Hammer

2 - Thinking of the past

Willow

Seven Months Later

He’s beautiful.

Amazing.

Strong and smart. Hammer is the kind of man a girl dreams about. Those deep brown eyes of his, those muscles, and that scar across his hairline. I get wet just thinking about him. It’s also wrong on so many levels. Not only because I have a fiancé but also because he’s an outlaw biker. A killer with a blood lust like I’ve never known.

So why am I not scared of him?

Because he would never hurt the innocent. I’ve known him all my life, even more so ever since my mother fell in love with the President of Snakes Henchmen MC. She fast became his Old Lady, then his wife, and Hammer, the man of my very wet dreams, came to live with us along with his kid brother, Tank. Road names, of course.

People have often asked why men like Hammer don’t scare and intimidate me. The answer is simple. I grew up in this life of MCs, bikers, and outlaws. I don’t know any other life. They all do bad things in order to keep the money coming in, to protect us, to make sure other MCs know not to mess with us.

The trouble with this is that other MCs want to make a name for themselves. So, they attack our club because we’re one of the biggest around. We’re not infallible or immortal; we lose people in these silly wars. The men of this club are only human, after all.

I don’t agree with murder, but I’m not going to lie and tell you that I think about the people this club has killed over the years. I know they deserved to die. People who hurt women and children, people who never pay for what they’ve done, deserve to be taken out. That’s what my father used to tell me as a young girl. He also told me not to think about it all; it would only drive me crazy.

I used to think no one could get to me being the President of Snakes Henchmen’s daughter.

How naïve was that?

Of all the people belonging to the club, my sister and I are most likely to be hurt because of who we’re related to. Most would attack at the top. Get the President’s daughters, get to the President.

There is one thing I know now. Never think I’m safe from harm. Always believe that hell is right around the corner, waiting to cut me down.

If it wasn’t for Hammer saving my life not so long ago, I’d be six feet under right now. He literally saved my life after an enemy of the club cut my throat.

Hammer was a friend to me when no one else could be. He was a friend to me even if he did distance himself from me. Hammer thought he was doing it to protect me; I know that. It hurt that he wasn’t around, but he will always be there should I really need him. I know that deep in my heart.

Seven months ago, I was kidnapped by members of a rival motorcycle club who mistook me for my sister, Nova. How they could have mistaken us is beyond me when we look nothing alike. She’s dark-haired, blue-eyed, and has a fantastic figure that most women, if not all, would kill for. The kind of figure that would take someone like me six years in the gym to achieve. The woman has a child, and you’d never be able to tell.

If I ever had a child, I imagine I’d balloon like a beached whale and stay that way until the kid was ten and probably longer.

Me, I’m the full-figured, wider-hipped kind of girl. I have a lighter shade of brown hair and hazel eyes, and my skin is just a shade darker than Nova’s. I get it from my no-good Puerto Rican birth father. The man who abandoned me when I was two years of age because of the fact my skin was too light for a half-Puerto Rican child. According to him, my hair and my eyes were too light in color.

He told my mother then that he knew she’d cheated on him and had some other man’s child, a child he would not raise.

How could I be his when he was so dark in color and I was practically white?

I never understood that.

Was he so stupid as to believe I couldn’t be his just because my skin was lighter?

I obviously took after my mother, the stupid idio.t.

My mother was only eighteen years old at that point, just sixteen when she gave birth to me. Yes, my father was much older than her, and it never escaped my notice that she was a minor when she fell into a relationship with my twenty-something-year-old father.

Mom was frightened of raising me alone. She tried to make him see that he was my father, that my eyes were hazel colored because his were brown and hers were green, meaning the mix of colors made mine lighter. My skin tone may have been light, but that was because she was so white.

But he beat the crap out of her before telling her that none of his family believed I was his child; they were all as dark as him. His nephew had a white mother but was dark like his father. He told my mother that neither he nor his family ever wanted to see us again.

I not only lost my father that day but everyone I’d ever known. My mother had no family, so it was just us. Not that I would ever remember them as I got older.

