Charity For Nothing: The Virtues Book III (2 page)

“Charity, right?”

I startled out of my reverie and looked to my right and
right into
a wall of muscular chest that was framed
very
nicely in black leather to either side. I let my eyes linger for a moment as I roamed the hills and valleys left by an absolutely superbly kept physique before my gaze slipped up over a shadowed jaw and came to rest on a pair of beautiful, deep gray eyes.

“Yeah, how did you know…” I left it open, voice dying off in hopes this handsome stranger would give me his name.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” I asked confused and he smiled.

“My name, it’s Nothing, and you look like Faith. Like a lot like Faith.” That made me smile, a weight lifting off my chest just a bit. I don’t know why I thought she’d look different. Probably because time and experience could change people irreparably and Faith had had both in abundance the last two years.

“Don’t suppose you know where they are, do you?” I asked and he smiled. It looked really good on him, if a touch tragic; the ghost of something indefinable there.

“Yeah, they’re this way,” he held out an arm, gallantly, a really old fashioned gesture by today’s standards and I smiled, taking it.

“Thank you, Nothing.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I put my body in motion alongside Nothing’s sleek, muscular, and taller frame. He looked to be in his early thirties, so not at all out of my price range; I liked them around ten years older.

Pretty quickly, my line of thought about the delicious number walking me towards my sisters vanished. My steps quickened and he let me go, the patter of my thongs on the asphalt of the parking lot giving way and taking me down the cement steps to the sand. I hadn’t been able to keep myself from rushing forward at the rich, familiar laughter of my oldest sister. I stopped a few steps into the soft white sand, Nothing catching up and drawing even with me.

Hope was in the air, Cutter, her boyfriend, had her around the waist and they appeared to be play fighting. I grinned and thought to myself,
typical Hope.
Except in all the time I’d known her around boyfriends or even just occasional fuck buddies, I’d never seen her smile like this, nor had I ever seen them treat her like this guy did; like she wasn’t dangerous to him. Dating Hope was like petting a pet panther in your lap. One minute it’s a cute cuddly kitty, the next it was digging claws in and nomming your face off.

I stood back and scanned the beach for that familiar light blonde hair so like my own and I found it cuddled in the arms of a well-built man with shoulder length blond hair that was several shades darker than my sister’s. He held Faith like she were a delicate thing, and she was. She smiled, but there was a tightness around her eyes and she was still thinner than I’d ever remembered her being. She looked like me in the body now, but from what Hope had sent me picture wise, she looked loads better than when she was at her worst. Her bones no longer stuck out so prominent against her skin and her cheeks had a healthy glow to them. Her hair still needed a trim, desperately, but I’d always been the one to do the homemade haircuts, at least after I’d turned sixteen.

I wondered briefly if Faith were waiting for me to do it for her and the thought instantly made me smile.

“Oh! Oh, holy shit! Put me down. Put me down now!” I turned my head just as Hope buried her elbow into her boyfriend’s solar plexus. He ‘oofed’ and dropped my sister to her feet, doubling over grinning while also grimacing, which made me kind of laugh outright as my oldest sister barreled full tilt across the sand. I dropped my bag next to me and opened up my arms laughing and pretty soon, it was all three of us standing there hugging, laughing, and crying like idiots giving zero fucks about the spectacle we were making of ourselves.

“Oh my god, Blossom, we missed you!” Hope cried and sniffed, but Faith’s tears had become something damn near inconsolable, and so had mine. We clung to each other, Hope getting her shit together first, as always, and looking on as Faith and I simply refused to let the other go.

“I missed you so much!” I cried brokenly.

“I missed you, too!”

“I love you,” Faith cried and I answered with what we’d always said.

“I love you more!”

“Yeah, well I love you both most of all,” Hope warbled before bursting into fresh tears and just like that… we were all home because home for a bunch of rag tag vagabonds like us wasn’t a place. It never really had been moving up and down the California coast with our hippy dippy mother. No; home was the three of us, our mother’s three virtues, all in the same place at the same time. It always had been and it always would be. Period.

