Page 3 of Jax (Black Angels MC #3)

Chapter Two

Ronnie

I did it.

I actually... did it.

Even an hour later, as I sank down on to the bed of my motel with a gushing breath, it was still unbelievable. I laid down onto the musty sheets, ignoring the stagnant smell that had soaked into the room.

There was only one motel in the small rural town of Fellpeak and it wasn’t exactly five-star. There wasn’t much in the room but an old television mounted on the yellowed doily-decorated side table in the corner of the room, looking like it’d collapse under a single breath. The tiny bathroom wasn’t much more: rusty shower, toilet, sink, and cracked mirror. There wasn’t even a lamp or a complementary Bible.

Even so, poor accommodations meant little to me when I knew that this was where I was going to be until Max got better. Where I’d go after that was a different story that I didn’t have to face just yet.

I turned my head, breathing in the bitter lemon-wash scent of the sheets and found my eyes wandering beyond the crack in the floral curtains. Outside, I could see the pale blue of my truck beneath the layer of rust; the sight of it without the plain silver trailer was an eyesore. My heart was already aching at the thought of Max being so physically far away from me. Mentally, she hadn’t been there for a long time, the last two years had been hard on her after the attack, but my hope had carried me here, to this town, and back to Jackson.

He’d taken Max off my hands within moments of agreeing to my plea, and then he hadn’t even let me give him so much as a thank you before he kicked me out of his compound.

The sour taste still sat at the back of my throat at the thought of our confrontation. Coming to Jackson after so many years had been risky, but he was my final option after having bled America dry of every horse expert it had to offer. Everyone had taken one look at her and told me the best thing to do would be to put her down. Selfish as it may have seemed to drag a traumatized horse around the country, I couldn’t give her up so easily. After losing the one place I had belonged, Max had become my everything. She had been there when I was young and stubborn, and I thought she would be with me until I was much older. In the last few years, Max was my only comfort, galloping through the fields on her back like I was young again, wondering if maybe, just for a moment, I could ride back to those times when life was vibrant and bright. Back when I lived only for horses and the man I was determined to marry when I grew up.

The man that now hated me. I knew we hadn’t parted on the best of terms, but when we inevitably reached our crossroads, he had chosen one way and I had chosen the other. Our lives turned out as different as night and day, coming across each other’s paths again to find ourselves looking at complete strangers.

I supposed that was how it was. It wasn’t like the old times. Not because of the time having passed, but the people having changed. I wasn’t little Ronnie looking at my young Jackson. I was the woman, Veronica, facing the man, Jax.

Jax, the biker, the outlaw, the man nobody messed with. I can’t say I was surprised. I wasn’t sure where I expected him to have run to, but seeing it all made sense. The thrill of the ride he had once sought out in horses was now replaced by a metal machine.

But that wasn’t the only thing he’d swapped. The warm bronze of his skin after hours under the sun on saddleback was now covered almost completely in soft black ink. His hair was longer, and his face had lost its boyish charm. It morphed into a sharper, more masculine handsomeness. He looked bigger too, in both muscles and height, though I hadn’t thought it possible for him to grow any more than his towering teenage height. It was hard to believe that the same boy managed to eclipse the powerfully free image he had once painted for himself.

I supposed I was no longer the same person either. From the young, stubborn, and wild teenage girl he had once known—always getting into trouble somehow or other—and the me now was a massive contrast. The woman I became had long since lost her childhood innocence and naivety and replaced it with a cold hard awareness of how dark the world really was.

The softness of a single tear shed from my eye fell down my cheek and was swallowed by the sheets. I pushed myself to sit, wiping my cheeks with the long sleeve of my shirt.

No more tears.

It was a promise to myself I wanted to keep.

Since I intended to keep it, letting myself wallow in “what-was-once” and “what-could-have-been” wouldn’t be a smart choice. If anything, I wanted to hold true to the fact that I wasn’t a doll. I had my own mind, my own brain. I was smart. I was myself.

I took a deep breath, using the inner strength in my chest to push down the swelling emotions wanting to escape.

Knowing I needed to take my mind off it, I leaned back as I outstretched my leg. My heel dug into the floor, my toes pointed at the ceiling as my lungs reached capacity. The ache was dull at first, the muscles twitching but not pulling as I relaxed the stretch and leaned forward, pushing myself down over my thighs and releasing a long, drawn-out breath.

It was on the third set that the throbbing and twinges started beneath my skin and the protesting burn followed them.

The attack was severe… You’ve lost a lot of blood… We need to operate.

“One…Two…Three….” I breathed through the voices. The endless repetition of doctors, and nurses and surgeons nagging on and on in my head.

The muscle is too badly damaged, and your body is resisting the antibiotics. We’ll have to remove part of it.

“One…Two…Three….”

