“Piss off,” I muttered, turning my face into my pillow. “It’s not morning yet.”

This time when my phone started both ringing and vibrating from its place on my nightstand, I heard it loud and clear.

“Tegen! That’s the fourth call in a fuckin’ row!”

“Shit!” I yelled into my pillow. “Stop bitching and just answer it!”

“I can’t!” he yelled back. “It’s your fuckin’ mom!”

The phone stopped ringing and I heard him let out an angry sigh.

Almost instantly, it started ringing again.

“TEGEN, ANS—”

Cursing, I jumped up, grabbed my pillow and swung it up in the air, then slapped it down over his face.

“Shut. Up,” I hissed, already reaching for my phone.

Pressing Answer, I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hello,” I snapped.

“Tegen?”

“Mom.” I sighed, instantly feeling bad. “Is everything okay? It’s not even light out.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s just…I wanted to catch you before you made plans for the long weekend. I thought maybe you could come home for a few days.”

Reaching up, I rubbed the heel of my palm over my eyes and sighed.

“Hawk’s coming home, isn’t he?”

James “Hawk” Young, lifer in the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club, was the father of my half brother, Christopher Kelley. Christopher was four years old and nearly two decades younger than me. Despite his dark red hair, green eyes, and freckles—traits our very Irish mother had given us both—he looked just like his extremely good-looking dad. Right down to his brooding eyes and the hard line of his mouth.

“He is,” she said softly. “And I’m just not ready. I just…I have enough to deal with, with Jase. Please come home, Tegen.”

Herein lay the problem. Despite how good-looking Hawk was, my mother wanted nothing to do with him. She couldn’t bear even the brief encounter to hand over Christopher for a few days. One might think that my traveling all the way from San Francisco, California, to Miles City, Montana, just to hand my half brother over to his father and comfort my mother in his absence, was a little extreme…it actually wasn’t. Not after what my mother had gone through.

When she was nearly nine months pregnant with Christopher, my mother had been shot in the head by her boyfriend’s wife. Not Hawk’s wife; Hawk wasn’t married. But Jason “Jase” Brady, also a member of the Hell’s Horsemen, was.

Actually, my mother had still been married to my father when she’d met Jase.

My mom, Dorothy Kelley, had gotten pregnant at fifteen, given birth at sixteen, and was forced by my grandparents to marry my father. My father, a truck driver, was rarely home and when he was, was more interested in television and beer than my mother and me. When I was four, my mother met Jase.

She fell in love with Jase almost instantly, unconcerned at first that he was married with three small children, because she thought he’d eventually leave his wife.

It didn’t happen. But my mother stuck it out. She worked at the Hell’s Horsemen clubhouse, cleaning up after the boys, cooking for them and doing their laundry, enabling her to carry on her affair with Jase as discreetly as possible.

Eventually my mother left my father, who’d subsequently hopped in his truck, left Miles City, and never returned. She cut ties with my grandparents and Jase moved both my mother and me into an apartment in town, a nice four-unit condo where we had a front door, a driveway, and a backyard, and everything continued much the same as before.

I hated it. I hated watching her throw her entire life away for a man who would never truly be hers, a man who would always go home at night to his wife and children and leave my mother alone, usually crying for him. Knowing that no matter how much she loved Jase, if he never left his wife she would always be considered a club whore, nothing more, and yet she still stayed.

That’s how I grew up.

The fatherless kid of a club whore, I watched my mother cater to a man who, in my opinion, didn’t really love her, watched her work her ass off for a club full of criminal bikers who lied, cheated, and more than likely killed their way through life.

And that was it. I had no one else, no other family to turn to.

I left Miles City, desperate to get away from the club life and all it entailed, the day after my high school graduation. With a full scholarship to San Francisco University and an internship already in place at a small newspaper, I had no plans to ever return.

After leaving, I’d been more than ready to get rid of “the look” that had defined me all my life, that look consisting of braces, glasses, secondhand clothing two sizes too big for me, and wiry red curls that took a day and a half just to tame in any sort of way.

One of my first friends in college, Grace, a true hippie raised on a commune in Northern California, had taken me under her wing and “crazied me up a bit,” as she liked to call it. So now I was free of both glasses and braces, my crazy hair had no choice but to remain in dreadlocks, and my body was a work of fucking art. Every single one of my tattoos I loved—colorful, large, and intricate, taking up both my arms, my back, chest, stomach, and both thighs. And my piercings…eh, I was fickle. Aside from getting my ear holes stretched a little more every so often, I’d alternate which ones I wore because I liked to change it up a bit every now and then.

In San Francisco, nobody gave me a second glance. And I loved it. There was no reason to ever return to Montana.

Except, that wasn’t in the cards for me. No matter how hard I tried to cut all ties with Miles City and its merry band of chrome and leather criminals, they just wouldn’t let me go.

After my mother was shot, Jase’s wife was tried, convicted, and shipped off to prison. My mother survived, obviously, but the damage had been devastating. Her memory had suffered, and at first she didn’t remember anyone or anything. Then, slowly, her memory began to return.

She remembered her childhood, her parents, and old friends; she even remembered my father and eventually me.

Then the progression came to a screeching halt. Her last memory of me was as a toddler.

My entire childhood, my teenage years, her meeting Jase and leaving my father, the many years of service she’d devoted to the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club…all of it was gone. Forever, it seemed.

