Gabriel - Jessie Cooke Page 0,4

But when the guy and his friends started making mama jokes, Booger lost it. Once they’d made it safely back to the club he’d told Gabe that “mamas and old ladies were off limits, always.” Gabe missed his mother, a lot...and that memory brought on another one. The reason he was currently sporting a black eye, a split lip, and some kind of injury that had caused a knot of blood to coagulate in his blonde hair was because someone had said something about his girl Patrice. Someone had gone too far.

Gabe had been looking for her. He hadn’t seen her for what he suddenly realized was a long time and he was asking some of the guys if they’d seen her. It was a guy they called Ripper who had crossed that invisible line. “Last time I saw her she was in the hallway with the boss. My guess is he’s about balls deep about now.” Gabe had thrown the first punch, but in minutes, especially with Blackheart conspicuously absent, the wake of their beloved brother had turned into a full-on brawl. Many of the guys didn’t know what they were even fighting about, but most of the Jokers loved a good fight almost as much as they loved a good lay. Gabe wondered now if Ripper was waking up as torn up as he was...and then, even though he was trying hard not to, he wondered about what the man had said.

Gabe had no idea how he’d gotten back to his own trailer the night before, but he was sure he never saw Patrice or Blackheart after that. He loved his president. Blackheart had been like a surrogate father to him since his own father died. He trusted him with his life, even if he didn’t know Patrice well enough to know if he could really trust her or not. He was sure Blackheart wouldn’t go there...mostly sure, almost completely sure.

He shook his head at himself in the mirror and that simple motion made him throw up again. He supposed he should head over to the club and see what kind of damage they’d done, and what kind of hell they were going to catch when Blackheart or Le Singe saw it. Le Singe had disappeared early the night before too, but since he was the closest to Booger out of them all, no one thought anything of his needing some time to himself. Gabe shuddered to think how angry he was going to be when he saw the damage they’d done to the bar, and how many bottles of booze had ended up broken and leaking sticky liquid out all over the floor. He groaned and headed back to where his bed was, with the intentions of picking up the jeans lying at the bottom and getting dressed. But once he was that close, the bed seemed to be calling to him and he flopped back down on top of it and once the room stopped spinning, he reached over to the bedside table and picked up his phone.

He stared at it for a while, as if wishing for a text from Patrice would make one appear. When it didn’t, he used his shaking hands and fingers to type in, “Hey, just making sure you got home okay last night. I lost you.” He wondered again why she would just leave and not send him so much as a text message. His head kept going back to her being with someone else. Gabe wasn’t sure which of his brothers might fuck his woman, but he knew a few of them who had priors. Most of those guys were older, part of the “wild bunch” around since Blackheart put the club together. They were the kind of guys who had no boundaries and figured if something wasn’t nailed down, it was fair game. But Gabe couldn’t imagine Patrice giving in to any of the old timers, and he knew without a doubt that if she said “no,” that would have been the end of it. The Jokers were a lot of things, but Blackheart insisted from day one that no woman would be abused on his watch, and he’d made an example of the men who ignored that directive, with a legendary fury that no one wanted to be at the center of.

He finally pressed “send” on the text and let the phone drop to his bare chest. He closed his eyes...just to rest them while his head