Mess Me Up Read online

  Text copyright ©2018 Lani Lynn Vale

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  Since you know how much I dislike writing my dedications, I’ve decided to tell you what’s on my mind right this very moment.

  Random thought of the day, I wish sugar didn’t make you fat. I’ve been thinking about glazed donuts all morning, and I’ve done nothing but contemplate how one would taste. If I went at five in the morning, they’d still be warm. I wouldn’t be able to stop at just one, either. I’d have to eat at least three. And then I’d have to get a cup of milk to go with it…and yeah. Diets suck.

  Happy reading!

  Acknowledgements

  Jeremey Mooney- Model

  Golden Czermak- Photographer

  Danielle Palumbo- My awesome content editor.

  Ellie McLove & Ink It Out Editing- My editors

  Cover Me Darling- Cover Artist

  My mom- Thank you for reading this book eight million two hundred times.

  Cheryl, Kendra, Diane, Leah, Kathy, Mindy, Barbara & Amanda—I don’t know what I would do without y’all. Thank you, my lovely betas, for loving my books as much as I do.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 2

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Author Note:

  What’s Next?

  Other titles by Lani Lynn Vale:

  The Freebirds

  Boomtown

  Highway Don’t Care

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Last Day of My Life

  Texas Tornado

  I Don’t Dance

  The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC

  Lights To My Siren

  Halligan To My Axe

  Kevlar To My Vest

  Keys To My Cuffs

  Life To My Flight

  Charge To My Line

  Counter To My Intelligence

  Right To My Wrong

  Code 11- KPD SWAT

  Center Mass

  Double Tap

  Bang Switch

  Execution Style

  Charlie Foxtrot

  Kill Shot

  Coup De Grace

  The Uncertain Saints

  Whiskey Neat

  Jack & Coke

  Vodka On The Rocks

  Bad Apple

  Dirty Mother

  Rusty Nail

  The Kilgore Fire Series

  Shock Advised

  Flash Point

  Oxygen Deprived

  Controlled Burn

  Put Out

  I Like Big Dragons Series

  I Like Big Dragons and I Cannot Lie

  Dragons Need Love, Too

  Oh, My Dragon

  The Dixie Warden Rejects

  Beard Mode

  Fear the Beard

  Son of a Beard

  I’m Only Here for the Beard

  The Beard Made Me Do It

  Beard Up

  For the Love of Beard

  Law & Beard

  There’s No Crying in Baseball

  Pitch Please

  Quit Your Pitchin’

  Listen, Pitch (10-16-18)

  The Hail Raisers

  Hail No

  Go to Hail

  Burn in Hail

  What the Hail

  The Hail You Say

  Hail Mary

  The Simple Man Series

  Kinda Don’t Care

  Maybe Don’t Wanna

  Get You Some

  Ain’t Doin’ It

  Too Bad So Sad

  Bear Bottom Guardians MC

  Mess Me Up

  Talkin’ Trash (10-2-18)

  How About No (11-6-18)

  My Bad (12-4-18)

  Prologue

  Sometimes life just kicks you in the balls and you have to deal with it.

  -Rome’s secret thoughts

  Rome

  RP’s Biggest Fan,

  I’m not sure how you became my therapist, or how we even got to the point of being pen pals, but I’ll take what I can get.

  I could use a friend.

  So, you want to hear about my life? How it’s nowhere near as glamorous as everyone makes it out to be?

  Where should I start?

  How about the paparazzi. They’re awful. They follow me home. They follow me to work. They follow me to my son’s appointments—though technically, they don’t know he’s my son. Luckily. That was one thing I did manage to do right—keeping him out of the limelight.

  Lucky for me, too. Or, at least for him.

  And if the paparazzi wasn’t bad enough, my ex was only with me for my money—because she knew that I had it.

  If there was one thing I could erase from my life, it would be her.

  But, if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have my son…and at this point, he’s the single bright light in the sea of darkness that is my life.

  Last week she threatened to sue me because I broke the custody agreement we have for our son. Do you want to know what I did? Nothing. Not one damn thing. I stayed at her house while she went away for the day, and I put a drink on her coffee table.

  Let me repeat that…I put a drink on her coffee table.

  Ok, so it was a Coke can, and I didn’t use a coaster… but I’d finished the damn thing. It was completely empty, it wasn’t sweating, and it didn’t leave any sort of mark.

  But, with the way she reacted, you would’ve thought that I’d carved my initials in the table using a screwdriver or something.

  Oh, and let’s not forget what my team manager wants me to do.

