“You don’t remember?”
“Not much, no. Don’t remember you being there. Lakota verifies seeing you. But I know damn well I didn’t fuck around on you. Even if I wouldn’t’ve remembered doing it, I would’ve been able to tell this morning, and I am saying to you now that I did not.”
“There was that girl all over you.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Girls are all over everybody at a party like that. I need you to take my word that I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It looked wrong to me.” But now she wondered whether she’d overreacted. Wouldn’t be the first time.
He sighed. “Sadie, can I come in?”
“Aren’t you going to be late for your biker bonanza?”
“I’m not going. I’m here instead. With you.”
“You’re not going?” Her heart got loud and thumpy again. He’d picked her over his club?
“I got yelled at this morning for telling you I love you last night. That was a very strange experience, I gotta say, hearing that from a guy I’d never met—and in front of about fifty brothers. I’m sorry I don’t remember saying it, and I’m sorry I said it like that the first time.” He reached out and cupped her cheek. “But sweetheart, it’s true. I love you.”
Gordon should never have done that, and not only because walking into that place was probably dangerous as hell. He was supposed to keep her confidences. But Sadie didn’t care at all. “Holy shit,” she breathed.
“So can I come in?”
She nodded and let him right back into her life. He hadn’t actually ever left it.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sherlock needed coffee, badly, but Sadie didn’t drink coffee. When he’d started spending the night with her, she’d bought some instant for him, but that shit was swill. So as she let him into her apartment, he asked, “Spare me one of your Diet Cokes?”
She turned and cocked an eyebrow at him. “You hate it.”
“Need the caffeine.”
Nodding, she headed to her refrigerator. Sherlock went to sit at her dining table and rest his head in his hands for a second. The vase of fresh red tulips mocked him with their bright cheer.
It had been a long time since he’d been blackout drunk, but he sure the fuck had managed it the night before. He’d woken up sprawled in the corridor between the Hall and the showroom, like he’d been on his way somewhere and had just run out of battery.
When he’d crept into the Hall, Bibi and the women had been putting out a massive, greasy breakfast, navigating around fallen bodies everywhere, and after some biscuits and gravy, a gallon or so of coffee, and a very fast, very cold shower, Sherlock had felt like he’d get through the day. Everybody had been starting to liven up; the enticing aroma of Bibi’s sausage gravy and buttermilk biscuits would bring the dead from their graves.
Most of the bodies had roused, and they’d just been starting to get motivated for the last stage of the run—from Madrone to L.A., with press coverage all the way—when there’d been some commotion at the door, and then J.R. was pushing a skinny, grey-haired black dude in a suit toward him.
Sadie’s sponsor, Gordon. Who was about five-foot-eight, maybe, and who’d stood toe to toe with Sherlock, and even popped him in the chest a couple of times, while he lectured him about treating Sadie with care and respect, and what it meant to love an addict, what his responsibilities were. As Sadie might have said, fuck a duck.
They’d had the attention—first concerned and then amused—of every conscious ear in the place. When Gordon had finished, he’d said, “That girl is strong, but she’s nowhere near as tough as she likes to think she is. She loves you. Treat her with care or cut her loose. Now’s when you decide.” Then he’d held out his hand, and Sherlock had shaken it.
Within fifteen minutes after Gordon had left the Hall, an extremely confused Sherlock had gotten bits of the blanks filled in from Lakota, taken a massive dose of shit from his brothers, and Hoosier had told him he could bail on the day if he wanted to, no judgment.
He loved this rally, and he didn’t want to miss it. But apparently he’d fucked up with Sadie, and he couldn’t let that hang out there. Especially not with Sturgis coming up right on the heels of the day.
So here he was, sitting at her table, sipping on the noxious brew that was diet soda. Guh. At least the carbonation was scrubbing off the last of the fur on his tongue.
She sat across from him. “Who’s Taryn?”
Fuck. What the fuck had he said last night? He took another long drink and forced it down. It seemed she wanted to jump right into the shark pit. Okay, then.
“My ex, I guess.” Without knowing what he’d said last night, unadorned honesty was the best policy. It was the best policy in most situations, as far as he was concerned.
“You guess?”
“It’s over. I said ‘I guess’ because I’m not sure there was ever something there to be over. It’s complicated. I’m not really in the mood to hash that out right now, but the summary is that it’s over, and it was over before we met.”
“Lakota thought I was her.”
“I never brought her around to the clubhouse. She only met a couple of my brothers. But they all knew about her, I guess.” He sighed and put up his hand before she could push him on his choice of words again. “I guess because I don’t know. But the guys gossip. A lot. Like fishwives. So it wouldn’t surprise me if they all know I was banging a chick named Taryn. Okay?”
“Okay.” She looked down at her hands. “Did you love her?”
“No,” he answered at once. “What we had wasn’t like that.”
She nodded without looking up. “Last night scared me.”
