Gentle Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 4) (10 page)

“You mean my drinking?”

Spider nodded.

“Yeah. He knows I relapsed for a year.”

“Right.” Spider sighed. “You were so fragile back then… I wasn’t sure how you’d react to what I had to tell you or what you’d decide to do if you knew. When you were drunk, you were unpredictable and impulsive and I had visions of you going out to the Fallen Angels clubhouse in a blind-drunk rage and shouting at Ace. I decided to focus on helping you get sober and then I’d share everything with you.”

Mirrie was silent for a minute, then she said, “OK, yeah. I can see why you’d keep it from me when I was still drinking.”

“I didn’t want to, believe me, but I had to be sure that you were stable and steady in your sobriety. But the other thing was that after you got sober, I started keeping tabs on
you
.” He nodded his chin at Mac, who looked astonished.

“Me?”

“Yeah. I knew that you were friends with Matt Kingston and I was
sure
that you’d get him and his team on the case to find Mirrie. For a whole year, I waited for you to just show up here or at my place and find her yourself. I promised myself that if you tracked her down, I’d tell you both about the gun.” His face hardened. “But you never came, man.”

“Yeah,” Mac mumbled. “I – I decided against asking King.”

“I know you did,” Spider said. “So then I started dropping by Dangerous Curves maybe once a month, just to see what you were up to.”

“You did?” Mac stared at the tattoo on his face. “How the hell did I miss
you
showing up in that place?”

“You were…ummm… distracted.” Spider glanced at Mirrie, worried about hurting her. “You were busy.”

“I know about all the women, Spider,” Mirrie said. “The back rooms, the screwing around. Shane told me everything.”

“Thank God.” Spider shut his eyes. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to break
that
news.”

“So let me guess.” Mac grimaced as he thought about his behavior from Spider’s perspective. “You saw me drinking and laughing at Curves, and taking the women to the fuck rooms, and figured that I’d just forgotten about Mirrie, right? Moved on? And you thought that I’d never really given a shit about her and she’d be better off without me?”

“Yes,” Spider said without batting an eyelash. “That’s exactly what I thought. I figured if you
really
cared about her, you’d have asked King for help. When you didn’t and then when you were screwing a different woman every weekend, I just assumed that you didn’t care that Mirrie had left you. I decided that if that was the case, she was better off without you… and I just let it all go.”

“Fuck,” Mac said softly. “The time we’ve wasted and lost.”

“But then you showed up here two days ago, at long fucking last,” Spider said. “When you stormed in like some lovesick teenaged Romeo and said that you loved her, I was ready to dance on the goddamn
tables
, I swear. I let you stay here and hang out and I pushed her to talk to you and I promised myself that if you two sorted it out between you, I’d finally tell you about the gun. And now I have.”

They all sighed.

“Alright,” Mac said. “That’s everything? All the cards are on the table?”

Mirrie and Spider both nodded.

“Yeah, mine too,” Mac said. “So we’re in this together now, guys. I’m going to have to tell King and the guys about all of this but nothing we said goes beyond them, right?”

“Absolutely not,” Mirrie said fervently. “All I want is to get on with my life and now that I know we’re all safe, I can do that.”

“With me?” Mac asked.

She gazed up at him, her incredible eyes warm and shining. “With you.”

“At long fucking last,” Spider muttered. “Good Christ, you two took long enough to get it together, huh?”

“She was worth waiting for,” Mac said quietly.

“He was too,” Mirrie said.

Spider rolled his eyes. “Urgh. It’s getting way too gushy in here for me, so I’m leaving now. I’ll go and eat a plate of brownies and let me tell you what: that’ll be a hell of a lot better for my blood sugar levels than staying here with you two.”

“Not so fast,” Mirrie said as she stood up. “I need to gush a bit more.”

“Urgh,” he said again. “Let me leave first, OK?”

“Nope, I’m going to gush on
you
.”

“Me?” Spider grinned. “Oh, sweetie. You’re not my type.”

“All this time, you’ve kept us safe and we didn’t know it,” she said, ignoring his teasing. “You stood up for both of us, took on a dangerous, brutal MC… you’re a true, good friend, Liam, and I’ll owe you until the day that I die. Thank you, so much. Just – thank you.”

Spider swallowed hard. “You mean the world to me, Mirrie. I’d do it all again and I’d take on a dozen MC’s if it meant keeping you safe.”

She grasped his hands in her own and they stood for a few seconds, just looking at each other.

