Unattainable

  Unattainable

  (Undeniable #3)

  by

  Madeline Sheehan

  Edited by Pam Berehulke

  Cover by Meredith Blair

  Copyright © 2013 by Madeline Sheehan

  Smashwords Edition

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to www.smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve got a lot to say, so bear with me…

  I want to thank my street team: Ellie, Heather, Hillary, Virginia, Courtney, Shorty, and Karinna. You girls aren’t just my cheerleaders and my support system, you are the very best friends a girl could have. Thank you for everything. What would this crazy writer do without you? I really don’t want to find out.

  And to my editor, Pam Berehulke, my very favorite grammar, caps, and tenses Nazi, who takes my filthy, ellipses-ridden manuscripts, dumps them into a washbasin and, with her bar of soap and washboard in hand, scrubs the holy fuck out of them until they’re oh-so-pretty, shiny, and, most importantly, clean enough to eat off of.

  And to Jovana, Pam, and Alyssa, who drop everything for me, who are always available at any hour of the day to answer all my stupid questions, and who put every bit as much energy and love into my books as I do; I got nothin’ but love for ya.

  And to my friends and family, to my husband and my son, I know how much it sucks when I’m absent from the world, day after day, staring at a computer screen, immersed in the lives of my fictional characters, but I also know that you know how important that part of my life is, that I wouldn’t be me without it. So, thank you from the bottom of my heart, for accepting me and all my flaws, for watching over me and taking care of me while I knock these screaming stories from my system. And thanks for picking up all my slack as well. No one likes a dirty house.

  And to my girls, my fellow authors, to Gail, Karina, Claribel, Emmy, Cindy, Syreeta, and Trevlyn. What in the fuck would I do without you? Who knows better than you the trials and tribulations? So thank you, thank you, thank you, for the hours upon hours spent listening, commiserating, complaining, shit talking, pumping each other up, planning, and plotting, thank you for all of it. Thank you for being the kindest, most caring, heart-driven women in this industry. I’m lucky to know you; I’m even luckier to have become your friend.

  And to Deuce’s Babes, to all my readers, past, present and future, to the wonderful, kind, caring, funny, fun-loving women and men I’ve had the pleasure of meeting through my books, THANK YOU. What an incredible journey this has been and what an honor it is to know my words are being read by YOU. My gratitude is all yours.

  Last, but not at all least, thank you to Cole “Deuce” West. Deuce and I have spent many late coffee-glugging nights together, many early bleary-eyed mornings, and many long, boring afternoons spent staring out the window, and yet I’m still every bit as in love with him as the day I met him. Actually, with each passing book, I fall that much more in love with him. He’s not an easy man to love, he makes a lot of mistakes, and he pisses me off more than he makes me smile. But at the end of the day, despite his age, he’s still a beast in bed, and really, who would I be without him? I’m glad I’ll never have to know.

  Long live the Hell’s Horsemen!

  “Biker Born, Biker Bred and when I die, I’ll be Biker Dead.”

  All my love,

  Madeline Sheehan xx

  Dedication

  For Christina Collie

  Ripper in the front,

  ZZ in the back,

  Dirty in the mouth.

  This book is all yours…with love.

  PROLOGUE

  Take one fresh and tender kiss

  Add one stolen night of bliss

  One girl, one boy

  Some grief, some joy

  Memories are made of this…

  — Dean Martin

  I’ll always remember the first time I laid eyes on him; the bane of my entire existence. I was eight years old and he was eleven—tall, blond, with deep brown eyes, and when he smiled…dimples.

  Most importantly, he’d been sweet to me. He paid attention to me when no one else did.

  “Hey,” he said, bending down beside me, smiling. I smiled back. He was the first kid I’d seen since my mom had started bringing me to the club. He looked older than me, but only a few years or so, and he was so cute. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Tegen Louise Matthews,” I said, offering him the teacup I’d just snatched from the lap of my stuffed teddy bear. “You can join us,” I told him, gesturing to my circle of stuffed animals.

  “A tea party with Tegen Louise Matthews,” he said, his smile growing even wider. “I’d love to.” He settled down beside me and crossed his legs into a pretzel. “You got a nickname, Tegen?” he asked. “Or are you just plain Tegen?”

  “Just plain Tegen,” I said, lifting up my teapot and pouring him a generous amount of invisible tea. When I finished pouring my own cup, I lifted it to my lips.

  “Wait,” he said. “You forgot to cheers.”

  I wrinkled up my nose. “Cheers?”

  “Yeah, with your teacup. My little sister always makes me ‘cheers’ before tea. Like this.” Lightly he clicked his plastic cup with mine. “Cheers,” he said, glancing down at his cup then looking back to me. “…Teacup,” he finished, grinning.

  “What?”

  “Teacup,” he repeated. “That’s what I’ll call you. I mean, what other nickname can you give a girl named Tegen who likes to have tea parties with teacups?” He frowned. “Unless you don’t like it?”

  My eyes went wide. “No!” I cried excitedly. “I’ve never had a nickname before and I love it!”

  “Then it’s settled,” he said, holding out his free hand. “Nice to meet you, Teacup. My name is Cage.”

