Ryder's Widow (Iron Gospel MC #2)

Chapter 1

EDEN

Gladys made the grinding noise again while I had both hands buried in croissant dough, which was exactly the kind of betrayal I expected from a mixer older than my marriage.

I leaned over the steel bowl and listened as the hook dragged through another turn, caught somewhere inside the housing, then shoved onward with enough spite to throw flour across the counter.

The dough stayed cool under my fingers and the butter held in thin sheets, so I could still save the batch if the machine gave me one more minute.

At five foot three I had to come up onto my toes to get my weight over the bowl, the only part of the job my body had never solved.

It had built the rest of me. I started at sixteen and I was thirty-one now, and the difference showed as shoulders that made every sleeve I owned sit wrong, forearms my father used to call unladylike, flour worked so far into the creases of my knuckles that it survived soap, and a shiny thumbprint of scar inside my right wrist where a sheet pan found me at nineteen.

My hair came down four times a day, heavy and dark red as wet brick, too much of it for any clip built for a normal head.

I shoved it off my neck with the back of one wrist and left flour there.

Gladys had never respected deadlines, charitable causes, or the fact that I had promised three hundred pastries for the compound fundraiser.

She respected brute force and praise, usually in that order.

“Come on, you miserable old woman. You can die Monday.”

“You say sweeter things to that machine than you say to me.” Ryder filled the kitchen doorway the way he filled every doorway on the compound.

Six foot two, heavy through the chest and shoulders, forearms that made his cuffs look like a manufacturing error, the gut he kept carefully short of soft because he liked beer and liked being argued with about it more.

Worn jeans, black Iron Brotherhood shirt, the sleeve over the pale drag-mark down the point of his left shoulder from a slide on wet asphalt years before I met him.

Thirty-eight. The black hair he cropped close had gone iron at both temples in the six years I’d known him, the beard stayed short because I complained when it didn’t, and the white scar beside his mouth showed most when he was pleased with himself.

Dark brown eyes open since long before dawn, and the small curve of the aid in his left ear he had stopped bothering to hide around our second year.

He hadn’t been in bed when I reached for him.

Before he left the bedroom he had passed me my controller inhaler, waited until I finished, then gone for coffee when I said I was fine.

Men here watched his face for orders. I watched it for the changes he thought nobody could read, and the strain around his eyes had been there all week.

“Gladys has never volunteered my labor to feed half the county without asking me first.” I shut the machine off before it could scatter a gear through my dough, pulled the bowl free, and shifted to Ryder’s right when he came toward the counter.

Neither of us thought about the movement anymore.

I had learned early that words reached him more cleanly from that side, and after years of sleeping, riding, arguing, and standing together, I no longer had to remember.

“She also doesn’t steal raw pastry when my back is turned. ”

Ryder slid two fingers beneath the edge of the dough and tore off a piece while looking directly at me.

He had flour on his knuckles before I could slap his hand away, and the satisfaction on his face belonged to the man who had once eaten an entire tray of failed macarons after I told him they weren’t fit to serve.

“You saw me do it. Theft requires skill.”

“Theft requires taking something that belongs to someone else. Your standards are embarrassingly low for a criminal.” I rescued the dough, wrapped it, and put it in the refrigerator before he could contaminate anything else.

He caught the back of my shirt when I passed and drew me between his knees where he sat against the counter, his hands settling at my waist. The urge to lean into him arrived before the question I had been saving.

I let myself have the first and refused to lose the second. “Why are there men at the west gate?”

His thumbs moved beneath the hem of my shirt and found skin. “Fundraiser security.”

“Jax doesn’t put two prospects behind the tree line to protect a bake sale, and Bear canceled the kids’ games.

” I rested my flour-covered hands on Ryder’s shoulders, leaving white prints on black cotton.

He would complain after he had already worn the shirt all day, which was part of why I did it.

“Leah asked whether she should bring Leo and Maya tomorrow. June keeps pretending she wants a final head count when she actually wants to know whether we should be worried. Tessa sent me a picture of Gage cleaning a gun beside a box of raffle tickets.”