“Urgh,” Mac said, breaking the silence. “Now
I’m
drowning in the gush.”

“We need a sugar overload,” Spider proclaimed. “Brownies are the answer!”

“Brownies are
always
the answer,” Mirrie agreed. “Let’s go eat ourselves in to the next-up size of clothing, yeah?”

Mac ran an affectionate hand over her hair. “My girl, the sweet-tooth.”

“Yep.” She raised herself up on her toes to kiss him. “I love sweet things.”

“Including me?”

“Hell, yeah.” She kissed him again, a soft, lingering kiss. “You know it, sweet thing.”

Chapter Ten
Three weeks later

Aidan pulled up to Dangerous Curves, killed the engine. He looked over at Gabi, who had been uncharacteristically quiet the whole drive over.

“Angel?” He spoke quietly but she still jumped. “You sure about this?”

“Yeah.” Her voice was shaky and Aidan’s heart broke for her just a little bit. “I’m sure.”

“You don’t have to, baby. If it’s too soon, nobody’s going to be mad at you for needing some more time.”

She turned to look at him now, her dark eyes flashing. “I promised Jax I’d be here, Aidan. He’s counting on me to work. Besides, I have to start paying him back.”

Aidan didn’t tell her that Jax had brought in an extra woman tonight to waitress, just in case Gabi backed out at the last second. Nobody – not even Gabi herself – was sure how long she’d last, so Jax was
more
than covered on the staff front. Curves was definitely a place where trouble could and did start in the blink of an eye, and Jax was as worried as Aidan about how Gabi might react if a fight broke out. They figured her tolerance to violence was pretty low.

Aidan
also
didn’t tell her that Jax didn’t give a flying fuck about being reimbursed for Gabi’s sessions with Francine. Hell, Jax would have paid for them without a second of thought. So would Aidan, for that matter, or Mac, or King, or Naomi, or Sarah. Even Dillon, Curtis, and some of Gabi’s fellow Curves waitresses had offered to chip in to pay for Gabi’s therapy, even though they didn’t make boatloads of cash bouncing and serving up beers to bikers.

Gabi had refused, of course. She’d gone to Jax on her own and had made a deal with him: if he could pay for her therapy with Francine, then Gabi would waitress for free and just take her tips. Jax had treated her request seriously, treated her with respect – but privately, he’d told Aidan that he wished she’d let him pay for them free and clear.

Aidan hadn’t met Francine, probably wouldn’t meet Francine, but he thought that she was nothing less than a miracle-worker. Dillon shared his perspective, he knew. God, what the woman had done for Gabi and Maria was astonishing. Gabi had seen Francine every day for just over three weeks – and now here she was, back at Curves. Ready to walk in to a room of hardened criminals and yes, MC members. No Fallen Angels, of course, but still… a rough crowd.

Aidan was so damn proud of her, so in awe of her strength, he thought his chest might explode. So instead of telling her about the extra girl, or about Jax really not being all that invested in his deal with Gabi to get his money back, Aidan just nodded.

“OK,” he said. “Let’s go.”

She opened her door and stepped out in to the late-summer chill. She shivered and tugged her jacket tighter around her body. Without a word, Aidan wrapped his arm around her shoulders, escorted her to the door. When they reached it, he stopped and lifted her face up to his.

“I love you,” he said in a low growl. “I think you’re amazing.”

“I love you too,” Gabi said with a smile. “And you’re kinda amazing yourself.”

“I’m right here, baby.” He touched her lips, traced their shape with his thumb. “You need anything and I don’t care what it is, you ask me. Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“So.” He pushed open the door and they were met with a roar of heat and noise. “Let’s go to work.”

**

Tessa Mahoney stared at herself in the full-length mirror in the Curves staff room. She sighed heavily at her tree trunk thighs, her protruding stomach, her flabby ass and turned away in disgust.

Just that morning, her boyfriend Kevin had ordered her on to the bathroom scale again and Tessa had actually stepped on with a bit of confidence this time. After all, she’d had nothing but grapefruit for breakfast and chicken salad for lunch and carrot sticks with low-fat yogurt dip for dinner for the past six days. She
had
to have lost a lot of weight, she figured.

Kevin had squinted at the numbers. “Fucking hell.”

“What?” she’d asked him, a bit excited to hear the answer. “It’s good?”

“Are you kidding me?
Look
.”

She’d glanced down and then frozen. One hundred and thirty-eight pounds. She’d winced.

“Fuck, Tessa,” Kevin had said. “Just six pounds this week? At
your
weight, you can drop way more than that and not even notice.”

