Simple Ride (Hellions Ride Book 6) (3 page)

***

One week, six hours, eight minutes,
that is how long it has been since I last reached my mother.
Anxiety overwhelms me. Wesson and Colt are getting bigger. They are
a lot for her to handle, two growing boys. My stomach aches, my
heart beats loudly, and my head pounds from thinking of
them.

I miss my boys. I miss being a mom to
my kids. Without them, I am not me. This self-imposed exile from
their lives is slowly killing me.

They are better off without me,
though.

They didn’t ask to be born. They
didn’t ask to have Dennis for a father. They didn’t ask to be
brought into a world of uncontainable fury. They simply didn’t ask
for anything I gave them. Life with my mom is far from perfect, but
it’s the only good thing I have ever given them, even if it comes
at the sacrifice of me.

Sighing, I clean the bathroom of Crews
Transports. Doll makes Tripp and Rex keep it relatively clean, but
seriously, a scrub brush and comet are the tools to my
day.

Blaine cries out, and I fight to keep
my own tears at bay. Doll is blessed to be able bring her baby to
work with her. Blaine is a good boy. Tripp, Doll, and little ‘BW,’
as they call him, are a picture-perfect family. Okay, maybe not
your typical picture-perfect, but add leather, ink, and
motorcycles, and you can call it the picture-perfect family of
badasses.

“
Shhhhh, BW, please, baby,
please. Momma is losing it here. Daddy will be home in two days. I
don’t know what to do for you, son,” I hear Doll pleading with the
toddler.

I come around the corner to see tears
streaming down her face. Her blonde hair is tied in a messy knot on
her head, and her sweats clearly show she had a rough
night.

“
You okay?”

When she practically jogs to me and
hands BW over, I hold the boy to my hip and rest his head on my
shoulder. Then Doll drops her face into her hands.

“
I can’t do this. He isn’t
eating right. He has diarrhea. Tripp is gone. He keeps crying. Oh,
Pamela, he wails and wails.”

I sway back and forth as BW settles
against me. “Breathe, Momma, he feels every emotion from you. Get
calm, and then we can find the source of his irritation. First,
though, he can’t feed off you being a mess, making him become a
bigger mess.” She looks up at me, her red eyes understanding. “If
it’s a competition of who can cry the longest, baby girl, he’s
always gonna win, so get your head on straight.”

She rolls her shoulders
back while I gently pat the diapered bottom of her boy.
“
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.
Pami’s gonna buy you a mocking bird
,” I
sing the lullaby and little BW stops crying just enough to take in
my soft tone. “That’s it, baby boy.
If
that mocking bird don’t sing, Pami’s gonna buy you lots of bling
bling
.”

Doll laughs at my change of words, and
her son lifts his head to look at her. Once he sees his mom is
okay, he settles back against me and closes his eyes as I continue
to make up parts of the old song and sway slowly.

“
Magic,” Doll whispers when
she finds that Blaine is soundly sleeping and drooling on my
shoulder.

“
Teething. I think he’s
cutting molars. Orajel and Motrin are your new best
friends.”

She smiles at me in the Doll way that
lights up a room. “Right now, Pamela, you are my very best
friend.”

“
Real talk, Doll. You gotta
breathe. It’s hard when they are little, and it’s easy to get
overwhelmed, especially when they don’t feel well. They can’t tell
you what’s wrong, and not one of us has the ability to read their
little minds. But you can’t join his pity party because someone has
to sort out the world’s problems from the view of a two-year-old,
and it’s not gonna be him.”

“
You are so
wise.”

“
He is the one person who
has heard your heartbeat from the inside, Doll. You are connected
in a way no one else can understand. Flesh of your flesh and blood
of your blood. What you feel, he feels, so you gotta be rock solid,
Momma.”

“
How many do you have?”
Doll asks, watching me carefully. She knows. She can see the mother
inside of me. Can she also see the failure I am to my
kids?

