A Dream of Summer (Bleeding Angels MC Book 3) (19 page)

I take greedy gulps of air, trying to get as much oxygen in my lungs as I can. I feel like I’ve been drowning and have just come up to the surface. My neck is raw from Ryan’s hold on me. I move my hands up to try to touch the soreness, but I realize I’m still bound. I start to take in what’s going around me. I can hear the sound of cries and gunshots, but there’s too much smoke and mayhem for me to see clearly and I’m too disoriented from Ryan strangling me half to death.

It takes a few seconds for me to place what’s going on and then, with stark realization, I see that I’m in the middle of a shoot-out. I can feel the panic attack rising, but I squash it back down as firmly as I can. I can’t afford any weakness now. I pull at the ropes binding my wrists with my teeth. Jake had left them loose, so it only takes a few pulls for me to open them enough for me to slip my hands out.

I scramble to my feet, only ducking back down straight away when a bullet hits the ground where I’d been only a second ago. The Feds don’t seem to have realized that I’m in the middle of all of this. It strikes me that we’re on our own again.

I look ten feet ahead of me and see Jake and Ryan fighting. They’re both covered in dirt and bleeding, the red blood sticking the dirt to their faces and hands like crazy glue. I stand up again, making my way over to them, screaming at Ryan to get off of Jake, but before I walk five paces I fall to the ground, holding my shoulder and I hear another cry behind me. I’ve been hit. I look at the wound, and although there’s a lot of blood, it seems like the bullet just skimmed me. I hear a moan behind me and see one of the bikers slumped on the ground, a hole in his chest leaking blood. Whoever had taken the shot, they’d been aiming for him, not for me.

Jake must have seen me drop to the floor like a stone. “Aimee!” He screams my name in desperation, trying to reach me before Ryan tackles him to the ground.

But Jake’s cry has caught someone else’s attention. Scar turns and sees what’s playing out in the triangle of Ryan, Jake, and me. He can’t have missed that all Jake’s doing is trying to protect me.

“You son of a bitch!” Scar yells, and the disappointment that he seems to have in Jake is visible in his eyes. Jake seems to be gaining the upper hand and has started to pummel Ryan as fast as he can. “You fucking liar! You’re no son of mine!” Scar cries as he watches Jake brutalizing RyanJake turns around and looks at him in shock.

“Jake, look out!” I cry as Scar raises his gun and points it towards the son he had thought he had always wanted, the son that he thought was going to follow him in his footsteps. Suddenly I’m transported back years, watching the same man aim his gun at my father. I realize that I’m about to watch the same person that murdered my father, kill the only man I have and will ever love. But I’m powerless to stop Scar. He’s too far away, and there’s no way that I’ll get to him in time.

I see the minute movement in his fingers as Scar pulls the trigger and the gun recoils towards him. I scream, feeling like my heart is about to come out of my mouth as I wait for Jake to fall to the ground. But in the last possible moment Jake spins around and Ryan, seeing his advantage, advances on Jake to take him down. It’s not Jake’s body that the bullet connects with—it’s Ryan’s. There’s a grunt as he falls, the light leaving his eyes before he even hits the ground.

It takes both Jake and I a moment to process what’s just happened. We lock eyes with each other and it’s like we’re both trying to say as much as we can in that one look—how much we love each other, how much we need each other.

A sound like a dying animal comes from ahead of us and we both move as one to witness Scar’s shock at what he’s just done. He looks down at the body of his dead son and then at Jake. “I’m going to kill you.” His voice is practically a whisper, but its harshness makes it travel over the sound of the hail of bullets as if it were a shout.

He raises his gun again, pointing it towards Jake. Jake’s close enough now to reach out and touch my hand. “I love you, Aimee,” he tells me, and I can see in his eyes that he doesn’t know how we’re going to dodge this bullet. My eyes fill with tears. We’ve run out of options. We’ve reached the end of the road. “I love you too, Jake.” I barely manage to get the words out as I wait for the sound of the shot when Scar pulls the trigger. I lift my head to look at the man that is responsible for bringing so much death and destruction. That’s when the tide changes. I watch as Scar’s chest explodes, once, twice, three times, four… too many times to count.

Jake and I both stand still in complete and utter shock as we watch Scar’s body fall to the ground. He reaches his hand out towards Jake, just like my dad had done towards me as the life was drained out of him. But this time, no one runs towards him. Jake remains by my side, his hand gripping mine hard. Scar dies alone, his arms flung out. He lies in a pool of blood, spreading out from underneath him and he looks, for all the world, just like a Bleeding Angel.

In the seconds that follow, I see men dressed in black run out from the surrounding trees.

“Down! Get down on the ground! Now!” The shouts fill the air as the men in black point their rifles at the last few bikers and members of the dealers gang who are left standing. They drop their guns and fall to their knees, holding their hands up in surrender. It takes a moment for it to sink in. It’s over.

