Chapter 2
CHAPTER
TWO
Cage
Ass crack of dawn, and the Merritt woman was out on her back steps trying to fight her own door with a flathead screwdriver. The door was winning.
Up since four, no sleep in me, nothing to do about it but tear apart a carburetor that didn't need it. Story of my life. Bays were rolled up to the cold because cold keeps me sharp, and sharp's all I've got at that hour.
Wood grinding on wood, and under it a woman's voice rising with the filthiest language outside a clubhouse. It would've made my sergeant at arms blush, and Reap's heard everything. There was no stopping the chuckle anytime I heard a new colorful phrase.
Couldn't see shit across the lot. Morning was gray and thick, and she was mostly movement in a canvas apron, putting her whole body weight into a frame that wasn't giving.
Bottom rail soaked, hinges shot, whole thing sitting crooked. A hand plane and a wrench would fix it faster than she could cuss at it, and I had both.
She'd rebuilt her own porch rail last week with no help and no power tools, and handed Hutchens his ass on the courthouse steps with half the town watching.
I'd stood across the square for all of it and I'd have stood there another hour.
She didn't ask for help. Ever. And I had a pretty good idea why.
Thinking about that made me want to put my fist through the bench.
I crossed the lot loud, boots heavy on gravel. She'd flinched once when I moved too fast. I don't forget shit like that.
She clocked me before I got close. Screwdriver came down to her side, slow and easy, and something in the back of my skull said that woman will stab you without thinking twice and something lower said yeah, but she’ll look hot doing it.
"Morning," I said.
She gave me her back. "It's stuck." She looked at the door like it had personally wronged her family.
"Yeah, it's swollen. Bottom rail's been soaking up water since before you moved in." I stopped at the bottom of her steps. Kept my hands where she could see them—open, flat, like approaching a horse that kicks. "Quick fix. I've got a hand plane."
"So do I."
"You've got a flathead and what I'm guessing is a genuine desire to murder that frame."
She turned around. Hair everywhere, face flushed, that canvas apron cinched tight at her waist and pulling everywhere else.
Everything in me quit at once. She was sweating and pissed off and put together well enough to wreck a man's whole morning, and I stood there knowing I was fucked and not caring.
My hands itched to untie that apron like it was theirs to untie already.
The things I imagined doing to this woman. Fuck.
"I've got it," she said. "Thank you."
That thank you was a door closing harder than the one she couldn't open. Her phone rang inside, and she held my eyes one more beat before she went around front.
I went back for the plane and the wrench. Hinge pins out, eight passes on the rail, pins back in, swung it twice. Smooth. A fix that takes longer to explain than to do.
Halfway to my bay when it swung open behind me. Clean.
"Hey." Louder: "I said I had it."
I lifted a hand and kept walking. Grinning where she couldn't see it. She might not ask for help but I sure as shit wanted to give it to her. The door today. Orgasms all night. Yeah, I wanted to help alright.
The office smelled like it always did, motor oil and carpet that's never met a vacuum.
Gabriel's jacket on the hook behind the desk.
Two years it'd been hanging there. I don't look at it.
Except my eyes snag on it every time I forget not to, and it still guts me.
Not ready to move it, and fuck anybody who's got an opinion about the timeline.
"Well, well." Clunky boots first, then that mouth.
He dropped the parts invoices on my desk and leaned into the doorframe, the stance he takes when he's about to enjoy himself at my expense.
Nine goddamn years as my VP, busting my balls the whole way.
Broad through the chest, a scar through one eyebrow from a bar fight he brings up every time he ties one on, and a mouth that runs like a faucet with the handle snapped off.
"Since when do we do house calls?"
"Being neighborly."
"Being neighborly." He stretched it out like he was getting paid by the syllable. "Wrench says you had the bays open before five. We adding carpentry to our line of work?"
"Invoices, Mercy."
"Uh-huh." He dropped into the chair and put his boots on my desk, because nothing I've ever said has stopped him. "You want to tell me about her, or should I sit here and watch you pretend you didn't cross a parking lot at dawn to fix a woman's door?"
I didn't take the bait. Never do. He never stops throwing it.
"Get Ledger on the parcels. Hers and ours. My dad and her grandmother had a deal on that lane—kept the second access open so her shop met code. I want to know what the county's got on file before Hutchens does."
Mercy's scarred eyebrow climbed first. "All this to be a good neighbor?"
"Hutchens put that notice on her door because there's no easement on file. He's betting she signs a complaint before anybody tells her different. Nothing more to it."
"Sure." Easy. Didn't believe a word. Neither did I. One of my guys tells me that story, I’d laugh him out of the building and bring it up at the bar for a month.
Boots hit the gravel outside, slow and even, and Mercy's grin died halfway to whatever he'd been about to say.
Nobody in this town walked that unhurried unless hurrying was somebody else's job.
Then Reap filled the office doorway with road dust still on his cut and his helmet hooked under one arm, and I lost the end of my own damn sentence.
Reap looked at Mercy. Looked at me longer, and didn't take the chair, because he never sat down in a room he might have to walk out of fast.
"Somebody parked at the colliery gate half the afternoon. Mud packed on the plates so I couldn't pull a number. Drove south past the county line."
Mercy's boots came off the desk.
"Colors?" I said.
"Rain slick over everything. Probably the point of the rain slick." Reap leaned one shoulder into the doorframe, arms crossed, waiting on my call. The colliery gate is a rusted chain across a road nobody's touched since the mine closed. You don't sit that long unless you're hunting on my ground.