“
That’s a problem for
another day, Delilah,” I answer her honestly, but with her real
name so she doesn’t press me further.

Chapter Three

~Boomer~

“
Pass me the socket wrench
set, Axel,” I call to Shooter’s boy, who is really Rex’s son
biologically, but somehow in only the way the Hellions can do, Rex
and his woman Caroline have found a way to truly co-parent with
Shooter and Tessie.

He is an amazing kid. His mom and he
brought my best friend out of his own personal darkness and back
into the light of life. Mercy was no friend to their ride, but
together, they made it through.

“
If you don’t pull your
head outta your ass, I’m gonna sock it to ya,” Shooter says from
behind me.

“
Momma doesn’t like those
words, Shooter,” Axel chimes in, handing me the tool.

Shooter and I both smile.

“
What’s wrong, Booma?” Axel
asks with the childlike innocence that has me frowning.

“
Nothing.” I turn back to
the car in front of me, but a firm hand on my shoulder stops
me.

“
Come on, man. What’s said
in the garage blows out the tailpipes, never to be heard from
again,” Shooter says, making me laugh.

“
You’re going soft,
brother. That was the stupidest thing I have ever heard come out of
your mouth, and we both know I have heard some crazy
shit.”

“
Language,” Axel chastises.
“Momma is gonna be mad at all of us boys if y’all don’t clean up
your mouths. She even got Lux in on it.”

Now that has both Shooter and me
laughing. ‘Lux’ is Caroline, Rex’s old lady and his deluxe model
woman. She is Fancy Nancy and hell on wheels at the drop of a dime.
Ride or die, she’s a Hellions ol’ lady with fire. They all have
that, though. Doll, Sass, Tessie, Lux, Doc Kelly, each one is a
badass broad in her own way.

Purple Pussy Pamela is, too; only, she
is so caught up in her secrets she holds so close she can’t see
what’s right in front of her.

I am stupid. Completely dumb. Sign me
up to wear the dunce cap; that’s how badly I fucked up. Men like me
don’t spout poetic future shit after planting their seed so deep
inside a broad it will take days to slide out. No, men like me are
supposed to fuck hard, fast, furious, and without thoughts of the
future, just raw release. Any other woman would have never given
them a second thought. Any other woman never would have gotten the
offer.

Pamela did.

I gave her the offer to be on my bike.
She knows this world. She knows what that means. Other barflies
would have jumped at the opportunity to be claimed in order to have
this life and the family it comes with permanently. It isn’t an
offer to give lightly or to decide on quickly. Pamela did,
though.

Pamela walked out. She turned me
down.

I have been fucking her for over a
year. Then I laid my world at her feet, and she walked away. She
didn’t look back. She hasn’t called.

“
It’s nothing, man,” I try
to brush him off.

“
Then stop looking at your
phone and the door like you’ve gotta take off in an
instant.”

I take pause to focus on my latest
behaviors. He is right; I have been watching my phone and door like
a fucking lovesick teenager.

This stops now!

No broad needs to have this kind of
power over a man. Even more so, I don’t really know her other than
she sucks my cock like it’s her job. Oh, wait, I guess it is. She
keeps the club happy, and the club keeps her in our fold. I guess
she showed me my place.

I run my hand over my beard in
frustration. “My mind is all over the place.”

“
Get your head on
straight.”

“
Wanna blow stuff up,
Booma?” Axel pipes in, going to the toolbox for Shooter.

I laugh. “Why would you ask
that?”

“
My dad always tells Lux he
needs to blow a load. Your name is Booma ’cause you make things go
boom, I reckon … so you wanna find some stuff to blow
up?”

“
Always, little man,
always. We better get this car finished first, though.”

“
Sounds good to me. Shooter
has the good fireworks hidden in the shed.” He smiles
brightly.

“
Hey, that was a secret,”
Shooter jokes.

