Boulder's Spark (Thunder Bastards MC - North Carolina #2)

Chapter 1

SPARK

The taillights are still in my mirror when I make up my mind.

Two of them tonight. They came up the lane at dusk with their pipes wide open, parked crooked on Wade’s gravel like it was already theirs, and the lean one with the gray mustache tucked a folded paper under my wiper blade without once raising his voice.

Rental terms, he called it. For the hay barn.

He said I should think hard, a girl alone all the way out here, and then he looked at the dark house behind me long enough that the looking was the message.

They didn’t touch me. They never touch me. They come back every few days like a bill collector, and every time, the space they don’t touch gets smaller.

Now their lights sink behind the ridge and I’m sitting in Wade’s truck with the engine idling and my bag already on the seat, because some part of me decided to pack it three days ago and wouldn’t say why.

Oil pressure good. Half a tank. Heater rattling because the fan bearing’s going and I never got to it. I check the gauges twice, out of habit, out of needing my hands to do a thing I understand.

Wade’s denim jacket is still folded over the seatback. Three weeks and I can’t move it.

“If you’re ever in trouble,” he told me that last week, when he thought I wasn’t watching him rub his left arm, “you find my brother Boulder. He owes me.”

I asked what kind of trouble. He said the kind you can’t fix with a wrench.

I put the truck in gear and roll down the lane, past the barn they want so bad, past the mailbox with brIGGS half gone to rust, and turn west toward Caulder Mill. An hour of dark county road between me and a man I’ve never met.

The kind of trouble you can’t fix with a wrench, Wade. You could’ve just said his name sooner.

Everybody in Carrow County knows whose bar The Hollow is.

I park the truck between two pickups, hold the wheel for a minute, and then I make myself walk in before the sitting can turn into driving home.

Inside it’s warm and loud, griddle smoke and spilled beer. A Friday crowd, but a town crowd, nobody in leather. A dark-haired woman about my age runs the floor with a rag over her shoulder. She takes one look at my face and puts me at the end of the bar, in the corner seat.

“What can I get you?”

“Coffee.” My voice comes out rusty. I haven’t used it much lately. “Please.”

She doesn’t push a menu. She brings the coffee in a heavy white mug and presses it into my hands, her palms closing my fingers around the warm ceramic for one second before she lets go. First time anybody’s touched me in three weeks that wasn’t a handshake at a funeral.

Then she leaves me be.

I watch the door in the mirror behind the bottles and rehearse.

Two sentences. That’s all I have to say. I said them out loud to the windshield the whole drive. “Boulder. Wade said you owed him.”

The coffee goes cold in front of me and I don’t order another.

I sit on my two sentences for the better part of an hour.

A young waitress laughs at a client’s joke, quick and startled.

Somewhere in the back a cook hollers about a check.

The floor woman circles past me twice. The second time she tips the pot toward my mug and I shake my head.

Once, headlights rake the front windows slow, too slow, and my hand’s in my pocket around the truck key before the beams roll on past. A pickup hauling a horse trailer. Nobody. I let go of the key one finger at a time.

If Boulder doesn’t come tonight, I don’t know what I’ll do. Sleep in the truck. Come back tomorrow. Go home and sign whatever the gray mustache leaves under my wiper next.

Then I hear it.

Thunder, but from the ground. It builds from the west until the glasses on the back shelf buzz with it, and heads come up all down the bar. Headlights sweep the front windows, one after another after another.

Engines shut down. Boots hit the gravel.

They come in with the cold, big men in leather, loud, loose, smelling of October. The first one through is tall and dark, and he finds the floor woman in a single sweep of the room.

More of them. Gray beards and younger ones. A patch here, a laugh there. My two sentences are climbing my throat and I don’t know which one he is. I don’t know his face. Wade didn’t keep pictures of his brother. I never asked why.

So I do the only thing left. I stand up off the stool and put the name out into the noise, pitched to cut through it.

“Boulder.”

The room mostly doesn’t hear it. But a mountain of a man just inside the door stops with his gloves half off.

He turns his head, and the noise of the bar goes on around us and doesn’t matter.

He’s older than me by plenty, big through the shoulders in a leather jacket that reads VP on one side, a short beard going gray at the jaw, and his face.

Lord, his face. Wade is in the bones of it.

Wade around the eyes, Wade in the set of the mouth, Wade but younger, harder and a hand-width taller.

My throat closes so fast it hurts.

He crosses the floor slow, and men move out of his path. Up close he blocks the light. Up close I have to tip my head back, and I hold the bar rail behind me and give him my second sentence with the last of my nerve.

“Wade said you owed him.”

He doesn’t rock, doesn’t blink, but for three long seconds the biggest man in the room looks like the one who’s cornered.

“Sable,” he says.

Not a question. My name, in a stranger’s mouth, low and rough and certain, and I’ve never seen this man in my life.

“You know me.” It comes out thin.

“I know you.” His eyes go over me once, quick. Not the once-over men give. Checking, I think, for hurt. For damage. “Wade’s girl.”

“Wade’s dead.” I’ve said those words to the county clerk, to the pastor in Tarver, to the feed store man wanting his account settled. “Three weeks ago. His heart. And there are men coming around the farm, and he told me. He told me if I was ever in trouble to find you.”

The floor woman has drifted close on the other side of the bar, not pretending she isn’t listening. Boulder doesn’t look at anyone but me.

“Anybody follow you here?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“You eat today?”

The question sits so far from anything I braced for that I just stare at him. Toast, maybe. This morning. He reads the answer off my face and his jaw sets. He turns his head, and the woman behind the bar is already moving.

“You’re not going back out there tonight,” he says. “Not alone. You’re staying.”

The no rises before the relief does, pure reflex.

Three weeks of carrying everything myself, and my mouth’s already half open to tell him I can sleep in the truck, same as I planned an hour ago if he never showed.

Then I catch myself, arguing my way out of the one thing Wade told me to find. What comes out is smaller.

“I can’t pay for a room. I only have?—”

“Sable.” My name again, quiet, and the argument dies in my mouth.

He stands close enough that I catch cold road and leather coming off him. But his hands stay at his sides. Not an inch of touching in him.

“You found me. That was your whole job. The rest is mine now.”

I should ask what Wade meant, what the owing is, why a man I’ve never met went stone still at a dead man’s name. I should say I’m sorry for his loss, because it was his loss too, whatever stood between them.

What I do is nod, and for the first time since I found Wade on the kitchen floor with the radio blasting, I can breathe again.