Wild Wind A Chaos Novella - Kristen Ashley Page 0,90
with babies, and I’m not giving them this, Tack. I’m not givin’ them the Club like it is. They’re not inheriting this block of pure shit from me.”
They’d rode together, side by side, up to Lookout Mountain so they could see this view.
It was Black’s idea.
He’d met Keely.
The fall had been hard and swift.
But they both already knew where their path led as brothers.
Keely just solidified it for Black.
“Getting the Club right needs patience,” Tack told him. “This is gonna be slow, Black. We can’t make any sudden moves. Every step planned out, purposeful.”
“You need to cut Naomi loose.”
That made Tack look to his left.
To his brother.
To Graham Black.
“Brother—”
Black looked right, their gazes caught and hung.
“She’s draining you and you know it,” he said. “And we need your shit sharp.”
He was not wrong. If Tack had ever loved his wife—and those days, he asked himself frequently if he ever had, and came up short every time—he’d fallen out of that as hard and swift as Black had recently fallen in.
“A man in love wants that to be contagious,” Tack noted.
“No, a man finds love, he wants the men he loves to have that bounty. She looks at me, brother, and the world takes flight in her eyes. All I wanna do is follow, and I couldn’t give that first fuck where it goes, as long as it’s never lost to me.”
“Always a poet,” Tack muttered.
“I’m not fucking around with you, Tack,” Black bit. “Life is too goddamned short to waste it on leeches like Naomi and you know that better than me.”
Tack clenched his teeth.
“Cut her loose,” Black advised.
“First, she’s the mother of my kids, and second, Black, we got some important matters at hand, brother, and Naomi is not one of them,” Tack pointed out.
Black held his eyes and sighed.
He then looked to the lights.
Tack did too.
“The babies you two will make will be beautiful,” Tack told him, and it was no lie.
Black was a good-looking man.
Keely was amazing.
“Oh yeah, they will. Boys. We’re gonna have a crew of boys,” Black declared. “She pops one out, fill her with another one.”
Tack felt one side of his lips hitch up. “Not sure you can make that call.”
“Keely is so on board with that, it isn’t funny.”
“I meant about them all being boys,” Tack shared.
“I’ll take girls, love ’em with all I got. That baby is her mixed with me, love every cell in their bodies with everything that makes me.”
“Good you got that attitude, ’cause far as I can tell, chances are fifty-fifty.”
“We can have five girls and we’ll go until we got at least two boys.”
Tack looked at his brother again. “Why?”
Black looked at him too. “You gotta ask that?”
“I did, didn’t I?”
“Okay then, a man needs a brother.”
Tack had a brother.
He was a piece of shit.
He found others.
Some of those were pieces of shit too.
But not the one at his side.
No, absolutely not him.
So Tack understood where he was at.
“I wanna watch ’em grow up,” Black said. “Teach ’em how to set up a tent. Show ’em the glory of sitting in the quiet, under the stars. Take ’em for a ride. Show ’em the thrill of wind in their faces. Teach ’em how to change oil. Get ’em dirt bikes. Knock their heads together when they pull shit so they won’t be assholes. Watch them find a woman and do the work beforehand so they’ll know how to treat her. Then, when they find the one, know in my soul a goodness complete, because I know they got what I found in their mother. And then spoil their babies so bad, they end up hating me. That’s gonna be my life, brother. That’s what’s gonna make Keely and me. That’s a great life right there. That is everything.”
Tack had a son and a daughter.
Their mother was one thing.
His Rush and Tabby…
Another.
So Tack knew that Black, like Black had an annoying tendency to be, was right.
That was everything.
* * * *
“Been waiting a long fucking time for today.”
Jagger Black took his gaze from the stars blanketing Tack’s house in the mountains and gave it to Tack.
“Twenty-four years. A long time, sitting on it, until you were ready to hear that story,” Tack continued.
Jag said nothing.
Tack did.
“You were his everything, Jagger. Everything.”
He watched the man swallow.
Then Jag turned his attention back to the stars and whispered, “Wind in their faces.”
“Wild wind, that was your dad. His edges have been smoothed with memory. Everyone remembers Keely being the crazy one,