Checkmate With Bishop: A Hellions MC Novel (3 page)

Dory still hadn’t called back and her lack of response played on his mind. 

Had he waited too long?  Was she already on to a new life, the kind of life she deserved and had no residual emotion for someone she’d once, back in the day, loved?  Maybe.  But Bishop didn’t give a fuck.  They had unfinished business between the two of them and no one or nothing was going to stand in the way of him telling her…

“Bish?” Trey’s deep growl stopped the leaner man in his tracks, the only movement in the room was of Bishop’s hazel gaze hitting the president’s chocolate brown eyes.  “We gotta talk, amigo.”

“No one’s stopping you, buddy,” Bishop threw over his shoulder as he shoved a folder into the safe built into the concrete floor behind and to the right of his desk.  “If you got something on your mind, then it’s fucking up to you to start the convo, dig?”

Bishop caught Trey’s head nod as he swung the safe’s door closed and put the carpet tile back into place.   Not too long ago, Bishop would’ve simply shot to his feet, relying on his thick thigh muscles to carry the rest of him up.   That move, however, was long since gone and he placed a hand on the floor to give him the leverage.  He’d tried working out in the gym that now consumed half of the equipment shed after the move to open Hellions-Billings, but he didn’t have the stamina nor the muscle strength to wield the heavy weights anymore.  He was lucky if he could walk five miles an hour for a full hour, on the treadmill.

It was just another motherfucking thing about him that was no longer the norm.

“Think things are getting worse, not better, brother.”  Trey’s tone, one of heartbreaking sympathy, had Bishop avoiding the other man’s gaze.  “And I need to know just what the fuck is going on.”

If Trey’s tone had been anything other than it was, Bishop would’ve lost it and demanded to throw dogs in the parking lot even though he knew he was in absolutely no condition to go a round with the other man. 

So instead of playing it brash or from the balls, Bishop went truthful.

“How old am I?” he asked his president.  Or rather, he asked Trey’s boots since he couldn’t look the man in the eye.

“Uhm, thirty eight?”

“Yep.  And how old were my dad and grandpop when they…”  Bishop found he couldn’t finish the thought, to actually say the rest of it out loud and the words just dangled in the air between the two men. 

That was until Trey put two and two together.

“Fucking
Christ
!  Bishop!”  Trey’s bellow resounded against the office walls and echoed out the door, down the hall and clear into the warehouse portion that abutted the manager offices at Hellion Construction.  “Just shut that fucking shit down
now
, brother!” 

Bishop glanced up to where Trey towered, never knowing when the other man had found his feet, but immediately saw Trey’s thick finger was pointed straight at Bishop’s face. 

“I never, fuckin’
ever
, wanna hear you spew that shit again, yeah?  You ain’t your daddy and you ain’t your pops!  You get me?”  Yeah, Bishop got him as could everyone in Missoula County proper.  Trey’s hand went to his goatee, the one that Bishop knew Trey had grown to try and cover up the pretty-boy dimples that took him from ‘badass’ to beautiful in order to stroke it.  A self-soothing move the big man used when he was upset, nervous or just feeling a lot of emotion he wanted to keep inside.

And it hurt to know that Bishop had caused both the stroking and the bellowing.  Especially since it was over something neither one of them could help.

“I got it, Trey.  Can’t lie to you, buddy.  But real and true, I know I got it.”  Bishop had planned on telling Trey later, after he was in the hospital and the tests were still being reviewed, but he knew it was too late for that.  They were just too close, had grown up at the same club and knew too much about one another for him to deny what Bishop knew was happening.

Trey stared at Bishop with stark eyes, brown orbs so filled with pain and sorrow that Bishop felt his chest compress.  “What’d the doc say?  What’d the tests show?”

Bishop shrugged.  “No doc and no tests, yet.  Have other shit to do before I submit myself to all that garbage.”

The sound of the chair’s cushion was the only thing heard as Trey dropped himself back into the seat.  “You haven’t been?”  And while the words were simple, the tone was more in the incredulous arena.

Bishop finally met his best friend’s eyes.  “Nah. Too much shit to take care of before I subject myself to all that fucking crap.”

