Chapter Ten
Lennox
The tent went on forever. White linen draped from poles that disappeared into the dark above the string lights.
They went on forever too, hundreds of them, Edison bulbs in copper cages throwing warm gold onto the faces of people who had paid a lot of money to be here and were making sure everyone knew it.
I moved through it with a glass of sparkling water I hadn’t touched.
The ice had melted twenty minutes ago. The carbonation was long dead.
I held it anyway because a woman at a charity gala without a drink in her hand was a woman who needed explaining, and I had decided, that I was done being explained.
The navy dress was Danica’s. She’d brought it to the cottage the night before and laid it on the bed without ceremony, the way she did everything.
“It’s simple,” she’d said. “It won’t fight you.
” She’d been right. The fabric fell from my shoulders to just below my knees without asking anything of me, and I had stood in front of the bathroom mirror with my hair down and my hands at my sides and looked at a girl I was starting to recognize.
A man in a tuxedo with a name tag that said something about pediatric oncology shook my hand and told me his foundation was thrilled to partner with the Reckless Kings on the silent auction.
I shook back. My grip was firm. His eyes met mine and held, and I didn’t look away first. When he laughed at something I said about the venue -- a bland, harmless observation about the tent poles -- I laughed too, and the sound that came out of me was real and uncalculated, and I didn’t flinch at the sound of my own voice the way I used to.
I kept moving.
Across the tent, by the entrance to the catering line, I spotted Brick.
He was wearing his cut over a black button-down.
I took note because it wasn’t his usual attire.
He stood with his arms crossed, watching the area with the wary patience of a man who’d rather be anywhere else.
When our eyes met, he gave me a single nod that contained approximately seven words of club brother approval and no more.
Near the far wall of the tent, Beast was deep in conversation with a woman in a sequined dress who was gesturing broadly at a display of donated artwork.
He had his hands in his pockets and his head tilted at an angle that suggested intense, performative interest, and I knew from the set of his jaw that he was counting the minutes until he could light a cigarette.
They were trying. All of them. Clean cuts, polished boots, and the visible discomfort of men who’d spent their lives on the outside of gatherings like this suddenly standing in the middle of one.
I felt a warmth for them that surprised me with its size.
They had come because Rogue had asked, and Rogue had asked because Danica’s contact at the foundation had made it clear that the club’s presence would mean something to the right people, and the right people were the ones who could make Stewart’s narrative harder to sell.
Politics. I was learning.
I turned from a conversation with a woman who’d asked twice if I was related to the Hale family and I’d answered twice that I wasn’t, and that was when I saw him.
He was across the tent, standing with his back to a tall floral arrangement of white lilies and greenery.
Charcoal suit, immaculate. The silver at his temples caught the string light.
He held a glass of scotch low at his side, the amber liquid barely disturbed, and he wasn’t scanning the area, wasn’t working the crowd. He was watching me.
He had been for some time.
I knew the look. I had lived inside it for years.
Grant Stewart’s distinct stillness when he had decided where you were going to be before you decided it yourself.
The patience of a man who understood that most people moved on predictable lines and that waiting at the intersection was simply efficiency.
My grip tightened on the water glass.
The condensation ran cold between my fingers.
I set my jaw. I didn’t look away from him, didn’t set the glass down.
I did not move toward the exit or toward the cluster of club members by the silent auction table or toward Rogue, who I could feel somewhere to my left though I hadn’t located him yet.
I stayed where I was.
Grant lifted his scotch. Not a toast. A small, private gesture, two fingers raising the glass an inch, the way a man acknowledges a thing he has been expecting. His mouth did not smile. His eyes did not change.
The tent full of people continued its bright, oblivious noise around us.
A string quartet played something classical and forgettable from a raised platform near the entrance.
Ice clinked in glasses. Someone laughed too loudly at a joke I couldn’t hear.
The white linen billowed gently in the night air coming through the open sides of the pavilion.
And across the space, Grant Stewart watched me with the look of a man who had already written the next several moves and was simply waiting for me to occupy my square on the board.
