Chapter 11

~Roxana~

 

“Ralph!” I call out as I stomp through the hallway of his house towards the living room. “Show yourself, dick head!”

“Kitchen, gorgeous!” he calls back.

I make a left and push through the saloon doors. Yeah, saloon doors. He thinks he’s a frigging cowboy or something with those custom-made things. I spot him sitting up at the kitchen table devouring a slice of pizza right out of the half-empty box open in front of him.

“Hey,” is his garbled greeting as he munches away.

“It’s five in the morning and you’re eating that?”

“Hey! I’ll eat what I want without complaints from you when you call me up at 4:30am saying we need to have an emergency meeting ASAP.”

I blow out a breath. “Fine…sorry.”

His right eyebrow arches in surprise. “Excuse me? Did you just apologize?”

“Yeah, why?” I ask, folding my arms across my chest.

“Getting soft, are you?” he teases. “Or did the VP fuck your normal bite into submission?”

“Fuck you.” Way too close to the truth for my liking. “What makes you think he and I fucked anyway?”

He laughs and looks me up and down. “You’re not walking too good.”

“I’m walking just fine.” Yeah, a straight up lie. I’m sore as hell after last night.

“If you say so,” he answers, clearly just being kind, because he’s well and truly right about it and I know it’s obvious right now in my step.

His expression shifts then, serious and all business. “So, what’s going on? What’s this emergency meeting about?”

I tell him what happened yesterday with me and Neil getting shot at by Broker and his guys.

He shoots out of his seat. “And you’re telling me now?”

“It happened either way, Ralph.”

“Too busy fucking Ax to pick up the damn phone and alert me, were you?”

“Hey! If you must know, I needed….” Shit, I can’t believe I’m admitting this. “I needed to calm down.”

“It shook you up,” he realizes.

“A bunch of guys toting automatics. Yeah. But that stays between us, okay?”

“Rox, no one expects you to be…a robot.”

“Yes, they do! Of course they do and as far as the boys know, that’s the way I am, okay?”

He holds up his hands. “All right. Fine.” He starts pacing and fiddling with his goatee, meaning he’s deep in thought. “Okay, we need damage control. And we need to go on the hunt for these guys.”

“They were after Ax, not me.”

“Great, a biker turf war right on our doorstep.”

“It’s my turf, not theirs,” I growl, slamming my fist down on the kitchen counter.

He stops in his tracks and turns to me. “No, Rox.”

He knows me so well, that he realizes what I mean by that right off the bat. “Yes. It’s the only way, Ralph. Or they’re gonna run right over us. The Mavs and Black Thorns. The Mavs are coming. Now. They’re trying to push us out and force their own way in.” I draw in a deep breath, knowing the shit that will surely come at us with the decision I’m about to make. “This is war.”

Ralph shakes his head. “Rox—”

But I cut him off. “What choice is there, Ralph? These bikers are already running roughshod all over us, committing acts of terror on our territory, the places we’re supposed to protect. The motel was one of them. If we don’t retaliate here, we’ll lose everything. Our credibility. Everything we’ve worked so hard to build together in this city.”

“We have enough money to leave this behind now, Rox. To make a better life somewhere else without all this bullshit. We can just go.”

I round on him, furious at his idea of giving up. “Standing down?” I basically spit. “No way. I don’t back down. Ever.”

“Rox,” he says, sadly, shaking his head.

“What?” I snap.

“You’re power mad.”

“You’re calling me a megalomaniac?”

He nods. “Too many years of this. It’s gone to your head. We don’t stand to lose much if we walk away from this, so your reason for going to war has nothing to do with that. This is about you being used to ruling these streets and now some assholes have come on in to challenge that, to take the power that you’re so addicted to now. That’s why you want war. You don’t wanna give up that power.”

“What is this? You’re not on board here? We’ve been in this together since the beginning, Ralph. We built this together.”

“And this is a step too far, Rox. The Mavs moving in. Black Thorns sending their VP down here. That VP almost getting taken out yesterday. You’re damn lucky you’re still alive. We’re in the middle of a biker turf war. We’re talking a bloodbath here. You know how those things go. I’d rather it wasn’t our blood caught up in all this. Leave them to it. Let’s walk.”

“No!”

“I’m not on board, Rox! That’s it! Simple as that!”

His words hit me right in the gut, winding me painfully. The very idea of him not being here alongside me is incomprehensible. “You…you want out?” God, I can barely even say the words.

“I’m tired, Rox. I want to settle down like normal people do, you know?”

“Is this Michaela talking?” She’s been his girlfriend for a couple of years now and it’s clear to me that she has some sort of hold on him.

“She and I both want this. We want a family, Rox. I can’t do that around all of this. It’s not safe.” He closes the distance between us and takes my hands in his and asks softly, “Don’t you want that too, gorgeous?”

I jerk out of his grip. “No,” I say, scrunching up my face at the thought of it. “I don’t want some man tying me down and controlling me. I’ve always run free and I always will.”

“Run free? Those are your dad’s words, Rox. And look what happened to him.”

“Don’t you dare—”

“I’m just saying, just trying to warn you and stop you from making the same mistakes he did. And your perception of settling down is skewed because you’ve never…”

He trails off, thinking better of what he was about to say. But I want to hear it. I want to hear what he thinks he knows about me that I apparently don’t know about myself. Why? Because there’s nothing.

“Say it,” I press. “I’ve never what?”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and says, sadly, “You’ve never been in love. You’ve never let anyone love you.”

“That’s not true,” I bite back right away. “What about you and me?”

“Different kind of love, Rox. I’m not talking about sibling love here. You know what I’m talking about. You get too close to some guy and you run. It’s been your MO since I’ve known you.”

His words affect me more than I like in light of what happened with Neil last night. We…made love and I let my guard down. Argh! Before I know it, I’m slamming my fist into the fridge and thundering, “No one tames me! No one! Never! I will never stand for it!”

As usual, Ralph isn’t the least bit affected by my outburst. He never has been. We’re too used to each other’s ups and downs to be surprised by anything from one another. He just looks at me and says calmly, “The right guy won’t try.”

Shit, I can’t entertain that. I can’t…I can’t think about it.

Shaking my head vehemently, I step back. He’s throwing me through too many loops here. Him breaking off our partnership after all these years. Talking about love and shit; the one thing I’ve always protected myself against. Talking about me having that. No. No way. I can’t even dignify that. Because, he doesn’t know. No matter what he says at the end of the day, it’s not the same for him. He’s a guy. For me, if I settle down, the unspoken expectation is there to be the good little woman playing house. No way. That’s not me. It’s what every guy I’ve ever met wants from a woman in the long term. But not me. I’ll never be someone’s submissive. Not in that way. Sex is a different story, of course.

Sex? Argh! Neil! I made a mistake. I let him in. I just…it was just me getting caught up in the moment. That’s all. It didn’t mean anything. Yeah, no. It didn’t. Of course it didn’t. Stop. Don’t think about him.

“I…I need to go,” I stumble, backing out of the kitchen hastily.

“Rox, wait.”

But I can’t.

I need to clear my head.

And so, I turn and run, hightailing it out of his house.