Mom met Shepard when she was newly pregnant with me; she had a thing for him but always kept it to herself. She knew she couldn’t do anything about her feelings when he was ten years older than her, and she was with my birth father at the time. Mom didn’t want to cause Shepard any problems. He saw her as a kid, and he was a man. But she once told me how she used to dream about a life with a man who would never beat her, never cheat on her.

Shepard was a biker; aren’t all bikers low down, dirty, cheating, murdering bastards?

Don’t they stand for the worst things in this life?

No, not all of them. Some clubs out there fight for the rights of the innocent. No matter what you believe. Yes, they will intimidate you to get what they want. But Shepard’s club never has and never will rape and beat women. Okay, they might beat a woman if she’s a fuckin.g crackpot and means to cause them harm. But it’s very doubtful.

Anyway, Mom was friends with Shepard’s Old Lady and had been for years since she was around ten. Celia was obviously older than my mom and lived across the street from my mom’s parents. Until she left and met Shepard. When Mom ran away from home with my so-called father, they found Celia, who helped them until Mom was old enough to actually be with my birth father without him going to prison for sleeping with an underage girl. Celia had lied to Shepard about how and when she met my mom, but he knows the truth now.

I don’t remember that woman at all, but I remember when she took off with Nova, leaving Jett behind. Jett is Shepard’s son and now the VP of the Snakes Henchmen.

Shepard became tougher, meaner. He was desperate to find his daughter but failed at every turn. He has told me on more than one occasion that if it wasn’t for my mother’s friendship back then, he is sure he would have gotten himself killed.

When I was eleven, my mother and Shepard fell into a relationship. My mother had fallen for Shepard long before he fell for her, but she never said anything; she waited for him to realize how much he wanted her.

It wasn’t long before he finally branded her as his Old Lady. They were soon married, and we became a family. It wasn’t long before he told me that he loved me as though I was his real daughter and that I could call him Daddy if I wanted to. I did, and I have every day since. Fourteen years, and they’re still together.

That’s how I met Hammer, through my dad. My parents were best friends with his parents, right up until his were murdered by a rival gang. As I said, he and his brother came to live with us for a while. Twelve years ago, and I’m still wondering if my childhood fantasies about him claiming me could ever come true, even though I know they won’t.

It’s wrong for me to even think like that when I’m engaged to someone else. But it’s hard to let go of the childish fantasies.

Pathetic right?

He’ll never be mine. Hell, I don’t think he’ll ever be anybody’s again. Not after losing the woman he loved the way he did. My best friend.

I sometimes wonder what went through his mind when he saved me that day.

What the hell must he have been thinking when he saw me in that room?

When those monsters kidnapped me, not only did they beat me almost to a pulp, but they cut my throat.

How did I survive having my throat cut?

Hold up, I’ll get to that part.

Satan’s Barbers. The MC who took me, who the Snakes Henchmen had trouble with in the past, wanted Shepard to admit to killing their Prez. Shepard wouldn’t admit to it because it wasn’t true. That fucke.d up MC just wanted to make a name for themselves. Just like other MCs before them.

The Snakes Henchmen are the most significant MC in Tennessee, and the Mother Charter for Snakes Henchmen everywhere. And the assholes from Satan’s Barbers wanted some of the glory and respect that would never belong to them. But causing war with an MC like Snakes Henchmen is like signing your own death warrant with a fate worse than the Grim Reaper.

Those assholes kept me in a dark, dank room, a camera set up to record every vile thing they did to me. Each time they would hurt me, they’d scream about how I needed to tell my father that he needed to come to their clubhouse and admit in person what he’d done. Maybe then they’d let me live, but my daddy was a dead man. Pity they didn’t tell Shepard where to meet them.

Fools!

The idio.t in charge, Crack, wouldn’t listen to me when I told him and his enforcer again and again that Shepard wasn’t my biological father. I thought if they knew that, they’d let me go. I stupidly thought they’d have no use for me.

Crack told me that they didn’t give two shit.s if I was his actual daughter, stepdaughter, or even adopted. A daughter is a daughter, and even they knew Shepard would kill or die for any of us, me, Nova, or even Sophie, our baby sister.

I couldn’t even argue with that because I knew it was true. And honestly, I’d been calling Shepard Dad so long that he didn’t feel like a stepfather to me. In my heart, he’d been the only father I’d ever known, the only one I ever wanted.