Reclaimed (4 page)

“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.”

I knew they were talking about Emmie. She was still at the hospital, taking care of security and press and everything in between for Gabriella Moreitti, the woman who had risked her own life to save Mia’s. After living with Emmie and Nik for over a year now, I knew that Emmie was hiding, that she was probably blaming herself, and she didn’t want to face what was going on outside of the hospital. I knew and understood her need to pretend that everything was okay outside the hospital doors.

“I’ll go talk to her first,” Drake Stevenson suggested. “If I can get her to talk to me, that is.”

Emmie hadn’t been answering any of the band members’ calls. They had given her the space she needed, but it looked like they were tired of her hiding.

“I’ll go with you,” Shane Stevenson offered. “She can’t run away from both of us.”

Nik grimaced. “You say that, but we all know she can.” His gaze went to his daughter, cuddled up against her Aunt Lana’s pregnant belly. The look on her pale little face had her father shaking his head and turning away from the sight almost in defeat. “Okay. Drake, you and Shane go on. Jesse and I will follow in a few hours. I want to make sure that Seller’s men are doubled up outside the bus.”

Drake and Shane kissed their wives goodbye and Drake dropped a kiss on top of Mia’s head before picking up his own daughter, Neveah, and giving her a tight squeeze. Seeing those two together did something strange to my heart and I had to look away from the love I saw shining out of Drake’s blue-gray eyes.

With the living room minus two huge rockers, it felt a little roomier. I grabbed a big mug of the strongly brewed coffee and sat on one of the chairs in the living room. No one spoke except for the three toddlers sitting on the floor, jabbering to each other while they played. Eventually Mia got off her aunt’s lap, complaining about being kicked in the stomach too many times.

Large green eyes so much like her mother’s looked haunted as she crossed the small space and climbed into my lap. She wrapped her arms around my neck and laid her head on my chest. “Will you rub my head?” she asked softly.

I instantly started stroking my fingers through her hair the way her mother had shown me that Mia enjoyed. We sat like that for the longest time and I thought for sure she was starting to fall asleep—something the five-year-old needed right then more than anything. She hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the last two days, poor baby.

Her head popped up off my shoulder, her little shoulders shaking, and I knew that the little nap she had just taken had been filled with nightmares. “Daddy?” she called out and Nik was across the room, lifting his daughter into his arms. Tears ran down her cheeks as she buried her face in his neck. “I want Momma,” she sobbed. “Please, Daddy. I want Momma.”

The torment I saw on Nik’s face had me lowering my eyes, unable to stand the sight of his pain. “Okay, baby doll. Okay. Daddy’s gonna go get her.”

He tried to soothe her for a few more minutes, more for himself than for Mia, before he left with Jesse. Mia’s crying didn’t subside after her father left, if anything it became harder, shaking her little body. Her three aunts tried to do everything to soothe her, but Mia needed her mother right then more than anything else on the planet.

Unable to take hearing her cry, I picked up Jagger, who was only a few weeks past his first birthday, and took him into the bathroom to give him a bath. I could still hear Mia sobbing from behind the closed bathroom door and let a few tears of my own fall as I took care of the little boy who looked so much like his father.

J
ET

Max was in one of his moods this morning. I couldn’t blame my little nephew, though. I was in a mood, too. It was the kind of mood his mother’s large breakfast couldn’t cure, either. I sat at the kitchen table beside the highchair where the baby was screaming his head off, wanting his mother and only his mother. If the kid had wanted me, I’d have already had him on my lap, offering him the eggs that I was just picking at because they held little appeal to me.

Today was my final day on probation. Today was the day I went to find Flick and brought her home.

My stomach churned as I prayed she would come willingly. After getting nowhere with her boss, I had no idea how Flick would react to seeing me. She’d covered her tracks well when she’d left Creswell Springs and it had been a miracle that I’d found her in the first place. Seeing her by chance on one of the national news stations had been a one-in-sixty-billion long shot. If I hadn’t been watching TV that night, specifically that news channel, I might not have ever found Flick.

That just pissed me off.

Never finding Flick hadn’t been an option. Now that I knew where she was, and couldn’t even get her fucking super bitch of a boss to let me talk to her on the phone, each day that had led up to my probation ending had been hell. I just wanted to hear her fucking voice for two seconds, damn it. Two. Fucking. Seconds.

“Mommy, can I have pancakes?”

I turned my head to watch as Lexa took her usual place at the kitchen table. She wiped sleep out of her blue eyes before giving me a bright smile. “Hi, Uncle Jet.”

“Hi, kid.”

Raven set a plate of pancakes on the table in front of her stepdaughter—now her adopted daughter. Brushing a kiss over the little girl’s hair, she turned back to the stove where she continued to cook the huge-ass breakfast she seemed to make almost every morning these days. Raven cooked when she was happy, so I was glad for that much at least. Didn’t make my mood any better, though.