  He wants me to pose naked except for a strategically positioned football for Sports Illustrated. When did Sports Illustrated stop focusing on sports in favor of selling what’s sexy?

  You told me last week that you weren’t sure that you were going to write anymore. I realize that this back and forth we have going on isn’t normal, but if it doesn’t bother you, it doesn’t bother me.

  I hope you write to me soon, RP’s Biggest Fan.

  Rome.

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  I do all my ironing in the dryer.

  -Rome’s secret thoughts

  Rome

  “I can’t do this anymore, Rome.” Tara’s sad eyes met mine. “It hurts too much to watch him suffer. I…I have to go.” She transferred my sleeping son into my arms as she spoke.

  I looked at my baby mama,
the woman that I was never really in love with but had given me my son. The same woman who had literally taken everything I’d ever loved away from me.

  First and foremost, she had been the reason I lost my best friend, Tyler.

  “What about Matias?” I asked, trying to think of something, anything, else but Tyler. “What am I going to tell him when he wakes up?”

  She squared her shoulders and then shot me what was her best attempt at a pain-filled expression.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But what I do know is that I can’t watch my baby die. I just can’t.”

  Then she pulled her suitcase into the entry and turned around, going through the door, never once looking back.

  I knew what she was saying was a lie. That whole scene was nothing but a big, fat lie.

  The only reason she stayed with Matias as long as she had was because doing so gave her access to me—and my wallet. I’d been a professional football player when we met, but after I announced my retirement at the end of last season, Tara changed.

  Then I went and joined a motorcycle club, and well…that, as one would say, was all she wrote.

  She thought she’d signed up for a life of fat paychecks, the notoriety of being a professional football player’s wife, and everything else that came with that life. What she did not sign up for was a sick kid, a washed-up football player, and a man who was slowly losing everything he’d been given.

  The one thing that had saved me was my motorcycle club—the Bear Bottom Guardians.

  Bear Bottom, Texas was a small town between Longview and Kilgore, right in the middle of nowhere—at least at first. The town was founded by the MC and growing a hell of a lot faster than anyone ever imagined it would.

  The population had started small—a mere few hundred souls—and had grown to almost twenty times that—and almost all of them had been bikers, their old ladies, and their families.

  Bear Bottom Guardians had been just an idea at first, but slowly over the course of the years since the club had been formed, it’d turned into something much more. A place to be without having to worry about who you were.

  We had a police station. We had a firehouse. We had an excellent school system and several bars. Hell, we even had our own transit system, even if it was just vans instead of real buses.

  And the club was responsible for making this town what it was today.

  Though technically, we were affiliated with the Dixie Wardens, we had broken off from the main club to become more independent—or at least a few of the original founding members had. I’d come later, once all the fun stuff had happened—like telling the Dixie Wardens that we didn’t actually want to be Dixie Wardens. We were the Bear Bottom Guardians MC through and through, now.

  And I wouldn’t even have the Bear Bottom Guardians MC if it wasn’t for my ex-teammate, Linc James. Linc had given me a gift, and he didn’t even know it.

  I’d been struggling with life eight months ago.

  I’d lost nearly everything. My child, my reason for living, had been diagnosed with leukemia. My best friend, the man who had been a constant in my life for the majority of it, hadn’t spoken to me in over four years because of Tara.

  Tara was a lying, deceitful bitch, and the catalyst that caused my life to go down the shitter.

  Then Linc had taken me to a party while we were home that just so happened to be at the Bear Bottom clubhouse.

  That night, I’d made some friends. The little idea of becoming a member of a motorcycle club—a part of a club like Tyler and I had promised each other we’d do one day—had taken root.

  When I’d gotten out of the NFL, retired early due to an injury that just wouldn’t go away—at least that was what the media thought, anyway. The real reason was due to my son being extremely sick, and me not wanting to chance not being able to see or spend time with him while I was working and gone for days and weeks on end.

  I’d been floundering.

  Then one morning, I ran into Liner while I was having breakfast at a diner, and he’d fanned that ember, reminding me that I didn’t have to be alone.

  That was when I started to prospect.

  Six months later, I was a full-blown member of the Bear Bottom Guardians MC, and that was all she wrote.

  My phone pinged, and I looked down at the screen to see a message from Tyler.

  Grinning at the meme he’d sent me, I replied, then dropped my phone onto the coffee table.

  The coffee table that I had to leave clean every time Tara left me with Matias, or else I’d face her wrath.

  Tara hated me—even more so lately—and that was because of one man, Tyler.

  Tyler, my best friend since before I could walk, had been stolen from me. How had he been stolen from me? Because of Tara.