“I know,” she’d said quietly. “I’ll try harder.”

“You’d better.” His voice had been hard. “Fuck, would anyone believe that you used to be a goddamn semi-professional ballet dancer? I mean,
look
at you.”

And she had looked and she’d seen what Kevin did: a tall, fat woman with piggy eyes and messy blonde hair. Ugly. Pathetic. Undisciplined.

God, she could barely remember the time when she’d been in ballet training. Despite standing at a towering five-foot-seven inches (‘towering’ for ballerinas, that is), she hadn’t even weighed one hundred pounds then: she’d fought like hell to keep the scale right at ninety-nine. She’d danced for seven hours a day and Kevin had loved her body. He’d barely been able to keep his hands off of her then, loved taking her to his work events on his arm. Not like now, when he went to all his investment firm galas and parties alone and couldn’t stand to touch her unless the lights were off and he’d been drinking.

Tessa wasn’t totally sure how it had all gotten so out of control. OK, yeah, she’d fallen and wrecked her knee and had to stop dancing and that had been the end of her dream. Yeah, the lack of exercise and sitting on her ass had been part of the problem – but so had the comfort-eating. Lots of it and daily.

Ice cream. Brownies. Bags of chips. Licorice. Pizza. They were the only things in the world that made her happy, that lifted the depression of never being able to dance, not ever again. She’d thought that once she’d recovered from the knee surgery and got back on her feet, that somehow the weight would just magically drop off… but it hadn’t.

Nope, it was the
opposite
, actually. She’d finally managed to find work waitressing at Curves and she’d been thrown in to an even deeper depression at that fact: all she’d ever done was focus on her ballet and so she’d never developed any other life skills. She’d never worked at a grocery store, never babysat, never worked in an office for the summer. If Tessa wasn’t a dancer, she wasn’t anything.

I’m nothing. I’m nobody.

The answer was food. It was comforting and it was warm and it was delicious. It was easy to buy, to hide, to consume. It was like a friend and she needed a friend, badly. But like a frenemy, it had turned on her – made her lazy and weak, made her fat and disgusting and seventy-five pounds heavier than she’d been when dancing. So, much like a toxic friend, it had had to go.

“Christ, Tessa,” Kevin had said to her that morning as she’d stood there on that damn scale, trapped in her self-loathing. “I’m just trying to
help
you, you know. I want you to like your body again, but no way you can do that when you look like a fucking cow.”

She’d flinched. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll do better.”

And she had. That day, she’d worked out on the Stairmaster that Kevin had bought her for four hours instead of three, had her salad without any chicken and skipped the dip with her carrots. She was determined that when she got on that scale next week, she’d be below one hundred and thirty pounds. Even that was too much –
way, way too much, you goddamn pig, you lazy heifer
– but it was a start.

The door opened behind her and Tessa jumped and tugged her baggy blouse down over her fat ass. When Gabi walked in, Tessa forgot all about everything to do with herself: she was unbelievably thrilled for Gabi to be back.

“Argh!” Tessa squealed. “I’m so happy to see you!”

“Tessa?” Gabi blinked in shock. “Oh, my God!”

Tessa hurled herself across the room and hugged Gabi. Gabi returned the embrace after a brief pause, then ran her hands over Tessa’s back a bit before letting go.

“How are you?” Tessa asked, her beautiful face so warm and concerned.

“I’m better,” Gabi said, staring at the purple rings under Tessa’s emerald-green eyes. “How are you?”

Tessa waved her hand carelessly. “Oh, you know… the same.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Huh?” Tessa cocked her head to one side and her blonde curls cascaded over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“You’re lost some more weight since I last saw you,” Gabi said quietly.

“You noticed!” Tessa said, delighted. “Yeah, my diet’s finally working.”

“…Diet?”

“Yeah. Kevin’s helping me.”

“
Is
he?” Gabi asked, a dangerous note creeping in to her voice. “How’s he doing that, exactly?”

Just then, the door opened again and the two other waitresses, Kenleigh and Morgan came in, chattering and laughing. When they saw Gabi, they pounced and in the flurry of hugs and kisses, Tessa slipped out. Gabi watched her go, feeling nothing but worry.

OK, sure, it wasn’t like Tessa was a damn stick – but she’d definitely lost some of her glorious curves. Gabi figured she’d dropped about forty pounds in less than three months and as alarming as that was, far more worrying was the fact that Tessa looked… what? Exhausted? Beaten down, maybe? Certainly her spark and spirit had diminished as her waistline and cup size had.

