JUSTIFIED (Motorcycle Club Romance) Read Online Free

For two seconds, I forgot why we were even there.
     
    Standing in that room, I didn’t feel like I was in an old, stately, peculiar mansion in the middle of nowhere. I was starting to feel, like Ash said before, like I was on an extended vacation.
     
    “Let’s see. Cheerios and bananas it is,” Ash said as he rummaged through the pantry. Tuck squealed in his high chair.
     
    I started to get up.
     
    “No, Mama. You stay there. I’m cooking for us this morning,” Ash said. He was clearly trying to ease my mind, and I wanted nothing more than to ease his too. It was going to be difficult to be separated from him, but it was nothing compared to the pain of dropping off your wife and child in the middle of nowhere.
     
    “Sounds good to me,” I obliged. “What’s gotten into you this morning? I haven’t seen you this happy in forever.”
     
    He cracked an egg on the side of a skillet. “It’s just an incredible feeling to know that you two are safe. You’re pretty much off the grid here. Untouchable.”
     
    Sometimes I wondered if he was just extremely paranoid or if actual threats had been made against our lives. There were times over the years when it was hard to distinguish. Ash didn’t take killing Tripp lightly. It gnawed away at him from time to time, manifesting itself in night terrors and denying himself happiness.
     
    “So I was giving myself a tour of the house last night,” I began. “There’s a really creepy room down the hall. It’s like a dining room with no windows. It has these grandfather clocks in each corner of the room. Then there’s another door that leads to a bedroom and half-bath.”
     
    “Houses like these, people are constantly changing up and remodeling and adding extra rooms here or there. I’m sure it was just some former owners who wanted a private dining room or something.” Ash tried to come up with some sort of logical reasoning to pacify me. He had more important things to think about anyway.
     
    “Wait until you see it,” I continued. “I just felt like I was being watched in there.” I shivered just thinking about the room. “I hope the upstairs is semi-normal.”
     
    “I’m sure it is,” Ash replied.
     
    “Do you know the history of this place?”
     
    “Nope. Guess it never occurred to me to ask.”
     
    “Can you find out? I’m just curious.”
     
    Ash looked at me as if I had asked him to do me a huge favor. I knew he was busy. I knew he had more important things on his plate, but if I was going to be living here for an indefinite amount of time, I wanted to know as much as possible about it.
     
    “You never wanted to know about the other places we’ve lived.”
     
    “The other places we lived were normal. Let’s see, there was your parents’ basement. Then the cottage on Olive Street. Then the little rental house on Callahan. Then our other apartment on Fourth and Grand. All perfectly normal, boring places.”
     
    “Trust me. This is just another boring place to add to the list.”
     
    I looked at him in disbelief and gave an audible sigh. With Ash, actions always spoke louder than words. The more I spoke, the less of his attention I seemed to receive, especially when he was stressed.
     
    “Look. I’ll try and dig up some dirt on this place when I get a chance,” Ash promised. “I’m not sure I’ll find any, but I’ll ask around.”
     
    “Thank you.”
     
    “You gonna eat your breakfast?” He stared down at the cold plate of scrambled eggs situated in front of me.
     
    I pushed them around with my fork and took a bite. “I appreciate you cooking breakfast this morning. I’m just not that hungry.”
     
    “What’s wrong now?” He shook his head when he thought I wasn’t looking. Growing up in a family of four boys who were raised by their father, he never learned how to truly be patient, especially when it came to women. “Are you going to start crying? You know I hate it when I’m about to leave and you start