Chapter 6
SIX
DOC
I’d been reading people my whole life.
In the field, it was survival. The way a man held his hands told you whether he was reaching for a weapon or a surrender.
The pitch of someone’s breathing told you how much pain they were hiding.
You learned to read the space between what people showed you and what was actually happening underneath, and if you got it wrong, someone died.
In the years since, the skill hadn’t dulled.
It just found new targets. I could call out the brothers when they were bullshitting me about something.
I could figure out when the prospects were in over their heads.
I could even read the people who showed up at the compound needing help, sorted the liars from the genuine in the first thirty seconds.
Last night, standing in the lot watching Valentina and Richard Carrington reverse their rental Mercedes, I’d read them in a glance.
They weren’t afraid of losing Evie. They were afraid of what it looked like.
A Carrington daughter, their carefully maintained investment, pouring beers in a biker bar.
Living in a compound. Sleeping with a man who had tattoos on his arms and engine grease under his nails.
Every piece of it was a stain on the image they’d spent decades building, and image was the only currency they understood.
Their weapon was respectability. Mine was going to be the opposite.
I’d made calls that morning. Early, before Evie woke up, sitting in the kitchen with coffee and my phone and a plan that was either brilliant or insane.
Rook helped. He was good at finding things, and what he found gave me everything I needed.
The Carrington Foundation’s annual gala, chaired by Valentina for the last twelve years.
Richard’s board memberships, three of them, all with people whose opinions lived in the same postcode as their money.
The family’s social footprint, carefully curated across two decades of charity events, country club memberships, alumni networks.
A life built on being seen in the right places with the right people.
That was the pressure point. Not money, not lawyers, not county inspectors. Reputation. The fear of what people would think. Take that away and the whole structure came down.
By eight-thirty the Angel’s Rest lot was ready.
Not by accident. Every brother who wasn’t on the road had parked out front, bikes lined up in a row of chrome and black leather, gleaming in the morning sun.
Razor was leaning against his, Priest sat on a chair outside the bar.
Ghost was somewhere, which meant everywhere.
Angel stood in the bar doorway with his arms folded, coffee in hand, looking like the man who owned everything the eye could see, and like nothing bothered him.
Evie came through from the lodge at ten to nine, dressed, nervous, her jaw set in the way I’d learned meant she was bracing for a fight. She looked at the lot. At the bikes. At the brothers arranged like the world’s most deliberate welcoming committee.
“What is this?”
“Trust me,” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”
She looked at my face. Read something there that made her expression shift from nervous to curious, and then to something warmer. “Okay.”
The Mercedes turned off the private road at three minutes past nine. Punctual. Of course they were. People like the Carringtons treated a schedule the way they treated everything else, as a way of proving they were in charge.
The car rolled into the lot and stopped.
The engine cut. I watched Valentina through the windshield, watched her eyes sweep the row of bikes, the brothers, the bar, the compound stretching out behind it.
Watched her face tighten as she calculated what she was walking into and decided it didn’t matter, because she was a Carrington and this was a biker bar and the math was self-evident.
She got out. Pearls, heels, the cream wool coat from last night.
Richard followed. Pressed charcoal suit, no tie, the casual version of power that cost more than the dressed-up one.
They closed their doors simultaneously, a choreographed move they probably didn’t even know they did, two people who’d been performing in sync for thirty years.
Valentina’s eyes found Evie. Then me, standing beside her. Then the arm I slid around Evie’s waist, my hand settling on her hip, my thumb tracing a slow circle through the fabric of her shirt.
“Genevieve,” Valentina said. The same voice from last night, the one that expected compliance the way it expected oxygen. “I hope you’ve had time to think about...”
I had no intention of letting her finish her sentence. Instead I kissed Evie.
I turned her toward me, cupped the back of her neck with one hand, and kissed her the way I’d kissed her last night when she came to my room.
Deep. Open. Obscenely slow. I licked into her mouth and she gasped against me, her hands grabbing my shirt, and I took the sound and swallowed it and gave her my tongue in return.