Trey was quiet as he stared at the man before him as if trying to process the info given.  “Stella is head nurse at St. Pat’s.  So all you gotta do is say the word…”

“I know, Trey.  I know,” was Bishop’s tight response.  Stella was Trey’s aunt and one of the few in the family who hadn’t joined the Hellions either by marriage or by becoming a Honey.  She’d chosen a nursing career instead, which Bishop had to admit suited her personality to a ‘T’.  “When I’m done getting my shit together, Stell’ will be the one I’ll contact.”

Trey did a deep, hard blink as he stared at a spot over Bishop’s shoulder.  It was a hard conversation between two men who had known each other most of their lives.  One that Bishop had never counted on as having to give and which Trey obviously had never wanted to receive.

“What kind of shit are we talking about here, amigo?  Property?  Money?”

Bishop kept his face on his friend as he nodded.  “And Dory.”

“What about Dory?” Trey breathed on a deep growl.  Of everyone that knew of Bishop’s short lived marriage, Trey had taken it the hardest when she’d left.  But then the man had only been seventeen when her bumper had made haste to disconnect from Missoula…and from the man she’d married.

“I need to talk to her, buddy.  But she hasn’t returned my call.”

Trey dropped a palm to the desk with an audible tap.  “You need me to fuckin’ talk to her, to convince her it’s important she calls back, all you gotta do is say so.”  The man, the Hellion president that held the gavel, seemed so motherfucking determined as if calling Dory was the be-all and end-all to the situation.

Bishop bit the inside of his lip at his brother’s words in order to curb the smile that threatened to burst forth before he nodded.  He wasn’t sure he could open his mouth to respond without laughing.  And he knew Dory would take Trey’s interference just as Bishop would in her placeas a puppy biting at her heels. 

“Like I said, I’m working it, dig?  Just like I’m fucking working everything else, Trey.”  Bishop swallowed over the lump in his throat as his mind realized that it was up to him, was
his
motherfucking responsibility to control the end of his life and how it would go down.  “Let me work it, dude.  Let me work it the best way I know how.”

Trey’s eyes bored into Bishop’s and found both men swallowing hard and deep.  “Know I’ve got your back, Stan, yeah?”

At the sound of his own name, his legal name, Bishop’s body went to tense.  But not so turned to stone that he couldn’t respond.  “Yeah, Stephen.  I know.  Just like I’ve always had yours, big guy.”

Chapter Three

Friday nights we closed the shop at five when most of the other hair salons kept their doors open until at least seven, which was only one of a myriad of ways that Luscious was different than the competition.  But Joy and I had been determined to make our place, make our little company special within the community.  

And we had.

We catered to everyone:  the teens, the seniors and especially the biker-girls that were willing to spend a lot in order to look better than their much younger competition.  And since I had knowledge of the biker world, I knew what those ladies of a certain age both needed and wanted.

It was a special trade and one that not every shop in town wanted or even knew how to work.

But I did.

And I exploited my previous experience in the Hellion Honeys so that Joy and I became the salon of choice when the biker-bitches rolled into town on the back of the machines their men rode.   From April through middle September, our shop was the place to be in Casper!

Enough so that we could close at five on Friday nights without guilt, without a care to do what normal people did with their free time. 

Which was, in my case, shop for groceries.

With a growing thirteen year old at home, it was a constant struggle to keep him fed but one I didn’t lament in the least.  Even if it did mean that each and every shopping expedition resulted in more bags than the cart wanted to hold.  But I’d learned how to load the conveyer belt, putting all the heavier items on it first in order to double-deck the purchases before toting them out to my SUV.  Knowing which of the sacks to put in what passed for a trunk and which to load into the backseat.

Pulling into the narrow driveway of my small house, I saw the lights on behind the curtains and smiled.  Of all the mothers I knew, I was the luckiest because my J.R. was always exactly where he said he’d be at the exact time he’d told me.

I flicked my high-beams and did a short bleep of the horn to signal my arrival as always.  Which I knew my kid would be watching for.  So I wasn’t surprised to see my ever-growing son holding the kitchen door open with his butt as he struggled into his shoes while shooting me a smile.

