Boone's Wildflower (Iron Thorn MC #8)

Prologue

Everett

The first time I knew I was in trouble, Harper Kincaid had flour on her cheek and a pie plate in each hand.

It was a Saturday in late June, six years ago now, though some days it feels like last week and other days it feels like a whole other lifetime.

The Kincaid farm sat just outside Clover Ridge on a stretch of pasture that ran soft and green down to the creek, and Cade's mama, before she passed, had laid the kind of barbecue spread that meant you'd be unbuckling your belt by sundown and not feeling sorry about it.

Brisket on the smoker since five that morning.

Three kinds of slaw. Sweet tea in mason jars sweating on the picnic tables.

A whole row of pies cooling on the kitchen windowsill — peach, blackberry, lemon meringue, and one that smelled like cinnamon and apples and something I couldn't name then but I can name now.

Harper had been baking since dawn. I knew because I'd pulled up at seven to help Cade move a piece of stalled equipment in the back field, and the kitchen window had been lit yellow before the sun was up proper, and I'd seen her through the screen, hair in a knot on top of her head, sleeves shoved past her elbows, mouthing the words to a country song I couldn't hear.

I'd looked too long even then.

By the time the party was in full swing, the farm was loud with bikes and dogs and kids, brothers from the club scattered across the lawn with paper plates, Cade's daddy out by the smoker with a beer in one hand and tongs in the other like he was conducting a small church orchestra.

I was on the porch with Cade. We'd been best friends since we were nine years old and got into a fight at the creek about whose turn it was to use a tire swing, and we'd been inseparable about ninety percent of the time since.

He was leaned back in one of the rockers with his boots up on the rail, halfway through a story about a customer at his daddy's body shop who'd argued with him for forty minutes about a transmission, and I was laughing in all the right places because the story was funny and because Cade told it well, but mostly I was watching the screen door.

I'd known Harper since she was a skinny twelve-year-old with skinned knees who used to follow Cade and me out to the creek and pretend she wasn't following us.

I'd known her at fifteen when she'd dyed a piece of her hair pink and her daddy had nearly fainted.

I'd known her at twenty when she'd announced she was moving to Nashville to go to pastry school, and her mama had cried, and her daddy had said "good for you, sugar" in the steady way he said most things.

I had known her, in the brotherly distant way you know your best friend's little sister, for the better part of two decades.

I had not known her like this.

She had come home from Nashville for the weekend that summer, and she was twenty-four, and somewhere between the last time I'd seen her at Christmas and that Saturday in June, the universe had decided to do whatever it was it had done, and now she was a woman, and I was a grown man on a porch trying very hard to keep my eyes on my best friend's face.

She had been in and out of the kitchen all afternoon, ferrying food, refilling tea, hollering at the boys about getting mud on her mama's rugs, and every time the screen door swung open and shut and she came down the porch steps with another tray balanced on her hip, my whole chest did this dumb tightening thing I couldn't have explained to a doctor if my life depended on it.

I had not put words to it yet. That part came later. That part came that night.

She came out the screen door for what must have been the eighth time that hour with two plates in her hands and that streak of flour high on her right cheekbone like a piece of warpaint from a war fought in the kitchen.

She'd taken her apron off. She was wearing a yellow sundress the color of butter.

Her hair was still up in the same loose knot and pieces of it had fallen down around her temples, and there was a little shine of sweat at her collarbone from the kitchen heat, and I noticed all of this in the half second it took her to register I was on the porch.

"Y'all eating?" she said. "Or am I going to have to wear these plates as hats."

"Hand 'em over, Harp," Cade said, swinging his boots down off the rail.

She brought him his plate first, like a good sister, balanced it on his thigh with the fork tucked under the napkin so it wouldn't roll. Then she turned and brought me mine.

"Brisket, slaw, beans, and I gave you an extra piece of cornbread because I figured you for a cornbread man.

" She said it easy, like she said most things, but she wasn't looking at me when she said it.

She was looking at the plate. Her hands were full.

