Whisper Falls (29 page)

“Tell me about California, Lucky,” she said softly, but she knew her tone underscored the seriousness of the question.

Lucky’s hands went still and he raised his gaze to hers in the darkening air. His muscles tensed. And his heart felt heavy.

Maybe he should have seen this coming. Maybe he should have known you couldn’t get this close to a woman without her needing to know your secrets. And . . . maybe it had been a lot easier to just not think about those secrets lately, after deciding the past really
was
behind him and that it was finally safe to let a woman into his life.

His first instinct was to lie. To sugarcoat every bit of it. He’d gotten real good at that in Wisconsin, after all. On the rare occasions he’d volunteered information about those days to friends, customers—it had been easy enough to talk in vague stories that made it sound like nothing worse than sewing some wild oats. He could do that with Tessa, too. Except that—to the very core of his soul, he didn’t
want
to lie to her. He didn’t think he could bear it.

So he considered just refusing to answer, point-blank. Telling her it was nothing she needed to know, that it was a long time ago and didn’t matter. God knew it was his least favorite subject, and the very idea of dredging it up made his stomach churn.

But with Tessa, that wasn’t good enough, either—it wasn’t right. He wasn’t sure
what
was right.
He
wasn’t even very good at reconciling the man he’d been
then
with the man he was now—so how could he expect
her
to do it?

So finally he said what he was thinking. “You might hate me if I do.”

He saw her flinch—just slightly; she’d tried to hide it. She’d clearly been hoping he’d tell her nothing really bad had happened. Which made the idea of telling her the truth all the more daunting.

“I would never hate you,” she whispered. He thought her voice sounded like an angel’s in the night. An angel with a daisy chain around her ankle.

“You might,” he heard himself say.

“No,” she insisted.

Which was sweet as hell—but she didn’t know yet. And if
anything
could change the way she felt about him, it was this.

So maybe he should shut up. Just not tell her.

But again, no matter how he looked at it, he felt he owed her the truth.
It’s that damn love thing.
It felt like a chain in a way, and not the daisy kind. More like a big, heavy, steel contraption that pressed on him, and pulled on him, and took away the freedom inside him, in his head—which was maybe the last freedom he’d retained after coming back here.

And yet . . . it wasn’t fair to describe it that way—because it wasn’t an
ugly
thing. It wasn’t something he would give up if he could. It felt like something holding him tight in its grasp—but also like something warm, good. So good that . . . for Christ’s sake, it had him making daisy chains in a park. He must want it. It was scary as hell in a way, but he must want it in his life to have gone there so easily.

With one hand still resting softly on her ankle, he ran the other back through his hair. He couldn’t think how to begin. He couldn’t think how to make sense of the things he’d done, the shit that had happened when he’d been young.

Just do it. Just tell her. Dive in. Get it out
,
once and for all.

“From the time I was twenty until I was twenty-three, I was in a motorcycle club called the Devil’s Assassins.”

He looked up at her in the dark, met her gaze. So far, she didn’t look too worried. But he hadn’t gotten to the heart of the matter yet. And in fact, he’d sugarcoated it already—calling it something as simple as a club, just as they did in Cali, just as they insisted to anyone who asked.
Stop it. Tell her the whole awful truth.
“But . . . it was really an outlaw gang. We did . . . illegal things. To make money.”

She bit her lower lip, her eyes showing concern. “What
kinds
of things?”

And Lucky pressed his mouth into a flat, unhappy line. It shamed him to remember this. “We ran guns. And drugs. And we stole cars and motorcycles.”

He could sense her muscles tensing merely from the way her ankles balanced on his leg now. “And you, personally, did these things?”

He sighed. “My job was . . . stealing cars. I was . . . good at it.” It was strange to remember he’d once taken pride in the skill.

Next to him, Tessa stayed quiet a moment and he hated himself for who he’d been back then. “Why?” she finally asked.

The question confused him. “Why was I good at it?”

“Why did you join this club?”

He thought it over. Funny, back then, it had seemed the obvious thing to do—like some grand opportunity. “I was wandering, drifting—and it was someplace to belong. They got to do what they wanted, live how they wanted—they had a lot of power, and when I was twenty, power was appealing.”

