Read Wanted: Devil Dogs MC Online
Authors: Evelyn Glass
Wanted: Devil Dogs MC
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
WANTED copyright @ 2016 by Evelyn Glass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
“What do you mean she’s in the hospital?” Isabel walked away from her circle of laughing friends to better hear what the faceless woman on the other end of the phone was saying to her.
“I know this must come as a bit of a shock, she’d been doing so well, but these things tend to go one way or another pretty quickly.” The kind voice did nothing to assuage the rapid beating of Isabel’s heart.
“What things? I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about. I spoke to her a couple of days ago and she was fine and now you’re telling me she’s in the ICU. What happened?” Isabel thought about the most likely explanation: her mother had hurt herself doing repairs on the Victorian boarding house that was her pride and joy. “Did she fall off a ladder or something? Has she broken anything?” The idea of her mother immobilized was pretty impossible to imagine. Caroline Bishop hadn’t been still a day in her life; she wouldn’t know what do with a broken arm or leg.
The pause on the other end of the line was so long it made Isabel wonder if she had lost the connection.
“She hasn’t broken anything, Miss Bishop.” The tone of the kindly nurse was suddenly uncertain.
“Issy, you coming? We’re going to be late for class.” Amy waved her over as she and the rest of their little group started heading towards the medics’ building at the far end of the quad.
“I’ll catch up with you guys.” Isabel waved them on, before going back to her cell. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“Miss Bishop, I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized you weren’t aware of your mother’s condition.”
Condition, the word was laden with possibilities Isabel didn’t want to consider.
“What condition? What are you talking about?’ The frustration in her voice was clear and she didn’t do anything to hide it, a fact she would regret later, but was too caught up to think about just then. “Look, this must be some kind of a mistake.”
The noise of rustling as the nurse goes through her paperwork is a welcome distraction to the sound of Isabel’s blood pumping through her body as if it were trying to escape. Finally the nurse found the page she was looking for. “I’m speaking with Isabel Bishop, only daughter of Caroline Bishop residing at No 11, Skyline Drive?”
“Yes, that’s correct.” Isabel shook her head as she confirmed it, still not understanding what was going on. “But I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why is my mother in hospital?”
“It would be much easier to explain in person, when you get here,” the nurse said as if it were a foregone conclusion.
“Get there? I’m in Dallas! I have a class that I’m already late for. I can’t just come to Chicago!” Isabel looked towards the direction her friends had already disappeared off into. Rationally, she knew she was rambling, that she was in shock, but it was hard to be rational when it felt like your life was about to change.
“We don’t know how much longer she’ll be conscious for and she’s been asking for you.” The nurse’s voice was soothing, as if that would soften the content of what she was saying. “She’s very sick, Isabel.”
Images of her mother ran through Isabel’s mind. Caroline Bishop was a force of nature. She was vital, beautiful, the center of any party, the focus of the boarding house that she had run for so many years. In her late forties, she looked ten years younger. She was fit and healthy and the most capable person Isabel had ever known. She couldn’t imagine her mother unconscious, lying in a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her. The images just didn’t make any sense.
“How bad is it?” Isabel gripped her cellphone hard in her hands, frightened she might fall if she let go.
“How soon can you get here?” There was no mistaking the tone in the nurse’s voice; Isabel had heard it time and time again at the hospital where she was doing some of her training.
“It’s terminal.” The voice reaches Isabel’s ears from far away, pulling her out of her memories.
“Sorry?” She blinks her brown eyes wide, suddenly very awake.
The older man gives her a strange look, as if he’s wondering if he should be dealing with an actual adult instead of the doe-eyed twenty-two year old in front of him. “Your pipes, they’re terminal.”
He gestures with his wrench and Isabel follows it with her eyes to the floor of the basement, her basement, which is now submerged in two inches of water.
“It doesn’t look like they’ve been updated since this place was built.” The plumber shakes his head in disbelief, as if he can’t imagine how anyone could be so careless. “The house needs a complete overhaul, starting here. Otherwise this won’t be the first leak you’re going to have.” He gives her a warning look as if to emphasize his point.
There’s no need; Isabel is already well aware of how dire the situation is. She’s the one who’s going to have to bail the water out of the basement as if it were boat. The plumber, or Bob as his uniform loudly proclaims, starts packing up his tools and Isabel is gripped by a mild panic. “Wait! What are you doing? You’re not going to fix it now?” She points at the pipe in the ceiling that is still gushing water.
He sighs heavily as if she were asking him for the moon. “It’s an emergency call-out so that’ll be time and a half.” He gives her an appraising look, not bothering to hide the fact that he clearly doesn’t think she has that kind of cash. Isabel has to admit that he wouldn’t be completely wrong. Bob seems to take pity on her, seeing something in her face that makes him a little more amenable. “I knew your mother.” His voice is gruff and he doesn’t look her in the eye, as if the mere thought of having a crying woman on his hands is enough to terrify him. “I was sorry to hear about her passing.”
