Chapter 8
Elliot
The trouble started, predictably, the moment other people found out.
A cop and a biker, together, was apparently a scandal in stereo.
Simone's honest colleagues worried she'd compromised herself, even after everything.
The department rumor mill treated it like the juiciest thing to happen in county law enforcement in a decade.
And a few of Elliot's more cautious brothers worried a cop in the family — even one who'd cleared them fair and square, even one who'd just helped take down a corrupt captain on their behalf — was still a permanent spotlight the club didn't need.
"It's a liability," said one of the newer prospects, not quite meeting Elliot's eyes across the clubhouse table. "Every cop in the county's going to be watching us extra close now, wondering what she knows that we don't want getting out."
Elliot had been waiting years for this exact argument, and he'd had a long time to prepare his answer.
"A cop who can't be bought," he said, "who's in our corner because she checked the books herself and found nothing to check — that's not a liability. That's the best character reference this club is ever going to get."
Knox backed him without hesitation. "He's right. We didn't spend ten years going legitimate to get scared of the one person who proved it worked."
The room came around, the way rooms full of good men usually did once someone said the honest thing out loud first, though it took the better part of an hour and more than a few pointed questions before every last voice in the room settled.
"What happens," Diesel asked, near the end, "if this doesn't work out between them? She's still got the badge. We're still the club. That doesn't just evaporate if Bishop's love life goes sideways."
"It won't," Elliot said.
"You don't know that."
"No," Elliot admitted. "But I know Simone, and I know myself, and I know we're both the kind of people who don't start something we're not prepared to finish honestly. If it ends, it ends honestly too. That's the only promise I can make you."
Diesel studied him a long moment, then nodded, apparently satisfied. "Good enough for me."
Knox waited until most of the room had filtered out before pulling Elliot aside, arms crossed, expression thoughtful.
"You handled that well," Knox said.
"Had a lot of practice arguing this club into doing the harder, better thing. Figured I could manage one more round."
"This one was personal, though. Different stakes than a charity drive or a rezoning fight."
"Higher stakes. Same principle." Elliot leaned against the bar, tired in the specific way that came from defending something that mattered to more than just himself.
"I meant what I told Diesel. If it doesn't work, it doesn't end badly for the club.
I wouldn't have let it get this far if I thought otherwise. "
"And if it does work?"
"Then I imagine you'll be seeing a lot more of Detective Adler around here."
Knox almost smiled at that, something rare and pleased crossing his usually unreadable face. "Wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to this club. She's sharper than half the prospects we've brought on in the last five years."
"Don't tell her that. She'll ask for a cut of the dues."
"She'd probably audit them better than Sable does."
Elliot laughed, the tension of the afternoon's argument finally draining out of him, and clapped Knox on the shoulder on his way out, already thinking about the evening ahead, about Simone, about a grove that had started as his thinking spot and become, somewhere along the way, the center of everything that mattered to him.
Simone had her own version of the fight happening across town, and she'd told him about it at the grove the night before, chin up, refusing to flinch even as she recounted it.
"My captain — the acting one, now that Voss is gone — pulled me into his office this morning," she'd said. "Wanted to know if the rumors were true. Wanted to know if I was compromised."
"What'd you tell him?"
"I told him the truth. That I closed my investigation with a clean finding before anything happened between us, that the finding stands on its own evidence regardless of my personal life, and that if he wanted to challenge either of those facts, he was welcome to review the entire case file himself, start to finish. "
"How'd he take that?"
"Badly, at first. Then I mentioned that my clean finding was the thing that ultimately exposed Voss's corruption, and that the state oversight board had already praised the thoroughness of my work, and he decided rather quickly that this wasn't a fight worth picking."
"I'm not resigning," she'd told Elliot, fierce and certain. "I'm not hiding it. I've got the cleanest record in the county and I just brought down a corrupt captain. Let them try to find fault with that."
