Chapter Six
Cox frowned down at her, the V between his eyes becoming a canyon. Autumn held his gaze, unwilling to give him any ground. His eyes were the blue of a favorite pair of jeans, faded with age and use but with random strands of fresh-dyed dark.
Somewhere during their wanderings tonight, his handsomeness had really sunk in, and she needed to get control of herself. A whole ocean—wide as the Pacific—churned between ‘wooing’ him to try to get the Horde to stop treating her like the enemy and actually liking him.
When had she started to like him?
No, she didn’t. That was nuts. Less than three hours ago, all she’d known of him was the basic details she’d researched; he wasn’t important enough to have gone deeper than a surface search. She didn’t know much more about him now. The man could not be accused of oversharing.
Maybe that was it: he was so gruff, so taciturn, every nugget of insight felt like a gift just for her. Also, though he really did not use it often, he really did have a talent for words. Poetry slipped randomly from his lips. The world feeling ‘too big to wear,’ logic stretched until it was ‘pale and stringy’—metaphors like that were nuanced and evocative.
Autumn had a tragic weakness for artists, especially poets and songwriters. She would never have expected one of these bikers to be a danger in that way, but here he stood. Each time Cox delivered a pithy turn of phrase, it was like he’d brushed her hand with his.
Also, he had saved her life. No figurative language in that statement; the man had literally saved her life. Maybe that was when she’d started to like him—when he’d yanked her out of the road and she’d been pressed to his broad chest, tucked inside his kutte, closed in his arms.
He smelled good, too. That had surprised her and momentarily trapped her within his kutte. Bikers should smell like body odor, motor oil, and smoke, right? Not the warm, herbal scent that had wafted up through his shirt.
“I talk as much as I want to,” he told her now, his tone defensive, like she’d found out something he didn’t want known.
“Okay.” She put conciliation in her tone, letting him know she didn’t mean to push. With a short swing of her arm, she indicated the path before them. “Should we keep going?”
For a second, two seconds, longer, he said nothing, still frowning at her, his eyes flicking back and forth like he was looking for an escape route in her expression.
Then he started walking toward the bar again.
A tempest forming on the horizon of her mind, Autumn fell into step with him.
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~oOo~
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As they strolled past Marie’s, Autumn looked longingly at her rental car, parked in the lot. If Cox noticed the direction of her attention, he said nothing, for which she was grateful.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like to walk, or that she wasn’t fit. She did an hour of yoga five days a week, three at home and two at a studio; she was plenty fit. But when she felt at all vulnerable, she wanted ready access to her exit. In Signal Bend she always felt vulnerable, and heading into No Place—okay, yes, that had been her idea, but regardless—she would have felt much safer if her car, and thus her exit, were just outside the door.
She could have said that out loud, of course, collected the Audi right now and driven it the few hundred feet between the diner and the bar, but when that thought occurred to her, her brain had knocked it aside at once. She didn’t want to admit any weakness to Cox.
Walking side by side, not saying much, they approached No Place on foot. It wasn’t a weekend night, and it wasn’t particularly late, so the lot wasn’t particularly full. No motorcycles parked by the door, and maybe a dozen cars and trucks scattered across the gravel lot, most of them near the building. Muted music seeped through the weathered wood boards that made the building’s rustic fa?ade. Autumn recognized the country twang, but that was not her genre, so she didn’t know the song.
Cox stepped up ahead of her and opened the door. The music swelled into the air—a woman singing, something sad. Maybe a little familiar, but only in the ‘hear it in the market sometimes’ way.
He held the door for her. When she walked through, his hand grazed the small of her back—just for a moment, though the heat of his touch lingered quite a while.
The front door led directly into a small foyer, nothing more than a way to keep bad weather out of the bar. When Autumn paused in that narrow space, Cox leaned around her to open that door for her as well.
Maybe he thought she’d paused so he’d do just that, but her hesitation was about something else, and it held fast when the door was open. She couldn’t move her feet.
She felt Cox looking down at her as he let the door close again.
“Y’okay?”
Her voice failed her on her first try, but after a discreet throat-clear, she smiled up at him. “Yeah. I’m good.”
That frown-canyon deepened, but he didn’t say a word. Nor did he move for the door again.
“It’s nothing. Just a mental stumble.” She reached for the door herself.
A large hand landed on the door, keeping it closed. But he said nothing.
That hand had a thick silver ring on the index finger: a signet ring, with the symbol of the club, their ‘flaming mane,’ etched into it. Autumn stared at it as she gave him an answer, as if giving up a secret were a password to entering the bar.
“I’ve only been here once before,” she told Cox’s ring. “It didn’t go too well.”
“What d’you mean?”
She couldn’t believe he didn’t know. He was Horde, they knew everything in town, apparently, and there was no way this gossipy little town hadn’t chewed on her humiliation for weeks after.
