Grey (Storm's Soldiers MC Book 2) Read online

  Grey

  Paige Notaro

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE-Meagan

  CHAPTER TWO-Vaughn

  CHAPTER THREE-Meagan

  CHAPTER FOUR-Vaughn

  CHAPTER FIVE-Meagan

  CHAPTER SIX-Vaughn

  CHAPTER SEVEN-Meagan

  CHAPTER EIGHT-Vaughn

  CHAPTER NINE-Meagan

  CHAPTER TEN-Vaughn

  Thanks!

  Other Books

  Copyright

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without the express written consent of the author. This book is licensed for personal use only.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ©2014

  Paige Notaro

  Cover Design:

  ©2014

  SilverLight

  Also by Paige Notaro

  Storm’s Soldiers MC:

  Black and White

  Stand Alone:

  Uncaged

  I love hearing from fans!

  Here’s how you can reach me:

  www.facebook.com/PaigeNotaroAuthor

  [email protected]

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my loving family who suffer through my long silences and then sudden bursts of excitement as I’m about to publish.

  It is dedicated to my friends and fellow authors without whom I would have never gotten half as far in twice as much time

  Most of all it is dedicated to my fans. Your support and sweet messages have given me more joy and pleasure than you can ever know. Thank you!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Meagan

  The words echoed in the silence.

  He ain’t wrong.

  I read the tattoos off Vaughn’s chest, the cryptic numbers and the pointed crosses, now full of new blurry meaning.

  Vaughn watched me, silent, as if waiting for me to make sense of the jumble he had created – as if that was my job. That made me angrier than anything else.

  My arm stiffened, ready to lash out on his cheek, but Darryl’s impatience beat mine out.

  “Fucking trash,” he growled. He whirled Vaughn out from in between us, back on the floor. Vaughn staggered back, his long arms out for balance. He managed to stay standing, but Darryl was already plunging towards him, fist pulled back.

  “Darryl, no!” My hand landed on his curled hand, a ribbon holding back a piston. His muscles seized. The two men stood huffing at each other.

  I took the second to whisk my panties back on, but by then Vaughn was stepping in, a cloud of rage over his face. I dashed around my brother and got in the way of his arm.

  “Vaughn, what the fuck?!” I screamed with all the force I had intended for him earlier.

  He blinked a couple times at me. His eyes lightened. “He started it,” he muttered finally.

  “No. You did.”

  I shoved a palm in his chest, but it did nothing to budge it. I felt the crack between the vast and familiar ridges of muscle, and a strange burst of heat overcame me even amidst all my anger.

  Sweet Jesus, had it even been a minute since this touch would have taken the two of us somewhere else? What was happening now?

  “I didn’t do anything but treat you right,” Vaughn said.

  “Does that matter? You just admitted what you are.”

  His defiant look didn’t go away, but it couldn’t meet me anymore. “I ain’t just that.”

  Darryl tensed at my back. “Oh no, shithead? You ain’t the marks you fucking choose to put on your skin?”

  “I am.” Vaughn glared over at him. “I can choose to be more.”

  “What about me?” I said. My rage burned out and my voice fell towards sadness. “Can I choose to be more than my skin?”

  Vaughn staggered back as if my words had hit him. His eyes swam over my body, over the large expanses of dark skin still on display past my lingerie.

  “It’s not that,” he said. “It’s not about you.”

  He couldn’t lift his head at me - at either of us. His face had a twisted look as he searched the hardwood floor. Despite it all, the sight of him like that made my heart ache. I wanted to rush in, to help. Not being able to, somehow made me sadder than the reason why I shouldn’t.

  “Vaughn.”

  He looked up at my voice, poring over my face as he had over the floor, still searching for answers.

  “You are what you are,” I said. “And I am what I am.”

  “I’m sorry.” He took a step towards me. “I didn’t-“

  Darryl condensed back to granite behind me. “Not another fucking inch,” he growled.

  Vaughn froze, looked from him to me, as if I were his absolution. His bare white chest glowed in the warm room light, the ink looming out dark and angry, all the sharp edges of it bright and distinct.

  I shook my head. “You need to go.”

  He stood blank, licking his lips. Bit by bit, the spark behind those pale eyes dimmed out. He held up a hand.

  “Give me my clothes then.”

  Darryl sent them howling over my head, aimed at Vaughn’s feet, but he scooped them out of the air. Still facing us, he slid into his jeans and tugged his dingy white top over the chest that had broken us. The leaves rustled outside, long and impatient, and inside we just took deep pulls of breath and observed each other.

  He nudged his jacket on over his shoulders and zipped it up. The white skull gleamed out at me, chattering with amusement.

  “Storm’s Soldiers,” Darryl read over my shoulders. “Real fucking subtle.”

  Subtle enough to trick me, but I saw the truth now: Storm’s soldiers. SS. It had all been there in front of me.

  “It is what it is,” Vaughn said. “Sorry it couldn’t last.”

  He nodded at me once, then opened the door and slunk out into the night.

