Epilogue #2, Forge's Awakening (Sons Of Liberty MC #20)

Epilogue #2

"I'll source it. There's an estate sale in Germantown next weekend—big colonial, been in the same family for eighty years.

The listing mentions original furniture.

" Dana's eyes lit up the way they always did at the words estate sale, and she caught Forge watching her with that expression she still couldn't fully name. Warm. Hungry. Proud. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You're looking at me like that again."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm a vintage Carhartt jacket someone forgot in a box of rags."

His laugh was low and real—still rare enough to matter, common enough now that she'd stopped keeping count. "You're better than a jacket."

"High praise from a man who loves that jacket."

"I love what it represents." He pushed off the counter and crossed to her, his hands finding her waist with the automatic possession that had become as natural as breathing. "Someone found something valuable that everyone else overlooked. Someone saw what it could be instead of what it was."

"You're getting poetic in your old age."

"Must be your influence." His thumb traced a circle on her hip through the fabric of her dress—today's was a 1960s A-line, navy blue with white buttons, the kind of piece that made customers ask where she'd found it. "Ready to go?"

"Almost." She leaned into him, letting his warmth settle around her like a second skin. "I want to finish the displays first. That front window needs work—the arrangement looks static. I want to swap the mannequin for the writing desk and put the silk scarves on a stand where the light hits them."

"You're going to rearrange the window display at closing time on a Saturday."

"It'll take ten minutes."

"It'll take forty and you know it."

She grinned up at him, unrepentant. "Fifteen. Twenty, tops."

Forge shook his head, but his hands didn't leave her waist. "I'll wait."

"You always wait."

"I always will."

He said it simply, like a fact. Like gravity or weather—something that existed whether you believed in it or not. Dana's pendant shifted against her collarbone, warm from her skin, the engraved words pressed against her pulse point.

Worth Saving.

She rose on her toes and kissed him—brief, firm, a promise rather than a question.

"Fifteen minutes," she said. "Then we go home."

"Home." He said the word like he was still getting used to it. Like it was something he'd heard about but never quite believed in until now.

Dana moved to the window display and started working—pulling the mannequin, repositioning the desk, draping the silk scarves over a wrought-iron stand she'd found at a flea market in Camden.

The afternoon light caught the fabric and threw color across the hardwood floor, warm golds and deep crimsons pooling like something alive.

She stepped back to assess, head tilted, seeing the arrangement the way a customer would see it from the sidewalk. Almost right. The scarves needed to cascade instead of drape—gravity as design element, not obstacle. She adjusted, stepped back again, adjusted once more.

Perfect.

Through the glass, Frankford Avenue was settling into its Saturday evening rhythm. Families walking home with grocery bags. Kids on bikes weaving between parked cars. The old man from the hardware store two doors down sweeping his sidewalk the way he'd swept it every evening for thirty years.

Her neighborhood. Her community. The place she'd chosen to rebuild because running wasn't in her vocabulary and never had been.

She turned from the window and found Forge exactly where she'd left him—leaning against the counter, arms crossed, watching her with those gray eyes that had been the first thing to make her feel safe in longer than she could remember.

The claiming pendant caught the light as she moved toward him.

His shelves held her inventory. Her photograph sat beside his register.

And outside, his bike waited at the curb the way it waited every Saturday—patient, steady, ready to take them both home to the compound where brothers would be starting the grill and Grace would be pouring whiskey and Pounder would be telling some story that grew more impossible with every telling.

"Ready?" she asked.

Forge straightened, held out his hand.

She took it.

THE END

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I hope you enjoyed FORGE’S AWAKENING. If so, I’d love to hear about it, and so would everyone else! If you’d like to leave a review, here is a link to the amazon page:

www.amazon.com/dp/B0H55CD4RX

Epilogue #2

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