I Built My Biker Husband a Home, Then Caught Him Naked Beneath His Mistress! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Somebody Picked for Him

Birdie tells Ramona that Rusty brought Tawny into the club, then Ramona hears her baby's heartbeat alone and sees Boone with his hand on Tawny's back in the same clinic.

Birdie Sykes showed up on my porch that night with a Dutch oven and a bad hip.

She was fifty-eight and had not set foot off club property for supper in ten years.

"Don't say a word," she said. "Eat first."

She sat me down at the table I had built from the barn wood and put a plate of brisket in front of me.

I ate it.

It was the first real food I had kept down in three days.

"They're all talking about you," Birdie said. "Half of them think you're the toughest woman they ever saw."

"And the other half?"

"The other half are waiting to see who Boone picks."

"He picked."

"No, honey." She lowered her voice. "Somebody picked for him."

I put down my fork.

"Say that again."

Birdie glanced at the dark window and went on.

"Tawny showed up at the club eight months ago on Rusty's arm."

"Rusty's arm?"

"He called her his cousin from Lubbock and asked Boone to give her a job pouring beer."

"I never heard that."

"You weren't there on Friday nights, Ro. You were here, framing a house."

She said it kindly, and it still landed hard.

"Within a month she was cleaning the back room. Within two she was in it."

"And Rusty said nothing."

"Rusty said she was a good girl who needed a break."

I thought of him at the door yesterday, steering me to a stool, offering me coffee.

I thought of the prospect saying, Mrs. Kilgore, I'd really wait.

"Why are you telling me this, Birdie?"

"Because I buried a president who trusted his best friend too far," she said. "And because that girl's eyes never once lit up when Boone walked in the room."

"What about Boone?"

"He drinks alone in the back room and won't talk to anyone but Rusty."

"He should have talked to me."

"He should have," Birdie said. "He hasn't talked to you in years, and everybody knows it but you."

That one hurt more than the rest.

She patted my hand and went out into the dark.

I didn't sleep.

Two weeks later I sat in an exam room with paper crackling under me and a nurse writing down my age.

"Forty-one," she said, and wrote something next to it.

"I know how it looks."

"It looks like a woman who knows her own body," the nurse said, and smiled at me.

I had been told at thirty-two that I would not carry another child.

I had cried in my truck for an hour and then gone back to work.

The doctor came in with a folder and a handheld screen.

She was young and brisk and didn't waste a word.

"Let's see what we have."

The picture came up gray and snowy.

Then there was a small bright flicker in the middle of it, going fast.

"There's your heartbeat," she said. "Eight weeks, right on schedule."

I had both hands over my mouth.

I had not planned to cry, and I couldn't stop.

"It's a high-risk pregnancy at your age, and your history makes me careful," the doctor said. "I want you in here every two weeks. No lifting."

"I frame houses."

"Not for the next seven months you don't."

I laughed through the tears.

"Is there anyone who should be here with you?" she asked.

I looked at the little flicker on the screen.

"No," I said. "Just me."

She printed a picture and slid it into a folder with a pink cover.

I held it against my chest all the way down the hall.

I walked toward the waiting room and the glass doors, wanting my truck, where nobody could see my face.

The doors slid open and a man came in with his helmet under one arm.

He was six foot two, broad in the shoulders, with a gray beard and a scar through his left eyebrow.

I stopped so fast my sneakers squeaked on the floor.

Boone didn't see me.

He was looking at a woman in the corner chair.

It was Tawny, in tight jeans and a blouse tied up at her ribs, with her hair done and her lipstick fresh.

She had her feet on the chair across from her and no belly I could see.

She stood up and he walked over and put his hand on the small of her back.

He had never put his hand there on me in public.

Not once in twenty-three years.

I looked at the pink folder in my arms and then at them.

Tawny turned her head and saw me across the waiting room.

She smiled.

It was a small, slow smile, and it did not look afraid at all.

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