Free RIDE (A Stone Kings Motorcycle Club Romance) by Daphne Loveling Page A

didn’t want you to think he liked you. Because he doesn’t. Obviously.”
    The blood began to rush in my ears as she flounced away.
    In a daze, I fell into the driver’s seat and tried to process what she had said. I knew Debbie had told me all this to hurt me; I was under no illusion about that. But it didn’t matter. I also had no doubt that Caleb had said it. Princess . It was the word he had called me when we were at the hot springs together. That couldn’t be a coincidence.
    I didn’t leave my room for the rest of the weekend.
    When Monday came, I couldn’t make myself get up and go to school. My mother barely noticed. On Tuesday, I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer, and trudged my way toward the campus, steeling myself for the inevitable moment I would see him again.
    Caleb had the gall to act like nothing had happened when he showed up at my locker that morning. It was as though he had never said those horrible things Debbie told me he did. But I knew better. I was through being such a naive little idiot, to think someone like him would ever have been attracted someone like me. I didn’t know why he had gone through all that trouble just to humiliate me, but I didn’t need to know. All I needed to know was that he had done it.
    I screamed at him to leave me alone, loudly and crazily enough that anyone around would hear me. All he could do was back away. Even though it was humiliating to have caused such a scene in front of my peers, I didn’t care. All I cared about was that he knew he would never, ever get the opportunity to hurt me again.
    After high school, I fled to Seattle, spending the summer impoverished in a closet-sized room I rented in a house close to campus. I worked part-time in an ice-cream shop until school started and I could move into the dorms.
    During the years I spent at the University of Washington, I rarely went home except for a week at Christmas break to see my sister and her new fiancé, and to check in on Mom, who was growing increasingly erratic and belligerent. I felt guilty for staying away, but I couldn’t bear being there, either.
    Eventually, I met my future husband, David, and we married about a year after I started my first “real” job, as a PT in a private clinic in Seattle.
    Things with David were rocky pretty early on in the marriage, and I probably would have left him within the first year, except I got pregnant with Zoe. I kept at it, trying to make it work so that my child would have a father, but it was no use. Not long after she was born, it was obvious that David was completely indifferent to being a father. In fact, he made it clear he resented that he was no longer my main focus.
    His verbal abuse, which I had tried to tolerate throughout the short duration of our marriage, became physical one night when he came home from a bar and wanted me to have sex with him. When I told him I was too tired and he was too drunk, he threw me against a wall outside the hallway of the nursery.
    As Zoe woke from the noise and began to cry, I realized I couldn’t stay in the marriage any longer. I couldn’t raise my daughter to believe that the way David treated me was the way a man should treat his wife.
    A week later, I found myself hiring a lawyer and signing the lease on a small apartment near my work.

    I would never have come back to Colorado at all, except for my mother’s declining health. My sister Patricia tried to help, but she had her own husband and children to take care of.
    Zoe and I were relatively mobile, I had a job that was in demand, and there was a silver lining in getting away from Seattle and David for a while, so I packed us up and moved us back into my mother’s house.
    A few months later, we moved Mom into a treatment facility, where she stayed until her death.
    And now, in spite of my vow to never come back to my hometown all those years ago, here I was. Reliving my awkward past in the very house where I had grown up.

    S ighing , I flipped