“I have no idea what crush you’re talking about, but yes, Saint was a big part of my life once upon a time,” I admit, accepting the ice-cold glass of vodka and lemonade that Seth passes my way. “Thank you, Seth. So what else have I missed out on while I’ve been segregated?”

  “Nothing much on my end,” Brooks answers first, downing his glass then giving me his attention. “Still working at the sandalwood factory.”

  We chat for a bit, and then we have dinner, a lasagna and salad that Logan made for us. Sabrina comes back from work just in time to have some of the dessert we both made earlier today, chocolate cheesecake and strawberries, before the boys start heading home. It’s been so long since I felt like I could open up and be close to my brothers, like when we were little, but after tonight I realize how much I’ve missed them all. Even Brooks, who is generally a total asshole.

  I already feel like I’ve made the right choice by moving here.

  There’s no going back now.

  Saint,

  Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written to you. I’ve been settling in at Logan’s house and found a new job at a bar, so I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve been looking at different colleges too, trying to figure out what my passion is and what I’m meant to do.

  How are you doing? I’ve been thinking about going to visit Hammer, but I’m not sure if I should call him or just show up. Am I even welcome there anymore? Maybe calling would be safer. I don’t really know what to expect, but I do want to see him, and I do want some answers. How would you feel about me coming to visit you?

  Sky

  I write this letter, but then decide not to send it. Some things are just better said face-to-face.

  I’m going to go see Hammer.

  And then I’m going to go and see Saint.

  * * *

  Feeling extremely nervous, I step onto the Knights of Fury MC turf. The last time I was here I was being dragged away and put into Mom’s car, which was five years ago. So much has changed since then, but the clubhouse building remains exactly the same, the brown brick, the rickety metal fence and the worn wooden door. There’s a few bikes out front, making me pause for a moment as I scope them out, trying to see if I remember any of them but coming up short.

  Slowly, my white canvas shoes take me to the entrance. I knock once, and then twice, louder, when no one answers the first time.

  “Is that someone knocking?” I hear a masculine voice ask. “Jesus Christ. Those knocks were too polite to be the cops. Who the fuck could it be?”

  I don’t know if anyone has even knocked on this door, other than police, because normally everyone just walks in like they own the place. However, I don’t really feel comfortable doing that, especially when I don’t even know if Hammer is in there.

  “I hope it’s someone selling chocolate or candy,” another voice adds, just before the door opens, and I see Renny, aka Renegade, and Temper standing in front of me. While I wasn’t that close with Renny growing up, Temper was one of my favorite bikers. The man has a heart of gold for the select few he lets in. For everyone else, though...if Temper doesn’t like you, you should get the fuck out of Dodge.

  “Sky?” Temper asks, brow furrowing. “Is that you? Holy fuck, it is! What the fuck happened to you? You grew up on me.”

  He opens his arms, and I run into them. “And you grew old on me, Temper.”

  “Only you can get away with saying shit like that, trouble,” he mutters, voice husky. “What in hell are you doing here? You’re the last person I thought to see on the other side of this door.”

  I let go of him and turn to Renny, offering him a shy smile. “Renny.”

  “Sky,” he replies, stroking my hair. “Hammer is going to be fuckin’ happy to see you.”

  Relief fills me, and my shoulders release all of their tension. “Is he here?”

  Temper nods and pulls me gently by the wrist. “Come on.”

  He leads me through the house and outside to the yard, and that’s where I see him on a chair, smoke in hand, staring out at the sky.

  “Hey, Prez, look who the cat dragged in,” Renny calls out ahead of us.

  Hammer doesn’t even turn around. “If it has tits I’m not in the mood,” he calls out, tone irritated.

  “I mean, she does have them, but I’m not gonna look at them if I wanna live to tell the story,” Renny says, chuckling deeply.

  This seems to get Hammer’s attention. His slow head turn has my nerves racing. He looks the same. A little grayer, a few more wrinkles around his eyes, but he’s exactly how I remembered him.