“How come?”

“I’d never felt like I’d had any before. And when you get patched into an MC, it’s supposed to be like . . . a family. A family where you matter. They made me feel important. They said they’d always have my back.”

“And did they?”

“No,” he answered simply. An understatement of epic proportions. “All the family shit was a lie.”

She simply stared at him then, for a good long time. And he wondered what she was thinking—when she finally said, “Are you gonna tell me the rest of it?”

“How do you know there’s more?”

“The look on your face,” she replied. And when he still didn’t launch into the story, she said, “Lucky, I just need to know where you’ve been.”

He nodded. Swallowed. He understood that. So he took a deep breath and said, “The whole thing ended . . . bad. But . . . it had been bad for a while already.”

“Go on,” she prodded.

“Not long after I was patched in—”

“What’s that mean?”

In that moment, drawn back to an existence he’d long ago left behind, he’d forgotten the whole world didn’t know MC terminology. “It’s when you’re made a full member. You go through different stages before you get the club’s whole emblem to wear. You’re tested in different ways, made to prove your loyalty, and your usefulness.”

“Tested how?”

He sighed. It sounded so stupid now, juvenile. “Steal something maybe, do something against a rival gang, find a way to score some drugs for the club.”

He heard her pull in a slow breath, let it back out. “Did you, um, do drugs?”

God, he was in Destiny—no one in Destiny did drugs. She’d think he was slime, but he wasn’t gonna lie. “If you wouldn’t do coke with the other guys, they thought it meant you were a cop. But I found out pretty fast I didn’t like not having full control of myself when I was with them—I figured out it was best to stay alert. So I got good at faking it, at acting like I’d done it and, when nobody was looking, just brushing it away.”

“Have you . . . done anything like that since then?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t for me. I was happy to leave it behind with the rest of that life.”

“Tell me the rest,” she reminded him.

It made him let out another long, shameful sigh. “Almost as soon as I was made a full patch, I started seeing maybe it wasn’t as great as I thought. I mean, I knew they were dangerous—but what I didn’t catch on to until too late was that they were dangerous even to each other. One minute we were swearing we were brothers to the end—and the next, guys were getting drunk or high or both, and then starting fights over nothing, or making threats, and you felt like you were gonna be stabbed in the back any minute.

“Duke hooked up with the Assassins around the same time as me, and we got along, and figured out pretty quick that it was good to have an ally. I think we both wanted to leave the club a while before we did, but the thing is—you can’t just decide to go. Once you’re in, it’s for life. So to even talk about leaving would put a target on your back.

“Anyway . . . how things ended.” He returned his gaze to hers. “You sure you wanna hear this, hot stuff?”

She nodded. “Not want to. Have to.”

He sighed once more—then just tried to barrel forward. “The president of the Devil’s Assassins was a guy named Wild Bill Murphy. And I didn’t realize it at first, but he was . . . fucking crazy. He could be the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet or the meanest bastard on the planet, and he could switch on you in a heartbeat.” Just remembering the cold look Bill could get in his eye made Lucky feel a little sick.

“So Bill’s old lady was a girl named Vicki. And she . . .” Shit, this shouldn’t be the hardest part, but with Tessa, it kind of was. “She had a thing for me. And there was . . . chemistry between us.” He sensed Tessa tensing further beside him in the dark, but he couldn’t help that—right now he just had to keep going. “It was only physical, but it was strong, and she egged it on. She was always flirting with me, and whenever Bill wasn’t around, she was coming on to me, rubbing up against me and shit.”

“And you . . . didn’t respond?” Tessa asked.

Thinking back, he said, “Flirted some maybe, but that was it.”

“Why not?”

He looked her squarely in the eye. “I valued my life. I told you, Bill was a crazy bastard, and real possessive. She was putting us both in danger doing the things she did. Truth is, she wasn’t the brightest girl—she didn’t seem to get that she was playing with fire. Or . . . maybe she did. Maybe that was part of the thrill for her.” He just shook his head, remembering. “Either way, late one night, I finally gave in. We had sex in a back room of the Assassins’ clubhouse. I was drunk, and too stupid to realize there were still a few members out front who could guess what was going on. They told Bill the next day.”