Jake pulls me towards him, holding me against his chest as I finally let the tears come. They pour out of my eyes in relief. We’ve done it. We’ve won.

I hold onto Aimee and I think she’s the only thing that’s keeping me standing. My whole body feels like it’s been bruised and battered, emotionally and physically. But it doesn’t matter. We’ve done it. We’ve won.

The Feds try to separate us, taking me as one of the members of the Angels, until Aimee manages to find Agent Warner and tell him that I’m not one of them. She’s right—I never was an Angel. We walk slowly over to one of the ambulances that has pulled up, and I softly touch Aimee’s neck where the bruises from Ryan’s strangle-hold are already starting to show.

“I’m fine.” She smiles at me, kissing my fingertips, and she’s the most beautiful thing that I’ve ever seen. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with. There’s no question, no second thoughts—she is the light of my life.

We walk a wide circle around Scar’s body. The CSI guys are already poking and prodding him, taking samples of whatever it is that they take samples of. The words that he’d said to me—they were something I had already imagined, but had never wanted to admit. I wasn’t blind to the physical similarities between us. It was hard not to see the ways that we looked alike. But it was harder to see any other way in which we
were
alike.

Aimee catches me staring at Scar’s lifeless form and a look of concern passes across her features. I squeeze her shoulder to reassure her. “It’s okay, Aimee. I’m fine. He was right,” I say, looking away from the body behind us and focusing on the ground in front. “I’m no son of his.”

“Are you scared?” Jake sits across from me in the coffee shop and I realize I’ve completely zoned out of what he was saying.

“Sorry? I was miles away.” I smile at him, drawing my heavy coat a little tighter around my shoulders. I wonder if I’m ever going to get used to this cold.

“Are you scared? Nervous about your first class?” Jake asks, reaching across the table for my hand and giving it a gentle squeeze.

“A little,” I admit. “But that isn’t what I was thinking about.” I look out of the window at the busy New Yorkers rushing about in the chill of the morning. Their heads are down and they move straight forward, not looking to the left or the right of them.

“Aimee, it’s your time. You deserve this.” Jake encourages me, assuming that I’m thinking about my mom who I’ve left behind in Painted Rock.

“
We
deserve this,” I correct him. “But it’s weird. I haven’t really gotten used to it yet. Not having something hanging over me, not being worried all the time. I feel like I’m missing something!” I laugh and take a sip of my foamy cappuccino, knowing how ridiculous what I’ve said sounds.

“I know what you mean.” Jake follows my gaze, looking out of the window. I can’t help studying his face. I know his profile as well as I know my own. He really is far too handsome for his own good. “It’s hard to believe we’re really here.”

It had only been less than a month since the shoot-out in the middle of the clearing. But with everything that had happened, it felt more like it had been years. I smile to myself as I remember my conversation with Agent Warner when he came to the studio to take my statement the day afterwards.

***

“Isn’t this the part where you deputize me or something and give me a gun?” I had asked. “I mean, without me you guys wouldn’t have gotten the Angels,” I pointed out, only partially joking.

“You mean without you almost getting yourself killed, we would have had a much neater operation—yeah you could look at it like that,” Agent Warner said, looking totally unamused.

“How did you guys get there so quickly, anyway?” I asked.

“Like I said, we’re stealthy,” Warner replied before he started the tape recorder.

He questioned me for the next four hours straight about everything that I knew about the Angels and everything I’d witnessed the night before. I had talked and talked and delved a little deeper into the mind of Ryan than I ever wanted to again. I caught Warner looking at me with interest as I gave him my insight on the profile of some of the bikers. He was due to question Elvis later that day—he was in the hospital but stable. I gave him a few suggestions for how to approach him and once Warner had finished with his questions he turned the recorder off and gave me an appreciative glance.

“You had pretty much the highest GPA in the state. You ever think about going to college?” Warner had asked, leaning back into the couch and loosening his tie. He was dressed in a suit that made him look like the Feds from every TV show you’ve ever seen. It was more appropriate than the trucker disguise I’d seen him in before.

“Only about every day for the past five years,” I’d joked. “But, with the Angels, going to college just wasn’t an option. Besides, I had to look after my mom.”

“You’ve taken a lot of Advanced Psych books out of the local library. Some past due.” Warner consulted his little notebook and I wondered how many of those scribbles in there were about me.

“You guys don’t do things by halves, do you?” I breathed out, still not quite able to come to terms with the fact that I was being spied on. “Yeah, I like psychology—if I ever went to college that would be my major.”

“Have you ever thought about a career in profiling? I think it’s something you’d enjoy, and you’d be damn good at it,” Warner says, as if it were a foregone conclusion. I wish I had his confidence in my abilities.

“Thanks, Warner, but where is all this going?” I may only be a kid in comparison to him, but I’ve been around long enough to know that something’s on his mind.

“Nowhere—just, you know, chatting,” Warner had said, getting up and collecting his tape recorder like that was the end of the conversation.

