The Hope We Dare (Iron Outlaws MC Colorado #7)

Chapter 1 Shade

SHADE

“Welcome back, Mr. Shade. Mr. Jackal,” Babyface says as he lifts the barrier at the gate house to allow us access to drive the van up to the clubhouse.

The prospect has an instinct for driving fast cars and even faster bikes and calls everyone by formal titles because that’s what his momma taught him.

He also looks like he’s fifteen. Or maybe it’s just turning forty and getting older that makes everyone look like a teenager.

I nod.

“You have a good week?” Kai asks him.

Though he’s Jackal to the world, when it comes to me, he’s Kai. Just like I’m Garrett to him behind closed doors. We keep our names private, only using them for each other when we’re alone.

“Week was fine. From what I can remember of the weekend, sir, it was a blinder. Went through seven condoms and only remember using two.”

The sound of Kai’s laughter fills the van. It’s one of my favorite sounds. “Isn’t that the best kind of party? Catch you later, kid.”

I shut the window to keep out some of the cold. “I can’t imagine anything worse,” I say.

“Fucking seven times in a weekend. You used to do that on any given Tuesday.”

I shake my head. “I meant the partying.”

Kai squeezes my thigh, and I glance down at what will be the last sign of affection from the man I’ve loved for four years for the rest of the day. “That’s because while your birth certificate says you’re forty, inside, you’re actually eighty.”

I glance over at him. “Still young enough to pin you down and spank your ass.”

“As Babyface would say, I look forward to it, sir.”

Shaking my head, I pull the van into a parking spot outside the clubhouse. “You know, it was nice to see your mom and enjoy some sunshine, but I swear to God, being in Tucson dehydrates my bones.”

Kai’s mom is the only thing I have that resembles family.

Still got the scars across my back from the day my old man found me making out with a guy in the garage during my final year of high school.

Apparently, good men don’t love one another and fuck each other’s asses, according to my sanctimonious father.

My life experience is that plenty of good Christians fuck asses and take great pleasure in fucking other people over in general.

The scars across my back where he tried to switch the gayness out of me stretch and tug when I lift weights. Can’t escape them.

That was the last day I saw either of my parents. I took myself off to the army office and enlisted. Couch surfed until I went to basic training. But even there, I couldn’t be myself. Don’t ask, don’t tell was the name of the game I had to play.

Kai’s mom was a revelation. But I can’t tell him that sometimes her effusive love for both Kai and me freaks me out. Like I’m waiting for the moment she decides to tell me I’m too old or not good enough for her nearly thirty-year-old son.

Kai removes his sunglasses. “Think it says something about you that you like the cold and damp better.”

I glance up at the clear and bright sky, which suggests we can get back to doing most of our travel on our bikes. The sun is warm through the windshield. “Spring might be my favorite time of year.” The temperatures are staying above freezing and the sun gets a little higher every day.

Kai sighs. “Wraith says it’s been unseasonably warm, which is why everything is thawing out faster than usual. Kinda makes me wish we could have taken the bikes to Arizona. Got out more.”

“Wouldn’t have been able to collect all our furniture if we had.” Kai likes beautiful things. I like them well-constructed and built to last. Over the years, we’ve collected items and had them sent to his mom’s place, where we stored them in an outbuilding.

“I’m looking forward to seeing what that mid-century dresser looks like in the dining room. And I’d forgotten we bought those dark green glazed lamps in New Mexico last year. You think they’d look good in the bedroom?”

“You’re the one with the eye for this shit. I’m just the hired muscle. Tell me where you want them, and I’ll put them there.”

I know he could move them himself. So does he. But he lets me because I need to be useful.

He turns to face me before we get out. “Thank you. For driving. For making it work to see Mom. For buying the house with me. This life.”

“My pleasure, Wild.”

Wild. The nickname I gave him the very night we met. When a casual bathroom hookup at a gay bar in San Antonio led to a night I’ll never forget. We’ve barely spent a day apart since, and usually only because of club business.

We were both Outlaws when we met. Straight out of the army, I needed another brotherhood in a world where I could breathe.

A veteran I knew was an Outlaw road captain and he offered to sponsor me as a prospect.

