I'd Rather Not
I’d Rather Not
Book 3 of The Kilgore Motorcycle Patrol Series
By
Lani Lynn Vale
Text copyright ©2019 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
To my baby girl that just totally rocked those stitches in her leg last night. I love you. This one is for you.
Acknowledgments
Golden Czermak - Photographer
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.
Kendra, Laura, Sarah, Kathy, Mindy, Lisa, 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
Blurb
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
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
Epilogue
What’s Next?
Do you Follow me?
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
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
How About No
My Bad
One Chance, Fancy
It Happens
Castiel and Turner
Snitches Get Stitches
F-Bomb
KPD Motorcycle Patrol
Hide Your Crazy
It Wasn’t Me
I’d Rather Not
Make Me (9-10-19)
Sinners Are Winners (10-8-19)
If You Say So (11-12-19)
SWAT Generation 2.0
Just Kidding (1-7-20)
Fries Before Guys (2-11-20)
Maybe Swearing Will Help (3-10-19)
Ask Me If I Care (4-14-20)
May Contain Wine (5-12-20)
Jokes on You (6-9-20)
Blurb
Oakley Spurlock is dying.
She only has weeks to live, thanks to a freak infection that totally and completely destroyed her kidneys.
Despite her family’s desperation, not a single one of them is a match.
In a last-ditch attempt, Oakley’s father takes to social media to beg for help to save his daughter’s life.
***
Pace Vineyard is lost. So lost, in fact, that he’s not sure he wants to be found.
But then a beautiful woman’s face is splashed across social media, and Pace finds a spark in his soul for the first time since a bomb went off beside him.
He’s already missing two legs. What’s one kidney?
At least, that’s what he tells himself.
What he doesn’t expect is to give his heart to the woman, too. Or for the woman to run away with it and force him to follow.
Prologue
Don’t be sad. Because sad backwards is das, and das not good.
-Coffee Cup
Pace
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said to Ford, leaning into the Humvee’s window. “That girl sends you more care packages than my mother.”
“You don’t have a mother,” Cherry Bomb, the resident explosives expert for our unit, said from his shotgun seat. “And I think it’s kind of cute.”
We all looked at the package that Ford’s sister sent him.
Ford, better known as Elder to our unit, blushed like a school girl every time he got a package from her. It was actually pretty sweet.
And even though we’d never seen each other in our civilian lives, we’d grown up in small towns not so far apart. Hell, his father had even arrested my father. Though, we hadn’t realized that until we’d compared stories when we got to this particular hell hole.
“You’re just jealous that my sister actually likes me, Pascha.”
I gave Ford a quelling look, then trained it on all the other men that were in the Humvee.
I really hated my name. I hated it mostly because my mother had given me my name, and my mother was just as much not a part of my life as my sister.
Sadly, Ford was also right. I was sort of jealous. Whereas his sister actually cared that he was over here, mine had no clue that I’d even left the states. And if she had known, I highly doubted that the woman would even care.
“What have I told you about using my real name?” I growled.
“You told me to never call you Pascha,” Ford repeated.
Cherry Bomb, also known as Taylor Downs, snorted and continued to stroke his hand ove
r his gun. He did that sometimes, and for the most part, we let him do what he had to do. This place was definitely not comforting, so if he had to always be touching his weapon, we were going to let him be.
“What all is in it?” I asked, touching the box that was in Ford’s hand with my gloved finger.
“Random shit, like always,” Ford explained as he started pulling shit out of the box.
Ford’s sister, Oakley, was actually adorably cute. I’d only ever seen a couple of photos of her—photos mainly consisting of Ford and Oakley when they were children—seeing as Oakley liked to cut them out and make weird, random ass ornaments out of them and send them to Ford because she liked to embarrass him. But the pictures that I did see? Well, those took my breath away.
Oakley was a gorgeous girl.
She also had two different colored eyes, just like Ford did.
Ford’s were a light green and a dark blue.
Oakley’s were a dark, almost emerald green, and a dark blue, almost blue jean in color. At first glance, you couldn’t even tell that they were different colors, not like you could with Ford’s.
Ford had told me that when they were younger, their eyes had been the same color. But when they were around ten, they’d begun to change. Though Ford’s much more dramatically than Oakley’s.
Ford and Oakley had inherited their unique eyes from their parents.
All that I’d inherited from my parents was poor time management skills, and an almost police record.
“Look at this.” Ford held up a small stuffed bunny the size of my index finger. “Here, you can have it.”
I grabbed it out of mid-air as he threw it out the Humvee window and glared at it.
My name, Pascha, was derived from the Greek meaning of ‘Easter.’
I’d explained it over a drunken night right after boot camp to Ford, and he’d been giving me hell ever since.
I stared at the white bunny, which also had two different colored eyes, and wondered if I’d ever find a girl that sent me care packages. Even if she sent me bunnies.
“Look, she sent your favorite again.” Ford tossed me a rope of licorice, again out the window.
That was when the world exploded around us.
***
Twelve hours later
“I just wanted to call and explain to you that your brother has lost a lot of blood, he could quite possibly lose his legs, and…hello?” I heard a strange male’s voice say into the phone. “Hello?”
“Did she hang up?” Ford’s tired voice sounded from somewhere in the room.
“Yes,” the stranger said. “What a bitch.”
“I’m not sure you’re supposed to use that kind of language, Doc.” Ford’s amusement was clear in his tone.
“I just called them to tell them that their son had suffered a major accident, and she asked why I’d bothered calling her. When I explained, she hung up. If anybody deserved to be called a bitch, it was her,” the doc grumbled.
“Is he really going to lose both of his legs?” Ford asked, sounding sick to his stomach.
