Chapter 2
TWO
DUKE
I’d been thinking about her for four days.
Which was a problem, because I didn’t do this.
I was the guy who showed up, got the job done, moved on.
Somebody’s truck breaks down in or around this town, I arrange the tow from our shop - The Forsaken Iron Works.
Somebody needs a hand in the shop, I’m already there.
That was how I worked. Show up, be useful, keep moving.
The moving part was important. You kept moving and you didn’t have time to think about what you were moving away from.
Four days, and every time I closed my eyes I saw her standing on the side of that highway with her shoulders drawn in and her body angled to keep her daughter behind her. I knew fear when I saw it, and that was it.
I hadn’t asked her name. Nor had I asked where she was from, or what she was running from. But I knew the look. The one that said she’d been measuring people for years, weighing every word, calculating how much honesty was safe.
Rosie called on Wednesday.
“The girl’s working out - her name’s Trixie by the way,” she said, without preamble, because Rosie didn’t waste words. She was no-nonsense in that way.
“Good with customers. She shows up early, stays late, and never complains. Ruby’s a sweetheart too. They’re managing.”
“Good.”
“But she’s careful, Duke. Too careful. She smiles at everyone and tells nobody anything. Won’t say where she came from, won’t say why she left. She jumped last night when I dropped a baking tray behind her. Full body flinch, hands up, the whole thing. Covered it fast, but I saw it.”
I sat with that for a second, my coffee going cold on the workshop bench, my wrench loose in my other hand.
“I’m coming in for lunch,” I said.
“Somehow, I figured you would.”
I walked into Rosie’s just after noon. The bell jangled.
The lunch crowd was thin today, a couple of truckers at the counter, old Hank in his usual spot with his newspaper.
The place was warm, grease and coffee and the particular hum of a diner that had been running long enough to wear grooves into its own rhythm.
She was behind the counter.
Reaching for something on the top shelf, up on her toes, one hand braced on the counter for balance.
The stretch changed the shape of her. Pulled the fabric of her shirt tight across her back, outlined the width of her hips, the full curve of her ass in those jeans.
My brain produced a thought so vivid and so unhelpful that I had to look at the floor for a second and remind myself I was a grown man in a public place.
She turned with two mugs in her hands and saw me and something moved across her face. Quick, controlled, put away before it had time to settle. Recognition, then warmth, then the automatic retreat of a woman who’d trained herself out of showing things.
“Hey,” I said. Because I was a man of stunning verbal range.
“Hey.” She set the mugs down. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
She poured. I sat at the counter and watched her hands, the efficiency of them, the way she moved behind the counter with the competence of someone who’d figured out the job in days and made it look like years.
She remembered Hank’s coffee was black with two sugars.
She remembered the trucker at the end wanted his eggs over easy.
She was paying attention to everyone, all the time, and the precision of it said everything about how she’d been living.
You got that good at reading people when your safety depended on it, and everything about her told me at some point it had been a useful skill.
I stayed through lunch. Ordered a burger I didn’t feel hungry for, a second coffee I definitely didn’t need, and told myself I was just checking in because the club had towed her car and that made her loosely our responsibility, in a completely professional way that had nothing to do with the fact that I couldn’t stop watching the way her hips moved when she walked to the kitchen window.
She was built in a way that kept pulling my attention.
Full through the hips and the thighs, a softness to her waist that her work shirt couldn’t hide, breasts that filled the front of it in a way I was trying very hard to be respectful about and failing.
I was mesmerized by her body and it made me hard just thinking about putting her breasts in my mouth whilst gripping those hips.
She moved with an unconscious ease, unhurried, practical, and every time she turned to grab an order and the fabric shifted against her body, the back of my neck went hot.
I didn’t do this. I fixed engines and I rode highways.
I deflected feelings with jokes and kept everything at arm’s length.
I did not sit in a diner with my coffee getting cold because a woman with curvaceous hips reached for a coffee pot and her body did something that made my hands want to be involved.
Her little girl appeared halfway through my burger.
She came down the stairs from the apartment above, still in her pyjamas, the stuffed teddy dangling from one hand.
