Page 38 of Jacob

Jacob

“Nothing Else Matters.” The reason Jacob played guitar—Nothing Else Matters. The only song he knew every word to—Nothing Else Matters. Sure, he knew bits and pieces to others, but word-for-word, inflection for inflection, he knewNothing Else Matters.

All for Sparrow. It was her song—always would be her song. Nothing, except lollipops, made him think of her more thanNothing Else Matters. Standing on that make-shift stage, in that biker bar, before all of Ohio and Dash, he serenaded her.

He’d thought the lollipop arrangement was a grand gesture. He’d thought buying her something cute, something personal, would win her over. That’d been what he’d seen his brothers do. That’d been what all the other Ol’ Ladies seemed to want. Not Sparrow. She was different. So, he had to do something different.

The possibility that she might bitch him out, pull the cord, or otherwise humiliate him for singing this song to her did cross his mind. Hell, it had his stomach gnarled in knots. He had to risk it, if he didn’t he’d spend who knows how long wondering what would’ve been.

Watching her take off from behind the bar, he’d almost stopped singing. It was all he could do to stay on stage as she headed for that door. He’d expected her to fight. He never anticipated she’d run away before he had a chance to utter a line. But then he sang and he knew he had her hooked.

He couldn’t make out her expression. The bar lights were too low, and the lone spotlight on him made it hard to see much of anything. However, as long as she kept listening, he’d keep singing.

They were the longest six and a half minutes of his life.

When the lyrics ended, but the music played, he stayed on stage watching her, almost daring her.Your move.What would she do? The DJ cut the song, and thanked Romeo, calling a list of names to the stage.

She ran.

“No, you don’t,” he mumbled as he jumped down from the stage. She could stop writing to him. She could try to return his lollipops, but he drew the line at rejecting his serenade. He didn’t sing to just anyone.

Well, okay, he sang to a few girls in high school. Chicks dug guitars. However, not one of them gotNothing Else Matters. That was Sparrow’s song. He’d never sung that to anyone else, and he’d be damned if she’d run away from him when he’d just sang it in front of an entire bar just for her.

Jacob charged through the crowd. He didn’t quite shove people out of the way, but he wasn’t exactly gentle.

“Fucking nailed it,” Dash called out when he approached the table they’d shared with the women who arrived shortly before them.

“That was amazing.” The brunette reached for him, and he shrugged her off. No time for her. He had a mission. His gaze fixated on the door Sparrow went through. She’d left the bar, out into the parking lot. He had to get out of there if he wanted to catch her, and that clingy bitch would just slow him down.

He exploded through the door, causing the prospect to jump back from his post. “The fuck?” he asked, but Jacob didn’t bother to answer, he had other priorities.

Jacob scanned the parking lot for her as anticipation strangled him. It didn’t take long for him to spot the messy curls swaying in their loose ponytail as she speed walked away. She’d gotten a good ten feet into the lot. Without giving the young biker a second thought, he sprinted after her.

It’d been a few years, and a pack and a half of cigarettes a day, since he’d played high school football. He wasn’t as fast as he once was, and his legs protested his demand on them. However, he pressed on.

The pounding of his boots against the pavement thundered in his own ears, so when she peered over her shoulder at him, only to gape at him wide-eyed, he shouldn’t have been surprised. He must have been a sight barreling toward her. The scared expression, and the fact that he’d closed in, had him skidding to a stop.

“Sparrow.” He reached for her and his fingers curled around her arm, sliding down toward her wrist as she turned toward him.

Despite the cloudy night casting shadows on her face in the dimly lit lot, all he saw was confusion in her expression. Stepping into her personal space, wanting to get a better look at her, he scanned her features.

Rapidly, her eyes shifted back and forth as though she were searching his face for something before she seemed to give up and squeezed them shut. “What are youdoing?”

Furrowing his brow, he took hold of both her hands and squeezed.How more fucking obvious did she need him to be? Now she needed him to fucking say it?“Showing you.”

When she pulled, he resisted at first. Everything inside him screamed to hold on but the look on her face. The pleading expression, even half-hidden, had him relenting and her fingers slid over his palms, leaving tiny electric sparks in their wake.

She brought those hands to either side of her face, pulling the skin taut. “Why?” she asked in an exasperated tone before she turned and walked deeper into the lot.

“What do you mean, why?” He couldn’t begin to fathom that question as he followed behind her, feeling like a lost puppy.

“It makes no sense—you’re Fury, I’m a Roughneck,” she challenged over her shoulder as she marched away from him.

He balked but bit his tongue. Her loyalty to her father’s club, to her man’s soon-to-be club, but they weren’t loyal to her. She deserved better than that.

“You’re in Montana and I’m in Ohio,” she continued as she kept walking.

Again, he held back his immediate response to challenge the weak argument. Her location could be changed just as easily as her club affiliation. She was a woman. She wasn’t a damn patch and she’d never hold a patch. She wasn’t an Ol’ Lady, she was a club daughter. While that meant something to Odin’s Fury, from what he’d seen, that meant shit to the Roughneck Riders. So her location meant fuck-all as well.

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