Mica (Rebel Wayfarers MC) (18 page)

“Oookkaay, Daniel…sounds like you know quite a bit already. What do you need me for?”

“With everything I know about this woman, there are some things that don’t add up. I want you to apply that investigative reporter instinct and see what you can find out. See what I’m missing before I get involved.” Once it was said and out there, it did sound pretty weird.

“Wow, man, seriously? Do you really think that’s all you want?” was Steve’s dry rejoinder.

Daniel continued, “I only want the background information, Steve. Something happened to this woman, and I need to know what it is. She has old scars on her back, a lot of them. She can fight fairly effectively, man; she held off four attackers. She put three of them on the ground, even as she stood there with a dislocated shoulder. She’s strong, but vulnerable at the same time, and it makes me want to protect her. The police aren’t convinced it was a random mugging, so it feels like there’s a lot to worry about.”

“Holy shit, Daniel,” there was a brief pause and the sound of rustling paper, “um, okay. Here’s what I’m willing to do—I’ll dig around and see what I find, but before I hand anything over, I need to know what the information will be used for. I won’t be party to blackmail, or an obsessive or abusive relationship. I’m also not responsible for what I discover, and you’ll get a report with all the good…and the bad news I find.”

Sighing in relief, Daniel answered Steve honestly, “I need to know, and I can’t wait for the normal relationship bullshit in order to find out. I don’t want to hurt her, but I need to know why she avoids hard questions, and what’s in her head.”

“Okay, tell me again what you already know.” And as easily as that, Steve was on the job.

27 -
            
Daniel’s childhood

Danny’s mother Darlene grabbed the back of his jacket as he was headed out the door. “Daniel Tomas Rupert, you will not go to the pond until you have cleaned up your mess in the mudroom,” she scolded.

Rolling his eyes at her, he whined, “Mom, Dad already has J.J. and Dickie at the pond. They’ll get more ice than me!” She glared at him, and snapping her fingers, she pointed towards the back of the house.

Knowing it was futile to argue with her, because she might be short, but she was mighty, Danny rushed to the mudroom off the porch at the back of the house. In the area where they rinsed dirt and mud off their boots during planting season, he had scattered papers from last year’s playbook. He’d been looking for the breakdown of a sweet, three-on-two offensive sweep play that a rival team had executed really well.

Gathering the papers, he quickly put them into order. He placed them back into the binder, tucking it onto the shelf above the clothes washer. Looking at the shelf, he grinned, seeing nearly 20 years of binders. This was something his dad had been doing for years, and so far, Danny was the only one of the brothers that shared his dad’s enthusiasm for the strategy of the game.

In Mukwonago, Wisconsin, just outside Milwaukee, there was really only one game that mattered—hockey. Fourteen year old Danny shook himself and looked one more time around the room to make sure he had gotten everything picked up. Seeing the all clear, he sprinted up the long, central hallway of the farmhouse, yelling over his shoulder, “All done. See ya, Ma!”

Pulling the front door closed with a slam, he ran headlong into the front yard, grabbing a stick and his skates from the porch without slowing down. Slinging his arms madly for balance, he raced through the snow towards the gate. Not slowing, he vaulted it fearlessly, only skidding a little as he landed. Danny recovered smoothly, and gathered his feet underneath himself, jogging towards the pond at the back of the field.

Stopping and kneeling at the pond’s edge to lace up his beaten-up, hand-me-down skates, Danny watched his dad working with his brothers on their stick handling. His hands and arms moved with muscle memory to tighten the skates, leaving him free to concentrate on his brothers. He saw little Dickie was guarding his left side, and he figured J.J. had probably already smacked him with a high stick in a scuffle—J.J. didn’t pull punches, even for their five-year-old sibling.

That exposed a lot about his oldest brother’s mood today, and identified a weakness to take advantage of in his baby brother. Throwing off his jacket and grabbing his stick off the ground, he stood and stretched hard. Danny was leaning and lunging his legs first one way, and then the other, carefully keeping his back straight and holding in his stomach muscles. Stick up and then stick down, he completed the exercises that he knew worked for him here on the pond, where there were more hazards than just the players.

