Chapter Four
Alone in the restroom, Autumn gripped the sink with both hands and closed her eyes. There was no reason Cox’s stupid swipe should have hurt her; it was hardly the worst thing a man had ever said to her. It wasn’t even the worst thing a member of the Horde had ever said to her. She’d spent her life turning her skin to armor so comments like that didn’t reach her.
She should never have gotten cute and forced Cox to come along with her. In that moment, she’d been engaging in gamesmanship, trying to turn around the infuriating but unsurprising news that she could expect a Horde shadow all weekend, so she had control of it. But now she’d had a meal and what amounted to a conversation with a ‘patch’ who didn’t matter in the slightest. Daniel Cox wasn’t an officer in the club. He wasn’t a decision-maker or even particularly influential with his ‘brothers.’ All he had was one vote at their table, or however that worked.
But in the past hour she’d relaxed somehow, set down a shield or two, and he’d managed to get under her skin.
Part of it was probably that he was a good-looking guy. That thought had perched in her brain while they were still at the inn, one of the times he’d almost smiled, and she’d noticed the squareness of his jaw. He was blond and blue-eyed, with a beard just a skosh longer than tidy and brushed-back hair that reached the collar of his ‘kutte.’ If her memory of her research served, he was in his late thirties, but the two creases that formed a ‘V’ between his heavy eyebrows were deep enough to belong on a man at least a decade older. Daniel Cox frowned a lot, and his face was beginning to freeze like that. Maybe that was why she’d felt a little jolt the few times he’d nearly smiled at her.
When she’d called him by his first name, he’d corrected her sharply. Nothing she could think of in her research suggested why he’d dislike his name. ‘Daniel’ was a perfectly normal name, and he didn’t have a stupid nickname, like ‘Badger’ or ‘Thumper’ or ‘Double A.’
Why was she spending any time thinking about this guy? He didn’t matter, and his stupid swipe at her mattered even less. She didn’t have to make conversation with him; nor did she need his company. If the Horde was really so sure she was up to something nefarious and couldn’t be trusted moving alone through town, then Cox could skulk after her in the shadows like the creep he was, and she’d get on with her evening.
The restroom door swung open, and a woman and her young son came in. Autumn smiled at her and got a sneer from the mom in response, but the little boy said, “Hi!” before his mom dragged him into the ADA stall.
Autumn watched the stall door slam before she turned back to the sink and considered herself in the mirror above it. Why was she getting bruised all of a sudden by the contempt of the residents here? They’d been slinging rocks at her since she’d first made an offer on the abandoned machine shop.
Now she finally had the deed to that property and could move forward. Or maybe Chase was right and this project was doomed, even with the property in hand. It beggared her comprehension, but these people seemed dead-set against any kind of real improvements to their community.
No. She was not going to give up. She had a good plan, a good property, and once it was finished, the people here would thank her.
However, she’d been too confident—okay, arrogant—with Cox earlier. Rather than approach the construction contract as a gift she might bestow on Signal Bend Construction and its biker owners, she needed to frame it differently, at least in her own head. She needed SBC to do the build. If the Horde were building, they’d be invested in its success. They’d gathered the town against her; she needed them to swing public opinion the other way.
Alright then. In that case, she’d been approaching Cox all wrong. She’d been matching his hostility, resenting his presence and sending clawed swipes back with each gruff comment. Instead, she needed to approach this as she might if she were interested in him personally. She needed to woo him.
Could a storm cloud like him be wooed? She supposed she’d find out.
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~oOo~
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When Autumn left the restroom, Cox wasn’t at their table—in fact, the table had been cleared and three people were seated there.
Had she run him off?
She cast a glance about the space, looking for their server, wanting to make sure she knew this wasn’t a dine-and-dash situation and the bill would get handled. She didn’t catch sight of the server, but she saw Cox up by the front door, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, looking like a promotional poster for a remake of The Outsiders.
Autumn headed that direction. As she came around the end of the row of booths, she saw his legs—looking long in his faded jeans. They were crossed at the ankles, and she noticed he was wearing scuffed, black cowboy boots. It had to be his posture, that nonchalant lean, but Autumn felt another faint twitch of interest, like when he’d almost smiled at her.
Okay, fine. He was good looking. So what? Nothing about this man should appeal. Not only was he a walking red flag, but he was not remotely her type. She liked educated men with level heads who knew how to dress like grownups and comport themselves in company, not gruff loner bikers with grease under their fingernails.
She wanted to like those men, at least. Her history suggested a different kind of preference—but even then, not bikers.
Clearly, Signal Bend’s chilly reception had bruised her psyche more than she’d realized or was prepared to admit. Maybe it would be a mistake to try to make nice with this man while she was feeling so tender.
