Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7)

by Lauren Gilley

  “You’ve got to go to the hospital.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he’d said, tone implacable. “I just wanna get you home.” Ordinarily that would have been a come-on, but the aftereffects of panic still lay heavy in his gaze, and so she’d let him walk her out to the stolen car he’d come in, and climbed into the backseat with him so Fox could drive them home.

  Where a bevy of squad cars awaited them on the front lawn.

  Michelle groaned. “What the hell now?”

  “They attacked here, and at the workshop they sent us to,” Fox said, piloting the Mercedes up over the curb and into the lot; into a free space beside one of the flatbeds. “Everyone’s fine,” he said, in answer to Michelle’s indrawn breath. “Save the corpses, and those are all theirs. Kicked right in the front door, apparently. They wanted to keep us as busy as they could.”

  He didn’t say why they wanted to keep them busy; he didn’t need to.

  He killed the engine and twisted around to fire a look at Candy. “The cops will want to talk to you.”

  Candy nodded, grim. “They’re not hanging around all night. Fuck them.”

  Fox smirked. “That’s the spirit.”

  They piled out of the car, and trooped toward the front door, which was hanging askew; it had been kicked in, just like the front door of the house where Candy had found her and Michelle, though she’d be willing to bet it had taken a ram or more than one try with a boot.

  Fox had been right about the corpses. They no longer clogged up the threshold, but had been dragged out into the yard and draped with white cloths. A uniformed officer stood over them with her hands on her hips, watching them, presumably waiting for the coroner.

  There was yellow tape, but then Martin Jaffrey was there, lifting it up. “He’s the home owner, let them through.”

  Inside, Jenny stood with her arms folded, radiating competency and gravity, beside a tousled young man in a dress shirt; the two of them side-by-side, and talking with another officer. Michelle searched for the wreckage that must have been left when she was taken, but save the plywood patch over the hole in the wall, and a few ruined chairs stacked in a corner, there was no evidence that a truck had driven straight into the building. Jenny had captained the ship efficiently; had gotten everything cleaned up…and then killed a handful of guys.

  She lifted her head at the sound of their approach, and emotion flared in her gaze. “Excuse me.” She stepped around the officer, and the next thing Michelle knew she was wrapped up tight in another Snow sibling bear hug. Jenny wasn’t as strong as Candy – no one was, really – but Michelle heard her spine pop.

  “Oh my God,” Jenny breathed, and then pushed her back at arm’s length. “Are you okay?” Her gaze tracked over Michelle’s face, and down her body, assessing. “Did…” She bit her lip and left the next question unasked.

  Michelle knew what she’d wondered, though. “I’m fine. We’re fine.” She attempted a smile. “Turns out Luis likes to hear himself talk, and it’s a good thing Axelle’s taller than me.”

  Jenny smiled back, tight and worried. She shifted around and looped a supportive arm around her shoulders. “Come on. You can talk to the cops later. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

  She wanted to argue. The old her would have; would have asked for a glass of whiskey and insisted on staying and tidying up all the loose ends. Proved she was tough enough for that; not put anything off for later.

  But, despite her insistence, and her longing, and the funk that had plagued her in the weeks leading up to this, she wasn’t the old her anymore, was she? She’d gotten used to a quieter life. Her worries were for TJ, and Candy, and this family they had here.

  Congrats, you played yourself, she thought, with a bitter inward smile. She would always love the club, always fight for and protect it. But she loved the love it had given her more, and right now, she was content to nod, and let her sister-in-law steer her down the hallway to the sanctuary.

  There was blood on the floor at the mouth of the hall, a big puddle of it that had dried tacky, and which someone in a windbreaker was snapping photos of. When Michelle glanced down to dodge it – and Jenny made a stern face at the tech when he moved to protest their passing – she saw that Jenny had her other arm around Axelle, and was thankful that, given her own slow slide into some sort of fugue state, someone was looking out for the other girl, too.

