“Thanks for your help.” His smile had turned sly again, but he made no more move.
Just ‘thank you.’
Jenny had never made a move on a man in her life. She wouldn’t know how to begin. Always, she waited for the man to ask her out, or ask for her number, or start the conversation. It was a small miracle that she’d comported herself with this guy as competently as she had.
“Um. Okay. Well, I hope she likes it. Have a good night.”
When he tipped an imaginary hat at her and turned away, Jenny went to her cart and pushed it to the sleepwear, trying to ignore the disappointed bubble in her belly. Mrs. Turner liked matching housecoats and slippers, and she loved that Jenny always bought her a new set for her birthday. That was why she’d come shopping, not to pick up men.
~oOo~
She’d kept her eyes peeled while she’d been in the store and especially as she was checking out, but he must have checked out as soon as he’d had his purse, because she hadn’t seen him again.
She scanned the parking lot, too. It had gone dark while she’d been shopping, so she didn’t have much hope. But then, parked in a striped space under a light standard, centered in the halo of light, was a big, shiny black Harley. It totally looked like a bike James Dean would ride—the actual James Dean or her new personal favorite version. She supposed there could have been another biker in Wal-Mart. Tulsa wasn’t exactly hostile to bikers; they even had their own MC in town, and most people she knew thought they were decent guys. Actually, she didn’t even know if he was a biker. He’d been wearing that jacket, but that could have been a style choice.
Still, a girl could hope.
Moving as slowly as was reasonable, she made her way to her Escort and opened the hatch. She carefully placed each blue sack inside, and the new tube of giftwrap, and closed the hatch. Then to the cart corral, like a bipedal sloth.
When she turned back, out of ways to delay, there was a tall, dark form leaning on the rear fender of her car.
Oh, praise Jesus and all his disciples.
She walked straight toward him, at a significantly more purposeful pace. When she was close enough, he held out his hand, and she took it without even thinking about whether it was smart to do so.
Big and warm, rough and hard. This was a man who worked with his hands.
“Didn’t get your name.”
He pulled her close and turned, pushing her back to the side of her car, then leaned in, gripping the roof and framing her between his arms. He was wearing more leather—a vest over his jacket. There were a couple of white strips patched to his chest. It was too dark to read them, but she understood. He was more than a biker—he was an actual Brazen Bull.
He’d asked for her name. “Jenny.” She whispered it, afraid to break the spell.
“Hi, Jenny. I’m Maverick.”
“Maverick?” She couldn’t trust her hearing or any other bodily function just then, but that hadn’t sounded like a name. Except for Tom Cruise in Top Gun.
“Yep. You got a fella?”
She shook her head, and he smiled.
“Been thinkin’ about kissing you since I saw you dancing around in that sweater. What d’you think about that?”
Jenny thought it was one of the better ideas in the history of man. Right up there with flight. And Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
She nodded, and he bent his head to hers.
Oh yeah. Absolutely brilliant idea.
He didn’t have a beard, but his face was rough with the day’s growth. That fine sandpaper contrasted starkly with the warm velvet of his lips and made Jenny’s nerves stretch out. He kept his tongue to himself, let his lips caress hers until she felt greedy for more. She was surrounded by him, drowning in the scent and heat of him, and she opened her mouth as much to breathe as to ask for his tongue.
When she touched her tongue to his lip, his chuckling breath stuttered across her cheek. He shifted, no longer leaning his weight on his hands, and wrapped his arms around her, sliding under her open coat. The move brought her body firmly to his chest—broad and hard as a brick wall—and she was dwarfed and overwhelmed. As his tongue pushed into her mouth, he leaned forward, forcing her to bend backward, so far that she had to trust him to hold onto her so she wouldn’t fall.
He held on, and she didn’t fall, not even when her heart raced so hard she thought she’d pass out.
After a glorious, breathtaking, impossibly brief eternity, he pulled back and brought her up. As if he knew that her knees were weak, he held her tightly for another few seconds, until she could support her own weight.