You’ll only get about eighty-percent of movement back if you work hard at rehab. But the pain might never go away.

“ One…Two….”

BEEP-BEEP!

I jerked hard, both in mind and body. The sharp noise from across the room had my hand slipping off my leg and my knee jerking into my ribs.

“ Goddammit,” I gasped, lifting myself up and dropping back onto the sheets once more. I tried to breath as normally as I could until the throbbing in my leg subsided enough for me to look in the direction the beep had come from.

The screen of the black, cheap burner phone sitting on the pillow of the bed had already stopped flashing, but it didn’t matter. I already knew who it was. There was only one person who had the number.

I wiped the thin layer of sweat from my brow, grabbed the device, and looked up at the screen.

Fellpeak Organic Farm.

A farm?

It beeped again.

10 minutes.

Wait. He wants me to go?

When Jackson—I meant— Jax had taken Max out of my hands, I thought that was it. I wasn’t exactly surprised that he’d want as little involvement with me as possible. After seeing Max like she was, I knew it would take time to help her, and although I was expecting him to keep me notified, I didn’t think he’d be demanding my presence so quickly. I reread the message to make sure I wasn’t reading it wrong, but after the sixth time, I knew Jackson couldn’t be clearer.

I stood from the bed and before I even got my boots on, another beep rang from the phone.

9 minutes.

Maybe Jackson hadn’t changed as much as I thought.

* * *

“Y ou took in another one?” I mumbled, pushing back the strands of hair the wind was tugging out. My boots pushed against the dirt at the base of the fence, working a small groove the size of my shoe as I waited for Jackson to reply to me. Sometimes he never did—a kid’s opinion isn’t important after all—and I didn’t think he would.

“Stop scuffing your boots, Ronnie,” Jackson tutted, fiddling with the strand of mature golden grass between his teeth. He flicked it about like a cat’s tail and I glared at it with envy.

With one more kick in the dirt—just to annoy him—I climbed through the fence, taking his bored reply as invitation into the field. I took a seat next to him in the long grass, plucking my own piece of grass and placing it between my teeth—until it was suddenly gone.

“Hey!” I glared, watching Jackson toss it into the endless sea of its counterparts.

“Don’t put weird things in your mouth,” Jackson didn’t bother to look at me. His big brown eyes looked at the figure of the spotted stallion gnawing on a nearby tree branch.

“Hypocritter.”

He smirked. “It’s hypocrite.” It was small and fleeting, but I glared at his face anyway. His stupid, pretty face.

“So,” I grumbled, leaning closer to him. Not enough to touch him since I didn’t want him to move away. “What’s this one’s problem?”

“It’s not as simple as a problem, Ronnie.” Jax sighed, the piece of grass lowering toward the earth. “It’s a trial. A series of problems it’s got to overcome.”

“Like in the Bible?” I mused, thinking about the sermons momma had me attend every Sunday.

“Yeah, like the Bible.” Softness overshadowed his voice, and I knew he had stopped listening to me. Daddy always told me he had an attention span as short as a toothpick for people, but as wide as an ocean for horses.

If only he had that kind of attention for me….

A child’s dream—that’s what Pa would call that. But even when I grew up, I knew I’d still have that same dream. Jackson was the love of my life, after all.

I watched him a little longer that afternoon as he observed the stallion, leaving only when I was called for supper. Without looking back, I knew Jackson would be staying to watch that horse long past his supper and long past the sun setting.

That was just who my Jackson was.

* * *

T he memory felt longer than the short few minutes it took me to arrive at the organic farm. I felt as if I were waking from a long dream, and I remembered little from the journey.

So much for no more reminiscing….

I had long since left town and was now bumbling down a dirt path past the hand-painted wooden sign reading Fellpeak Organic Farm.

I drove toward an old-styled farm house that looked like it had been preserved for the last fifty years with the wooden swing on the porch, hatched window shutters, white pansies in the flower boxes, and endless golden fields stretching into the horizon behind it.

The sight of it filled me with a warm, homely feeling, seeing a house that appeared to have a long history of care and love.

It was the nasty screech of my truck’s breaks as I came to a halt that broke those warm feelings. I set my stiff handbrake after a few attempts and hopped out of my rust bucket. Wishing my years of love and care had let my old baby survive as well as the house had, it hadn’t.

My boots stirred up a cloud of dust around my ankles, the particles already clinging to my jeans as I slammed the creaky door shut and looked around. The first thing I spotted and was overjoyed to see was Max’s trailer. It was parked beside a traditional red and white further up the track. As I approached, I saw a lone figure sitting on the top of one of the fences. When I came close enough into view to take the sight in, I halted.

Perched with that same impeccable balance, haunches up and tucked underneath his body, arms resting on those wide-set knees, was Jackson. His delicate position made it seem as if a single breath would knock him off that high fence, but I knew all too well he was as sturdy as stone.