“Okay, that’s enough, that’s enough! Jesus, you’d like to think y’all were at a funeral the way you’re all carrying on.”

“Shut it, Pyro.” Hope grumbled against my neck.

I gave the finger in the general direction the voice had come from to a track of masculine laughter.

“Shit, is she like a mini-Hope?” Someone asked.

“All of the fearless sass you can handle,” Faith said backing up and wiping tears off her face.

“Just a little less likely to cave your nuts in, she’s got more patience than I do,” Hope said, backing off and doing the same. I put my hands to my cheeks which were hot and tight from the salt of my tears and did my best to wipe them away.

“Well it’s a party now!” Cutter crowed.

“It wasn’t before?” a blonde tattooed woman asked.

“Not until the guest of honor arrived,” he stated and threw open his arms at me. I laughed and gave him a hug, even though it felt awkward and a little weird. I wasn’t used to strangers to me treating me so casually, or like I was family. That’s exactly what these guys did though. Each one greeting me with an enthusiastic hug and a ‘welcome home’ or ‘welcome to Ft. Royal.’ There was a lot of laughing and greetings and
a lot
of really weird names that made me totally curious. Not nearly as curious as I was about Nothing though.

He stood on the fringe of the happy reunion, a sad little ghost of a smile on, what I found to be, some seriously sensual lips. It was like he set himself apart, but he was still one of them, and I found the dichotomy fascinating. It wasn’t something I could study or explore, because all too quickly, my attention was ripped away, to greet yet more arrivals clad in the black leather vests with dirty but colorful patches on them.

Everyone was keen to stay on the beach, despite the leaden clouds on the horizon, stating they would have plenty of time to move the party to someplace they called The Plank before the rains reached us.

“Prospect!” Cutter called and a youngish looking man, maybe early to mid-twenties, perked up like a gopher out of a hole.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Get our guest’s keys from her, would you? Take her Jeep and trailer to the house and unload it, then get your ass back here for food and beer aplenty on me,” he ordered.

“Do what?” I asked.

Hope looked on bemused, “It’s okay, Charity; give Trike your keys.”

I handed them over to the eager young man and made a bit of a face for his benefit, “I’m sorry you have to do this,” I uttered and he flashed a grin.

“I don’t
have
to, I
want
to. It’s all part of things and my pleasure serving a pretty girl like you.”

“Aww,” I laughed lightly and blushed, handing the keys over, “Thank you!” He nodded once, and trotted off in the direction of the parking lot. I noticed the big colorful patch in the center of his vest was missing and filed it away for later. I didn’t know how any of this club stuff worked and usually the conversations with my sisters on the phone had been brief, either because of things on their end, or because of things on mine. Classes and studying had eaten my life whole, especially with taking the absolute maximum of classes allowable at any given time in order to graduate sooner.

I’d wanted to get down here and now here I was, and I was just so mentally and emotionally exhausted after such a harsh whirlwind of activity to get here, I didn’t know where to start.

That was okay, apparently, according to the men and women of The Kraken, I would start by being introduced to every last one of them. A cold drink was shoved into one hand and pretty quickly, maybe midway through the introductions, a plate of food was shoved into the other. I sat down around a cold bonfire pit in the sand, back against a fallen piece of driftwood with Hope on one side and Faith on the other. Their men ranged out on the other side of their women. I listened to stories of my sisters and how they’d found their way to Ft. Royal.

Things grew a bit somber and quiet when they reached the part about finding and rescuing Faith, and I grew more than a little emotional. I looked to my older sister who looked back at me. We were very nearly a mirror of one another except for our eyes. Hers were a brilliant green-blue like the shallow waters just down the beach. Mine were just plain blue, and wet with tears as my throat closed on anything I could possibly say. Frustrating, that. All I had wanted was to drop everything and come down here and say so much and now, now I was here and couldn’t say anything at all. What was there to say? Once again, when things had gone pear shaped, I had been coddled and relegated to the baby’s table.

