Throttle MC: A Stepbrother Romance (3 page)

Better life, my ass.

True, from an objective perspective, most people would probably say that Lon Cooper had made the right decision to send his only child away from the only home she’d ever known.  Even if he had sent her away from an extended family she loved, to a place that felt as cold and unfriendly as a prison. Most people would have nodded their heads in approval, and been certain that he’d surely saved me from a life of wasted potential.  Most people would say he had made the right choice to send me toward a future of more than just bikes, heat, and desert. 

Most people weren’t me.

My father, Lon Cooper, raised me alone.  My mom, Tessa Hadley Cooper, died when I was just a baby.  I don’t know how she died, exactly.  All my daddy ever said was that she had been sick, and I could never seem to pull much more out of him about it.  The other club members and old ladies probably knew better than to tell me more than Lon was willing to tell me himself.  At any rate, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how crafty I tried to be, I could never catch one of them up with my questions about her. 

Even without a mother, though, I’d grown up surrounded by family.  Not blood relatives, of course, but family all the same: my dad’s club brothers, their old ladies, their kids... I was never lonely, never lacked for attention.  I never wished for anything more. 

Well, nothing except a mother, that is. 

Growing up inside The Throttle, I knew that the club’s business wasn’t always safe, and wasn’t always strictly legal.  But the details were generally kept from the women and children, so I never felt anything but secure.  The most worry I ever felt was during the occasional times when Dad would have to go away on club business.  Whenever he had to be gone overnight, I was left in the care of Cassie, one of the old ladies who had no children of her own.  Cassie would never let on that there was any risk, but as I got older I would sometimes see the worry lines appear in her forehead – lines that would disappear when her old man, Wrench, would come back safe and sound. 

Although most people would probably be surprised to hear it, my childhood was pretty much idyllic.  That is, until around the time I hit puberty. After that, things just seemed to start going wrong. For one thing, my dad began to worry that the club was no place for his adolescent daughter.  Though I never wanted for female friends or women to ask about the mysterious changes taking place with my body, he grew more and more troubled about me being around The Throttle, and more and more obsessed with my future. 

It didn’t help much that school was easy for me, and my teachers were always writing notes in my report cards about how bright I was.  One teacher in particular, Ms. Anders, even braved the unknown and came to see my father in the auto repair shop that served as the club’s main “legitimate” business, to advocate on my behalf.

“Hadley should be encouraged to go to college,” she urged him as he stood looking at her, stone-faced.  “I’m quite sure that with enough effort, she could get into a top school.  There are many possible scholarship opportunities available for a girl with her potential.”

“What makes you think she needs a scholarship?” growled my father, barely opening his mouth to bite the words out around his cigarette. Ms. Anders, terrified that she had insulted him, apologized profusely, got the hell out of there, and never showed her face at Cooper’s again.

But the seed had been planted in my dad’s mind. He started talking, not just about sending me away to college, but about sending me away to high school.  I protested vehemently, saying I had no intention of leaving Cheyenne.

Unfortunately, there was no arguing with Lon Cooper once he had made up his mind.

The final straw was something completely harmless that Dad blew all out of proportion.  At the time, one of my friends from school, Jimmy Stocker, had started hanging around the club.  I had known Jimmy since I was in kindergarten, so he had been around the MC since childhood.  Like most boys my age, he looked at my dad and the other members of The Throttle with a mix of starry-eyed admiration and fear. That was one of the main reasons I hardly ever got picked on at school.  All the boys imagined one of The Throttle coming down on them with a vengeance and wouldn’t come near me to so much as pull on my pigtail.   

Jimmy was a little braver than most, though, because he knew Lon Cooper not only as the formidable president of the MC, but also as the guy who used to give Jimmy and me airplane rides when he would come over to my house to play after school.  Jimmy had almost grown up around the club, since he was my friend and playmate.  That he would eventually prospect for the club someday seemed inevitable.  Even his mom, Cora, had long since accepted the idea.  My dad treated Jimmy almost like the son he never had.  That should have made me jealous, I guess, but I just hadn’t been paying enough attention to realize that the difference in our genders mattered in any way.  To me, Jimmy was just my friend. There was no difference between us.

