Read Online Checkmate With Bishop: A Hellions MC Novel by J. A. Hornbuckle - Free Book Online

night.  ‘It’s club’s business, babe,’ he’d told her, but in retrospect he heard the finality of his words.  Ones that were said so firmly, that allowed no further discussion.  Words he then wished he’d delivered better.  Because he knew both from her expression and from the way the memory of them made him flinch, were the wrong words to say.
    ‘When will you be back?’ she’d always asked on a quiet question, deadpanned with no expression on her face.
    ‘When I get home, I guess,’ he’d reply, trying to harden his heart against the accusation that was never offered by her in either word or tone, but had been very apparent in her eyes.
    And his heart remembered the rest.  The way she’d lay back down on the bed, her back toward him as she’d murmur, ‘be safe, honey.  And come home to me, okay?’
    Now he recognized what that must have cost her.  Cost his girl as she watched him leave her side never knowing if her man would come back. 
    But he hadn’t seen it then.
    Hadn’t recognized that every time he left her, she counted it as a goodbye of the long variety.
    As in the totally gone arena.
    That was until she piled herself, all her mis-matched suitcases and duffle-bags into her tiny Corolla the morning after one of their last and most devastating fights.
    The one where he hadn’t recognized that his words of, ‘if you think that your pussy is better than any other Honeys…’ was the clincher in severing his marriage.
    Christ almighty!
    How could he have been so completely and totally fucking stupid? 
    Been so callused in hurting the one girl that had ruled his world?
    But she’d shown him.  Shown him in no uncertain terms when he’d arrived home that next day to find her leaning against her Corolla.
     ‘I’m leaving,’ she’d announced with no expression on her beautiful face and an unfocused gaze.  ‘You were right.  The Hellions will either make or break you.  Well, they’ve broken me, Stan.’  She’d focused in on his eyes before continuing with a gaze that had shrunk his balls to the size of pebbles.  “I’m done.”
    ‘Err…’ he’d started, but she’d cut him off in his stutter.
    Casting her eyes over the street that they’d lived on, she again brought her green eyes to his.  ‘This isn’t me.  It isn’t what I wanted nor what we talked about having.  I love you and all, but I gotta go.’
    He’d tried to work it, attempted to put the fear of god into her by issuing some half-assed ultimatum, which according to her was when he’d told her to consider herself dead to him.  He still wasn’t sure about that but he knew his words hadn’t had made one motherfucking, goddamned bit of difference. 
    Not to her leaving. 
    Not even to her expression as she’d stared at him. 
    Taking the two steps to meet him on the sidewalk, Dory had grabbed his t-shirt on either side.  ‘I’ll always love you, Stan.  You are my heart.  But this just isn’t my life.’  And after kissing him in the sweetest kiss she’d ever delivered, Dory had turned and went to the driver’s door of the car.  ‘Take care, honey.’
    And before he could even rally, before he could even react, Dory was gone.
    He’d been served the divorce papers less than two weeks after she’d left.
    For Stan, life as he’d known it, had joyously planned it out, was over.
    It was at that moment Bishop, the smart-mouthed, devil-may-care fully developed man made his way into the world to replace the smart-assed youth.  A fully grown man who carried only pieces of his heart.
    Receiving those papers so soon after she left, he decided in his thirty-eighth year, had been the motherfucking worst day of his entire, miserably short life.
     
     

Chapter Six
     
    I pushed open the screen door with my foot, carefully balancing two glasses of ice tea as I went out to the front porch.  J.R. was pushing the lawn mower as he did every Sunday morning in the summer, studiously strafing the machine in