HORIZON
Motorcycle Club
a boxset
CLARA KENDRICK
Copyright © 2017 Clara Kendrick
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Book 1
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Book 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Epilogue
Book 3
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Book 4
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
Book 5
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
Book 1
Chapter 1
I was a firm believer that when important things happened, time just tended to inexplicably slow down. It could be the moment when you realized a friend had become your best friend, or it could be when you realized that you were at fault for something terrible, something you didn’t think yourself capable of. Or it could be the second when you saw someone you felt instantly drawn to, like they were essential to you in some way that wasn’t yet clear to you.
Like the first moment I laid eyes on her.
She walked into the bar, her hair a red halo illuminated by the winter sun, helmet tucked under one arm, looking as natural there as wings on an angel. All sounds around me faded to the periphery as the door shut behind her and she surveyed the area. The lighting was too dim to make out what color her eyes were, but they were luminous, darting around, taking in her surroundings in almost an obsessive manner, like she was nervous, or new.
One thing was for sure she was new to me. I knew just about every woman who walked in through that door to this bar, and I meant both the general meaning of the word and the biblical sense. I had something of a reputation, and I supposed I’d earned it. The world was full of beautiful women, and even the small town of Rio Seco was lucky enough to see a good number of them passing through. That was how I preferred my interactions with them in passing. I had a short attention span, and once was usually enough for me to quench my curiosity.
Once was enough.
If I’d cared enough to talk to anyone about it, meaning a professional at unraveling these kinds of things, I was sure I would’ve gotten a diagnosis of some sort of inability to commit, or open up, or let anyone get close to me.
At least, that was the casual diagnosis of a woman who had been stung by me declining to go out on a second date, in as many words. I think highly professional terminology like “immature motherfucker” was thrown around. She probably wasn’t wrong. She just didn’t have to be so combative about it. She broke every damn plate in my kitchen, and I’d since made the permanent transition to disposable dinnerware.
But that was then, and this was a glorious now, a brand new woman I was sure I’d never seen before. I hadn’t even had a chance to screw up anything between us. I could make a fresh start, be a perfect gentleman, or the man she needed for the moment. The way she tossed her hair over her shoulder was seared into my retinas, and when her roving gaze locked with my eyes, my heart did something funny and stupid inside of my chest, flopping around like there was something wrong with it. There was no reason why something as unearthly as this beautiful woman should be here, trailing her fingers over the bar, turning away from me, sitting down.
That was the thing about Rio Seco, though. It was a small town, but situated along a major crossroads. People blew through here like tumbleweed, stopping for a bite to eat or something to drink, a break from the roads that wound through the desert on their way to the mountains. Some people were gone within a matter of minutes, never to return. And some people got stuck, out of money or luck or both. Others just saw the magic of the place. I figured I was somewhere between those two stuck and love-struck with a town that never seemed to be much of a destination, just a stopping point on the way to somewhere else.
I started to push myself up out of the booth to introduce myself.
“You didn’t hear a single word I said, did you, Ace?”
I didn’t so much as snap to attention as seep reluctantly back into reality, dragging my eyes away from the woman perched on the edge of a barstool like a visiting deity.
“I was listening,” I said. “I promise I was listening. We were talking about…uh…jog my memory, if you would, bud?”
Jack sighed and shook his head. “Nothing important, apparently.”
Now he was just trying to make me feel bad, so I dug deeper into my memory to come up with something. “It is important. We were talking about your nightmares.” Though why nightmares could exist in the same world as that woman was beyond me.
“‘Were talking’ is the operative term there,” Jack said. “But as soon as that pretty thing came sashaying in here, you were miles away.”
I would’ve argued that she floated in rather than sashayed, but it didn’t matter.
“Anybody you know?” I asked, having to work to keep my voice casual.
“What, are you looking for an introduction?” Jack laughed at me. “I’m not enabling you.”
“I don’t need an introduction. I was just wondering if you knew her name.”
“And make your charmed life any easier? Hell, no. You can at least try a little, like the rest of us poor bastards. Though I’ll never understand what women see in this.” At “this” he gestured around my face and head, and I knew he meant my dark hair I kept pulled back in a knot and the beard I kept neatly trimmed.
“You’re just jealous,” I said. I sincerely thought that every man on the planet should give growing a beard the old college-try at least once in their lives. Women loved my beard, and I’d had more than one lover ruminate that my hair was better than hers. In a good way. It was something for them to get their fingers tangled in, at least; a way to draw them in.
