Page 1 of No Fear
Chapter One
Remington Bomar was not a good man. Good men didn’t run away when the going got tough. They didn’t abandon the people that meant the most to them, people that relied on them for protection and safety. They didn’t drink themselves into oblivion so they wouldn’t have to face their mistakes. Good men weren’t selfish, violent forces of nature so no, Remy wasn’t a good man… but he wanted to be.
All his life, he’d told himself that being born a Bomar meant that he’d never had a chance. Good men didn’t exist in his family. It wasn’t his fault. But then he’d come back, come home after ten long years away, and he’d seen the truth.
It wasn’t about his DNA. It wasn’t about his last name. It was about him and the choices he had made. The choices he would have to make to change. He wanted to be better than what his blood said he was and he knew that would be an ongoing daily battle, particularly since he’d decided to stay here.
In Old Settlers, Oklahoma being a Bomar came with a long list of expectations and all of them were bad. It was well-known and widely understood that the Bomars ruled the darker underside of their small hometown. Between the boozing, brawling and whoring they’d built up a legend as dangerous, out of control bastards that was more truth than myth. The vast majority of them was either a criminal a liar or a thief and for the most part they all checked more than one of those boxes on their best day.
They were simply born bad.
Some people said they were hellions, others called them devils and either way they weren’t wrong. There was something inside of them, inside all of them, that made them violent and mean. It made them lash out when other people, normal people, would have simply walked away. It made them choose the hard way every single time the high road was presented.
Remy couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that craved violence. Even his younger brothers, who were the most well-liked and law-abiding of the bunch, were prone to fits of rage and anger that left a path of destruction in their wake. But the twins had overcome their demons and he had to believe that meant there was hope for him too.
His little brothers had made better choices because they were better men than their father and uncles and cousins. They’d distanced themselves from the family while Remy had been gone and he was more proud of them for that than he could say. They’d decided to live their lives within the confines of the law instead of outside it and they were clean. They were good men and they’d built good lives for themselves.
But the line Cash and Colt had drawn in the sand divided them from the rest of the family. It set them apart and though they would always have the Bomars to protect them from the rest of the world, they’d been too young, too naïve, to know that drawing that line also meant they’d need protection from the family.
Remy felt his fists clench at his sides at the thought. They’d taken advantage of his brothers. All of them. And maybe it shouldn’t have surprised him knowing what he knew about his family but it had. Because it had been Lincoln that masterminded the entire thing. Lincoln, his eldest cousin, his oldest friend, and the one person Remy had trusted with the truth, with his real reason for leaving when he’d been a scared, eighteen year old kid.
Even when they’d been young, Lincoln had been the self-appointed leader of their group so when Remy had left town, he’d trusted his cousin to do right by his brothers. He’d asked Lincoln to look out for them, take care of them when he couldn’t. Instead, the bastard had conned Colt into working for him. Lincoln had given Colt dirty money in exchange for brawling in an illegal underground fight club as the family’s champion. He’d let Colt lie to Cash about it for years and he’d almost gotten him killed.
Not even a month ago, Colt had been attacked for no other reason than the fact that he was a Bomar. He’d won a fight for Lincoln and someone else had lost money on it. They’d lashed out first by hitting the businesses and then, when that hadn’t gotten their message across, they’d assaulted Colt and left him fighting for his life.
That was when Remy had found out what was going on and he’d damn near lost his mind he’d been so furious. Lincoln was everything about the Bomar family that he despised. Selfish, manipulative, violent. He was not a good man either but the fact that Lincoln had agreed to let Colt out of his deal and have Remy take his place in the cage, was the only thing that had saved him a beating of his own.
Remy gripped the counter in his kitchen and tried desperately to get a grip on his anger. Just thinking about Lincoln could put him into a full on rage these days and it was a good thing his cousin was nowhere nearby or he might have strangled him. Instead of focusing on just how good it would feel to wrap his hands around Lincoln’s throat and squeeze, Remy focused on his family.
They were here. All of them. At least all the ones that mattered. His brothers and their women. Women he’d begun to think of as his sisters. Women that were showing his brothers, and him, what it meant to truly be a family. That’s what the four of them, soon to be five of them, were, his family and he intended to protect each and every one of them.
His younger brothers had both arrived for this impromptu family meeting with their significant others in tow. Neither of them ever went anywhere alone which wasn’t that strange really. They’d never done anything alone, ever. Cash and Colt had always been a team, from the very start, but now they weren’t two halves. They were whole, each of them, and the reasons for that were obvious.
Remy watched as Cash whispered something in his fiancé’s ear that made her blush the same color as her hair. His little brother easily lifted the feisty redhead out of her seat, dropping into it and then depositing her onto his lap. One of his hands instantly went to the swell of her belly, stroking it protectively as they whispered to each other.
Remy tore his gaze off the happy couple when they started kissing but that meant seeing Colt wearing the same soft look his twin was sporting as he spoke to his new girlfriend. The willowy blonde shot Remy a small smile but his brother caught her chin, turning her gaze back to him and said something that made her giggle. A moment later Colt too was kissing his woman and Remy was again forced to look elsewhere.
Because watching Cash and Jemma, watching Colt and Skylar, it made something dark and ugly twist at his guts.
Jealousy.
He didn’t want Jemma or Skylar. God no! He didn’t want them but he wanted what his brothers had found with them.
Peace. Acceptance. Love.
He hadn’t needed to spend much time with the couples to realize that the women in his brothers’ lives had done a lot towards making them into better men and he wanted that for himself. Someone that could give him the same serenity that Cash had found with Jemma. The same understanding that Colt had recently found with Skylar. And, as had become common in the past few weeks, thinking about his brothers and their significant others meant thinking abouther.
An image of a woman, a girl really, rose up to taught him just that fast and easily. Dark hair, big blue gray eyes, pale skin and rosy red lips that reminded him of strange things like princesses and knights in shining armor. Only she wasn’t a princess and he was about as far from being a knight as a man could get.
But damn if he didn’t think they might be able to save each other.
Remy smiled softly to himself as he thought about her, about her sweet smile and the way her eyes lit up when she looked at him. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking of her right now. Not here and not now, but just thinking about her managed to soothe the worst of his anger. And telling himself not to think about her was useless, pointless, because she was all he thought about, all the time, from the moment he met her.
Something had happened to him that day. He couldn’t explain it. Couldn’t put it into words. But the moment he’d seen her, the second their eyes connected, an electric current shot through him and as swift as a bolt of lightning he’d felt something in his chest split open, realign, as if his heart knew to make room for her.
He’d been around the world. He’d seen the dark, dirty sides of life and the equally dark and dirty parts of people. He’d seen the evil that people tried to hide. He’d experienced it firsthand. He knew enough about bad to know a good thing when he saw it and she was a good thing.
Good. Sweet. Kind. Innocent. Too innocent for a man like him that was for sure. Too damn young too. But none of the reasons he should stay away from her mattered because he couldn’t. He’d tried. Not hard but he had tried, at first. He couldn’t any more stay away from her than he could stop blinking.
