Checkmate With Bishop: A Hellions MC Novel (31 page)

Or chose not to.

“Good.  So you can see that having us live right next door probably wouldn’t be the smartest play.  That way you can do your thing and I can do mine without having to sneak our lovers in and out without rubbing each other’s nose in it.”

Lovers?  Dory was
already
fucking planning to have
lovers
?

“Plus, I don’t think it would be smart to have J.R. witness all the different Honeys leaving your place in the mornings.  I mean, I don’t want him to grow up a prude, but I’d like him to have a good moral compass when it comes to sex and I think it’s up to us to set the example.”  Honest to Christ, she was gonna make his fucking head explode with the shit coming out of her mouth.  First by letting him know that she would be screwing multiple men whenever she’d have the opportunity and then basically calling him a man-whore if he wanted to get some himself!  “Don’t you agree, Stan?”

Oh fuck to the no!  He absolutely, totally and in no fucking way agreed with anything she was fucking spouting!  And to do it in such a level, calm voice?  The bitch needed to take it fucking down a notch if she wanted to talk that sort of shit through.

So he let loose, knowing in advance that it was gonna be on the wrong side of rough.  “You wanna share that pussy around town?  Ain’t no skin off my nose, but you won’t be spreading those beautiful thighs in that particular house!  Go to his place or get a room, but J.R. better not know about it.”  He wanted to include himself in the list of who didn’t need to know but didn’t think he was ready to play that specific card at that moment.  “I’ll make sure to keep my fuck bunnies at the compound and away from our kid.  Is that gonna work for you?”

“Why are you so mad, Stan?”  Christ!  She was a piece of work!  “I was just pointing out that…”

“Shut it, mama,” he warned.   “Don’t say another goddamn word or I’m gonna lose my shit.”

She stared at him like he’d lost his mind.  There were a few moments of quiet but it was the thick kind, one that seemed to need more than a while to settle.  “I wasn’t trying to make you angry, Stan.  Really.”  Taking in a deep, deep breath and sitting back, she seemed to be trying to remain calm.  “I just want to get it all out in the open before we make any decisions.”

“Talking about you fucking somebody else, being filled with another fucker’s cock ain’t the way to do it, Dore.”  He knew he was giving her ammunition, giving her a head’s up about the feelings he had for her but it couldn’t be helped.

It was her turn to blink and she did it hard and deep.  “That wasn’t what I said.”

“That’s what you meant though, right?  Just said it with a bunch of frilly-ass, pretty words but the idea’s the same.” 

He watched her throat move as she swallowed thickly.  “Actually, I signed a six-month lease a two bedroom house today.”

“What?”  His voice still held a harshness of the anger that was just starting to dissipate. 

She raised her gaze to his and sat even more upright in her chair.  “It’s only two blocks from your place.  Close enough so J.R. can go back and forth but not so close that we’re up in each other’s stuff.”  Her tone was one that, to Bishop’s ears, sounded cautious and the fact that she appeared worried about his reaction had his heart skipping another beat. 

And even though he knew he should’ve counted it as a win, should’ve been smiling at getting his way in having her stick around and start settling into Missoula, Bishop found he couldn’t.

Not when she had made it more than motherfucking clear that while he was welcome in J.R.’s life, she didn’t want him in hers.

Chapter Twenty Four

“I don’t get it,” J.R. mumbled, his forehead crinkling as he tried to work out my explanation.  “
You
say he’s my dad,
he
says he is and
everybody
knows I
am
just from the
way I look
.  So why do we have to do this test?”

I kept my smile to myself because my boy-man had a point but he was still too young to realize the ways of the world.  “Because the attorneys will need it when our case goes to court.”

“And we have to go to court because…?” Ah, we were finally getting to the root of the questions he’d been zinging my way the entire time since we left the motel to go to the clinic.

“Because your dad and I don’t want to have any misunderstandings when it comes to you.  There’s a lot of things that are based on parentage, baby.  Inheritance, medical issues and all sorts of stuff I’m probably not aware of.”  Okay, my answer was total bullshit because I was making it up as I went, but lucky for me, it seemed to satisfy J.R.

Turning the conversation on its head, my kid went a new direction.  “You guys talked for a long time last night.”

Even though I felt his question down to my toes, to the point it had me readjusting my grip on the steering wheel, I tried to keep it breezy.  “Did we keep you up?”