When she opened her eyes, he was smiling slyly down at her. “I gotta go, but I think I’m gonna need your number, Jenny.”
She nodded. He let her go and rooted inside his vest. He pulled out a felt-tip pen, handed it to her, and held his hand out flat, palm up. Her hand shook as she took the cap off the pen and wrote the number of The Roost across his callused skin.
“This is where I work. You can reach me there, or leave a message.” She couldn’t risk him calling home when she wasn’t there.
He cocked a curious look at her but didn’t ask any questions. While she watched, he pursed his lips and blew over the ink. Then he caught her chin in his other hand and bent his head—oh yay! He was going to kiss her again.
“I hope you work a lot. ‘Cuz I’m gonna be in touch real soon.” He laid his lips on hers for the space of a heartbeat, and then he stepped away.
“You have a good night, Jenny.”
“Thanks. You, too.” Ugh, how lame.
With another sly grin, he turned and walked—no saunter, no strut, just a steady, confident stride—to that shiny black Harley. Jenny stood and watched him pull a pair of gloves on, mount his bike, and fire the engine up. He pulled off, sending her a jaunty salute as he rolled by.
She watched until he turned out of the lot. Then the spell broke, and she was standing on a Wal-Mart parking lot, alone in the cold.
But a sexy man called Maverick had just kissed her practically unconscious and asked for her number. She touched her fingers to her swollen lips and smiled.
CHAPTER FIVE
Maverick hadn’t slept, not to speak of, in days. Since that last, entirely wakeful night in his cell, he’d been lucky to catch a couple of forty-five-minute naps in a night. The bed in this crash room was too big and too comfortable, the pillows too fluffy, the linens and blankets too soft. The clubhouse sounds and smells were all wrong.
And his brain would not shut the fuck up.
Even so, every morning, even after three nights spent staring at the ceiling, he was on his feet before six-thirty, working the kinks from his long-abused body. He showered and dressed and made his bunk...his bed. Then he went downstairs for breakfast.
The first morning, after that shitty, surreal encounter with Jenny, where he’d creamed his goddamn jeans like a thirteen-year-old, he’d stood in the middle of the room and waited for first count. Even after he’d realized how stupid that was, it had taken him a couple of attempts to make his body go to the door, try the knob, open it, and step through.
He had forgotten how to live a life without permission.
By Monday morning, he’d stopped waiting for first count, but he was far out of sync with the world nonetheless. Even a window without bars or chicken wire was strange and unsettling, and he’d caught himself several times staring out the club’s front windows, transfixed by the vehicles and people moving freely about.
Activity already bustled in the party room this Monday morning, when Maverick came down at about quarter to seven. Delaney had called church for seven, and Mo had come with him. Several boxes of doughnuts and pastries were lined up on the bar, and the rich aroma of strong coffee brewing wafted through the room.
Good coffee—absolutely one of the highlights of life outside. No more instant.
Mo smiled when he went up to the bar. “Morning, love. How’re we doing today?” She poured him a cup without asking and pas
sed the cream over.
“I’m okay. You?” He ignored the cream. He’d taken cream before, but the crap they’d had inside had been the powdered creamer filth, and he’d never even tried to develop a taste for it. He’d taken the prison swill black, and his first cup of coffee with real cream on the outside had tasted like custard. He was a black coffee man now.
“Two more weeks before I go back to school, and I’m gonna enjoy every second. I was thinkin’ you and I could do some apartment hunting, if you’re of a mind.”
The thought of renting a place gave him a weird, vaguely sick feeling. A whole apartment to himself? Alone? He was too used to four close walls. More space than that made him feel loose and unsteady. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted the apartment he’d had with Jenny. That had been his alone for years, but it had become a home when she’d moved in. He wanted that home back.
But he didn’t have it, not yet, and Delaney had already told him that he couldn’t live in the clubhouse. He could stay only until he got himself settled, and the implication had been that he should be quick about getting settled.