“Is he teething or something?” Hawk asked as he entered the kitchen. He stopped at the stove and took one of the plates Raven already had put together. Loaded down with eggs, bacon, pancakes, and potatoes, I figured he’d be going back for seconds if he could.

“Or something,” Bash muttered as he came in through the back door that led out to the driveway. “He’s just a momma’s boy. Can’t stand for her to have any other man’s attention but his own.”

“Sounds like his father’s son,” Hawk said with a smirk as he shoveled food into his mouth.

“Sounds like his uncle, too,” Raven teased from the stove. It was good to see her in a teasing kind of mood, but I couldn’t find the will to smile that morning.

“Shut up, Rave.”

“Say you’re sorry or you don’t get more potatoes,” my sister threatened, holding her spatula up as she gave Hawk a mock glare.

Hawk blew out a deep breath through his nose, making his nostrils flare. “Sorry,” he mumbled half under his breath before going back to eating.

Bash, unable to stand around listening to his son scream and cry, bent to pick up the baby. Max instantly shut up, but glared down at his father with wet, blue eyes. “What’s your problem, boy? You want your ma?” His voice was quiet, teasing. “Well, too fucking bad, kid. She’s mine. You hear that?” The grin on the huge-ass fucker’s face was full of pride for his son. Max didn’t care if his father was teasing him or not, he just continued to glare down at the biker who was more beast than man.

“Where’s Gracie?” Raven shot at Hawk and I wondered the same thing. Usually the sweet little redhead was sitting right beside her man by now.

“She was going through yesterday’s mail. Said she would be down in a few,” Hawk frowned toward the open door that led toward the living room and stairs. “Baby?” he called out, a worried look on his face.

Moments later, Gracie appeared in the doorway, but she wasn’t wearing her normally sunny smile. Her eyes were on the piece of mail she had clutched tightly in her hands as she walked into the kitchen. Her face was unusually pale and her eyes were wide with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and…fear. The air in the room seemed to crackle with tension as Hawk saw the same thing in his ol’ lady’s eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded, beside her so quick you wouldn’t have believed a man his size could actually move that fast. Hawk cupped Gracie’s face in his big hands. “Gracie?”

My eyes were glued to the redhead. I watched as she swallowed hard and closed her eyes tight before handing Hawk the papers in her hands. “My grandfather wants to see me.”

“Jack?”

“No, from my father’s side. He and my uncle want me to come back for a visit. They said it was important. Business.” She opened her eyes and shook her head, a humorless laugh escaping her. “It’s probably about the rest of my inheritance.”

Hawk didn’t seem to hear her as his eyes raced across the words on the paper he now held.

“I emailed his lawyers two weeks ago, telling them I didn’t want the money. That I didn’t need it. I even talked to Jenkins about it. He’s been looking into the conditions of my inheritance, because I’d been thinking of donating the funds to a women’s shelter back east. There wasn’t any, so I just told Grandfather I didn’t want it.”

“Wait,” Raven said, frowning. “Don’t you have to marry someone they approve of before you can get it?”

“Yes, and since I would rather live on the streets than marry anyone those two a-holes picked for me, I don’t want it.” Gracie grimaced. “But now this appears, asking for an in-person meeting about it. I don’t know what’s going on. I figured they would just take the money for themselves.”

“It’s a lot of money, though, Gracie,” Bash reminded her. “Maybe they need you to sign some papers or something.”

“They could do that through Jenkins. I don’t need to see them to sign papers. I don’t want to see them. Ever. None of them tried to help my mother when she needed help the most. They’re all the same. Every one of them is an abusive piece of white-collared trash. They aren’t worth my time.” The vehemence in little Gracie’s voice was enough to assure me that she meant every word.

Hawk crumbled the paper in his fist. “You won’t have to, babe. I promise. I’ll get Jenkins to take care of that, so don’t worry about it.” He stuffed the crumpled-up paper into his front pocket and pulled Gracie close, kissing her long and deeply.

The intensity of his kiss made me wonder just what Hawk had seen in between the lines written on that sheet of paper. He kissed his ol’ lady like he might not ever get the chance to again. When he finally pulled back, Gracie was flushed and would have stumbled back if my brother wasn’t holding her so close. “I love you,” he breathed quietly, but I still heard him.

I clenched my jaw and turned my gaze back to my eggs. Those three little words, spoken with such power from my brother, seemed like the easiest thing in the world. So why the fuck hadn’t I been able to say them when I’d needed to the most?

“Holy shit.” Colt stormed into the kitchen. “Jet, get in here and see this.” He didn’t wait around long enough for me to ask what the hell was going on. I pushed my plate of cold eggs away and followed after my little brother.