  Darla was there, waiting for them, behind the closed – safe, secure, impenetrable, Michelle’s brain supplied, because it felt like stepping into a vault, a wonderful locked place untouched by the day’s violence – door of the sanctuary. She let out a howl, already crying, and ran to hug them both tightly, murmuring a litany of oh I’m so glad and praise Jesus. Michelle and Axelle were set up on the couch, ginger ale for Michelle, and some of Candy’s Macallan for Axelle. The boys were asleep, Darla said; they woke fussing when the shooting started, but she’d soothed them and sung to them and they were doing fine, now. Jenny got the med kit and swabbed the raw, red patches where the cuffs had chafed at their skin; brought them socks for their bare feet, and a plate of crackers and a jar of peanut butter that Michelle didn’t feel like eating, but which Axelle leaned toward with sudden, surprising interest. Michelle could feel the threat of shock, a cold specter at the back of her mind, so she forced herself to make a few cracker sandwiches and choke them down.

  She wanted to see TJ.

  Both boys had been staying in a room that had once been devoted to storage – a narrow rectangle formerly lined with metal shelves – and which Candy had lovingly renovated himself. New sheetrock, and paint, fresh carpet; he’d even cut a window into it, one Michelle was now seriously thinking about outfitting with bars. A lamp burned softly on the dresser, and she could see Jack sprawled out in his toddler bed, TJ in his crib.

  She tiptoed across the room and rested her arms on the crib. The light gilded TJ’s round cheeks, and the button tip of his nose; hair all wheats and golds, gleaming in the dimness, just like his daddy’s.

  Michelle blinked stinging eyes and breathed a moment, gaze tracing every line and curve of him.

  The brush of socks on carpet heralded Jenny’s arrival behind her, and she thought the sound had been purposeful, so as not to startle. A moment later, Jenny joined her at the rail of the crib.

  “Sometimes.” She and Michelle had long since perfected the art of whispering without vocalizing; they could have entire conversations without the babies even stirring in their sleep. “I don’t even think they look related. But other times I see them together, and I think they look more like brothers than cousins.”

  “Yeah,” she whispered back. Jack had Colin’s dark eyes, but it was true; Michelle had noted the same thing on occasion. Something about the arch of their brows and the angle of their cheekbones was distinctly Snow. TJ had her eyes, that Devin Green blue she shared with all her relatives.

  Jenny breathed a sigh. “I know they’ll deal with the same stuff we’re dealing with now, one day. They’ll grow up in this club, and it won’t always be safe or easy. I wish I could spare them that.”

  Michelle flicked a glance toward her to read her expression – but Jenny stared down at TJ with something like peace in her eyes.

  There was a truth known to every woman attached to the MC, a simple one: their children could be spared. They could pack bags, and load up cars, and disappear. Raise their kids in the backwoods of Montana, and teach them how to fish and birdwatch instead of how to shoot and brawl. How to sell hardware in a family-owned store in some quaint, Hallmark-ready town, instead of how to sell drugs to spoiled rich kids.

  They shared a smile of mutual understanding. They would never leave. It wasn’t even a choice, really. And no amount of terror or hardship would lead to regret.

  For Michelle, it was a relief to still know that, after today.

  “You wanna go take a shower? I’ll look after him if he wakes up,” Jenny said.

  “A shower sounds amazing.” She got another hug on her
way out, this one gentler, supportive.

  A shower had sounded amazing, though she’d thought she was too tired, and didn’t realize that showering was necessary until she stepped under the hot jets in the master en-suite. She felt dirty in a way that had nothing to do with dried sweat and the musky dirt from the bed of a truck. Felt the phantom weight of the cuffs at her wrists and ankles, still.

  She stood in the spray long after she’d finished washing, head bowed, watching the water swirl around her pink-painted toes and down the drain. Not thinking; not dwelling or remembering or replaying any part of the day. She emptied her mind. It was a skill, and she’d had years of practice. Another of Fox’s tricks: fretting doesn’t solve anything. You have to learn to let go.

  So she did let go. And in the vacuum left behind, she was filled with a wash of calm. Something like peace. It persisted while she turned off the taps, wrung out her hair, and toweled dry. Lasted until she pushed the curtain back and found Candy standing in front of the mirror, wincing as he tried to ease his cut back off his shoulders.

  “Wait, wait, wait.” She tucked the corner of the towel firmly into place above her breasts and went to help him. “Let me see. Where did they get you?”