No. She had to turn public sentiment toward her favor, and she had an opportunity to make some progress on that front with Cox. At a minimum, she had to stop treating him like an adversary.
So toughen up, honey. Go make nice.
Without shifting position or expression, he watched her approach.
“You waited for me?” she asked.
“Told you: I’m with you or following you tonight. I don’t like following, so I thought I’d give you another chance to choose.”
The words had barbs that hooked in her throat, but she got them out: “You can come with. And I’m sorry I snapped at you earlier.”
Daniel Cox actually smiled. A real smile. Not big, but authentic. Autumn steeled herself and managed not to care how that curve of his lips changed his entire aspect. She ignored the eye crinkles as well.
“Which time?” he asked, and she’d swear in court there was a faint whisper of amusement in his tone. Neither the smile nor the amusement lasted long; a few seconds later those creases between his brows were back to their full depth. But that moment had been real.
What had changed while she was in the bathroom? Had he given himself a talking-to similar to her own? Why? As far as he was concerned, he gained nothing by being nice to her; his whole club—hell, his whole town—was trying to chase her off. Their relentless distrust of her was the only reason she and Cox were interacting at all.
Deciding it didn’t matter, Autumn smiled herself. “I suppose that’s fair.” She let her apology end there; women apologized too much in general, and she tried to deploy hers judiciously. “Let me get the check, and then we can head out.”
“I got the check.”
“You didn’t have to do that. I can expense it.”
“I got the check,” he repeated, as if it were an end to the topic.
Autumn let it be. “Okay. Thank you.”
With a nod, he finally pushed off the wall and stood at his full height—which towered over her, but virtually all of the male population, and most of the female population, towered over her.
Generally she enjoyed being petite. It was a pain when she needed to reach something high, but otherwise, the whole world had room for her. She was often underestimated and condescended to in business; a lot of men—especially older men—seemed to think because she was small she was an actual child, but she had learned to use that against them. She also usually wore five-inch heels so they couldn’t literally look down at her.
However, as Cox held the door open and she passed him in the threshold, Autumn felt a brief but powerful sense of being overshadowed.
“Y’okay?” he asked as he came through and let the door close.
“Sure. Where to?”
“I go where you go.”
“Yes, but we decided you were going to show me Signal Bend through your eyes.”
He shook his head. “I don’t see anything special through my eyes.” Seeming to decide not to be quite so recalcitrant, he huffed a sharp breath and added, “If your dainty feet can handle some walking, we can walk down Main Street, or over to the park, where they’re settin’ up the Spring Fling.”
The people setting up the weekend’s festivities were the movers and shakers in this town. “Let’s go to the park.”
Another one of those smiley twitches at the corner of his mouth. “Can your dainty feet handle the walk?”
Choosing to take that sarcastic question as banter and not challenge, Autumn replied with a pert roll of her eyes and headed off in the direction of the town square, which was half a mile away at the most. Cox caught up with her in two long strides.
She’d been to last fall’s Harvest Festival, which was exactly what one would expect of such a thing: food, rides, games, contests, vendors. The town had dolled itself up from front to back and top to bottom. Back in those na?ve days, Autumn had been charmed.
“Is the Spring Fling like the Harvest Festival?” she asked as they walked.
Cox shrugged. “I guess.” Again, he rethought and decided to elaborate. “A lot of the same vendors, and there’s rides and music like the fall and summer, but the events are different. Different location, for one thing—in the middle of town, for the most part. And for spring, there’s a bonfire at the end of each night, and we roast a few pigs on spits on Sunday night.” He shrugged. “The kids’ll do some flower and ribbon dance thing to open things up Saturday morning.”
“You mean a Maypole?” She thought kids doing Maypoles was weird. People really needed to learn the history of the ‘cool’ thing they were planning. Eight-year-olds should not be doing fertility dances.
The private girls’ school her dads had sent her to had a graduation tradition where the senior class danced around a Maypole while wearing virginal white gowns, and one girl (usually the valedictorian) was proclaimed the ‘Queen of Love and Beauty.’ This at a school with a one-hundred-percent college acceptance rate and a sixty percent Ivy League acceptance rate. The alumnae of her alma mater included legions of doctors, judges, senators, and corporate executives, but still they graduated like medieval princesses.
To the day she died, Autumn would be proud that her class had gone on strike protesting the tradition, and that she’d been among the girls who’d led that charge. The school hadn’t ended the tradition, but Autumn’s class would go down in school history as the one class (so far) who’d refused to be cast as virgins in need of inseminating.
“There’s no pole. And it’s April. It’s just flowers and ribbons and dancing. You’ll have to ask Adrienne about it—she’s the one started it.”
