“That’s easy for you to say. You never served.”
He seemed to consider his words even as the chants intensified. “You’re right. I was never in the military. But these are just kids.”
“Kids who don’t understand.”
“That’s probably true,” he said. “But they’re just kids. Nothing to get upset about.”
Chuck didn’t understand what he was saying. He couldn’t. Those chants were so far off the mark, and the signs they started producing were even worse. Didn’t they understand the level of sacrifice members of the military undertook? The things they did so entitled little brats could protest, could exercise their constitutional rights? It was so much harder than anyone imagined, serving in the military. You had to make choices in fractions of seconds, choices that could save your life, save your friend’s life, save a stranger’s life, or fuck everything up. It was easy to hoist a sign and shout something catchy. It was harder to tote a weapon and try to save everything, even as it was all falling apart in your face.
One of the protesters suddenly seemed to take notice to the way I was ogling the entire operation, and started to stride toward me.
“Just walk away, Sloan,” Chuck said, worry painted over his features. “Let’s go.”
“I’m a grown man. I can handle a little confrontation.”
“What the hell are you staring at?” the protester demanded. “You got a problem?”
“Yeah, I have a problem,” I confirmed. “You’re protesting the military, and I’m a veteran.”
“Oh yeah? Of what war?”
“Iraq.”
“Then you’re a criminal, along with all of the rest of them. There was never any…”
The kid was giving me a treatise on all of the various reasons why Iraq had been a doomed mission, but the roar of rage in my ears drowned him out. I was vaguely aware that my vision was going, too, fading to a pure, hot, whiteness that I normally only experienced if I was brawling inside of a bar, after way too many drinks. This situation was a lot different, though. I usually liked to brawl for fun, and this was serious. My fist cocked back, a look of shock appearing on the kid’s face when he finally realized what was about to happen to him.
“Sloan, no!”
Book 3
Chapter 1
“Sloan, no!”
The asshole who was about to get a taste of my fist against his face looked surprised he was going to get hit, limpid eyes widening in shock, even though he should’ve seen it coming. To spout the kind of vitriol he had been shouting alongside a bunch of other people outside one of the newly renovated historic buildings of downtown Rio Seco, he should’ve been prepared for the kind of consequences I was prepared to dole out. I was already prepared for it, prepared for the sting on my knuckles, how sweet it would be to shut him up.
Except that Chuck’s enormous hands closed down on my shoulders and yanked me backward.
“Let go of me,” I growled, twisting in his grip.
“It’s not worth it,” he told me, though his voice was tight with emotion, too.
“This guy’s being an asshole.”
“You’re right about that. But he’s still not worth it.”
“You heard what he was saying.” That was what had set me off to begin with, the kind of chanting that the group of protesters was doing. It was awful, horrendous, talking about soldiers being puppets and implying that they enjoyed what they did way too much. As a former Navy SEAL, I wasn’t about to roll over and take that. This scrawny little fucker obviously had no idea what he was talking about, and I was about to be glad to educate him until Chuck had stepped in, of course.
“I did hear what he was saying,” Chuck admitted. “Sir, have you ever considered the way your words might make a veteran feel?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I hurt your feelings?” the asshole asked in a whiny little voice. “They’re just words, big man.”
“Your words are illustrating just how ignorant you are,” I informed him. “I’d be more careful with them, if I were you.”
He sneered something else at me, but I’d stopped listening. I hated everything about this interaction, the way I was powerless to stand my ground against my own temper, powerless against Chuck, powerless even to do the one thing I wanted to do the most punch the asshole right in mouth that was spewing all that hate. He had no idea what it took to serve in the military. What you had to do…that wasn’t a choice. No one would choose to do the things I had to do.
But I hated everyone’s eyes on me the most. The urge to yell at them not to stare at me was overpowering, but I knew it would just make me sound crazier. I could understand what people thought of me in that moment as clearly as if they’d been shouting their feelings at me everything from panic to fear to cool appraisal, like the level gaze a woman I’d never seen before was in the middle of giving me. The more I looked around, though, the more I realized that I hardly recognizedanybody in the crowd of protesters. That was odd, especially for a town of Rio Seco’s size or lack thereof. Where had we gotten all these political protesters? The small desert town I called home only had one bar, for Christ’s sake. There wasn’t enough energy or interest here for a political movement. One positive moment in a sea of negatives, though, was that it looked like at least a few of the protesters were super uncomfortable with the confrontation. I hoped that meant they didn’t agree with all the things this asshole had been spewing.
They all looked like they were waiting to see what I would do next, though, like I was an animal in a zoo. That woman in the middle of the pack…she seemed the most interested by far. God, I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be doing any of this. I knew why I’d snapped, but I wished that I hadn’t, that I’d just gone inside the bar like Chuck and Haley had wanted me to. What was it about that strange woman that was making my hackles rise? I’d never seen her before in my life; why did she have such a strong effect on me? Was I going crazy?
Who knew? Maybe it was just that the summer heat of Rio Seco had finally gotten to me.
“You’re rabid, man!” The asshole snarled at me even as I struggled to break free from Chuck’s grip on my arms. All I wanted to do was walk away, but to be fair to my friend, he didn’t know that. “All of you are!”
