Checkmate With Bishop: A Hellions MC Novel (25 page)

He found a purple toothbrush in a travel holder next to the sink and squeezed on some paste.  He only hoped that he could just hand her the implement and let her do it herself instead of forcing him to perform the ritual.  And at finding she could, Bishop smiled as he oversaw her ministrations, holding a glass of water out before taking the used toothbrush away to rinse it in the sink.

Seeing her hold up the glass of water without looking, caused him to grin which remained even as he settled the tumbler on the vanity before he reached to snag her, his beautiful ex-wife, the mother of his amazing son, underneath her arms in order to haul her drunk-assed self to her feet.

“Wait!” she yelped as her noodle-like legs and toes tried to find their purchase on the tile floor.  “Ah can do dis…” she tried to advise, but the movements of her body said otherwise as the full weight of her body dragged his arms down.  Bishop moved and placed his feet on either side of hers as he adjusted his grip, holding her waist tightly as he shuffled her back into the bedroom.  It was a long, tiresome shuffling shamble.  One comprised of hitting her heel with his toes in order to move it forward before performing the same maneuver on the other foot just to be able to get her close to the bed.

Because he wasn’t sure, even though he was feeling so much better, he had the strength to pick her up and just fucking carry her there.  Which would’ve been the easier choice, but one that might’ve resulted in the both of them sprawled on the carpet of her hotel room.

“Just a couple steps more, babe,” he encouraged through heaving, panting breaths.  He didn’t remember her as being so heavy back in the day.  But then he hadn’t been on the tail ends of a sickness he’d thought was gonna kill him either.  “That’s it.  Just a little bit more.”  He braced her against the side of the mattress as he leaned down and ripped the comforter, the top sheet open.

When he straightened, he saw her eyes were wide open and although glazed were no longer struggling to maintain their focus.  “Why’re ya bein’ so good ta me, Schtan?  Why’re ya here?”

Pushing down on her shoulders, Bishop finally got her seated albeit in one of the swaying variety before replying.  “’Cause I promised J.R. I’d protect you.  Even if it’s from your fucking self.”  He tried to catch her eye as he struggled for the truth, but her eyes couldn’t seem to stay focused on him.  “I hate the situation, babe.  Hate that you kept my son from me.  But I don’t hate you.”

“Fuckin’ fucked up shit, huh?” she grumbled as her eyes followed what his hands were doing, as he unbuttoned and then removed her jeans.  “Jay-sus, ah really fucked up dis time.”

He was grinning while he used a couple of fingers as he reached behind her, over her sexy as fuck t-shirt to unlatch the back clasp of her bra before pressing those two digits in the center of her chest in a silent order to lay back.  Which she did, thank Christ, without complaint.

And as she watched him slide the straps of her bra down her arms, reaching beneath the jersey to snag where the lacy covered underwire met in the center and dragged it out from underneath her top without touching her breasts.  He was surprised to find she was smiling when his eyes came back to her face. 

“Ya used to love to do ‘at,” she slurred.  “Get ma clothes off.  Make me nekkid.”

She wasn’t wrong in the least and at her words his mind immediately flashed with the mental pictures at what her speech called to mind.  Never mind the chubby he’d grown, totally without his knowledge and consent, which took that particular moment to call attention to itself with a deep throb.  “Just trying to get you into bed, Dory,” he mumbled as his face heated although he would’ve been hard pressed as to say why.

Bishop shifted her body on the sheets, using both hands on her shoulders as he righted her on the pillows, tucking her long bare legs beneath the covers.  But as he stood to his full height, assessing his ministrations with an eye to fixing anything she wouldn’t find comfortable, he felt her fingers as they snaked into the palm he had dangled at his side.  “Don’t…” she said on such a stricken note and without even a hint of a slur, that his eyes immediately shot to hers.  “Don’t leave me, Stan.  Please.  Don’t leave me again.”

What. The. Fuck?

He felt the arc of anger as it moved through him, so sharp and so fucking fast that it caused all his muscles to tense. 
He
wasn’t the one who’d packed
his
shit and taken to the road without fucking warning!  Wasn’t the one to unexpectedly call their marriage
quits
without explanation.  A marriage that he’d considered to be of the ‘forever’ variety even though they had hit a rough patch as all fucking couples do.  And just as he opened to mouth to correct her, Bishop again heard a soft snore.