  I sat down on the piano stool. My body still lay bare but for my lingerie, but I couldn’t stand the idea of tugging back into that tight white dress.

  “Fuck,” Darryl patted my head. “You ok?”

  “No Darryl, I’m not freaking ok.”

  I shoved his stomach with both hands. It did nothing, but he obliged me and took a step back.

  “Easy girl, don’t unleash that anger on me.”

  “I’ll do whatever I damn well please.”

  He crouched down into my view again, managing to look pissed and concerned all at once. “Are you really fucking mad at me?”

  I was mad at everything. Vaughn, myself, him. Tara for not being here. The door for not locking itself when Vaughn had come in. “Why do you just pop by without calling?”

  “Well, shit, cause you seemed to be fond of my visits before. Didn’t think I’d catch my baby sister with a racist dick in her mouth.”

  “Oh, god. Why’d you have to go mention that?” I could almost taste Vaughn, still hear the content sounds I made as his peach flesh thrust into me. I wanted to retch.

  “It ain’t something I’m likely to forget.”

  He shivered and popped back to his feet. His hand landed on my head. “Listen, I’m sorry it happened like that, but fuck, I ain’t sorry that it happened. Did you want to go on seeing a skinhead?”

  His light touch soothed the self-loathing out of me. I shook my head.

  I did not want to date a racist.

  But sitting there, I couldn’t quite understand why that meant I could no longer see Vaughn.

  *****

  The night passed
in tears and ice cream. Darryl took off after bringing me a vat of mint chocolate-chip and giving another gentle brush of my forehead. There was nothing more he could do but save me from the memories his presence brought back.

  I woke in a sweat several times that night. Even after light started to hit my tired eyes, I didn’t actually get up until it was noon. Lucky thing I had no class. Then again, it would have given me something else to think about.

  I muddled through a lunch of canned soup, taking my sweet time and mostly feeding uneaten spoonfuls back into the bowl. The annoying part was I couldn’t really understand why I felt so glum.

  There were the obvious reasons: the shame of being caught, the embarrassment of dating a racist when it was right in my face, the memories of all the countless times I’d let him take me in the past.

  But that sort of darkness I knew not to hold onto. We’d grown up poor. I’d tucked my head down through plenty of name calling at school and done plenty of things that I wasn’t terribly proud of later.

  The feeling running through me now was something I had little experience with. It felt an awful lot like loss. Like a piece of me had fallen out and left a gap where a future had been building itself.

  It was insane.

  Vaughn and I had done little more than have sex. Intense, sweaty sex that left our bodies lingering on each other, but still, there was nothing else there. We weren’t dating. This wasn’t even a breakup.

  So why did it feel as bad as any I’d had?

  I let the spoon plop in the mostly full bowl and lounged in front of the TV. The screen blared in front of me, and I put on my favorite comedies but the words ran through my head without much meaning. I flipped stations aimlessly until I finally landed on the History channel. It was black and white and about Hitler, of course. That era wasn’t anywhere near my focus at school, but it was enough to capture my attention.

  This was Vaughn’s spiritual forefather. His tattoos directly sang praise to the monster screaming in German on screen. This was a guy who had gassed eleven million and started a war that led to many million more deaths on top of that. Why should I mourn for a guy who wanted to be associated in any part with that?

  The sadness churned to bile in my mouth for a while, but eventually it sank back into a general gloom. Whatever Vaughn’s reasons for wearing that symbol, he had never mentioned it in his time with me. It didn’t matter in the context of us.

  Not that there was an ‘us’ anymore.

  The grey cloud hadn’t lifted off my head by the time I slouched into work that evening. The bar was busy for a Sunday night, but I could only crawl around. Even then, I messed up more than one order.

  “You trying to get free drinks or something?” Jeannie asked after I came back for a redo on my third screw-up. “All you need to do is ask if you want something to drink.”

  “I don’t want free drinks,” I told her, slipping a dark lager back on the bar. “You know I don’t like porters anyway.”

  “I’m starting to realize my knowledge of your tastes may not be right.”

  I stared at the empty corner booth by the pool tables. “Well, I’m starting to think the problem is my tastes.”

  “Mmm.” She handed me the correct drink and gave my grip a squeeze. “So that’s what up.”

  “Girl, you don’t even know the half of it.”

  “Aw, I’m sorry, honey,” she shrugged. “But I did tell you that guy was trouble.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Well, live and learn right? You can tell me all about it after we close up.”

  Jeannie’s face stood plain and eager. She almost never went out with us on account of having a kid and all. This was quite the offer. Only, my story was almost too embarrassing to share.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Sure, let me know.”

  I handed off the fixed drink with my apologies and let myself sink into the bustle. Word of my condition spread quickly through the staff and Marissa and Kiera both offered sympathy hugs when we linked up at the bar.

  My creeping guilt came back at this tenderness. I shouldn’t need this show of support. Even if I did, this misery had built up on the back of my foolishness and ignorance. Sure, I wasn’t caught up on my racist symbols, but god knows the other signs were there.

