He knew that most of the Horde—everybody but C.J.—hadn’t questioned his ideas because he had been so instrumental in Lilli’s rescue, and he had been riding a high of his brothers’ regard. What he could do with a keyboard was as much like magic to most of the Horde as it still kinda was to Bart himself. He hadn’t known he could do half the things he’d done that awful day, and he’d done it literally with one hand tied up—he’d been shot in the shoulder in the earlier firefight. He had some whiz-bang shine left over after that success, and they hadn’t questioned his ideas.
But once those ideas were in place and doing exactly what he said they’d do, the Horde and the town experienced some hard growing pains. They’d been dying, but they’d been doing it privately, just the few hundred souls who’d been sticking it out. Now they were reviving, which meant that they needed to be more open and welcoming, and they’d needed to cool it with some of the colorful local customs—like bar fights as entertainment, for instance. That wore hard on the men of the town, the Horde especially.
They were working on solving that problem.
In the meantime, Bart, who was excited about the changes and openly enthusiastic about the movie deal, was getting a lot of heat for bringing all this new shit into town. He was hoping one day that heat would become credit. He knew everybody knew, deep down, that what they were doing was a good thing. Some day they’d act like it and stop bitching about people wanting to take their picture. He hoped.
He let his thoughts wander around in that territory, feeling prickly and morose, as he worked on Bob Sanderson’s tractor—his straight job these days, a mechanic at Keyes Implement & Repair. When he finished, he was running later than he liked. He was grease to his elbows, and scrubbing with Lava soap and the never-hot water in the squalid garage john wasn’t getting him clean. So he booked it to the clubhouse and showered in his room, where he had a good hand brush.
He needed to get to the B&B to pick up the van—the club van was too ratty for the likes of Riley Chase and Tanner Stafford—but he took a couple of extra minutes and put some goop in his hair, finger combing it sort of messily straight up. Then he put fresh jeans and a clean white t-shirt on and shrugged on his kutte. One more look in the mirror. That was as good as it got. He grabbed his watch from the dresser and wrapped the wide leather band around his wrist. He liked wearing a watch. It was old school.
Bart took a look at that watch as he closed the buckle. Shit. Shit. He was going to be late.
CHAPTER THREE
The flight, for the most part, was uneventful. On the first leg, Riley and Pru sat directly across the aisle from Tanner and his assistant, Mark. There were no direct flights from LAX to Springfield, so they laid over in Dallas for a couple of hours. In the Dallas first class lounge, Tanner, who’d barely made the flight in L.A., came over to Riley and Pru’s table with drinks and managed to send Pru packing in short order. She wandered over to chat with Mark, and Tanner made himself comfortable on the bench seat next to Riley.
She had not worked with Tanner before. Film-wise, he was a class above her, routinely headlining Oscar-bait films, while Riley worked primarily in television and cranked out a rom-com during her hiatus. Fame-wise, though, they were on the same level. And they were represented by agents in the same agency. So they moved in many of the same circles and thus were fairly well acquainted with each other. Not friends, not pals, but they’d chatted a few times at parties and dinners and events.
Tanner had a storied reputation for romancing his leading ladies. Probably the last eight or ten movies had had him linked hotly with his co-star. By all accounts, he was pure torrid intensity and a truly epic lay, until about a week after the premiere, at which point he was gone. A few of those blazing and brief “relationships” had become public relations tangles for him (he’d left a pregnant non-industry girlfriend for one co-star), but in the end he always managed to come out unmussed. People liked bad boys far better than they liked bad girls. Beautiful British bad boys whose eyes crinkled when they smiled could probably drown puppies by the basketful and still get a pass.
The gossip press was already anticipating the “Rilanner” show, but Riley was not interested in that kind of drama. It helped that she also didn’t think he was all that hot. Sure, she could appreciate that he was beautiful—tall and chiseled, with bright green eyes and shampoo-model-gorgeous dark hair (it was long now, for the role, she guessed, so all the more shiny and shampoo-y). But that was kind of the problem, as far as Riley was concerned. Too pretty. And much, much too aware of it. He wasn’t a bad guy, overall, if you weren’t sleeping with him, but he was vain. Even by Hollywood standards. He was extremely good looking and extremely talented, and that somehow made the vanity even worse. The guy could spare a little humility. Honestly.
