Nasty Bastard (Grim Bastards MC Book 4) by Emily Minton, Shelley Springfield Page A

sleep after seeing her son and is awake now. If she’s still sleeping, I’m gonna have to wake her up. There are questions to be answered, and tired or not, she’s gonna be answering them. She’s not gonna be happy to be talking to me, if our earlier conversation is any indication, but she has no choice.
    After taking a few steps, Dad catches up to me. “Smoke, hold on a minute. We need to talk about this shit.”
    The shit he wants to talk about is probably me and Gidget. Fuck, I knew this was coming, knew he would have some sort of input. Dad can never keep his mouth shut, even when he should. Right now, he should definitely be keeping quiet. I’m too close to the edge to treat him with the respect he deserves.
    “All I’ve got is a minute or two, so you better make it quick,” I say, stopping in my tracks and turning to him. “I need to check on Gidget, and Boz wants me to ask her about the other guys with Torch. Then, I’m gonna head over to Stone’s place and finish the search we started last night.”
    He walks to me, stopping mere inches away. “What’s this about Gidget being your woman again? I thought you ended that shit a long time ago.”
    “Don’t start, Dad,” I tell him, crossing my arms over my chest. “This is between her and me; it has nothing to do with you.”
    “You and that girl were over years ago. You were both too young back then to know what you wanted.” He runs a hand through his hair and adds, “You were too fucking wrapped up in her to see straight. I’m wondering if you’re still just as blind as you were as a teenager, and if y’all are still over.”
    His words piss me way the fuck off, bringing up shit that I’d rather not even think about. Hurting Gidget is all on me. I made the decision, and fucked up big time, all on my own. Still, if Dad had just kept his mouth shut, none of it would have happened. After he compared her to Mom, I couldn’t think of anything else. Something in me thought I needed to let her go, so she could live the life she wanted. It was like he drilled that shit in my head.
    I take a deep breath to get a grip on my anger before saying, “We’ve never been over, Dad. You’re smart enough to know that.”
    “You’ve held on to it too fucking long, boy. Should have let her go years ago,” he says with a shake of his head. “She went away to her fancy ass college and started a new life, and you got your officer patch, became VP. She got the life she wanted and so did you. It’s time to move the fuck on.”
    Some of what he says is true, but a whole hell of a lot of it isn’t. “Yeah, I’m VP and fucking proud of it. Still, I go to bed every damn night lonely and wake up the same way the next morning. If that’s what you think I want, you don’t know shit about me.”
    The pain in his eyes is easy to see, but I can’t find it in me to regret one damn word I’ve said. Not that I want to hurt him, but he deserves to hear the truth from me. He’s my Dad; he should know enough to know I wanted more from life than what I got. If he doesn’t, that’s his damn problem.
    “Fuck, son,” he mumbles under his breath, taking a step away from me. “You still love her, even after all these years?”
    I step forward, closing the distance between us, and tell him what I should have told him all those years ago. “I’ve loved Gidget since I was nine years old. I’ll still be loving her when I take my last breath.”
    “I hate that for you, Smoke. I really do,” he says, sounding more like my dad and less like a brother. “I’m afraid you’re gonna end up getting hurt.”
    “That’s what you’re not getting, Dad. Pain is all I’ve felt since the day she left,” I tell him honestly.
    “She’s Stone’s daughter, a traitor’s kid. That fact alone is gonna cause you problems, and we haven’t even talked about what her brother did to the Pres’s old lady,” he states, looking right into my eyes. “If you try to claim her, you could