7. The Ride #2
"The surveillance?" I whisper.
"What surveillance?" Reed asks, his friendly demeanor vanishing instantly, replaced by that old, defensive MC instinct.
"I'm guessing he's the trouble that followed her home," Rafe answers for me, his voice going tight and professional. "He is running surveillance on her house. And right now, he is sitting across from her at the corner booth."
Rafe looks at me, his hazel eyes locking onto my pale blue ones. "He looks like competition. And from the way she was sitting, she looked small."
Small.
The word hits me somewhere I wasn't expecting.
Nora Beckett doesn't do small. She argued property lines with me. Climbed through my gate like she had every right to be there. Looked me dead in the eye while asking for something I'd already told her she couldn't have.
Sitting across from that man, she looks cornered.
That's different.
That's worse.
My male pride rears up and claws at the inside of my chest. A fierce, ugly jealousy fires through my veins, hot and immediate.
"Fucking city trash," Colt snarls, his humor disappearing in a second.
Colt punches his starter button, his V-twin roaring back to life with a violent shake. "We don't let outside dick come into Moonrise and put hands on our people. I don't give a shit if you are sleeping with her or not, Jax. He is in our yard."
"He is right," Reed grunts, starting his own engine. The heavy rumble fills the air again, cutting through the morning calm. "We don't do outside threats. Let's go look at this piece of shit."
"Hold on," I shout over the noise, waving my hand. "I have no claim over her. I told you, she is an adult. She can handle her own business."
But the men are not listening anymore. Once the brotherhood senses a threat within the perimeter, the machine moves on its own momentum.
Knox kicks his shifter into first gear, his face a cold, unreadable mask of violence. Priest drops his visor, his Road King letting out a deafening roar as he leads the line, turning his heavy bike around in a tight circle on the narrow road.
"Jax!" Rafe yells over the exhaust thunder, pointing his helmet toward the highway. "Get on your fucking bike!"
They zoom off, a wall of black iron and screaming pipes heading back toward the mill road.
"Damn it," I mutter under my breath, slamming my fist against my thigh.
I have no choice but to follow. I punch my starter, the engine catching with a furious howl. I drop the clutch and spray a massive curtain of gravel into the ditch as I tear after them, my heart slamming against my ribs at full throttle.
Two minutes later, the six bikes idle down into a low, rumbling crawl as we pull into the gravel lot of the old Moonrise Café.
The diner is a low-slung building made of white clapboard and neon signs, its parking lot mostly empty save for a couple of rusted local trucks and the sleek, silver Houston rental sedan parked right near the front entrance.
The silver car looks untouched. No dents. No scratches. No evidence it has ever worked for a living. It looks exactly like the man who drove it. I have pulled cars out of rivers that were more honest than that sedan.
We park the bikes at the edge of the lot, hidden under the shade of a massive live oak tree. We do not turn off the engines. The low, wet thrum of six V-twins vibrates through the gravel beneath our tires, a steady, intimidating warning track.
I lift my visor, my eyes immediately locking onto the large plate-glass window at the front of the café. And there she is.
Nora is sitting in the corner booth, her back to the window. Her shoulders are locked so tight they barely move when she breathes. Most people wouldn't notice that. I notice it. People sitting across from friends don't hold themselves like they're waiting for impact.
Sitting across from her is the man.
From this distance, he looks like my exact opposite. He is polished. His dark hair is perfectly cut, styled with expensive product that probably wouldn't melt in the Texas heat.
He is wearing a crisp, white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows in two neat, identical folds, revealing a gold watch that costs more than my entire salvage yard inventory. His hands are soft, white, free of grease, scars, or the thick calluses earned from actual labor.
He looks assembled. Like every inch of him was built for boardrooms and negotiations. Nothing out of place. Nothing real. The kind of man who has never had to get his hands dirty to get what he wants.
A sharp, painful wave of annoyance cuts through my jealousy, making my throat dry. Is that the kind of man she is drawn to? Is that the world she belongs to outside of Moonrise? A world of clean angles, expensive suits, and soft hands?
I look down at my own hands gripping the black rubber controls. My knuckles are thick, scarred, stained with black iron grease that never truly washes out of the skin.
I cannot hear a word through the heavy glass, but I don't need to.
The man is smiling while he talks.
Nora is not smiling back.
He keeps smiling anyway.
That tells me everything I need to know about what kind of man he is.
Suddenly, the man reaches across the table.
His soft, white hand moves smoothly, his fingers extending toward her face. He reaches out and gently brushes a stray strand of her red hair away from her cheek, his fingers lingering against her skin for a half-second before dropping back to the table.
She doesn't pull away.
That's the part that knots my stomach.
Not because she likes it.
Because she doesn't.
I know that kind of stillness.
I've seen it before.
The kind people learn when fighting back costs more than enduring it. When the safest move is to go very quiet and wait for the moment to pass.
Nora Beckett is enduring him.
That's not nothing. That's everything.
An absolute detonation of pure, primal fury goes off inside my skull as my vision goes completely red at the edges. My lungs stop working, a violent, hot pressure building behind my eyes until I feel like my head is going to explode.
Seeing his hand on her skin triggers an animal instinct in me so loud it drowns out the roar of the bikes. I want to kick that glass window into a thousand pieces, drag that polished bastard out into the gravel, and stomp his teeth into the dirt.
"Oof," Colt mutters from my right side, his voice cutting through my internal red-out. "Look at that smooth motherfucker. He just touched your girl, Jax. Are you going to let him slide with that?"
"He has got soft hands, Rowe," Reed says, his voice low and dangerous. "You want us to go inside and introduce him to some Moonrise hospitality?"
"Does he have something on her?" Rafe says, his eyes fixed on Nora's rigid posture. "Look at her eyes. She is not enjoying that breakfast, Jax."
"You have got competition, brother," Priest says quietly from the front. "And he is playing on her home turf."
Suddenly, I can't take it anymore.
The teasing, the comments, the visual of his hand on her face is too much goddamn noise for a man who lives in the quiet. I cannot stand here like a cuckold watching another man mark territory on a woman I am supposedly trying to kick off my land.
"Fucking forget it," I growl.