Possessive Badge Daddy (Steel Mountain Daddies #3)

1. Lila

Chapter One

LILA

The lunch rush at Marvin's rolls in hungry and I keep it moving. Coffee for the counter and iced tea for the window booths, then some gentle town gossip with the ladies from the knitting circle. I talk the tourists in the corner into the peach pie as Marvin hollers behind the pass. The bell over the door won't quit. My apron pocket fills with tips, and in my head the money is already spent. Sneakers for Rosie, because my child will not stop growing. My old car’s making that grinding sound again, which I’m going to have to get seen to at some point.

Tips, chatter and serving the fine folks of High Vale. Most days, I like it just fine.

Some days everything comes together sweetly, like today.

The sun is beaming down on this perfect, cloudless day.

Marvin’s diner is done up in pink and red, a Valentine's candy box with a griddle in the back, chrome stools and cute checked curtains framing mountains so pretty they look like they’re in a movie.

My playlist hums out of the speakers mounted up on the wall, because Marvin surrendered the music to me my first month here.

Dolly, then Patsy, then some uptempo rock-and-roll classics to keep me and the coffee moving.

I've waited tables in towns that were nothing but an address and a lease I could break fast. No connections, so Rosie and me could keep moving on.

High Vale is the first place I might think about settling down for good.

This sweet mountain town and the kindly, grumpy old man who owns the diner sort of snuck up on me, and I let it.

Rosie's coloring book lives under the register until school lets out, next to the cigar box of crayons Marvin pretends he didn't buy just for her.

Come the afternoon lull she'll be right there coloring on the last stool, seven years old and deadly serious about staying inside the lines.

A diner counter is no after-school plan out of a fancy magazine, but it's what I've got, and Marvin has never said a word about it except to grumble that she colors better than his signage.

Then the low roar of a big engine rolls up the street, and my whole body shivers. This is the best part of my day. Ridiculous. I’m tuning to that growl before I've turned around, accidentally pouring the deputy three inches more coffee than he asked for.

Wrench.

Through the front glass he swings off his bike, and it's a production, all of it: glossy black hair swept back and a thick black beard. He’s a wall of muscle in a biker cut that strains over those enormous shoulders.

Wrench is the club's mechanic, and he looks it. It’s like he’s been built by engine blocks and stubborn bolts, his tattooed forearms roped under rolled sleeves, calloused knuckles and big hands. He is an unreasonable amount of man.

My body reacts the way it did on my first day at the diner.

Heat rolls up from low in my belly and spreads out to my fingertips.

My pulse picks up its skirts and runs, and I'm pressing my thighs together behind the counter and taking a slow breath through my nose. I tell myself I’m a grown woman, a mother of one who has no darn business fanning herself with an order pad over a grizzled biker.

He’s here every day. This is normal. You'd think my body would build up a tolerance, except it reacts like every time is the first time.

His big dog stays put in the sidecar, ears forward, scanning the street with a business-like expression until Wrench whistles for him to move.

There's a rumor at the salon that the dog can take a grown man off a moving motorcycle, and I believe it. He looks like those military dogs, all muscle and alert expression. Scary-looking, maybe, if you didn’t know his name was Waffles.

Rosie asked, back when we first arrived, marching right up to the scariest-looking animal in the county while I aged a decade behind the counter.

Wrench crouched down to her level, said something soft in Spanish to the dog, and the dog melted into a hundred pounds of wagging tail.

The next time she saw Waffles come into the diner, my daughter folded a napkin around a strip of bacon and held it up like a precious offering. Wrench never looked up from his plate.

“Waffles eats when I say so, chiquita.”

“I know,” she said. “Say so, please.”

Wrench said one quiet word, and the dog’s tail drummed hard against the floor as he delicately took the bacon from Rosie’s napkin.

Today, the bell rings as the door opens and Wrench folds himself onto the last stool before the register.