Riley liked her men a little more used. Like Devon. Devon had been gorgeous in her eyes. With his dreads and his moth-eaten, stretched-out sweaters, and his pierced lip—she’d really loved that pierced lip—and his lean, spare frame. And his eyes. God, those big, brown eyes. She’d really loved the way he’d looked. She’d really loved him, period.
Best not to spend too much time dwelling there. She’d spent plenty of time there the night before, playing Laughing Warriors videos until the wee hours, sitting in the middle of her bed with her MacBook and her silly box of relationship keepsakes.
He’d died almost nine months ago. She was supposed to be ready to move on, apparently. She thought she might be. And then she thought she might not. A death was not a breakup. It wasn’t the end of a relationship, the death of feeling. She could be angry at him, and she was. He’d only been out of rehab for barely more than a week, and he’d promised her. But she couldn’t stop feeling. She couldn’t move on, because he couldn’t move on. There was no closure to be had. Only finality.
She seriously needed to stop thinking about this. She was getting herself caught in a loop. Maybe this trip to Hicksville was what she needed—away from her life, her mother, her keepsake box. She hadn’t wanted to come, but maybe there was some head-clearing to be had.
But in the immediate, Tanner was sitting next to her giving her meaningful looks. He was going to be disappointed; she was going to break his streak. She wouldn’t be moving on with him, not even in a reboundy way. Because he was not her type.
She didn’t have a type, per se, though—not a physical one, anyway. She had a personality type, an emotional type. She wasn’t sure she understood what it was, exactly, but she knew it when she saw it. And Tanner Stafford did not have it.
So she was on her guard when he shooed Pru away and then stretched his arm across the back of the booth, behind her, and leaned in.
“Riley Chase. You and I are to be lovers.” He gave her a crinkly smile and picked up a loose curl of her hair from her chest—just above her boob—and laced it through his fingers.
She pulled her hair free from his grasp. “You mean our characters. Yes. It appears so.”
He leaned in a little closer. “We shall have to spend some time together, of course, to find the seed of our chemistry.”
Shall. Did people in the twenty-first century actually say shall in casual conversation? Maybe it was a British thing. She smiled at him and leaned away. “You know about Debra Winger and Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman?”
He cocked his head and crinkled at her some more. “Indeed. Quite the grand love story, that. What say you and I aim even higher?”
“They hated each other. All that intensity on the screen was loathing, not love. Maybe we should try that.”
His crinkles faltered for a second and then recovered. “Are you saying you loathe me, love? I can’t believe I’ve done anything to deserve that.”
“You haven’t. I’m saying that I’m not interested in anything but the job. You’d have a better chance getting me to loathe you than love you, especially with this shtick. So let’s just stick to pretend.”
He lifted his hand and tucked it underneath the scarf she had
loosely looped around her neck, laying his palm on her chest, his fingers lightly at her throat. It was an offensively intimate gesture. What he said made it worse: “Ah, right. The grieving heart. But that was some time ago. It’s time you healed.”
Fed up with his little seduction game and now pissed the fuck off, Riley slapped his hand away. “Don’t underestimate me, Tanner. Nothing about you is attractive to me. But I’m a good actor. So are you. We don’t need to be in love to play lovers. We need to be good actors. So this whole thing you’ve got going on here is a waste of your time.”
It had been her relationship with Devon that had taught Riley this important fact, among other things: never try to throw somebody out of a fight—or, in this case, a disagreement. Trying to control somebody else’s actions was too difficult, and invariably resulted in the other person getting the last word. If you needed to be apart, you had to be the one to go. So she scooted out off the bench and went to the bar to grab Pru and drag her to the bathroom, leaving Tanner sitting alone in the booth.
