“She’s a friend.”
Her eyes slid to him. “Friends don’t get that upset with friends. Especially not female ones with men.”
He knew all about Jean. From the minute he saw her shuffling down the hall nine years ago, juggling grocery bags she was too weak to deal with, telling him plain she had no one to help, it started.
He knew she’d never been married. He knew she lost her fiancé in Korea. He knew she never got over it and lived her life alone. No man. No kids. Friends eventually dropping like flies.
The only help she’d accept was visits from her rabbi and a few members of her community.
And Hound.
How it happened, he couldn’t put his finger on. One second, he was helping her get groceries in her pad. The next he was veering his eyes so she could sit on the pisser or take a shower without humiliating herself too much. He figured the progression was natural enough once she trusted him more and more: groceries, cooking for her, setting up her chair, getting her cleaners, helping her get to bed.
And then they were there.
He’d talked to her about getting help in but she wouldn’t hear of it. Her pension was shit, she couldn’t afford it (she thought), and she refused to let Hound help financially.
Fortunately, part of that progression meant she let him pay her bills and go out and buy her groceries, and he used enough of her cash so that if she looked, which she’d stopped doing, she’d see her accounts dwindling. Just not as much as they would if he didn’t pay her rent and utilities, buy her groceries, cover the excess on her medical care and have a deal with her cleaner and hair dresser so that they told her how much they cost was a quarter of what they actually did.
He was a carouser and rough-houser long before he found Chaos, which was why his parents scraped him off. Like Keely’s, they were straight-laced, had sticks up their asses and felt living the Christian life was more important than trying to understand their boy, who was simply not straight-laced, hated church and was intense in a way that scared them, but they had no desire to put the work in to understand where that came from.
He’d put himself forward as a recruit for Chaos when he was seventeen.
With Tack’s sponsorship, they took him on as recruit when he was eighteen.
And apparently he could hold a grudge, because once he found the family he wanted, he never looked back to the one who didn’t want him. And apparently it was no loss to them, because they didn’t come looking either.
He had no idea how he took Jean Gruenberg on as family along the way. He didn’t know if he’d adopted her or she’d adopted him.
But she was the Jewish grandma to the atheist biker he never in his life expected to have.
And he loved her down to his soul.
“We’ve never talked about this, but hearing how upset that young woman was, I think the time has come that we should,” she told him.
“She’s a friend. The widow of a buddy of mine.”
Her faded blue eyes grew alarmed, then distressed.
“Oh, Shepherd,” she whispered.
“It’s been a while, and with some other buds, we been lookin’ after her, her kids. ’Cause a’ work I’ve had to skip a few times when I’d do things for her I normally do, and she got tweaked. It’s all good now.”
That last was a lie, and with anyone Hound spoke to he’d not give a shit he lied.
With Jean, it made his stomach feel sick.
“Perhaps—” she started.
“She’s just a friend, darlin’,” he cut her off quietly.
“You’re not getting any younger. You need to think about settling down. Finding a woman. Making a family,” she shared.
“I got a family.”
“Your own, motek,” she added.
He grinned. “I got my own family, Jean bug. I’m good. It’s all good.”
All of a sudden, those faded blue eyes on him were piercing. “You are the kindest, most gentle soul I’ve ever had touch mine. If you do not give that to a child, Shepherd, that will be lost to this world and that would be such a crying shame, it’d be hard to reconcile it.”
With her words, it shoved right into his head that Keely was forty-three.
Close to past it, but probably not quite yet.
She also had a twenty-one-year-old son, a nineteen-year-old one, and would likely not want to start that shit up again at her age.
Tack and his woman, Tyra, had not thought twice about starting up again after Tyra got in there with Tack, years after he’d rid himself of the bitch who’d been his first wife, Naomi. His girl with Naomi just gave Tack his first grandchild, a boy, and his two youngest with Tyra were barely older than their nephew.
It worked for that family.
The thought of telling Dutch and Jagger he’d knocked their mother up made him want to puke.
The thought that he was even having these thoughts made him want to kick his own ass.
“She was loud then I didn’t hear anything for a long time including your door open and close, Shepherd,” she said sharply. “Though I did hear it later, very late. It woke me up. Did you go out to a late-night movie? With her?”
This was no one’s business.
Except maybe Jean’s.
“Took some time to settle her down,” he hedged.
“It sure did,” she replied, gaze intent on his, lifting her coffee cup to her lips without breaking her regard.
“What happened shouldn’t have happened. She’s the widow of a dead buddy of mine,” he told her.
“I’ll tell you what, Shepherd Ironside, in some cultures it’s the responsibility of the brother who lives to wed the wife left behind in order to make certain she’s cared for.”
“That’s not our culture,” he reminded her, and it definitely wasn’t Chaos culture.
“Perhaps it should be. Perhaps there would be very lonely women who struggle, some of them with children, who wouldn’t have to struggle so hard, and their children would have a steady man in their lives who provided for them and gave them the understanding their mother was worth taking care of, because that’s the truth.”