Feeling a little looser, he stepped onto the ice, carefully skating around the branches and brush sticking through at the edges of the pond. Moving faster, he started his on-ice warm-up routine with footwork, beginning slowly and working up to a fast pace. He was working on a solo four corners drill, skating forwards and backwards with easy and hard crossovers on the turns at the corners of the pond, just getting his skates underneath him and getting a read on the ice.

“Danny, come on over, son,” called his dad. “Let’s do a real four corners.” Tapping J.J.’s head, he counted, “One. Dickie, you are two. Danny is three, and your old man is four.” His hands clapped together, the sound muffled by his gloves. “Let’s go, boys, start northeast.” He called the order of the players in the drill and indicated the starting corner.

Skating back and forth, slapping the puck with the wooden, taped sticks with hard, confident passes, the four of them worked the sides and edges of the pond. They were arching, cutting, and skating towards imaginary goals on the ice for several long minutes. The boys each had the reddish-brown hair and dark blue eyes of their dad. Even though there were age differences between the three, they all looked very much alike. Until a recent growth spurt, it had even been hard to tell J.J. was 2 years older than Danny.

The boys had always been fairly competitive, and they had remained reasonably close in skill set until the last year, but it would be clear to any educated onlooker that the middle son had a greater talent than the two boys who sandwiched him on the sibling ladder. Their dad tried hard not to favor Danny, but it thrilled his heart to see him handling glancing hits from his bigger brother with aplomb, and then finessing the puck around his younger, stumbling brother.

Breathing hard from the active session, Jonathan Sr. pulled himself out of the lineup. He called to the boys to start running a clean one-touch drill, where the teammates pass into a good set-up position for each other. He thought this was one of his favorite team-building routines, because the only way it really worked was for each player to care about the shot and spot that the next player had. He called out instructions and reminded them to work the drill along both sides of the pond, switching up positions with each round.

Forty-five minutes later, he called the boys over to the upside-down bucket where he was sitting and watching them. “Are we ready for practice tonight, boys?” asking them without saying anything more if they had pulled muscles or hurt themselves in the skirmishes that had developed over their time on the pond today. Looking around at his brothers, Danny answered, “Hells yeah, Dad, we’re ready! Ruperts’ Rule!”

28 -
            
Aftermath

Shifting his legs for what felt like the hundredth time, Mason finally gave up the thought of sleep that kept chasing across his mind. He still had his arms wrapped tightly around Mica, and she was sleeping quietly. Her head rested comfortably on his chest, one arm draped across his belly, and her leg resting heavily on top of his thigh, tantalizingly close to his cock. He was glad for this time to watch her sleeping, to hold her tenderly before she woke up. He wanted to treasure this time with her, because he knew… what had gone down this morning, what they had shared, might very well be the closing of a door instead of an opening.

He wasn’t sad or bitter; in fact, he was thrilled she had trusted him enough to reach out when she needed him. He had been totally blown away at the passion and sensuality she brought to the bedroom. She had literally taken his breath away, and he had loved her as perfectly as he could, wanting to tend to her desires ahead of his own.

Even with all the rightness, joy, and pleasure they’d experienced together, he was afraid she would have regrets, and he didn’t think their friendship could recover from this if she did. He was afraid this could be the last time he held her, either as a friend, or as a lover. That fear had him where he could hardly breathe, so he wanted to stretch these moments out as long as possible. He had wanted her for such a long time, and then over the months, that had morphed into loving her as a friend. She was an integral part of his life now, and he was terrified that things would change.

He didn’t know why Daniel had left her alone last night, but that was a decision the other man made, which Mason was not sorry about. Daniel had given him an in; it had given him a precious opportunity to be here…with her…for now.
Livin’ in the fucking moment
, he thought to himself, chuckling
, is a damned great way to be, man
.

