Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rogue
I wake up before her.
The light through the slats is grey and just starting to turn, and Hadley's curled against my side with her cheek on my chest and her hand flat on my stomach when I look down at her.
For days now I've woken up with her against me.
Days, and I'm still not used to it.
My hand is on her hip where it ended up sometime in the night and I haven't moved it for hours.
I look at her in the grey light.
The freckles across the bridge of her nose are darker than they were two days ago because she's been outside in the morning sun.
Her mouth is slightly open. There's a faint mark at the side of her neck from where I had my mouth on her last night before we went to sleep.
The chain that used to live between us in this bed is gone.
She put it on top of her dresser a couple of days ago and it's stayed there since.
In its place is my mother's ring, sitting six inches from my hand in the back of my nightstand drawer under a roll of socks I haven't worn since I bought them.
She saw it.
I didn't know it at the time.
My back was to the doorway with the ring in my palm and my head bent down, and she came back for a sweater and saw me and stepped back out before I knew she was there.
What I knew was that she came into the bunkhouse kitchen that afternoon without the sweater she'd gone to get, and her hand kept finding the bare place at her throat the way it does when she's holding something inside her chest and not ready to talk about it yet.
She ate quieter than usual at supper and her eyes wouldn't quite settle on mine across the table.
She knows.
I haven't told her I know that she knows.
That ends today.
I slide out from under her one inch at a time and lift her hand off my stomach and set it on the pillow where my body was.
She turns her face into the warm spot and stays asleep with her hair across her cheek and a small line between her eyebrows that smooths out when she settles.
I pull on jeans from the floor and walk barefoot to the front room.
The cabin is quiet.
Nash is asleep in the spare room with Diesel at the foot of his bed where I tucked them in last night.
The kid sleeps the way all kids sleep—full-body, mouth open, one foot hanging off the side of the mattress.
The dog sleeps the way old dogs do. One ear up, the rest of him gone.
I close the door to the hallway behind me so the kitchen noise doesn't carry.
I make coffee. The good stuff, the bag from the place in Llano she likes.
While it brews, I walk back down the hall to the bedroom and pull open the drawer of my nightstand.
The roll of socks is where it was last night. I move it.
The ring is under it.
I pick it up, knowing my life is going to change today.
The band is warm against my palm faster than it should be.
My mother wore this ring for thirty-two years.
Plain gold, two small dark green emerald stones set flat into the metal on either side of a two-carat diamond center.
The diamond catches the grey morning light when I turn it.
She gave it to me the week before she died, sitting up in her bed at the farmhouse outside Snyder with the oxygen line under her nose and the back of her hand against my cheek.
*You give this to a woman who deserves it, Silas. I'll know when it happens, even if I'm not here. Mothers know.*
I told her I didn't know any women like that.
She told me eventually I'd find one, and I told her she was being optimistic, and she laughed and called me a difficult child and closed her eyes.
She was right. I was wrong.
I close my hand around the ring.
The metal is warm now from my skin and I can feel my mother's hand on my cheek the way it was the day she put this ring in my palm.
*Mama, I found her.*
I put the ring in the front pocket of my jeans and button the pocket flap closed over it.
It sits against my thigh through the denim like a weight I'm finally allowed to carry.
I walk back to the kitchen and pour two cups.
I set hers at her place at the small table where we've been eating together every morning since they've been here.
I crack four eggs into a bowl and whisk them up.
The bacon goes into the pan. The biscuits from yesterday are wrapped in foil in the oven keeping warm.
I work at the stove with the ring in my pocket and the morning going faster than I'm ready for.
I'm a man who came out of his old life with a hole in his ribs, and a debt to an MC Prez.
Now, that same man is making breakfast for the woman he's going to marry.
The bacon goes onto the paper towel. I move the eggs into the pan.
Hadley appears in the doorway.
She's in one of my shirts, again, which I guess I should consider her nightly ritual.
She sees me at the stove and stops with her hand on the doorframe and looks at me adoringly.
I look back. My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. "Mornin', baby."
Her hand stays on the doorframe. Her mouth moves around the name like she's testing it again. "Mornin', Silas."
