His brows twitched, his expression asking the obvious: So why’d you end up a biker wife?
Maggie quirked a grin. “We all have our choices to make. College wasn’t for me. But my girl – Ava loves learning. She’s wanted to write books since she was in diapers.”
“She’s a smart girl.”
“Yes she is.” She felt her smile stretch and let it go, allowing it to spread at will. “She was raised by a smart girl.”
“Oh.” Ronnie’s expression tightened with panic. The pulse in his throat looked ready to punch through the skin. “I didn’t mean–”
“I know what you mean.” She waved for him to calm down. “She and I aren’t the same kind of smart. I get that. She’s my little book-smart brainchild.” Maggie had been drinking Jack Daniels since she was sixteen, and she’d developed a taste for its subtle, sweeter undertones. It was almost like honey down her throat as she took another swallow and twisted her smile to something sinister. “Now let me tell you whatImean. When I said you were a salesman, that wasn’t a compliment, sweetie.”
He paled under his golden tan.
“I know your kind. Boys with good backgrounds, boys with money – you see something you want, and you take it for yourself. You saw my daughter, and maybe I should give you some credit. Maybe you saw that she was beautiful, and brilliant, and talented, and quirky in a cute sort of way. Maybe you adore her for that. Or maybe you saw a hot piece of ass and figured, what the hell, she’s from a biker family, she must be easy to nail.”
“Mrs. Teague, I swear–”
“But let me make something perfectly clear to you, Ronald.” She heard the knife-edge in her voice, the one that made Ghost say, “That’s my girl,” and sent prospects and hangarounds running for cover. “If you’re just out for a lay, if you don’t adore my daughter, then you made a big mistake crossing my threshold.”
He was struck mute, staring at her in unblinking disbelief. Maybe terror.
“Understand?”
He nodded.
“Good.” Maggie drained the rest of her drink and stood. “Sleep tight. My husband will be in sometime later. If you hear someone stumbling through the dark, it’ll be him. Try not to make any sudden movements or weird noises. He only shoots when provoked.”
When she put her glass in the dishwasher, she smiled to herself a moment. Then it faded. She hadn’t been bluffing with him. Felix Lécuyer had broken Ava to bits. She’d be damned if she watched some pretty asshole put pressure along those fault lines.
The sound of the bedroom door easing open woke Maggie sometime in the darkest middle of the wee hours. She blinked against the black veil of sleep and inhaled deep the familiar smells of leather and cologne. It was Ghost. Her waking panic dissolved, and she let herself come slowly to the surface, rolling onto her side to meet him when he climbed into bed in his boxers.
“What time is it?”
“Four-thirty.”
Maggie reached through the sheets and found her husband’s chest, the wall of dense muscle, the wiry hair that she laced her fingers through. She shifted closer to him in a practiced move that was no longer conscious, just instinct.
“I heard about Andre.” She didn’t apologize; they’d reached a point in their marriage at which they no longer offered platitudes, but a quieter, more intense understanding.
Ghost exhaled; she could hear the exhaustion in his breath. “Collier’s heartbroke. Everybody’s mad as hell.I’mmad as hell,” he amended. “Jesus. I thought we were done with this bullshit.”
“I know, baby.”
When Maggie met Ghost for the first time – when she was sixteen, propped up against the wall in front of Leroy’s, wearing short cutoffs and red lipstick – the club had been entrenched in the typical outlaw pursuits of the one-percenter life. Selling guns, drugs, and protection services, they’d been the sort of “undesirable element” the city had wanted to eradicate. They’d been as outlaw as outlaw got, unrepentant in their sinning. She’d smelled the wicked coming off of the man who would become her husband; it was smoke-scented, vivid and acrid against the clean-scrubbed autumn air.
But even then, Ghost had been working toward a more lucrative, legitimate way to make bank, one that would give him the means to support his son and eat something besides ramen. In those first forbidden years, in the pensive, post-coital moments, he’d confided his dreams to her: a business. A whole fleet of businesses. A way for the club to stand on its own without help from the underbelly. A way for the club to survive. That had been his driving passion: the survival of his club.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he’d told her. “There has to be a smarter way.”
The bike shop had come first. Then the trucking company. By the time Ava was two, the Dartmoor property had been purchased. Walsh had come along, and with his help, the finances had been refined, and Dartmoor had grown again, becoming more profitable than Ghost had ever hoped.
James may have been president for a long time, but it was Ghost who’d brought about the evolution of the club into a sustainable entity. He’d elevated it. And it was that ambition in him, the drive, that Maggie had fallen in love with.
“I’ll take up a collection,” Maggie said, “for his kids.”
Ghost rubbed her upper arm. “Yeah. That’d be good.”
“I’ll call Flanders tomorrow and get the funeral set up.”