  His head was shaved. He was a literal skinhead and I had just taken his bare scalp as another rough part of him to run over me.

  After we closed up at night, all three of the girls hung back. I didn’t want to leave them hanging, so I let them tug me out to another bar where we sat around a tall pitcher and four mugs.

  “He didn’t hit you, did he?” was one of Marissa’s first questions.

  “No, no,” I said. “Nothing like that. We just got into a fight.”

  “Fight?” Jeannie asked, dabbling at her beer. “I heard you guys were in a fuckbuddy situation. What’s there to fight about in that?”

  “That’s how those always end up,” Kara said, shaking her head. “One of them always wants to do more than fuck.”

  “It wasn’t me,” I said. “I was fine the way things used to be.”

  Kara didn’t seem wholly convinced, but she gave me the benefit of the doubt. “So then what happened?”

  “It turns out things weren’t what they seemed.”

  Marissa patted me on the back and huddled in. “Well, you had fun, right? You broke your dry spell. Now you can move on to something better.”

  It was all true, but the idea of moving on just made me feel worse than any thought that had come before.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Vaughn

  It was noon, and I was already piss drunk. A few guys laughed over by the bar, and some others mingled in tables further away, but their presence barely registered.

  I hung in a dim corner of the Iron Crossroads, alone in the shadows with a bottle of cheap shit and my thoughts. My mind wasn’t the finest of companions in the best of times, but I couldn’t share my truths with anyone else. The whiskey helped keep the internal dialogue to a minimum.

  I wanted to be angry. Fuck, I deserved to be pissed. Things were spinning smooth right up until the end. There would have been no issue if it weren’t for timing. A little bit earlier and my shirt would have still been on. A little bit later and we wouldn’t have been in plain sight.

  But no, the devil had come knocking at just the right time, and here I was, blue balled and humiliated. Tossed out like I was trash by some goddamn n –

  The thought never finished. Every time I tried, Meagan’s face would glow in my head like a red light. The idea of her dark-set eyes soft and sad choked out my anger with regret and cut off the words that sprang to mind. The sparks of hatred never caught, never burned. I just sat revving my engine over and over, trying to find some way through.

  “There he is boys,” a voice cut through the haze.

  Aw fuck.

  Footsteps trudged up toward me. I didn’t bother to look up, but other than Thurge’s heavy squelches, I made out two sets more. He’d brought a damn boarding party.

  “Where you been, brother?” Thurge said, pressing in across the table. His square face hovered above mine with gruff concern.

  “Right here.”

  “Yeah, I see that. Sent you a couple dozen messages the other day. We could have used you for the pickup run.”

  I looked up and saw Asher and that new recruit glowering down at me. No sympathy there. Nor should there be.

  I hadn’t slept that first night. After lying in bed bleary-eyed till noon, I’d bought a handle of whiskey, driven way out into the country and drunk myself into a stupor before even sunset. I barely remembered stumbling home sometime near midnight.

  “Battery ran out,” I said, taking another long draw from my tumbler.

  “Your phone’s or yours?”

  I sighed over my glass. “What’d you come here to find, Thurge? An apology? Well, I’m fucking sorry. I assume you boys got it done anyway.”

  “We did indeed,
but that’s not the issue. We’re all just worried about you.”

  “I’m not,” Asher muttered from above.

  “Correction, then. Calix and I are concerned about you.”

  “Well, don’t worry. I won’t fuck up again.” I rattled my cellphone on the table, watched the screen light up and instinctively dreamed of seeing her number.

  “Now you say that,” Thurge said. “And yet, I can’t avoid noticing that you have been coming off your hinges as of late. You’re up, you’re down. You disappear and then you show up a wreck.”

  “Free country, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Thurge took a draw from the bottle of whiskey. “Yes it is. And that’s half the problem, ain’t it? None of us truly feel bound to our kin.”

  That finally got my eyes on him for a spell, wondering if he had picked this whole mess apart. My breath came a bit easier seeing his eyes lost inward. The comment was no accusation leveled on me.

  The moment of fear finally took me out of my shit. I’d let down my boys last night. Even when I was with Meagan, I had promised myself that would not happen, yet here I was, abandoned on one end and abandoning my duties on the other.

  “Hey,” I said, waiting till Thurge’s hazel eyes returned from his thoughts. “I’m sorry, alright? I swear. It ain’t gonna happen again.”

  “I ain’t pissed, brother,” Thurge said. “That ain’t what I’m here to talk about.”

  “I’m pretty pissed,” Asher’s voice drifted in from above.

  “Then perhaps this is not the table you should be attending,” Thurge said. Asher shrugged and took off toward the bar with the prospect.

  “Don’t mind him,” Thurge said. “He’s just angry because he didn’t tie his merchandise to his saddle properly and it went scattering all across the road. We’re lucky it happened before we hit the highway.”

  I chuckled. “I suppose that might have something to do with y’all having to ride heavier than usual.”

  “On account of being understaffed.”