The truth was that Gabi had always been envious of the other woman’s voluptuous figure. Gabi had never seen Tessa anything close to thin, but she didn’t think thin was a good look for Tessa, to be honest. She was one of those women who had the height and the frame to carry extra weight – and she looked
better
when she carried it. Forty pounds ago, Tessa had been sexy and sultry, like a fifties movie starlet. All ass and sass and she’d been gorgeous inside and out.

Still fretting about Tessa, Gabi got ready for her shift. She tousled her hair a bit, put some wet-look gloss on her full lips, slipped in to her high heels. And there she was: back to work at Curves.

She took a deep breath and walked out to the large main room, looked around. Aidan was already behind the bar and he caught her eye. He gave her a sexy little wink and she smiled. Just then, she heard a deep voice behind her:

“Hey, hon. Glad to see you’re back.”

Gabi turned to see Curtis Manning gazing down at her from his towering height. His handsome face was hard, his blue eyes chips of ice, his surprisingly full mouth set in a line, his massive arms crossed over his impressive chest. The man was nothing less than scary-as-fuck and that made him the ideal bouncer for Curves, but he was a nice guy under it all, Gabi knew. She also knew that he had a serious thing for Tessa and that made him the perfect target for her worry and anger.

“Can I talk to you?” she hissed at him. “Alone? Now?”

Startled, he stared at her. “Uh, yeah. What’s up?”

“Not here,” she said as Tessa passed them to go to the bar; Gabi noticed that she pointedly ignored Curtis. Kenleigh and Morgan emerged from the staff room and Gabi gestured at the door. “In there.”

Curtis held the door for her, shut it behind them. Then he leaned against it and nailed her to the spot with those hard eyes.

“I know what you’re pissed off about,” he said, his voice its usual gravel. “Tessa, right?”

“Exactly right!” Gabi burst out. “Fuck, Curtis… how have you not noticed what’s going on with her?”

“Who says I haven’t noticed?” he asked.

She paused. “OK. And?”

“And.” He shrugged his huge shoulders. “She told me to mind my own fucking business.”

“She – she did? That doesn’t sound like Tessa.”

“I know.”

“What did you say to her to get that kind of reaction?”

“I brought her a sandwich one night,” Curtis said slowly. “She flat-out refused to eat it, though. Said that she wasn’t eating bread or pasta or fruit.”

Gabi’s gut clenched. “Dammit.”

“So then I told her that she was losing too much weight too fast and she freaked out at me. Said that I had no goddamn business telling her how to live her life, and that I should keep my pervy eyes to myself.”

“Oh, God.”

“Yeah. So I said that I was worried about her not taking care of herself and she told me that she was fine and that Kevin was taking good care of her. Said that I was to mind my own fucking business and to stay the hell away from her.” Curtis sighed. “And she hasn’t said a word to me since. Leaves the room when I walk in, turns her back on me when I’m bouncing in the bar. Fuck, she won’t even
look
at me.”

“Shit.” Gabi bit her lip. “Have you said anything to anyone else? Maybe Kenleigh?”

“Sure I have. And she and Morgan both stared at me like I was crazy. They said that pretty much every woman on the planet wants to lose weight and trade in their body for a hotter, thinner model. Morgan laughed and told me that she’s been on a diet since she was thirteen years old.”

Gabi grimaced. “Well, I can’t argue with them, sorry to say. For most women, life is a perma-diet and constant worrying about their thighs and ass and getting in to a bikini.”

“I know it, hon. The other problem is that Tessa isn’t anorexic-looking, you know what I mean? She’s losing weight way too fast and she’s being unhealthy about it, but she’s still a pretty healthy weight. She still
looks
fine.”

“But she’s not fine.”

“No. She’s not. Not even close.”

They looked at each other.

“You’ll talk to her?” Curtis said quietly. “You’ll try?”

“Of course I will.” Gabi reached out and touched his muscled forearm. “I promise.”

He heaved a sigh of relief now, ran his rough hands through his cropped dirty-blond hair. “Thanks, Gabi.”

“I don’t know how much good it’ll do, though, not while she’s still with Kevin. He’s a big part of the problem, you know.”

His face hardened again. “Yeah, I know. I think he’s pushing her to lose weight.”

“It’s more than that. Tessa told me that he’s actually helping her with her diet.”

Curtis narrowed his eyes. “What’s
that
mean?”

“I don’t know… but I’m going to find out.”