“Thank you.” Isabel nods quickly, the words coming out of her mouth automatically, without her even having to think about them anymore. For a while she had puzzled over what the appropriate response was to all the ‘we’re sorry for your loss’ commiserations she’d received in the weeks after her mother’s death. She’d learned pretty quickly that a quick thank you was the best way to close what was inevitably an awkward conversation for all concerned.
“I’m sure I can give you a good deal.” Bob gives her a reassuring smile and an awkward pat on the shoulder.
“Thanks.” She breathes a little easier at the thought of a discount; she sorely needed something to lighten the load right now. “Knock yourself out.” Isabel gestures for him to go ahead before she trudges up the stairs.
She makes her way to the office that had been her mother’s. The room still held all of her things: her pens with their chewed tops, her diary with scrawls that were indecipherable to anyone apart from her. Isabel falls more than sits in the chair that she’d christened as ‘the spinney chair’ when she was a kid playing at working. Now sitting in it, faced with the piles of bills in front of her, it doesn’t seem nearly as much fun as it had back then.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Mom?” She looks at the framed picture on the desk, one of the only items she had brought into the space. It was her favorite picture of her mother laughing at some unknown joke, her head thrown back as she clutched a dark-haired serious-looking girl in her arms, Isabel.
It is still so hard to accept the fact that she is gone, that her mother is gone and she is never coming back. No amount of hoping or wishing will change that. Three months have gone by and the loss of her still hits Isabel with such force. It’s like a weight on her chest that makes it hard to breathe.
She rubs her temples, forcing herself not to cry. If she succumbed to that feeling every time she thought about her mother, she wouldn’t be able to function and that is exactly what she needs to do now. Now she’s the only person she can rely on; there is no one else. She is alone.
Isabel takes a deep breath and plunges into the pile of bills in front of her. Electricity, gas, water, taxes, taxes, and more taxes, the mortgage repayments – everything is behind; it is all way behind and way past due. It had taken a while to understand where all the money had gone. The Bishops had never been flush but they’d been comfortable. Isabel’s father had been a cop and his pension still comes through every month but it isn’t a fortune – being killed in the line of duty apparently doesn’t buy your family any kind of real security after the fact.
It’s funny; thinking about her father has never really made Isabel sad, because she barely knew him. He had been shot and killed when she was only four. She has no real memory of him, nothing other than the vague silhouette of him drawn from her memories and the stories her mother used to tell. Caroline Bishop had only been in love once.
When Isabel had asked her why she’d never remarried or even dated anyone else – it wasn’t as if her mother lacked admirers, after all – she looked at Isabel as if she were mad. “Because I’m still married to your father.” She held up the finger where she still wore his ring and that had been the end of the conversation.
Isabel often wonders if she will ever love someone like her mother had loved her father. It seemed unlikely – theirs was a love from another time. Unbidden, thoughts of Mike filter into Isabel’s mind and she pushes them away. That is a whole other can of worms she isn’t ready to deal with just yet. He’d been her closest friend in Dallas, but the night before she’d got the call about her mother they had slept together. They had both had too much to drink at a party, but Isabel knew that was a poor excuse for ruining what she had thought would be a life-long friendship. Now Mike seems to want to take their relationship to the next level and Isabel avoids his calls.
Since that night, he has offered to come to Chicago and help her with the boarding house any number of times, but she knows she has no intention of ever taking him up on it. Doing so would send completely the wrong signal and confuse things even more. But that wasn’t the only reason that she is avoiding Mike’s calls; he also has a habit of asking her the question she can’t answer. Isabel thinks back to their last conversation.
“When are you coming back?” His tone wasn’t accusatory, just expectant.
“I don’t know, Mike. There’s still so much to sort out here.” Isabel had been in the middle of trying to figure out her mother’s booking system when he’d called and it felt like she was trying to understand Greek.
“You’re the best student in the class. I think this is pretty much the definition of extenuating circumstances. I bet if you asked the school, they’d let you repeat the year once you’re done in Chicago.” His tone was soft but it wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned her return as if it were a foregone conclusion.
“I don’t know when I’m going to be ‘done,’ Mike.” She’d raised her voice, the floodgates of her frustration, pain, and sadness over the previous few days had needed a release and he had been the nearest punching bag. “My mother is dead, Mike. She’s dead and I didn’t even know that she was sick! And now I have this house, this business. I have tenants and I have no idea what the hell it is that I’m doing! I’m fighting my way through the medical bills that have taken pretty much every last cent we had so right now I can’t even afford a plane ticket back to Dallas, even if I wanted one. So the answer is I don’t know, Mike. I don’t know when I’m going to be ‘done.’”