I was in the middle of opening my mouth and digging deep for the nastiest insults I could lob out at him when Chuck surprised us both by butting in again.
“Please be more respectful toward my friend,” he said, giving me a shake in case the asshole didn’t know which friend he was talking about. “He is a veteran.”
“I figured as much,” the asshole spat. “Does he always fly off the handle like that? Maybe he should be seen about that.”
“Motherfucker, I will”
“Enough.” Chuck was placid, his calmness implacable. It made me angry, and emotional, that he didn’t see any need to rise to the asshole’s bait. Chuck simply didn’t understand the kind of bullshit the guy was spouting, and I knew it was because Chuck didn’t come from a military background like me.
Of course, somewhere deep down inside of me, the place where my logical self was in the middle of cringing away from my embarrassing behavior, the temper I just couldn’t avoid if the right buttons were pushed, I knew that Chuck was just trying to help me. Even if he couldn’t completely understand where I was coming from, he had my best interest in mind.
None of that mattered to my temper, though. My temper had already lumped Chuck in with the protesters, with the guy who continued to disparage me even as I struggled to land a punch or even a kick on him.
“We’re leaving,” Chuck was in the middle of informing both me and the asshole, turning away, back toward the bar. He looked over his shoulder. “You should try to be more understanding of situations where you have no experience.”
“Yeah, well, fuck you, too. You’re both idiots.”
“Are you seriously walking away from that?” I demanded, incensed, trying to wriggle free from Chuck
’s tough grip. The man was as strong as an ox. All I could do was kick against the ground as he pushed me onward. “He called you an idiot.”
“You and I both know he’s the one who’s an idiot,” Chuck said. “The last thing we need is another fight this close to the bar.”
Chuck was talking about the brawl he and I had participated in a couple of months ago, in which another guy had been rough toward Haley, a waitress in the bar. It had been pretty ugly, I’d been informed later, not so much of a brawl as Chuck smacking the guy down and me, stupid drunk, trying to get in on it. I remembered very little of it, just that I really wanted to help, and I guessed my only regret was getting in Chuck’s way. He’d been the one to actually have a stake in it, as he’d apparently been hopelessly in love with Haley. I’d just wanted a good fight.
Or something. Really, the details were all so fuzzy.
“This is different,” I tried to tell him, aware of what a fool I probably looked like in the moment. Chuck was an enormous black guy, and though I wasn’t a small man, myself, no one in Rio Seco was as big as Chuck. He was in full control of my movements whether I wanted him to be or not, and he marched me through the entrance of the Horizon MC Bar as easily as if I wasn’t resisting at all.
Haley met the both of us at the bar with a worried stare and a cold beer in each hand.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Chuck said, taking one of the beers from her. “That’s some nice service right there.”
“Everything okay?” she asked, giving me a suspicious glance. It looked, for a moment, like she wasn’t in the mood for delivering the second beer to me, but she handed it over with a little huff.
“I don’t know. Is everything okay, Sloan?” Chuck almost looked like he was expecting an actual response to that question, which was more than a little laughable. He knew for a fact that nothing was okay. That asshole outside had mocked me in a way that I had never thought I’d be mocked. I was certain the time of spitting on U.S. veterans was over with the Vietnam War. He had no idea what I’d gone through. No one did, not even Chuck or the rest of the guys. They knew better than to ask.
That was the best part about being a member of Horizon MCnot including this present moment, of course. We’d all been through a lot in our lives before winding up in Rio Seco, away from it all. The last thing any of us wanted to do was to rehash the “glory” days. Nobody grilled Ace about the cop who’d gotten killed on his watch, while he was deep under cover, back when he was a cop, too. And no one dared to question the circumstances of Chuck walking away from the badge, even if it was common Horizon knowledge that it was because he’d discovered his sister’s body during a routine domestic violence call. Brody and I didn’t exchange war stories from Iraq, even though we’d both done tours there though with separate branches of the military. And certainly none of us pushed Jack to go into therapy or try something, anything to recover the memories an explosion in Afghanistan had robbed him.
There were some things you just didn’t talk about. I knew that some people talked about it, sure; but none of us had to if we didn’t want to. The silence about our collective pasts was something that brought us closer together, in my opinion. Shit had gone down, and we’d all emerged on the other side of it, alive but perhaps missing a few odds and ends. There was no need to obsess over it, or cry about it. We just needed to keep marching forward, to hell with the past. But nights like tonight, the way I’d lost my shit at a total stranger, were something I really, really didn’t need.
“Sloan?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said, masking the roughness of my tone with a quick chug of the beer Haley had handed me. “Damn, that’s cold.”
“I hope so,” Haley said. “They’re supposed to be cold.”
“Could you just bring a couple of buckets over to the booth when you get a chance?” Chuck asked her, planting a kiss on the top of her blond head. “I think we’re going to need them.”
What he meant was that he thought I was going to need them, but I didn’t dispute the point. I did seem awfully thirsty at the moment.