A smile so much like his father’s, it caught on my heart.

“What took you so long?”  So much for the comparisons between J.R. and his dad since J.R.’s voice had been trying to take on its new depths without much success.  There were growls and there were squeaks but not much in between as he grew into the new registers his voice was taking.

“We were just about out of everything,” I wheezed as I struggled to find the ground in my effort to exit the tall vehicle.  “It was an every aisle job, man.”

I caught the eye-roll J.R. was so studiously trying to keep to himself and turned away in order to hide my grin.  Eye-rolls were just part and parcel of the whole raising-a-teen experience and one that I was becoming intimately familiar with.

Snagging a couple of the handles of more than a few of the carriers that were heavy enough to slide my purse down my shoulder, I maneuvered the concrete stairs of our back door and made my way into the house.  Placing them by lower countertops, I felt my purse slip even further and reached to capture my cellphone before it tumbled out and down.  I’d already lost one cellphone to that kind of action and didn’t want to repeat it again.

Setting it on the countertop I went back outside and smiled at my tall little man who had three bags looped around each arm.  “Not too heavy, baby?”

I got the full-frontal eye-roll as he slid by me with the rustle of plastic and couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped my lips.  It seemed that every day my darling boy set out to prove that he was already fully-grown at thirteen even though I knew my heart would never accept it even when he was thirty-five.

“Mom?  Your…” J.R. started but the crinkling of the bags hanging off my wrists overrode him.  Not that I was worried since I was within fifteen feet of him in spite of the surprise I could hear in his voice.

Climbing the three steps, grunting at all the extra weight of the two bags I carried in each hand, I schooled my face into a determined grin.  I may not have been able to match J.R. in amount, but I was pulling my own weight nonetheless.

I watched my boy, my little boy who was not so little anymore, use one hand to pull up his sagging knee-length shorts while holding my cellphone up to his ear.  “Yeah, she’s here.  Just a sec’.  And who can I say is calling?”  My brain idly noted how he straightened at whatever was said before he twisted to me, his hazelly-green eyes turning to mine as he held out the phone. 

But it was the emotions contained within those amazing orbs that made my feet sputter in their movements as I stopped just inside the door.

“He says his name is Bishop Bastian,” my beautiful, wonderful boy announced, confusion tangled in the set of his eyebrows.  “And he wants to talk to you.”

My heart seemed to hesitate before it began to pound as the bags I’d been carrying dropped from my arms and thudded to the floor while I reached for the phone.

Stan.

Stan was on the phone and had talked to J.R.

I closed my eyes as the plastic of the cellphone hit my fingers, everything within me clenching as I struggled with the thought of…

“Hey, Stan,” I offered, my eyes still squeezed shut even though I worked to maintain an even tone, clutching the cell to my ear.

“Dory.”  His one word response held a wealth of meanings, those I’d already learned in my time with him so long ago.  Some things couldn’t be forgotten no matter how much you tried.  “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“No.”  Damn, I had no defenses to prevent my voice from going into a higher register as I walked the tightrope between the bass timbre from my past and the question in my teenager’s face.   Directing my speech to the one male I knew I could control, I explained and hoped J.R. took my hint, “just bringing in groceries.” 

I took a deep breath in order to calm myself, only hoping afterward that Stan hadn’t heard.  “I got your message.  What’s up?”

Okay, I had been trying for breezy during a time I felt anything of the sort but still, I’d gotten the main portion of my question out there.

“We need to talk,” the velvet growl answered, a noise that I felt in places that had no business being awake at that time of the evening and with my son looking on.  “You didn’t call me back.”

Grabbing the first bag at my feet and bringing it up to the waist-high counter, I waved towards J.R. in an effort to encourage him to go back to the truck to continue removing the groceries. 

And to get him out of earshot, if I was being honest.

True to his early-teen attitude though, my kid stood across from me in a pose of studied casualness and watched with sharp, all-seeing eyes.  He was deliberately ignoring my hints.  Covering the bottom half of my cellphone, I was done with suggesting and decided to give a clear directive.  “J.R., honey, can you bring in the rest of the groceries?”