Chapter Two
Archer
I WALKED BACK into the clubhouse to find my father waiting for me and sighed. Austin ‘Booker’ Carver was the VP of the Dogs of Fire, fiercely loyal to my mother, a fucking giant force to be reckoned with, and not a man you crossed.
Ever.
“My office,” he growled. “Now.”
I followed him down the hall and into his office, taking a seat and setting my helmet on the chair beside mine. “What’s up?”
He leaned against his desk and crossed his arms. “I’d like to know why your mother is currently in a puddle, surrounded by her women, a bottle of tequila between them.”
Well, shit.
“Mom’s cryin’?”
“Yeah.” He frowned. “As you’re very well aware, your mother only cries over the Folgers commercials at Christmas, the soundtrack to Melody’s first movie, and when she’s really pissed.
And since St. Nick isn’t set to shove his fat ass down our chimneys for several months, and I changed her iBot streaming password, that means she’s really pissed, and since I didn’t do it, that leaves you.
” He cocked his head. “And by that dumbass look on your face, that means you know what I’m talking about. Spill.”
“Why me?” I challenged. “Daisy and Cash—”
“Daisy and Cash aren’t here,” he snapped. “And are you seriously trying to throw your brother and sister under the bus? Jesus Christ. Talk, kid.”
I bristled a little, but in the end, I talked.
Well, sort of.
“Let me get this straight,” Dad hedged. “This woman followed you back here for no apparent reason? Before you answer, keep in mind the entire fucking compound is wired for picture and sound.”
I slid my palms over the thighs of my jeans. “Well, we might have been havin’ a little fun on our way home.”
“Translation, you and Dennis the Menace were playin’ a little game of Fast and Fuckwad and this woman had an opinion about that because you nearly took out her side mirror.”
“Fuck me, is nothing private around here? ”
“And what the fuck was up with the Che Guevara comment?”
“Technically, it was Che Guevarette and I thought that was pretty funny.”
“It’s not how we treat women.” Dad leaned in and scowled.
“You also don’t ride like an asshole. Jesus, Arch, what the hell?
What do you think your mother would do if you hurt yourself or someone else because you were being an idiot.
You’re twenty-six years old, son. You can’t use peer pressure as an excuse. You know better.”
I sighed. “Yeah, I know. I get it. It wasn’t my finest hour.”
A knock at the door brought Hatch and I slid down in my chair in a futile attempt to hide.
Dad gave him a chin lift. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Hatch said, focusing on me. “Dennis is gone. You got a problem with that?”
“No. He’s been pushing the limits lately and I was gonna come to you privately anyway. I let today get away from me.”
Hatch stood beside my dad and frowned. “Didn’t like how you spoke to Echo.”
“Her name’s Echo?” Dad asked.
“Yeah,” Hatch confirmed.
“Cool.”
“She was cool,” Hatch said. “She had guts, too. Really didn’t like how you and Dennis treated her, but I liked that she wasn’t afraid to say so.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It won’t happen again.”
“Did you apologize to her?” Dad asked.
“Sort of, I guess. Actually, no.” I grimaced. “ Didn’t really get the chance.”
Dad shook his head with a sigh.
“Right,” Hatch said. “You’re mine for the next week.”
Dad raised an eyebrow in question.
“Bike safety, toilet licking, whatever the fuck I tell him to do,” Hatch provided.
Dad grinned at me. “I can get behind that.”
“Sorry I fucked around, Prez,” I said.
“Appreciate that, kid.” Hatch squeezed my shoulder, then walked out of the room, just as my mother walked in.
I stood immediately because something my mother had always driven home to us boys was that when a woman walked into a room, a man stood to greet her.
Period.
She looked wrecked, and I immediately felt like a dick.
“I’m sorry, Mama.” I opened my arms, and she immediately walked into my embrace, wrapping her arms around my waist, bursting into tears.
“Do you know how much I worry about you the second you ride anywhere? But I tell myself your dad and uncles taught you well, so I was just being silly.” She gripped my cut.
“But then I find out you’re playing fast and loose with your life and others and I…
well, I just… I don’t know… I…” She started crying again, and I pulled her back to me, hugging her tight.
“I know, Mom, I’m sorry.”
“You have to promise me you won’t ever do that again.”
“I won’t.”
She sobbed even harder, if that was possible. “Because if I lost you…”
“Enough!” Dad ordered, pulling Mom gently away from me so he could wrap her up in him. “Go get a beer, Arch. I got her.”
“You sure you’re okay, Mama?” I asked.
She nodded, waving me away before burrowing further into my dad’s chest.
Feeling like the heel I was, I grabbed my helmet and walked out the door, calling Devlin on the way.
“Hey,” she said on the first ring.
“Hey.”
“Why do you sound like someone just killed your puppy?”
“I kinda fucked up and now Hatch is doling out some punishment, which I deserve, but it means, I need to take a week off my internship.”
“How’d you fuck up?”
I filled her in on the incident, leaving out the Echo part.
She let out a hiss and then a groan. “I fucking hate that Dennis kid.”
“Seems like the general opinion.”
“Well, you were pretty much done on your time anyway. Finish up your week with Hatch, then you’ll have a station ready for you whenever.”
Jesus, she was cool.
“Thanks, sweetheart, I appreciate it.”
