“Let me think about it, okay?” I pleaded.
“Fine. Just don’t wait too long or you won’t have a choice.” That was the second warning I’d gotten in the same day not to wait too long, yet they needn’t have bothered. My dream the night before had shown an angry Nico. He’d been furious with me and thought I wasn’t planning to tell him. I knew what I needed to do.
“I promise.”
“You know he asks me about you every time he calls,” Ghost murmured as he turned a corner.
“What?” I whispered. My heart fluttered and tried to burst from my chest. I’d wanted to call him a million times, but I wasn’t sure how to talk to him without slipping up and giving away my condition.
“Don’t act surprised. The man is insane for you, but you should already know that if he knocked you up. That means the two of you were much more than friends. Honestly? I think your brother knows more than he’s willing to admit, even to himself. To do what he did, he had to have been insane,” Ghost said with a snort.
“Whatever,” I said, trying to sound unaffected.
“Now what the hell did your father want?”
“Same thing as always. Wants Angel to talk to him. We all know he wants Angel to heal him, but that’s never going to happen.” Everyone in the club knew our father was responsible for our mother’s death, but they didn’t know all the reasons Angel hated him, and they went back farther than that.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew that Angel asked the Royal Bastards to watch out for me when he left for the military. I was also pretty sure he threatened our father with them if he harmed me in any way. Which was why I didn’t understand why he didn’t think there was a possibility I could end up with one of them. Then again, I had put on a pretty good act for a couple of years.
He grunted as we stopped at the last light in town before taking the highway out to the clubhouse. I stared sightless out the window.
The light turned green, but we didn’t move. With a frown, I glanced at him. He was staring in the rearview mirror. When I glanced back, the only thing back there were some people outside a restaurant.
“Ghost? The light’s green.”
It took him a full second to look at the light and shake himself out of whatever the hell had grabbed him. He blinked rapidly, and we left town behind us.
“What were you looking at? Was someone following us?” I asked him. With my father’s surprise visit, it wasn’t an impossibility.
“No. Just thought I saw someone I knew.” His expression looked so lost, I wanted to comfort him, but I didn’t know how. He could be a prankster, but he was tight-lipped about his personal life. I guessed something bad had happened in his past, but he would never say much. At least not to me.
When he parked outside of the clubhouse, I gripped his arm. “Thank you for the ride today. I really can’t thank you enough.”
“No problem. You know I don’t mind.”
It had been hell to evade the prospect for my first appointment. I had pretended I had an appointment in the massage clinic that was in the same building. He’d waited out front when I told him I didn’t want him coming in the massage therapy place because it was weird.
I’d barely held my shit together on the way home. That first session had been rough.
Initially, I hadn’t wanted anyone to know I was going to counseling. To me it had been embarrassing to admit everyone had been right and that I’d fought it so long. Then I was afraid that if it didn’t work out, my brother would never let it lie again. He’d keep pestering me. I wanted to do this on my own before I told anyone.
Finally, I broke down and told Ghost, because my car hadn’t wanted to start and I needed a ride. He was the only one around unless I rode with the prospect, and that seemed… wrong, I guess. To be on the back of anyone’s bike but Nico’s didn’t seem right.
Anyway, Ghost had seen how emotional I was after my session, so he offered to take me each time because he was worried about me driving back like that.
“Can you do me another favor?” I asked him.
“Favors are racking up, doll. Not sure you’re ever going to be able to pay me back,” he said with a teasing grin.
Unable not to laugh, I playfully swatted his arm. “Knock it off. Can you see if you can find out when he’s coming home?”
There was no need to specify who “he” was.
Ghost gave me a lopsided smile. “Yeah, I can do that. No guarantees, but I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thanks,” I said, and we both got out of the car.
After being in the sun, the dim lighting inside my brother’s house was hard to adjust to. My brother was coming inside from the backyard, and Trace sat up on his shoulders.