by Paula Cox
“Pretty lady? You're a charmer as well as a Numb, now?”
“What do you know about the Satan’s Martyrs?” he asks, looking down at me.
I don’t know, the way he looks down at me like that . . . it almost makes me feel safe. It’s mad, I know, that standing in a car park in the middle of the night with a strange man would make me feel safe, but it does. I have to fight the urge to collapse into his chest, to collapse into the solidness of him. Sometimes, I think, a woman just wants a strong man’s arms around her. But, hell, I’m not going to start gushing openly about it. Give the game away; give too much of myself away.
“Just what I’ve heard,” I say, giving no sign of my desires. It’s like we’re playing poker and, if I do say so myself, my poker face is pretty good.
“And what have you heard?”
“What everybody in the Cove has heard.”
“Just rumors,” he says, eyes glinting, lips twitching cockily.
“Fine,” I sigh. “But what about tonight? What . . . I just don’t get it. Patrick’s your big brother, right? And he just got out of prison? Surely that should make you happy.”
“Surely it should,” he agrees. “But we don’t need to talk about that.”
I throw my hands up. “Then why wait for me here if you don’t want to talk?”
“Who says I was waiting for you? Maybe I was just taking in the night air—”
“Don’t play games with me,” I interrupt. “Do you know how much money was in that envelope?”
“Yes,” he says. “Two grand, or thereabouts.”
“Then . . .” I shrug and tilt my head at him.
“You want to know why I gave you the money.”
“Yes!” I cry, louder than I intended. My voice fills the dead night air like a siren’s call.
“It doesn’t matter. Just buy yourself something nice. You have an amazing figure. Maybe a nice dress? I don’t know. Buy whatever it is women buy with that kind of money.”
“So you just gave me two thousand dollars like it was no big deal, and you won’t even tell me why?”
“Buy yourself something nice, pretty lady,” he says, as though I didn’t speak. “Look, all I know is that I rode out to Sapphire Lake tonight. To think, I guess. I don’t do that a lot, ride out somewhere just to think. It’s not my thing. But tonight I did. Had to get my head sorted. But when I tried to think, you were in my head. You weren’t just the bright spot during the party. You were the bright spot after the party, too.”
“All this for a woman whose full name you don’t know,” I mutter.
“Yeah, I guess so. That’s important to you, isn’t it?”
“If you’re going to stalk me,” I say, “you should know my name.”
“Introduce yourself then. I guess knowing your full name’ll help when I’m writing you a goddamn poem.”
“Ha, funny. My name is Hope Warren.”
He holds his hand out, the hand with the grazed knuckles. Poking out of his sleeve and crawling up his arm is a tribal tattoo, painted grey, wrapping around his wrist and ending at the top of his hand, just above the sleeve. I find myself wondering if his entire body is covered in tattoos. If his muscular chest is covered in tattoos. His back. His belly. I look his neck. Yes, a red-flamed tattoo pokes out there, too.
“Nice to meet you, Hope Warren,” he says, nodding down at his hand.
I swallow. For some reason, shaking his hand seems important. If I shake his hand, aren’t I agreeing that we’re no longer strangers?
But then I shake it anyway. His hand is large, strong, and warm despite the night. I look down at my small pale hand in his paw, and I’m suddenly struck by the power of this man. If he wanted to, he could break me in half.
My heartbeat gets faster and faster as we shake, a drum’s beat pounding in my chest.
And then he takes his hand away, and my breath catches.
“Now that we know each other, Hope, it’s time we took a ride.”
“What? A ride? Where?”
“That’s a secret.”
I spread my hands out before me, the way you do when you’re trying to explain something. “You can’t just expect me to ride into the night with a complete—”
“I can and you will. Do you know why?” He steps even closer to me, closing the gap completely. I smell oil and manly sweat and oak. I have never smelled anything so entirely manly.
Looking up at him, willing my voice to be steady, strong, I say: “No, why don’t you tell me?”
He breathes out, and the warmth of his breath touches my forehead. “Because you want to, pretty lady. Anyway, it’s a surprise. I don’t want to ruin the fun.”
“You can’t be serious . . .”
He steps away from me, reaches around the back of his bike, and stands back up with a helmet in his hand.
“I’m deadly serious,” he says.
He lays the helmet on the back of the bike and climbs onto the front, twisting his body so that he’s staring at me.
“Get on the back of the bike, pretty lady. You won’t regret it.”
“I’m not a whore,” I say. “I can’t be bought.”
“You’re not a whore,” he agrees. “You can’t be bought. But you’ll get on the back of this bike, sooner or later. We both know it. I can see it in your eyes, Hope. You want it.”
I’m stunned. It’s true. I do want it. But how can he tell? He doesn’t even know me! Every channel in my mind has tuned to one station: Get on His Bike Now!