  Despite his young age, he was the lone male figure that actively participated in my life on a regular basis from that point forward.

  But eight-year-old feelings eventually turned into twelve-year-old feelings, and twelve-year-old feelings turned into fourteen-year-old feelings.

  The older I grew, the more I grew to love him until I no longer looked to him as the one stable figurehead in my life, but instead loved him with an intensity that at times bordered on madness.

  Love, they say, has the potential to kill a person if they aren’t careful.

  I wasn’t careful. I let that love blossom uncontrollably until it was in full bloom, exploding from within me, with nowhere to go.

  It wasn’t the same for him. The older he grew, the more he changed.

  Gone was the sweet, caring boy he’d been, and his place…

  He became the cockiest, most self-centered, self-serving, egotistical, narcissistic, and depraved motherfucker I’d ever met in my entire life.

  Which, when I think back on it, is probably why I fell even more in love with him.

  Girls are stupid like that. Falling in love with what they can never have—the untouchable, the seemingly larger than life, the unattainable.

  However, I wasn’t alone in my stupidity.

  Nearly every female that crossed Cage’s path fell immediately into a big bucket of fucking stupid. Young, old
, and everything in between, it didn’t matter. The minute they saw his smile, heard his smooth-as-whiskey drawl, watched the fluid way he moved, they went instantly stupid.

  As more time passed, my feelings, unreciprocated and with nowhere to go, began to fester and rot until I couldn’t take it anymore and took matters into my own hands.

  And did something really, really stupid.

  I bit down on my lip as my body burned, trying to adjust to his harsh entrance.

  “Fuck, you’re tight,” Cage mumbled drunkenly, pulling nearly all the way out of me. As hard as I fought it, his movements hurt and a whimper escaped me.

  My body, despite the horror I was feeling, was slowly adjusting. Wet warmth flowed through me, and when he slid back inside, this time there was no pain, only a slight discomfort.

  “Fuuuuuuck,” he groaned, grinding his hips, a movement that made my stomach flip with a brand new feeling. A good one. One that had me forgetting what was really happening between Cage and me; fooling me into thinking this was going to go the way I’d planned. That I was going to give Cage my virginity, something that was going to make him realize that I was the girl for him. That no one would ever love him more than I would.

  His hand slid into my hair, tightly gripping a handful, while his other hand clamped down on my hip. His face dropped into the crook of my neck and I turned my head, seeking him, needing to see him, needing to confirm that my feelings were reciprocated, but his grip on my hair tightened, holding me in place.

  Then his hips pulled back.

  I gasped as he slammed back inside of me. Our bodies slapped together, my breath returned and…

  He pulled back. And slammed back into me.

  “Shit, Teacup,” he muttered, increasing his pace. “I can feel everything. Your pussy is a motherfuckin’ vice.”

  Which, judging from his tone, was obviously a good thing.

  And stupidly led me into further believing Cage would want me past tonight.

  “So good, babe,” he breathed against my skin, his body repeatedly meeting mine, his movements growing faster and faster. I held my breath against the onslaught of what was happening inside me, both physically and emotionally.

  Cage was everywhere now. He was inside of me, inside my body and my heart. It was awkward and uncomfortable, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing but it didn’t really matter. Because it was Cage and it was me and I’d wanted this for so long, wanted him for as long as I could remember, and so awkward and uncomfortable were small prices to pay for finally having what I’d always wanted.

  And then, almost as soon as it had begun, it was over. Cage was groaning, having pulled out of me and I felt him finishing, felt the moisture on my belly as his body jerked above me.

  It took all of a minute for him to roll off me, to turn on his side, to breathe in deeply and breathe out heavily.

  And then he was snoring.

  “Cage?” I whispered.

  I lay there unmoving for several heart-pounding minutes, not knowing what to do until what he’d left on my stomach had begun drying, making the tiny hairs on my body feel stiff and pulled.

  Rolling out of bed, wincing as I did, sore, feeling my pulse pounding between my legs, I walked stiffly to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Swallowing hard, I glanced down at myself.

  Gross.

  Not only was I covered from breast to pelvis in half-dried semen, but my own blood was smeared across my inner thighs.

  It was then I realized he’d never kissed me.

  Which, in the end, killed the girl I’d once been. It left me broken, stuck, unable to move forward. And no matter how many years had passed, I was unable to let go.

  When it came to Cage West, my mistakes were plenty and my regrets were numerous. If my past were a person, I would grab the throat of that motherfucker, drag her ass down Re-do Street, and once I’d beaten the ever-loving shit out of her, I’d stand over her beaten-down, broken body and say:

  “You stupid bitch. You ignorant, stupid bitch. Love isn’t a fucking answer. It hurts more than it doesn’t, it’s harder than it is easy, it takes work, guts, and perseverance.”

  Most importantly—what I would stress the very most—is that love doesn’t solve a goddamn thing. Love doesn’t erase a broken heart, and it sure as fuck doesn’t change people.

  But no matter how old, how flimsy, how frayed the rope of love is, it does keep you tethered to the people you love.

  And I was forever tied to Cage.

