Chapter 7
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— Austen —
Handful had been asking for weeks. Sunday dinner at the clubhouse.
The whole crew. Just food and family. He’d said it casually, the way he said things when they mattered to him and he didn’t want to show how much.
I’d said no the first few times — not because I hadn’t figured him out by now, but because I knew enough about myself to know I wasn’t ready to walk into his world until I was sure about what I’d be walking into it as.
The Handful I’d met originally and the one I’d been dating for three months barely seemed like the same person.
The first had been all swagger and sharp edges, and I hadn’t liked him much.
The second was quieter — content, polite, surprisingly willing to take things slow.
And I couldn’t shake the worry that I’d walk into a clubhouse full of his brothers and watch him slide back into the first version.
But, the third time he asked, I said yes. Because three months of dating a man who showed up, read Jane Austen and asked before he kissed me had earned him a yes to dinner. Just like he’d earned our first date way back when.
He hadn’t made a big thing of it, but I’d noticed it was Sunday, not Saturday. The brothers held family dinner on Saturdays, he’d mentioned that once in passing. No more parties on Saturday nights, no more of whatever the weekends used to look like. But I worked Saturdays. So they’d moved it.
Handful’s truck rumbled to a stop on the gravel a little after five.
He’d offered to bring me on the bike — asked almost shyly, like the answer mattered — but I’d said no.
The thought of sitting pressed to his back with my arms wrapped around him for the whole ride felt like a kind of intimacy we hadn’t gotten to yet, and I wasn’t going to ride behind him on his bike on the way to a dinner I was already nervous about. The truck was easier.
I’d been here before so the place wasn’t completely foreign to me.
The main building with its flat roof and the row of garage bays.
The houses visible through a gap in the fence line, on what Handful had told me was club-owned land.
The bikes lined up outside the main door.
The prospect at the gate, who nodded at Handful and looked at me with the careful blankness of someone who’d been told to be polite.
What was different was me — why I’d come, and who I’d come for.
Handful parked, cut the engine, and turned to look at me. “You okay?”
“Fine.”
“We can leave whenever you want. Say the word and we go.”
“Handful. I’m fine. Take me inside.”
He grinned and we went inside.
The noise hit first. Not loud, exactly — not the thumping bass and shouting of the parties I’d been to — but full.
Layered. The sound of a lot of people in a space that was built to hold them: conversations overlapping, kids shrieking, something clattering in a kitchen I couldn’t see, and underneath it all, music from a jukebox.
The common room was large and lived-in. Bar along one wall, pool tables, couches that had seen better days.
The kind of place that looked rough until you noticed the details — the floor was clean, the bar was stocked properly, the lighting was warm instead of harsh.
Someone had put effort into making this a room people wanted to be in.
It wasn’t exactly The Velvet Hour, but I could see the attraction.
And it was full. Not just the brothers I’d expected — the officers, the ones Handful talked about — but families.
Women, kids, a chaos of movement and noise that didn’t match anything I’d pictured.
I’d braced for a version of the parties — drunk men, women wearing almost nothing, nude posters tacked to the walls, the air thick with swearing, floors sticky with spilled beer.
Across the room, Colt looked up from the pool table — took in Handful’s hand at my back, then me, then Handful again. He set his cue down.
“You’re the one who threw him out of her bar,” he said.
“I am.”
“Good.” He nodded. “He deserved it.” Then he turned to Handful. “Does she know what she’s getting into?”
“Colt—”
“Still time to run,” Colt said, back to me. “I can hold him down if you need a head start.”
A woman I knew was his wife appeared at his shoulder. “I’m being welcoming,” Colt said without even looking at her.
“Austen.” Handful tightened his hand at the small of my back. “Colt, VP. His old lady, Lilac.”
“Welcome.” Lilac’s mouth curved. “Colt’s offer stands. I’ll help too if you need to escape.”
Near the far wall, Holden stood with a woman I didn’t recognize — dark-haired, quiet, her hand through the crook of his arm. He studied me for a long moment. “We were starting to think he’d made you up,” he said. The woman poked him in the ribs.
“Holden,” Handful said. “Road captain. His old lady, Bea.”
