Cognac Secrets (Voodoo Bastards MC Book 4), page 1
COGNAC SECRETS
THE VOODOO BASTARDS MC
BOOK 4
A.J. DOWNEY
CONTENTS
Cognac Secrets
BOOK FOUR
COPYRIGHT
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
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Also by A.J. Downey
About A.J. Downey
COGNAC SECRETS
Voodoo Bastards MC
Book IV
by A. J. Downey
BOOK FOUR
Published 2024 by Second Circle Press
Text Copyright © 2024 A.J. Downey
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner and are not to be construed as real except where noted and authorized. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or names featured are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Editing & book design by Maggie Kern @ Ms.K Edits
Cover art Dar Albert at Wicked Smart Designs
DEDICATION
To Mary, Dar, Carrie, and the rest of team A.J. for always putting up with my last-minute bullshit. You who tolerate me on my publishing schedule are the real heroes.
PROLOGUE
Sandrine…
The music was loud, the lights flashing, and the dance floor packed with gyrating bodies to the rhythm and the beat.
I loved it. Lived for it. It was my favorite escape to just get lost in the music and the bass and forget whatever the hell was bothering me. Moving my body to the song and letting my heart open up and spill all its heavy contents onto the dancefloor to be trampled underfoot.
I’d been finding myself in the French Quarter more and more often in whatever bar would offer me my dance therapy on any given night. I would just walk down either Bourbon or Decatur until I heard something that suited me and would duck into that particular bar, look for the dance floor, and just get lost in it.
That’s how I’d found myself in some no-name hole-in-the-wall crammed on the dance floor with a bunch of bikers on a Friday night. But I didn’t mind at all, especially when the short one, who was exactly my height, danced up to me, a glass of what smelled like cognac in his hand, and smoothly joined in my rhythm.
I smiled and delighted in how nicely we fit together, and how he didn’t hesitate to thrust his knee between my own jeans-clad legs, pressing the top of his thigh against the most intimate part of my body, like it was a perfectly natural thing to do. I mean, I knew, given my past with overbearing men in my life, that type of shit shouldn’t turn me on and make me melt, but it was just a different kind of vibe, you know?
I liked it when he slid his hands around my body, slipping them beneath the hem of my cropped tee against my skin. It felt good, and I mean – it definitely didn’t hurt that this guy was easy on the eyes.
He kept his beard neat and cut close, his eyes dark and sharp, and he just had this sexy, broody kind of demeanor. Shit, I liked it!
I didn’t know how lit he was, or how long we danced, but I just stuck to water. I didn’t want to mess with my already fucked-up brain chemistry any more than it already was – because I hated feeling crazy. I mean, I was – but I wasn’t at the same time. That was neither here nor there on the dance floor. That was why I came here. So that I could be free, and let loose, and be unapologetically me for a little while before it was back to reality and the slog called life.
The liquor flowed, the beat went on, and with every song, we grew closer, more familiar. He grew downright daring, his lips grazing the side of my neck in this almost ethereally light touch that sent a wave of gooseflesh sweeping over me, my skin rising and pebbling beneath his touch in an almost physical manifestation of longing. God, how I wanted to be touched like this. How lonely I’d been, and how I would have given anything for a man to see me… but I knew it wasn’t likely to happen. That was just my lot in life. Be a good daughter. Be a good sister. God has a plan for you. That plan was to make me into a good and obedient wife to a man I could and would never love. Be kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, struggling to make ends meet and to watch my blue-collar husband drown himself in alcohol while our kids and I went hungry to pay for it – and you know what?
No fucking thank you!
I didn’t want it. I watched how my mother, my brothers, and I suffered, while my dad drank like a fish. How he’d quote scripture and shackle us all with his Bible verses and how the church bullied my mom the one time she’d tried to escape him into staying with him. I didn’t want that life. Fuck that life… but it was a different way my people had out on the edges of the swamp in their small community. I knew if my father or brothers ever found me that I’d be dragged right on back and put up in front of the preacher with the likes of Tommy Boudreaux across from me. Dim-witted and mean as a cotton mouth, and I didn’t want any of it.
Hell, the only way ol’ Tommy would get married is with a shotgun pressed to the woman’s back – not his.