It gave me a place to work through lingering PTSD and make my peace with some of the things I was ordered to do.

Kai loved bikes and a good fight. He was in a different chapter, and like me, quietly lived the other parts of his life in secret. When I saw him that night in the bar, I saw the same kind of struggle and courage in him that existed in me.

A desire for a certain type of life in a club that would never accept us.

Ten hours after we met, Kai asked to be allowed to transfer chapters. I thought it was a terrible idea; he kissed me goodbye in the privacy of an alleyway and told me that you didn’t walk away from something as good as we had.

He was that sure after ten fucking hours. I smile at the thought.

All I had was a list of worries. Of being found out. Of it going wrong. Of him being too young for me.

Instead, Kai rode home, packed up his shit, and moved in with me. Over time, we became known for being a good pairing. His tracking skills. My shot. But the truth of it was, we always understood one another.

Or maybe Kai understood me better than I understood myself.

We were…are…a pair.

Nobody asked why the new guy moved into my house and never moved out.

“Straight face on,” Kai says.

I draw a circle around my face. “This is the only face I’ve got. It’ll have to do.”

When we get out of the van, I groan. We stayed overnight in a hotel in the Navajo Nation township of Kayenta, Arizona. A cute place with a pool that neither of us set foot in because we were either fucking or sleeping.

My back creaks after driving for nearly seven hours in a van that allegedly has shock absorbers, but I’m not convinced. The last hour, it felt like sitting on a wooden bench.

The wind no longer stings our cheeks as we cross the lot. It carries the cool freshness of the snow on the mountains, but the meadows are barely even dusted with it anymore, and the sun is warm enough to heat my shoulders as I tug my cut over them.

When we push the clubhouse doors open, we’re hit with a blast of warm air and wild rock. The quiet of the van did little to prepare me for the volume.

“Fuck you,” Grudge, our president, playfully yells at Smoke, our road captain, as he twirls a pool cue around like it’s a lightsaber.

“You’re the one who said to make it best out of five.” Smoke’s dark hair falls forward as he holds out his hand. “That’ll be two hundred bucks.”

Grudge reluctantly takes his roll out of his pocket and lays two big ones into Smoke’s hand.

“Good thing your old lady makes the big bucks as a lawyer,” Atom, the club’s sergeant at arms, says from his seat near the fireplace.

Lucy runs a law firm in town that she set up. Grudge wants to get remarried to his ex-wife so badly, but they’ve been heads down, renovating his house and her new office, so they haven’t done the deed yet.

And it’s making our president antsy.

Wraith, our impressive vice president, chuckles as he tugs his hair back into an elastic.

“The wanderers return,” Catfish says from his spot at the bar.

Next to him is Wren. Our treasurer is rarely far away from the person who stole his heart.

The way the club accepted the two of them gives me hope that the club might someday accept the two of us.

Wren and Catfish are the only ones who know what Kai and I mean to each other.

“How was the ride?” Wren asks.

“Would have been better on our bikes, but at least I managed to pick up a shit load of my furniture from my mom’s place,” Kai says.

Neither of us adds that it’s ours, and we’ve been slowly collecting it all until we had a place to call our own.

We’d been renting in town, with the whisper of an idea to settle down here.

Being nomad added a cloak of anonymity to our relationship.

Made it harder for us to get complacent and give ourselves away.

But both of us have a hankering for something more permanent. A future.

“You headed over to your new place now?” Wraith checks his watch. “I got an hour before I need to go pick Fen up and take him to soccer. I can give you a hand.”

“Nah. It’s okay. We got it,” I say.

Would it be easier to let them help? Sure.

But I want moving into our first home together to be a thing between the two of us. I know Wild, and he’ll want to take photographs, and to kiss me when he gets excited about how shit is coming together.

Kai sticks with Wren and Catfish to catch up while I make my way to our president.

“You need anything from us, Prez?” I ask.

“Yeah. I got two jobs. There are a bunch of members who aren’t pulling their weight. Need you to pay ‘em a visit and make sure they understand what their end of the bargain looks like. Tell ‘em they won’t be getting paid if they don’t step things up.”

“Send me the list. I’ll start on it in the morning. What’s the other?”