Somehow between the moment she’d pleaded with him not to leave her again, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean, and him trying to formulate an answer that would’ve blistered her skin with the fury he was feeling, Dory had passed out cold.  So quickly and thoroughly, he found it was his fingers that still held her then limp ones.

He carefully disengaged, placing her hand on bed while he felt the flash flood of his indignant rage begin to drain away although her words were stuck in his brain, winding their way deep within him. 

Is that how she really saw it? 

That he’d quit her instead of the other way around?

Bishop turned quickly away from the bed, wishing he could twist away from his questions just as easily.  But it was impossible for him to stop plucking at the threads of his memory of their time together, looking for the ones that would give him an inkling of what she’d meant with her fervent entreaty.

Please don’t leave me again.

A request that was probably more fueled by the alcohol than anything else.  But he knew that wasn’t the full truth and for the first time since he’d heard her good-bye, received her farewell kiss that had been given with tears trailing, Bishop opened himself up to the possibility that he may have had a hand in losing his wife.

There had been the nights when she’d been crying so hard that their bed had jiggled, fucking waking him up with not only the movement but the sound of her sobs.  The first couple of times he’d cuddled to her, asked her what was wrong, being as fucking solicitous as he knew to be.  But after receiving some rambling account of something the Honeys had said, had done, he’d just tuned that goddamn shit out.  Had just murmured some kind of crap about how she needed to suck it up and learn to work with the other girls.  To just shut up and follow their direction before he’d find his heavy eyelids closing again in order to get some sleep before he’d get yet another bullshit call out to handle some other fucking thing in order to sort out whatever stupid stuff a brother had gotten himself into.  And then after those first couple of times, he’d just played possum, pretended to be asleep so he didn’t have to deal with all of Dory’s fucking shit as well as his own.

In retrospect, that had been the wrong way to play it.  Almost an insult in how little support he’d offered his wife as she struggled within the hive.

Shucking off his jeans and draping them over a chair, Bishop started turning out the lights all but for the one on the nightstand opposite where Dory lay. 

Had he really been that callous, that big of a selfish prick in his lack of concern for her?  Only worried about doing his duty to his club before taking care of their marriage?

As he slid into the other side of the queen bed and propping a head behind his head, he admitted that the Honeys hadn’t been the only problem.  There had been the older Hellions, the men on the council at that time who’d found delight in working Dory up.  Ones who’d even bragged to him about how they could get Dory so pissed, she was spitting over nothing but a touch here or there, a whispered suggestion of what they could fucking do to her when Bishop wasn’t around.  “You got yourself a wildcat, Bish!” they’d tell him, usually with a wink he’d always considered to be a compliment on snagging a hot young wife.

But revisiting those comments at a much later age, and with a lot more experience under his belt, Bishop was shocked at the memory.  But on the heels of that one, came another.  One of Dory getting ready for bed and of the view of the various bruises she had sported on both breasts and ass.  When he’d pressed for answers, she’d admitted that Zip had caught her alone at Big Duke’s party and felt the need to ‘get grabby’ but she’d handled it.

And the recollection also included how she hadn’t looked at him even for a moment as she’d haltingly explained.  But she also hadn’t let him near her for a good week afterward.

With a stomach full of ice, Bishop turned on his side tucking a hand beneath the pillow to stare at the profile of the woman next to him.  A beauty which had only become more so with the passage of time and at her internal strength he was just beginning to recognize.

It had been a day like any other day at Hellion Construction when the process server had done his official duty, delivering papers into Bishop’s hands.  Papers that’d announced they were writs of divorce into palms that were covered in the dust of the shelves of whatever supplies were to be pulled.  His job at that time was to do whatever he was told, whether that was assembling the parts or gear in advance of the following day’s jobs, reviewing bids and entering them into the computer or just making a run for lunch.

But on that particular morning as Receptionist Rita had led an unknown man into the desk area of the warehouse, Bishop was unaware of what exactly was happening.  Because he’d been all up in his head, trying to convince himself that Dory hadn’t really left but had just needed to get away for a time in order to get her shit together. 

A kind of vacation.

