Dirty Little Secret Page 2

  “You ever gonna trust me enough to tell me who he is?”

  “It’s complicated,” she whispered. If he knew everything that she was dealing with and what she had dealt with, he would go running. She knew without a doubt that she didn’t want that to happen. Whether she’d meant to or not, she had come to count on him, to depend on his steady hand and level head to be there, to prevent her from falling when it all got to be a little too much.

  “I’ll take that answer for now, Christy, but at some point, I need to know. At some point we’re gonna have to tell Jagger.”

  That thought caused her heart to beat double-time. How would Jagger take what she had decided to do with her life? What would he do when he realized it was him leaving that had put her in a precarious situation?

  “Please, just let me do it on my time,” she pleaded.

  He sighed, that wasn’t at all what he wanted to do, but he had learned that with her, he couldn’t push. She didn’t push back, she flat shut down, and then it would take him weeks to get back the little trust he had managed to get from her. It wasn’t worth it to push, but goddamn he wanted to do just that. He was sick of not being completely honest with his bothers. He had to wonder about himself—how it was so easy for him to keep living a lie.

  “Whatever you want,” he breathed loudly through his nose.

  Christine could tell in the rigid way he held his body that he was unhappy with her. She hated that, but now was the time she could protect her brother, now was the time that she actually had some control over the situation, and she didn’t want to give that up for anything. There were a million times in her life that she had backed off and let other people tell her what to do. She wasn’t doing it again. There was a part of her that didn’t want to upset Travis, but there was a bigger part of her that wanted to own the fact that she could upset him.

  “It is what I want,” she told him.

  “Then we’ll do it your way, but I want you to realize that every time I lie to him, I’m potentially fucking up my spot in the club. And realize I’m doing that for you.”

  He didn’t turn around as he talked to her, but she heard it just the same. The defeated tone in his voice about killed her, but she knew that this was the time she needed to be selfish, she needed to worry about herself, because if there was one thing that she had learned, no matter how much she wanted to—it was that she couldn’t trust anyone but herself. She couldn’t count on anyone but herself, and that was just the way life was.

  “Where’s Steele?” Liam asked as he walked into the clubhouse.

  The group all had one look for their pres, all grinning. “According to Felicity over here, he’s out with a chick.” Tyler pointed at Jessica.

  “Would you stop calling me Felicity?” she asked, feigning irritation.

  “Why do you think he’s got a woman?” Liam asked as he had a seat and checked the time on his phone. It was almost time for the kids to get off the bus, and he knew that he would have at least a few free hours. Mandy and Drew were completely in love with their little sister, Tatum, and he didn’t even get to hold his daughter when they were around.

  “There are many reasons,” Meredith piped up from where she sat next to Tyler.

  “Do share. I’m not just asking where he is for my health; I need to see him about some business.”

  Jessica ignored the chuckle coming from where Tyler sat. “He leaves here every couple of days; his beard trimmed, the soul-patch just so, or even clean shaven. He has on clean clothes, and I’ve caught whiffs of a feminine scent coming off him. Those things taken separately don’t mean a lot, but all together, they’re telling me that he’s got a woman.”

  Liam sighed. “I don’t even wanna be involved in this. When he gets back, tell him I’m looking for him. I’ll be taking a much needed nap if anyone needs me.”

  “Who’s at the shop?” Tyler asked, referring to Walker’s Wheels, the club’s source of legitimate income.

  “Jagger was leaving to go over there right as I came in. Bianca’s got to do a sort of Fall Festival or some shit, so he’s going to go over there after he closes up the shop. He wanted to be close in case she needed help.” Liam couldn’t help the sheepish grin that came to his face. The way these guys had changed always amazed him. It didn’t make them any less dangerous when they needed to be in his eyes; it made them more dangerous because now they had something to lose.

  “Did you get the message that Rooster left on the club’s voicemail for you?” Tyler asked, seemingly satisfied with the answer from Liam about the shop.

  “I did.” He cleared his throat loudly. “That’s what I want to talk to Travis about.”

  None of them said anything, but over the past few months, Rooster’s name had been coming up more and more. They all wondered what in the hell was going on, but nobody wanted to ask.

  Chapter Three

  It was dark when Travis made his way back to the clubhouse, and he wasn’t in the best of moods. Being dishonest to the people that cared about him and always had his back was tiring, and it fucking sucked. Thinking he’d gotten somewhere with Christine only to get the feeling he was never going to get anywhere also fucking sucked.

  “Liam’s lookin’ for you.” He stopped short, not having seen Tyler on the front steps smoking a cigarette.

  Travis cleared his throat and did his best to wipe the scared look off his face. “Is he inside, or do I need to go see him at home?”

  Tyler kicked his long leg out in front of him, his voice deep in the dark of the night. If Travis didn’t know better, it would sound threatening. “He waited on you a long time.”

  The Native American was a man of few words, and he always made them count. Travis had purposely ignored two calls from his pres. “I was out of range, and I only saw his calls when I hit Porter Pike. By that time, I figured I’d be here in a few minutes anyway.”