Brody jerked his chin at us from behind the bar, which meant that Ace had the night off. Instead of pursuing other wholesome pastimes and hobbies, though, Ace had come to the bar anyway, and was currently sprawled out by himself in the club booth. The booth itself was pretty swanky. Super comfortable upholstery, always available since only Horizon MC members were allowed to sit there, and always the best place to sit in the entire joint. It helped that we owned the baror at least our president, Jack, did. Brody was the general manager, and Ace was the main bartender. Those three were always trying to get Chuck and me to quit our jobs and come work at the bar, but I wasn’t sure I would want to spend all my time here like they did. I liked being outside, first of all, minus the summer heat. And I wasn’t sure I would get any legitimate work done here, where I had access to as much booze as I could stomach whenever I wanted. Seriously. I didn’t think I’d ever paid a bar tab here in my life, though Jack kept one running because he thought it was funnyand something he might get to someday hold over my head to get me to do something. Jack didn’t really need the money. He had all the money in the world he needed to live comfortably and then some one of the only perks from an explosion when he was an Army Ranger that scarred him up and wiped his memories clean. It was more about the power dynamic with him. He loved pranks and cheerful blackmail opportunities.
Nervously, as Chuck and I approached the booth, I wondered where Jack was. He was always here, like some kind of mascot or fixture, even if he never did any real work. It was odd not to see him in his regular seat, laughing and joking and holding court over his bar.
“Hey, there was a gorgeous chick in here asking for you earlier,” Ace told me as I slid into the booth. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch. She was smoking hot.”
“Just wait until I tell Katie,” Haley teased him, plopping down the buckets of beer Chuck had requested. If I knew her, she’d probably been making them up as we were outside in the middle of our altercation. She understood the way we functioned all too well. “She is going to be so mad at you.”
“No way,” he argued, though he looked a little uncertain of himself. “We have a strong relationship. We can look as long as we don’t touch. And maybe we’ll work our way up to being open to touching someday, too.”
“Do I even want to know?” Haley asked, grim.
“We’re thinking about a threesome,” Ace announced. “We’re at the theoretical stage, of course. Exploring whether it would work with our relationship. You know. Trying to go about it in a responsible manner. Rounding up our expectations for the encounter. Casually discussing who we might ask to share a night of once-in-a-lifetime pleasure with us. That kind of thing.”
“I really did not want to know, as it turns out,” Haley said, walking away.
“Wait!” Ace called after her, grinning. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about! Something really, really important!”
“Ace, I know you’re not about to proposition the woman I’m sharing my life with to have a threesome with you and Katie,” Chuck said, his voice admirably calm.
“What if it was Katie who did the propositioning instead of me?” he asked. “Would that change anything?”
I had to laugh, at this point. Ace was such an idiot. “How sure are you that Katie would ask Haley?”
“Hey, now. Haley’s a great —”
“What would keep her from choosing, say, Chuck, here?” I asked, elbowing Chuck in the ribs. “Or even little old me? Well, not little. If you catch my drift.” I gave my very best leer, and Ace shuddered.
“She would never”
“I would like to interrupt, if I may, at this point,” Chuck said. “You should know that I personally would feel honored if Katie invited me into the bed you all shared, but I would respectfully decline. Ace, you are not what I usually look for in a man.”
He spluttered. “I have to say, Chuck, that I am personally offen
ded. Why, I can be everyone’s cup of tea if you just give me a chance.”
Katie chose that moment to stroll in and plop down. Jack wasn’t around to tell her not to, and she took her liberties with the club booth as often as she could. “What are you all talking about?”
“Club business,” Ace said quickly.
“Man business,” Chuck blurted out at the same time.
She stared at the two of them in confusion.
“Trust me,” I said, patting her hand and handing her a beer. “You do not want to know.”
“Yeah, I’m kind of picking up on that,” she said, eyes darting between Ace and Chuck suspiciously. “Did you guys see that rowdy bunch of people just down the street? What’s up with that?”
I shuddered. “Bunch of assholes, is what’s up with that. You still on duty? Could we make like a noise complaint? Disturbing the peace? Something?”
She took a long drink of her beer. “Does it look like I’m on duty? What are they doing, anyway?”
Chuck beat me to the punch. “Some not-very-well-thought-out chanting.”
“Against veterans,” I added.
Katie winced. “Ouch. That’s not nice.”
“So you’ll call some of your on-duty colleagues to come and break it up?” I asked hopefully.
“There’s not a lot I can do unless they’re blocking traffic or shouting profanities,” she said, not without sympathy. “Did you see them do either?”
“Well, Sloan was kind of the one shouting profanities,” Chuck pointed out.
I rolled my eyes at him. “Thanks for throwing me under the bus. What if I pushed one of them out into the street and blocked traffic? Would that work?”
“I think you know the answer to that one,” Katie said. “Sorry we can’t just go around arresting people because they’re assholes. Sometimes I wish we could, but that just wouldn’t be the American way.”
“The jails would be stuffed to overflowing,” Ace said, nodding.
Brody ambled over, and Katie and Ace scooted in for him. “I think Jack’s on his way in,” he said. “That means you better go claim the VIP seat, Katie.”
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