RIDING DIRTY (Steel Titans MC Book 4) by Franca Storm (ebook voice reader .txt) 📕

public place. Talk about a far cry from how I usually operated. There was nothing covert about it.

I made an effort to lower my voice, going on, “I have absolutely no clue how to raise a child.”

“How could you? You’ve never done it before.”

Good point. In fact, he was making a lot of good points. He was trying to make it okay, to make it seem like it wasn’t such a big deal, that it wasn’t such a crazy curveball. And I wasn’t ready for that. I couldn’t take it down a notch yet. I was still very much immersed in freak-out mode. “It’s not that simple,” I told him.

“It could be.”

I blew out a breath and slumped back in my chair. “I don’t know.”

“You gotta talk to Slade.”

“Not yet,” I said, shaking my head. “I want to know where I’m at, what my decision is, before I sit down with him.”

“What about deciding together?”

“I need to be sure.”

“Well, while I appreciate you talking it out with me, I ain’t exactly a major resource in this area. Ain’t never had a kid, nor come close to it. Never got nobody pregnant, not even a scare.”

“I still don’t know how I’m pregnant. I’m always careful and so is Slade.”

“Yeah, well, nothing’s one-hundred-percent, is it? Luck of the draw.”

Luck of the draw? He was right. That was exactly what it felt like. A game of chance, something absent of rules, strategy, or control.

Out of the blue.

Unplanned.

Chaotic.

Uncontrolled.

Not exactly the way I usually lived my life, or went about doing things. The whole situation was actually the antithesis to what and who I was. And yet, it had to be dealt with.

But not right now.

I was in the middle of a mission. I needed to get back to it ASAP.

Rising from my seat abruptly, I told Ricky, “I need to get back to work.”

“Right now?”

“I was close to IDing the commander.”

“Willa, I don’t think—”

“People are counting on me.”

Besides, I needed to bury myself in something that made sense to me. It was my salvation, my lifeline, the thing I could always count on when everything else around me was going to shit. Soon, though, when Shadow officially went away, I’d have to find something else to take its place, to be that lifeline.

31

~Slade~

 

I WATCHED HER.

It felt like that was all I’d been doing for the last few days. As much as I wanted to go to her and sort this thing with her, I knew I couldn’t. It wasn’t what she needed and I knew it wasn’t what was best. Besides, I needed to know that she could come to the realization on her own. And, fuck, if she couldn’t, we were in a shitload of trouble.

Telling her she was going about this the wrong way weren’t going to do shit. She had to see it. She had to damn well know it.

I got that she was in some major shock. So was I. We’d been careful, yet it’d happened. She was pregnant. We were pregnant. But I wasn’t shocked in a negative sense, like she seemed to be. In fact, it was verging on excitement for me. I weren’t used to surprises being… good. They usually meant brutality, pain or… death. But this was all about life. And it was my second chance. I’d been so close years back and I’d lost it all. I never thought it’d come my way again.

There was only one way I could see this. It was a miracle. And I was nothing but happy about it. I was sure I would’ve been full-on bursting with excitement and shouting it from the fucking rooftops, if Willa had seen it the same way, if she’d reacted well. But her pulling away from me had put a hell of a damper on it all.

And it had me worried.

There was no way I was gonna let this second chance slip away from me.

Loving her.

A baby on the way.

Leaving our dark and dirty lives behind.

We’d made it so far now. I weren’t gonna let nothing stop us from making it the rest of the way.

Everything in me was willing me to go to her, to tell her all this, to convince her that this baby was a good thing, that it was everything.

But I didn’t get to call the shots here. To do this, to have this baby, to raise it, to love it… she had to be all in. There weren’t no other way it could work.

I knew her real well. Willa Rose was somebody who made damn sure she had all the answers before she acted—or reacted. Some things took longer than others for her to figure out. And this was the heaviest of anything she’d dealt with so far, because it was way out of her wheelhouse. I had no doubt that a lot of her pulling away and shutting me out, shutting down as a whole, was largely due to that. It was the way she operated, the way she’d always operated. It was more than just her procedure. It was a survival tactic.

I cursed and pulled my gaze away from my phone, where I’d been tapped into the surveillance room camera watching Willa hard at work on trying to track down that commander. Thankfully, she wasn’t going it alone this time and she’d let Mason in on it with her. It meant she’d actually slept decently over the last few days. She’d also been eating and managing to keep it down too, thanks to some meds the doc had hooked her up with. Unfortunately, she’d pushed back the checkup and sonogram that he was trying to get her to go in for. She weren’t ready yet. Meanwhile, I was fucking well dying to see. Jesus. It was a mess.

The creak of the clubhouse door had me swinging my head that way to see Liam rushing in. He caught sight of me and headed over quick. He’d barely come to a stop beside me when the