Bocca: A Steel Paragons MC Novel Read online

  I pushed that away and filled them in the best that I could. My brain was starting to get fuzzy from the pain meds but I pressed on. I didn’t go into detail on what had happened to me, I was sure that would come later. Right now, I just needed to get the important shit out.

  Cal told me about everything that happened on their end. And then I was done, my body giving in and my eyes closing for good.

  I slept for days. When I finally came to, I felt better, at least physically. I could get up and hobble around on my own. I was even able to take a semi-decent shower.

  There were meetings.

  I searched and dug and tried to find any information on Keften Jugovac that I could. Now that I had a name, that was. Thanks to Silas and Hunt. Without them passing that along, I still would have been blind and clueless. The whole Vac thing made sense now. I knew about this guy, though he was more in the background. I should have put two and two together and I was kicking myself that I hadn’t.

  More meetings.

  More planning.

  More searching and reaching out to people.

  I’d picked up a few cryptic messages that Lucy had left in the unknown, but I hated to bother her. I did however, get in touch with her long enough to let her know I was alive. Though I tried to convince her that I had it handled and she should enjoy her honeymoon, I got the sense that she wasn’t going to be able to let it go.

  And I understood that, because if it had been me, I wouldn’t have either.

  I didn’t give her a chance to apologize and feel bad about putting me on this path. It wasn’t her fault and I wasn’t going to let her think it was. I’d chosen to go into this. To search out these people. To dress up, play pretend, and try to take these guys down. That was all me and I made sure that she understood that. I wasn’t mad at her, not in the least, and she shouldn’t be mad at herself.

  Though it was hard, we decided to keep this whole thing in-house. We didn’t want to let the other clubs in because they already had enough to deal with. The danger didn’t seem like it was close and so there really was no reason to set everyone on edge.

  Was it a stupid move?

  Maybe.

  But I agreed that it was the best one. Until we knew more anyway. Keften had gone deep underground. Either he feared us or he was using that time to regroup and come back even harder. We wouldn’t know until we found him.

  There was still the fact that he seemed to know who I was that bothered me. I had a feeling that no matter how hard I dug, I wouldn’t find the answer to that. Keften had an ace up his sleeve and I wouldn’t doubt that he would go to great lengths to keep it hidden.

  Three weeks went by and I found myself so busy that I barely had a moment to breathe, let alone stop to think. Even though insanity surrounded me, I never forgot about Rosemarie. She was always there, in the back of my mind, her beautiful smile helping to carry me through the hardest of days.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I wasn’t one of those men that would push that shit away, thump my hard chest, and tell myself that I was crazy.

  There was something there. It was real. And all I wanted to do was get back to it. Get back to her.

  Even when the clubwhores came to me and tried their hardest to get me to see them, I didn’t. No matter how many times they batted their fake lashes, or pushed their boobs in my face, I just didn’t care. I didn’t want any of them. My dick had become interested in one person, and one person only.

  Remember when I said I didn’t jack my shit anymore?

  Well, turned out that I was a liar. Because I felt like I was constantly trying to take a moment to myself. Whenever the reminder of her sweet scent or sexy voice would fill my mind, I found my dick so hard that I had no choice but to excuse myself from whatever I was in the thick of and take it to the bathroom. I swear I tugged my dick so much that it wouldn’t have surprised me if it was on the verge of falling off.

  I wanted to know more about her. The more she popped into my mind, the more blanks came forth begging for me to fill them in. I could have. I thought about it more times than I wanted to admit to. I had never had a problem digging into someone’s background. I didn’t usually pause when it came to searching out people’s darkest secrets. But every time I would stop what I was doing and question if a little peek wouldn’t be so bad, I started to feel queasy. Even when I went as far as to type her name out, I just ended up deleting it before I went any further.

  I didn’t want to read about her. I didn’t want to find out things behind her back. I wanted to hear about her life from her lips. I wanted to be there to see the spark light up her eyes when she told me about her favorite things. I wanted to hold her hand when she told me about the hard things she had to go through. Hell, I just wanted to sit with her after she came home from work and wrap her in my arms while she told me about her day.

  All of that should have scared me.

  But it didn’t.

  It proved to me that she was different.

  It made me smile at the prospects of how my life could be with someone—more specifically, with her.

  I hadn’t seen love in my upbringing. I was never shown that from my parents. Maybe in a way, it molded my young mind to not believe in such things. But lately, I was starting to question the whole true love thing. I’d seen it with some of my brothers. You know, how a woman could bring a man to his knees.

  I saw it every time Loch looked at Reagan and how he melted.

  I felt it every time Diesel kissed Ellie.

  I heard it every time Tank called Nadya ‘Angel.’

  And I was overcome with everything anytime Axe was around Allison. Because that right there, was the one that I never thought would get the good stuff in life. Not because he didn’t deserve it, but because I thought that his past had him too fucked up to accept it.

  So with all that, I’d started to see that the world was perhaps different from how I’d grown up thinking it was. That maybe happily ever afters did exist, even for guys like us.