Ryder looked toward the refrigerator and gave his better ear to a room that contained nothing but the hum of the old appliance and Gladys waiting to ruin my weekend.

“Silas has been testing routes. Bear doesn’t want families wandering between buildings if somebody chooses to get brave near the road. ”

“Is that all?” I asked, hating how badly I needed his answer to make the armed men outside harmless.

My father had spent my childhood choosing which sleepovers, sports, school trips, pets, and arguments my asthma made too dangerous.

He could turn a cough into a locked front door before I got the chance to tell him I could breathe.

Ryder knew every ugly fight that history had caused.

He could become impossible when he was frightened, but he had never looked me in the face and lied about danger that reached me.

“That’s what I know.” He lifted my left hand from his shoulder and kissed flour from the base of my thumb, his mouth lingering there while he watched me. “If that changes, you’ll hear it from me.”

The answer settled the worry enough for me to notice what his other hand was doing under my shirt. “You’re very persuasive for a man who hasn’t fixed Gladys.”

“I’m not touching the demon until you admit I told you to replace her last year.

” Ryder turned his head and bit the inside of my wrist when I tried to pull away.

Heat moved through me so quickly that I had to press my knees against his thighs, and his eyes changed with the knowledge that he had caused it.

We had been married long enough for desire to lose every trace of shyness without losing any of its surprise.

He could look at me across a dirty kitchen and remind me of every private thing those hands knew.

“You told me to buy a machine that costs more than your bike.” I kept my mouth away from his and enjoyed the offense gathering in his eyes.

“Nothing costs more than my bike.” Ryder said it with the certainty of a man defending scripture, and Gladys’s next complaint felt personal.

“Gladys heard that.” I tipped my head toward the mixer and kept my mouth from his.

Ryder hated being denied a kiss he had already claimed, and watching him discover that marriage hadn’t cured me of enjoying his frustration was one of my cheaper hobbies.

“Order the gear. The used deck oven in Bloomington might come free next week, and that’s three hours each way, so I’m not spending the oven money on a mixer because you insulted her. ”

“Your eyes go flat gray when you’ve decided you’re going to win.

” He said it like a man filing a grievance.

“You’re leaving flour on my route maps, buying equipment from strangers, and protecting an appliance that screams every time you turn her on.

I should’ve put limits in our vows.” His hand slid higher along my back, and the next pull brought my mouth within a breath of his.

“No naming machinery. No bringing home anything that needs rewiring. No letting my wife work herself sick after I volunteered her for shit she didn’t agree to. ”

The last one took some of the game out of me. I pushed against his chest until he gave me room, then reached for the towel by the sink. “You don’t get credit for noticing after you promised Bear I could do it.”

Ryder rose behind me and crowded the counter with both hands flat on the edge of it.

He didn’t apologize quickly, and I had learned not to fill the space while he worked through the difference between what he meant and what he had done.

“You’re right. I knew you wanted the oven, and I liked the idea of everybody seeing what you can do.

I said yes before I asked whether you wanted your whole Saturday taken. That’s on me.”

“It is.” I wiped the flour from my fingers and checked the clock above the stove, already rearranging the day in my head.

The croissants needed another turn and rest. The cinnamon rolls could wait until morning.

Tessa had promised to handle the raffle display, which meant it would either look gorgeous or threaten somebody.

I wasn’t angry enough to waste good food, but Ryder needed to remember that my skill wasn’t a compound resource he could allocate.

“Next time, you ask me before you donate my weekend.”

“Next time, I ask.” He picked up the towel when it slipped from the counter and laid it beside my hand. “I’ll take the first load over and clean everything you use.”

“You clean like you’re hiding a body.” I turned to catch his answer.

“Never had a complaint.” Ryder caught my waist again, testing whether I had finished being angry.

I turned and caught his belt before he could walk away. The apology had been real and the solution had belonged to the problem. “You also buy the gear.”