Page 51 of Wife Number One

I shook my head. “As long as nobody else knows. I don’t need everyone giving me shit.”

“I don’t think they would…”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

He chuckled. “Okay, fine. You’re lucky it’s me who collects the mail and saw all those enrollment papers you had sent. I still don’t know why you sent them to the clubhouse. You could have just downloaded them.”

Easy for him to say. “Yeah, well, I went and bought a laptop after that, didn’t I? It’s not like I’m a computer genius like you are.”

Fang rolled his eyes. “Having an email address and a Facebook page doesn’t exactly make me an IT whiz. I don’t know how you made it to thirty-five without either.”

I smiled at him, making it overexaggerated and sickly sweet. “Was too busy fucking your sister.”

Fang flicked up his blinker and spun the wheel to take the bluff road that would eventually lead to the woods. The clubhouse was nestled behind thick trees, deep inside them, surrounded by an even more robust fence line. Fang didn’t even bother replying to my barb. We both knew I’d never met his sister. If he even had one. I didn’t fucking know. I wasn’t in the habit of going around the club and asking all of the members about their mommies and daddies and how many offspring they’d birthed.

It was hard enough to keep up with the amount of devil spawn the club members had produced over the past few years. Half the time the clubhouse was like a fucking nursery.

At least during the day. No kids were allowed after dark unless we were in lockdown, and thankfully, we hadn’t had one of those in ages. I couldn’t think of anything worse than being trapped at the club with kids twenty-four seven.

I mentally urged the van to hurry up, my results waiting for me on the shitty old laptop I’d bought when I’d first decided to take the course. It had my login details saved on it. Once I got home, I’d be able to check my results. They should have come in at nine, and it was already eleven.

I can’t believe I’d fucking gotten arrested. Of all fucking days.

Fuck Chaos. If I’d known it was him getting his ass kicked at that diner last night, I would have left him to become hamburger. Walked right on past him dying on the floor, the way he had when the fucker had sent a bullet straight into my goddamn leg.

By the time Fang drove us up the tree-lined road and waited for the massive iron gates with the Slayers’ emblem to open, my leg jumped with nerves and excess energy.

“Settle,” Fang warned. “Getting there faster ain’t gonna change what’s on those results.”

Easier said than done. I’d spent four fucking months taking this class. I’d never studied for anything in my life, and learning how to do that at thirty-five had felt like pushing a boulder up a hill.

But I’d done it because it was the first step in getting into medicine.

I clamped down on my bottom lip, despising that the stupid fucking dream was even in my head when it was so ridiculous to begin with.

Even Fang didn’t know about that. I’d told him I was bored and just wanted to take the GED to prove to myself I could. I’d told him I hated that I felt like school had beaten me and I wanted to prove I could beat it right back now that I was older and hopefully slightly smarter than I’d been at fifteen.

Though that was probably debatable.

But I hadn’t dared tell him the real reason I’d wanted to do it was because medicine and healing had, somewhere along the line, become all I could think about. It had started long before Chaos had been scraped off the side of the road and left in our basement for me to fix. I’d been sewing up minor bullet wounds and gashes the club members had come back to the house with for years. Somebody had to, and most of the guys were too busy fainting or gagging over the sight of blood. I’d found it an oddly interesting rush to have someone’s life in my hands without having a gun pressed to their head.

Though having the muzzle pressed up against Chaos’s skull last night had been pretty fucking sweet too.

I’d watched hours of YouTube videos on all sorts of medical topics. Whatever I could find. It was all fascinating to me.

I watched until watching wasn’t enough. I itched to learn more. To learn in a real setting where I could actually develop proper skills.

I’d never wanted a nine-to-five job, but suddenly there was something in my life worth more than going on gun runs, riding my bike, and fucking women.

So I’d enrolled in the stupid GED class because I needed that in order to get into any sort of medical course.

But first, I had to pass.

“You’re going to pass,” Fang said, like that big fucker could read my mind.

“I know,” I quipped back, trying to sound like the cocky prick I normally was.

But it was hard with this. I was so far out of my depth, and I knew it.

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