“You going to go over there and introduce yourself to her or what?” Jack asked.
“I don’t want to be too forward with her,” I said. “Don’t want to scare her off.” Like she was some kind skittish pony who might gallop away at the wrong provocation.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” he said, a slow grin stretching his face. “What’s going on with you?”
“Maybe I should, um, get her a drink. Or somethi
ng.”
“You’re going to buy her a drink, but you don’t want to scare her away?”
“I mean take her order. I’m the bartender here.”
“You’re on break.”
“I could get off break.”
“You’re on break because you’re supposed to be listening to me bellyache.”
I groaned, and covered my eyes. “I’m the worst friend.”
“You’re not the worst friend.”
“You should’ve called Brody in for this.”
“Brody’s visiting a brewery in Santa Fe, seeing about getting a keg of one of their special edition ales for the bar.”
“No one here wants that. Everyone loves mainstream beer, here. Cheap beer.”
“I told Brody he could try something new.”
“Well, if Brody wasn’t off trying something new, he could be here, helping you.”
Jack huffed. “I don’t want to talk to Brody about this. I don’t want to talk to anyone about this. I don’t even want to talk to you about this, but here we are.”
“I’ll let Haley get the redhead’s order,” I said, sagging a little with some combination of disappointment and relief.
“Thank you, Ace. Thank you for clearing time from your busy schedule of womanizing to hear me out.”
“Any time, bud,”
“So do you have any advice?” Jack was still enjoying himself at my expense, amusement painted over his features at just how caught up I could get in a woman I’d never seen before, but I could see the exhaustion plainly through the grin. Oh, yes. That’s right. We had been talking about his nightmares, and what he could do to get rid of them.
I fought to direct my full attention to the man sitting in the corner booth with me, since he’d become one of my closest friends, after all. It was pathetic to let a beautiful woman distract me from attempting to diagnose Jack’s problems, even if she was an angel on earth.
“It’s just the same nightmare, over and over again?” I asked, frowning as I took a swallow of a beer I’d let grow lukewarm with inattention.
“Kind of,” he said. “Same theme, though, with a few variations. It doesn’t matter, though, because they always end the same me watching myself die.”
“What, like you’re looking down at your own body, riddled with bullet holes or something? You put your hands to your middle and they come away bloody?”
“No, I’m watching it. Like a movie. I can see my own face and everything, as if it’s from a camera angle or something.”
“That’s kind of messed up, bud.”
“I know it’s messed up, that’s why I’m telling you.” He looked exasperated. “I wouldn’t bother you with the minutiae of my dreams if they were normal.”
“Well, you never know with dreams. Who are you to say they aren’t normal? Have you done any research?”
“Like a music montage in a library research, or message boards on a search engine research?”
“Whichever makes you happy.”
“Well, the internet told me I’m dying.”
“That’s the internet’s answer to every malady,” I said, waving my hand in front of us to dispel that notion. “It’s the beginning of the war between robots and humans, you mark my words. Making people think they’re dying because of cold symptoms or bad dreams… That’s firing the first shot.”
Jack laughed, and that told me I wasn’t a completely useless friend. At least I could still bring humor to the situation, barring any real solutions.
“I mean, wouldn’t it be stranger if you weren’t having nightmares at all?” I asked. “If sleeping was just closing your eyes at night and opening them in the morning?”
“I wish it was as easy as that,” he confessed.
“But you’ve been through some shit,” I said. “If you keep insisting that you don’t need professional help, then maybe the nightmares are your way of processing getting blown up.”
He sighed. “For the millionth time, Ace, if I’d gotten blown up, I would’ve died. I didn’t get blown up.”
“You survived an explosion,” I said, finishing my beer with a toss of my head. “In my book, that’s as good as getting blown up.”
“I just want the nightmares to stop,” he said. “Have you ever had problems with recurring dreams?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“Then what are you doing differently? What can I do to get the kind of sleep you’re getting, where your dreams don’t bother you?”
“Get laid, for one,” I said with a grin.
“I should’ve known better than to ask you for advice.”
“It’s sound advice,” I argued. “Nothing like a little sex before bedtime to make sure you sleep like the dead.”
“Sleeping like the dead is what my nightmares are about, Ace,” he said with another heavy sigh.
“Okay, I’ll admit it. Poor choice of words.” I fiddled with the label on the beer bottle. “If you were really worried, you could always talk to somebody about it.”
