The Princess and the Prospect Read online

  “The fuck!” I yelled back, finally amassing a little clarity that allowed me to think past the too-fast beat of my heart. “I didn’t even know she was pregnant. You told me to stay away from her! She lied about who the fuck she was and how old she was, and who knows what else she lied about too. Probably everything. Probably lying about being pregnant too, for all I know. What did you expect me to do? Sit around, pining for a liar who never told me she was pregnant to begin with?”

  “Ever,” Double-D called out, ignoring my tirade. “Get her out of here, please.” He tipped his chin toward the woman still clinging to my arm as if someone was about to take away her favorite toy. As if she was used to having me as her toy. The image she portrayed was more than of the two of us being out on our first date. I was still unable to even so much as glance over at Anna. If I looked at her now, it would be real. Her words would be real and I would have to deal with them. Just a little longer, and…

  “No!” Mindy had the audacity to yell at Double-D. “I came with Joker, and I’m going to leave with him.”

  “You sure as fuck aren’t talking to my family like that!” Ever yelled at her as she yanked on my other arm pulling me free from Mindy’s unexpecting clutches. “I don’t give a fuck if Joker wants that pussy, we’ll chalk this one up to him losing out.” I don’t know if it was the shock of Ever saying something like that in front of her family, or what, but the entire room grew still as the tomb. Then I watched Ever’s horrified face as she turned to her sister. “Shit!” She proclaimed, and then mumbled out a quick apology to Anna who I couldn’t avoid looking at any longer. Her beautiful face was contorted in a mask of pain as a tear slipped free from her long lashes and fell freely down her cheek. My heart clenched at the sight.

  “What in the fuck is happening to my family?” Double-D asked while losing some of his bluster. Ever turned venomous eyes on Mindy, but Deck stepped in the way pointing his finger to someone beyond my view. “Prospect there is gonna show you the way out and see that you get home,” he told Mindy.

  “Yeah, whatever,” she responded snidely. “Joker, I like you, but I’m not trying to raise anyone else’s babies for them just because their baby mamma is too young to do it.”

  “Fuck you!” Anna shouted as I watched Double-D reach for and take hold of his daughter before she could launch herself at Mindy’s smug face. “You’re not coming anywhere near my baby, Bitch!”

  “Holy fuck!” I’d been shocked as shit to hear those words come from Anna’s mouth, especially the way they were laced with so much venom. Come to think of it, that was both the first and the last time I ever heard Anna cuss.

  “Come on,” Double-D called out to everyone, and then seemed to think better of the order. “Actually, just you,” he said to me. Something was communicated silently between Ever and her father in the next minute before Anna stopped it.

  “It’s okay. I’d rather you be there, Ever.”

  “If that’s what you want,” she agreed.

  Surprisingly enough, Double-D ended up leading all of us to the room that the club used for Church. This was a place women weren’t supposed to be allowed to enter at all and now it was filled with Double-D’s family, which included his wife and two daughters.

  “You want me to wait out here?” Deck asked.

  “Why? You’re family too,” Anna informed Deck, as if he didn’t already know he’d married into this craziness.

  When we were seated, it didn’t escape my attention that I had been basically surrounded by Anna’s family with Double-D sitting on one side of me while Deck was to my other. Anna and Lucy were seated across from us. It was as if they all thought they had to trap me in the room in order for me to do the right thing by her, or whatever their end goal was here.

  “I’m assuming since you’re here with her, the pregnancy was confirmed?” Double-D asked as he glanced down at Anna’s hands that were hiding under the table. “I saw what you were holding,” he informed her.

  She glanced up at her dad with unshed tears glimmering in her eyes still. Then her face broke out in the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen on her. There had to be a hidden path from heaven to the girl’s soul, because there was no way a person could light up like that without some sort of divine intervention. I froze, unable to move as I just took the sight of her in and contemplated how someone so perfect could have been so devious in her pursuit of me, so selfish as to nearly cost me everything I’d worked for since I left the Army, and callous enough to rip my heart out with the truth of her betrayal.

