Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(75)

In other words, during their marriage, more fights surfaced when Beverly refused to give Boz a baby if he refused to give her his fidelity.

In the end, he’d refused.

And in the end, I thought she was upset that she’d held out, and even now apart didn’t have a part of him like I had so much of Black through my sons, but just simply the fact she didn’t have her own family.

She loved my boys. Unlike my own sister, and Graham’s (a long, ugly story), she was a great auntie to them and always had been.

She also still loved the Club, keeping her finger on the pulse and having earned the respect of the brothers who she could, in her way.

She was definitely happy for me, for Jag, that he’d taken up his father’s legacy.

I knew by her voice it still stung she had no son to take on that legacy.

“You need to break up with that guy,” I announced suddenly.

“Keely—” she began.

“You totally need to break up with that guy,” I repeated.

“Boz is never getting back with me,” she replied.

“So?” I asked. “He lost out. Hold out for what you want.”

“There aren’t many of them out there.”

“Who cares? Hold out for one.”

“You know, I still live mostly paycheck to paycheck.”

The abrupt sharpness of her tone had my back coming up again.

“Beverly—”

“He’s an insurance salesman. A good one. He makes good money. His clients love him. He’s very likable on the whole, actually. He could sell the London Bridge back to the people who bought the wrong one, even pointing out it was the wrong one, that’s how good of a salesman he is. And he thinks he scored with me.”

“He did,” I shared, because Boz might be a little goofy, but Bev was like a biker babe cheerleader, all exuberance and sweetness and liveliness and affability, totally “Go Team!” with the bright-eyed, girl-next-door looks that matched.

“I’m just so fucking tired of it all,” she stated.

And the way she stated that sounded like she wasn’t tired, she was exhausted.

“Tired of what?” I asked quietly.

“Everything. Paying the bills. Dealing with the roof leaking. Buying all the groceries. Putting them away. Having to unload the dishwasher. Even me being the only one putting dishes in the damned thing.”

“The boys would deal with your roof,” I offered, knowing it was lame.

But they would.

“You know,” she began in a tone that made me, already vigilant in our conversation, start to brace, “you and me, we gave everything to that Club. They didn’t ask for it. It was us who gave them everything. And it’s been a long time that I’ve been wondering if we haven’t wasted the best years of our lives in loyalty to a bunch of men who, for your part, gave back out of guilt, and for my part, didn’t even want it.”

“Bev,” I whispered.

She was still my friend because unlike everyone else, early on, she’d pulled off the kid gloves with me.

But I’d never heard her say anything like that.

“So I’m gonna marry an insurance salesmen who wouldn’t know his way to a woman’s clit if he had a fifty-page instruction booklet, but he loves me. He’d never cheat on me. He’s over the moon I said yes. He came over Friday night with this basket his secretary made, filled with bridal magazines, and champagne and pretty flutes and a box of chocolates, and Post-it notes, saying we were going to spend the evening going through the magazines and he wanted me to stick a note on anything I loved.”

Wow.

That was sweet.

She kept going.

“So I have to spend some time introducing him to my clit. And I never felt with him the way I felt when I made Boz laugh. Whatever. He’s one thing Boz is not. Chaos is not. Good for me.”

“I—” I started to say something but I heard my front door open.

I turned that way.

The boys usually came in the back. It wasn’t unheard of for them to come in the front.

But they usually came in the back.

Maybe Dutch was there to tell me in person they’d taken his brother on as recruit (Jag would be celebrating, though tomorrow, even as sick as a dog as he’d be, he’d be cleaning up the mess of the celebration afterward, starting at oh-dark-hundred, no matter what that mess might be).

Though it was a given Chaos would take him on, so I couldn’t imagine why one of the boys didn’t just text me.

“Can you just be happy for me and try to help me find the way to happy?” Bev asked.

I couldn’t answer.

Not immediately.

Hound stood in the double-wide doorway to my kitchen.

Chaos cut. White thermal. Faded jeans that did things to his substantial package any woman, even one not into bikers, would give her favorite pair of shoes, her most beloved handbag and anything else that was requested for a shot at. Hair unkempt and wild from his ride, falling over his forehead and into those beautiful blue eyes that were wary and locked on me.

In other words, hot.

In other words, if he wasn’t such a motherfucking dick, and I wasn’t on the phone with Bev, I’d take about a second to think about it.

Then I’d pounce.

It was then I cursed the day I’d had double-paned windows put in to replace the old ones. With the rest of the built-to-last house, back in the kitchen, I never heard a bike approach. I never heard anything.