Nor did she want to relive it now, literally on the threshold of the place again. The bravado she’d felt earlier, deciding she’d wander the town like someone who belonged here, as if she could manifest belonging, had evaporated between these two doors four feet apart.
“Let’s just say it was made clear I was unwelcome.” More like she’d been chased out, and practically tarred and feathered on the way.
“No, say more. What happened?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear about it. I know how this town talks.”
“I didn’t. I don’t listen much to town talk.” He paused, then added, “Because yeah, I know how it does. What happened?”
A man came up to the other side of the door, settling a badly abused straw cowboy hat on his head. He tried to push the door open, but Cox held fast. He glared through the window, and the guy stepped back, raising a hand that said, Sorry.
“What happened?” Cox repeated.
“You’re not entitled to the answer, Cox. I don’t want to tell you. Open the door or get out of my way.”
He opened the door. When she went through this one, there was no touch of his hand on her back.
A couple dozen people, mostly men, were scattered across the bar. She saw nobody in a kutte besides, now, Cox, which made sense considering the lack of motorcycles on the lot. They were all at the park.
The dance floor was empty. A few people looked over, but nobody seemed to make especial note of her. Maybe having a member of the Horde at her side served as a screen.
The man in the battered hat gave Autumn a cursory look without any recognition and nodded at Cox. “Hey, Cox.”
“Neal,” Cox replied, which ended that interaction. He wrapped a hand around Autumn’s arm and drew her deeper into the bar. “You want a table, I expect.”
“Actually, the bar would be better.” She meant not to hide. She had trained herself to face her insecurities boldly. She made herself stomp right up to the things that scared her.
Cox shifted their path so they headed to the bar. Three stools were taken—one by a heavy-set, older man sitting alone at the far end, with a half-full beer glass and an empty old-fashioned glass, and two by a man and a woman, both skinny and in maybe their late thirties, sitting together near the register. They all nodded as Cox and Autumn approached the bar. The big guy at the end held his attention on Autumn long enough to make her stare back until he looked away and then put his back to her.
The bartender, a younger guy with a sandy, tidy but thin ponytail came up. “Hey Cox, miss, what can I getcha?”
“Hey, Vince,” Cox said and turned to Autumn.
“Jameson on the rocks, please,” she answered as she climbed onto a stool. “And a glass of water.”
“Usual for me,” Cox said.
Vince nodded and got busy making their drinks.
“What’s your usual?” she asked when Cox leaned back against the bar beside her.
“The thing I usually order,” he answered, and his delivery was so deadpan she had no idea if he was being a little playful with that answer or shutting her down. Considering what she knew of him, the latter was more likely, so she let it drop.
Vince brought their drinks: Jameson on the rocks and a glass of ice water for her, a bottle of Bud Light and a shot of something amber for him. He tossed the shot back as soon as he turned around.
“What was the shot?” she asked as he turned again to lean back on the bar, now with a bottle in his hand.
“Wild Turkey.”
She laughed; it fell out of her mouth before she could do anything about it.
“That’s funny?” he asked, frowning at her yet again.
“More surprising, I guess. There are better bourbons. I mean, Jack Daniels is a better bourbon, and that’s not exactly top-shelf, either.” She lifted her glass to her mouth. It was a generous pour; maybe three fingers, plus three clear cubes.
He sipped his beer and didn’t respond.
For maybe ten minutes, Cox leaned against the bar, taking regular short pulls from his bottle as he scanned the room, and Autumn sat on her stool, sipping her Jameson while she studied the menu board like a great work of literature, all to the twangy soundtrack of old-school country music. The big guy at the end of the bar flung a few glares at her, but he looked away every time she made eye contact with him. He obviously knew who she was and didn’t like her, but Cox’s presence was keeping him in his manners.
“You want somethin’ to eat, miss?” Vince the bartender asked.
Autumn shifted her attention from the menu board. She’d been studying it out of the total lack of anything interesting to look at, not because she was still hungry after Marie’s. “No, thank you.”
With a friendly nod, he turned back to his glass-stacking task.
Okay, this sucked. She’d been worried about and then ready for a gauntlet of some kind, maybe a repeat of that awful night last year, when she’d been pushed around, pawed at, had food and booze thrown at her, and literally shoved out the door, but this nothing was almost worse.
No, it objectively was not worse. But Autumn was so restless she thought she’d pop out of her skin. It was like she was waiting for something to change.
Maybe she should change it. Put herself right in the middle of whatever action this bar on this night had to offer, and see what happened.
Looking over her shoulder, she considered the dance floor. That would put her in everybody’s notice—and she didn’t mind dancing on her own, either. She didn’t know this music, but she didn’t need to know a song to follow its beat.
That other night flashed through her mind again. No, she didn’t want to be out there on her own, an unambiguous target, should anyone care to take aim. Could she ask Cox to dance? Did he dance?