He finished the damn Coke and pushed the can to the side, then spanned the table and caught her hands in his. “Sadie, look. I’m not asking you to be in that part of my life. I know it’s not a place for you”—she went tense at that for some reason and tried to pull her hands from his, but he clamped down and held her fast—“It’s okay with me to keep my club life and my personal life separate. I’m different from most of my brothers. I like different things, my brain works differently—I don’t know. I’m just different. They’re my family, and my friends, and I love them all, but the club’s not everything to me. Hell, things have been changing a lot in the club, anyway. Half of them have wives and families now, and they go home for dinner and television like regular folk most nights. Last night was a rare kind of thing. Parties usually get wild, but not like that.”
“But you like the parties?”
“Sure. They’re parties. That’s the point. And yeah, there are women around who are there for sex and dress that way. I’m going to notice them, and I’ll probably flirt. I like to flirt. I’m telling you that as long as I’m with you, that’s where it’ll end. You need to trust me and believe I love you. If you’re that jealous, this isn’t going to work.”
“I never knew I was jealous before. But I really am. It hurts.”
Unable to think of a response to that, he sat and watched her, waiting for her to look up at him again, but she didn’t. “Look at me, little outlaw.”
She raised her head.
“I love you,” he said, offering her a smile. “Trust me.”
“How old were you when you lost your virginity, Sherlock?”
Not expecting that question at all, it took him a beat to process it. “Seventeen.” He hadn’t exactly been holding girls off with a stick in high school. He’d been a skinny geek who played Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Not a lot of girls in his anemic social circle. His first time had been in a friend’s basement, after playing D&D and getting drunk on some kind of schnapps. His friend’s older sister had pushed up on him, wanting to see his cock. Then she’d wanted to experience his cock. Like the surprised dweeb he’d been, he’d gone in unprotected and had blown his wad in, oh, about five seconds. She’d laughed through the whole short, pathetic experience. Except for the part where he’d had sex and had touched gi
rl parts—and hadn’t made her pregnant—it wasn’t quite the high point it could have been.
He’d come a long way since then.
“I was twelve.”
Shock made him twitch. “What?”
“My babysitter and her boyfriend got me strung out on E, and he fucked me. I remember it, kind of, in this foggy, off-center way. I bled for a while afterward, but didn’t hurt or anything at the time. It was just this thing that was happening to me. That went on pretty regularly until I was fourteen. That’s how I got introduced to sex and to drugs.”
“My God. Sadie…” He felt sick, but it wasn’t hangover. Shock and rage rolled in his stomach.
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken, and Sherlock saw that her eyes had lost focus. “I had some really weird ideas about myself and sex for a long time. It wasn’t until after it stopped happening that I started to freak about it and go looking for ways to keep my head quiet. Sex was a way to keep it quiet. So was Oxy, and later H. Cutting helped, too. Still does.”
Her eyes sharpened again and she looked directly at him. “I started using when I was twelve. I was a full-blown addict at fourteen. I’ve only been clean for fourteen months. You’re the first person I’ve ever let get to know me like you do. You’re the first person I’ve ever tried to be normal for. Normal feels weird and scary to me. Is it normal to be okay with what happened last night?”
Still reeling from the information she’d shared, Sherlock tried to sort through his head to find an answer to the question she’d asked. As far as he knew, the only thing that had happened was Shay rubbing on his back. He didn’t remember that, either, but Lakota had told him about Sadie standing at the bar, and that was what he’d seen. But it didn’t really matter what had happened. He hadn’t fucked anybody. And he wouldn’t.
“I think it’s normal to trust the person you love. The person who loves you.”
“Love hurts.”
At that, he smiled. His heart felt raw and sore. Never in the weeks he’d known her had she seemed so young and vulnerable as when she’d stared at him with those violet blue eyes and spoken those two words. “Yeah. I guess that’s why they write songs about that.” He pulled on her hands. “Hey, sweetheart. Does that mean you love me back?”
With a little grin lifting one corner of her wonderful mouth, Sadie nodded. “Obviously, dummy.”
“So, then, you want to take a ride to a family-friendly biker rally where we hand a big check to the children’s hospital and then go to a carnival?”
She blanched. “Sherlock…”
“Come on, sweetheart. I wouldn’t ask you to come if it wasn’t safe, and we’ll leave before that changes. Whatever you saw last night, I want you to see something better.”
~oOo~
Sherlock shook his head and tapped his finger on the bar. “I’ll use my hand, sweetheart.”
The buxom bartender at one of the outside bars at the Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis, South Dakota gave him a saucy shrug and plucked the shot glass out of her cleavage and set it on the bar.
“Sad to be using your hand around here this week, though, don’tcha think?”
He just grinned and pushed some cash her way. “Thanks.”
“Damn, bro. Another one bites the dust.” Lakota leaned over the bar and put his mouth around the shot glass tucked between the bartender’s tits. He lingered before pulling away with his mouth around the glass and tipping his head back. “Ahh!” he gasped as he set the glass down. “’Nother round, baby doll.”