“
Bro code. Booma needs bro
time, and what better way than lighting stuff on fire and watching
it go up? It’s on a need to know basis”—Axel makes a serious face
at Shooter—“and he really needed to know. We’ve got his back,
Shooter; you tell me that all the time. Family and shi—stuff.
Stuff, right? Booma is family. He gets bro code.”

Shooter ruffles his hair.
“Totally.”

After fixing the car and making some
stuff go boom, I leave Shooter and Axel to head to the bar. I am
playing with fire, and one of us is going to get burned for
sure.

The place is slow for the usual
Saturday night crowd at Ruthless. Then again, since Tessie’s
attack, only Hellions hang around here, keeping it light and
tight.

Kerri comes around the corner, looking
every bit the sex kitten she is in a super short mini skirt that
lets her ass cheeks hang out.

“
Hey, Boomer,” she purrs as
she slides on the bar stool next to me, her breasts filling out her
shirt to maximum capacity.

I lift my beer to her and tip it back
without speaking. Throwing my hand up, I get Corinne’s attention
for another long neck. She makes a face before popping the top and
slamming the glass bottle down in front of me.

“
Watch yourself,” I warn
Corinne. “Know your place.” I’m not about to take any disrespect
from a damn barfly.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see
Pamela come around from the back where the bathrooms are. She
glares at me and then Kerri, and I smile as I take another pull of
the beer. Yeah, misery loves company, and she had her
chance.

Tracking her movements in my
peripheral vision, I am surprised when she drops to her knees
beside my barstool. When I turn to her, my eyes burn with desire,
and my mind races with thoughts of what she could be hiding behind
that cold stare. Her hands slide up the inside of my thighs as her
gaze remains locked on mine.

“
If it’s a showdown you
want, baby, it’s a showdown you’re gonna get.” I smirk, taking a
long drink and watching the condensation drop from my bottle into
the open cleavage of her chest. Oh, if only to be that small drop
of water sliding down the peaks and into the valley of
sweetness.

My cock throbs in my jeans as it
pulses against the zipper. Her fingers come up to my button when I
reach down with my free hand and stop her.

“
What are you doing, Pami?”
I ask honestly, wondering what she really thinks right
now.

“
I know my place.” She
smirks at me, each word laced in menace.

“
On your knees, on your
back, doesn’t really matter to me. You’re not my business anymore.”
I push her hands off me, forcing her to lean back so as not lose
her balance, giving me enough room to stand.

“
Boomer,” she calls out as
I walk to the back room where the pool tables are.

I don’t look back as I tell her, “That
ship has sailed, woman. That ship has fuckin’ sailed.”

~Pamela~

Go to work, come home, and check in
with the club every few days. Survive, get by, and keep my bastard
husband away from my kids. Sitting in my chair in my shithole
trailer, I rub my empty belly absently.

Ghost flutters.

I feel them. I feel her. Even though
she is gone, I feel her inside me. The pull is so deep I could
drown in the misery.

My only responsibility and
priority is to my children, and I failed her. In my head, I can
hear the rapid beating of her tiny heart, the heart I longed to
hear at every doctor’s appointment. The swishing and steady
thump, thump, thump
were
heaven to my ears. In one night, in the flash of one mistake, she
was gone.

I didn’t deserve her. I don’t deserve
Wesson and Colt. God took her to keep her for his own, for I am
weak and undeserving of such a precious life. Wesson and Colt were
my gifts. They were my opportunity to see the light and get
away.

I didn’t listen to my gut. I didn’t
take the many opportunities I was given to leave. I failed to walk
through every door that was opened to me. As a little girl, Momma
took me to Sunday school where we sang songs and learned Bible
verses. The trainings of a child, the motto, the chant—if he leads
you to it, he will get you through it.

I balked.

Every time I could leave and should
have, I froze. From the moment I knew she existed, I knew in my
heart, deep into my very soul, it was going to be the end this
time.