Chapter 2
EDEN
By Sunday morning Ryder had found three reasons to cross the kitchen without sitting down and none that required him to eat.
He carried trays to the clubhouse, came back for the cash box Bear had forgotten, then stood at the counter reading a message while the eggs I had made him cooled near his elbow.
I was already dressed for the fundraiser in a black sundress and flat sandals, my hair pinned up before the kitchen heat could take it down, and I had enough pastry proofing to feed every person Bear allowed through the gate.
The only thing I couldn’t force into place was my husband.
“If you leave again without eating, I’m sending Leah after you with the plate.” I slid the eggs across his phone, covering the message before I could read it. Ryder looked at the food as if I had interrupted an armed negotiation. “She has children. She knows how to win by exhausting people.”
“I need to meet Jax at the gate.” He moved the plate aside and reached for the coffee he had forgotten to drink.
His gaze went to the window above the sink, where the inner road curved between our porch and the clubhouse.
A prospect stood near the fence pretending to check the lock.
Another crossed behind him with a radio against his shoulder. “I’ll eat over there.”
“No, you’ll steal the croissants meant for the auction and tell yourself butter is a protein.” I caught Ryder’s wrist before he could take the mug. “Sit down long enough to tell me why you were out of bed before sunrise again.”
He faced me, and for a moment I thought I had finally reached the question he had been avoiding. His right hand closed over mine, his thumb rubbing flour from the side of my finger even though I had washed twice. “I told you what was happening.”
“You told me Silas was testing routes. You didn’t tell me why that requires you to stare through our kitchen window like you’re expecting somebody to shoot the hydrangeas.
” I tried to make it lighter than the worry behind it.
Ryder liked those bushes only because I had planted them.
“If there’s more, I need to know before the compound fills with people. ”
“There isn’t anything you need to carry.
” The answer bothered me before I understood why.
He hated any suggestion that I couldn’t handle weight.
He had been the first person in my life to ask whether I wanted help instead of treating the sight of my inhaler as an order to sit down and obey.
Before I could challenge him, he pulled me against him and kissed my temple.
“Stay inside the fence. If Bear cancels the fundraiser, you don’t argue. ”
“Bear has never canceled food I already made. He isn’t suicidal.
” I pressed my face into Ryder’s shirt and breathed in soap, leather, and the faint smoke that clung to him after a night at the clubhouse.
He held me longer than breakfast required.
I held him tighter and trusted that he would tell me when the words mattered.
“Eat your eggs, Road Captain. Then you can go terrify the gate.”
A knock struck the front door before he answered.
It wasn’t Leah, who would have walked in while announcing herself, or June, who had promised to stay at the clubhouse until the vendor tables were settled.
Ryder’s arms locked around me. I felt the change in him before he released me and turned, putting his body between mine and the entry hall.
“Stay here,” he said.
“If it’s a donor, try not to look like you’re about to bury them.” I picked up the tray of chocolate croissants that needed moving away from Ryder and followed him anyway. No marriage of mine had ever included waiting behind a wall while he dealt with somebody on my porch.
The woman outside looked too young to be alone among the motorcycles and armed men.
She wore jeans despite the July heat, a loose blue blouse, and sneakers gone gray to the laces with the dust off the quarter mile of gravel between the main lot and the inner road, which meant somebody at the first barrier had made her leave her car and walk.
Blond hair clung to her face. She kept one hand around the strap of her purse and the other over her stomach, not protectively, exactly — more that she needed somewhere to put it.
When Ryder opened the door, her eyes found him and filled with tears.
“You said Sunday.” Her voice shook, and she looked past his shoulder before I could decide whether she was frightened of him or relieved to see him. “I couldn’t wait anymore.”
Nobody reached this porch. The gate had been shut to everything but scheduled vendors since Friday, and Bear had two prospects on the west line with orders about strangers. “How did you get through the gate?”
Ryder didn’t answer me. He didn’t tell her to leave, either.
He also didn’t ask who she was, and he didn’t turn around with the confusion I expected.
He stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance with the door open behind him, every muscle in his back holding the readiness I had seen when unknown men came near us at gas stations.
A man ambushed on his own porch by a woman he had been hiding should have shown surprise before shame.
Ryder showed neither. He arrived already knowing his lines, the way he did after walking a route in his head the night before.
Calling the flatness shame let me keep hating him in a straight line, so I did.
“Are you hurt?” I put the tray on the narrow table beside the door and stepped around him onto the porch. Whatever strange business had brought her here, she looked ready to faint. “Come sit down. It’s too hot out here.”
Her attention moved over my dress, bare arms, wedding ring, and the framed photograph visible on the entry wall.
Ryder and I had taken it outside the courthouse after our fifth anniversary, his mouth against my hair while I laughed at something Tessa had shouted.
The woman’s fingers tightened on her purse strap. “You’re Eden.”
“Yes.” I waited for the part where she told me why she knew my name. When it didn’t come, I reached toward her elbow and stopped short of touching her. “There’s a chair right behind you.”
“Don’t.” Ryder’s order landed between us. He had used that voice on club brothers twice his size, but the warning was for me. “Let her say what she came to say.”
The woman lowered herself into the porch chair. She was working hard not to cry, and compassion moved ahead of the suspicion that had begun to form. I went to the porch refrigerator, took out a bottle of water, and twisted the cap loose before handing it to her.
“My name is Jess.” She held the bottle between both hands and didn’t drink from it. “Ryder told me he wasn’t married.”
The sentence was so wrong that I almost corrected her before I looked at him. He hadn’t moved. His face showed no surprise, and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“You have the wrong Ryder,” I said, although there was only one man on this compound who used the name. “Or he lied to you about it. My husband and I have been married for five years.”
“I know that now.” Jess wiped beneath one eye and stared at the water in her lap. “I found out after. He kept saying you weren’t really together anymore, that you lived here while things got sorted out. I believed him at first. Then I saw the pictures.”
I looked at Ryder again, waiting for the annoyance that appeared when a stranger dragged him into a lie, for him to tell me who Jess was. His face had ended danger for me so many times that I kept looking after the first glance gave me nothing.
“Ryder.” I said his name the way I did when I needed him to stop a joke before it became an argument. “Tell her.”
He looked at me then. I had slept with that face inches from mine.
I knew the scar beside his mouth, the line that appeared between his brows when his left ear missed part of a conversation, the small pull at one corner of his lips when he wanted me to know he was enjoying my temper.
I found none of him in the man standing at the door.
“Jess doesn’t have the wrong person.” He kept his hands at his sides. “She came here to tell you the truth.”
The entry hall narrowed around us. I didn’t understand his words well enough to react to them, so I turned back to Jess. “What truth?”
She lifted her head, and the fear in her eyes made me want to hate her.
Hating her would have been easier than seeing that she was younger, frightened, and caught inside whatever Ryder had refused to explain.
“We’ve been together for months. He told me your marriage was finished. I didn’t know you thought it wasn’t.”
“My husband came inside me last night.” The words left me before shame could stop them. Jess’s face crumpled, and I hated her for making me say something so private on my own porch. I hated Ryder more when he didn’t deny it. “Did he tell you we were finished before or after that?”
Jess looked at him. It was a small movement, and it hurt worse than if she had reached for his hand. She expected him to answer for both of them. “He said he had to keep things normal until he could get me somewhere safe.”
“Safe from me?” My voice came out broken around a laugh I hadn’t meant to make. “Did he tell you I was dangerous?”
“No. He said you wouldn’t let go.” Her fingers moved to her stomach again. “I wouldn’t have come if it was only me. I’m pregnant.”
Voices carried from the clubhouse while I tried to understand her.
Tessa was arguing about the raffle sign.
Somebody laughed. The kitchen behind Ryder smelled like butter and chocolate.
I had worried about burning pastry while he worried about where to put the mother of his child.
“Does anyone here know?” I asked Jess. “Did you meet Bear? Jax? Did Leah know before I did?”