Haunt (Bayonet Scars #6)
J.C. Emery
For Mandie,
I couldn’t do this without you.
PROLOGUE
June 2001
I reach out from the warm cocoon I’ve created for myself in our bed. My hand slides across the cold sheets as if I’m going to find him there. I know he’s left me again. I felt him get out of our bed the moment my breathing evened out and he thought I was asleep. Just like every other night since he accused me of being pregnant.
In all fairness, I am. But still. We weren’t trying, but we weren’t being very careful either, so in a way, we should have expected that second blue line to show up.
We’re happy about it.
Well, I am.
His daddy used to be.
Now I’m not so sure.
During the day, Wyatt is devoted and loving but still a badass. He’s the man I fell in love with back when he was still a boy. But as the day wears on, he becomes less and less of the man I know and more of a cold-blooded soldier for the club. I hate it. I used to party with him, but now he has me tucked safely into bed every night while he does things he thinks I don’t know about.
And I’m sick of it. Sick of everything. And he’s too stupid and self-absorbed to see what’s really happening here.
It’s not the baby that makes me sick to my stomach every morning. It’s the overwhelming smell of perfume and sex that radiates off of him as he crawls into our bed. He doesn’t even shower before wrapping me in his arms and rubbing my belly.
“Don’t give me any trouble tonight, you got that?” I say to my rounded stomach. Our baby is a little hellion. He acts up at all hours, but especially at night. He kicks at my ribs and pushes on my bladder, and the only thing that calms him down is if I give him some attention. All I have to do is be busy doing something else and he starts acting like I don’t talk to him all freaking day and we don’t spend every single second together. Lord help me if this is any indication of what’s to come once he’s born. I might have to follow in my own mother’s footsteps and add a little whiskey to his bottles.
Baby Z—that’s what Wyatt likes to call him—adjusts his position and sits his little baby ass right on top of my bladder. While he makes himself more comfortable, he makes me uncomfortable. Not that he cares. As my dad keeps reminding me, it’s not about me anymore, and it’ll never be about me again. My dad’s words play in my head on repeat as I waddle to the bathroom to get ready.
“It’s not about you anymore, kid.”
I try to fight off the sinking depression that settles in as I flush the toilet and wash my hands. The girl I see in the mirror is unrecognizable. She’s not the fun, crazy girl I was seven months ago. She’s not full of life and so in love that it borders on obsession.
No, that girl’s gone.
That girl was sixteen.
The girl I see in the mirror is seventeen. She’s already somebody’s old lady. She’s about to be a mother. And she has no clue what she’s doing anymore.
“Let’s see what your daddy’s up to.” My eyes are fixed on my little boy—well, of his current accommodations—who is kicking at my ribcage. I give him a poke and try to explain the situation so he’ll settle down. “I can’t bust balls if you keep kicking me this hard. Quit knocking me off my game.”
A woman walks by my SUV and turns her nose up in my direction. My window is down, so I know she heard me. People do this—especially lost girls. They either judge me for talking to my kid, or they judge me for being knocked up with my kid—all the time. I wiggle out of the SUV and straighten my back as I waddle toward the front door of the clubhouse. She’s walking ahead of me, purposefully slow, and when she gets to the door, she holds it open for me.
“Trying to figure out who the dad is?” she asks in a snide voice.
I roll my eyes and pull my long, reddish brown hair over my shoulder so she can see exactly who she’s talking to as I walk by. I spent twenty minutes hunting for this top specifically. It’s an old Forsaken tee that’s all cut up and tied back together on the sides and over the shoulders to give it a sexy vibe with the back shredded down to my bra strap. It’s one of the few sexy things that fits me these days, and it perfectly displays the large tattoo of my man’s name on my back.
Turning around and giving her a cocky smirk, I say, “Bitch, please.”
The clubhouse is dark inside, but not nearly as dark as the one in Detroit. I don’t know if I like it or not. Everything here is so different than it is back home.