Unbeloved (Undeniable #4)(44)

I arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Wild *,” Eva repeated. “You need to just take control. Forget about everything else—the past, your fears—forget about everything but you and Hawk and what you want. But mostly about what you want to do to him,” she finished with a sly grin.

“I’m not wild . . . *,” I said, stumbling over the last word and feeling my face heat. Desperately, I tried searching for a word that adequately described exactly what I was and came up empty. “I’m . . . dusty *,” I finished with a sigh, feeling ridiculous.

Eva’s face went slack as she gave me an exaggerated look of dismay. “You’re in your forties, Dorothy, not dead! So go home, kick your daughter out of the house, go upstairs, get naked, and f*ck your man!”

“He can barely walk!” I hissed.

“He doesn’t need his leg for this!” she hissed back.

“He’ll need his third leg,” a new voice chimed in.

Eva and I both looked up to find Christina, Bucket’s heavily tattooed girlfriend, staggering through the kitchen’s swinging doors. Wearing only a black bra, a matching thong, and a pair of blood-red stiletto heels, she traipsed heavily across the linoleum before collapsing into the nearest chair.

Christina looked more haggard than I’d ever seen her before, with her long black hair a snarled mess, her dark makeup smudged around her eyes, giving her a raccoon appearance, and her red lipstick looking as though it had been forcefully smeared off her mouth and up her cheek.

I raised an eyebrow at Eva who, with a roll of her eyes, shook her head.

“So whose third leg are we talking about?” Christina asked.

“Hawk’s,” Eva answered, and flashed me a grin that I returned with a silent snarl.

“Oh,” Christina said, sounding bored. “Just hitch up that saddle and ride, girl, ride.”

“See,” Eva said smartly. “Told you.”

“It’s not that easy,” I protested.

“Why the f*ck not?” Christina exclaimed. “I mean, it’s not as if you haven’t taken that ride before. Seriously, D, how long were you jerkin’ that joystick behind Jase’s back? Five, ten years? The whole damn time?”

My mouth fell open. I’d forgotten just how crude Christina could be. She had no filter, no reservations, and had always been more like one of the boys than any other woman associated with the club. In fact, she was a lot like my own daughter, aside from the fact that Tegen would never be caught dead parading around the clubhouse in lacy underwear and high heels.

Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that most of the women associated with the club were a lot like Christina. With the exception of a few, they were hard women with battle-ax personalities, essentially strong enough to take on the kind of men who became part of Deuce’s crew.

How on earth had I ended up here?

While I might have been cheating on my husband with a married man, and later, engaging in a sexual relationship behind my lover’s back, as far as the club’s female standards went, I was exceptionally tame. A gazelle thrown into a pit of lions who’d somehow managed to survive.

Although not necessarily unscathed, but I’d survived nonetheless. Life sure did throw you some interesting curveballs sometimes.

“What are you thinking about in that crazy brain of yours now, Dorothy?”

I looked up at Eva, shaking free of my thoughts, and shrugged. “Just . . . you know, how in the world I ended up here.”

Eva smiled, one of her wide, warm smiles that made you feel like she knew things that others didn’t. I both hated and loved that about her, the way she could light up a room with just a simple word or smile.

“You ended up here,” she said, “because here is where you belong. It may not always be pretty, in fact sometimes life can be downright ugly, but everything happens for a reason, Dorothy. Everything.”

Her words were nearly identical to Hawk’s, and something I’d once said to Tegen in order to ease her nerves. Although I’d never been a big believer in fate or destiny, I couldn’t help but think that maybe there was some truth to it. Even Hawk had admitted that he’d made mistakes.

Yet . . . maybe our mistakes were what led us to where we were supposed to be all along. Was it possible that without our mistakes, we wouldn’t have become the people we were meant to be? And if we hadn’t made the choices we made, what would have become of us all?

Would we still have somehow ended up in the same place?

Oh good God, my head was starting to hurt. This line of thinking reminded me very much of my childhood, when my parents had tried to instill religion in me and I fought tooth and nail against it. I might have been very much a romantic, but when it came to blind faith, I’d always needed hard proof, something they could never give me.

But maybe love was a lot like blind faith in the unknown. And maybe that was why it had been so hard for me to let go of what I’d known, instead of moving toward what I’d really wanted.

“Will you two lovesick twats get your mind off your men?” Christina suddenly snapped. “You’re both making me sick.”

“I think your excessive drinking is what’s making you sick,” Eva said dryly.

“Speaking of making me sick,” she continued, giving Eva a pointed look. “One of you bitches needs to call that little dog off Cox before Kami comes in and sees what the f*ck her man has been up to.”