Except I wasn’t a baby anymore. I was a twenty-four year old woman with world travel experience and a four year nursing degree under my belt. I looked over at Hope and Faith in turn and had to sigh inwardly. There were some things that would never change when it came to my little family of three… my being ‘the baby’ was likely one of those, no matter how hard I resisted the idiocy of it.

Chapter 2

Nothing

Only one time before had it happened; that feeling like I’d been punched in the gut, just from looking into a woman’s eyes. The first time it’d been my wife Corrine’s eyes. A strange shade of lavender as she’d beseeched me not to let her die. I scrubbed my face with my hands as I tried to banish the painful image of our first meeting out of my head before images of our last barged their way in.

Charity’s eyes weren’t lavender like Corrine’s had been, so it wasn’t that. I don’t know what it was about them, other than being a startling, pale, shade of blue. Like shadows on ice, crisp and refreshing under the heat of the baking Florida sun. I’d led her to her sisters, but as soon as I was able to, I put a little distance between us, but my gaze hadn’t exactly been sidelined from watching her.

Lightning dropped down next to me and knocked his shoulder into mine. “What ‘cha looking at?” he asked and I tore my gaze away from Faith-lite.

“Not a damn thing,” I grated.

“Bullshit,” he said grinning, “She’s single, according to Hope. You finally going to give it up and try something new?”

“Hadn’t planned on it and still don’t; I’m married.”

“
Were
married,” Radar said, dropping his ass into the sand on my other side. “At some point, man, you gotta give up carrying the torch for Corrine. She’s gone, and it’s been something like
three years.
You can’t punish yourself for somethin’ you didn’t do for forever.”

“What do you fuckin’ know about it?” I demanded, and shoved some food in my face, chewing automatically.

“I know Corrine’d be pissed lookin’ at you livin’ like this, day in and day out. Hell, you aren’t even living, you’re just down here grinding it out. That ain’t no way to be, my brother. That ain’t no way to be.”

“What would you fuckin’ know about it?” I demanded again, and it sounded petulant, Like something Katy would have said which just drove the knife that much deeper.

“You ain’t the only one to have dealt with loss, Nothing. Fuck you for suggesting otherwise.” Radar said coldly and I wanted to punch myself in the face. He wasn’t wrong.

“Sorry, man.”

He got to his feet with his beer and his plate, “Get over yourself,” he shot back over his shoulder and moved off to a different small grouping of us. I hung my head and gripped the back of my neck.

“Two points,” Lightning said coolly.

“Yeah, batting a thousand,” I groused.

“That’s on you, Man,” he said getting to his feet.

I swore softly under my breath…
and then there was one.
Just me, all alone, which is pretty much all I fucking deserved in this life.

I rolled my neck and shoulders and finished my food and beer, figuring I could go help Trike with the girl’s stuff. It’d give me something productive to do without having to be around the rest of the guys in my fouled mood. They didn’t deserve it, and I wasn’t entirely sure I could rein it in. So what if I had the ulterior motive of digging into what kind of person she was?

Charity had knocked me off balance with one look and that scared me some. No one had ever been able to do that before. No one except Corrine, and I didn’t want to go down that road again. I really didn’t. It ended on a lonely stretch of highway over near the glades. It ended with a lot of screaming, broken glass and loads of pain.

It ended with two dead bodies and left me behind with no way to pick up the pieces or to stitch the wound left by my guilt.

It left me what I was.

Nothing.

Chapter 3

Charity

The party moved down to a little bar in the leading edge of town called, not surprisingly, The Plank. I had to laugh at the sign above the door; it read
The Plank
in burnt in big block letters and below that,
it’s beachy, it’s manly, it’s made of hard wood,
in a gilded script.

“Who came up with
that?
” I’d asked and someone had launched into the story of Mac, the bar’s previous owner and the club’s old president.

We, and by ‘we’ I meant Faith and I, had been driven there in an old, beat up, green Subaru wagon full of paint in the back. Marlin had done the driving and it’d been nice to watch him hold my sister’s hand as he’d taken the two or three turns, refusing to let go, compensating for his lack of grip by using his knee to hold the wheel while he repositioned his one hand to follow through. He really loved her, and it showed.