“Christ,” I exhale, thinking things just got a lot more complicated. Before, this was just about bringing the kid before Lyla and letting her spit on him, maybe beating the shit out of the kid. Now? Fuck, there’s going to be blood. There’s no way to get around it. “I’m not going to use Red,” I mutter. “At least not directly, but if she invites the girl down and she’s on our turf,” I mumble, trailing off with a shrug. I realize I’m splitting hairs and I also know that Jasmine is going to hate me if her girl gets hurt during all of this. The club comes first and even if I don’t like dealing with all of this shit, Lyla is one of our own. I may not like how Ford is going about all of this, but I understand, especially now.
“Lyla’s too damn young to be having a baby,” Ford rumbles, scrunching his hair and suddenly looking older than he should.
“You were only twenty when you had Lyla,” I remind him.
“Lyla is barely eighteen. She had plans, Grunt. Hell, my baby was innocent before this asshole came along.”
I don’t argue. He’s right. Lyla was. Then again, with most of the club watching her, she didn’t have a choice but to be innocent. This asshole would have never got to her if she hadn’t been spending the summer at her mom’s.
“So, what’s the plan?” I ask, not really wanting to know.
“You make sure Gabby and your old lady keep in touch. For now, we’ll sit back and watch.” I let out a breath, because we both know what that means. I also know that Jasmine isn’t going to like it. “I know what you’re thinking, but we only have one other play.”
“Forget all of this shit?” I suggest.
“Get Jasmine talking about her friend’s man. You get his name or any other shit about him and I’ll leave the girls out of it.”
Fuck…
He smiles because he knows that’s what I’m doing. I get up and leave, because I know that Jasmine may never forgive me when she finds out I’m using her to get information.
Motherfucker.
14
Ford
“What were you and Grunt talking about, Daddy?” Lyla asks, coming into my office a mere minute after Grunt disappeared.
“Club business, Princess.”
“Don’t hand me that bullshit. You were talking about me. I heard you.”
“Eavesdropping on your old man?” I grumble, looking at my daughter.
I’ve not done much in this world to be proud of. I have two things that fall into those categories. One is the club and the other is my daughter. My father always said that I didn’t have enough good in me to amount to a hill of beans.
I guess if there was any good in me, it was all Lyla. She wasn’t planned, and instead the result of a wild party with Sherry Bryant. Sherry is an artist, extremely high class and nothing I’d tie myself to long term. I’m definitely not the man she wanted for more than a wild couple of nights, either. Sherry wasn’t happy when she found out she was pregnant, and if she’d had the money alone to get an abortion, I might have never known. I begged her to have Lyla. She only agreed after I told her I would set her up for life, if she would give me my child. I don’t regret it. Lyla has a relationship with Sherry, although it’s not constant. Lyla has no idea that I had to pay her mother to keep her and I’d never tell her. I learned a long time ago that if you stir in shit, it smells worse and worse.
“Don’t hand me that, Dad. If I didn’t, I would never know what you’re planning—”
“Butterfly—”
“Don’t you, Butterfly me. I know you’re doing everything you can to find out who the father of my child is, but it’s useless. I won’t tell you.”
“Damn it, Lyla,” I growl.
“It’s none of your business!” she huffs with her hands on her hips. With her long blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, she reminds me of her mother so much right now that I could almost smile. Sherry is a good-looking woman, too bad she’s like me and that’s about all that’s good about her. “I was the one that got played. I was the one that made the mistake and I will be the one to deal with it,” she announces. She might look like her mother, but fuck if she doesn’t sound like me. I take pride in that.
“Come here, Butterfly,” I tell her, holding out my arms. Lyla looks at me, and then all at once that mask she tries to wear, cloaking her emotions, slips. On her face, I can read sadness, despair, and more than a little fear. Just like that, she’s my little girl again. As she walks to me and slides into my lap, I hug her tightly, squeezing her to me. My eyes close at the sweetness, the love I feel at having my daughter come to me.
“It’s going to be okay, Lyla,” I murmur, cradling her once I’ve pulled her into my lap. She settles in and I kiss the top of her head.
“I know,” she whispers. “You won’t let it go any other way,” she says, sadly, but showing that she has all the confidence in the world in me.
“Damn straight,” I respond gruffly.
“I don’t want you to go crazy, Daddy,” she says, squeezing me tighter.
“Butterfly, he hurt you. He lied to you and then when you needed him most, he left you alone. He needs to learn not to fuck with a woman’s heart. More than that, he needs to learn not to fuck with my daughter’s heart.”
“How do you know he lied to me?” she sniffles and my heart squeezes in my chest, because I know she’s crying and that’s the last thing I want. When I find this bastard, he’ll be lucky if I don’t tear his head off and feed it to my damn dogs. I’m going to do that to his dick anyway.
“Because I know you. You never would have been with him if he hadn’t.”
I don’t know shit about raising kids. Everything I learned was just from being there for Lyla. Because of that, the two of us talk about everything openly. There aren’t secrets. I was there when she started her period and I was the one to make sure she had tampons or whatever she needed. Sure, I sent a prospect to go get that shit, but still it was me that gave them to her, me that made sure she had ice cream. She’s never hidden anything from me….
Except this bastard.
“He didn’t exactly lie to me, Dad,” she mumbles. “I was just stupid and naïve.”
“Give me his name.”
“No. This is the way it has to be. I don’t want you or the club getting involved. You won’t believe me, but he’s a decent guy, and if I told him about the baby, he’d come back.”
“Then, why in the fuck won’t you tell him,” I ask, pulling away to look at her. I hold her face in each of my hands, not letting her turn away from me. “I thought you told him about the baby and then he ran.”
“No, I was going to tell him about the baby, but before I got the chance, he decided to tell me how he was in love with Gabby and was using me to get over her. He said he realized that was a shit thing to do and that it was over. He wanted to end things before anyone got hurt.”
“Lyla,” I sigh, not sure what I want to do now, but I’d like to take my frustration out on this asshole.