Sure they’d been fighting about the amount of time he spent at the club, at the amount of phone calls he was receiving in the middle of the night that found him dressing, snagging his keys and leaving.  But he hadn’t had a choice about going, right?  They’d even had words about the $300 he’d loaned to Trace which Dory had reminded him was part of the money they needed pay their rent the following month and the brother in question was notorious for borrowing without feeling the need to repay.

In Bishop’s young mind, those had been trifles, things not even worth the effort to yell about.

But he had yelled back at her.

And obviously it had been enough to cause Dory to leave.

Enough to have a process server shoving a sheaf of papers into his filthy hands in the middle of a work morning. 

Papers that had destroyed him from the inside out, cell by motherfucking cell.

“Wha’ cha’ fuckin’ got there, hot stuff?” Big Duke had called, looking more like one of those fat Buddha statues than ever as the older man leaned his forearms on his desk, his beady eyes almost swallowed in the bags that puffed both his upper and lower lids.

Bishop had swallowed before folding the papers in half, then half again, tucking them into his back pocket.  “Legal shit,” he’d replied on a mumble, unwilling, so fucking
unable
to confess to the impending demise of his marriage.  “Nothing to do with the club.”

“Ever’ lil’, bitty thang in yo’ life has to do with the club, shit-for-brains,” Zip had shot back across all the other desks between him and the young recruit.  “We own yo’ ass, ‘member?”

Bishop raised his head, knowing he was taking his life in his hands as he replied.  But there was no way he was gonna stay silent.  “Personal shit, Zip.  And that’s all you need to know.”

“Don’t like your ‘tude, boy,” Big Duke rumbled but was over-spoken by Trike, Trey’s dad who had the desk that abutted the fat man.

“Leave him be, Duke.”  Trike weighed probably a hundred pounds less and was younger by a good ten years but the man had held the gavel before Duke and there were times that Trike had no problem flexing that particular muscle.  “Even fuckin’ recruits get to have a personal life.”

“Not when he’s sleeping next to pussy tha’ don’t wanna share!”  Bishop had felt everything within him still at Zip’s accusatory words.  “She’s fucking hot but won’t even drop ta her knees when told ta hold that full wet mouth in a circle for a brother.”  Zip’s watery eyes, ones that were always bloodshot moved around the room to take in the other Hellions who were avidly watching and listening to all the doings.  “Honeys are supposed ta share!”

“Not the wives!”  Bishop knew the rules and wasn’t afraid to speak up about them.  Christ!  He’d been raised in the club, knew everything that was expected by its members and their women alike.

“We changed that un’,” Zip sneered triumphantly.  “Seemed a little too selfish-like after seein’ all the sweet new,
young
pussy you recruit fuckers keep bringin’ in.”

Every eye had gone to the older man, the one that had no trouble ordering beat-downs on other members for even the smallest of infractions.  “Wha’?  You fucks didn’t get the memo?  The council made it all fuckin’ official-like a’ the last goddamn council meetin’.  Your women are expected ta work every cock in the club if a brother requests it.”  A smile that could only be called a leer had spread over the other man’s wrinkled, bearded face.  “Any ol’ time a brother or brothers request it.  No matter if it’s her with her hands, her fuckin’ mouth or her tight young pink parts.”

Bishop had seen Trike’s face harden before it had turned to Zip’s.  “It wasn’t official, dick.  It was a motion that failed when the vote was four to two.”

“I say what passes and what doesn’t,” Big Duke grumbled but there was something about his response that told of his uncertainty in the face of Trike’s challenge.  “Zip and I like this one so it stays!”

“You fuckin’ lay one hand on my goddamn wife, even fuckin’ glance at my daughter for any of your sick brand of sex and you’ll be fuckin’ pushin’ up daisies, yeah?”  Trike’s voice, though not all that loud, carried in the then silent, cavern-like space.  “Real and true, I’d have no probs with doin’ time for cappin’ a brother’s ass if he so much as thinks of doin’ the dirty with my goddamn girls!”

Zip had dropped his head at Trike’s speech while Big Duke looked up towards the ceiling, giving Bishop the opportunity to walk away, to quickly stride down the long rows that reached floor to ceiling with different parts of the various bits each of the crews needed to have on hand.