Epilogue
CASSIDY
One month later
Someone drops what sounds like a full keg in the hallway, and Crash stops moving inside me.
“If that’s a prospect, I’m killing him,” he says.
“Don’t stop.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.” He pulls my knee up toward my chest and drives back in, deeper at this angle, and my head goes back into the pillow. “Where was I?”
“Right there.”
“Right there,” he agrees, and stays right there, snapping his hips against mine.
The headboard hits the wall. He doesn’t ease up. A month of mornings in this room and he’s quit treating me like I’ll break.
He knows my body now, knows I want his weight and his teeth and roughness, and he gives me all of it.
“Eyes on me,” he says.
I open my eyes. He’s braced over me on one arm, watching my face, hips rolling slow and deep and merciless.
I grab the back of his neck and pull him down and bite his lower lip, and he groans into my mouth and his control slips—the rhythm goes harder, rougher.
He pulls out, flips me onto my stomach, and drags my hips up before I’ve finished gasping.
“Like this. Yeah?”
“Yes,” I moan.
He pushes back in and sets a pace with nothing careful in it. One hand spreads wide between my shoulder blades and pins me to the mattress, his thumb hooking the collar of the shirt I’m still half wearing, and dragging it aside to put his mouth on the back of my neck.
“Faster,” I command him.
I push back to meet him, hard, stealing the rhythm out from under him, and his laugh breaks off into a curse. He likes it when I fight him for the pace. He told me so the second week, and I’ve been abusing the information ever since.
“Brat,” he says.
“Slacker.”
That earns me what I want.
He hauls me up off the mattress, my back against his chest, both of us upright on our knees, and he never stops fucking me through the move—short, deep strokes now, grinding up into me from below.
His free hand slides down my stomach and finds my clit. His fingers move in the opposite direction of his cock, and the two rhythms cross, creating a storm of sensation between my thighs.
“Crash, come with me.”
“Yes, baby, yes.”
Slow heat rolls up the backs of my thighs, gathering, my whole body winding tighter on every stroke. I’m shaking against his chest and pushing back into him.
His arm bands across my chest, and locks me to him, and his fingers keep that opposite rhythm, patient and ruthless. The heat crests and goes everywhere at once.
The waves keep rolling, and somewhere in the middle of it, he turns my face back toward him and kisses me.
“Fuck,” he says, right at my ear, and his pace finally slips. “I love you!”
He finishes deep, his words dissolving into a groan against the back of my neck, his hips stuttering through it.
We collapse flat, his weight crushing me into the mattress.
“You bit me,” he says into my shoulder.
I chuckle. “You liked it.”
“I really did.” He nips at my neck lightly with his teeth. “We need our own house.”
“You say that every morning.”
“Every morning, I mean it.” He rolls off me and lies there with one arm behind his head, in no hurry to be anywhere.
“I’ve lived in this clubhouse my whole adult life.
It was enough. Now we share our mornings with twenty brothers, and sometimes the women they’re fucking if they’re still here.
Trapper eats breakfast with us every single day. ”
“You love Trapper.”
“I love Trapper. I don’t want him at my breakfast table.” He turns his head and looks at me. “I want a kitchen where I can fuck you on the countertops, whenever I want.”
“Romantic.”
“I’m serious, Cass.” He pushes me playfully. “I want a shower built for two. A whole house where everything in it is yours and mine and nobody else’s.”
“Then let’s finally get serious about buying a house.” I sit up and find my shirt on the floor. The cut he gave me is hanging over the back of the chair next to my clothes, where it lives now. PROPERTY OF CRASH across the back.
The first week I wore it, it felt like a costume. Now it feels strange when it’s not on, like leaving the house without my own skin.
“We’ll find the perfect house. But not today.” He gets up and pulls his jeans on. “Today we’ve got the barbecue.”
He comes around the bed and kisses me, unhurried, his hand at the back of my head.
“I love you, baby,” he says against my mouth.
“I love you, Crash.”
He grins. “I know.”
Saber’s yard is full. Bikes in a row along the fence, trucks behind them, kids running between the legs of large men who step around them without looking down.
Saber is at the grill with a beer and a pair of tongs, arguing with Razor about how long ribs take. Razor’s dog lies in the shade under the porch, on its side, sleeping through all the chaos.
Shelby spots us first and crosses the yard with her arms already open.
“Hey, girl!” She hugs me, then holds me out at arm’s length and looks at the cut. She does this every time. “Still not over it.”
“It’s been a month, Shelby.”
“You don’t get to dictate how long I’m excited about it.” She loops her arm through mine and walks me toward the porch. “Tell me about the new location for the bar. Saber told me almost nothing.”
“The books are finally cleaned up. The bar is making a ton of money.” We climb the porch steps. “So, I pitched Crash and Saber a second Bones and Bucks location, making it a chain. In town this time, on a busy street. Foot traffic, lunch crowd, tourists passing through.”