  And that, well, got me feeling like this thing with Rosemarie could maybe be real.

  I had two choices, fight it and try to move on, though I knew that I’d probably never feel something like that again. Or give in, resign myself to some weird kind of fate or some shit, and go and get the girl.

  Which was what I wanted to do—go get the girl, that was. I knew the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about her had to mean something.

  Maybe I was a romantic deep down at heart. Sure, I could admit that.

  I was going to make her my woman. I knew that much. I just had to wait a little bit and hope that I wasn’t alone in this whole feelings thing.

  But then again, self-doubt was a bitch. And she reared her ugly fucking head when I was alone. What if Rosemarie didn’t feel the same as I did? What if this weird connection I envisioned was really one-sided? Hell, for all I knew, she never thought of me once I walked out of her door.

  My chest ached and I blindly rubbed it as I flopped down onto my bed.

  What if I was crazy?

  I searched for all the signs and wondered if I’d missed something. I mean, could one really diagnose themselves?

  No, I was certain I wasn’t crazy. At least not when it came to this. It was just strange because no woman had ever affected me like she did. No woman had ever held some kind of spell over me. Rosemarie was nothing like anyone I’d ever met and I for damn sure wasn’t ready to dismiss the feelings I had going on.

  So that left me staring at the ceiling wondering how exactly I was going to get back to her. And how I was going to make sure I was the man that she not only needed in her life, but desperately wanted too.

  First, I had to make sure I was worthy enough. Which meant that I had to get my shit together, like right fucking now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Rosemarie

  He came into my life like a hurricane and left like a tornado.

  I didn’t know why, but my emotions were all over the place. Everything thrown
all about and there I was standing in the middle of the aftermath trying my best to figure out where to start with the cleanup.

  A day.

  I’d known the man a little over a day and had barely had any interactions with him during that time.

  So it was ridiculous that I couldn’t seem to shake him.

  I pushed through the next day.

  Then the day after that.

  Then a week.

  I didn’t intentionally count them as they went by, but somehow my brain did. It was stupid. Insane. Crazy. Delusional, even. There was an emptiness inside of me where there hadn’t even been a hole before. I couldn’t explain it, and after a month went by, I stopped trying to fight it.

  I had feelings. I wouldn’t say love because that would have just been unimaginable. But there were feelings. The kind that scratched at my soul and punched my heart.

  It wasn’t that I was simply attracted to him. There was more to him than his overly charming exterior. There was more to him than that playful façade he put out there. Yes, there was much, much more to that man and I wanted to know it all. I wanted to dig through and explore each layer. I wanted to brush the dirt away to get to the next one. And maybe, I even wanted him to do the same to me.

  “Alright,” Sara Ann said as she slid up next to me. “I can’t stand back and watch this anymore.”

  I shot her a look like I didn’t know what she was talking about. But clearly, I wasn’t fooling anyone, including myself.

  “Tonight. My place. Wine and Chinese food.”

  Her tone told me that I shouldn’t dare argue with her. It didn’t matter that I was tired or wanted more than anything to go home, take a shower, and slide into bed. It didn’t matter that I felt like I’d been walking around in a daze. No excuse that I tried to throw out there would be acceptable.

  “Fine,” I said with a resigned sigh.

  “Oh,” she said as she started to walk off. “And tonight, you tell me everything.”

  “I figured that’s why you said wine,” I hollered after her and laughed.

  Three hours later, I was in my lounge clothes and curled up on one end of Sara Ann’s couch. She mirrored me at the other end. Neither one of us cared about appearances behind this closed door.

  “I feel like I’m just a mess,” I blurted out.

  “Well, I have to be honest, you kind of have been. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has something to do with a sexy, charming biker that I caught naked in your bed.” She winked and I chuckled as I shook my head. She knew nothing like that had happened but the lightness helped me.

  “I just don’t know,” I said and blew out a long breath as my head fell back. “I don’t even know him. I don’t even know his real name.”

  “And?”

  “And…well, isn’t that like crazy. This stranger comes into my life for a day and I can’t stop thinking about him. I have no idea what kind of shit he’s into, but it must be something bad. I can’t overlook the fact that I found him like that. It was…horrible.”

  She looked down. I had a good feeling that she knew more than she’d let on but she wasn’t sure if she should tell me. I just wanted to know…something?

  “I don’t know the guy at all. I fixed him up. It was like he was a patient. That was it.” Even as I said the words I knew they were all wrong.

  “Okay, first. He wasn’t like a patient. You took him into your home. You let him have your bed. You did things that…you shouldn’t have.”

  I cringed at her words because they were very true. If it ever got out, it could be the end for me. Goodbye job that I love. Goodbye condo on the fourth floor. Goodbye life that I worked so hard to build for myself.

  Her words weren’t threatening and I didn’t even feel an ounce of fear that she’d known what went on over at my place.

  “You might be trying to put him into some kind of box that just isn’t there. It got personal the moment you dragged his messed up ass up to your place,” she said and tilted her wine glass in my direction like she knew she had made the right point.