She stopped at the bottom of the staircase and looked at me with the direct, unblinking stare of a child who hasn’t learned to edit herself yet.
“You’re the bike man,” she said.
“That’s me.”
“Your bike is loud.”
“Yeah. It is.”
She considered this for a moment. Then she walked past me to her mother, climbed onto the stool beside me with the determined, graceless effort of someone whose legs were about a foot too short for the job, and sat there with her teddy on the counter and her feet swinging above the floor.
“Can I have juice?” she asked her mom. But she was sitting next to me, and the choice of stool hadn’t been random. The easy way she’d planted herself beside me shifted something in my chest I wasn’t prepared for.
Trixie poured the juice. Her eyes met mine over Ruby’s head, just for a second, and I could read the whole complicated thing in her face. Grateful, cautious, a tenderness underneath both that she covered by turning to wipe the counter.
Rosie caught me on my way out. She was in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, a cloth over her shoulder, the expression on her face the same one she’d worn for as long as I’d known her.
“She needs people,” Rosie said. “She won’t ask for them, won’t let herself need anything, but she does. The girl’s been on her own a long time, Duke. Even when she wasn’t alone I think.”
That last part sat in me for the whole ride back to the compound.
Even when she wasn’t alone.
I called her that evening. Rosie had given me the number for the landline in the diner apartment, the old wall-mount phone that came with the room.
“Hey, it’s Duke. I was thinking,” I said, when she picked up. “You and Ruby should come out to the compound Saturday afternoon. Let the kid run around, see the place. There’s space for her to wear herself out and Rosie says you haven’t had a day off since you started.”
Silence. The kind where someone is deciding something.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
“I know I don’t.”
“I mean you’ve already done enough. The car, the tow, the diner. You don’t owe me anything.”
“I know that too.”
More silence. I could hear the weighing up. How much to accept. How much obligation it would create. What it would cost.
“Ruby would love it,” she said finally. Giving herself permission by giving it to her daughter first.
“Saturday. After lunch. Rosie knows the way, she’ll give you directions.”
They pulled up around two. Ruby was out of her car seat and across the gravel the second Trixie opened the door, her teddy swinging from one fist, her eyes already trying to take in everything at once.
Trixie followed at the pace of a woman who wasn’t sure what she’d agreed to, her hands in her back pockets, her shoulders tight.
The compound was loud and alive, the way it always was on a Saturday.
Bikes being worked on in the shop, the clang of a hammer from somewhere behind the lodge, music from a radio someone had left on.
Ruby stood in the middle of it with her mouth open, taking in every sound, every movement, every man in leather who walked past and gave her a nod.
And this kid was fascinated. Utterly, completely fascinated.
“There’s so many bikes,” she breathed.
“Yeah. There’s a few.”
“Which one is yours?”
“The black one. Right there.”
She looked at it the way other kids looked at ponies. With her whole body leaning toward it.
“Are there other men with bikes?” she asked, watching two prospects cross the yard carrying engine parts.
“The best kind,” I said.
She looked up at me. Considering. Then she put her free hand in mine, casual, the way kids do when they’ve decided you’re safe, and said, “Show me.”
I looked at Trixie. She was standing by her car, watching her daughter hold my hand, and the expression on her face was the most unguarded thing I’d seen from her since I first met her. A mother watching her child trust someone and trying to decide if it was safe to let it happen.
I showed Ruby the workshop. The tools, the parts laid out on benches.
She wanted to know the name of everything.
Wrench. Socket. Spark plug. She repeated each one with the grave seriousness of someone learning a foreign language.
When I lifted her onto the seat of my bike, engine off, her feet dangling a mile above the pegs, she gripped the handlebars and made a vroom noise so committed that Hawk, passing through the workshop behind us, stopped walking.
He looked at me. I looked at him. His eyebrow did plenty.
“Don’t,” I replied.
“So, your MC… Forsaken Angels, is that right?” Trixie asked.
“Yeah, that’s us,” I replied. “We own this whole compound, and that garage over there too,” I said with a nod over in its direction.
She looked over at the shop.
“The Forsaken Iron Works,” she said quietly with the realization slowly creeping over her in real time.