She snuck a peek on their way to the ladies’ and was gratified to see him looking confounded. Good. What a douchebag.
~oOo~
While he wasn’t exactly chastened, Tanner did leave her alone during the rest of the layover. During the flight, when he and Mark sat in the row in front of Riley and Pru, they both turned around a couple of times to talk to the women, but only in a cordial way. So he was on much better behavior. Still, Riley put her earbuds in and closed her eyes. She didn’t turn any music on, but the pretense was enough to give her some alone time, and she made the most of it until the landed in…she couldn’t remember the name of the town where the airport was. Not Signal Bend. But somewhere in Missouri.
The foursome walked unaccosted through the airport. Riley had girded herself for the usual gauntlet, and she sensed Tanner do the same, but no one seemed to recognize them—or, if they did, no one seemed to care. As they approached the baggage claim, Riley did notice a group of young women standing near a gift shop, and it looked like they did, in fact, recognize them. But they kept their distance and only stared and giggled amongst themselves. Strange. In the major cities, people gawked openly and were always bold about asking for—or even demanding—autographs and photographs. But here they were left alone. Huh.
When they got to the baggage claim, they looked around but saw no one there to greet them. That was unusual, but so was this whole trip, so Riley and Pru went to the carousel and collected their bags. Tanner huffed and had Mark do the same.
Riley was deciding that maybe her impression of Tanner Stafford as an okay guy, overall, had been excessively generous. At least today, he was behaving like a toad.
Not sure quite what to do, they stood in a little cluster around their bags, several feet away from the baggage belt. Pru and Mark both had their phones out, trying to track down whatever transportation had been arranged. Riley realized that she didn’t even know who or what was supposed to pick them up. She never knew details like that, but standing here in this little airport, she felt like she should know. Like she was beginning to understand why everybody else controlled her life.
She caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to look. A man in black was striding quickly toward them, almost a trot—their ride. She just knew. Instead of a suited driver with a pre-printed card, this was a man holding a piece of cardboard which looked like it had been torn from the side of the box. Neatly hand-lettered with black marker was the notation: Signal Bend Crew. Was that them? Were they the Signal Bend Crew? Considering the grin on the face of the man holding the sign and running toward him, she supposed they were.
He had a sweet, open smile. A little crooked. Straight, white teeth, but not Hollywood straight and white, all bleach and caps. His were natural. Nice. That nice smile led her to look him over more fully in the few moments it took him to reach them. Short-ish, dark blond hair, sort of intentionally messy, sticking up in all directions from his head. Long sideburns, but otherwise clean-shaven. On the tall side, but shorter than Tanner. Broader, though, across the shoulders. Nice shoulders, in fact, under a bright white t-shirt.
He was wearing a black leather vest with a narrow, rectangular white patch on the left breast and a larger, curving patch on the bottom right. The smaller was embroidered with the phrase: Never Say Die. The larger with the word HORDE. Yep. This was their guy. Riley’s first encounter with an actual outlaw biker. She wondered which one this was. He was pretty cute.
He took the last few steps toward them, dropping the sign to his side and holding out his right hand, first to Riley. “Hi, I’m Bart. I’m your ride into Signal Bend. Sorry I’m late.”
She took his hand, noting the muscular forearm with the elaborate tattoo on the inside, from wrist to elbow, the three thin, braided leather bands around his wrist, and the glint of the heavy rings on his fingers. His grip was strong, and his hand felt hot and almost like sandpaper.
His eyes were grey. She smiled up at them. “Hi, Bart. I’m Riley. This is my cousin, Pru.” Aggravated with Tanner’s cocksure behavior, she intentionally put Pru before him; that arrogant d-bag needed a timeout.
Bart held out his hand to Pru with the same wide, crooked smile. “Hi, Pru. Nice to meet you.” Pru smiled and nodded as she shook his hand, but she said nothing.
Riley had expected something different from her first encounter with a big, scary biker. More growling and less grinning, she supposed. She’d googled bikers at home and had seen lots of pictures of older, angry-looking, heavyset men with wild beards, weird tattoos, and weirder scars. Bart was young, in his late twenties or early thirties, maybe, and practically fresh-faced, though there was something serious in his eyes. His very nice eyes.