“I’m talking to you about it.” He smiled. “You’re somebody.”
“As touched as I am, I’m talking about someone who actually knows something about recurring nightmares. Someone equipped to help you deal with everything.”
“You’re talking about a shrink.”
“So what if I am?” I shrugged, spreading my hands. “People see them for a lot less earth-shattering reasons.”
“I don’t want to see a shrink.”
“Do you want to get a good night’s sleep without watching a cinematic rendering of your own death?”
“Well, yeah, but there are limits to what I’d do. Like I wouldn’t kill a man to get some nightmare-free sleep.”
I jerked a little at that, even as Jack paled at what he’d said.
“That’s stupid,” he backtracked. “I didn’t mean that. That was a stupid thing to say.”
“Nobody would think any less of you if you went to go talk to a professional about what was going on,” I said. “Nobody would even have to know.”
“But I would have to know,” he said. “I would think less of myself.”
“Why?”
“Because there are people who have been through much worse than me, and they’re getting by just fine on their own.”
“Bud, let’s take a good, hard look at this.” I held his gaze, then lifted my eyebrows. “You suffered extreme amnesia after survivingan explosion in Afghanistan. You literally had to be told who you are while you were recovering from your injuries. You have no idea” Jack tried to cover his face with his hands in consternation, but I stopped him, grabbing one of his wrists. “No, I’m not saying this to attack you or make you feel bad. You still don’t have any memories prior to waking up in that hospital, do you?”
Jack didn’t say anything to that, but he didn’t have to. I knew that he didn’t have the memories. That he’d had to be informed of his own name, where he was from, who he was. He’d returned to his childhood home and had drawn a blank, the complete absence of feeling driving him away until he found Rio Seco. We’d met when I was still a recent transplant, too, and had shared an affinity for the open road, the emptiness of the desert around us. It felt like a fresh start, Rio Seco, and I knew it attracted Jack just as much as it did me.
“Talk to someone,” I urged him. “A professional. I care about you, man, and I don’t like to see you like this. But I don’t think I have the skills to help you get through this.”
“I know this is a pain in the ass to sit there and listen to”
“Stop. That’s not what I meant. I just want you to be okay. That’s all I care about. Don’t do anything you’re uncomfortable with, but you deserve to seek out help if you think things aren’t working right now.”
“I was just sort of expecting the memories to start coming back already,” Jack said. “The doctors said there was still hope for that to happen, but I don’t remember anything. It’s like my life just started in that hospital. And n
ow these nightmares feel like even more of a setback than…”
“Hey guys.” Chuck slid into the booth as Jack trailed off. “What’s going on?”
“What’s up?” I slapped his shoulder and scooted over to accommodate him in the booth. “Just sitting here, discussing”
“We were just talking about the hot redhead at the bar,” Jack interrupted smoothly raising his eyebrows at me. “Have you seen her around here before?”
I guess I could understand that Jack wasn’t too excited to discuss something like recurring nightmares with just anyone, but Chuck was one of us. “Us” being the Horizon Motorcycle Club. In Jack’s defense, Chuck was former law enforcement, like me, instead of former military, like Jack and our other two members, Sloan and Brody. We were all fans of motorcycles and the open road, though, which bridged any other differences we might’ve had with one another.
“I think I would’ve remembered someone like her,” Chuck said, rubbing his chin. “She’s definitely just passing through, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Hopefully not,” I said, making rings with the condensation on the bottom of my beer bottle.
“What he’s saying is that he hopes he can give her a reason to stick around,” Jack translated, grinning.
“If anyone can do it, it’s Ace,” Chuck said loyally.
“You flatter me,” I said. “I’ve been on my break, or else I would’ve tested the waters already. You off from work already today?”
“Finally caught up on everything, so I decided to take off from the shop and celebrate,” he said, clinking the neck of his full bottle of beer with my empty one. “Of course, that means there’ll be like twenty people waiting for me to open up shop tomorrow. That’s always how that works get caught up, then get pulled under again.”
“Well, at least you have work,” I said. “Too many cars to do repairs on is better than too few, right?”
“You’re right,” he agreed.
“If you were ever not busy enough to make money at the shop, I’d break my bike to give you work,” Jack said.
Chuck laughed. “Thanks for that. Don’t hurt your bike, though.”
“It would be fine,” Jack said. “I know you’d take care of it, and if I hurt it too badly, I’d just scrap it and get a new one.”
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