  “Before you found out who she was, how did you feel about my daughter?” The question from Double-D took me aback and jolted me out of my reverie, but he was already moving on to the next question before I could even register what he was saying. “How long were you seeing one another? Were you seeing one another or did you just think she was nothing more than club pussy since she was hanging around?” What the fuck kind of shit was this asshole spouting off about his own daughter? I got to my feet, and then I put the mother fucker on his back with a punch to his jaw. Fuck that guy. How dare he speak about his own kid that way?

  “CJ!” Lucy’s shrill cry of her husband’s name didn’t faze me one bit.

  “You talk like that about your own daughter?” I screamed at him as Deck moved around me to help him up. The bastard started laughing at me as he moved to pick himself up from the floor.

  “Now you’re laughing?” I asked. He glanced around at everyone and smiled at Ever who was also smirking, a knowing look passed between the two of them, and all the while the fucker didn’t stop laughing. My fingers twitched with the itch to throttle the bastard. “You’re seriously sitting there laughing after insinuating your daughter is a whore? What the fuck, man? No wonder your family’s falling apart and your kid’s acting out. Jesus. She told me her family was fucked since her brother died.” I turned to see Anna’s face scrunch in sadness as I spilled one of her secrets to her family. “I see that now.” I couldn’t keep looking at her though, so I shifted my focus back to her father. “She told the truth about something, at least.”

  Double-D took his time getting to his feet. He then massaged his jaw with his hand before turning a dopey grin on me. I took an inadvertent step backwards, because that grin was so fucking off-putting I didn’t know what might come out of the man next. I could see a plan forming in his eyes and I had a good feeling about where this shit was going.

  “Looks like we need to set up a good ol’ southern shotgun wedding, son!” It wasn’t long after his declaration, and the gasps of surprise had died down from two of the three women present, that Lucy scooped Anna up into arms and took them out of the room, leaving me with her father, Deck, and Ever to go over the details of my impending nuptials.

  WEDDING DAY

  “Are you fuckin’ serious?”

  “As a heart attack, brother,” I answered him and turned back around to stare at the cracked gray wall once more. Deck moved away from me and off to the side where his wife, the very sweet and beautiful Ever, stood waiting for things to get a move on too. She seemed almost disinterested in the events playing out now until Deck said something to her. The shock on her face was easy to read. I guess her little sis had been spitting more lies about her impending nuptials and the part I was playing in them. I really couldn’t expect any less, I guess. She lied about everything. Hell, if her mother hadn’t been there to confirm the sonogram pictures I would have thought she was lying about the baby too.

  I know what you’re probably thinking. Why the hell am I going through with this if I hate her so much? In this day and age you don’t have to be married to co-parent. I know this. The thing is, I was medically discharged from the military. I get medical coverage for life now. That means my future wife and kids will also be covered. Since I believed it was my kid, and she had the amnio test done that could provide a DNA sample to test. The kid was mine, though I wasn’t allowed to know if it was a boy or a girl even though I knew the test would show the s
ex. Anna didn’t want to know, so I didn’t get to know.

  Getting the DNA test had been one of my stipulations before agreeing to marry her. I would stay married to Anna to make sure she remained covered by my insurance through the pregnancy and post-partum crap. Most likely, we’d finalize our divorce after that, but the baby would still be covered by me even if it’s mom wasn’t any longer. Hopefully, by then I’d have a plan about what to do concerning the baby, and the fact that this bitch’s lies had ruined how I had pictured my future life. I was supposed to get married once – maybe, but it was supposed to be with the person who birthed my kid, and it was supposed to be for life. I didn’t want a bunch of different bitches out there giving birth to a hoard of my children like some men did. I wanted shit to be normal – something I didn’t have growing up.