He had money, at least. That wouldn’t be a problem. Delaney and Simon had handed him a fucking sack of bound stacks of bills, and Simon had given him a sheaf of papers accounting his earnings for the past four years, less what they’d paid to Jenny over those years—and an accounting of that, as well. It was all in code, but Simon had explained it. The partnership with the Volkovs had been lucrative work. His cut was smaller because he hadn’t worked the jobs, but even so, he had a decent nest egg.
He had money. Enough to put a good down on a little house, if he wanted. It’d be okay if Mo helped him out. Less lonely.
“Sounds good. I got...I gotta get with my probation officer today, and D wants me to put in some hours next door, but after work tomorrow, I could spend some time.”
“That’s good. I’ll spend some time today putting together a list of places to see. Any thoughts on what you’d like?”
Jenny and Kelsey. That was what he’d like. But she hadn’t called yet, and he wasn’t sure he believed she ever would.
Maverick shook his head. “I trust you, Mo.”
~oOo~
The club roster was not much changed since he’d last sat at this table—Griffin had been patched in while he was away, and Apollo had signed on to prospect, done his time, and been patched in during his sentence. The new prospects were strangers to him. But otherwise, he knew his fellow Bulls.
And yet, he felt like the stranger at this table. Becker had taken Maverick’s customary seat, and there was a minute or two of awkwardness as they figured out how to reconfigure the table. Ultimately, Becker made way for Maverick, and he sat where he’d always sat, and felt like it was somebody else’s place.
Delaney started the meeting by welcoming him back to the fold, and there was more cheering and back-slapping. But then that was over, and a normal club meeting began. As Maverick listened to the financial report and the status of various jobs he hadn’t been part of, including the Russian gun routes, he understood that he was out of sync even with his club. As stable as the club roster had been, much had changed in four years. They’d been dominant in local and regional outlaw circles before, but now they were playing on a national stage. They were moving guns for some very bad folks, to some even badder folks.
He was no law-and-order tightass. Hardly. He’d been a rebel from the time he’d first said no. He was far happier handling his grievances himself, with his fists, than looking to any system to do it for him. He fucking despised institutional power—even more after spending four years as its bitch. Nothing that the club had done before had given him pause. They’d kept the outlaw work in bounds, only laying down hurt where it was earned. They’d kept innocents clear, and they’d put good out into their neighborhood and town, good they wouldn’t have been able to do without the bad. He was proud to be a Bull. They’d earned the respect that patch got them—and it was respect, not fear.
But he wasn’t so sure that this work with the Russians was in bounds—not the same bounds, anyway. He’d killed two people in his life: one in a boxing ring, his last fight, and the other in prison, on the club’s orders—on Irina Volkov’s orders. Maverick had never even met the woman, but he’d killed for her, and he’d paid dearly for it.
Before the Volkovs, the Bulls had never done a contract hit. Even Rad, the patch with the most blood on his hands, who’d put a lot of hurt down on people over the years, and had killed a few enemies of the club, had never, to Maverick’s knowledge, killed for anyone but the club, in retaliation for harm done to one or all of them. Taking the life of someone with whom they had no personal beef? That was next-level shit.
It was going to take some work to get his head lined up with where his club had gone in his absence.
After they discussed the gun routes and the schedules for upcoming runs, none of which Maverick would be in on, since he couldn’t leave the state, Delaney said, “Now. I wanted to get all that out of the way before we talked about what happened last night.”
Everybody’s attention drew to a fine point. Maverick looked around the table and decided that Delaney, Dane, Rad, and Eight Ball were already informed, but whatever was coming would be news to the rest of the members.
“The prospects got jumped last night, comin’ out of Callwood Auto Supply. They’d picked up an order. Got the shit kicked out of ‘em, and lost the van.”
“Fuck!” Gunner barked. “They okay?”
Delaney nodded, and Dane picked up the talk. “Willa patched ‘em up. We sent ‘em home with a couple of girls to take care. They’ll be okay. The van was full of off-book parts, but D already talked to Tulsa PD, and there’ll be no blowback if they’re still in the van when—if—law finds it.”
