Epilogue 1
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— Holden —
O ne Month Later The house was a few houses down the row from Colt and Lilac’s — two bedrooms, a porch, a yard that needed work, a kitchen twice the size of my room at the clubhouse.
Dutch had offered it the morning after Bea came back. No ceremony about it. Pulled me aside, handed me a coffee, and said, “There’s a house open on the row. It’s yours if you want it.”
The truth was, Bea had been in my bed every night since she’d shown up in the parking lot.
Which was fine by me — until about three days in, when Handful started grinning every time I walked past the common room and Glitch made one too many comments about how thin the clubhouse walls were.
Bea hadn’t been quiet since the first night.
She’d clearly stopped worrying about professional dignity with my brothers.
Our own place worked.
I’d told her that night, her head on my chest in my bed at the clubhouse.
“A house?” She’d tilted her head up to look at me. “With Dutch as our landlord?”
“With Dutch as our neighbor. We’d own it.”
She’d gone still. “You want to buy a house together.”
“I want to live with you. Dutch’s house happens to be the fastest route.”
“Sold.” She kissed me. “Literally.”
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Moving day was two days later. Dutch said the paperwork would catch up when it caught up — the house was ours, we might as well be in it.
I ran the move like a route. Had the prospects doing the heavy lifting — couch, bed, dresser, boxes.
Colt and Handful supervised with coffees in hand, which was about the right division of labor for a VP and whatever Handful considered himself these days.
Knox and Luca ran around like they owned the place.
The old ladies popped by over the course of the morning.
Betty came first with a tin of cookies. Lilac came after with the babies in the double stroller — ten minutes of Bea fussing over Danny and Graham before Lilac hauled them home for nap time.
Indira dropped in between clients, just to hug Bea and promise dinner once we were settled.
Dutch came by around noon. Leaned against the doorframe. Took a slow look around. “Good bones,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Take care of her.”
“Always.”
Bea’s books went on the shelves next to my route maps. Her tea collection in the kitchen next to my coffee maker. Her lavender soap in the shower. The house smelled like both of us before we’d finished unloading the first trip.
I hung Danny’s framed routes in the hallway — three of them, the ones Lindsay had pulled out of his shoebox and given me the second time Bea came with me to visit.
Bea found me standing there looking at them. Slipped her hand into mine without a word. We stood for a long time.
We were still standing there when the knock came at the door. It was Lindsay with a plant and a card and an expression that cracked the second she saw the routes on the wall.
“Oh, Holden.”
I pulled her into a hug. “Come in. Bea makes the coffee stronger than I do.”
“Which is saying something,” Bea called from the living room.
Lindsay laughed through the tears. The plant went on the windowsill. She stayed for an hour.
Visitors came and went all afternoon. The prospects kept trailing boxes through the front door, following Bea’s directions on where everything went — kitchen, bedroom, spare room — Bea pointing with a coffee in one hand and the kind of confidence that suggested she’d been planning this in her head for weeks rather than hours.
Road captain, I thought. She’d picked that up from me.
By late afternoon, the last box was down. Bea stretched her arms over her head, then dropped her hands to her hips and looked around the living room.
“We did it.”
“We did.”
“We have the house to ourselves.”
“I know.”
She looked at me. Slow. Deliberate. “We have a brand-new couch. A brand-new bed. A brand-new kitchen table—”
“Bea.”
“—and a porch. We didn’t check the porch.”
I had her off her feet and against the wall of the new hallway before she’d finished laughing, her legs hooked around my waist, her mouth on mine.
“Which one first?” she murmured.
“All of them. We have all night.”
She grinned against my mouth. “Biker domestic bliss.”
“Biker domestic bliss.”
Outside, the compound was quiet. Danny’s routes on the wall. Bea in my arms. Any screaming of my name she was about to do was going to happen in a house where only I would hear it.