mad didn’t begin to express what I was feeling right at that moment. I was so pissed off I was shaking, but I was hurt to my core too. Jet had finally cracked something deep inside of me and I knew if I didn’t stop it soon I’d end up in a broken pile after all.
Blinking back tears, I grabbed my backpack from the passenger seat and headed inside.
The first thing that should have alerted me that something was off was that Toby wasn’t barking. He wasn’t waiting for me at the door to jump up on me and give me slobbery kisses. The huge dog had been a gift from Jet the year before and it had been soon after that when our affair had started. But I was so distracted from the pain in my heart and the jumbled, angry mess that was my head that I didn’t notice.
Tossing my bag toward the couch in the living room, I brushed the rest of my tears away and turned for the kitchen. I wanted a shot of something strong that would numb me up really good, but I couldn’t because of the baby. I pulled a bottle of water from the fridge instead of the bottle of tequila that my mom kept in the freezer. Taking my water, I went down the hall to my room.
As soon as I opened the door, I realized that I should have been paying better attention. My heart stopped as I saw Toby lying on my bed, with duct tape keeping his mouth shut and his legs tied together. He let out a soft whimper that stabbed at my heart it sounded so pitiful. With his next breath, he released a vicious growl, alerting me to the fact that we weren’t alone in the room.
A cold laugh that sent chills down my spine came from the direction of my window and it felt like I was moving in slow motion as I turned my head and met the evil gaze of Westcliffe.
“Hello, sweet Felicity.”
Chapter One
Felicity
Two Years Later
I gasped as I opened my eyes and quickly glanced around at my surroundings. My hands, like they always tended to do when I first awoke each morning, went straight to my stomach. Feeling how flat it was only caused my heart to ache as well as pound against my ribs. Fighting back tears, I pushed my tangled hair out of my face and tossed my legs over the side of the bed.
Head in my hands, I took several deep breaths to calm my racing heart as I pushed back the dreams I’d had yet again. They were the same every night. The same beginning. The same tragic ending. Some nights I wasn’t even sure if it was a dream, or if I was just lying in bed with my eyes closed, remembering. The dream was so close to the reality of my past that I couldn’t be sure sometimes. As drained as I felt most of the time, maybe I hadn’t been sleeping after all.
“Felicity?”
I lifted my head and found Nik Armstrong standing in the narrow doorway of the sleeping area. After spotting him there, I turned my gaze to the two other beds across from my own. Mia wasn’t in her bed and I had an instant shot of fear before I heard her sweet little voice from the front of the bus along with her baby brother’s gurgles of laughter.
“Are you hungry?” Nik asked in a quiet tone, as if he knew what nightmare was replaying in my head and was experiencing the same thing.
Mia not in her bed. Mia taken by some faceless woman with a vendetta against her mother. Mia with blood that wasn’t her own soaking her clothes as Emmie Armstrong handed her sobbing daughter over to her child’s shaking father before racing off to the hospital to check on the woman who had saved her child.
“Not really,” I muttered and reached for the hairband on the small shelf above my pillow so I could pull my short red hair up into a knot. Food hadn’t had any appeal the last few days. Not since I’d been woken up to Natalie Stevenson pounding on the tour bus’s door and discovered that Mia had snuck out while I’d been asleep.
The guilt was choking me, making nausea roil my stomach. No one had said anything, not with words or even with a look, that they blamed me. They didn’t have to. I blamed myself enough for them all. I was Mia and her brother Jagger’s nanny. It was my job to care for them, watch over them, love and protect them when their parents were working. I hadn’t done a very good job of it though.
I hadn’t heard Mia as she’d snuck out of the bus, but I should have anticipated it. After the fit she’d thrown earlier that night, wanting to watch her father perform at the rock festival that was one of the last stops on Demon’s Wings summer tour, I should have known that she wouldn’t just go to sleep. The little girl was sweet and sassy, but she was also stubborn to a fault. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep when I knew she was just lying in her bunk, pretending to be asleep. I shouldn’t have…
“How about coffee?” Nik’s voice broke me out of my thoughts with a small smile. That smile was all he could seem to muster in the last few days. With Emmie still at the hospital and Mia still lost in the nightmare of nearly being taken, I was surprised Nik could find the will to smile at all.
The sound of deep voices from the front of the bus let me know that the other members of Demon’s Wings had arrived, so I nodded. “I’ll be out in a few,” I assured him as I stood and headed toward the small bathroom.
A few minutes later I entered the living room/kitchenette of the tour bus that we’d called home for the last fourteen weeks. Demon’s Wings was doing their USA tour with OtherWorld and I’d gotten to see most of the country in just a few weeks. It had been fun, but now I was ready to take the two kids that I’d come to love as my own and hide in their house back in Malibu.
The small living room was crowded with huge men that would have had any woman’s panties melting with just a smile. Three of the four men’s wives were sitting on the long couch. One with baby Jagger on her lap as she made him laugh while another held Mia close to her very pregnant belly, rubbing soothing circles on her back. Three toddlers were playing with their toys in front of the three women, each of them seeming oblivious to the tension in the air.
“I’m going to the hospital,” Jesse Thornton, the drummer in the band, announced as he swallowed a huge gulp of the strong coffee he’d become my hero for inventing. Without his coffee I would have been a walking corpse. “She might think she needs to take care of everything with Gabriella, but she’s needed here more.”
“Don’t gang up on her,” Layla Thornton advised her husband. “She’s got to be hurting right now, and having all four of you showing up will only make her feel like she’s being backed into a corner.”