Where did Hawk fit into any of this?

Well, as it turned out, my mother, in the midst of her already fucked-up love triangle, turned to Hawk for the comfort she couldn’t find with Jase.

No one had known.

After my mother had been shot, Hawk appeared at the hospital in a fury. He beat the crap out of Jase, during which he spilled the beans about him and my mother, crudely bringing to light Christopher’s true paternity.

And now…

My mother still didn’t remember either of them. To her, Jase was just some pathetic, broken man who refused to leave her alone, and the husband of the crazy woman who’d shot her. And Hawk was the father of the child she didn’t remember conceiving or carrying.

As for me, it was hard. There was a lot of explaining on my part, rehashing year after year in hopes she’d remember something past my toddler years. A lot of tears were shed, but eventually she came to accept the fact that she forgot two decades of her life, and that I wasn’t her baby anymore but a full-grown woman.

As for Christopher, she loved him instantly. Because she didn’t remember him, he was presented to her as a newborn. The familiar red hair, green eyes, and pale skin hadn’t hurt much either.

Which was great, super. Wonderful, even. But she didn’t remember me and I couldn’t accept it.

I felt alone. Orphaned in a way.

So I blamed Jase and Hawk, as well as the entirety of the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club and their affinity for drama, for all of it.

My mother, as confused as she was, tried to break all ties as well, but Hawk being Christopher’s father made it hard for her. Several women associated with the club, women my mother had been close to, also refused to let her go. They continued to show up for visits and call her periodically despite her protests.

They also pressured her into spending time with Jase, or Hawk, in hopes that it would help trigger a memory.

So yeah, I timed my visits alongside Hawk’s trips home. He stayed on the road mostly, but when he would return, he wanted to see his son ASAP and it was my job to ensure that happened without him intruding on my mother.

“I’ll call the airlines today,” I told her. “I should be able to take a few days off work.”

“Thank you, baby,” she whispered tearfully and I felt my eyes prick in response.

“See you soon,” I said hurriedly, needing to get off the phone before we both ended up in tears. As much progress as she’d made, it was still hard for her to think of me as an adult and seeing her cry, hearing her cry…well, it was hard for me.

She was my mother. The only parent I had, the only person in my life that had ever loved me. I would do anything for her, including make myself miserable.

Hanging up, I halfheartedly threw my cell phone across the room and it landed pathetically in a basket of dirty laundry.

“Fuck,” I muttered. “Fuck.”

“Speaking of fuck,” the man beside me said. “And seein’ as you’re already naked…”

I glanced over at him.

ZZ.

Yet another biker in the Hell’s Horsemen Club. Sort of. He didn’t associate with anyone in the club other than Deuce West, the president, and he hadn’t set foot back in Miles City since Danny, Deuce’s prissy-ass little bitch of a daughter, had cheated on him with another Horseman, Ripper, and broken his heart around the same time my mother had been shot.

Deuce’s offspring were good at that…breaking hearts.

All the West kids looked the same no matter who their mothers were. Cage, Danny, and Ivy were all blond with identical dimpled smiles. The girls had been blessed with wide, doe-eyed baby blues and full lips, and Cage…ugh. UGH.

He was beautiful. And an asshole.

Like father, like son.

As for Deuce, I wouldn’t be surprised if every blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and dimpled beauty queen across all fifty states belonged to him.

My body and my looks would always be a sore spot for me. I was ridiculously skinny, and not in the graceful supermodel way, but instead awkward, all elbows and knees like a newborn foal. I had tiny breasts and no hips, my collarbone stuck out, and so did my hipbones.

I was still pale-skinned, red-haired, and freckled.

And I would always be—no matter how many times I looked in the mirror and saw someone not quite as unattractive as before—that stupid and ugly little girl that no one had wanted.

But whatever, I’d accepted the fact that I’d never be beautiful a long time ago.

After my mother’s injury, I returned to San Francisco just in time to start my sophomore year. Two months into fall semester, ZZ showed up looking for a place to crash in his downtime. Other than the Horsemen, he didn’t have anyone else. His father had been one of Deuce’s lifers but had died when ZZ was twelve. Deuce had become his surrogate father and ZZ had taken the path his own father had, into the life. When he was twenty, his mother had passed away, her body ravaged by cancer. Not wanting to return to Miles City and subsequently see Danny or Ripper, he’d tracked me down instead with Deuce’s help.

As much as I wanted to hate Deuce, I couldn’t. Even though I’d gotten a full scholarship from San Francisco University, I still needed money for living expenses. Deuce had paid my rent and all my utilities, even my cell phone service, and provided me with extra spending money throughout my college years.

And, despite my protests, he was still paying for everything. No matter what I said, pleading and begging him to stop, he always refused.

“You’re family,” he’d growl. “And I take care of family.”

It was hard not to appreciate that but I knew deep down he was only doing it for my mother, not for me. They all loved my mother, not just Jase and Hawk, but all of them—the bikers, their old ladies, their kids, even the club whores. She was a mother by nature; she cared for people and enjoyed doing it, and it was damn hard not to love her.

So, really, I was only sort of family. More like the redheaded stepchild of a family full of badass bikers…but still family.

And so was ZZ.

We hardly knew each other, but after six months of periodically rooming together when ZZ wasn’t on the road, one thing had led to another and we ended up fucking. And had been fucking ever since.