I swallow, wondering distantly if I’ll regret this, and then walk to the bike and pick up the helmet.
“You won’t tell me where we’re going,” I say. It’s meant to be a question, but it comes out flat like a statement.
“It’ll make it more fun. Trust me.”
Trust me.
The mad part is, I think I do.
I wrap my hands around his belly and lay my head on his back, right against the word ‘Numb’, the raised lettering tickling my cheek through the open-visor helmet.
He is solid. He is strong.
Then the bike roars into life and we’re speeding away from Rocky Cove, a clear sky of diamond stars winking down at us, the darkness shrouding us so that it’s like we’re the only people on the planet.
Chapter Four
Killian
I ride north out of the Cove. Hope’s arms are wrapped around me and her head is on my back, hugging into me. I was right, back in the car park. She wants this. Maybe she doesn’t know why, but she does. I’ve seen that look in a woman’s eye before. The look that screams out for a man. The look that screams out for a strong man to take control. And I’ve never had problem being that man.
But as she hugs into me, I wonder if there’s more. She didn’t submit instantly, as so many women have before her. She didn’t gush or smile like a minx or dance over to me and throw herself onto the back of my bike. There was resistance, sarcasm. She spoke in a biting tone. No, Hope has brains, and I’m not a toy to her. Do you know that, or just hope it?
I ignore the thought and speed us through the night.
After around fifteen minutes, I turn onto a dirt track in a bumpy stretch of dusty mud land, and head into the darkness. I have to go slow because of the bumps—we jostle up and down again and again—and the engine grows quiet.
“Where are we going?” she says.
There’s no worry in her voice, no panic. There should be panic. I’m Killian O’Connor. I’ve done things. Bad things. I lead a group of men who’ve done bad things.
“You’re not scared,” I comment.
“Huh, I guess I’m not.”
She sounds as surprised as I am.
“This is a killer on the bum, you know,” she giggles.
“Tell me—”
We go over a large bump, the bike dipping and then rising so quickly that both of us are jolted upward. We grunt in unison.
“The great Killian O’Connor, bested by a bump in the road,” she teases.
There’s a pause, and then I laugh. I laugh loudly and with genuine amusement. It’s the most I’ve laughed all night.
“There would be worse ways to go,” I say, once the laughter has stopped. “Much worse ways.”
The night sky is clear, the moon a crescent, the stars bright out here in the middle of nowhere without any light pollution. As we approach the amusement park a ten-foot-tall statue of a clown, one of its hands rotted away and its face warped and scratched away, is lit up by stars and moonlight. The clown stands beside an archway, which once upon a time was home to countless families laughing and shoving and pushing to get into the park.
I bring the bike to a stop.
“Here we are,” I say.
“You know,” Hope says, “if you were going to murder me, this would be the sort of horror movie place to bring me, wouldn’t it?”
“Maybe so. But I’m not going to murder you.”
She swivels off the bike and I do the same. When I turn to her, she’s taken off the helmet. She runs her hand through her brunette hair, smoothing it out. I take the helmet from her and place it on the back of the bike. We stand next to the Harley, watching each other for a moment.
Then Hope giggles. “Don’t go back to your restaurant ways,” she says, a cute pout on her lips. But not a judged pout, like the women before her—the women who saw me as a new plaything. No, I think she doesn’t even realize she’s pouting. “You’ve done enough staring for one night.”
“Is that so?”
I shrug and turn toward the park.
“Shall we go on, then?”
“Won’t there be anybody here?” she asks. Her heels scuff the dirt behind me, and then she’s standing right next to me, her sexy body close enough to touch. But I don’t touch, not yet.
“It’s deserted,” I tell her. “Look at the place. Don’t worry. I come here sometimes, to think . . .”
“I thought you didn’t make a habit of going places just to think?” she shoots.
“Ah,” I say, and then smile.
“You are an expert wordsmith, Killian O’Connor. That was about the best response I’ve ever heard.”
“And you, Hope Warren, are an expert ballbuster. Come on.”
Without waiting for her reply, I walk toward the dilapidated clown.
In reality, the place smells of dirt and rotting wood and old metal.
But in my mind it smells of cotton candy and French fries and perfume: the perfume of the countless mothers who mill about at the entrance, buying tickets and herding children. It’s dark, but in my mind it’s bright. Lights shine out from the stalls that border the walkway. Gypsy men stand behind the counters jeering at you, begging you to play their game. The shelves behind the stalls are empty apart from dust. But I see rows and rows of teddy bears and soccer balls and water pistols. I see the park as it was when my father brought me and Patrick here.