“On Main Street.” Shelby is already somewhere else, working. I can see it happen behind her eyes. “I love the idea.”
“Since you do the marketing for the bar, it’s really important that you’re on board, too!”
“I’m on board!” She hands me a beer out of the cooler without asking. “Where on Main?”
“The empty building next to the diner.”
“Next to the diner.” She laughs. “That’s where I met Saber!”
“I know! I love the story of how you two met.” I give her a side hug. “My brother is a lucky guy.”
“That he is,” Shelby agrees with a laugh.
Violet and Eden are at the other end of the porch, and we drift down to them.
Violet is sitting next to Leo, who is falling asleep on her lap.
Duke comes up the steps, takes the boy off her without a word, and she leans into his side like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Eden stands with Viper, her hand in his.
I sip my beer and look at all of it. The yard, the smoke, the kids, the row of bikes.
Crash catches my eye from across the yard and winks. I blow him a kiss.
A month ago, there was a war. Now there’s this.
Family.
Hours go by, and Saber kills the music himself, right when the sun starts going down.
“Alright,” he says. “Everybody shut up for a minute.”
The yard goes quiet. Men come in from the fence line. Shelby steps up next to me and grips my hand, and that’s when I know what’s coming, because she already knew.
“Trapper. Get up here.”
Trapper comes through the crowd. He’s been a prospect for years, but he’s done more for this club than a lot of patched brothers.
Saber holds up a cut. New leather, full patches. Top rocker, bottom rocker, the crown and skull in the middle.
“Years,” Saber says. “Years of guard duty on that gate, mopping floors. Years of making the worst coffee in Arizona.” Laughter rolls through the yard.
“And you never once complained where I could hear it. You bled for this club. You stood your ground for this family when it counted, more than once.” He stops.
The yard is silent. “Vote was unanimous. Get over here, brother.”
Trapper takes the cut in both hands. He stares at it a second too long, his bottom lip quivering, and all the bikers pretend not to see it.
He puts it on.
The yard erupts. The men close around him in a wall of leather and noise, slapping the new patches, shaking him by the shoulders.
Joker’s voice comes up over all of it, telling a funny story about Trapper everyone has heard fifty times.
Leo wakes up on Duke’s shoulder, takes one look at the commotion, and holds his small hand out flat, and Trapper breaks out of the crowd to high-five the kid. The yard laughs all over again.
Crash appears at my side and puts his arm around me, his hand curling at my shoulder.
Later, I sit on the porch steps with a plate I’m not eating from, and Saber lowers himself down next to me with a groan he’d deny making.
“Old man,” I say.
“Watch it. I can still throw you in the horse trough.”
“You can’t. I’m somebody’s Old Lady now. There are rules.”
“There are no rules that protect you from your brother.” But he bumps my shoulder with his, and we sit there watching his yard full of people.
Crash is at the fire pit telling a story with both hands, and a dozen brothers are laughing at whatever it is, and Trapper is standing in the middle of them in his new cut, grinning so wide it has to hurt.
“Dad used to do this,” Saber says. “The barbecues. You remember?”
“Yeah.”
“He’d stand right where I was standing tonight.” He turns his beer in his hand. “I used to think I was keeping everything going for him. The club, the family, all of it.” He nods toward the yard. “It’s not for him. It’s for this. Took me a war to figure that out.”
I lean my head on my brother’s shoulder. He lets me.
“You happy, Cass?”
“Yeah.” It’s an easy answer. The easiest one I’ve ever given. “You?”
“Very.” He finishes his beer and stands, and squeezes the back of my neck once. “Your man’s looking for you.”
Crash is crossing the yard toward the porch, firelight behind him, and he holds his hand out when he reaches the bottom step.
“Come here,” he says. “There’s a thing I want to show you.”
“What thing?”
“A thing. Come on.”
He pulls me up and leads me away from the fire, around the side of the house, where the noise drops off and the dark takes over and the stars come all the way down to the horizon, the way they only do out here.
He stops, turns me by the shoulders, and points.
“There,” he says. “See the ridge line? Left of the windmill.”
“I see desert, Crash.”
“Forty acres, backs right up against Saber’s east fence. Old house on it, needs work. It went up for sale this morning.” He’s behind me, his arms coming around me, his chin on top of my head. “I called the guy already. We can see it on Monday.”
I turn around in his arms. “You want to live next to my brother?”
“I want to live next to family.” He pushes my hair back from my face. “But far enough away where we have our own space, so I can have you all to myself when I want you.”
“I like the sound of that,” I say. “Monday?”
“Monday.” He kisses me, slow, no audience, no hurry.
I came home after four years, thinking I was over Crash. I was wrong, and being wrong was the best thing I ever did.