EPILOGUE
PENNY
The BBQ smoke curls up over the back lot, and somebody’s got the same string lights from Sasha’s wedding wound through the oaks again, because apparently this club doesn’t own two sets of decorations.
Sharon’s kids run circles around the picnic tables, and Lucy’s baby sleeps through the whole racket in a portable bassinet that Stray hasn’t let out of arm’s reach once since I got here.
I press my hand flat against my stomach without meaning to, then catch myself and drop it.
I’ve had my license for three months now.
Three months of skip traces and cheating spouses and one genuinely satisfying afternoon spent proving an insurance claim was fraudulent.
Three months of showing up here often enough that Ruth stopped looking at me like I might be recording everyone and started handing me a beer the second I walk through the gate.
Not everybody’s come around. Carol still watches me the way you’d watch a stray cat that wandered into the kitchen—tolerated, not trusted. And Bone gives me a nod now instead of nothing, which Evan tells me is basically a parade in Bone-language.
I found out this morning. Sitting on my own bathroom floor at six a.m. with Thunder’s head on my knee, staring at a stick that turned pink faster than the box promised it would.
I haven’t told him yet.
“You’ve been staring at that potato salad for two minutes.” Sasha slides onto the bench across from me, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, Jenson’s ring catching the light when she reaches for a chip. “Everything okay?”
“Fine.” I force my eyes off the bowl. “Just tired.”
She studies me a beat too long, the way she’s started to since we got close enough that she can tell when I’m lying, and then mercifully lets it go, launching into some story about Ruth trying to teach her to can tomatoes. I laugh in the right places. I don’t hear half of it.
Evan finds me twenty minutes later, a bottle of wine in one hand and two plastic cups in the other, grinning like he does when he’s had exactly enough sun and beer to be pleased with the whole world.
“Figured you’d want this.” He holds the bottle up. Something decent, not the box stuff Gunner usually drags out. “Ryder brought it. Says it’s the same kind we had at The Depot.”
My stomach turns just looking at it, and not from nausea.
“I’m good,” I say. “Not really in the mood.”
He pauses with his hand on the bottle’s cap and looks at me properly for the first time since I sat down.
Evan doesn’t miss things. It’s the thing that makes him impossible to lie to, and right now I can see him running through every version of me that doesn’t turn down wine on a Saturday afternoon.
“You’re never not in the mood for wine,” he says slowly. “Even the bad kind.”
“I know.”
“Penny.”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s something.” He sets the bottle down on the table like it’s suddenly not important, cups forgotten beside it. “You’ve been quiet since I picked you up. Sasha noticed too, she just didn’t say it.”
I look at him—at the ink crawling up his throat, the stubble he didn’t bother shaving today, those blue eyes that have been reading me easier than anybody ever has—and I know I’m not getting out of this conversation in the middle of a BBQ with Gunner’s laugh carrying every three seconds and Carol’s eyes on the back of my neck.
“Can we talk?” I say. “Somewhere quiet.”
Something flickers across his face—not fear exactly, but the caution I recognize from our last argument. He nods once and doesn’t ask again, just follows me away from the tables, past the smokers by the fire pit, toward the barn that’s become something like our place over the last three months.
He shuts the door behind us. The light through the gaps in the wood cuts thin gold lines across the dusty floor, same as it did the day I told him I quit the force.
“You’re scaring me a little,” he says. “Just so you know.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“Then talk.”
I take a breath. My hands are shaking, and I press them flat against my thighs to stop it, and I think about every way I rehearsed this in the mirror this morning and none of them feel right standing here in front of him.
So I just say it.
“I’m pregnant.”
The barn goes so quiet I can hear the horse moving around in the pen outside.
Evan doesn’t move for a second. Doesn’t say anything. Just stares at me like I’ve spoken a language he needs a moment to translate, and my stomach drops straight through the floor because I can’t read whatever’s happening behind his eyes, not for the first time in three months.
“Say something,” I whisper.
“You’re—” His voice cracks on the word. “You’re sure?”
“Took the test twice this morning. I’m sure.”
He crosses the space between us in two strides, and for a second I think he might grab me, might do something big and loud, but instead his hands come up slow, framing my face like I’m something that might break if he moves too fast.
“Penny.” My name comes out wrecked. “Penny, are you—how do you feel? Are you happy? Scared? I need to know what you need from me right now, tell me what you need—”
“I need you to say something other than my name.”
A laugh bursts out of him, rough and disbelieving, and then he’s kissing me, hard, both hands still cupping my face like he can’t decide whether to hold me or lift me off the ground entirely.
“I’m happy,” he breathes against my mouth. “God, Penny, I’m so happy I want to shout it from the rooftops right now.”
“We have to wait,” I manage, pulling back enough to look at him. “I wanted to wait until I’m twelve weeks along before we tell anyone.”