She took in a deep breath that sounded almost like it got stuck for a minute, and then she groaned twice as she released it. Mason picked up his head to look at her, because that was not a happy noise. He watched her face carefully to see if it was a nightmare, or maybe an unconscious complaint about the temperature in the room. Her forehead creased, and her body started moving in short, sharp jerks. Her hands gradually drew up to her chin, and he realized her body was slowly shifting and winding in on itself, trying to become very small as she curled up.

Before he could decide what to do, her eyes opened wide. She was staring blindly, and her jaw clenched in tooth-breaking ferocity, choking back scream after scream in a muffled wave of noise. Her hands came up and slapped in an uncoordinated way at his arms and chest, her eyes unseeing since she was still trapped in the dream.

His hands settling on her body; he held her close to him, with one hand on her shoulder and one on her hip. As he touched her, the screams broke free from behind her closed teeth with a terror-filled sound that gradually resolved to one word over and over—
NO!
She wrapped her arms tightly around her head, protecting herself from something Mason could not see.

He moved quickly to kneel on the bed beside her, shaking her shoulder lightly and calling out to her, “Mica, babe, it’s Mason. Wake up, you are dreaming.” His voice seemed to break through to her, and her eyes focused in on his face, very slowly losing their wide-eyed, white-rimmed stare. The noises stopped too, and he talked to her non-stop in a calm, quiet voice. He was reassuring her with soft words that he was there and she was safe, and he began stroking her arms lightly with his hands, trying to ground her in the here and now with both sound and sensation.

He shifted back down in the bed as she calmed, pulling her head onto his shoulder again and trailing his fingers up and down the muscles along her spine. He touched her slowly, waiting until he felt a shiver of what might be arousal from her before he spoke again. “Hey, talk to me, babe. What was that about? What can I do?”

He felt her tense up alongside him and waited, steadily stroking her back. After a time, he knew she was relaxing again under his stroking fingers and said, “Talk to me, Mica. Just talk, nothing else. Tell me about the dreams.”

He laid there quietly for what felt like forever, listening to her heartbeat race and slow, and then pick back up to race and then slow again as she struggled internally over what to do.

Finally taking a deep breath, she started talking in a low voice he had to strain to hear, “The nightmares are my life, Mason. I was fourteen when my mother died. She went to bed one night, and didn’t wake up. It was a full day before we found her, because Michael, Daddy and I had left early for a meet. I rode our horses competitively, and trained others too, so my days revolved around horses and Playdays. When we got home and she still wasn’t up, and then we found Molly crying—well, I knew something was wrong. Daddy checked on her, and called the local justice to come pronounce her. We buried her in the hay meadow the next day…no fuss, no muss, just the four of us.”

Rolling her head to an angle so she could look up at his face, she was trying to gauge his reaction. Swallowing audibly, she continued, “He has always been heavy-handed for as long as I could remember, at least with people, but he got worse after Mamma died. With horses, he was a treat, and could get even the rankest stud to work like a charm, but never people. About a week after she died, Daddy came to my bed for the first time and raped me.” Spoken so bluntly, this confession took him by surprise, and his arms tightened around her, cradling her to his side.

“It’s okay,” she continued, and he realized with surprise that she was comforting
him
. “Mason, it doesn’t matter; it was so long ago.” Her fingers moved across his chest, touching and stroking, “He beat me less after that started, but then he took that part of his anger out more on Michael instead. Daddy is a harsh man, and owning a working ranch doesn’t leave a lot of time for frippery or lazy people. All I had to do was keep my head down, and it would have been better for Mikey. Earlier, I know you saw the marks and scars on my back, right?”

Mason nodded, softly kissing the top of her head and shifting slightly so he could grab her hand with his own, folding it up and trapping it against his chest. “So, you saw those. Well, it’s important that you know Michael has worse scars than mine. Some of mine are from stupidity, like the one on my hip, where I fell out of a tree and hit a limb on the way down, or the ones I have from losing concentration when fixing a fence, stretching the wire too far, and then having it break and whip back on me. Not many are like that, but some. Most of them are from Daddy, and then later, from…Michael…and others.”