  Would I change it if I could? Hell fucking yes, I would.

  But we don’t get to pick our families or choose who we fall in love with. And we all have our crosses to bear: our stories, our loves, and our losses.

  And this is mine.

  Well, ours actually.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Either you answer that fuckin’ thing or I’m throwin’ it out the window, Tegen.”

  Blinking sleepily, I focused on the angry face mere inches from mine, wondering what the fuck he was talking about.

  “Piss off,” I muttered, turning my face into my pillow. “It’s not morning yet.”

  This time when my phone started both ringing and vibrating from its place on my nightstand, I heard it loud and clear.

  “Tegen! That’s the fourth call in a fuckin’ row!”

  “Shit!” I yelled into my pillow. “Stop bitching and just answer it!”

  “I can’t!” he yelled back. “It’s your fuckin’ mom!”

  The phone stopped ringing and I heard him let out an angry sigh.

  Almost instantly, it started ringing again.

  “TEGEN, ANS—”

  Cursing, I jumped up, grabbed my pillow and swung it up in the air, then slapped it down over his face.

  “Shut. Up,” I hissed, already reaching for my phone.

  Pressing Answer, I lifted the phone to my ear. “Hello,” I snapped.

  “Tegen?”

  “Mom.” I sighed, instantly feeling bad. “Is everything okay? It’s not even light out.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s just…I wanted to catch you before you made plans for the long weekend. I thought maybe you could come home for a few days.”

  Reaching up, I rubbed the heel of my palm over my eyes and sighed.

  “Hawk’s coming home, isn’t he?”

  James “Hawk” Young, lifer in the Hell’s Horsemen Motorcycle Club, was the father of my half brother, Christopher Kelley. Christopher was four years old and nearly two decades younger than me. Despite his dark red hair, green eyes, and freckles—traits our very Irish mother had given us both—he looked just like his extremely good-looking dad. Right down to his brooding eyes and the hard line of his mouth.

  “He is,” she said softly. “And I’m just not ready. I just…I have enough to deal with, with Jase. Please come home, Tegen.”

  Herein lay the problem. Despite how good-looking Hawk was, my mother wanted nothing to do with him. She couldn’t bear even the brief encounter to hand over Christopher for a few days. One might think that my traveling all the way from San Francisco, California, to Miles City, Montana, just to hand my half brother over to his father and comfort my mother in his absence, was a little extreme…it actually wasn’t. Not after what my mother had gone through.

  When she was nearly nine months pregnant with Christopher, my mother had been shot in the head by her boyfriend’s wife. Not Hawk’s wife; Hawk wasn’t married. But Jason “Jase” Brady, also a member of the Hell’s Horsemen, was.

  Actually, my mother had still been married to my father when she’d met Jase.

  My mom, Dorothy Kelley, had gotten pregnant at fifteen, given birth at sixteen, and was forced by my grandparents to marry my father. My father, a truck driver, was rarely home and when he was, was more interested in television and beer than my mother and me. When I was four, my mother met Jase.

  She fell in love with Jase almost instantly, unconcerned at first that he was married with three small children, because she
thought he’d eventually leave his wife.

  It didn’t happen. But my mother stuck it out. She worked at the Hell’s Horsemen clubhouse, cleaning up after the boys, cooking for them and doing their laundry, enabling her to carry on her affair with Jase as discreetly as possible.

  Eventually my mother left my father, who’d subsequently hopped in his truck, left Miles City, and never returned. She cut ties with my grandparents and Jase moved both my mother and me into an apartment in town, a nice four-unit condo where we had a front door, a driveway, and a backyard, and everything continued much the same as before.

  I hated it. I hated watching her throw her entire life away for a man who would never truly be hers, a man who would always go home at night to his wife and children and leave my mother alone, usually crying for him. Knowing that no matter how much she loved Jase, if he never left his wife she would always be considered a club whore, nothing more, and yet she still stayed.

  That’s how I grew up.

  The fatherless kid of a club whore, I watched my mother cater to a man who, in my opinion, didn’t really love her, watched her work her ass off for a club full of criminal bikers who lied, cheated, and more than likely killed their way through life.

  And that was it. I had no one else, no other family to turn to.

  I left Miles City, desperate to get away from the club life and all it entailed, the day after my high school graduation. With a full scholarship to San Francisco University and an internship already in place at a small newspaper, I had no plans to ever return.

  After leaving, I’d been more than ready to get rid of “the look” that had defined me all my life, that look consisting of braces, glasses, secondhand clothing two sizes too big for me, and wiry red curls that took a day and a half just to tame in any sort of way.

  One of my first friends in college, Grace, a true hippie raised on a commune in Northern California, had taken me under her wing and “crazied me up a bit,” as she liked to call it. So now I was free of both glasses and braces, my crazy hair had no choice but to remain in dreadlocks, and my body was a work of fucking art. Every single one of my tattoos I loved—colorful, large, and intricate, taking up both my arms, my back, chest, stomach, and both thighs. And my piercings…eh, I was fickle. Aside from getting my ear holes stretched a little more every so often, I’d alternate which ones I wore because I liked to change it up a bit every now and then.