  Tyler took a long drag off his cigarette and leveled his gaze on their security officer. “I don’t know what’s goin’ on with you. Some of the ladies seem to think it’s a woman that’s got you so tore up, but I’m just gonna be honest and lay it out on the line for you.”

  Travis swallowed hard. He didn’t want to know what Tyler had to say to him. He already kind of knew what it was going to be, and he didn’t relish being talked down to by anyone, but coming from Tyler, it held even more weight. “Go ahead,” he whispered.

  “You need to get your shit together. A few months ago, I saw something in you—I saw you starting to step up and be what we need you to be at this clubhouse. You were becoming someone that Liam and I could count on, but especially for the last six weeks or so, you’ve been disappearing and you’ve been sneaky. Other people may not have noticed it, but I tend to watch what everybody around here does. I don’t want to think you’re doin’ shit that you shouldn’t be doin’, but I’m getting a bad-ass feeling about it.”

  The breath that Travis was trying to inhale caught in his throat. Nobody liked to hear Tyler say he was getting a bad feeling about anything. At that moment, he wanted to stop his VP and tell him everything that was going on, but something kept him from it. He couldn’t see betraying Christine. Not yet. She’d asked for his silence, and he couldn’t wipe away the progress that he had been able to gain with her. He’d worked too hard for it. It just didn’t sit right with him, either, to tell someone else before he told Jagger. He at least owed that to Jagger.

  “I do not want to think you’re fucking us over,” Tyler started again. “We trust you with a lot of things in this club, and you are the person who keeps us safe. Being shady doesn’t fuckin’ fly with me.”

  For the first time—ever—Travis was scared of Tyler. Sure, he was a bad-ass motherfucker that struck fear in the hearts of anyone that he went toe to toe with, but that was hardly ever his brothers in the club. He saw now what their enemies saw when they stared down Tyler Blackfoot. “I’m not doing that, not at all.”

  “Then give me something.” The tone of Tyler’s
voice was pleading.

  Travis turned around so that he didn’t have to look at his VP. He couldn’t stand the look in Tyler’s eyes. That was the look he gave when he was about to fuck shit up, and Travis did not want to be on the business end of Tyler’s fist. “There is a woman,” he admitted.

  The breath that Tyler exhaled was huge. That made him feel better, to know there was a reason for the sneaking around. A woman for Steele made everything that was odd fit together like a puzzle. “So what’s the deal? Bring her around so we can meet her, and you can quit fuckin’ sneaking around.”

  “It’s not that simple. She’s got…problems, and I’m doing my best to help her through those.”

  If there was something that most of this club knew about, it was problems. They excelled at that, and they seemed to take in every individual who had issues. Tyler wracked his brain to figure out why this woman was so different. “Are you not going to bring her around?” he asked, taking another hit from his cigarette.

  “I can’t, not yet.”

  “Is she related to one of us?” He threw out the off-handed remark. That was the only reason he could think why Travis would be keeping her such a secret.

  “Please trust me. Know that I would never do anything to put the club at risk, know that I would never do anything to truly betray anyone’s trust. Just know that I’m having a hard time working things out in my own head right now. I don’t need everyone else’s opinions on it. I have to decide for myself how far I’m willing to go with this. I just…” He stopped and took a deep breath. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do about any of this. I want this girl to be it. I want her to trust me, and I’m working on that, but I can’t get her to trust me if I run to the club and tell them everything about her.”

  Tyler stuck another cigarette in between his lips and put his lighter up to it before cupping his hand around the flame and letting it ignite to the tobacco. He took a very long drag off of it and looked at Travis, took a good look at him, before shaking his head. “You do what you need to do, but you’ve got two weeks. In two weeks, you need to figure out just what the fuck you’re doing with this girl. We can’t have you running off all the time, being incommunicado because you’re worried about what she’s going to think. You’re our first line of defense here, and if your mind is somewhere else, then we aren’t safe. You got that?”

  The words were thrown down like a gauntlet, and Tyler dared him not to agree. “Got it.”

  The two of them looked at each other, and it appeared that Tyler wanted to say more, but he held back. “Liam’s lookin’ for you. He got a message from Rooster earlier, and he needs your help.”

  They were back to where they had started, only this time, it wasn’t so tense. “Is he in there or at his house?”

  “He’s on up at the house.”

  Steele nodded and turned on his heel, going back towards his bike, completely fuming. He hated that Tyler had called him out. He’d told him to stop sneaking around and to be there for the club. That pissed him off; he was always there for the club. He worked his ass off. He sat at that computer, monitoring things for hour upon hour—if anyone needed anything technical done, they came to him. He was expected to fix every cell phone issue, every computer issue, every home alarm issue there was. Then at the shop, he was expected to do all the technical stuff there. If someone needed NOS or they needed to figure out which computer chip was fucked up in a car that fell on him too. God forbid he want something for himself, that he want a little peace and quiet with someone besides the people in the clubhouse for a little while. His life was the club, but it wasn’t the only part of it. By the time he drove down the driveway to Liam’s, he had calmed down somewhat, but he was still furious.

  Stomping up to the front door, he knocked roughly on it, waiting for his president to open it. When he did, Steele felt bad. He held a crying Tatum close to his chest, a burp cloth over his shoulder.