Hope and I walk in silence for a time. Her eyes roam over the abandoned place, taking it all in. It gives me time to think. Dad comes to mind. My best memories of my father are at this place. Maybe that’s why I come here so often when the club is getting hectic. When I come here, it’s like, for a few minutes, Dad is alive. It’s like Dad didn’t die when I was a ten-year-old kid. It’s like Dad is still living and I can see him as clearly as I could see the clown at the entrance.
I remember sitting on his shoulders, his strong hands on my shins, looking over the tops of the heads of the crowd, in awe of the stalls and the lights and the candy and the fun. I had never seen such pure fun before in my life.
“Can we go this way?” Hope says. “I think I see a ghost train. It looks spooky. Cool-spooky.”
“Sure,” I answer, and we walk toward the train.
Dad was a tough, strong man. But when he came here, his inner child emerged. If you gathered up all the laughter from my childhood and totted up where each laugh happened, this place would be weighed down with laughter, winning over every other part of my childhood life. I remember when Patrick and I were playing a game where you had to knock over a certain amount of skittles with a beanbag to win a soccer ball. A bright yellow soccer ball which seemed all the brighter sitting on the shelf on a blistering August afternoon.
We missed and missed and missed, spending all our quarters. Patrick was getting mad. He was much bigger than me back then, truly my big brother. I was scared of him, truth be told. And then I heard this rumbling behind us, earthquake rumbling, and after a second I realized it was Dad’s laughing.
“You’re both throwing it too hard,” he said.
“What do you mean, Dad?” I asked.
“Here, let me show you.”
He handed the man a quarter and the man handed him three beanbags. Three beanbags to knock over five skittles, which meant you had to somehow hit two skittles with one beanbag.
“Sometimes,” he said, smiling down at me, “you have you have finesse. You have to be gentle. You have to be smart. Brute strength won’t get you everything.”
Then he turned to the skittles, hefted a beanbag, and threw it underarm. It flew slowly through the air, feather-like, and knocked one skittle and bounced into the other. Both of them fell, and Dad grinned.
“He’s going to get us the soccer ball!” I cried, in my little kid’s naïve squeak.
“This is awesome,” Hope says, bringing me back to reality for a moment.
We stand outside the ghost train, which is crumbling to pieces. The booth’s windows are without glass and the train itself sits on bricks, raised from the ground. The wooden slats of the track are rotted entirely through and the metal bars are rusted into a dark brown which looks gray in the night.
“Awesome,” I agree.
But my mind moves back, past the amusement park, past Dad’s sudden death, to the club.
Patrick was already in the club. Patrick, my big brother, was the coolest man I knew. He was in the club and when Dad died, I joined. I needed purpose. I needed friendship. I needed brotherhood.
And then what did you do, Killian? And then what happened?
I clench my fists, my arms trembling. Hope has her back to me, taking in the ghost train.
And then what? a voice screams in my head.
And then, I remember, a member of The Bloody Fists, a rival biker gang which has given the Satan’s Martyrs trouble since before I was leader . . . Since before I was a member, even . . . A member of this rival club planted drugs on my bike and called the goddamn cops. I was facing a stint in jail. But my big brother took the blame and the time.
I’m shaking, now. I’ve done my best to blot it out while Patrick was in prison, but now he’s out and he’s causing trouble. Disciplining him is made all the more difficult by the fact he was only in there in the first place because of me.
Hope turns to me. “Is something wrong, Killian?”
“No, pretty lady,” I sigh, pushing the thoughts from my mind, burying them deep where they won’t bother me for a little while. “Nothing’s wrong. Come on. Let’s check out the ferris wheel.”
She tilts her head at me, puzzling me out, but then I turn and walk away from the ghost train. After a moment, she follows me.
We sit in the sturdiest cart of the ferris wheel, which is one strong gust of wind away from collapsing. Side by side, but we aren’t touching. I can smell her. It’s a strong animal scent that drifts up my nostrils. Not her perfume, not even the cleaning product which clings to her clothes. No, it’s her scent, reaching out to me, tempting me. I feel my cock get hard, rock-hard, but it’s dark and she can’t see.
She’s still looking at me as if I am a puzzle she’s trying to solve. Maybe she’s sensed I wasn’t completely here, that my mind had travelled back two decades to when Dad was alive and I wasn’t Patrick’s boss.
I can’t have her looking at me like that. I’m the one who does the staring, not the other way around.
I decide to change the subject. I decide to do something I don’t remember ever having done with a woman b
efore: ask her personal questions.
“So, Hope, how do you like working at the restaurant?”
“Oh, it’s great.” She smiles. “It’s fantastic. I can’t think of a better situation. The best part is when my feet ache so badly I think they’re going to fall off.”
“I’m trying here,” I say. “Don’t fight me on a simple conversation, dammit.”
She smiles again, a soft smile. The kind of smile a man dreams of having aimed at him. Maybe a man, but not you, eh, Killian? Because relationships get you buried quicker than a bullet.