The name moves through my chest the way it has every time she's said it since she said it the first time.
I lift the spatula. "Sit down. Coffee's already poured."
She crosses the kitchen barefoot, goes up on her toes and presses her mouth against the side of my jaw, and stays there a moment with her hand flat against my chest where she can feel my heart going.
It has to be going faster than usual under her palm.
If she notices, she doesn't say anything about it.
She sits.
I slide the eggs onto her plate next to the bacon and the biscuit, fill her coffee a second time, and sit down across from her with my own plate.
She eats.
Her fork moves and her hand goes to her coffee and I'm finding it hard to look anywhere else.
She catches me on the next pass of her fork to her mouth. "You're staring."
I take a slow drink from my coffee. "I'm lookin'."
She huffs a small laugh into her coffee. "Same thing."
"It isn't." I set the cup down.
She bites the biscuit. "What is it this morning, then?"
I rest my forearms on the table and look at her across it. "I'm tryin' to figure out the right moment."
Her fork stops halfway to her mouth.
She sets it down on the edge of the plate. Slowly.
She doesn't ask what I mean.
Her chin lifts. Her hand goes flat against the table next to her plate and stays there.
Her eyes don't leave mine.
She's the steadiest woman I've ever known.
I stand up from the table.
I don't kneel yet. Not yet.
I walk around to her side and reach down to take her hand and pull her up out of the chair so she's standing in front of me at the kitchen window, with the morning light coming through behind her.
I take off my hat and set it on the table.
A man doesn't propose to a woman with his hat on.
Her eyes follow the hat down and then come back to my face and the gold flecks in them are catching the light.
I put my hands on her hips and pull her closer. My forehead comes down against hers and stays there. "Hadley."
"Silas."
I take a breath. Her hands come up to my forearms and her fingers close around them.
"I escaped my old life to build something new. A new life, I suppose. I even built this cabin with my own hands. I figured I'd die in it alone."
She doesn't move.
"Then you walked across the gravel."
Her hand comes up to my chest and stays there flat against the place where my heart is going harder than it has any business going.
"I'm goin' into a fight tomorrow that I might not come back from. You know that. I know that."
She nods once against my forehead.
"But before I go into it, I need you to know somethin' that's been true since the night I stood on your porch in the dark watchin' your cabin and decided I was gonna have you."
My voice goes rough on the last sentence and I don't try to make it not.
"I'm yours, baby. Been yours longer than I knew I was."
She makes a small sound at the back of her throat.
Not a word. Just the sound a woman makes when she's holding back the thing she's about to do.
"I want to come home to you when this is done.
I want Nash to call me Dad one day. I want to fill this cabin up with kids and dogs and the kind of noise that's been in this house since you all have been staying with me.
I want to wake up next to you every mornin' until one of us is too old to make it through the night. "
Her eyes are wet now. Both her hands are on my chest.
I step back just enough to get my hand into my pocket. The button on the pocket flap catches once and I work it open with my thumb.
The ring is warm when it comes out.
I go down on one knee on the kitchen floor in front of her.
I hold the ring up between us. The diamond catches the morning light and the green stones flank it like my mother said they would on the right woman's hand.
"This was my mother's. She wore it for thirty-two years. She gave it to me the week before she died and told me to put it on a woman who deserved it. She told me I'd know when it happened, even if she wasn't here to see it."
My voice goes tight. "I know, Hadley. I know now."
She makes a sound that's half a sob and half a laugh.
"Marry me, baby. Be my wife. Carry my name. Let me carry yours."
She doesn't make me wait. "Yes." She nods through it. "Yes. Silas, yes."
I slide the ring onto her finger.
It fits perfectly—my mother was right, the woman who deserved this ring was going to have hands the right size for it.
The gold band settles against her skin like it has been waiting there for years to find its place.
I stand up.
I pull her against my chest hard.
She comes up onto her toes and gets her arms around my neck and presses her face against my throat.
The sob comes out of her muffled into my t-shirt.
I put my hand against the back of her head and hold her there.
My own face is in her hair so she can't see it.
She knows anyway.
Her arms tighten around my neck.
We stand in the middle of the kitchen with the eggs and our coffee going cold.