Tanner had given Bart’s offered hand a perfunctory shake. Mark had been more polite. Then Tanner walked away from the stack of bags without picking up a single one, and Bart did something wonderful.
He said, “Hey, buddy. I’m your ride, not your bitch. If you can’t manage, there’s carts over there. Van’s right out front. I’ll meet you out there.”
Then Riley’s new favorite biker turned, smiled sweetly at her, and picked up her bags and Pru’s—all of them. “This way, ladies,” he said.
Riley couldn’t resist one smug smirk sent Tanner’s way. He was staring stupidly. It wasn’t often that Tanner Stafford got put in his place so nonchalantly.
~oOo~
The van was long and white, with a sign on the side that read Keller Acres Bed & Breakfast, Signal Bend, and a phone number below that. It took Tanner and Mark several minutes to work out the luggage cart and get their bags onto it. They probably didn’t need the cart, but neither of them had the sense to realize it. By the time they were out at the curb, Bart had Riley and Pru’s bags in the back, and Riley had taken the shotgun seat and Pru the window seat immediately behind Bart. Bart sat behind the wheel and watched Tanner and Mark in the rearview mirror as they got their bags in back themselves. He was grinning. He looked over at Riley and blushed when she grinned back at him.
Finally, Tanner and Mark climbed in and sat down. Tanner looked vexed, but he said nothing. Mark was texting—probably to Tanner’s agent and/or manager to complain. She couldn’t imagine the leather-clad guy with the long wallet chain and the heavy boots who was driving this bus cared much about the complaint being lodged.
“Okay, everybody. We’re about an hour out, little less if I can get some clear road. How ‘bout some tunes?” He turned on the stereo, and AC/DC started banging out “Highway to Hell.” Riley snorted, then put her hand up to her mouth, embarrassed. Bart didn’t look her way, but he was still grinning.
He pulled away from the curb and followed the road out of the airport. They were on their way to the famous biker town. And Riley was feeling much better about the upcoming week. So far, she liked bikers just fine.
~oOo~
Well under an hour after they pulled away from the airport loading zone, Bart crested a rise in a
white gravel road, and Riley’s breath stopped. Oh, so pretty. They were at the top of ridge to a low valley, and below them, as Bart drove on, was a sight from a postcard—or, no. A painting in a museum.
The house, which Riley assumed was the hotel, or B&B or whatever, was big and bright white. Two stories, with a broad wraparound porch. The sun was low in the sky, painting pinks and purples across the white façade of the house. Across the broad, sparkling white drive and lot was a long barn, painted deep red, with exactly the white trim—including Xs on the doors—that a barn like this should have.
There was an enclosed field in front of the barn, and several horses grazed lazily on grass. As Bart pulled up near the house and parked, Riley saw a black and white dog sitting on top of a small stack of hay bales, watching the field behind the barn. Oh—he was watching goats, who were grazing back there.
On one side of all this quiet loveliness was a dense forest; on the other a wide expanse of farmland. Riley had lived in Los Angeles her whole life, so she didn’t know much about farmland, but she was pretty sure she was looking at corn that was ready for the harvest—tall stalks of green and brown, with filmy strands on top.
Everything was green and white and red and yellow and brown, the colors all so vivid they were almost heavy. Then she got out of the van, and took a deep breath. The road had been hilly and winding, and she’d been feeling a little whoopsie. A few deep breaths, though, and her stomach settled. The air here was fresh and rich, with a damp cool about it that was utterly unlike the air L.A. had to offer. Finding good air in Southern California required a trip to the mountains.
She wandered away from the van as everybody else was piling out and Bart was opening the doors at the back. She could hear the goats bleating, and she walked that direction, toward the black and white dog. He was pretty. Or she. Whichever. Pretty. He turned his head as she approached and thumped his tail once against the hay bale, then turned back to watch his goats.
Alone on Earth Page 3