Ha! Come on. Mr. Personality over here absolutely did not dance.
Well. There was nothing she could do here but drink.
She finished her Jameson and caught the bartender’s attention for another.
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~oOo~
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About half an hour later, Autumn finished her third whisky and her second pint of water. Despite trying to pace herself and watering down the booze in her belly, she was feeling it a little—that good, mellow buzz where her joints filled with liquid heat and all the crap that gnawed the edges of her mind every waking second shut up and she was simply in the moment.
This moment was still dull as grey paint, unfortunately. She was here with—sort of with—a very hot biker dude, but he was about as much fun as a case of the measles. They’d had some banter earlier—she remembered there was banter earlier, right?—but now he was just a bump on the bar. Every time she asked a question or made a comment, all she got back was a monosyllabic answer or a vague shrug or nod.
More people had come in; almost all the barstools were now full. A frowsy woman with vivid teal hair, who really could have used a bra to control the boulders rolling under her flowered polyester top, sat beside Autumn and kept leaning into her as she laughed at whatever her pipe-cleaner-skinny guy said.
And there was Cox, leaning against the bar, sipping his third? beer, paying Autumn no real attention, though he was six inches away.
This was stupid. Anyway, she needed to pee, and the urge was strong enough to warrant risking typhus or some other horrible bacteria that was surely lurking in a dive-bar ladies’ room.
Getting Vince’s attention, she tapped her empty whisky glass. When he acknowledged her with a nod, she slid off her stool. Bar stools always made her feel as small as a child; her feet barely touched the footrest, and she had to jump down. It was impossible to do so gracefully.
This time, she landed hard and almost stumbled, until Cox grabbed her arm and steadied her.
“Where you goin’?”
“To the ladies’ room!” she answered, finding the words more cumbersome than they should be. “Am I allowed to do that on my own, or do you want to come along and watch?”
For several seconds he stared at her, eyes flashing irritation or something like it. Then he let her go and tipped his head toward the far side of the bar. “Over there.”
As she made her way through the half-full bar, Autumn realized that maybe she was a little more than tipsy. She’d eaten a decent dinner, but maybe she’d ordered her Jamesons a bit too close together. Well, it didn’t matter. She had a warden tonight; if he was going to dog her every move, the least he could do was get her home safely.
She found the ladies’ room down a narrow, dim hallway and locked herself inside. It wasn’t as gross as she’d expected.
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~oOo~
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When Autumn came out of the bathroom, the big man who’d been sitting at the end of the bar was in the hallway, between the doors to the gendered bathrooms. Before she registered more than surprise, he grabbed her by the throat and whipped her around so his body blocked hers from view in the bar. He pushed her against the wall and leaned in so close she felt the humid waft of his breath, rank with beer and onions.
His hand was tight enough around her throat to throttle any hope of a scream. She could breathe, but only just. Grabbing at his hand had no effect; trying to dig her nails in only made him tighten his grip and close the slim passage her airway had left. Was he trying to kill her?
“You bought my house out from under me, you nasty bitch,” he snarled in her face. “I got three kids, and no place to go without takin’ ‘em outta their school. And for what? A damn motel?”
With the last word, he pulled her forward and slammed her to the wall again. The last little bit of air she had burst away, and stars did a conga line across her vision.
And then he was gone, and she was on the floor.
What had just happened?
She was on her hands and knees, trying to gather herself together again, aware of commotion nearby. By the time she could make sense, it was over, and Cox crouched beside her, offering her his hand.
His knuckles were bleeding.
She took his bloody hand and stood with him, finally getting her bearings enough to see her surroundings and make sense of the past few minutes.
Music was still playing, but the bar was strangely quiet nonetheless. A small crowd had collected at the head of the hallway. The big guy who’d tried to strangle her was being dragged out, apparently unconscious, by the bartender and a twenty-something Black man.
And Cox stood before her. Frowning, of course.
He brushed fingers lightly across her throat. “Y’okay?”
Was she okay? She had no idea, so she took a beat to check and decided she was shaken, but determined not to let that jerk get anything he wanted from her, not even her fear. So she focused on the physical: her throat hurt, but otherwise, she was fine. “Yeah.” Her voice was also a little raspy.
His arm came around her, and his hand rested at that spot on the small of her back, this time settling there possessively. He turned and began leading her forward. “Let’s get you outta here.”
Autumn absolutely wanted to leave. She wanted to disappear from this shitty town and pop up in her own home, where she was safe from belligerent rednecks. But before Cox’s sentence reached its period, she knew she absolutely would not go yet. “No,” she told him. “I am not getting chased out of this stupid bar again. Not ever.”
With that, she walked away from him, pushed through the crowd at the end of the hall, and made her way back to her stool, where a fresh Jameson and another pint of ice water awaited her.