  Sky? he mouths, shaking his head slightly, as if to clear it. He looks surprised, shocked...but also happy. Standing, he opens his arms and smiles widely, approaching me. When he reaches me, he hugs me so tightly that all of the pieces fit back together.

  Home.

  I’m home. I’m safe.

  “Dad?” I whisper, feeling emotional, tears prickling at the back of my eyes. I bury my face into his worn brown leather jacket and just hold on to him for dear life.

  He kisses the top of my head. “I knew you’d come back.”

  Lifting my face up, looking him in the eyes, I say, “Did you? Because I didn’t.”

  Sadness fills his brown gaze. “I hoped that you would. Does your mother know that you are here?”

  I shake my head. “No, and I’m not going to tell her. My brothers told me what happened. I know she didn’t want any of us to have any contact.”

  Which is quite the understatement. Mom is the one who took me away from Hammer. She didn’t want me to have a relationship with him because she no longer did.

  I pull back from him and wipe my eyes with my palms. “Is someone cutting onions?”

  They must be. I’m sure of it. I’m not much of a crier, and I’m the type who tends to bury her emotions as much as she can. Suffer in silence, that’s my motto.

  “I’ve missed you,” I admit.

  The man standing before me is the only parent who has ever shown me love, the only one who made me feel like I’m not a failure. Up until we left, Hammer had done nothing but love, support and be there for me, and even though it’s been years, all of those feelings and emotions come back. They say you never remember what a person says, you remember only how they made you feel, and right now I feel loved and cherished, and it’s all coming back like it was yesterday.

  This man took me to the hospital when I broke my arm.

  He made me soup when I was sick.

  He threatened the parents of the boy who was mean to me in fifth grade.

  Through all the years he was the one who got me through everything, and now I have him back.

  “I’ve missed you too, Sky,” he replies, cupping my face and smiling down at me. “Welcome home.”

  Chapter Ten

  The next voice I hear is one I didn’t expect.

  “Skylar?”

  I look around Hammer to see Saint himself, standing at the door. He’s dressed in a pair of low-slung jeans and he’s not wearing a shirt. My eyes linger on his body, one that was once bare but now is covered in tattoos and muscles, and I don’t know where to look right now. He’s beautiful. He seems older, more mature, and there’s a weariness in his eyes that wasn’t there before.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask him, lost for words.

  I thought I’d have a little time to prepare myself before seeing him, and when I did it was going to be at the prison, so this whole meeting has caught me off guard. I’m still drawn to him like no other, and I can’t seem to look away from him. It’s been so long since I laid eyes on that face and heard that voice, and now that he’s finally in front of me I don’t really know what to say or do. The last time we saw each other we were friends and I was a child. Yes, I was sixteen, but it was a schoolgirl crush. But now...seeing him as an adult woman has me feeling all sorts of things I don’t know if I’m supposed to feel. I’m still very much attracted to him. Is this normal?

  As I study him, I can see he’s looking at me in that same inscrutable way he always did. But this time, there is something else. It’s like he’s seeing me for the first time. He’s never looked at me this way before.

  “I could say the same about you,” he murmurs, stepping toward me.

  Hammer backs away and lets us have our moment, and when Saint’s arms come around me, his warm skin pressing against me, I don’t have words to express how I’m feeling. I’ve thought about this moment for so long, but it’s so much more than I ever thought it was going to be.

  “They let you out early?” I surmise, looking up at him. “I didn’t expect to see you here, that’s for sure.”

  He nods. “Yeah, early release. Long story.”

  “I have all the time in the world to hear about it,” I reply with an arched brow.

  Lip twitching, he smiles down at me. “I can’t believe you’re standing here right now. When you never wrote back to me, I just thought that you’d given up.”