I worried about my little sister. Mamma had had Stormy late in life, and she was her last behind me – only thirteen and pretty as can be. I wouldn’t put it past the lot of them to try an’ marry her off to Tommy, who was two years older than me at twenty-eight.
It was a backwoods little place where religion had twisted folks’ minds and made them rotten to the core. I would have and did do anything to get out. I wasn’t stupid. I knew I had to hang on and get my high school diploma first, and I did. Only one out of my generation to do it, and Mama had been so proud of me.
Neither one of my brothers had made it much past the ninth or tenth grade, but I knew that diploma was my ticket outta town. I would need it to keep and hold any kind of job once I made it out to the city – and boy, had that been an adventure. Scary as hell.
I didn’t have a penny to my name, hardly anything but the clothes on my back, my backpack from school, a few of my favorite books, cheap costume jewelry, and that diploma, my birth certificate, and social security card on me when I climbed out my bedroom window on my eighteenth birthday.
It was hard sneaking out, harder still running. Running ‘til my lungs burned, my legs ached, and the sweat poured off me, soaking me from the inside out. I didn’t know how long I walked, thumb out, hoping to hitch a ride. Hoping it wouldn’t be someone from town to pull up and drag me back to my daddy’s house.
Fuck, I’d been scared. I knew what happened to girls like me who hitchhiked. I could be raped and have my arms chopped off with a hatchet, like that one girl who survived the awful attack in California. I’d read her survivor’s story from a battered paperback I’d found left on the bench at the gas station.
Still, I’d rather her fate than to stay in that awful Podunk little town just across the state line in Mississippi.
Better to wind up dead in a swamp somewhere than live the life waiting for me back there.
Still, any time I needed to forget, any time I needed to feel free from anything and everything – be it the shackles of my past, or the prison of my own heart, mind, and loneliness – for a time I could escape them on the dance floor. Wouldn’t you know it? Tonight was one of those magical nights where I’d fallen into the arms of a wonderful dance partner and the magic of the beat suffused our souls and the liquor lowered our inhibitions enough that I could almost pretend we made some kind of real connection.
An illusion that was shattered pretty quickly when he groaned into my ear, “God, I’ve missed you, Mia…”
Mia?
Shit. He was so drunk he thought I was someone else. Well, damn.
“My name is Sandrine,” I told him. He shook his head and mumbled something like “Tonight I need it to be Mia…” and woof, did I understand that.
How many times had I found myself in this same situation, but different? How many times had I found myself in so much pain, so achingly lonely and scared, that I needed someone, anyone, to just be there for me for a night
Well, shit.
I guess Karma really was a thing. She was going to be one hell of a bitch tonight, serving me up the way I’d partaken in a lot of ways. It was a complicated story – that.
At first, I thought men who’d picked me up and professed I was a rare beauty or whatever had actually meant it. I’d bought into their bullshit, hook, line, and sinker, time after time, thinking they saw me… but no. The first time had left me devastated, when I’d woken up in the middle of the night in the cheap hotel room he’d gotten us to him putting on his pants and telling me I’d been fun, but let’s not make it out to be more of a thing.
He'd berated me when I’d cried. He’d told me love wasn’t a thing anymore when I’d professed that’s what I’d thought we’d been doing – falling in love.
I couldn’t tell you how much my heart yearned for that… to be loved. For real. Just once. By anyone.
But the years passed, and the more I got used for sex, the more I realized that love was just a fairytale told to small girls to keep them compliant. That if it did exist, it wasn’t what I’d been raised believing it was from all the cartoon movies with beautiful princesses and dashing princes. There was a reason they were called fairytales in the first place. Fairies didn’t exist. Neither did true love. It was all just another mechanism to keep women and young girls chasing after a man like we needed them…
Which we didn’t. We wanted them. There was a difference. The sad reality being that none of them realized that the latter was far more precious than the former. To be wanted was far more important than ever to be needed… but alas, it just seemed to be how it was. The way of things.
I’d had some really good lovers. Some really good partners… and I’d had some not so good ones, too.
The common denominator to all of those short relationships and their utter failure was me, and I knew that. I was as my daddy always said. Too difficult to love. Too willful. Too obstinate. Too much of a pain in the ass. Not pretty enough, not good enough. And yet, I held the knowledge like a secret and projected confidence wherever I went, because for some fucked-up reason, I couldn’t stop believing in the goddamn fairytale that there was someone out there for everyone. That someday, all my monumental defects and malfunctions aside, someone would finally see me and want me, warts and all.
