Page 8 of Ace

She seemed too entranced to do anything but obey.

He laughed at the Hello Kitty phone case, pushed past the lock screen and went to her contacts, entering his own number as Daddy before shooting off a text to his own phone so he’d have her number as well, and handing it back to her. “Text me before you go to bed, and we will make a plan for tomorrow.” His phone went back into his pocket and he grabbed her hand, pulling her from the bathroom to the main suite and out into the long hallway. “Come on, little one, let’s get you home.”

Ace

It was an hour later when he made it back to Utopia, and an hour and ten minutes before he strode into the new King’s Tavern, aka Daddy’s Bar and Grill. The place was packed, far more so than he had ever seen it. Men dressed in everything from business suits to cargo shorts sat on barrel jugs, drinking beer from the bottle, or sipping whiskey on ice. The demographic was all male, save for the one lone woman with black hair down her back, dressed to kill in a red leather get-up.

He grabbed an empty seat at the bar and pulled up to greet his brother and fellow Sin City Saints member, King.

“Looks busy tonight,” he said, making small talk as he gazed around the bar, expecting to see Knox or Baze or Axel but finding no familiar faces besides King’s. He said as much and King just grunted. “There’s some big Little hullabaloo tonight. Which means a bunch of unattended Daddies with free time and free money.”

King plopped a beer on the bar in front of Ace and popped the top off. Ace raised it, took a swig and held it up in mid-air as if to toast. “Well, here’s to that.” He chugged about half of the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “How are you liking the new place?” Utopia had only been open for two weeks, and of those two weeks, Ace had been busy with his job at the aquarium and with the trial. There hadn’t been much of a chance to hang out with his brothers. Now he needed advice and he had no idea where to find any of them.

King swept his eyes around the bright, chainy-looking space and shrugged. “I’m thankful and appreciative, I really am, don’t think for a minute that I’m not, but this is just a stopping point for me while I get money to rebuild. These people”—he waved his hand round the bar—“are nice enough, and most of them are good tippers, but I haven’t seen any of the regulars in a month. I just don’t see them coming into a place like this to get an overpriced craft beer when they could knock back a cheap pitcher of Bud at one of the other thirty biker bars in town. Besides, Daddy’s Bar and Grill? Come on, do I look like a Daddy to you?”

“Well, you look old enough to be someone’s Daddy,” Ace joked.

King scowled. “My Lorna would have gotten a kick out of this. She might have even loved it here, and while there’s comfort in that thought, it also hits like a kick in the teeth, just amplifying the pain because I can’t share it with her or even tell her about it.”

King’s blue eyes misted up and Ace felt bad for asking so many questions. Thankfully, or not so thankfully, King narrowed his eyes and changed the subject.

“What about you? How do you feel about… all of this?”

Ace considered confiding in him for a moment but decided instead to answer more generically. “I like the people. I’m happy for Axel and Jilly finding each other and Jilly’s found family for taking us in when we were up against a wall. They are all really cool people and no matter what happens here, I hope they’re in my life for a really long time.”

“But…” King prompted, obviously not buying what he was selling.

“But…” Ace was trying to put his thoughts into words when Knox appeared beside him. “Hey, King. Can I get whatever is cold and dark?”

King nodded and put a beer in front of him and Knox clapped Ace on the back. “So, rumor has it you had a young lady here with you today.”

King’s eyebrows shot to his hairline and he leaned against the back of the bar with his arms crossed over his chest, listening.

“It was just a friend. She ran into me and was helping me get cleaned up.” He waved his bandaged hand in the air, hoping they would take the bait and change the subject.

“What’s the other guy look like?” King muttered.

Knox, however, didn’t fall for it. “Luna said she was very nice and very pretty. And not at all Little. She gonna cause a problem?”

“Appearances aren’t everything,” Ace countered. “You can’t know everything about someone just by passing them on the staircase.”

Knox straightened his mouth into a flat line and Ace inwardly cursed himself for his defensiveness. “She’s a friend,” he repeated.

“Do I know this friend?” King asked.

“Lizzie.” Ace knocked back the rest of his beer and motioned for another.

“She’s not a friend,” King observed when he gave it to him. “She’s a woman who has spent the last three years making googly eyes at you while the rest of us wondered when you were gonna get the hint.”

Ace didn’t say anything. He had no rebuttal because he knew King was right.

“She also probably has Little tendencies,” King continued, rendering Ace speechless as he scratched at the label on his beer bottle.

“Well, that’s why she’s just a friend. Because I’m not a Daddy.”

“Bullshit,” King said, fake coughing the word into his hand.

Knox looked from Ace to King and back again, picked up Ace’s beer and grabbed his elbow. “Come on. We’re gonna go sit over here. And you’re going to talk.”