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“Thanks. I added a little more vanilla to the dough.”
“They were perfect.”
She turned her head, catching my gaze. “I’m okay, Bell. Really. It gets better every day.” Her hand lowered, and she rubbed her growing belly. “This baby doesn’t know how he was conceived, and it doesn’t matter. He’ll know love and grow up with two parents that would do anything for him.”
I didn’t know if I could do it. How the hell did you keep a baby after rape? “He’ll have wonderful parents. Raven already loves him.”
She smiled, laying her head back. “I want to start that bakery, but I don’t know how I’d get it going with the pregnancy.”
“Well,” I began, swinging my legs over the chair and resting my feet on the ground, “I’ve got an idea who your partner should be. She’s got fantastic taste and small business experience. You should seriously talk to her about it.”
Bree laughed. “Well, sis, I thought that was what we’re doing. You sell jewelry. I’ll sell all the yummy treats.”
“We can call it Bling & Bake!” I exclaimed.
“Uh, no.” She snorted. “That’s awful. It sounds like an edible shop.”
Damn. It did.
“What about Buttery Baubles?”
“Sis, we need to work on this.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
Chapter 3
The conversation about Laurel’s death certificate sparked a new interest in checking my father’s office and his desk. It had become mine with his death, but I hadn’t yet gone through it. I couldn’t until now. Everything was still so fresh and painful. It fucking hurt to open his drawers and look through his shit.
But I had to move beyond that now. There were too many fucking questions that needed answers. Too many things that didn’t add up. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered why my father didn’t fight harder to keep Laurel with us. What if everything I believed up to now had been a lie?
Jesus. Christ. The truth could change everything.
For over an hour, I dug through his drawers and personal items, notebooks, maps, and junk. A carton of Marlboro Reds. His favorite steel lighter with the club’s logo etched onto the front. A few drawings I made of motorcycles in middle school that I didn’t know he kept. Awards I’d earned.
A small envelope of photos that included old snapshots of club members like Raven. Damn, he looked young.
On the bottom, I found a picture of my dad, Laurel, and me when I was less than a year old. My pops held me, and his free arm hugged Laurel close against his side. They looked happy. More than that, I caught the way she stared at him like he was everything to her. What the fuck happened to drive them apart?
I sat back in the leather chair my father loved, kicking out my legs. My knee bumped into the underside of his desk, and I heard a click. A latch released with a click, popping open to reveal the secret compartment underneath.
I sat the photographs in my hands to the side, reaching into the compartment to pull out a stack of documents, newspaper clippings, photos, and other memorabilia. All of it was about my sister Gail. He’d kept track of her since her birth, proudly storing away everything he could about his daughter.
I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to keep my child a secret and love her from a distance. Rook never showed weakness or vulnerability. That was part of his position as the president of a 1 %er motorcycle club. But as I thought about it, I remembered moments when he would seem too distant or short-tempered. It didn’t happen often. I wondered if Gail or my mother was the reason.
These items had to have been precious to my father. In our house, pictures of me, my pops, and his club had been displayed everywhere, but with notable absence, my sister and mother were not. I wish Rook was here to ask. I would have understood if he told me the truth. I’d always wanted a sibling.
A sigh escaped as I replaced the memories in the compartment and shut it. A soft click followed. Someday, I’d bring Gail up here and show her what our father had saved. If there wasn’t so much shit going down with Undertaker and the Dirty Death, I’d do it now.
But the club and its problems trumped that reveal.
The trip down memory lane led me back to my mother. That seemed to be happening a lot today. I wondered if Eagle Eye had found anything yet. He was fucking fast when it came to this shit. He knew how to search for things I would never think to consider, and he was damn good at getting past firewalls and breaching security. He tapped into government sites all the time without getting caught.
The man was a tech genius.
I found him in his room, staring at two screens and shifting back and forth between them as he keyed in info, brought up flies, switched between them, and moved to the next item. Gave me a damn headache just to watch. The door had been ajar, and I walked in, standing behind him and not wanting to interrupt until he acknowledged me. I knew better than to distract him when he was fishing like this.
“Got an update for you, pres.”