The club van had delivered Maverick’s bike to him at McAlester. It was no great prize for a car thief. Same one they’d been rolling before he’d gone away. “That van’s a piece of shit. Were they after the cargo?”
“I don’t think they were, no,” Delaney answered. “Callwood is near Northside, just on the edge of Dyson turf. They’ve been setting little fires with us all around Tulsa for the past year or so, ever since...ever since you took Jennings out, Mav. Just trivial nuisance shit, slinging back and forth. But you’re released, and two nights later this happens across the street from their border? Still not big, but real harm this time. Prospects say the guys that jumped ‘em were black. I think Dyson’s looking to beef.”
Maverick was very interested in this. The hit on the prospects he didn’t know wasn’t the focus of his interest. The notion that the club might beef with the Dyson crew, though—he had a mountain of payback due on those bastards. He thought wiping out that whole fucking crew would go a long way toward getting his outlaw head screwed back on straight.
His hands curled into fists. He was all for this beef.
“Jesus fuck,” Rad growled. “We don’t do this shit in town. Not where we live.”
“We do if that’s where it’s dropped on us,” said Gunner.
Maverick turned and studied his friend. He really had changed a hell of a lot during these years. He’d always been the club’s loose cannon, loyal as fuck and great in a fight, but crazier than most, and he’d always carried himself like somebody who thought he was already halfway in trouble before he’d gotten out of bed in the morning. Maverick had spent a lot of time with him, helping him find ways to keep his head tied to his shoulders without bringing trouble on himself or the club. There’d been times when that had been nearly a full-time job.
Now, though, he seemed calm. Even just sitting in his seat, he was different. He didn’t fidget, for one thing. No infuriating shaking of his leg, his knee thumping against the table nonstop. Was that all about that pretty young blonde he’d marked?
“Right now, we need to know more. Apollo, get with your cousin at TPD and see if there’s word on the van. Rad, Eight, Ox—go to Callwood, see if anybody saw anything. I’m go
nna go talk to the kids, see if they remember more after some sleep, some food, and some head. Everybody else, get on with your regular day.”
“D.” Maverick jumped in before Delaney could gavel the meeting closed. With the president stopped and nodded, he said, “I want in on anything Dyson. I want to sit up front on any move we make.”
“Could get dirty fast, brother,” Dane said. “You sure you want that risk already?”
“Positive. I got my own shit to work out on that crew.”
“Your head straight enough for it?” Delaney asked. “You’re not steady yet, from what I see.”
“I’m steady enough. If I’m not, that’ll get me there. I paid hard for doing that hit. I’m owed now.”
The table was quiet. Delaney narrowed his eyes and examined Maverick. Maverick stared right back. “Alright. You say you’re ready, you’re ready. But you hold tight until we decide what to do.”
Maverick nodded. As long as he was on point when the Dyson crew got hit, he’d wait for the plan that would make it happen.
~oOo~
After church, Maverick did a few hours at the Sinclair station. Simon had been doing all of their auto body work on his own these years, getting some help with the heavy stuff from a couple of the guys. He’d spread his shit all over the body-work bay, like he owned the damn place. So most of Maverick’s first shift was spent muscling himself back into place where he’d once had seniority. After that, he’d hung out in front with the codgers from the neighborhood. A couple that he’d known had died, and a couple who’d been working men back then had taken their seats. Sitting with the old men in the hot sunshine, being pulled into their aimless conversation, was the first time since his ride on Friday night, before he’d stopped at The Wayside, that Maverick felt some peace.
How long was Jenny going to make him wait? He was Kelsey’s father. No matter what she thought, he’d done nothing to warrant being kept away from his child. If Jenny didn’t want him, that would tear him up, but he’d abide by that. But not being kept from Kelsey. No fucking way.
Slam (The Brazen Bulls MC #3) Page 7