The wind blew, and he leaned slightly into its embrace, his black curled hair caught in the breeze, brushing against the back of his bare neck. Brown eyes winced in the sunlight as he looked across the pastures and fields with an air of natural calm surrounding him. For just a second, I could see into the past. I could my Jackson sitting there, so relaxed, and peaceful, surrounded by the dirt, sweat, and sun that made him into the boy I remembered.

But this wasn’t Jackson. Just like the image arrived in a sudden wind, it disappeared the same way. The memories swept out of my vision and into thin air leaving me with an empty longing.

Damn this nostalgia….

I tried my best to move my lead feet, fending off that clinging feeling, as I stepped out of the sun and into Jax’s shadow.

“You’re three minutes late,” Jax announced, not moving an inch from his spot.

I ignored his comment, walking up to the fence and resting my arms over the second bar, peering through the gap. I may have been 5’ 8”, but pasture fences were tall, and I’d never been able to see over the top of one while standing and had long since given up trying.

Instead, Jackson’s shadow provided the perfect shade for my eyes to seek out what I had been looking for ever since I arrived.

Max’s beautiful brown coat appeared a golden bay under the warm sunlight as she stood in its direct rays. Her uneven, cropped mane rippled in the breeze and the long, slightly matted tail swept against her hind legs.

I shuffled on my feet, happy to see her out in the open, but the noise must have been louder than I expected, and Max’s head spun in my direction.

Her ears shot forward, her body turning to face me, shoes shuffling backward, away from my direction until her hind end hit the fence. She didn’t panic, but the caution radiating off her had me immediately backing away from the fence.

I should have been used to this reaction by now, should have expected it, but every time she reacted to me like I was a threat, it swelled up the painful guilt nestled deep in my core. The emotional blow had me looking for any kind of distraction.

“You work fast,” I said into the air, trying desperately not to look in Max’s direction as I could hear her starting to pace the back fence; she must have noticed me. I wasn’t unaware, though, of the shake of her head in my peripheral vision as she homed in on anything and everything around her.

“She needed space,” Jackson replied, his voice neutral, as if he hadn’t seen the interaction that had just happened. But he did. He always had. “Couldn’t keep her in that cramped trailer any longer.”

I nodded. One of the reasons I had spent most of my time in dingy motels was because I needed to rent pastures for Max. It had been difficult and expensive to rent a field for a single horse with issues like Max’s. Not to mention when I had to get her out of the trailer….

What Jax saw and dealt with had been a mild reaction compared to my history of dealing with Max.

“Jackson—”

“Jax,” he interrupted. “It’s Jax now.”

“Right,” I uttered. I looked down at my worn leather boots. They kicked at the soft dirt around the edge of the pole, stirring up dust again when I heard Jax’s tongue click.

“Don’t scuff your boots,” he scolded.

“Good to see your pickiness hasn’t changed,” I said in reply, earning a scoff.

Jax swung his leg off the fence and dropped down onto the earth. My head tilted up at him, and despite the fact I’d grown an inch or two since he last saw me, he was still miles taller.

“Come with me,” he said, taking the lead and heading back toward the farm house.

Before I followed him, I took one last glance at Max who continued to pace back and forth across the length of the pasture in a frenzy.

We were silently walking until he noticed my flickering gaze over my shoulder and at his curt, “She’ll wear herself out and calm down,” I whipped my head forwards.

The sound of dirt crumbling beneath our boots was deafening as we walked past my old truck and up to the porch. The creak of the steps broke the unbearable silence between us. Cool shade hung over our heads as I gazed at the back of Jax’s neck, a slight peek of his hair from under his hat curling over the tanned skin. “Your place is lovely.”

“It’s not mine.”

Blunt as ever.

“It’s not?”

Jax pulled on the large wooden front door. It swung open with unexpected ease.

“No. Sometimes I help out up here for old man Pete when he needs it.” Jax reached for the screen next. “He let me open one of the fields for Max.”

“That’s nice,” I mumbled, waiting as he stepped inside a small hallway and leaving me to follow him. He didn’t even hold the door for me… not that I cared.

The house was just as I expected. The second I stepped over the threshold, it was like stepping back into an early 19 th century house. I smelled the light, musty perfume of the natural oak floors, a warm and welcoming scent. Aged, black-and-white photos decorated the walls in an abundance of different photo frames of varying sizes. Floral wallpaper lined the walls and the wooden staircase was adorned in a faded, pale blue wash with small hand-painted petals and leaves decorating the banister. I was so enamored by the character that I hadn’t realized I paused at the entry way until I heard Jax’s harsh cough.

I followed him into the kitchen.

“Sit.” He gestured to the wooden table, then positioned himself in front of the small kitchen window, and I pulled out a shabby chic wooden chair and sank on the plump, floral cushion.