  Staring at the tattoo on his chest, a knight with a grim reaper ax, I say, “Nope. I was actually going to visit you at the prison next, after I got the details from Hammer, but looks like you beat me to it. I’m glad you’re back home; I didn’t like the thought of you locked up.”

  “I didn’t like the thought of it either,” he replies, lip twitching. “And I’ve never been happier to be home than I am in this moment. You’re a sight for sore eyes, Skylar. I feel like I’m fucking dreaming or something.”

  I think that’s a good thing.

  “I feel like this is a cause for celebration,” I hear Renny mutter to Temper. “Is she old enough to finally attend one of our parties?”

  “We don’t want to scare her off just yet,” Hammer mutters in a dry tone. “She just got here.”

  “Think the last thing she needs is to be around half-naked women and lots of bikers, Renny,” Temper replies, smirking. He slaps him on the back. “But if you need that, we can make it happen.”

  “Excellent,” Renny says, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “It’s been a while.”

  Saint touches my cheek, bringing my attention back to him. “Come on, let’s go sit inside. I’ll make you a coffee, or see if we have anything to eat in the fridge.”

  “Good luck,” Hammer calls out, laughing softly. The other men don’t follow us, which I appreciate, giving me that little alone time with Saint.

  “There used to always be food here,” I point out, remembering the days I’d open the cupboards and fridge and think I’d won the lottery.

  “There used to be women around here,” Saint replies, opening the door for me. “It’s just us now, and well. The place has a more bachelor vibe to it. None of us have old ladies, and the older members don’t live here anymore—they’re with their families—so it’s just about ten of us now.”

  “Bachelors don’t need to eat?” I tease, heading for the kitchen with him at my heel. “And I highly doubt it that there aren’t any women here.”

  As much as I don’t want to think of it in regards to Saint, I know that the Knights are notorious ladies’ men. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, even if I wasn’t allowed to officially attend any of their club parties, and I heard the rumors about Saint and how he got his name. He just has this allure to him; I don’t think he needs to even try with women—they just fall at his feet.

  It sucks to think that I also might be in that same category, but I like to think that I’m different, because we also have a genuine friendship, or at least we had one. I don’t know where we stand now, but we’re both here right now and that means something. He reached out to me, and now I’ve found my way back. If Saint didn’t want anything to do with me romantically, I’d happily still be in his life as a friend, and I truly do mean that. I want to see him happy no matter what, and if that’s not with me then I’d accept that.

  “None that stay around and feed us,” Saint replies, opening the fridge and scanning its contents. “If I knew you were coming, I would have run to the store. How about I order us all pizza or something?”

  He turns the kettle on, then sits down at the table, so I do the same. “I’m fine, Saint,” I tell him, grinning.

  I’m too excited to eat, nerves and happiness mixing together into a giddiness.

  “I can’t stop looking at you,” he blurts out, and then ducks his head. “You’re so different since the last time I saw you.”

  “Good different?” I ask, wishing that I knew what he was thinking.

  “Yeah.” He smiles and just stares at me, our eyes locking. After a while, he shakes himself out of a daze. “Tell me how you ended up here, because I bet it’s a fuckin’ story.”

  I tell him about my conversation with Mom, my decision to move and the sadness at leaving my roommate. We talk about my brothers and how I decided I was just going to show up and hope for the best.

  Blue eyes watch me as he listens intently and then says, “Well, there you go. Even I had no idea Hammer was checking in with your brothers.”

  “Glad someone else was in the dark with me.”

  A man steps into the kitchen, and I recognize him instantly. “What the fuck?”

  He waves, a sheepish grin on his face. “I’m Dee.”

  “Dee?” I ask, confused. “You’re a member? Why the fuck were you following me?”

  Did Hammer ask him to watch me?

  “I’m a prospect,” he admits, looking to Saint to explain the situation, I guess.