  Fucking hell. Too bad I didn’t think to tell her that I didn’t want her lies ruining my life when we met. Hindsight – she is a bitch. I glanced down at the watch I wore. I’d been standing here wasting this man’s time for 45 minutes now. I glanced around to see that Ever had left the room and Deck was standing in back looking worried. I was fuckin’ done.

  I started walking back down the little aisle that had been created by the few fold out chairs that had been brought in so the witnesses had a place to sit. “What’s up?” Deck asked as I drew closer to him.

  I glanced at my watch once more. “What’s up? Really? I’ve been waiting 45 fuckin’ minutes for this shit-show to get started. I’m done. They can come find me another day, when I’m not busy, and not being held up by their lying daughter doing God knows what in order to make her grand entrance.”

  I heard the gasp and we both looked to the doorway where Double-D was standing with his daughter’s hand in the crook of his arm. She was wearing a pretty little ivory dress with peach flowers all over it. It fit tight to her much larger than they used to be tits and the baby bump she now had while swishing around her legs down just above her knees. Her long dark brown hair was pulled back on the sides and the curled length draped down behind her shoulders to disappear behind her back. Tears wrecked what I was guessing had been the perfect make-up job. Then there was her dad, spitting hellfire and brimstone at me. Well shit.

  I watched as Anna tried to remove her hand from her father’s arm to no avail. He held her captive there in the doorway. He pointed a single finger toward the man waiting to marry us and I complied with a shrug of my shoulders. What did it actually matter to me anyway? I was marrying her for one reason only beyond the insurance shit. It would mean easier access to my kid, and the ability to get all the dirt I needed on her when it came time to go to court over custody because there would definitely be a time for that.

  “Daddy, no, please. This is humiliating enough.” I don’t know what she thought she had to be humiliated about. I was the one who had been deceived, not her.

  “Anna, you made your bed,” I heard him say to her. Here I was thinking he was trying to punish me with this marriage bullshit, but honestly I was beginning to think this was just his way of pushing another kid out the door. I felt a twinge of guilt for thinking that considering they’d all lost Toby not too long ago. Double-D’s son had been a club brother, or he would have been if he’d lived long enough to see me patched in officially. He was a decent guy, and I hated like hell that I knew at least part of what Anna had told me about losing her brother had been true. The emotion she had shown when she spoke of him is what had clawed at my heart and made me give her a chance. She was a horrible fuckin’ human if that had all been a part of her game too.

  “Short version is just fine,” Double-D told the judge as he stood his daughter up beside me. The both of us refused to look at each other and instead chose to focus on the man marrying us.

  The judge glanced back and forth a couple times between me and my sobbing bride-to-be. Then his eyes moved to Double-D. “You know we don’t really have to do this anymore for those in her condition.”

  “It’s getting done,” Double-D returned and then stood quietly behind us. I guess he was there just in case one of us tried to pull a runner. I was fuckin’ tempted. I didn’t really need the club, did I? Fuck. Despite how badly I didn’t want to marry this girl now that she had shown me her true self, nothing could stop me from wanting to be there for my own kid. I knew what it was like to live without the love of one of your parents. Instead of running I stood there and swore vows to the woman who had put us both in this position by lying her ass off to me. I didn’t expect her to hold steady to her vows, considering she was untrustworthy already at best. I certainly hoped she didn’t plan on me doing any better. I was there for my kid, she was just incidental shit to deal with. This was a contract we were signing so that health insurance would cover her, and nothing more. I continued to tell myself that as I tried too damn hard not to see the way her shoulders shook as she cried beside me.

  Chapter 2

  I was married. There had always been this illusion in the back of my mind that when I finally got married one day I would feel different somehow. Complete. Having met the other half of my soul and tied myself to him for the rest of our lives was supposed to mean something. It was supposed to make me feel different. All I felt sitting in the passenger side of Joker’s truck as he drove us away from the courthouse was infinite sadness. He hated me, and what was worse, I couldn’t blame him for it one bit. I had lied to him about who I was and how old I was. It was something that could have ruined his life, and I’d done it out of selfishness. It hurt my heart to think of what kind of person that made me. I rubbed the little baby belly I was starting to get and knew it didn’t matter anymore because I could never regret anything that made my child.