She paused for breath, sniffing hard against the inevitable onslaught of tears. Crying was something she’d become very good at since she’d lost her mom. She’d managed to keep it all in while her mother was dying in front of her in the hospital bed; she’d even managed to remain stoic and strong during the funeral. It was only once all the well-wishers had left and she was finally alone in the house with Jamie, the house that had always been filled with love and laughter and noise and the smell of her mother, that Isabel had allowed herself to cry. She had turned it into a rule, she wouldn’t cry in front of anyone, only when she was alone. It was the only way that she could stop herself from mourning her mother 24/7.
“Issy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.” The kindness in Mike’s voice made her feel like a complete bitch for letting rip at him. “I just miss you. I miss us.”
Isabel swallowed hard. She wasn’t sure that one night together constituted an ‘us’ but now wasn’t the time to have that particular debate.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off like that. I know you were just trying to help.” She sighed deeply, rubbing her tired eyes as her mother’s scrawl swam in front of her. “You’re a good friend, Mike.”
“I hope I’m more than that.” He paused, as if he were expecting her to say something. “You know when you want to come back, whenever that is, I can get you a flight.”
“I know.” She smiled into her cellphone. Mike’s family was old money – Texas oil – and he had always been generous with his cash, but never flashy. He was handsome, rich, and sweet; most women would fall at his feet. But Isabel wasn’t most women. “And you know I don’t like to take favors from friends.”
Mike barked a laugh and she could almost hear him shaking his head at her. It was a discussion they’d had more than once. “Then don’t think of it as a favor; think of it as a loan. You can pay me back when you’re a rich and famous thoracic surgeon.”
Isabel smiled; he had said ‘when’ not ‘if’ she became a surgeon. His certainty was enviable, something she had once possessed. She had been so sure for pretty much all of her life she wanted to be a doctor. She’d studied hard and, despite thinking that they didn’t have the money for college, her mother had somehow found the cash. To this day Isabel still hadn’t been able to figure out where her mother had come up with it.
After college, Isabel had been accepted to medical school. She’d had her pick from Stanford to Columbia, but the only school that offered her what she needed – a full-ride scholarship – was Dallas, so in the end it had been a no-brainer. She’d worked so hard for so long and then when she got the call about her mom, it was as if everything had stopped. Her world had flipped on a dime. Now she didn’t know what she was going to do, if she would ever be able to go back to school, if she’d ever be a doctor.
“So how’s the sale going? Any interest yet?” Mike was filling the silence, knowing her mind was elsewhere. He knew her far too well.
Isabel chewed her bottom lip, not wanting to lie to him but knowing what his reaction would be to the truth. “Ummm…pretty slow actually.”
“Issy, I thought you were going to speak to realtors.” There was no judgment in Mike’s voice but it hurt just the same.
“I was, but the house isn’t in any fit state to sell at the moment. It needs a lot of work done before I would be able to get anything close to market value for it.” Isabel knew her point was a valid one, but it wasn’t the only reason she hadn’t called any of the realtors her mother’s lawyer had recommended to her.
In the past, Isabel had never understood why her mother hadn’t sold the house once her father had died. They could have downsized. Her mom wouldn’t have had to worry about mortgages or tenants or any of the stuff she knew must have kept her mother awake at night. It was only now, that her mother had left the house to her, that Isabel started to understand her reasoning. The house was inextricably linked to her mother. Aside from her clothes and her room, which Isabel hadn’t been able to bring herself to clear out yet, it was the only thing Isabel had left of her. Her mother had loved that house and selling it to a stranger to live in or, worse, knock down just seemed wrong.
Rationally, she knew her mother had never wanted her to leave medical school, that she had never thought Isabel would have to run the house. But Isabel couldn’t see any way around it, not at the moment, anyway. So many times Caroline Bishop had encouraged her to make something of herself, to follow her dreams, to have great adventures. Out of habit, her hand went to the pocket of her jeans where the letter her mother had written her now remained. She kept it with her at all times, as if it would make her feel just a little closer to the woman she had loved more than anything else in the world.
“You know I’m here if you need me, Issy.” Mike’s tone was soft, leaving Isabel under no illusion that he wasn’t just talking about help with selling the house.
“I know. Thanks, Mike. Talk later.” Isabel ended the conversation before they could go any deeper down a path she wasn’t ready for yet. She wondered if she ever would be.
Isabel had a habit of getting involved with guys where there was no hope of a relationship, she had always been so focused on school, on her goals for the future that men had taken a distant back seat. More than once, she’d slipped out of a guy’s bed in the early hours of the morning without leaving a note or a number. Her friends teased her, telling her she was as bad as the guys they had slept with only never to hear from again. She never denied it; it was just the way she was. She didn’t do relationships, didn’t need them. Finishing school and getting her career kick started were too important for anything else to get in the way.