Badger’s wife. Getting Adrienne on her side might help immeasurably with Badger, and thus with the Horde. “Will Adrienne be at the park now?”
“Can’t think where else she’d be. Her and Lilli are in charge of most of the party shit around here.”
“She,” Autumn muttered and then could have bitten her tongue off. She had some grammar twitches, but she tried to keep them to herself. People didn’t like their grammar corrected, so Autumn judged them silently instead. Usually silently.
“What?” Cox asked.
“Nothing.”
The weight of his gaze drew her eyes to his. “What?” he asked again.
She sighed. “You said, ‘Her and Lilli.’ The correct way to say it is ‘She and Lilli,’ because both names are subjects in the sentence, and ‘she’ is the subject pronoun. ‘Her’ is an object or possessive pronoun.”
Cox stopped walking. “You got a red pen in your head?”
Feeling her cheeks grow warm, Autumn rejected the urge to duck her head. “I guess I do. I don’t make a habit of grading people out loud, though.”
“You just sit there and silently judge people, and think that’s better.”
Now she did look away—but she didn’t duck her head. A crow cawed at the right moment, and she looked that way.
“Let me ask you something.”
She turned back to him. “Okay, ask.”
“Did you understand my meaning, in my supposedly incorrect sentence?”
“Of course.”
“Isn’t that what words are for? Being understood?”
Not knowing how to respond, Autumn didn’t.
Cox continued as though she’d agreed with him. “So as long as whoever you’re talking to understands what you’re sayin’, all the rest of what’s supposed to be correct is just pencil-pusher bullshit.”
“Now you sound like a linguist,” she answered. The embarrassed heat in her cheeks evaporated as a smile took them over.
Cox gave her another prize of a half-grin. “I don’t know about that, but I know the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar.”
Stunned, Autumn felt her jaw give way, and she gaped at him
He actually chuckled, but the sound was bitter. “Fuckin’ hell, city girl. We got schools here, you know. English class, and math, and science, even history, all that fancy shit. You swoop in here from no place near, thinkin’ we’re all cousin-fuckin’ idiots who won’t know what hit us when you steal the food off our plates. You know that’s why everybody hates you, right?”
It was one thing to know she was hated, to see it in the narrow looks of people she passed, to overhear contempt muttered between people when she came near. It was something else to be told directly to her face, in civil conversation with someone she was spending time with.
Right then, Autumn discovered that her armor was gone. She was bleeding.
“I don’t think you’re idiots,” she said, trying to sound normal and unaffected but hearing the quaver in her voice as clearly as Cox could, “and I’m not trying to steal anything from you. I want the project to be a success, of course, and if it is, yes, my company—and I—will benefit, but so will you. I know MWGP has other projects that haven’t been exactly great for the communities around them, but that’s exactly why I started this project. I hate that part of my industry. I mean Heartland Homestead to help the town and its people—to be a good thing for us all.”
“You didn’t ask if we wanted your ‘help,’ Autumn. And when we told you we didn’t, you did it anyway.”
It was the first time he’d spoken her name. That small intimacy, strangely unexpected, added a full ton to the psychic weight of his words.
He was right.
As a woman in business, in addition to turning her flesh to steel so insults, attacks, diminishments, and condescension bounced off her, she’d cultivated an approach that rolled over every obstacle. Taking ‘no’ from a bunch of—she’d assumed—ignorant bikers who had their mayor residing in their intestinal tract had not ever been an option to her. She was the one with the MBA, she was the one with more than a decade of experience in the industry, she was the one with the great idea and the good intentions, so she’d never considered the Horde’s resistance, or the town’s, as anything more than a speed bump.
But the time for second thoughts was over. MWGP had title to the main property and to several secondary lots as well. Autumn had made good deals with the various owners, and if she sold, she’d very likely take a loss. And that might well get her fired.
Cox was right, but she was already all in. There was nothing she could say to him now, so she simply started walking again.
He let her take about five steps before he, too, continued toward the park, catching up to her quickly. They walked the rest of the way in silence.
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~oOo~
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Clearly, the town park was the center of the Spring Fling. The pavilion was set up for bands, and tents and stands were set up in what appeared to be a spiraling path around that point and out to the borders of the park. Lots of people were at work, setting up more tents and stands, stringing lights, erecting signs, and whatever other jobs such an event required. Music was piped through speakers at the pavilion, playing a country song Autumn was vaguely familiar with but didn’t actually know; hammering from various points in the park kept time with the beat.
“It’s two days long, right?” Autumn asked as she and Cox stood near the park entrance.
“Yeah.”
She looked up at him. “Just ‘yeah’?”
