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This moment, this reality right here, is more than I ever believed possible for myself. And now that I’ve had a taste, I know I’ll never let anything come between me and having all of Francesca Holt for myself.
Chapter
Fifteen
FRANKIE
The growl of motorcycles is a background track I couldn’t have predicted would be my reality a year ago. Even two months ago, the idea that this could be my life would be laughable. Yet, here I am.
My half-furnished apartment was packed up and the important things brought to the Ghost Born compound. The job I didn’t care about but paid my bills has been abandoned. Just when I’d accepted loneliness as the price I’d pay for allowing a snake like Mark Benson into my life, Arlo showed up.
I know I have my brother to thank. Damn, if that’s not a sobering thought. Here I am, safe, protected, cherished and adored. All because of my big brother and his overprotectiveness. It’s still a huge mindfuck that Hyram is behind bars because I chose to date a sadistic cop, who is also a criminal, if what I’ve overheard from Arlo’s brothers if true. The worst kind of criminal. A man who steals people from their lives and sells them to the highest bidder.
Quiet all around me pulls me from my mental musing. It means the men have all left for their workday. Gone to do the variety of jobs they hold in addition to their MC duties. A soft voice breaks the silence and reminds me that not all the men have left. It’s Grey, the slender young man in a relationship with Konrad and the girl called Blu.
Arlo’s told me enough of their story to break my heart, but this is the first time I’ve been alone with the boy. Looking at him now, I realize he isn’t much younger than me. Even after the horrors he went through, an innocence clings to him, making him seem younger than he is.
“Miss Frankie?” His voice is melodic, almost dainty. I have to smile at the memory of the almost feral way he snarled at Shaw during dinner last night when the fierce-looking MC president dared to take the last roll from the breadbasket.
“It’s just Frankie, Grey. You don’t have to call me Miss. I think we’re probably nearly the same age, after all.” If I sound as if I’m asking him, I sort of am. I know enough to know Konrad found Grey and Blu in a trafficking situation, and that they’re both adults, but Grey, in particular, looks as if he’s just barely grown. Arlo says it’s because he was starved and abused for so many years his body’s got catching up to do, but it could also be that Grey’s built small. Some men just are.
“Yeah, but I mean…” he stammers, “You’re gonna be a mom.” As though the simple fact of procreation makes me somehow more than just an ordinary woman.
“Still just Frankie.” I smile to soften the direction. Maybe, this pregnancy is making me more than I was before, because a surprisingly maternal warmth slides through me.
“Can I feel your tummy? Blu says when a baby’s moving in there that sometimes people outside can feel it. I’ve never been around a pregnant lady before. Please?” Grey’s eyes shine with excitement, his body nearly vibrating with energy, but he keeps his hands respectfully to himself.
I nod my agreement, and he’s around the breakfast table and on his knees with both hands pressed carefully over the mound of my stomach before I can blink. Blu walks through the doorway with the Russian princess staying with the men of Ghost Born for her protection, and they both crack up.
“Looks like Grey finally got the balls to feel up Frankie,” Amaliya, who goes by LeeLee, crows.
That girl is a whole-ass brat, and it’s a riot watching her run circles around Shaw. Jax may have been her rescuer, but he’d handed her off to the club to protect pretty much the instant he and Blakely got her back to the house.
The guys all seem to do everything they can to stay off her radar, and I get it. She’s a handful and a half. As the only daughter to the Pakhan of the West Coast, she’s spoiled and on a pedestal of her father’s creation. She’s also funny, fierce, and head-over-heels for the MC prez, who appears to be completely oblivious. After she was abducted by traffickers and found by Blakely, drugged, in the backseat of the kidnappers car when they stopped for gas, the Pakhan apparently asked the MC to keep her hidden and safe until the trafficking ring is taken down.
And if it seems as if a Russian Bratva kingpin partnering up with a newly founded motorcycle club filled with a combo of criminals and soldiers is a strange pairing, well, I agree. Maybe, that’s why it’s working out. The last place anyone would look for LeeLee is here, and that’s assuming kidnappers who are stupid enough to get gas mid-abduction have the intelligence to look for her. Arlo seems to think the kidnap attempt was a colossal screw up on their part, and that’s why whoever is leading them hasn’t made any detectible effort to find her.
Blu and LeeLee grab seats at the table, giggling while they watch Grey’s hands on my stomach. LeeLee pushes a plate with a cinnamon roll my way.
“Here, eat this. When my brother’s wife, Polina, was pregnant, sweets always got the baby kicking.” The wistful look on her face when she talks about her family tugs at me, thoughts of my brother never far from mind. I’m sure she misses them the way I miss him. Hy won’t let me visit him in jail, especially not while I’m pregnant.
The baby heaves a massive roll over maneuver, and my entire stomach clenches and bulges as he or she resettles. Grey gasps and presses his hands against me more firmly. The excited wonder on his face crowds out the melancholy in the room.
“That’s… It’s… I never…” His adorable awe makes me smile so big my cheeks ache.
“Yup. It’s great now, but let me tell you, in the middle of the night when they’re on my bladder? Not so much.”
The picture I paint has everyone giggling, but when my chuckle ends on a sharp cry all merriment disappears in an instant. Grey snatches his hands away from my stomach as if he’s worried he hurt me, but this pain isn’t from him. It’s sharp, stabbing, and deep, deep inside my stomach.
“Oh shit, something’s wrong. I need to get to the hospital, I think. Right now.”
Chapter
Sixteen
DIGG
There’s not much I wouldn’t trade to spend time in my truck with Frankie buckled in next to me, my hand on her thigh. The freedom and power that comes hand-in-hand with being on my bike might come close, though. Since Frankie came into my life, riding the bike has taken a backseat to carting us around in my oversized work truck. It’s safer for my woman and our baby.