  Still, it was hard for me to even look over at my husband. That word didn’t bring elation like I once dreamed it would. Instead, it felt false rolling around my head. I’d probably never say it out loud, because we weren’t really married. He’d made that clear when he refused to supply wedding rings, or even kiss me when the Justice of the Peace told him he could. No, what we were was a business transaction on paper only. The tears burning my eyes threatened to spill over again. I refused to let him see any more of them though. When the clubhouse came into view I finally glanced his way. I thought we’d been headed to his house so he could show me around and I could get settled in.

  Of course, there had been no plans for a honeymoon. I didn’t think there would be, but I hadn’t been prepared for being dragged to the clubhouse where I would undoubtedly be humiliated by being the ‘blushing bride’ paraded around even though he’d been reluctant to marry me. Reluctant probably wasn’t a strong enough word, actually. I knew the way the guys at the club gossiped about one another’s lives. They already knew this was a sham of a wedding and only being done because I was pregnant and… Yeah, so it was going to be humiliating.

  When we parked Joker didn’t bother to say a word to me. Instead, he got out of his truck and took off toward the clubhouse, leaving me there to sit in the truck. He didn’t even offer the courtesy of helping me down out of the truck that was way too high for me. I sighed and opened the door, but before I could contemplate jumping down my father’s friend, Crow, was there. “Come on little lady, let me help you out. You shouldn’t be hopping around when you’re in your condition.” He helped me down and then glanced around the parking lot finding it empty of any other people. “Were you supposed to wait here for Joker?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “He didn’t say what we were doing here. He just went inside.” I told him as my face heated with embarrassment at having to admit that my now husband couldn’t even offer me that courtesy or help getting out of his monster of a truck.

  Crow gave me an odd look before he pulled me into his arms and hugged me tightly. “Everything will be okay, Princess. It’ll get better. You guys just need some time to adjust.”

  A bitter laugh erupted from my dry throat, nearly making me choke on the coughing fit it produced. Crow squeezed me tighter. “It’s kind of
you to say anyway,” I told him before peeling myself out of his arms and moving towards the clubhouse door.

  “You have my number, if you need anything, you just call. You hear me?”

  “You’re not coming in?” I asked Crow, worried that none of the older crowd would be there to take my back in case things got dramatic or out of hand.

  “No, honey. I was on my way out just now.”

  “Okay, well see you around,” I told him and turned my back as quickly as possible because once again those tears were starting to burn my eyes. I knew what my dad said to me earlier today was true enough. I’d done this to myself and there was no use crying about it. More to the point – if I needed to cry, I would have to do it where no one could see.

  Once I pushed the door open the only way to describe the scene was loud. The music – it sounded like something from Disturbed – was cranked up so loud I couldn’t even hear my own thoughts. I could make out some laughter and yelling from across the room though. I glanced around and noticed that Joker was standing by the pool table talking to another newer member that I hadn’t gotten to know yet. There were a few women standing around with them too, which I found strange, because I thought – after what happened with Toby – that they weren’t allowed to be here anymore. I shook off the thought and moved over to the bar to park my ass on a stool until Joker was ready to take me to his house. The prospect behind the bar gave me a pitying look before leaning in to ask what he could get for me.

  “Can you just get me a Gingerale?”

  “Sweetheart, we don’t have that back here. You want a sprite or something?”

  “Sure,” I mumbled, my stomach feeling even queasier then.

  He slid a glass my way and plopped a straw down in it as he did so. “I’m not sure it’s my business to say anything, but this doesn’t look like the kind of place where someone in your condition should be,” he offered up as he glanced down at my slightly rounded belly. I just shrugged my shoulders.