The creases between his brows deepened as he met her gaze. “Yeah.” When she raised her eyebrows, he sighed and added, “Starts with a street party tomorrow night, goes all through Saturday, ends at nightfall Sunday. Saturday’s the biggest day, usually.”
That schedule was similar to their Harvest Festival as well—and it seemed fairly standard for something like this, wherever it was held. But she enjoyed getting Mr. Monosyllabic here to give her a full answer.
“Thank you,” she said with a smile. “Was that so hard?”
“YO, COX!” came a gruff shout before Cox could do more than make a face at her.
He turned to find the source. “YEAH?”
Autumn looked the same direction and found a large, barrel-chested guy coming toward them. Long, messy, dark hair and a mountain-man beard—a description that matched several of the Horde and probably a large portion of bikers everywhere, but this one was David ‘Thumper’ Allen.
“Help us out, brother. The genny’s givin’ us fits.”
“Yeah, okay.” Cox turned back to Autumn. “You can follow me, or I can put you with the women. Your choice.”
“Or I can go wherever I want, as I am not your prisoner,” she rejoined.
He nodded. “You can go wherever you want, but Thumper here will be right behind you.”
Thumper frowned lightly at Cox, got it, then nodded at Autumn. “Yep.”
She huffed and crossed her arms. “This is extremely annoying,” she said, looking to Cox. “You understand that, right?”
“Don’t much care,” he answered. “You’re not on your own while you’re here.”
“What is it you think I’m going to do, steal your children?”
“I don’t think you’re gonna do anything in particular, and I don’t care what you do. The word is, you’re not on your own while you’re here.”
Reminding herself that she needed to mend fences with the Horde, or at a minimum get their guard down a bit, Autumn relented. “Fine. I’ll go with you.”
Thumper grinned. “Looks like you got an admirer, Cox.”
“Fuck off,” Cox growled and grabbed Autumn’s elbow, leading her into the park.
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~oOo~
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The Horde tent was near the pavilion, in the center of the park. It looked like most of the members were on the job, setting up the tables and gear inside the tent, or the two huge smokers beside the tent, or in a cluster behind the tent, staring down at what was apparently a malfunctioning generator. As Cox approached, still leading Autumn by the arm, the Horde stepped out of his way, like their savior had arrived.
Without a word, Cox released her and crouched before the large machine. First, he pushed a button, but that did nothing. He set a hand lightly on the generator, as if checking for heat, then grabbed a handle, stood, and gave it a yank. Oh—a pull cord like a lawn mower. This was an old generator. Nothing happened then, either.
“Tools?” he asked, and one of the Horde—Kellen Frey, Autumn reminded herself—dragged a large black toolbox over.
With Cox focused on the malfunctioning generator, Autumn looked around. Most of the Horde were working or watching Cox, but she caught several stray glances, and every one of them was hostile.
She didn’t know what to do. What she wanted to do was walk away, but she’d only find herself followed by a different jerk in a kutte. Or worse, grabbed by one. Anyway, she’d kind of gotten used to Cox. Beneath that sullen glower, maybe he wasn’t a terrible person.
Standing idly amongst the Horde was extremely uncomfortable. She was where she needed to be, actually—she wanted to change the Horde’s attitude toward her, and she was surrounded by Horde—but she wasn’t sure how to go about it. She couldn’t ask to help, because she had no skills for building, or fixing, or hammering, whatever they were doing. She was an ideas person; she hired the actual work out.
So she took a few steps backward, out of the way, and stood there, watching Cox work.
It was impressive. His hands moved deftly, almost surgically, as he checked parts and connections, seeking the source of the problem, and he juggled a collection of tools like a gunslinger, swinging them into use or out of his way with a speedy grace like sleight of hand.
“Badge, hon?” called a feminine voice, and Autumn looked over as Adrienne, Badger’s wife, came around the tent to find her husband. She was pulling a collapsible wagon behind her, full of picnic wear—stacks of paper plates, towers of Solo cups, rolls of paper towels, and more.
“Hey, babe,” Badger said, turning from his study of Cox’s work. “Thanks.”
“I’m just gonna drop these here. I need to get back to the girls.”
As Badger nodded, Autumn had an idea. “Can I do anything to help?”
Adrienne considered her—and Autumn was relieved not to see anything negative in her regard. “How are you with paper flowers?”
Autumn grinned. “I was in charge of Homecoming events for three years in a row at my sorority. I’m an expert at paper flowers.”
Adrienne’s expression opened wide. “Excellent! Come with me!” She glanced at her husband as she made the invitation, and Badger answered with an ushering sweep of his arm.
It was so obvious Autumn could have slapped herself for missing it all this time. The women! That was how she changed the Horde’s attitude—and their perception. Get in good with their women.
Still smiling, she followed Adrienne to make paper flowers.