“You don’t chat,” I had pointed out, but he’d just given me a sly smile before he’d disappeared out the door.

***

Three days later I had an acceptance letter from NYU to study Psychology and enclosed was a note from Warner. I wondered if I was ever going to have any privacy again. He’d written that if I was still interested in profiling after college, he’d be in touch. They were always in need of people like me. I don’t bother to wonder how he’d know
when
to be in touch. The guy was stealth personified, after all. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world, but I figured we were due some good luck right around now.

Once my acceptance had arrived everything moved so quickly. Jake had been my first call and he’d told me that there was no way I wasn’t going to take my place on the course. He told me that his dad had been talking about setting up another body shop, to capitalize on their name, which was one of the best in the business. Now, with the Angels gone, Jake could fulfill that dream of his father’s. He would come to New York with me and set up a new shop there. It was going to be hard work, but after everything that he’d been through, it would seem like a breeze.

As I gaze at Jake’s profile, looking out onto the grim October morning, I wonder at how he seems to have taken it all in his stride. He’d told Sally what Scar had said before he died. She’d cried and apologized for lying to him, for keeping the secret. But Jake had told her that she didn’t have anything to apologize for—she’d told him the truth. Bill was his dad in every way that mattered, and there was no need for him to think any differently. It was one of the many reasons that I loved Jake. He’s the best person I know.

I think back to how proud my mom had been when I showed her the acceptance letter from NYU. She’d danced around the Summers’ kitchen and it was the happiest I’d seen her in such a long time, the sight had tugged on my heart-strings. “I’m glad my mom’s going to be staying with your family. I’d be worried about her if I knew she was going to be all on her own.” Jonah had managed to convince his Auntie B that with Jake gone, he’d need someone to take him to school when Sally was working. It didn’t take much persuading for my mother to agree. Jonah had become the apple of her eye and it was clear that she was going to spoil him rotten.

Back in the coffee shop, I catch sight of the time and realize if I don’t hustle, I’m going to be late for my first lecture. “I’ve got to go.” I spring up from my chair, knocking the table and spilling the remains of my coffee in the process.

I feel myself flush as the waitress rushes over and I hear Big George’s words ring in my ears. “No matter what happens, promise me you’ll never get a job as a waitress,” he’d told me when I resigned from Sunny Side Up. “You’re the worst waitress I’ve ever had! I only kept you around because you kept turning up!” he’d admitted, and I had to laugh because I knew that was his way of telling me that he was going to miss me.

“Come on, Winters, before you cause anymore havoc,” Jake suggests in his mocking tone.

“Hey, new rule: no teasing your girlfriend on her first day of college!” I point at him, putting on my best serious face and he dips his head down, biting the tip of my finger gently.

He smiles that lazy smile of his and I feel that familiar pull towards him that makes me wish we were closer to our new apartment. “Girlfriend,” he rolls the word over his tongue like it’s unfamiliar. “How about we make it something a little more official?” he asks, his brown eyes looking deep enough for me to fall into.

I smile teasingly at him. This isn’t the first time he’s raised the topic since all the craziness had passed. “I’ll tell you what. How about we give ourselves some time without getting shot at or threatened or attacked and we just have a normal relationship for a while? You know, dinner and a movie, that kind of thing?” I suggest, laying my head on his shoulder as we walk in the direction of my campus.

“Hmmm, not getting shot at or beaten up—I could get on board with that,” Jake muses jokingly. “But one day I’m going to ask you a question and you’re going to have to give me an answer.” As he says the words there’s a hint of vulnerability and I know that it’s not as easy for him to say as it sounds.

“I could get on board with that,” I giggle as he bends down to kiss me softly. As I thread my arm through Jake’s and we walk purposefully with our heads down against the wind, I look at the people around us. “Do you think we’ll see her again?” I ask.

Jake doesn’t ask who I’m talking about. “Suzie’s a survivor. She’ll show up again.” His confidence gives me hope. She’d disappeared the night of the shoot-out. When I’d got back to the studio, she was gone. Either she was afraid of the Angels coming for her, or she feared the Feds may not take too kindly to her connection with the bikers.

“I hope so.” I watch as my breath creates steam in the cold air. “Is it always this freakin‘ cold here?” I ask, gathering my coat closer to me as Jake hugs me tight against his strong body, careful not to touch the top of my shoulder where the bullet wound is still healing.

“I can think of a few ways to warm you up.” He looks down at me, one eyebrow raised.

“I think that can be arranged,” I laugh.

Looking up at the man that I’m totally crazy about, I think about the tattoo on his shoulder. He’d had it changed. The Bleeding Angels image remained because he said it was a reminder of everything that had happened and all that we’d been through. But now his ink read “Property of No One.” Every time I look at it, it makes me realize how far we’ve come and how we’ve done it together. Our future is our own now and we have all the time in the world.