  “Arm,” he said, turning his back to her in obedient response to her twirled finger. “And right there–” He attempted to reach back with his opposite hand and touch beneath his shoulder blade, but stopped with a hiss of pain.

  She hissed, too, when she saw what she’d missed before, in the dark of the car. A clean-edged slice through the leather of his cut, and, she saw when the muscles of his back twitched, through his shirt, too. She caught a glimpse of pale skin, and dark, half-dried blood. Blood had trickled down the back of his cut; stained his bottom rocker in thin streams.

  She helped pull his cut down his arms, another twitch of muscle and a low grunt the only things that betrayed how badly that simple movement hurt. Underneath, his shirt smelled of sweat – the acridness of stress and fear sweat, rather than the clean sweat of riding in the sun, or working hard, or fucking until the sheets were damp with it. There was more blood on his back than she’d expected, enough to have her pulse leaping with worry.

  “I’m just going to cut it off,” she said. “The sleeve’s ruined anywhere.” The sleeve was nothing but blood. Her hands trembled as she reached for the scissors in the drawer, but had steadied by the time she made the first cut. She shunted emotion to the side again, like she had in the shower. Didn’t think about pain, or vulnerability, or the things she stood to lose as she peeled the halves of ruined shirt down his arm, and wet a cotton ball with alcohol; cleaned the puncture in his back.

  “It’s stopped bleeding, but this could use stitches,” she said, thumbing at the slice, noting the gleam of subdermal tissues within the wound.

  “Tomorrow,” Candy said, tightly; the restraint of pain. “Just pack it for tonight.”

  She cleaned it thoroughly, carefully, applied ointment, and gauze, and medical tape. Urged him to lean back against the edge of the counter as she started in on his arm.

  This was uglier, though a through-and-through, the hole large enough to glimpse light through when she peeked. It needed irrigating. They had a bottle of sterile saline in the back of the cabinet, and she cupped a clean cloth beneath the exit wound to catch the drip as she squirted the solution into the wound. Repeated and repeated again until the saline came out mostly clear. More ointment, deep in the wound, and plenty of cotton batting and bandages.

  As she smoothed down the last bit of tape, she registered the scrape and echo of harsh breathing, and assumed it was Candy’s. She hadn’t been gentle enough; hadn’t taken proper care of him in her attempt to get outside her own head. But when she glanced up, she saw that his brow was troubled, and his mouth closed, and that the staccato pounding of breath was her own, and that she was shaking all over.

  And she was very much not okay.

  She set the used-up tape roll aside on the counter before the shakes took total control and she dropped it.

  “Hey,” Candy said, softly, reaching for her. “It’s alright.”

  It wasn’t – but it would be, again. She’d been at this long enough to know that one terrible day didn’t mean she wanted a sea change. But it felt very, very nice to have him reel her in slowly, and hold her, his fingers teasing circles against the back of her neck, beneath the tangle of her damp hair. She rested her cheek against his pec, right over the steady beating of his heart that was the best reminder that they’d both made it, that they were a little dinged up, but on their feet. The familiar smoothness of skin, and the downy softness of his golden chest hair, and the brick-wall hardness of muscle.

  “TJ okay?” he asked after a bit.

  “Yeah. He’s sleeping.”

  Slowly, her shaking eased.

  “You know,” he mused, voice rumbling through his chest, through all of her in the places they touched. “The first time I met you, you weren’t wearing anything but a towel.”

  She tipped her head back to find him smiling down at her, so softly, fond with remembrance, the sun and laugh lines carving shadows around his eyes.

  She recalled the day she’d arrived in Amarillo for the first time, the bedroom mix-up, and felt a smile tug at her own mouth. “You were so angry.”

  “For about a second,” he said, grin spreading to flash teeth, head tipping in concession. “And then I was thinking, Damn, she’s hot, how did I luck up?”

  “You didn’t, not that night.”

  It felt good to laugh quietly with each other, together, in this space where their lives together had started.

  His smile faded away slowly, replaced with seriousness; with a shining emotion that could leave no doubt to his honesty when he said, “I love you more than anything.”