I breathe him in, a mix of leather and clean cotton with a hint of engine oil, warm off his skin.

He's close enough that if I reached across I could lay my palm flat on his chest. I have his order on the wheel before he's got his gloves off and he nods his thanks.

That's our whole conversation, most days; the man barely talks. To me, anyway. I've caught him carrying on entire discussions with my seven-year-old about crayon selection, and muttering long, patient sentences in Spanish to that dog.

I refill his mug without being asked.

“Gracias, dulzura.”

It’s pathetic how I live for those words, low and warm, with that soft roll on them in his deep voice that makes my core clench.

The first time he said it I just about dropped a tray full of muffins.

My friend Taryn, the diner’s cook, had to explain to me with a big grin on her face, that dulzura means sweetness in Spanish.

Waitresses get called sweetheart and hon all day long, and it doesn’t mean a thing. But when he says it, it stays somewhere between my heart and my stomach, and flutters there through the afternoon. I quit trying to figure out why and concentrate on not blushing.

Marvin comes banging into the kitchen at the tail of the rush with a letter in his fist and a grin that takes years off him. Taryn’s pulling a pie out of the oven, whistling. She’s been so happy ever since she got together with Hawk, one of the bikers in the same MC that Wrench rides with.

"Heard the news?" he announces, waving a letter. “The Rotmere offer on this place expired, all quiet-like.” He keeps talking while I duck out of the kitchen to put the plates I’m carrying down and then come back in. Marvin knocks the table twice. “We're good. For now, anyhow.”

The Rotmere corporation is the only fly in the ointment of this otherwise idyllic small town.

I haven’t paid too much attention to how they’ve been buying up real estate around High Vale and how people talk under their breath about what’s happening, like they’re scared to say it out loud.

But if Marvin sells, the job goes, and the whole life I've built here comes up for grabs.

The diner is safe; I could kiss that letter.

I'm coming back from the window booths with the coffee pot when the sun glares off a pair of juiced-up headlights that empties my head of its upbeat chatter instantly.

There’s a mahogany car parked across the street, nose toward the diner, with out-of-county plates. It's been sitting there through the whole rush. I can't make out the driver behind the sun on the windshield, but I don’t need to.

My stomach drops through the floorboards and keeps going.

Cold sweat springs up on the backs of my knees and there’s a high-pitched ringing in my ears.

I could get to the side exit or the kitchen door in a few seconds.

But then where? And none of it matters, because the only exit I care about is a few streets over, in a classroom with paper suns taped to the glass, where my daughter is bent over her work.

I promised her we’d put down roots here.

I swore to myself that this town was the last first day of school she'd ever have to endure, that she'd get the childhood I kept packing into boxes.

The coffee pot rattles against a mug when I go to pour, and I have to grip it with both hands.

“Lila? You okay?”

Taryn's at my elbow with a plate for the window booth, kind eyes adding me up gently.

“It's nothing.” It comes out too fast, my voice squeaky. “Sun in my eyes.”

She doesn't believe me, but she’s sweet enough to pretend. I’m rooted to the spot. How long will it take to pack and how far can we get? How fast can I be at that school gate without breaking into a run?

At the end of the counter, Wrench puts his fork down. He looks past me, out the window, assessing the car, then back at me. Then he stands, and his face is grim. Calm and cold at the same time.

He drops bills beside his plate without counting them.

Two syllables in Spanish, low and sharp, and Waffles plants himself at the diner door, facing the street, motionless.

The bacon moocher is gone. The dog standing guard at the door is all soldier, and the man who put him there hasn't even raised his voice.

“Stay inside,” he says to me, gently.

It isn't a suggestion. Then he walks out the door, across the lot toward that car, his pace slow and menacing. The bell rings behind him, bright and cheerful and wrong.

Across the street, the car's engine starts up and I set the pot down before I drop it.

It doesn't matter that I can't make out the driver behind the wheel. I know that car.

Shawn found us.