Holden nodded once and looked away. Bea sent me a smile that could have lit the room.
“Austen!” Indira appeared from somewhere, Maya on her hip. She was currently gripping Indira’s hair with both hands and pulling. “I wasn’t sure you’d actually come,” Indira said, untangling herself. “There’s still time to change your mind, for what it’s worth.”
“How many people are going to say that to me tonight?” I asked.
“Depends how long you stay.” She looked at Handful. “Dutch is on the porch.”
Handful didn’t move. “I’ll find him in a minute.”
“Handful.” Indira used the tone. “I’ve known Austen for four years. She’ll be fine.”
He looked at me. “You good?”
“I’m good.”
“If you need anything—”
“I know where to find you.”
He held my gaze for a second longer before he crossed the room to find Dutch. He looked back twice before the door to the yard swung closed.
“Come on,” Indira said, turning for the kitchen. “I’ll introduce you to Betty before she comes to find you herself.”
The kitchen was its own country.
Indira steered me in by the elbow. “Betty, this is Austen. Handful’s girlfriend. Lilac you’ve met.”
Lilac glanced up from the cutting board.
“Briefly.” Dark hair pulled back, apron tied over a sundress, knife still moving.
The first time I’d seen her she’d been very pregnant with what I now knew was her second set of twins, parked at a corner table with a plate of cake she had no intention of sharing.
She looked considerably more comfortable here.
“Sorry about Colt. But the offer still stands, just say the word.” She went back to her chopping. “Welcome to the madhouse.”
Betty was at the kitchen table. Seventies, white-haired, the kind of woman who radiated authority without raising her voice. I remembered her too, holding court at the end of a table while grown men thought twice before they swore in front of her. She looked at me over her glasses.
“You’re the bartender.”
“I am.”
“Good. This family needs more women who know how to handle drunk men.” She went back to her work.
Through the kitchen window I could see the backyard — if you could call it that.
An open area of grass that ran up against the newer wing, with tables set up end to end and covered in mismatched tablecloths.
A soccer ball was in play, and two boys were running a pattern around the tables while a Labrador chased them in increasingly wide circles.
The ball hit the window right in front of me, rattling the glass in its frame.
“Luca! Knox! If that ball hits the window again I will end your soccer careers permanently!” Lilac called without looking up.
The boys didn’t slow down. The dog barked.
“They can’t hear me,” Lilac said to no one in particular.
“They can hear you,” Betty said. “They’re choosing not to.”
“They take after their father.”
The kitchen door opened. Handful.
Lilac didn’t look up from her cutting board. “She doesn’t need rescuing.”
“I wasn’t—” He looked at me. “You good?”
“Very. Betty was just telling me about the challenge of managing a room full of drunk men in an MC.”
He looked at Betty. She looked at him over her glasses with an expression that said she would get to him when she was ready.
“What did you tell her?” he said.
“Nothing she couldn’t have figured out herself,” Betty said. “Go away, Handful.”
He went. But the look he gave me on the way out stayed with me — warm and unhurried, like he was already planning his next excuse to come back through that door.
Lilac finally glanced up from her board. “You may not have noticed but he’s been in that doorway three times since you arrived.”
“I’ve only been here twenty minutes,” I protested.
“He’s protective of you.” She went back to her chopping. “I like it.”
I watched one of the boys — Luca, I thought, based on Handful’s descriptions — catch the ball on his chest and redirect it around a table leg while his brother sprinted past. The dog had given up chasing and was now lying under a table, panting.
“That’s Gunner,” Lilac said, following my gaze.
“He looks exhausted.”
“He’s been exhausted since the twins learned to walk.” She glanced at me with something that might have been sympathy. “You’ll adjust. The volume is always like this. It just stops being noise after a while.”
Through the window I could find Handful without trying.
He was out on the grass with Dutch and a cluster of brothers, doing the thing men did at these things — standing in a loose circle, hands in pockets, saying very little.
His head was tipped to catch something Dutch was telling him, and whatever it was, it made him laugh.
As if he’d felt me looking, he turned and found me. Lifted his chin once: you good? I looked at him for a second, lifted one finger off my glass — barely — and turned back to the room. Through the glass behind me, I was almost certain he was smiling.