He appreciated the fear in her voice when she said, “What happened?”

And this part was hard to say because even though he knew he wasn’t to blame, he still felt responsible. His throat went dry. “Bill beat Vicki to a pulp. Put her in the hospital. I went to see her and it was . . . pretty damn awful.”

Tessa had already moved on from that, though, asking, “What did he do to
you
?”

Lucky caught his breath and tried to quit recalling Vicki in that hospital bed with her eyes blackened, her throat and arms bruised, one lung collapsed, and all sorts of tubes coming in and out of her. “You remember that guy, Red, you met at my place?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“During my last year with the club, he’d gone from being a hang-around to a prospect.” And sensing she was about to ask, he explained, “A hang-around is somebody who tries to hang out and get in good with the club. They get bossed around, made to do stuff like get beer, stand guard outside meetings, shit like that. After that, you’re made a prospect—kind of a member-on-a-trial-basis.

“So anyway, me and Duke were both steering clear of the club’s usual hang-outs—but Red found us at a little run-down bar up the street from Duke’s apartment. Wild Bill had sent him looking for us with a message . . . to steer clear of his woman from now on.”

The fact was, Bill’s message had been much more detailed than that. But there was no need to scare Tessa with that now that he finally felt assured this all lay in the past, ten years and two thousand miles away. Even if he could still hear Red telling him in that Texas accent of his, “Wild Bill said it’s simple—you screw with his old lady, he’ll screw with yours. Wherever you go, dude, any woman you value—her ass belongs to him and she’ll be beggin’ for mercy before it’s over.” It still gave him chills.

But he went on with the rest of it. “So I asked Red if that meant Bill was kicking me out of the MC. But Red—being Red—didn’t know and said he’d have to ask.” The memory left Lucky shaking his head some more—leave it to Red to screw up a threat.

“What happened then?” Tessa asked.

And—God, he didn’t want to tell her the rest. If only he’d followed his instincts then. But he hadn’t. And that had changed everything.

“Well, I should’ve left that night—should’ve just got on my bike and rode, as far and as fast as I could. Duke and me even talked about it. But we were afraid it would make things worse, that Bill would reach out through other chapters and ally clubs and find us somehow. We decided that staying and riding the storm out was the smartest thing to do.”

After that, he stayed quiet for a minute, until Tessa’s voice sliced through the haze of memory. “Tell me the rest, Lucky.” And he could almost hear in her tone now that she’d begun to understand the kind of man she’d gotten herself involved with—and he only hoped like hell she knew he wasn’t that man
anymore
.

Only—what did it matter? Because when she heard the next part, she wouldn’t want anything more to do with him. He couldn’t see this ending any other way. And even feeling the finality of that deep down inside, he still couldn’t
not
tell her. He’d come too far here, and now it was like . . . purging his sins or something. He suddenly didn’t think he’d be able to live with himself if he didn’t go on with the whole story, even the part that sometimes still gave him nightmares.

“The next night, Wild Bill sent another messenger to the bar—but this time it was a full-patch member of the club, a big bald dude called Hammer. Me and Duke were the only people in the whole place—when Hammer walked in, even the bartender disappeared out the back.” As Lucky spoke now, he began to sweat—he no longer saw the shadow of Tessa next to him or felt the calm of the night around them. Instead he could almost smell the stale air of the bar, could almost hear Three Dog Night singing “Mama Told Me Not To Come” on the old jukebox in the corner, could almost feel the stark fear coursing through him when Hammer said in a low growl, “Bill sent me to say you’re
never
out of the club, asshole. And now I’m gonna teach you the same lesson he taught that bitch, Vicki.”

“Next thing I know,” he heard himself tell Tessa, “the guy was coming at me with a blade.”

She flinched—yet he went on, now filled with old fear, old desperation. “So Duke attacked him, from behind—hit him over the head with a bottle. But it didn’t even faze him. He just turned on Duke and started slashing through the air between them, backing him into a corner. Duke had a knife in his boot, but he couldn’t get to it, and I was . . . hell, I was scared shitless. I think that’s when I really understood just how good a friend he was.”