She met it with hers, wet, hot, and I let my hand slide from her neck down the length of her spine to her ass.
Gripped. Pulled her hips flush against mine, her body arching into me with a roll that was pure instinct and absolutely visible from where her parents were standing.
My other hand tangled in her hair, tilting her head back so I could kiss her deeper, and she moaned, quiet but audible, a sound that had no business existing outside a bedroom.
I let it go on. Long enough for it to become unmistakable.
Long enough for Valentina’s sentence to die in the air.
Long enough for Richard Carrington to look at the gravel, the sky, the mountains, anything that wasn’t his daughter being kissed senseless by a man with tattooed arms and his hand on her ass in the parking lot of a biker bar.
Long enough that when Razor muttered “damn,” under his breath, it carried.
When I finally pulled back, a string of wet still connected our mouths for a split second before it broke. Evie’s eyes were glazed, her lips swollen, her breathing ragged. She looked at me with an expression that was half what the hell are you doing and half don‘t you dare stop.
I kept my arm around her. Turned to the Carringtons with the warmest smile I had in me, which was considerable when I wanted it to be.
“Mr. Carrington. Mrs. Carrington.” I extended my free hand. Richard stared at it. “I’m Doc. I should have introduced myself properly last night, that was rude of me. I’m Evie’s partner.”
The word landed like a grenade in a library.
Valentina’s face went through three expressions in two seconds, horror, revision, and a forced neutrality that didn’t quite make it to her eyes.
Richard didn’t take my hand. I left it out there for exactly long enough to make the refusal obvious, then pulled it back, unbothered.
“We’ve been meaning to reach out, actually,” I said.
Conversational, easy, like we were at a neighbourhood barbecue.
“Evie talks about you both all the time. I’d love to come up to Denver sometime, meet the family properly.
Maybe dinner? I’ve got a bike, so we’d ride up, if that’s okay. Evie loves the bike. Don’t you, babe?”
“Love it,” Evie said. Her voice was even but I could feel her shaking against me. Not from fear. She was trying not to laugh.
“It’s great, who knew I’d be into bikes now?” She said, still trying to contain herself now she realised what my plan was.
I was enjoying this. I shouldn’t have been, but I was.
The Carringtons’ faces were a masterclass in controlled panic, two people watching their worst-case scenario assemble itself in real time.
“I was also thinking, when we make it official, the boys would love to ride up for the ceremony. Full formation. Chrome, leather, the works. I know a few of the guys have been talking about what to wear. Razor was asking about dress codes, weren’t you, Razor? ”
From behind us, Razor’s voice, perfectly timed. “I was thinking leather kilts.”
“He’s joking,” I said. “Probably. But listen, the point is, we’d want to do this right.
I know family is important to you. It’s important to us too.
” I gestured behind me at the compound, the lodge, the row of workshops.
“We’ve got plenty of room up here if you ever want to visit.
Fresh mountain air, great bar, the boys are excellent company.
Mrs. Carrington, do you ride? I could get you on one of the smaller bikes.
It’s a beautiful road up through the pass. ”
Valentina looked at me like I’d suggested she eat glass.
“I’d hate to think we got off on the wrong foot just because of a misunderstanding,” I continued, warm, relentless, giving them absolutely no room to breathe.
“Family should be close. And I want you to know, Evie’s been so happy here.
Haven’t you, babe?” Evie’s mother seemed to visibly recoil in horror every time I used the word babe.
“Never happier,” Evie said. Perfectly composed. Still not laughing, but it was costing her.
Richard Carrington was looking at me the way a man looks at a problem he can’t solve with money.
His mouth was tight, the controlled stillness of someone biting down on words that wanted out.
Beside him, Valentina had gone a specific shade of pale that I recognized from a medical standpoint as mild vasovagal response.
Her brain was sending blood to her vital organs because it had classified this situation as a threat.
Good. It was.