Chapter 25
Sloane
Two Months Later…
There are some decisions in life that feel inconsequential until you’re standing right up against them.
Like taking the first step to opening your heart after almost two decades alone.
Like adopting an elderly cat who looks at you like she’s given up on life and then turns into a purring puddle the second she’s on your lap.
Like letting your grown son move half his life into a clubhouse full of bikers, because apparently that’s a normal thing that happens when you blink and your baby turns into a man.
And like putting on a helmet while Cruz stands in front of me with his bike idling at the curb, his big hands gentle as he checks the strap under my chin.
“It’s not too tight?” he asks.
I shake my head. “It’s good.”
He studies me anyway, because that’s what Cruz does.
He checks and double checks. He makes sure.
He’s not fussy about much when it comes to himself.
He’ll walk around on a knee that’s screaming at him, eat whatever food is put in front of him, drink coffee that could strip the finish off a floor, and sleep in a hard chair if he thinks that someone he cares about needs watching over.
But with me, he checks.
He doesn’t make it feel like I’m fragile, even though I think that’s the line he’s always walking. He protects without making it seem like I need protecting. There’s an art to that. I’m not sure if he knows it, but he’s good at it.
“Still want to do this?” he asks.
He’s giving me an out. Again. He’s given me about ten since we walked downstairs.
I glance at the bike. It’s big and black and gleaming, with enough chrome to catch the weak late winter sunlight and throw it back at the street. It looks like trouble. It looks like freedom. It looks like one more step into a life I never imagined having.
I should be terrified.
I am terrified.
But I’m also excited enough that my stomach keeps flipping. “Yes,” I say. “Before I think about it too much and talk myself into having an extremely sensible cup of tea instead.”
His mouth twitches. “We can still have tea after.”
“Good. That’s the only reason I’m doing this.”
That earns me the dimple. The rare one. The devastating one. The one that should probably come with a warning label, because it has the power to make all my good sense take a nosedive straight off a cliff.
Cruz swings one long leg over the bike and settles in.
He moves like he belongs there. He always does.
In my café. In my kitchen. In my bed. On this bike.
In my life. That last one still gets me sometimes.
In the two months since we decided that we were going to do this—whatever this is—it’s been easy.
Not the easy that makes you scared that it’s too good to be true.
More the easy where you feel like someone’s always been in your life.
He looks over his shoulder and holds out a hand.
I take it.
Getting on the back of a motorcycle is not graceful.
At least not when you’re me and you’re wearing thick leggings, boots, a leather jacket, and a helmet that makes you feel like an astronaut who wandered into the wrong movie.
Cruz braces the bike easily while I climb on behind him.
The seat is wider than I expected, but there’s still nothing between me and the whole rest of the world except Cruz.
That thought lands with weight.
Not just physical weight, though I immediately understand how literal this is.
My thighs frame his hips. My chest presses to his back.
My arms go around his middle because that’s where they belong.
He’s warm and solid under my hands, and when the bike rumbles beneath us, the vibration travels straight through me.
Oh.
Okay.
That’s a thing.
“Arms tight,” Cruz calls back.
I tighten them. His hand covers mine where they’re locked together against his stomach.
He squeezes once, then lets go. It’s not lost on me, what this means.
I might not have been raised around motorcycles, but Hart is Hart, and the Satan’s Angels aren’t exactly a secret.
Everyone knows that riding on the back of a biker’s bike isn’t nothing.
Maybe for some people it’s casual. Maybe there are women who climb on and off without thinking about it.
But this is Cruz.
Nothing with him feels casual.
This feels like a statement. Like I’m letting him carry me, not because I can’t stand on my own two feet, but because I choose to hold on. For a woman who spent most of her adult life being the only person she could count on, that’s not a small thing.
The bike rolls away from the curb, and my breath catches.
For the first few minutes, I’m all panic and sensation.
The engine. The cold air. The lean of the bike as Cruz turns.
The strange, vulnerable awareness that there are no walls, no doors, no roof, no seatbelt.