Suddenly, Hound wondered what was behind that emotion.
“Who we talkin’ ’bout here, Jean bug?” he asked softly. “We talkin’ about Keely or we talkin’ about someone else?”
“My Haim didn’t have a brother, just a younger sister and she was a spoiled rotten brat.”
Hound relaxed and grinned at her.
“I’m old but I’m not stupid and I’ll tell you this, I’m sure it wasn’t gentlemanly behavior you used to settle her down,” she stated.
It was absolutely not that.
She kept at him.
“However, even so, it’s the way of the world today and today’s brand of gentleman would not have her out the door in the middle of the night. Did she need to get back to her children?”
Dutch had his own place. Most the time Jag crashed with him because he was his brother, not his mother, but also because his pad was closer to where Jag was taking classes to become a mechanic.
So it wasn’t just their ages that meant Keely did not need to get back to them.
“Her kids now are grown,” he told her.
“So it was you having to take care of me that made you send her on her way,” she declared.
“Jean, she left because she wanted to leave. It didn’t have anything to do with you.”
He felt the coffee he threw back after he gave her that stick in his throat when she said, “You support me and yourself, Shepherd. You seem not to have very many needs, single men often don’t unless they have expensive hobbies, which you don’t. But it’s obvious you have money. Why are you still in these terrible apartments?”
Well, it was now clear she paid closer attention to her accounts than he thought she did.
“Jean—”
“It’s because of me,” she spoke for him.
It was.
“Jean bug—”
“I??
?m here because I’ve lived here for fifty-three years, and it wasn’t like this when I moved in and I just don’t have it in me to move out. But more, I don’t have the money to do it. You’re here, in these apartments, in a bad part of town, right where you’re sitting now after making me breakfast, because of me. You’ll come back to make sure I have lunch. You’ll come back and help me get to bed. Boy your age doesn’t need a woman mine hanging like an albatross around his neck. You need a woman to love and children to raise, but more, you need a woman who loves you. I think it’s time we again discuss someone coming in to help, and it’s definitely time we discuss how much money you’re pouring into looking after me.”
“I don’t mind,” he said quietly.
“Well I do,” she retorted firmly.
All right.
He was done.
So done, he found himself maneuvered into sitting on the other side of a discussion they’d quit having two years ago.
“If I don’t, how can you?” he asked tersely. “Has it occurred to you that wakin’ up knowin’ I’d get a dose of you and havin’ something important to do in my day, that also bein’ lookin’ after you as well as stepping up for Keely and her boys, is the only thing feels right about me except my brothers’ givin’ me their love. But that last, I earned. The rest, those are gifts and you want me to give that up? Move out. Leave you to what, Jean? Some soulless company that offers care and you’re just a name on their daily list to tick off and they don’t give a shit about you?”
“Language, Shepherd,” she murmured.
Hound clamped his mouth shut.
“I despair every other morning when it’s time for you to help me shower,” she whispered.
“I don’t. I don’t give a sh . . . oot.”
She shook her head. “The beauty you have in you, motek, I don’t understand why you don’t offer that to a woman.”
“You don’t understand because the only woman I’d let have that is Keely, and her man’s been dead for seventeen years and she still loves him like the first day she laid eyes on him.”
Christ, why was he giving her this?
Maybe because he needed to say it out loud to remember it.
Her voice was filled with misery when she said, “Shepherd.”
“Don’t worry, Jean. I’ve lived with it so long it just is what it is because that’s all it can be.”
“And this visit of hers the other night?”
“She said somethin’ uncool to me and felt bad. She knows I’m hers and she lost one of the three most important things in her life, and the kind of woman she is, that important is important. I’m not that but she wasn’t feelin’ like losing me. So she made sure that won’t happen.”
“Is this . . . this . . . woman using you?”
He shook his head. “Can’t be used when you’re gaggin’ to be kept on that string.”
It was Jean’s turn to clamp her mouth shut.
She got over that quick.
“I’m not certain how I feel about this situation.”
“She loved him with a love that made even me wonder if there’s a God because only something divine could create that kind of beauty.”
She leaned toward him over her TV tray, her face earnest. “Please, find that for you.”
“It’s not out there for a man like me,” he educated her.
She sat back. “How can that be?”
For the most part, he was honest with her. That was what he gave his Jean.
But with some things, he held back.
Now, he put it out there.
“Because the man I am in here for you is not the man I am when I walk out that door. And the man I am for Keely and her boys is the man I need to be to replace the one they lost. But the man I am, there’s nothing divine about it.”
“You’re very wrong,” she stated irritably.
“I’m all kinds of right,” he shot back.
“You can’t be different men, Shepherd Ironside. You’re the same man who needs to be different for different parts of your life and the different people in it. You cannot tell me and make me believe that a single thing you’ve done in your life you didn’t have your reasons for doing it. So not in this house, Shepherd. Not sitting right across from me. You don’t talk yourself down looking right at me. The second man in eighty-nine years who I’ve given my love to, I didn’t give it foolishly. I know the man you are and it might not be divine but it’s blessed, because I’m blessed to have you here with me.”