  “He was checking up on you to make sure you were all right,” he explains, wincing and running a hand through his dark hair. It’s a little shorter than I remember it. “I know it sounds bad, but like you said in your letter, we aren’t there with you, so we wanted to make sure you were okay, and to do that we needed eyes on you.”

  “You or Hammer could have come yourselves!” I point out, scowling. “Or Temper. Renny. Any of you. And you could have come and actually said hello to me.”

  “We couldn’t send someone your mother was going to recognize—that would bring a hell of a lot of drama we don’t need. So we sent someone she wouldn’t know,” he explains, shrugging like it makes perfect sense to him. If he wasn’t sitting here all sexy, shirtless, and if it hadn’t been so long since I’d seen him, I might have slapped him.

  “So you sent some guy to come and talk to me in a bar?” I mutter to myself, shaking my head. “Next time a phone call will suffice, Saint.”

  He throws Dee a look that says bye then turns back to me. “I’m seeing you for the first time in five years and you want to fight?”

  “How did I know you were going to play that card?” I groan, quieting when he reaches out and touches my arm.

  “Let me get used to seeing you all grown up before you rip into me, all right?” he asks, flashing me a charming smile. He then stands to make our coffee. “Do you have any plans tonight?”

  “No. I have to work tomorrow, but that’s about it.”

  “Where are you working?” he asks, sounding confused. “More like why are you working?”

  “You know, to do things like eat,” I say slowly, arching my brow. “And buy things. I only just started at this new bar, but it’s a pretty cool place.”

  Saint, mug in hand, comes over and places it on the table. “What did you do with the money Hammer gave you? Are you saving it? I thought you’d go to college and just live off that so you didn’t have to worry about anything else except your studies.”

  Confusions hits me. I dare to ask, “What money?”

  Saint’s brows draw together, and concern fills those blue eyes. “The college fund Hammer set up for you. He’s been putting money into it ever since you came into his life.”

  College fund? I’ve never heard the words college fund in relation to me. My mother never gave me a cent, and always made me work for anything that I wanted. “I didn’t get any money, Saint. Mom never told me that there was any money.”

  “Nothing?” he asks, jaw going tense.

  I shake my head. “No, nothing.”

  “That fucking bitch,” he mutters, slamming his hands down on the table, making his coffee drip down the mug. “Hammer!” he calls out. Studying me, he murmurs, “Stay here a second,” then disappears outside.

  I can hear the two of them yelling before they come reappear in the kitchen. “Georgia didn’t give you any of that money?” Hammer asks me, searching my eyes.

  I shake my head. “No, nothing. I had no idea I had any kind of savings anywhere. I’ve always just lived paycheck to paycheck.” Not a luxurious life, but I’ve always gotten by.

  “There was a hundred thousand dollars in that account for you,” he growls, fist clenching. “I made it so you could access it when you turned eighteen.”

  Wow, that’s a lot of money. A hundred thousand?

  Wrapping my arms around myself, I don’t know what else to say. This woman I thought I could trust, even if we weren’t as close as some kids are with their mothers, has lied to me over and over. And now she’s had money that was supposed to be mine while she knew I struggled to pay my bills? And never told me about it? I’m speechless.

  “Guess she thought Sky would never speak to us again, so she’d never find out about the money,” Saint says, shaking his head. “The nerve of her, honestly. That money was for Skylar’s future!”

  “I asked her for some money once,” I say in a whisper, remembering the day so clearly. “She told me that she was done taking care of me and I was on my own. That she had five other children, and how could I expect there to be anything left for myself? That I was ungrateful. It’s why I didn’t go to college right away...”

  My brain cannot process this. I cannot understand how she can lie to me and make me feel that it was my fault. This can’t be true.

  “Maybe there is more to the story. Maybe she still has it and was waiting to give it to me,” I say, but the words sound stupid even to my own ears. It’s just embarrassing that my own mother would manipulate me and use me so easily, and I was none the wiser, visiting with her every week, playing my role as the good daughter, the only child she had close by to her.