The plate was full. I reached out and took it from her, and our fingers brushed across the porcelain rim, and she looked up.

She looked up.

I am thirty-six years old. I have been a patched member of the Iron Thorn for twelve years.

I have held men through funerals. I have stood between people and the worst nights of their lives.

I have walked into rooms in this town that no one else wanted to walk into.

I have a body that has been worked hard and a back that's been broken once and a face that has, on more than one occasion, taken a fist on behalf of someone who needed me to take it.

I am not, generally, a man who flinches.

Harper Kincaid looked up at me on her mama's porch six years ago with flour on her cheek and the late afternoon light catching in her eyes the color of strong coffee, and she smiled at me like I was the sunrise.

I flinched.

I flinched the way a man flinches when something he didn't see coming hits him square in the sternum. I felt it in my back teeth. I felt it in my hands. I felt some long quiet thing inside me get up on its feet for the first time and look around like a man waking up in a strange room.

I said, "Thanks, Harp."

She said, "You're welcome, Boone."

And I looked away. I looked at the rail.

I looked at my plate. I looked at Cade. I looked at the brisket.

I looked at any place in the visible universe that was not Harper Kincaid's face, because every nerve ending I had was telling me that if I looked one more second I was going to do something that could not be undone, and Cade was right there, and I had a code about this kind of thing, and I had a friendship that mattered to me more than just about anything else, and I had a creek-day memory of a skinny twelve-year-old with skinned knees, and I had no business at all looking at his sister like that.

She stood there one extra beat. I felt it.

I felt her register the look-away. She didn't say anything about it.

She straightened up, smoothed the front of her sundress, and went back inside, and the screen door slapped shut behind her, and I sat there on the porch with a plate of brisket on my knee and the dumbest, loudest, most catastrophic feeling I'd had in my entire life moving through my chest like a freight train.

Cade said, "You okay?"

I said, "Bee."

"What?"

"A bee. Buzzed past my ear."

He laughed at me. "You're scared of bees? Boone Dalton, six foot two, three hundred pounds of biker — scared of a bee."

"Six foot one," I said. "And it was a big bee."

He laughed harder. He drank his sweet tea.

He picked back up with the story about the transmission.

I ate my brisket. It tasted like sawdust because nothing tasted like anything just then.

The world had gone strange and bright at the edges.

I could hear Harper inside the kitchen laughing at something her mama had said and the sound of her laugh was sitting on the floor of my chest like a stone, and I told myself, very clearly, very carefully, in the voice I used when I had to talk myself down off something —

Boone, you cannot do this. That is Cade's sister. That is your best friend's sister. You will get up, you will eat your dinner, you will be polite, and you will go home, and you will get over this before the sun comes up tomorrow.

I made all those promises to myself sitting on that porch. I broke every single one of them before midnight.

The sun went down slow that night the way it does in late June, the sky going orange and then pink and then that soft purple-blue that always made me think of a bruise on the underside of a peach.

The brothers got louder. Someone started a fire in the pit.

Cade's daddy brought out his guitar and played the same three songs he always played, badly, and everyone sang along anyway.

I helped clean up because I always helped clean up.

I carried trays. I scraped plates. I caught Harper in the kitchen twice.

Once she was at the sink and I came up behind her with a stack of dirty dishes and she said, without turning, "Just leave them on the counter, Boone, I'll get to them.

" I left them on the counter. The second time I came in she was reaching up into a high cabinet for a pie server, and the dress rode up the back of her thighs an inch, and I stopped in the doorway and turned around and walked back out and stood on the porch for a full minute trying to remember how to breathe like a person.

That was when I knew it was bad.

That was when I knew this wasn't going to be a Saturday-afternoon problem I could shake off by Monday morning.

That was when I knew I was going to be carrying this around with me for a long time, because it had not arrived politely.

It had not announced itself. It had come up behind me in a kitchen and put its hand on my shoulder, and I had recognized it the way you recognize a face you should have seen coming.