Hound looked to her TV, his throat closing.
Jean didn’t care she lost his gaze.
She kept at him.
“Now, if this woman cannot see the blessing of you, then you need to find it in you to harden your heart to her and find one who does. She’s out there, Shepherd. She’s waiting. She’s lost and alone and she needs you in her life. So stop messing about and find her.”
Hound gave her his attention on a scowl.
“If it’ll make you be quiet about it, okay. I will,” he gave in. “But I’m still lookin’ in on you, I’m still lookin’ out for you, and I don’t want to hear another word about that. And that means with the money.”
“I have my own money,” she returned.
“You also have mine,” he fired back.
“I can pay my own way.”
“Good luck with that since you can’t pick up your own mail and you don’t have your freaking checkbook.”
She glared at him.
He pushed it. “So are we square?”
“Fine,” she snapped.
“Great,” he bit back.
She looked down to her plate.
Hound shoved up from the couch muttering, “You reaming my behind, it’s gone cold. I’ll nuke it.”
“I’m sure it’s perfectly all right,” Jean replied.
He pulled her plate out from under her fork and looked in her eyes.
“‘All right’ is not good enough for my Jean.”
Tears filled her eyes.
So he didn’t have to witness that crap, he took her plate to the kitchen and nuked it.
He brought it back to her hot.
Then he sat in her couch, drank his coffee and watched a morning show where he was pretty sure he would be happy killing every person on it—and none of that would be for good reasons, except no one could pull off that brittle, chirpy fake that early in the morning except them—but he was also pretty sure that wasn’t worthy of murder.
Jean ate her breakfast.
Hound did the dishes.
And with her stacks of books and the magazines she had left and her remote right there and her water pitcher fresh and her Baileys close and her box of chocolates closer, he left her on a promise to be back with her groceries and to get her lunch.
There was something he should have taken care of a long time ago.
But he never did.
So after his morning with Jean, he returned to her with her groceries and gossip rags and meds, and an appointment with her hair dresser, and getting her to the john then getting her lunch. When he was back on Chaos and he saw Tyra’s Mustang at the foot of the steps to the office of Ride—the custom bike and car garage that Chaos owned, ran and worked, and Tyra managed the office—and he saw Tack walk in that door, Hound moved that way.
He opened the door and was thankful to see only Tack and Tyra there, his brother sitting on his woman’s desk, his woman sitting in the swivel chair behind it, but she had it rolled close to her man.
They both looked to him when he walked in.
He closed the door.
“Gotta take some of your time,” he said.
“You need me to go?” Tyra asked.
“No, Cherry,” he answered, using the nickname the brothers gave her that had a lot to do with her hair, but it could be said it was also about her being sweet (Tack called her Red, that was Tack’s, and since it was no one used it, not even his older kids that weren’t hers). “I mean both of you.”
Tack
went alert. Tyra kept her gaze pinned to him.
Hound launched in.
“Got a woman, she means somethin’ to me.”
Tyra’s eyes got huge and Tack stared at him, a man who was a master at hiding shit he didn’t want seen, he couldn’t hide his shock.
Maybe Jean was right.
Maybe it was time to quit banging biker groupies (and definitely Keely) and find a woman to make babies with.
Or something.
Fuck, he was thirty-nine, a biker, and he’d spent seventeen years . . . pining.
Jesus.
“She’s eighty-nine years old and lives in the apartment next to mine,” Hound continued.
They both relaxed.
“She’s got me and she’s also got no one else but me,” he stated.
They both grew alert again.
“If somethin’ happens to me, I gotta trust someone will take her on. And I’m askin’ you two to do it.”
Tyra’s lips parted.
Tack straightened from her desk and turned to Hound.
“You look after an eighty-nine-year-old woman?” Tyra asked quietly.
“Groceries, rent, make sure she’s topped up with books, her gossip rags, medical bills, personal care, get this chick to come in and do her hair.”
“Personal care?” Tyra whispered.
He looked at her. “She trusts me.”
With that, her mouth dropped clean open.
Hound looked to Tack. “You’re not in, I’ll ask Tab and Shy. Tab’s a nurse. She’ll—”
Tack cut him off. “We got her covered.”
Hound nodded.
“Somethin’ happens to me, you break it to her gentle,” he demanded.
Tack nodded.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to you, Hound,” Tyra cut in.
And Graham Black was on the way home with pizza for his family when he got jumped in the parking lot and had his throat slit before he could even begin to fight for his life.
“Shit happens, it happens to me, I want to know you got Jean covered,” he replied.
Her face got hard.
It was cute.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you, Hound,” she repeated.
He gave her a look then looked to her man.
“Jean?” Tack asked.
“Gruenberg,” Hound answered.