As soon as Jimmy hit puberty, he began talking more frequently about his future with the club.  One day, we were hanging around in my air-conditioned living room, playing video games and taking refuge from the heat.  He was dreaming out loud about how it would all be when we were older. “I’ll be a Throttle brother, and you’ll be my old lady,” Jimmy said with certainty, puffing out his chest proudly as his imagination took him to that wonderful day.

“Old lady?!” I scoffed, pushing him in the shoulder.  But something in my chest dropped at his words.  A sudden realization hit me – an awful one.  Growing up so close to the club, it had never occurred to me that I would be anything less than a fully-fledged member of The Throttle when I grew up.  As I listened to Jimmy weave his fantasies in a dreamy voice, I finally put two and two together and realized that there
were
no women club members. Though I could not have articulated it at the time, the concept of being a
second-class
citizen
dawned on me for the first time at that moment.  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized it before.

As I sat there, stunned, Jimmy sat up and stared at me with a funny expression.  We were both thirteen years old.  We had known each since we were five – we’d grown up together, like siblings – and I had either not noticed or not cared that he had begun to change, to transform into the man he would become.  His chest had begun to broaden; his face had lost some of its baby fat and begun to take on hard angles.  When my gaze met his, I was surprised by something in his eyes, a hunger I had never seen before.  He leaned forward and before I knew what was happening, his lips met mine.

His mouth was urgent, his tongue probing, forcing my lips apart.  I was so shocked that for a minute I didn’t feel anything at all.  Then a tingling began between my legs, at the same time as something fired inside my brain that was simply one loud word: NO. 

I pushed him away, shaken. “Jimmy, what the hell?” I cried, moving away from him and sitting up. 

He had pressed up against me as he kissed me, hard enough that I felt his
thing
move against me.  When I looked him in the eye, he was red-faced, embarrassed but defiant.  “C’mon,” he rasped, his voice different somehow.  “You know you want it.”

“What? No!  God, you perv!” I punched him in the shoulder, not knowing what else to do about it but make it into a joke.  I abruptly jumped off the couch and went to the kitchen, calling back that I was getting us a couple of cokes.  When I came back, he was sitting up again and had turned on the TV.  He sat, flipping the channels on the remote, the moment seemingly forgotten. 

If that had been the only time it had happened, maybe I never would have been sent away.  The thing was, Jimmy’s unexpected kiss had awakened my curiosity.  It wasn’t that I was in love with him, or anything, but he wasn’t repulsive, either. Little by little, we started fooling around – nothing serious, just hormones in need of an outlet.  God knows we had plenty of opportunity.  Me with a busy MC president father and Jimmy with a single mom who worked two jobs, we had nothing but free time to ourselves.  Eventually, we got careless, and my dad walked in on us one afternoon on the couch, with Jimmy’s hand up my shirt. 

That was the last time I saw Jimmy.  Two weeks later, I was on a plane to Vermont, to go live with my mom’s sister, Tamara Hadley.

It was strange how little my Aunt Tamara resembled my mother physically.  I had one photo of Tessa Hadley Cooper, a candid of my parents taken before I was born. My mom must have been just a year or two older than I was now. They were on a picnic, and my mom sat next to my dad on a blanket, leaning against him with a smile as they shared a private joke.  I had inherited her dark hair and eyes and fair skin, though her figure had been more voluptuous than mine was.

By contrast, Aunt Tamara had short, dirty blonde hair, cut into a no-nonsense style.  She was compactly built, and her movements were quick and brusque.  Her mouth was turned down into a seemingly permanent expression of disapproval.  She had never married, never had children, and she lived alone in a small farmhouse outside of the Vermont town where I would go to high school.

