Chapter 9
Wendy had never been good at sitting still.
By the second day at the compound, the restlessness was crawling under her skin like ants.
She'd paced her small room until Hemingway gave her a look of feline disgust. She'd stared out the window at the parking lot full of bikes.
She'd read the same page of her paperback six times without absorbing a single word.
She needed to do something.
The common room was empty when she ventured downstairs mid-morning, brothers either sleeping off the previous night or handling club business she didn't want to know about.
She stood in the doorway, surveying the space—worn leather couches, a bar that had seen better decades, a pool table with faded felt.
And absolutely no books.
Well. That she could fix.
The hunt took her two hours.
She found paperbacks shoved under couch cushions, spines cracked and pages water-stained.
She discovered a box in the storage room that hadn't been opened since the building was a meatpacking plant, filled with westerns and thrillers from the 1980s.
She rescued a battered copy of The Godfather from behind the bar and a surprisingly pristine Hemingway (the author, not the cat) from a shelf in the garage.
By noon, she had a stack of thirty-seven books and no idea where to put them.
"What are you doing?"
She turned to find Lakeshore watching from the doorway, coffee in hand, expression somewhere between curious and amused.
"Building a library." She gestured at the pile on the bar. "Or trying to. This place is a literary wasteland."
"We're bikers. Reading's not exactly high on the priority list."
"Everyone reads something. They just don't always admit it." She held up a western with a cowboy on the cover. "This was under Stockyard's usual spot on the couch. Either he's reading it, or someone planted it there."
Lakeshore's mouth twitched. "Don't tell him you found that. He'll deny it to his grave."
"Secret's safe with me."
She turned back to her project, dragging an empty crate from the corner to use as a makeshift bookshelf. It wasn't pretty, but it would work. She positioned it near the window, where the light was best, and started arranging spines.
Lakeshore drifted closer. "You're really doing this."
"I can't just sit around waiting to be rescued. That's not who I am." She shelved a thriller, then a romance, then three westerns in a row. "Besides, if I'm going to be stuck here, I might as well make it livable."
"Stuck here." He repeated the words like he was tasting them. "That how you see it?"
Wendy paused, a paperback in her hand. "I don't know how I see it yet. Everything's happened so fast."
"That's how it goes with us." Lakeshore settled onto the arm of the nearest couch, watching her work. "Fast and hard and all at once. These men don't do anything halfway."
"Including Blizzard?"
"Especially Blizzard." Something flickered in Lakeshore's weathered eyes. "He's the quietest bastard in this club. Keeps everything locked down, frozen solid. But when he decides something matters?" He shook his head. "I've never seen him move this fast for anything. Or anyone."
Wendy didn't know what to say to that, so she kept shelving books. The crate filled up. She found another one, positioned it beside the first, and kept going.
By the time she finished, she'd created something that almost looked intentional—a reading corner tucked against the window, books organized by genre, a battered armchair dragged over from the far wall to complete the picture.
Lakeshore was her first customer.
He picked up a thriller she'd placed at eye level, turned it over, read the back cover. "Haven't read anything in months. Maybe years."
"That one's good. Fast-paced, lots of action. Very little romance."
"Sold." He tucked it under his arm and headed for the door, then paused. "Hey, Wendy?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks. For making this place feel less like a bunker."
He left before she could respond, and she found herself smiling at the empty doorway.
The afternoon brought more visitors.
Stockyard wandered in around two, pretending he wasn't looking for the western she'd found under his couch cushion. She'd shelved it at eye level, spine out, and watched his face when he spotted it.
"That's a good one," she said casually. "Classic revenge story."
He grunted, grabbed the book, and disappeared without admitting anything. But she caught him reading in the corner an hour later, boots up on the coffee table, completely absorbed.
The old ladies filtered through in waves. Jessica brought cookies from her bakery and declared the reading corner "civilized." Molly suggested adding a lamp for evening reading. Andrea helped Wendy drag a second armchair from the storage room, then stayed to browse the romance section.
"Didn't think bikers read romance," Wendy said.
"The brothers don't. But we do." Andrea selected a book with a shirtless cowboy on the cover. "Sometimes a girl needs something soft after all the hard."
Hemingway, meanwhile, had claimed the common room couch as his personal kingdom.
He'd started the morning curled on the armrest, watching the activity with suspicious green eyes. By afternoon, he'd migrated to the center cushion, spreading out like he owned the place. When Fang walked past and gave him a look that would have made grown men flinch, the cat yawned and stretched.
"Your cat has balls," Fang observed.
"He was feral before I adopted him. Nothing scares him anymore."
"Sounds familiar." Fang's gaze flickered toward the doorway, where Blizzard had just appeared. "Some things are born cold."
Wendy followed his look and felt her breath catch.
Blizzard stood in the entrance, surveying the common room like he was cataloging every change.
His eyes moved from the reading corner to the books to the cat on the couch, and finally to Wendy, standing beside her makeshift library with dust on her hands and a paperback romance tucked under her arm.
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
Something in his expression shifted—not quite warmth, but recognition. Approval, maybe. The acknowledgment that she'd taken an unfamiliar space and made it hers.
Then he crossed the room, bypassed the brothers at the bar, and settled into the armchair she'd positioned by the window. He pulled a book from the thriller section without looking and opened it to the first page.
Her corner. Her books. Her armchair, chosen specifically because it faced the window and got the best light.
And he'd walked in and claimed it like it belonged to him, because she belonged to him, and everything she touched became part of his territory.
Wendy should have been annoyed. Should have felt crowded, controlled, overwhelmed by the possessive weight of a man who took without asking.
Instead, she picked up her own book and sat in the second armchair, three feet away, close enough to share the silence.
They read for an hour.
No conversation. No acknowledgment. Just two people existing in the same space, turning pages, breathing the same air.
The compound moved around them—brothers coming and going, old ladies checking on Hemingway, the distant rumble of bikes in the lot. But the reading corner felt separate, sheltered, a pocket of quiet in a world of noise.
Wendy finished a chapter and glanced over.
Blizzard was watching her.
Not reading. Not pretending. Just watching, those gray eyes steady on her face, seeing things she wasn't sure she wanted seen.
"What?" she asked.
"You built this."
"It's just some crates and old books."
"You built something." His voice was flat, but something underneath it wasn't. "In my clubhouse. In one morning."
"I was bored."
"You were nesting."
The word hit her like a punch. Nesting. Making a home. Putting down roots in a place that should have felt temporary, dangerous, wrong.
"Is that a problem?" she asked, her voice coming out smaller than she intended.
Blizzard was quiet for a long moment. Then he turned back to his book, and something that might have been a smile ghosted across his face.
"No," he said. "It's not a problem."
They sat in companionable silence for another hour, neither of them needing to fill it.