  Tara was a greedy, devious, and cunning woman who didn’t care who or what she had to trample over in her rush to get what she wanted.

  Sure, I wasn’t completely innocent in what happened, but I was only guilty of being stupid, careless and reckless. Stupid for thinking only with my dick that night and careless about who I took to bed. I hadn’t cared who she belonged with, just as long as I was taking someone there. It was ultimately my recklessness, though, for letting a woman that I knew nothing about lead me by my dick to my bed that was my demise.

  I’d been celebrating at my home with a couple of the boys from my team when she walked in. After a few drinks, I’d been drunk and happy, and Tara came on to me.

  Not one to turn a pretty lady down, I took advantage of the easy pickings.

  As it turned out, those easy pickings also happened to be dating Tyler—although I hadn’t known that at the time seeing as we hadn’t exchanged a single detail about each other before we’d hopped into bed.

  The next morning, as I was walking her out, Tyler had been walking in.

  That’s when my friendship with my best friend in the entire world had blown up right in my face.

  Words were said by both parties, me trying to salvage a friendship that I needed more than anything, him saying that what I’d done was unforgivable. And before I could backpedal, Tyler was out of my life.

  Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for Tara.

  Forty weeks later on the dot, a bouncing baby boy had been delivered into the world by a pleased Tara. Although, that had more to do with money and less to do with the fact that she just became a mommy. Unfortunately for me, in her mind, my son would net her a lot of money and influence.

  The sad part is that I wanted nothing to do with Tara, and I never really did.

  If I ever wanted to have Tyler back in my life again—and I prayed that it would happen one day—I had to steer clear of her.

  Which I tried to do…well, at least as much as I could considering that I did have a baby with her.

  But every time I tried to breach the gap with Tyler, he’d just pull farther away.

  It wasn’t until I’d managed to run him out of the city in my desperate attempt to get him to understand that I saw the light. He’d have to be the one who’d come back to me, and it had to be on his terms. Meanwhile, I’d felt like my heart had been ripped out of my body for a couple of reasons.

  First, I no longer had my best friend, the man who had been with me through everything in my life at a time when I needed him more than I ever had.

  Second, my son, Matias Tyler Pierce, wouldn’t know his uncle—my brother, although not by blood.

  Another ping, this time with a message from Tyler’s woman, lit up my phone.

  Reagan: If you’re laughing at that meme he just sent, you’re going to hell.

  Snickering even though I was on the verge of a complete meltdown, I replied back.

  Reagan had been the woman who got through to Tyler. She healed him, she helped him work through what happened, and she orchestrated the rekindling of a friendship I had given up hope on.

  Which couldn’t have come at a better time.
/>   When they came back into my life a month ago, I’d been on the brink of losing it because my baby boy, my everything, was dying.

  The leukemia was winning, and I was losing my mind every day that he lost ground in his fight.

  Taking a seat on the recliner that Tara also hated me sitting in since I had taken it from her house, I stared at my son who was sleeping on the couch.

  Then I looked down at my hands and felt the first drop of wetness hit my thumb.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  I couldn’t fight something that I couldn’t see.

  ***

  “Daddy?”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes, looking over at my son who was picking his little head up from the bathroom floor.

  “Hey, buddy. How you doing, buddy?” I asked, running my hand over his little bald head as he breathed softly. Easily.

  “I want to watch the Dragon Riders.” He looked at me. “Can we do that?”

  I felt a lump in my throat. “It’s two o’clock in the morning. Are you sure you don’t want to try to go to bed?”

  About two hours ago, Matias, lately known as Ty-Ty, thanks to Tyler coming back into my life, had started throwing up. Throwing up so violently that we couldn’t even leave the bathroom because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to let me know that he wasn’t feeling good in time.

  Matias had done a lot of growing up over the last six months or so. No longer was he my little buddy—my toddler. No, he was my little man who said and did things that were beyond what you’d expect from a four-year-old.

  “No,” Matias shook his head. “I want to stay here. Can I watch it on the phone?”

  I handed him my phone, as I’d done many times before, and I watched as he expertly navigated the electronic device.

  Moments later, my phone was playing his favorite show, and my eyes again started to droop closed.

  I idly wondered what Tara did when things like this happened. She didn’t seem the type who would care whether he was sick or not, and that thought was making me a little sick.

  But now wasn’t the time to bring that up. He was doing well, not asking why I was with him instead of Tara, and I had a feeling that I didn’t want to know why he wasn’t asking.

  As a sense of dread filled my chest, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever be ready to hear the answer.