His head turned to his side window.  “Not as much as the night before.”

Wait…what?

I coughed as, for some unearthly reason, I tried to breathe my spittle instead of swallowing it. 

He’d
heard
us?

“Erm…what do you mean?”  I was going for the ‘dumb mom’ play as I carefully checked the side mirrors, even the rearview one, while I switched on my indicator to turn left into the clinic’s parking lot.  My mind was racing, trying to remember if I’d screamed aloud or had only heard that sound in my head as Stan had given me my bliss over and over again in the night before last.

“Just that you were pretty loud when you were in the bathroom getting sick and Bishop was trying to get you into bed.”

My shoulders sagged in relief as I pulled into a space. 

“And then again when the two of you had your bed thumping against my wall.”

Holy shit!  He
had
heard us!

“Well…” I started, carefully unlatching my seatbelt and wishing I still had long hair that could’ve hidden the flames I knew were moving up my face.

“No worries, Moms,” my kid uttered, as he opened his door.  “My parents have a thing for each other.”  He leaned back into the car where I was sitting as still as a statue.  “It’s all good.”

Shit, shit,
shit
!

“You coming or not?” I didn’t even want to look at him, embarrassed down to my core.  I’d always been so careful when it came to anything to do with J.R.  And that had included keeping my sex life out of the arena of our little family of two.  That he’d heard me and Stan doing our thing…well.  I had absolutely no freaking clue on how to handle it.

Without a word, I got out of the car, finding I was being overly fussy in straightening my clothes, turning on the car’s security system, doing anything and everything I could to give myself the space in order to get myself together.  And in glancing up, I saw J.R. was giving me just that by walking in front of me, cavalierly holding the door open and allowing me entry into the medical center in front of him.

It didn’t help when I saw Stan’s scrawl on the visitor log-in form which announced he’d already been in and had gone.

“It’ll be just a few minutes,” the receptionist told us.  “Just have a seat and I’ll call you when the lab is ready for him.”

“But we had an appointment,” I sputtered.

“And we had one of our senior’s pass out so we’re a little backed up at the moment.”  Her face held a professional smile but her eyes were cold and assessing.  Was I going to be one of
those
kind of people who would muck up the calm, efficient vibe she’d worked to create?  “Just have a seat and I’ll let you know when Mr. Bastian, Junior, can go back for his blood test.”

“Blood test?”  My boy turned wide eyes to me and I caught the quaver in his voice.  “You said it would be a swab thing on the inside of my mouth.”

And I had, since that was all I knew from the different talk shows that played in the shop when I was working my hair mojo.  “Can you tell us how long?”

“Maybe fifteen?  Twenty?  I can’t see it going longer than that.”  Luckily her eyes had warmed or I would’ve been even more seriously worked up than I was. 

“Thanks,” I managed to mumble as I turned to snag J.R.’s arm and stepped away.  “I need to make a phone call but I’ll be quick, honey.  Can you hang tight for a while?”

I saw my kid drag his palms down his thighs as he eyed me warily.  “Okay,” he finally sighed.  “When you talk to him, ask Bishop if he can come down here, okay?”

How did J.R. know?  How had he figured out I needed to call his dad?  “Yeah, baby.  I will,” was all I could promise as I adjusted my purse back up on my shoulder and turned to the glass entryway.

“What’s doin’, babe?” was how my ex-husband answered his phone on the first ring. 

Because I didn’t have time to arrange my thoughts beforehand, my mouth started running as soon as he stopped speaking.  “We’re at the clinic and they told us that the test is one of blood, not just saliva.  J.R. is beginning to freak out.  As in asking-for-you-to-come-down-here kind of freak.”

There was dead silence and after a couple of heartbeats, I pulled the phone away to see if we were still connected. 

We were.

But Stan didn’t say anything.

“Plus, he informed me that what we got up to the other night woke him up!”

Still nothing.

So, I tried explaining.  “You know, the stuff we did in the middle of the night?  He said he could hear the thumping of the headboard.”  My words were offered on a rush.

Complete silence, not even a rustle or the soft click of keys were heard.

“Stan?  Are you there?”

“Yeah, babe,” he replied and it was just at that moment I realized his voice held some kind of electronic buzz just as I heard motorcycle pipes of a bike just entering the driveway of the medical center.  “Can you see me yet?”