“Both of his feet, yes,” the doc said. “Most likely. A below-the-knee amputation is going to be the suggested course of action. We did what we could, but there’s just not enough of his feet left to do anything with them. Even if we did save them, he wouldn’t be able to walk on them. They’re…everything is just gone. When he wakes up, we’ll likely ask him. He’s got to be of sound mind, though.”
“He mentioned an emergency contact once,” Ford said. “But I can’t find any information on her, and his phone was lost in the explosion so I can’t even look there.”
That was when I tilted my head and opened my eyes as best as I could.
“My aunt. Her name is Diana,” I croaked. “And don’t call her. I don’t want you to worry her. Just take my legs.”
Ford stood up from his sprawl in the chair beside me.
“You’re awake,” he said, his different colored eyes looking down at me in worry. “Are you in pain?”
I thought about that for a long moment. “I can’t feel my toes.”
There was a long, measured silence before the doctor came into view.
“Pascha…”
“Pace,” Ford and I corrected at the same time.
“Pace,” the doctor said. “You were in an explosion…”
***
Two weeks later
“You’ll never walk again.”
I looked up to find my sister and mother in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped.
My mother and sister, two peas in a pod, came farther into the room, obviously not understanding that I didn’t want them here.
“You’re home. Why wouldn’t we come see our boy?” my mother asked, walking closer to me.
I wished she’d turn around and walk back out, but that would obviously be asking too much.
“What do you want?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“Now why would you think that we’d want something?” Bella, my sister, asked.
I gritted my teeth.
“Because the only time you talk to me is when you need money,” I repeated. “You both couldn’t even be bothered when the doctor called to ask permission to cut my legs off. Now why would I bother talking to you now, when you both need something?”
“We just need a couple hundred dollars,” my mother, the one woman that I should be able to trust above all others but couldn’t, said.
“You can just take your happy asses out of here right this instant,” Diana, my aunt, declared. “And if you don’t, I’ll call security.”
My mom whirled and sneered at Diana.
“You can’t tell me what to do,” my mother declared loudly.
I pressed the button for the nurse to come in and was happy to see that I didn’t have to wait long.
Before this degraded, like I knew it would do since Diana and my mother were in the same room, my mother and Bella needed to go.
Fast.
“Ma’am,” the male nurse said to the two interlopers. “We’re going to have to ask you to leave.”
My mother turned and hissed at me. “You didn’t.”
I took my finger away from the call button and said, “Next time someone calls you regarding me, tell them that you’re not really a mother to me. That Diana is. Then, if you have any shred of decency, rattle off her number.”
My mother’s eyes narrowed.
“You’re going to regret this,” she said as the nurse took hold of her arm.
That was when Bella started in.
“Jesus Christ,” Bella sneered. “It was only two hundred dollars. It’s not like that’s going to break you.”
That was true. It wouldn’t. Not anymore.
But back when we were growing up together? When she’d steal that two hundred dollars? That was the difference between making rent and eating for the next two weeks. Yet she’d done it, time and time again.
“No,” Diana said. “It wouldn’t.”
Bella turned her sneer on Diana. “Why are you here?”
That was a dumb question, and even Bella knew it.
Diana was here for me, and we both knew it.
Just like she always had been.
Where my mother had gone wrong, Diana had gone right.
Mom was a criminal mastermind. Diana was a lawyer and on her way to becoming a judge.
Diana was everything Mom was not. Even a mother to me.
“Time to go,” I said, instilling some steel into my tone that would allow no argument. “And don’t come back. I’m dead to you.”
Bella laughed cruelly. “What’s wrong, gimpy? You don’t want two non-violent women in your hospital room?”
Diana growled low in her throat.
I would’ve smiled had the other two women not been in the room.
“Go home,” I ordered.
“I can’t go home,” my mot
her said. “We got kicked out this morning.”
“Sucks for you.” I shrugged. “There’s nothing that I can do about that.”
“You could let us live at your place,” she suggested. “It’s not like you’re going to be using it for a while.”
What she said was true. I’d be in the hospital for a while yet, and even more, I’d be in a rehab facility for even longer.
“Why’d you even drive all the way out here, anyway?” Diana asked. “What did you do? Steal gas money?”
I would’ve laughed had it not hurt to do so.
Everything still hurt. Badly.
My body was broken.
I had a broken ulna in my left arm. A broken collarbone. Broken ribs. Shattered cheekbone.
Hell, I had even broken everything from the knee down in both legs.
Though, those bones were no longer bothering me seeing as I was now a double amputee from the knee down.
But…I was alive.
Cherry Bomb, one of my greatest friends, was not.
He’d lost his life.
I’d only lost my legs.
I would survive, if only for him.
“We hitchhiked,” Bella replied cheerfully. “We thought about asking him for money to rent a car…but guess we’re going to have to get creative.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
Not at all.
“You know,” my mother drawled. “It’s almost kind of sad that you don’t have any legs anymore. You can’t continue the precious job that you loved so much. The one that you wanted to do for your entire life.” She paused. “It’s almost like…karma.”
Bella snickered. “I think I’m still a signer on your account.”
My belly clenched. She wasn’t…but she was damn convincing when she wanted to be.
“You wouldn’t,” I growled.
“You don’t know what I would or wouldn’t do anymore. You don’t even know me.” She sighed. “Have a good life, Pascha. I’d say see you around, but we don’t travel in the same circles. Plus, my side of the road is definitely not handicap accessible.”
With that, she left, too.
“I hate them,” Diana growled.
I looked over at the woman that, for all intents and purposes, had been more of a mother to me than my own mother, and smiled.
“It’ll be okay,” I promised.