Aunt Tamara seemed to resent my very existence.  I never quite understood why she had agreed to take me in the first place if she hated me so much.  Starting that September, every day during the school year I took the bus twenty minutes into town to Stockton High, and then back again that afternoon.  Aunt Tamara refused to drive in to pick me up, and once I learned how to drive she refused to let me use her car.  As a result, I was never able to participate in extra-curriculars, and rarely socialized with any of the other kids after school. 

The entire four years of high school passed by in a slow agony of boredom.  I grew angrier and angrier with my father for subjecting me to such a lonely fate.  At first, I longed to be back in Cheyenne -- longed to see Lon, my Throttle family, even Jimmy -- and counted the days until I could go back once high school was over.  But in time, my anger at my father turned to ice.  I told myself I didn’t need anyone.  I decided I could only count on myself. After the first Christmas when I went home to Cheyenne to visit, I decided it was too painful to go back and be reminded of what I had left behind. Despite Lon’s requests, I never went back for the holidays again, and he never made the trip out to Vermont to see me.

I cut myself off completely from my dad as soon as I turned eighteen.  The day after I graduated high school, I left my Aunt Tamara’s house and never returned.  As it turned out, I did end up getting some scholarships to the state university.  That, plus waiting tables twenty-five to thirty hours a week kept me right on the bleeding edge of poverty, but still afloat.  I graduated in three and a half years with a degree in psychology that I didn’t expect to use much, some street Spanish I’d picked up from the Dominican dishwashers at the bar, and no idea of what I was going to do with my life. 

Now, two months later, I sat on the side of a deserted highway, no longer a quart low, on my way back to Cheyenne after seven long years. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, coming back now after all this time.  I wasn’t even completely sure how or when I’d made the decision to return. Maybe I wanted to show Lon I’d made something of myself, without his help.  Maybe in spite of myself, I had to admit that he might have been right to send me away.  Maybe in some ways it had been a good idea to at least give me a glimpse of another path, so I could at least choose the life I wanted to lead, instead of it choosing me.  The trouble was, now I had one foot in both worlds, but I didn’t feel on solid ground in either. 

Maybe that was something I had in common with my mother.  She had grown up in a well-respected, well-off family out east (a fact that my Aunt Tamara never let me forget for a moment).  But my mother had chosen something else.  She had chosen my dad over wealth, over comfort, over everything she had known.  And then her life was cut short, before she’d barely even begun to live it.  I wondered if she had ever regretted the life she had chosen.  Did she ever wonder to herself who she really was?  Did she feel like me, astride between two worlds? Or did she feel that she’d found her real home with my father?

I had expected at least to learn more about my mom from living with Aunt Tamara.  I had hoped that getting to know the woman who was my mother’s only other living blood relative would give me a connection to her.  But all I had found out was the family had been devastated by her choice.  Her father had disowned her, forbidding my aunt or my grandmother to ever mention her name in his presence again.  Tessa never went back to Vermont after her marriage to my father.  My aunt had never even known of my existence until, so many years later, my father called her out of the blue to take in her sister’s daughter. 

As I sat there on the side of the road with the windows rolled down, sweating in the heat, I thought about what awaited me in Cheyenne.  It was going to be tough enough seeing my dad again after all this time – a father I hadn’t spoken to in years before calling him yesterday to say I was coming for a visit.  Now I also had to worry about the man who was apparently my dad’s new VP.  My stranger’s icy blue eyes flashed again in my memory, sending a wave of heat through my core. 
Oh, man
.  Like I didn’t have enough problems already.  Suddenly, I found myself thinking about not even going at all. I could just turn around.  Go back to the next town and find a hotel for the night, then figure out where to go in the morning. 
Yeah, right.  Like you even have money to do that.  Don’t be a damn coward, Hadley.
  In the end, though, I sighed and turned the key in the ignition.