Just motion and sound and Cruz’s body steady in front of me.
Then something loosens. Not all at once. Not magically. I’m still me. I still have a brain that likes to present seventeen worst-case scenarios before breakfast. But the longer we ride, the more the fear starts to change into something closer to exhilaration.
The wind pushes at us, but Cruz is steady. The bike moves beneath us, but he knows how to handle it. I learn the rhythm of leaning with him instead of fighting against it. I stop gripping him like I’m trying to compress his ribs into powder and start holding him like this is what we do.
Like we’ve always done it.
By the time we’re out past Patterson’s diner and on the back roads outside Hart, I understand why he loves this.
It’s not just speed. Cruz isn’t reckless.
He doesn’t ride like he has something to prove.
He rides like he’s listening. To the road.
To the machine. To the wind. To me, even though I haven’t said a word.
The fields open on either side of us, winter-bare and silver under the muted sky. The mountains sit in the distance, dark and permanent. The whole world feels washed clean, stripped down to its essentials.
Road. Sky. Breath. Body.
Cruz.
I rest my helmet against his back and close my eyes for a few seconds.
I’m not scared. That realization hits harder than I expect.
I spent so long telling myself that I didn’t need anyone else, that it was me and Liam against the world.
My own personal wants always took a back seat.
Not that I was a martyr or denying myself.
Just that part of me was secondary. But now…
I’m not scared.
That doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing.
I don’t. I’m still learning how to love a man after twenty years of not needing one.
I’m still figuring out how to be someone’s partner when I’ve spent so long making sure I could survive without that.
I’m still adjusting to the idea that my son is now an adult and is making his own way in the world, but it’s a privilege seeing him as the man he’s become.
He’s growing into himself. Into the club.
Into the man he wants to be. He still comes home.
He still sprawls on my couch and eats half the contents of my fridge.
He still kisses my cheek in public, even when the guys are around, and no one gives him shit for it.
He still asks my opinion, even when I know he’s already made up his mind.
But there’s something steadier in him now.
The guilt about the trouble he brought to Hart hasn’t vanished.
Maybe guilt never fully goes away when it’s tied to love.
Maybe it just becomes less sharp. Less like a blade and more like a scar you touch sometimes to remember what happened.
Besides that, all he did was see something he shouldn’t have.
The only thing he did wrong was not to tell someone about it straight away.
Jackal and the club haven’t had any more contact. We’re not na?ve enough to think that he’s out of our lives for good. But we coexist, and he never made the connection between Liam and his nightclub, so as far as my son’s involvement goes, that’s a closed book.
Cruz slows the bike and turns down a narrow road lined with trees. It climbs gently, winding up toward a lookout I didn’t know existed. When he parks, the sudden absence of motion makes the world feel too quiet.
He shuts off the engine and the silence rushes in. I don’t move right away. My arms are still around him, my cheek still against his back. He covers my hands with one of his.
“You okay?”
I nod, then remember he can’t really see that. “I’m good.”
He turns slightly. “Good good, or trying not to hurt my feelings good?”
I laugh, breathless and shaky. “Good good.”
His shoulders ease.
We get off the bike, and this time I’m a little less ungraceful.
Cruz takes off his helmet first, then helps me with mine.
The cold air hits my flushed face. My hair’s probably a disaster, but Cruz looks at me like I’ve just stepped out of some ancient myth instead of off the back of a motorcycle with helmet hair and watery eyes.
“That was…” I trail off because I don’t have a word.
“Too much?”
“No.” I look back at the road we came from. “It was kind of perfect.”
His expression shifts and softens. He takes the helmets and sets them on the bike.
The lookout isn’t fancy. Just a wide gravel pullout with an old wooden rail and a view of Hart tucked below us.
The town looks small from here. Small enough to hold in a hand.
Small enough to protect. My café is somewhere down there, tucked into its brick corner with Prissy probably sleeping on the blanket Cruz gave me, completely unbothered that her humans have gone out into the world without her permission.