* * *
Later—I don't know how long, ten or fifteen minutes maybe—she pulls her face back from my throat and looks up at me with her eyes still wet and her hand still on the back of my neck and says, "Silas."
"Yeah, baby?"
"Tell me about your mother."
So, I do.
We move to the bed. Not for sex, just to be cuddled up against one another.
She lies against my side with her head on my chest and her ring catches the light when she moves her hand on my stomach.
I tell her about my mother. Cora McCrae. Born in a Scottish-Texan family outside Snyder, married my father at nineteen, widowed at twenty-six when he went off the road in a feed truck on a county highway.
Raised me by herself on the family farm. Worked the land until her back gave out and then worked it some more.
The kind of woman who'd put her hand on the back of a man's neck once and know his entire story before she said anything.
My mother would have loved her. I let her know that.
What my mother would have done is look at Hadley's hands and the way she works in a kitchen and said, *'That's the one, Silas, that's her.'* I tell Hadley that, too.
Hadley listens, no matter how much I talk about my mom.
Her thumb moves on my stomach in slow circles.
She tells me things back.
About her own mama in Georgetown. About Garrett, briefly—the man earned the right to be mentioned without it being a wound.
About the day Nash was born, twelve hours into labor at the hospital in Tulsa, the look on Garrett's face when they put the baby in his arms.
About what she thought her life was going to look like before her husband got sick.
She doesn't apologize for any of it.
She doesn't have to.
I listen to her tell me about her life, and I rub my thumb along her finger.
After a while, the radio on my hip crackles.
I pulled it out of the bedroom safe an hour before sunup and clipped it to my belt because every patched brother on this property has been running on the radio for the last two days.
It's Miller's voice. "Prez. Y'all need to come see somethin' at the south access."
Phantom's voice comes over the channel. "On my way."
Then Blaze. "Rollin'."
I sit up. Hadley sits up next to me. Her hand goes to her bare throat and catches itself before it gets there and drops back into her lap.
She looks at me. She doesn't ask.
"I gotta go, baby."
Her hand finds mine on the quilt and closes around it. "Okay."
I tighten my grip on her hand once. "Wake Nash up. Get him dressed. Take him to the bunkhouse. Marlena and Bex are there. You stay with them till I get back. Don't go anywhere alone. You hear me?"
Her chin lifts the way it does when she's giving me her real answer. "I hear you."
I get off the bed, pull a shirt on over my t-shirt and pull on socks and boots.
I strap on the sidearm I keep in the drawer of my nightstand. Pick up my cut from the back of the chair and shrug into it.
Hadley is standing next to the bed when I turn around.
Her bare feet on the hardwood. The ring on her finger. My t-shirt skimming the tops of her thighs.
She looks like a wife.
I put my hand around the back of her neck and pull her forehead against mine. "I'm comin' back, baby."
Her breath catches once against my mouth. "I know."
I tighten my hand on the back of her neck. "Say it."
She gets her hand into the front of my cut and grips it. "You're comin' back, Silas."
I press my mouth against her forehead and keep it there for a long moment. Then I let her go.
I get my hat off the table on the way out.
* * *
My brothers are mounting up in the gravel turnaround when I get to the bunkhouse.
Phantom is at the head of the line on his bike with his hat low and his hand on the throttle.
Holt to his right. Roan behind. Blaze pulling his bike out from the lean-to on the side of the bunkhouse.
Banshee already gone. He's been at the front gate since sunup.
Phantom looks at me when I walk up.
His eyes catch on something at the side of my mouth.
I haven't been able to wipe it off.
He looks at me for one moment longer than he needs to. Then his voice drops low enough that only the two of us hear it. "You ask her this mornin'?"
"Yeah, I did."
The corner of his mouth pulls up under his beard. He claps a hand once against the side of my neck. "Knew it was gonna happen sooner than later."
He drops his hand, tips his head at the south gate. "Let's go see what Miller's lookin' at."
I get on my bike. The engine catches under me.
I look back once before I lean into the throttle.
She's at the bunkhouse window where Marlena and Bex have her standing between them.
I memorize it.
If I die today, that's the last picture I want in my head.