I took a breath.
I held it.
I let it out slowly through my nose, and I didn’t bolt.
He came across the tent, glass in hand, without appearing to hurry, without drawing attention to the fact that he was moving at all. One moment he was by the lilies, and the next he was at the bar. As he worked the crowd, he moved closer to me.
The bar ran along the pavilion’s far edge, a long stretch of dark wood that ended at a service door covered by a heavy curtain.
Tall arrangements of white flowers in crystal vases stood at intervals along its length, screening the bartenders from the main crowd and creating pockets of relative privacy between the blooms. Grant had chosen the farthest one deliberately.
I watched him straighten his cufflinks -- platinum, custom, the same ones he’d been wearing the night he gave me the diamond bracelet -- and turn to face me with the ease of a man greeting an old friend at a party.
Someone approached him and he smiled, spoke with them for a moment, then made his way even closer. It didn’t take long before he was nearly within touching distance.
“Lennox.”
He said my name the way he always had. Two syllables that contained no question, only recognition of a thing that belonged to him.
“You look well.” His voice was low, pitched for me alone. “The Tennessee air agrees with you.”
I said nothing.
He didn’t rush to fill the silence. Grant had never rushed anything. He took a sip of his scotch. “Your mother asks about you every day. She’s been unwell. The stress of all this has taken a toll.”
The lie landed between us with the weight of something he’d rehearsed. My mother hadn’t asked about me in years. My mother had stopped being a person who asked questions around the time I turned fourteen, when it became clear that my father preferred her quiet.
“I’m sure she has,” I said.
He nodded, as if I’d offered sympathy rather than sarcasm.
“The foundation does good work. I’m glad to see you involved.
Though I have to admit, the company is… unexpected.
” His gaze moved past my shoulder, toward the cluster of cuts near the auction table, and came back to my face.
“These men have a reputation, Lennox. I hope you’re being careful. ”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you?” He leaned forward slightly, the way a concerned fiancé might lean toward his troubled partner at a charity event.
Anyone passing would see only caring. “Because from where I’m standing, you’re living in a motorcycle compound with a group of men who have felony records and federal attention, and you’re calling that fine. I worry about you. We all do.”
Sure. We. I felt the old response rising -- the urge to nod, to agree, to make the conversation easier by surrendering the difficult parts of it. My jaw tightened against it.
“I didn’t ask you to worry about me, Grant.”
Something moved behind his eyes. A recalibration, quick and precise. He took another sip of scotch, buying the half-second he needed, and when he set the glass down his smile had cooled by several degrees.
“Let me be direct,” he said. His voice had lost the warmth.
What remained was flat, even, the controlled delivery of a man reading terms from a contract he had no intention of altering.
“This situation has gone on long enough. The media attention, the speculation -- it’s embarrassing for everyone involved.
But it doesn’t have to continue. You can come home with me tonight.
Quietly. No scenes, no headlines. We’ll tell the press you needed time, you’re getting help, you’re back where you belong. The whole thing disappears by morning.”
He stepped closer.
One step. Then another. The gap between us narrowed until the scent of his cologne -- something expensive and understated that I had once found comforting -- filled the space where the night air had been.
I could feel the heat of him, the particular radiation of a body that had decided it owned the square footage around it.
My lower back pressed against the bar edge. There was nowhere else to go.
“These people can’t protect you, Lennox.
” His voice dropped lower. “My family has resources you don’t understand.
Connections. The kind that don’t appear on paper.
Whatever you think you’ve found here…” his gaze flicked past me again, toward the club members, then settled back on me with a coldness that nearly made me shiver “… it’s temporary.
And when it ends, and it will end, the fallout will reach further than you’re prepared for.
I’m offering you a clean exit. Take it.”
I held his gaze. My heart was doing something complicated in my chest, but my face, I hoped, was doing nothing at all.
“No.”
The word sat between us. Small. Final.
Grant’s jaw tightened. A muscle worked at the hinge of it, once, then stilled. He reached for my wrist.