“Fuck waiting.”
“Evan.”
“I know.” He presses his forehead to mine, breathing hard like he’s the one who just ran a mile instead of me.
“I know you want to wait. I get why. I just—” He pulls back, and there’s something wild and bright in his face that I’ve genuinely never seen on him before, not once, not even the night I told him I loved him.
“I can’t sit on this. I’ve got so many years of wanting this life with you sitting right here in my chest, and you just told me it’s actually happening, and I don’t think I can walk back out there and pretend I don’t know. ”
“Evan, if something happens—if it doesn’t—”
“Then we’ll deal with that together, same as we’d deal with anything.
” He takes my hand, presses it flat against his sternum where his heartbeat is going hard and fast under my palm.
“But right now, today, you just told me I’m gonna be a father, and I want my brothers to know.
I want the whole world to know. I’m done being quiet about wanting things, Penny.
Learned that lesson the hard way already. ”
I open my mouth to argue, to tell him again why I wanted to keep this between us for a while.
Nothing comes out. Because looking at his face right now, I don’t actually want to argue.
“Okay,” I say instead.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I laugh, and it comes out half a sob. “Go tell your brothers, Evan.”
He kisses me once more, hard and fast, and then he’s pulling the barn door open and taking my hand, tugging me back out into the sunlight before I can think better of any of this.
The whole lot turns to look when we walk back in, because he’s grinning too hard to look casual, and Ace calls out something about us finally emerging before somebody sends a search party, and Ryder laughs from his spot by the cooler.
Evan doesn’t laugh back. He just stops in the middle of the lot, still holding my hand, and the quality of his silence must say something, because the noise starts dying down table by table until even Gunner shuts his mouth.
“Penny said I could tell you,” Evan says, voice carrying loud and rough across the whole yard. “But I’ve spent my whole life being told to keep things locked down tight, and I’m done doing that with the things that actually matter.”
“Evan—” I start, my voice wobbly, but he’s already turning to me, both hands finding my face again like the barn was just a rehearsal for this.
“Penny’s pregnant.”
The lot erupts. Ruth’s hand flies to her mouth. Carol actually gasps, loud enough to carry over Sasha’s delighted shriek, and Jenson’s already crossing toward us with something unguarded breaking across his face, and Ryder’s whooping loud enough to startle the horse in her pen.
Evan doesn’t wait for any of it to settle.
He pulls me in and kisses me right there in front of the whole club, slow and certain, one hand cradling the back of my head like I’m something precious he finally gets to hold onto in daylight instead of stolen hours in the dark.
It’s soft. Real. Nothing like the desperate, hungry kisses we’ve traded in the evidence room, on his bike, against these barn walls.
For once, neither of us has to pull away before somebody sees, and when he finally pulls back, there are tears on my face I didn’t feel fall.
Then he drops to one knee in the gravel.
The whole yard goes silent again, faster this time, and my heart slams so hard against my ribs I can feel it in my throat.
“Evan—”
“Second time’s gonna go different,” he says, and his hands are shaking, actually shaking, this man who can face down a gun without blinking.
He reaches into his cut, and for one wild second I think somehow the ring is back, that somehow it’s been there this whole time, but what he pulls out is bigger and new, a delicate band with a stone that catches the afternoon light.
“Had this made a month ago. Been carrying it around waiting for the right moment, and I don’t know if this is exactly right, but I’m not waiting one more day, Penny. ”
“Evan.”
“When we were eighteen, I asked you this in a gravel parking lot, and you said no because you couldn’t be a part of this life.
” His voice breaks, and he doesn’t try to hide it, not in front of any of them.
“But now you’re my whole life. Penny Carpenter.
Private investigator. Mother of my kid. The only woman who’s ever fit against me like she was made for exactly this. Marry me.”
I’m crying too hard to answer right away, and somewhere behind me I hear Ruth start sobbing outright, and Ace mutters something to Ryder that sounds suspiciously like pay up, and none of it matters, none of it, because Evan Cole is on his knee in the gravel with a ring shaking in his hand, looking up at me like I’m the air he needs to breathe.
“Yes,” I finally get out. “Yes, God, yes—”
He doesn’t wait for me to finish. He’s up and has the ring on my finger and me in his arms all in the same motion, lifting me clean off the ground while the whole lot erupts around us—Gunner hollering, Sasha crying into Jenson’s shoulder, Bone actually smiling, real and unguarded, from his spot near the bar.
“Second time’s a charm,” Evan murmurs against my temple, still holding me a foot off the ground like he’s not ready to put me down and rejoin the world just yet.
“Damn right it is,” I say, and I mean it. This time I know what I’m saying yes to. And when he finally sets me down, I keep hold of him.
Thank you for reading Diesel’s Desire, the second book in the Wicked Sinners MC Series.