He hooked one foot behind his ankle and crossed his arm over his chest, revealing his forearm wrapped in a white bandage. I moved my gaze down to my hands, resting interlocked on the table and waited for him to join me. He didn’t.

“I need you here,” Jax said, and I felt my whole existence stutter.

“W- what?” My heart jumped.

“As much as I don’t want to be around you,” he explained, and my mind caught up with rapid speed, “if I’m going to help Max, you need to be here too.”

“I see,” I whispered, pretending I didn’t feel that pathetic squeeze in my chest. Jax’s help was only until Max got better, and once she was better we had to leave. I’d seen Jackson pull the riders into the recovery process time and time again, and I’m not sure why I expected anything different. He’d put our difference aside to help Max. “That’s fine.”

“I also need you to tell me what happened.”

I faltered. Images rushed past my vision and in an instant I was there. I could hear the rain, and Max’s terrified cries. My hand rubbed against my right thigh, trying to rub away the ache that began to radiate inside it.

I took a minute to wait for the anxiety to subside and my breath to calm. I knew this would happen. Knew he’d want to know what happened to Max. But facing this moment was a lot more stressful than I anticipated as I tried to organize my thoughts. All I had to say was what I needed to…nothing more, nothing less.

I’m not sure how long I sat there, trying to dig my way out of the emotions, but when I did, I found my eyes moving to Jax’s. His body language had done a complete one-eighty. He was no longer leaning against the window, calm and observant. He was now straight as a board, eyes dark and watching every single inch of movement. There was a pulse of energy radiating from him and into me and I couldn’t face it, turning my head back to the reclusive neutrality of the white table.

“It was raining when I found her…,” I said, the sound of thunder and lightning rumbling in a distant place in my mind. “She was near River Tree Bay on the outskirts of the property. There was so much blood in the rain, on the grass, and on her body. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, but it was just… everywhere .” My head shook down at the white table, hands shaking into fists. “She was just standing there… so quiet and still. It’s like she had just disappeared inside herself. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just took her by the reins, and I managed to get her back to the farm, and that’s when my father found us, and everything was a blur after that.”

I wiped against my eyes, trying to smother the tears that wanted to escape. No matter how many times I recounted the story, it didn’t get any easier.

I didn’t want to go into too much detail, and it was true that I didn’t remember much more of that night, though the reason hadn’t been shock.

“How did it get in?” he growled.

I startled in my seat as I was reminded of his presence.

“What?” I gawked, looking up at him, now only a few inches from where I sat. I didn’t hear him move, but his folded arms tucked his tight fists and his eyes were bearing down at me.

“ How. Did. The. Animal. Get. In ?” Jax repeated, punctuating each one of his words with a low growl.

“They told me they’d found a hole in the fence a couple feet up from where we—” I stumbled over my slip. “—where Max was. The animal must have chewed through it or—”

“They’re electric fences, Ronnie,” Jax growled back, the timber of his voice raising my heart rate as I looked into his silent, bubbling eyes. The brown was almost black as they looked down at me, his lips pulling back, baring his clenched white teeth. “Animals don’t just chew through them.”

“Maybe it broke when the storm came in, or the power went out, or—”

Jax hissed, cutting me off. He let out a huge sigh, turning his body away from mine with remarkable speed as he threw his head to look up at the ceiling, muttering only a last, and obviously sarcastic, scoff under his breath. “Sure. Maybe.”

Some things didn’t change, and as I caught the dark glare in my direction, I held my breath. Jax looked beyond pissed and I wasn’t going to provoke him. Opening my mouth anymore would do just that.

I sat in silence for what felt like ten years before the creak of the floor made me jump.

“I got some shit to do,” Jax snapped, turning and power-walking out of the kitchen and into the hallway so abruptly that I wasted a precious few seconds of time before I threw myself out of my chair.

My leg jerked at the sudden movement, and I stumbled slightly into the doorframe. Jax paused and looked back at me.

“Is that it?” I asked after him, propping myself back up onto two feet. “No more questions or training or… anything?”

“Max needs a few days to get used to this place and get over this morning. Until then, you just need to come and visit her once a day. Don’t go near her, just stay in her sight. The old man’s also been told not to go near her. So, yeah, until I start with Max next week. That’s it.”

With that, he grasped the door, swung it open with little care, and then left through it, leaving a resounding bang behind him as the heavy door slammed shut.

A few seconds later I heard the roar of a truck’s engine, one much smoother than mine, start up and then disappear into the distance.

I stood there until only the sound of the empty farm house filled my ears. I took a deep breath before going and sitting next to Max’s fence, glancing at the traces of where Jax had been and letting go of the weight our short conversation left on me. I took my time bathing in Max’s nearby comfort. She didn’t come closer, but even as she was, I was happy just to have her near.