  “I know,” she said, because she thought it was important that she know. “I love you, too.”

  He cradled her face in one freshly clean hand and leaned down to kiss her. Their first kiss since they’d parted this morning. A gentle brush of lips, careful, like he was worried she was too fragile for more right now.

  But gentleness had always carried its own sort of aggression with the two of them, and she didn’t want that to change, now.

  She reached up and threaded her fingers through his hair, tightened them, and urged him to kiss her deeper. He made a sound against her mouth – of pain, she thought at first. But then his tongue was flicking between her lips, urging them open, plunging deep, and no, it wasn’t pain, but desire. Fervor. His hand closed on the back of her neck, firm but careful, holding her, and he kissed her like he was starving for her. That was good: she was starving for him.

  When he picked her up and carried her out into the bedroom, her legs hooked over his arm, his lips pressing feather-light kisses at her hairline, she remembered the last time he’d done this. It had been the night he’d returned home from going to see Pacer, when those first murders had taken place: the bodies starred out on the hard ground, sightless eyes fixed on the sun, the buzzards circling. He’d come in worried, burdened, and she’d teased him, and it had been with mock growls and playful ferocity that he swung her up and carried her off like a war prize.

  Tonight, he toted her to the bed like a groom with his new bride; like a prince with a swooning damsel. She relished it, maybe more than she should. She’d never liked being treated like something precious by men before, but Candy was too impossibly big and strong and larger-than-life for it to ever feel like anything less than reverence and the carefulness of a big, violent man unused to watching his steps around someone smaller.

  Her eyes started stinging again, when he laid her out on the pillows, and he saw them, of course he did, because his gaze was fixed on her face, ravenous, and covetous, and worshipful.

  His brows tucked low. “Okay?”

  She nodded, throat tight. “Just…glad.”

  His brow smoothed, and he chewed at his lip a moment, a boyish-looking betrayal of his own strong emotions.
“I know, baby.”

  He stripped off his jeans and boxers without ceremony, then turned his head to sniff at himself. “I can shower.”

  “Candy, get down here.” But a moment later, “Oh, your arm.”

  “Fuck my arm.” The bed dipped beneath his weight as he nudged her legs apart and settled between them; plucked at her towel and smoothed its halves apart. Unwrapped her like a gift. And then sat back on his heels, and stared at her – studied.

  Years ago, she would never have pegged Candy Snow as a thoughtful man. As someone who appreciated things beyond their most basic ability to bring him pleasure. A prejudice of hers, she could admit. But she recognized the look on his face now, the careful way he was studying her, as if committing her to memory.

  He reached out and touched her in the dip between her collarbones, lightly, with just the pads of his fingers. Trailed them down, a path that tingled and sparked in the wake of his touch, between her breasts, and up the gentle slope of her belly. He paused there, briefly, to cup the growing swell, his gaze locked with hers. He hadn’t asked about the baby, and he didn’t now, but he’d been worried. A raw honesty in his gaze, maybe even a silent censure for endangering herself and their child both. But that went unsaid, too, and he moved down, and cupped her sex, already slick for him.

  “Candy.”

  He surged down to her, then, pressed them together, skin-to-skin, and at last, finally, she was home.

  Fifty-Six

  When they first arrived back, and Candy went to talk to one of the local officers, Fox leaned in to Albie and whispered, “Don’t say anything to the cops. We don’t even live here.” Then he’d smacked Albie lightly on the shoulder. “Come do a perimeter check with me.”

  An excellent idea. Axelle had gone off with Michelle and Jenny, was being looked after, and it would be best to ensure that the cartel hadn’t left a man behind. A sniper, even just an observer.

  Outside, frost had settled over everything, jagged white fur on the cars, and bikes, and fence posts, the air sharp in his lungs, breath pluming like dragon smoke. The stars were clearer here, compared to Knoxville; the sky broader, all its many shades and tints of blue visible. Fox vaulted easily over the wire fence, and Albie followed, less easily. They went off property, through waving grass turned silver by the moonlight, and up a short rise, where Fox halted, and turned back to look at the clubhouse, glowing warm and yellow like a beacon on an arid sea.