They'd chosen the same thing, separately and then together: the truth, publicly, on purpose, no matter what it cost either of them.
It cost less than either of them feared, in the end. Voss's downfall vindicated Simone completely — the state oversight board praised her integrity in an actual press release, which she found almost unbearably funny after years of being punished for the exact same trait in her old department.
"First time honesty's ever paid better than silence," she told Elliot, disbelieving, like she was still waiting for the catch, some hidden cost that hadn't shown up yet.
There wasn't one. Elliot had checked. Twice. He was thorough like that.
The press release came out two days later, and Simone read it aloud to him over breakfast at the diner, Marge hovering nearby pretending not to eavesdrop and failing spectacularly.
"'The board commends Detective Adler's exceptional integrity and thoroughness,'" Simone read, disbelieving, "'in uncovering and reporting evidence of misconduct despite significant institutional pressure to the contrary.' Elliot, they used the word exceptional. In an official document. About me."
"Sounds accurate."
"Sounds like a different universe than the one I used to work in.
" She set the paper down, something bright and unguarded in her expression that Elliot was quickly coming to treasure.
"My old captain used to write me up for being 'insufficiently flexible with departmental priorities.
' That was code for refusing to look the other way. "
"Their loss. Clover Ridge's gain."
"Careful. That's dangerously close to sentimental for a man who usually talks in chess metaphors."
"I contain multitudes, remember? We covered this already, in the grove."
Marge arrived with a fresh pot of coffee, topping off both their mugs without being asked, beaming at the two of them with the specific delight of a woman who'd watched a whole town's gossip mill spin itself into a happy ending.
"Told you," she said to Simone, refilling her cup. "Took me about a week to figure out this town. Took you a little longer, but you got there."
"I'm a thorough investigator, Marge. I like to be certain."
"Sure you do, honey." Marge winked at Elliot on her way back to the counter, entirely unsubtle about it, and Elliot decided not to mention that half the diner had clearly already picked out a wedding song for them, months before either he or Simone had used that particular word out loud even once.
That night, vindicated and free and entirely, publicly hers, he brought her home — his place this time, the grove's borrowed privacy traded for four walls and an actual bed, spring dawn just starting to threaten the edges of the curtains after a long evening that had started at the clubhouse with another impromptu celebration and ended, gradually, unhurriedly, with just the two of them.
"No public indecency charges tonight," Simone said, toeing off her boots in his front hallway, glancing around at the space like she was cataloguing it — bookshelves crowded with paperbacks, a chessboard set up mid-game on the coffee table, the particular, lived-in orderliness of a man who took care of his things.
"Damn," Elliot said. "I had a whole defense prepared."
She laughed, and he caught the sound of it against her mouth, and this time there was no restraint left to burn through, no line to respect, nothing between them but two people who'd earned this the hard way and intended to enjoy every second of finally being allowed.
"Show me your place properly first," she said, between kisses, laughing as he walked her backward through the hallway. "I want the full tour."
"Later."
"Elliot."
"There's a bedroom. That's the only room on the tour I'm interested in tonight.
" He kissed her again, unhurried despite the clear urgency underneath it, and she gave up on the tour entirely, gave up on anything except the warmth of him and the particular, dizzying relief of finally, finally not having to hold back.
This time there was no restraint left anywhere in him, no careful line to mind, and Simone felt the difference in every unhurried, deliberate thing he did — the way he backed her toward the bed like a man who'd spent months rehearsing exactly this in his head and had no intention of rushing through it now that he was finally allowed.
Her shirt came off somewhere between the doorway and the bed, his following soon after, and she got her hands on him properly in the low dawn light — the solid warmth of his chest, the tension in his shoulders when she dragged her nails lightly down his back, the low, rough sound he made when she found the spot just below his ear that made him forget, for a moment, to be patient at all.
"Careful," he warned, breath uneven against her throat.
"I don't do careful with you. We established that already."
"So you did."