“More or less,” I agreed. “I knew she was connected to the MC, but I also knew I wouldn’t be getting anything out of her. Colt didn’t tell her anything about the club, and I wasn’t really trying that hard to get information on you guys anyway.”
“Why not? You got daddy issues?” Matt asked scornfully.
I turned my head until I met his metallic-blue eyes. The loss of his brother had taken its toll on the younger Reid. I could see the wariness etched into every line on his face. Life had dealt him a shitty hand lately, but at least he had people who loved him standing behind him. I was kind of jealous of that. “I hate Calvin Samson just as much as any of you. If he hadn’t been holding my mother’s well-being over my head, I never would have come here in the first damn place.”
“What’s your mother got to do with any of this?” Spider asked, still so soothingly calm it made me feel weak, because I knew good and well that he could strike at any moment and destroy me. Maybe I should have just let him. Gotten it over with so I could be at peace in whatever reality came after death.
My heart ached at the thought of my mother, wasting away in a nursing home a little more with each passing day. The experimental drugs were helping, but they could only do so much at this late stage of her disease. “My mother has Alzheimer’s. Calvin pays for her nursing home bills and the drugs that increase her number of good days. If I didn’t do what he wanted, he was going to stop all of it.”
“What a jackass,” Matt muttered, sounding the slightest bit empathic.
“When he gave me the ultimatum to give the mayor and DA every last detail of what I knew about the MC, I realized it was time to figure out a Plan B. So yeah, I traded Calvin’s secrets for the cash to take care of my mother.” I nodded at where the flash drive was sticking out of a laptop on the desk. “You know the rest if you’ve listened to all those files
.”
“How do we know that’s everything you told them?” Hawk questioned in a hard voice. “Maybe you recorded this and then turned around and gave them shit on us.”
“Yeah, that totally could have happened.” I met his gaze without flinching. “But it didn’t. I wouldn’t do that to Quinn.”
“And now we’re just supposed to trust you?” Hawk shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“I have no reason to lie. But more than that, I didn’t have anything to tell anyone. Colt didn’t let a single thing slip about club business, and I wasn’t trying to find out anything. If I really wanted to get shit on you, all I had to do was fuck around with any of at least six different brothers.” I lifted my gaze, signaling the ones I knew for a fact were loose-lipped. They were the ones who came into Paradise City often, and after one drink and a single lap dance, I could have gotten any of them to spill the beans on what the MC had been up to. It would have only taken one slip of the tongue and I could have gotten all the information needed for the Feds to invoke RICO. “Moose over there, he would spill every last secret the MC had if I flashed my tits at him long enough.”
There were a few grumbled agreements, and I lifted a brow at Hawk, daring him to call bullshit.
“Right, let’s talk about your meeting with Bubbles.” Bash was back in my face, his eyes twice as menacing now. “Tell me everything.”
I gulped hard, the sound seeming to echo in the suddenly deathly quiet room, but I gave him all the details I had on my father’s latest fuck buddy.
Chapter 4
Jos
Getting a call at one in the morning was never a good thing. The moment my cell started going off—with the generic Darth Vader tone I’d assigned to my dad’s number, announcing in that kind of creepy voice, “This is your father. This is your father. This is your father!”—I knew something was wrong.
For one, Dad called maybe once a month to check in on me, and I’d had the obligatory ten-minute chat the week before. He’d told me not to worry about him or Grandpa Chaz, which I rarely did. But something had been off—and not just his command for me not to worry about them.
Just from his voice, I’d known something was up. He’d seemed stressed. For another, he kept telling me he loved me. Dad telling me he loved me was about as frequent as his phone calls, and even then, it was usually casual. “Love you, Jos,” he would say as he hung up from every other call we’d ever had.
Not that last time, though.
“I love you, honey,” he said not two seconds after I answered.
“I love you, Joslyn. You’re the only good thing in my life.”
“I love you, sweetheart. You know that, right?” I knew then and there something was going on, and it wasn’t a good something. Three “I love yous” from him in less than as many minutes had my palms sweating, and I’d had to switch my phone to my other hand to dry it before I dropped the damn thing.
My voice had been choked when I’d repeated the words back to him, assuring him I knew he loved me. And I did. He might not have been around much my entire life, but that really wasn’t his fault. Mom hated that he was in the MC with his dad. When she married him, she thought she could change him. When she didn’t, when he picked the MC over her, she got pissed and moved to Oakland. Weeks later, she found out she was pregnant with me.
For the first twelve years of my life, I was carted back and forth to Creswell Springs, usually with my dad and grandpa on the back of one of their motorcycles. Damn, I’d loved my summers upstate with those two men. But that last year was the same summer I grew breasts, and when I came home excitedly telling my mother about the crush I’d developed on not one, but at least three boys, Mom put a quick stop to my visits with my dad and his MC.
If he wanted to see me, he would have to come to Oakland. Which sucked, because Dad’s job and his time with the MC were valuable. I didn’t get to see him as often as I wanted to after that, but he started the calls to check up on me once a month. I was just happy to get that from him and my grandpa.
Blindly, I reached for my phone, trying to get it before the noise woke up the baby sleeping in the crib on the other side of our shared bedroom. Heart racing, I lifted the phone to my ear as I sat up in bed. “Daddy?” I whisper-shouted, trying to catch my breath. My heart was racing so quickly, my body was shaking. Nausea churned in my stomach, and I fought the urge to gag as I heard the noise in the background.
“Jos.” My dad’s hoarse, emotional voice filled my ear, and my racing heart stopped so suddenly I nearly blacked out. “Sweetheart, I’ve got bad news. Grandpa… He’s gone, Jos.”
Grandpa.