“Just promise me you’ll never do anything that dumb again. ”
“I promise.”
“Okay, we’ll see you when you’re off grounding.”
I chuckled and we rang off. I headed to the kitchen for a beer and hung with my family for a bit before Hatch found me something boring to do.
* * *
Echo
I made it onto the freeway just as my phone rang. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road as I answered the call, but I should have. Damn it. “Hello?”
“Why the hell are you all the way down in Cully, baby sister?”
“Hi, O,” I said.
My big brother, Oscar, much like my father, was overprotective to a fault and tended to boss my sister and me around, which annoyed us to no end.
“Don’t you ‘hi O’ me, Echo,” he growled. “Why are you in Cully?”
I sighed. “I made a wrong turn.”
“Wrong turn, my ass. This is why you have GPS.”
“What’s that?” I made wind noises, followed up by gargling. “Sorry, you’re breaking up. I’m going through a tunnel.”
“Echo,” he growled.
“I think I’m going to lose you,” I lied, then hung up and smiled. “Take that, bossy butt.”
Feeling quite smug, I pulled off the freeway, and into my little Salmon Creek community that housed the duplex I shared with my sister, Delta.
I had one side, she had the other, while my parents lived practically down the street, and Oscar lived in downtown Vancouver in a bungalow he’d restored a few years ago.
I fully recognized how lucky I was that my parents had set the three of us up with down payments on homes, giving us the leg up so to speak in order to succeed.
We’d all gone into our adult lives without any kind of debt, because our parents had paid for our college tuitions, provided we worked part-time jobs while we went to school.
No brainer. We also had to go to local schools.
We were well-off, but not rich by any stretch of the imagination, so nursing was my focus, Delta went into video game design, and my brother…
well, he was a pain in the butt in the form of a cop.
Detective, actually.
Hence the overprotectiveness on four-thousand.
Who was currently standing outside my front door.
“Shit,” I hissed, hitting my garage door opener as I pulled into my driveway.
Oscar walked through my garage as I turned off my car and opened the door, frowning as I climbed out. “No.”
“E—”
“Don’t you arrest people for stalking?” I hissed, slamming my car door shut.
“I’d like an explanation.”
“Excuse me?” I snapped. “For what?”
“Why were you at a notorious biker clubhouse when you’re supposed to be heading home after your shift?”
I gasped. “Did you have me followed ?”
“I don’t have the manpower to have you followed, sissy, you know that.”
Then it dawned on me, and I dug my phone out of my purse. “Oh my god, it’s that damn family locator app that Mom made us all download, isn’t it?”
“Echo—”
“No, that was for emergencies. In case I was kidnapped or something. This is out of line, big brother. Your access is hereby removed, directly, forthwith, and immediately.”
“Forthwith and directly both mean immediately, E.”
“I’m driving home my point,” I screeched with a stomp of my foot.
“What is going on over here?” Delta demanded, walking into the garage.
“Our brother is being an overprotective ass,” I informed her as I locked my car and headed for the door to my home.
My siblings followed me inside and I dropped my purse and keys on my kitchen island and faced them with a frustrated grunt. “I didn’t invite you in! You have to be invited in!”
“We’re not vampires, E,” Delta said.
“You could have fooled me, sucking the ever-blessed life out of me, every goddamned day of my ever-blessed life,” I muttered, stomping up my stairs and into my bedroom, changing into sweats and a T-shirt, taking my time in the hopes that they’d both be gone by the time I finished.
They were not.
They were, in fact, sitting at my dinette table, sipping on beers from my fridge, a bag of my wavy potato chips open between them.
“We need to have a serious conversation about boundaries,” I said.
“Let’s start with you,” my brother lobbed back.
“What I do and where I go is none of your business. I’m an adult.”
“You walked your ass into a biker compound, Echo—”
“You went to a biker compound?” Delta breathed out. “ Why? ”
I dragged my hands over my face and tried not to scream in frustration.
And then I lied. “I didn’t do it on purpose. I made a wrong turn.”
Delta narrowed her eyes, but didn’t comment further, and I took her silence as an opportunity to make my way to the fridge and grab my own beer.
“What are you ordering us for dinner?” I asked my brother as I sat across from him. “I don’t want pizza.”
“Food for information, baby sister.”
“I already gave you everything.”
That I’m willing to give you, anyway.
That part I said to myself.
“Echo, you need to be more careful.”
I raised an eyebrow. “And you need to not talk to me like Dad.”
“You cannot go barging in— ”
I slammed my beer bottle onto the table and snapped, “I am twenty-five years old, Oscar. I just sat with a forty-two-year-old woman monitoring her vitals as she died. Then I held her twelve-year-old daughter while she sobbed in my arms because her dad was busy trying to keep her fourteen-year-old brother from breaking every goddamned thing in the house.”
“Oh, honey,” my sister breathed out.
“So, I’d appreciate it if you’d either shut the fuck up or get the fuck out of my house.” I stood and leaned down close to his face. “Right fucking now.”
My brother’s nostrils flared as he took a deep breath, then his sigh was loud as he let out that breath. “Thai food sound good?”
“Thai food sounds great,” I said, taking my seat again.
After taking down our orders, he pulled out his phone and made the call, while I got us all fresh drinks.
The crisis was averted, at least for now, so I put the incident behind me and moved on with my day.