As she poured another round, Lakota leaned down and crossed his arms on the bar. “Glad your little chick let you off the leash, dude.”
“Fuck you.” In truth, Sadie was still jealous and unhappy about this trip. But it was better. She’d enjoyed the charity rally, and then, instead of going to the party that night, he’d ridden her up the PCH, and they’d found a quiet place on the beach to sit and watch the tide come in. The water had been rough, the waves crashing heavily, and sea spray had misted their bodies while he’d fucked her.
She’d come to the clubhouse with him to see them off on their way to South Dakota. She’d been wide-eyed and somber, chewing her fingers, but when he’d kissed her and whispered, “I love you. Trust me,” she’d nodded and thrown her arms around his neck.
He thought she’d be okay. He was keeping in touch.
And God help him, but he liked that she was jealous. Having somebody care about him like she did was a fucking rush.
Currently, though, Lakota was standing in the middle of the world’s biggest biker bar during the world’s biggest biker rally, trying his damnedest to be morose. “Seriously—Con, Trick, now you. I’m all on my own. Not sure what to do with myself.”
For years, the four of them had been a little crew within a crew. They were all within a few years of age, all single, and they’d all hung out together. They’d all patched in within a few years of each other, too, so for a while they’d been the club youngsters. Lakota and Connor had even lived for years in the clubhouse, so they’d always been around.
Sherlock had always been a little bit outside of even that group: Trick and Connor had a bond of their own, and Lakota hung with Ronin some, too. The only of his brothers who truly shared Sherlock’s interests beyond booze, chicks, and the club was Bart. They were both hackers, gamers, all-around tech geeks. But Bart had been a family man nearly as long as he’d been in California. They understood each other in a way their brothers didn’t, and they worked closely together every day, but they weren’t confidants. Sherlock didn’t have a confidant. He’d never felt like he needed one.
“Don’t know what to tell you, bro. Maybe you should start hanging out with Fargo and Keanu. They’re still chasing tail. And shit, since Diaz is back in the game, I’m surprised his dick hasn’t fallen off.” Diaz had been dumped by his supermodel wife a while back. Something like a year later, he was still stalking around the clubhouse like a feral dog scenting out bitches in heat. He’d never been precisely faithful; Ingrid travelled a lot for her work, and Diaz was a firm believer in the run rule, but Sherlock thought he was doing a whole lot of spite fucking.
Lakota gave him a hint of a strange look, just enough to make Sherlock’s brow crease, and then it was gone, and Connor had come up behind them and draped his arms over their shoulders.
“My brothers. Deme and me are heading to the Chip. Let’s do it.” He stood back and cracked his knuckles and his neck, just in case they’d missed the point. Sherlock looked at Lakota, and they both grinned. They had not missed Connor’s point.
~oOo~
The Buffalo Chip campground hosted bare-knuckle fights throughout Bike Week. The Chip had gotten huge and chaotic, hosting a shit ton of wild events, so the Horde weren’t staying at the campground. Both charters had rented space in some rancher’s pasture, about fifteen miles from Sturgis. They had their own mini-campground, far enough from the revelry to be fairly quiet at night, even though they were hardly the only ones renting space there.
Some of the guys—the older ones, especially—were playing it cool this week. Hoosier had ridden up on his trike, defiantly confounding everybody’s assumptions about what the septuagenarian was capable of. Missouri’s Showdown Ryan, maybe ten years younger but with a body that had taken a crazy amount of abuse, had also ridden up on his old Softail. Both oldsters seemed to be making the pasture a comfortable place to stay.
No old ladies had joined them. Not one. Sherlock thought that strange, but he guessed most of them had kids. Still, it was odd to see so many of his brothers at this rally, hanging around together, no women among them, just sitting around drinking and shooting the shit.
Including him.
The club really was changing.
Tonight, though, they all rode up to the Chip, because Connor could not turn down the chance to bash heads, and bare-knuckle fighting was his forte. That Demon was getting in on it, too—well, that was not to be missed. Demon had been a lot calmer since he’d gotten his son and settle
d down with Faith, but when the dude got mad, he’d make the Hulk take a step back.
Both charters of the Horde were gathered loosely along one side of the ring, cheering Connor on as he brought down his third competitor. Sherlock could see him flagging, but he just roared at the guy on the mat like some kind of gladiator and then held out his hand to help him up. Trick, serving as his corner man, shouted for him to come the fuck over.
At Sherlock’s side, Demon barked a laugh. “Looks like I got next. That dude’s gonna flatten Con.”
A massive, long-haired ape of a dude had climbed into the ring. He had several inches—height and width both—on Connor, who was not a small man. But Connor was graceful for his size. As the block of granite shrugged out of a Priests kutte, Sherlock said, “You think?”
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