Chapter 13 – Harper
Patty’s banana bread tastes like childhood—warm, safe, uncomplicated. She asks exactly zero questions about why a man on a motorcycle dropped me at her door like I was something worth protecting.
"More coffee?" she asks.
"Please."
She pours without comment. We sit at her kitchen table, floral tablecloth older than I am, and a cat called Marmalade sleeps in the window box like the world isn’t falling apart three blocks away.
"You want to talk about it?" Patty asks.
"Not really."
"Good. I hate talking." She sits down across from me with her own mug. "But I'm excellent at listening, if you change your mind."
I sip my coffee and look out the window at Copper Ridge moving through its afternoon like nothing’s wrong, mountains standing around it like they always have.
I left to escape this feeling—the waiting, the constant sense of being watched. Fourteen months building something new.
And he found me anyway.
"That man," Patty says, not looking at me, looking at her coffee instead. "Ronan. He's a good one."
"I know."
"No, I don't think you do." She sets her mug down.
"I've known that boy since he came back from overseas.
Judge brought him here, said he needed space to put himself back together.
Ronan didn't talk to anyone for the first six months.
Just worked on bikes and rode that mountain road like he was trying to outrun something that was already inside him. "
I'm quiet. Listening.
"He doesn't let people in," Patty continues. "Not easily. Not ever, really, except his brothers from the MC. So, the fact that he brought you here, that he's asking me to keep you safe..." She looks at me now. "That means something."
"We barely know each other," I say.
"Some people you know in three weeks. Some people you don't know in three years." She stands, takes her mug to the sink. "Time's got nothing to do with it."
My phone buzzes on the table. I pick it up expecting Jess, expecting Rosa—but it’s a number I don’t recognize, local area code. My stomach drops. I stare at it for three rings before I answer.
"Hello?"
Silence. Just breathing on the other end.
And then... "Harper."
His voice. The same smooth, controlled tone I recognize immediately.
"Derek."
"You sound surprised." That slight amusement in his voice, like this is a game and he's already won. "You shouldn't be. Did you really think you could just disappear?"
My hand tightens on the phone. Patty has turned from the sink, reading my face, her expression hardening.
"What do you want," I say.
"To talk. Just talk." The concern in his voice is perfectly calibrated, the same tone he used when he'd apologize after, when he'd make it sound like I was the one who'd misunderstood, who'd overreacted. "I'm worried about you, Harper. Running off to some mountain town, all alone—"
"I'm not alone."
A pause. I hear the shift in it, the thing underneath the smooth surface.
"No," he says slowly. "I suppose you're not. I've heard you've made... friends."
The way he says friends makes my skin crawl.
"Stay away from me, Derek."
"I'm staying at the Pinecrest Lodge." He says it casually. Like he's commenting on the weather. "Room 212. Beautiful view of the mountains. You should come by. We can talk properly. Clear this all up."
"There's nothing to clear up. We're done. We've been done."
"Harper." The smooth tone cracks slightly. Just slightly. "You don't get to decide that on your own. Four years doesn't just end because you got scared."
"I got smart," I say. "There's a difference."
The silence that follows is different. Colder.
"I'm here for three days," he says. "I suggest you think carefully about how this goes. Because I can make things very easy for you, or I can make them very difficult. Your choice."
He hangs up.
I sit there with the phone in my hand and my heart beating too fast and Patty watching me with the expression of a woman who's raised three sons and knows exactly what a threat sounds like.
"That him?" she asks.
"Yeah."
"He here? In town?"
"Pinecrest Lodge."
She crosses her arms. "Ronan know?"
"Not yet."
"He's going to."
I look at her. "I'm not his responsibility, Patty."
"No," she agrees. "But you're his choice. And that man doesn't choose things lightly." She picks up her phone. "I'm calling Judge."
"Patty—"
"Harper." She looks at me with something between sympathy and steel. "You're in my house. That makes you mine to protect until Ronan gets back. And Judge needs to know if that man is in town making phone calls."
She's already dialing.
Judge arrives in fifteen minutes.
Not Ronan. Judge himself, which tells me exactly how seriously they're taking this. He parks his Road King at the curb and walks up the porch steps with the calm, unhurried pace of a man who has handled significantly worse situations than an ex-boyfriend in a mountain town.
Patty lets him in.
"Harper," he says. A nod. Nothing more. He doesn't waste words.
"Judge."
He sits across from me at the table. Patty puts coffee in front of him without asking. He takes a sip, sets it down, and looks at me with pale eyes that have seen things I'll never fully understand.
"Tell me about the call," he says.
I do. Word for word, as much as I can remember. The tone of it. The threat underneath the pleasant surface. The fact that he knows I'm not alone, that I've made friends, which means he's been watching or having people watch for him.
Judge listens without interrupting. When I'm done, he's quiet for a moment.
"He's testing," he says finally. "Seeing if you'll come to him. Seeing if you're scared enough to try and manage this alone." He looks at me. "Are you?"
"No."
"Good." He picks up his phone. Types something. "Ronan's on his way. He'll be here in five minutes."
"Judge, I don't want him doing something he can't come back from—"
"Harper." Judge's voice is flat. Certain. The voice of a man who commanded soldiers in combat and never had one question the call. "Ronan has already done things he can't come back from. We all have. What we don't do is let men like Derek Sutton operate in our town without consequences."
"This isn't your fight."
"You're here. You're under our protection whether you asked for it or not. That makes it our fight." He stands. "And for what it's worth, Ronan made it his fight the night you walked into that bar. He's just been waiting for permission to act on it."
The sound of a motorcycle comes up the street.
I know the engine note by now. Deep, steady, controlled. Everything Ronan is.
He cuts the engine and he's through the door before I've fully stood up.
His eyes go to me first. Scanning, checking, the same way he checked me outside the bar after Cal touched my wrist, the same way he's been checking me since the first night, like he's running threat assessments without knowing he's doing it.
"You okay?" he asks.
"Yes."
His jaw tightens. He looks at Judge.
"He called her," Judge says. "Pinecrest Lodge, room 212. He's here for three days. He wants her to come to him."
Ronan goes very still.
It's not the stillness of someone who's frozen. It's the stillness of someone who's just received targeting coordinates and is running calculations.
"He called her directly," Ronan says. Flat. Even.
"From a local number."
Ronan looks at me. "What did he say."
I tell him. The same way I told Judge, word for word, and I watch a shift move behind Ronan's eyes, cold and tactical and completely certain.
When I'm done, he doesn't speak for a long moment.
Then he turns to Judge.
"I'm handling this," he says. "Tonight."
Judge nods once.
Ronan looks at me.
"Stay here," he says. "Don't leave. Don't answer calls from numbers you don't know. Don't go anywhere alone."
"Ronan—"
He crosses to me. Puts both hands on my face, firm and careful, the way he touches everything important.
"Stay here," he says again. "Please."
I see it then, underneath the control—the fear. Not for himself. For me.
"Okay," I say.
He kisses me once. Hard and brief.
Then he's gone.