My heart sputtered.  How had he gotten there so fast?  “Yeah, I see you.”  Resolved to get a grip and act as a grown-up instead of the freaked out wimp that had somehow overtaken me, I breathed in a deep breath that I refused to call a sigh.  “I’ll meet you inside.”

“Yep.”  That was all I got before I turned on my heel and tucking my phone away into its pocket of my big bag, made my way back inside.  As soon as I cleared the door I saw J.R.’s wide, frightened eyes come to me.  I did a dual thumbs up as I walked to my kid who seemed to be almost visibly shaking.

“Is he coming, Mom?”

I eased into the seat next to him, automatically reaching across his shoulders to pull him against me.  “He’s already here, buddy.”

“Shit, really?” His voice came from around my collarbone as my kid started to struggle against the grip I had on him.  And then I heard it, heard such a note in my boy-man’s voice that my heart tipped over.  “Hey, Dad.”

“Little man,” was the reply and the connecting chairs moved as Stan dropped into the seat on the other side of our boy, which found J.R. twisting out of my arms only to throw himself into his father’s.  I tried to watch, I really did.  But I kept having to blink to clear the view from the tears that wanted to fill my eyes at the sight of their two dark heads coming together, of how Stan’s large frame bent over a much smaller one and of how his large arms moved to hold our son as close as possible.  “Heard you were asking for me.”

“They want to take my blood, Dad.”

“Took mine earlier, so we’ll be sporting the same arm shit, yeah?”  God, was that Stan’s voice speaking so tender?  “It’s a pinch, J.R.  That’s all it is, just a quick pinch, a couple of minutes and you’re done.”

 J.R. opened his mouth to reply, his eyes still closed as he clung to the man who’d planted his seed in  me but, just as he was about to speak, we heard, “Stanley Bastian, Junior, please report to the lab.  Stanley Bastian, Junior.”

I reached out a hand, fumbling to find a space on the skinny back that didn’t contain one of Stan’s large fingers.  “That’s you, baby.”

All three of us rose as one and I led the way to the young, pretty Latina who was standing outside of the room notated as the ‘Laboratory’.  To my mind, the way she had unzipped the top of her scrubs to showcase a good two, maybe two and a half inches of cleavage wasn’t very professional.  Nor were her flashing, dancing heavily eye-linered eyes and overly-glossed, full mouth. 

“Senor Bash-tee-an,” she crooned to J.R., giving his name a Latin flare and a look I decided was entirely nonprofessional as her dark, exotic eyes did their roam over his still boyish physique.  One that lingered on my boy-man’s face, his shoulders before sliding southward.  “Are you ready?”

J.R. didn’t spare either me or his father a glance as he stepped up to her, closer than I found socially acceptable.  “I’m a little nervous,” he said, but he spoke with such élan that anyone else would’ve missed the quaver in his voice.  “It’s my first time.”

She smiled up at him (the temptress!) and snagged his arm with one of hers (who was she to touch my kid?).  “We will take very good care of you, si?  I vow, you will not complain as we take you.”

I must have gasped or given some other sound because all of them stopped before three sets of eyes came to me and where I stood.  Had she just propositioned my son?  It sure as shit sounded like it to me!  And he was there for nothing but a simple blood test!

“He is in good hands, Mr. and Mrs. Bastian.  We know what we are doing,” she stated proudly before her beautiful eyes went again to caress my little boy.  “Are you ready for us then?”

“Lead the way,” J.R. mumbled, but I saw his eyes seemed heated with something I could only begin to guess at.  His tongue snaked out and wetted his lower lip.  “I’m all yours.”

“Fuck, I didn’t get any of that when they called me in,” Bishop mumbled on a note that I could only call a complaint as he turned to me.  “Hey, babe.  You okay?”

I opened my mouth but didn’t have any words to express what I’d seen.  I let my shocked eyes trail up to Stan’s even as I parted and then closed my lips a few times.

Snaking a arm around my shoulders, Stan smiled down into my face.  “Okay, so I’m getting you’re just starting to see our little guy as ‘real’, meaning into the man he’ll probably grow into.”  He gave a nudge and I found myself stepping away from the lab’s doorway, back into the waiting area.  “Shit, he worked that but good!”