  “That still doesn’t explain any of it.”

  I took a large gulp of my chardonnay as I tried to dig deep and figure something out.

  “And besides,” I went on before she could say anything else. “It isn’t like he feels anything like I do. He clearly hasn’t thought of me. I may not know where to find him but he sure as hell knows where I live. Where I work. He knows how to find me if he wanted to. So the only thing I can think is that he must not want to.”

  I had an idea that she knew where I could find him. And that wasn’t why I’d said that. I wasn’t fishing for answers because what I had said was the truth.

  He hadn’t done anything.

  So what else was I supposed to think other than he wasn’t thinking about me like I was about him?

  Hell, given the playful flirting I’d seen, I imagined that he could have his hands full with one simple wink. For all I knew, he had a million girls to go through as he forgot about me.

  “So…what happened? You never did tell me.”

  Then I went on babbling pretty much about every little thing that happened from the moment I found him a crumbled mess outside the building until the moment his people dragged him out of my home.

  The goodbye was such a whirlwind that I almost barely remembered it. A lot happened in that twenty minutes. And maybe it was just a lot of nothing, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “I mean, I know he was trying to distract himself from the pain, but he asked me about my day. And though he was gritting through it, I could tell he was still doing his best to listen to me.”

  That meant something. Then it hit me. Why it meant something.

  “Tad never listened to me. It was always how his day was. What client he landed. He didn’t come home and ask how my day was. He never stopped to notice if I’d had a good one or bad one. Maybe it’s that I’m so starved for attention that I…oh, God! I just became that clingy chick that guys always try to run from. Didn’t I?”

  Sara Ann laughed.

  “No, I don’t think that’s it,” she said and then took a healthy sip of wine. “Sometimes things happen for a reason.”

  “But that’s crazy,” I replied waving her off.

  There was no such thing as fate or destiny. There weren’t such things as an instant connection or scintilla, as my grandmother had always called it. No sparks and fireworks and love at first sight were not things that I believe in.

  It wasn’t real.

  Right?

  “Maybe you should stop questioning it. Stop trying to figure it out. If the universe wants it to be, then it will be.”

  Her words should have been simple enough but I tried not to snort at the cheesiness of it all.

  “No. It’s just me being ridiculous. The first man to come into my life in a long period of time and it has shaken me a little,” I said willing myself to believe those words. “Besides, those men were kinda scary. I know nothing about him and one could only assume that he’s part of some dangerous club. Or at least has involvement with things that are not legal. Not safe. Look how he ended up here. That is just not normal.”

  Was I being judgy?

  Perhaps.

  But even as I pushed those words out of my mouth I didn’t fully believe them. Sure the dangerous part was all truth. There was something going on there. And I knew I didn’t want to know, not even a little. But as far as the men that crowded into my home that day, I honestly didn’t feel any fear. Intimidation? A little, if I had to be completely honest. Though they were big and rough around the edges and scary, I knew that I hadn’t felt like they were there to hurt me.

  “Let me tell you about those men,” she said, leaning over and grabbing the bottle to refill both of our glasses. I took a big swig, knowing I was going to need it for this.

  Then she spun a story about rough around the edges men that would give their lives for their families. Men that took it even further and looked after a
small town just south of here. These men were uncouth and didn’t give a fuck about what anybody thought about it.

  She told me a story of a young woman that had been attacked and how all of those men were there for her because they considered her one of their own. Sara Ann didn’t go into too much detail, but I got the feeling that the man that had attacked the woman was never heard from again. She made it very clear that she didn’t know that for sure. But she also emphasized that sometimes, the law didn’t always do the victim justice.

  I found myself agreeing with her. I’d seen it before. I’d been there to help the victims right after an attack. I’d seen too many lives ruined and caught in the crossfire of something they had nothing to do with. And those people that caused the pain…well, some of them were still out there living their lives like it hadn’t happened. If there was a lucky break and they were taken in by the police, sometimes that was worse. Because the sentences handed down were never enough.

  So yeah, I couldn’t say that I had that gasp, hand-to-the-heart in shock moment over her insinuation. I may have even been silently cheering inside. Which left me to question who I was a little.

  “My point is,” she said as she finished up her tale, “they are good men.”

  I found myself absently nodding.

  I had seen it. Even in the little interactions that I had witnessed in my home. They were a complete mess of panic and worry when they’d come in. They hadn’t known where Bocca was and the relief that washed over them the moment they laid eyes on him was palpable. Standing there, I’d felt like an outsider but I felt their concern and love all the way to my heart.

  But how was any of that going to help me out?

  He still hadn’t tried to make contact. It was as if he had walked out that door and left the memory of me behind.

  “I have found the beauty of life in your eyes.”

  His words may have been spoken in Italian but I understood them clearly. There was something meaningful there. I clung to that for weeks, hoping that he really meant it. However, I knew I didn’t really know the guy and maybe it was just false charm.