  “Sorry, she just spit up on me, and Denise took the twins to the Fall Festival tonight. I’ll be right with ya.”

  In the grand scheme of things, Liam had a hell of a lot more going on than the rest of them, yet he showed up every day. Some days his eyes had huge circles under them, and they could all see the lines of fatigue that wore on his face, but he never complained.

  Not like Steele’s own dad had done. When the going got tough with a child, he got gone and never returned.

  That thought came out of nowhere, and Travis shook his head. It had been years since he had even thought of his own father. He wasn’t sure what had brought that up, but he hoped that it went back to whatever hellhole it came from. He wasn’t for sure how long he sat in the living room, waiting on Liam to make a reappearance, but it startled him when the other man came back in, this time without a baby.

  “Finally got her to sleep,” he laughed, running a hand through his hair. “Sometimes she gets pissy when Drew’s not here to sing to her.”

  “He sings?” Steele asked, his eyebrow quirking up. He’d never heard the teenager sing before.

  “Not well,” Liam laughed again. “But Tatum loves it. She’s infatuated with her older brother. If nobody else can get her to calm down, he usually can. It’s a good thing he’s old enough and man enough that it doesn’t bother him.”

  There was a soft lull in the conversation, and Travis took a moment to admit how far Liam had come. If someone had told him two years ago that this would be his pres’ life, he would have bet money that they were wrong. “Tyler said you wanted to see me?”

  “Yeah,” Liam stood, taking a baby monitor with him. “Let’s take this out to the porch in case Denise and the kids come home while we’re talking about it. This isn’t something I want everyone to know just yet.”

  Now he was intrigued. Liam was usually very forthcoming in all that he did. He wasn’t one to keep secrets, even if it was probably in the best interest of the club to do so. He wasn’t a president in the way his father had been president. He felt that if everyone knew exactly what they were facing, then that made them a stronger unit, and Travis thought so too. The fact that Liam was going against what he had previously said to be true worried him.

  They each had a seat, Liam sitting across from Travis. “I got some information from Rooster today, and he’s coded it. I can’t figure it out, but I knew you would.”

  Rooster. That name was one that Travis hated to hear; it wasn’t for the reason that everyone thought either. It wasn’t the fact that he was a sheriff’s deputy and he could easily put them all in jail if he wanted. Only Liam knew how close Travis and Rooster were, and Liam had kept that secret. He hadn’t ever used it to advance his position in anything or force someone to do something that they didn’t want to do, but apparently today, he needed to call it in.

  “It’s been a long time since Rooster and I were close.” Travis squirmed. This whole last hour of his life had been complete and utter FUBAR.

  “I have a feelin’ you’re gonna know what this means. He left me a message on the club voicemail about there being a package at the PO Box. When I went to get it, this is what it was.”

  Liam pulled a packet of papers out from under the couch cushion and opened them up, extracting a piece of paper. The piece of paper was a photograph of a place that Steele recognized. There was a spot on it circled.

  “What the hell or where is this?” Liam asked.

  “It’s where we used to play as kids, and where he’s circled is where we used to hide stuff so that our moms couldn’t find it.”

  Liam nodded, stuffing the picture back into the envelope it had come in. Travis watched as he stuffed the papers back under the couch—for someone that was so concerned with safety, Liam sometimes had the most obvious hiding places. “Being his cousin and all, I figured you’d know. We need to get out there and see what he wants us to find.”

  Did Liam have to go there? Remind him that they were cousins? It wasn’t like he was bound to forget anytime soon. They’d kept that secret long enough; he�
�d hoped they could keep it forever. “Tomorrow morning will be better. It’s hard to see out there at night.”

  “Then we’ll get a group together to make the trip.”

  Steele stood up, looking at his pres. “You gonna tell them?”

  “It’s up to you whether you want them to know if Rooster’s your family or not. I just knew you could help me. That’s the only reason I called in the favor.”

  Steele nodded and made his way out of the house without another word. Some things were better left in the past.

  Chapter Four

  Her heart was pounding as she ran from the house, down the blacktop road. Remnants of the snow that had fallen a few days before still lay in patches. Her bare feet hit them as she raced this way and that, trying not to run in a straight line. The last time she had tried to run, she’d learned that the hard way. The bullet had clipped her shoulder. This time was it, though; she knew that there wouldn’t be another chance. She either made it this time, or she wouldn’t. Christine knew that if she didn’t make it this time, she was dead. Clinton knew the sheriffs in Simpson, Allen, and Warren counties. They could easily cover up her murder—she would be just a Stepford housewife that had grown bored of her older husband. No one would ever believe the truth; they would never know the hell she had lived in for two years.

  “Christine,” the voice called out from somewhere behind her, taunting in its tone.

  She couldn’t breathe too loudly; he could hear that, and then he would know where she was. Placing her hand over her mouth, she breathed as deeply as possible, willing her heartbeat to regulate so that she no longer panted. It was hard to do, especially with how scared she was. The fear that engulfed her was all-consuming, but the bitch of it was, she didn’t know if she was scared that he would catch her or that she would never get away.

  “When I find you, you’re going to be very sorry,” he threatened.