"Could be nothing." Flat, steady. Sure it wasn't.
"Log it. Nobody rides that stretch alone. Wrench swings past on his runs. Anything moves, it gets brought to Church."
Reap nodded once and walked out the way he'd come in. No goodbye. Reap doesn't do goodbyes. His engine caught and rolled before he'd cleared the lot.
Two brothers in my office before noon and both of them circling the same thing: somebody was pushing into my territory, and she was standing right in the middle of it.
I picked the carburetor back up. Saw her steps instead.
The screwdriver hanging at her side. The woman swinging it like she'd been waiting for a target worth the effort.
Flash of windshield coming up her lane.
Hutchens. He got out, straightened his hat, checked his smile before he knocked. Adjusted it, like trying on a tie. Men who rehearse their faces are there to fuck you over.
Everything I had said go. Cross the lot, get between them. I didn't. If I went up there without her asking, I was just the next guy deciding what she needed, and I'd seen what the last one left behind. The flinch. How she checks her door. I'm not that. I won't be that.
So I stood in my bay, knuckles pale on the bench edge, and watched the sheriff walk into her building. Goddamn useless.
He walked out smiling bigger. I wanted to feed him that smile tooth by tooth.
On his way to the cruiser he looked across at my bays and let me see it.
He knew I was standing there. He knew I wouldn't cross.
The smile wasn't even the worst of it. He'd walked into her building and I hadn't, because she hadn't asked me to, and that line I was holding was starting to cost me by the fucking minute.
Her boots on gravel, fast and hard. Paper wadded in her fist, chin first, hair wrecked from the pins, tearing across the lot like an EF-5 with a target.
My grip locked down on the carb hard enough to score my palm.
My chest did that thing again, the stupid hot pull, low and dropping lower, and behind it every reason I had no business wanting her coming at me hot like that.
Didn't look at one. Neither did my dick.
The woman had barely been in town long enough to unpack and I'd already gone stupid over her, and I wasn't ashamed enough to lie about it.
She was mine. Every man wearing my patch was going to live with it same as me.
I put the carb down and met her at the front of the bay.
"Tell me one true thing." No good morning.
She doesn't hand those out. "Hutchens sat in my grandmother's shop and offered to make my access problem disappear.
Clerical review. The sixty-day clock becomes never.
All it costs me is a signed complaint saying Locke Garage blocked my access.
" Her eyes locked and stayed. "He had it drafted before he walked in, Cage.
Already in the car. And that's the other thing.
Cage. President Locke. He gave me your club's whole history, and you left every word of it out of your introduction.
Told me your kind of help costs things I can't see yet, and being your neighbor makes my shop a target. "
My road name, from Hutchens. Heat crawled up the back of my neck. Pissed me off more than it should've. She should've had it from me. Everything about her was sorting itself into mine-to-give, and I hadn't authorized a goddamn bit of it.
"Yeah, my name is Cage," I said. "Only name anyone's used on me in seventeen years. Should've told you the rest myself."
"Warning label of a name." She crossed her arms over the paper. Cold catching up to her. "Tell me right now what your club has to do with my easement, because I'm done being the only person in this county who doesn't know what her own property's about."
"Nothing." I kept my voice low and even. "That easement's worth nothing to us. That's why he's on your porch."
"Explain that."
"Hutchens wants this club gone. Has since before he had a badge.
The garage is clean, the tow contract's clean, and whatever else he thinks we do, he can't prove.
Half this county doesn't get towed out of a ditch in February without us.
" She was listening with everything she had, arms tight, barely breathing.
"So he needs a civilian. New in town. Nobody around to tell her different.
With a signed piece of paper saying we pushed her off her own land. "
The paper crumpled in her fist. "And your club?"
"We gain nothing from you losing that shop. We buy a war if you sign." I should've stopped there. "My gate stays open. Rain, courts, Hutchens—doesn't matter. Nobody wearing my patch will ever ask you to pay for that, not in money, not in anything else, and if somebody does, you come find me."
Too much. I knew it while I was saying it and I kept going because apparently that's who I am with her.
"You didn't start this. He brought it to your door because your grandmother's lane passes my fence. I'm sorry about that. Not sorry about anything else."
She was quiet, turning it over, looking for the hook, the part where it costs her later. Whoever taught her to look for it had taught her good. But I'm not hard to read. Everything I own sits on eighty feet of open lot. What I fix, who I ride with. All right there.
Somewhere in all that truth she'd come closer. Or I had. A foot of morning air between us where three had been, close enough to see the pulse ticking in her throat. My hand hung half-raised, wanting her jaw, her hip, anything. She looked at it. I looked at her mouth.
She took half a step back, and the cold came in off the lot again. Her shoulders dropped. Half an inch. She quit looking at me like something she might have to swing at.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?" I said.
"I believe you." She said it like it surprised her worse than the notice had. "Don't make me regret it. I don't have any trust left to spare."
She walked back across the lot, sun catching the red in her hair now the gray had burned off, and I watched her go like an idiot who meant to stay one until somebody hit him with a wrench. Behind me, Mercy's voice drifted out of the office, pleased as hell.
"Being neighborly," he said.
"Get your ass to work, Mercy."
Her shop light came on across the lot. I had a colliery rider to deal with, a sheriff to outmaneuver, and a club that needed me thinking about anything but the woman in that window.
None of it stood a chance. She was going to be mine, mine to look after and mine to keep, and God help whoever tried me on it.
She just didn't know yet, and I wasn't dumb enough to say it out loud.
I was still standing there when the second light came on upstairs.