Daire and Aspen

Chapter 16: Aspen

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. If that's true, very soon some people are going to be chipping off the icicles before they can eat. I knew that being with Daire would require me to be part of his MC. He's said he would limit his involvement as much as possible, but when you're the president of a large MC, that wasn't feasible, nor was it a workable long-term solution. I knew if Daire and I were going to make it long-term, I would have to make peace with the club and most of the members.

And I was going to do it my way so there could be no doubt that they were dealing with a different Aspen.

Once I finished renovating the clubhouse so it looked completely different and had a separate playroom for Elly and the other babies, I launched phase two of my plan: the charitable program I had named The Ladies of the Lords Foundation. 

Daire had given me five hundred thousand as seed money and I had big plans for raising more and doing a lot of good in our town and the state for women's shelters and foster homes. As president of a large MC, Daire had connections with numerous other MCs who loved a reason to get together, do some good, have some fun and then party after.

Although I didn't know anything about fundraising, Molly did. She was a professional fundraiser and had promised to help behind the scenes. Her refusal to take a more active role was probably due to wanting to avoid Tacoma, but she denied it every time I brought it up.

"You know when we have meetings at the clubhouse, you might see him," I cautioned her.

"I won't see him," she promised me with an edge to her tone. "I'll just look right through the motherfucking stupid asshole jerk-face and walk on by."

Well, OK then. That attitude didn't start any alarm bells ringing. None at all. Hoo-boy. 

Ever since we'd met for lunch, Molly and I had been calling and texting regularly and seeing each other at least once a week. She was Elly's honorary aunt and the two were crazy about each other. I felt like our friendship was back where it had been before I'd disappeared, and that soothed something in me because I'd really missed our friendship.

Daire had been dating me like crazy, making plans for us as he'd never had to do before. To use an old-fashioned term, he was wooing me. Sometimes our dates were outings with Elly, but most times they were just the two of us -- dinners out or long rides on the bike or walks along the beach with our shoes off and dangling from our fingers. 

During the clubhouse renovation, I'd become good friends with Sarah and Wendy, two of the ol' ladies that had never been mean to me. They had little ones of their own and we exchanged babysitting duties between the three of us so we could go out at different times with our men. I'd introduced Sarah and Wendy to Molly and the four of us also had been having some fun girls' night out evenings. Sarah and Wendy also consulted with me on the other ol' ladies who were solid and didn't have any real loyalty to Jessie, Roseanne and Marley, the three women at the top of my grudge list. There were some other women on it, but those three took top billing, especially since they were unofficially in charge of the ol' ladies since Daire hadn't had an official ol' lady to take over the women.

Marley also happened to be Head's ol' lady, and I wasn't fond of him since he had been so rude to me that day Daire had forced me to come to the clubhouse. Others hadn't been nice, either that day or after Daire had kicked me out of his life when I told him I was pregnant, but almost all of them had apologized sincerely and had gone out of their way to be nice to me since. It was the ones who had apologized only because Daire had forced them to and hadn't been sincere that bothered me. I'd proven I could forgive a lot if there was a sincere apology and changed behavior.

But Head and his ol' lady and Jessie and Roseanne had dogged my steps during the clubhouse renovation, trying to stir up trouble in a very subtle, insidious way that allowed them plausible deniability should Daire ever hear of what they were doing.