It hadn’t happened yet, and I worried it never would, but I was determined for whatever reason to keep on keeping on despite how much it hurt to be rejected, time and time again.
Despite how crestfallen I felt on the inside to have fooled myself into believing that I’d somehow connected with this guy, this biker, only to have him call me by another woman’s name.
Damn my luck.
Still, there was one thing that I knew in this moment on the dance floor. Whoever this Mia woman was? He loved her, and missed her, and longed for her in a way that called to the echo of sadness in my own heart, pulling on my heartstrings in such a way that it made me a marionette… a puppet, willing to do anything to soothe that hurt, that ache in his being. Because I knew I couldn’t stand hurting like I did on the regular, and his hurt called to mine in the moment. So, for right now, for tonight, I made the decision to be whoever he needed me to be – because goddammit, I was just too fucking nice.
Wouldn’t be the first, nor the last time it got me into trouble, I reckon.
CHAPTER ONE
Bennie…
“Right here.” I gently led her by the elbow, guiding her into the back seat of the black SUV. She settled into the seat, smoothing her pencil skirt over her knees, and looked up at me with those wide, deep brown eyes of hers.
“Thank you,” she murmured through those imminently kissable lips. I gave a curt nod and shut the door to the armored vehicle and swallowed hard, schooling my face into a blank slate from behind my aviators as I took a step back to allow the car to pull away smoothly from the curb.
Two blocks up, the vehicle exploded, and I would never see my beautiful Mia smile again.
I sat up in bed, panting, soaked with sweat, haunted by the trust in those deep brown eyes of hers as she’d looked up at me, as I’d put her in the back of that instrument of death.
She’d trusted me, and she’d died for it. I’d trusted that her family only had her best interests at heart…
But it’d been nothing but betrayal all around, and I’d been the one meant to protect her.
I’d failed.
I put my head in my hands and raked my fingers through my sweat-slicked hair, sniffing and clearing my throat.
It was still something like three hours before I needed to be up and start the fuckin’ grind that was my independent accounting for several small businesses and to do a few books for some not-so-legal, underground enterprises – the club included.
I’d gotten wrapped up in some of the illicit stuff after I got out of the Army. I’d served a few tours, had combat experience, and had come out with some serious PTSD and disillusionment, along with a few other injuries that’d been deemed “not service related,” which was bullshit.
I’d tried getting hired on to some jobs once out, started college for accounting, but shit was expensive even with the college credits. Even though school was taken care of, living expenses weren’t.
That’s when a buddy of mine from my unit overseas had reached out. Said there was some good money in the personal protection racket. Said the work was boring but steady and they were looking for a guy. He thought I might be interested.
He’d been right about that. At the time it’d felt like a lucky break… even luckier that I was supposed to look out for the dude’s daughter and not dude. Mia Stephanopoulos was smokin’ hot, around my age, a spoiled Mafia princess, and with a stubborn streak a mile wide and six times as long. She punched my ticket in so many ways, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance with her. That wasn’t what I was there for, but Mia Stephanopoulos was just full of surprises and one of those surprises was that I fit her bill.
The affair was secret and torrid, and right under her daddy’s and her brothers’ noses. Somehow, that just made things hotter.
We carried on for over a year, and it was good. We were in love and trying to figure out how to get her out and to disappear, fade away, and live our dreams of a simpler fucking life when all hell had broken loose.
She’d been targeted by a car bombing attack at shift change as I’d sent her and Tommy off to some gala thing like the Met or whatever. The attack had initially been blamed on a rival family, but they didn’t want anything to do with claiming responsibility – which was odd.
Crazed with guilt and grief, I’d gone rogue. I’d gone digging… and I’d found the call had come from inside the house.
Mia’s little brother was to blame. Some shit about removing his competition when it came to their daddy’s fortune well before it was even Daddy’s time to pass away. I mean, the old goat wasn’t even that old! Late sixties, early seventies – maybe?
He’d tried to protect his son. I mean, I got it, but… it was the last thing he did.
Took me a while, but I went through every last one of them. In a chef’s kiss perfect moment of cosmic divinity or karma, or whatever you want to call it, I took the last surviving member of the family out on the one-year anniversary of Mia’s death – which was coming up on five or six years ago now.
