Chapter Fourteen
“Do you play pool?” Cox asked and threw Autumn for a small loop. She wasn’t sure why he was talking to her at all, he clearly didn’t like her and he apparently had his sights on the girl across the room, but here he was.
What a room it was. Her only prior understanding of what a bikers’ clubhouse looked like came from television, so she wasn’t surprised to find a large bar as a prominent feature. Nor was she shocked by the pinball games, the enormous TV, the various well-used seating arrangements, the impressive number of Harley posters and other branded décor, or the bulletin board of photos and other mementos that bordered on or crossed well into obscene territory. Hollywood had gotten those details right.
What surprised her, however, was the beautiful bar-top, a glossy, ruddy wood with an intricately carved rolled edge. And things like a large, elaborate chess set with the inlaid-wood board as the top of a table, where a game was clearly in progress. Or the full wall of family photos, of children and pets and wholesome memories like trips to beaches or amusement parks, or the kids’ play area below that wall. She was surprised by the number of scented candles scattered around the room and suspected that one of these men’s ‘old ladies’ was trying (and largely failing) to combat the smell of a lot of men being men. But most of all, she was surprised by the beautiful mosaic piece on the front wall, something like eight by eight feet in size, of the Night Horde patch, what they called the ‘Flaming Mane.’
That piece was true art. She wanted to get up close and study the tesserae, because from here they looked like gems—ruby and onyx and nacre. That chess set was art, too. And the bar-top.
She hadn’t expected a biker clubhouse to be beautiful.
Chase brayed loudly again, an ugly blast of noise. She’d never heard that particular laugh from him, and it was severely off-putting. The three generous pours—she’d been counting—the Horde had eagerly served him had obviously mixed with whatever was left of his airplane bender and given it new life.
At this rate, her boss was going to be blackout drunk before the night went full dark. The Horde really seemed to have a knack for getting people far drunker than they had any intention of becoming.
Then again, Chase wasn’t exactly hesitating over there. He wasn’t fighting with his better nature. She wondered if he had a better nature, or only a mask that made a fairly close impression of decency. Either way, Chase’s sense of decency was on sabbatical.
“Autumn?” Cox prodded, and she returned her attention to him.
Cox. Standing right in front of her for the first time since she’d puked on him (or at least near him), looking down at her with that perpetual scowl. No one who spent so much time looking one last irritation from bloody murder should be so good looking. The man had the healthy blond sheen of a California surfer and the personality of a Russian dissident.
A Russian dissident poet. She remembered those random streams of poetry that spilled from his mouth.
Rather than let that thought sink in and cause mischief, she pulled a much fresher memory forward: when she’d come into this room, he’d been snuggling with the pretty waitress from Marie’s, and they’d both looked very comfortable in each other’s personal space.
She hated how seeing Cox with a pretty woman on his lap had hit her like a physical blow. It had felt like jealousy, insecurity, like the night of her junior prom, when she’d returned from the bathroom and found her date—ostensibly her boyfriend—making out on the dance floor with a girl she’d thought a friend.
But she had nothing to be either jealous or insecure about where Cox was concerned.
Now he was ignoring that woman and focused on Autumn. Just walked away from one woman without a second thought, to focus on another. Maybe Cox had about as much decency in him as Chase.
Why was he talking to her, anyway? And asking her to play pool? And why was he doing it now?
Alarm bells chimed in her head. He was up to something. Maybe the whole club was up to something. That would explain why Badger and the others were not only humoring Chase’s boorishness but contributing to it.
But why? How? They’d dropped in unannounced less than half an hour ago, and come into a clubhouse full of relaxing bikers. The Horde had had no time to plan or execute some nefarious scheme to compromise Chase and/or her. Even if they’d had a secret plan ready to go should an opportunity arise, to what end? The deal was done. Chase and Autumn were here for the groundbreaking, which the club was hosting. The Night Horde would make a lot of money from this project.
They weren’t enemies anymore. They were all on the same side. Autumn could lay down her sword.
Her fingers didn’t want to unclench, everything in her screamed that she needed to remain ready for a fight, but ...
But ...
But dear god, she was tired of wearing armor every waking moment of her life.
Suddenly, Autumn’s sense of herself slipped, and she couldn’t quite remember why she was always fighting. What was it she fought for? Her condo she was hardly ever in? Her dads she saw once a week? Her best friend she only saw while they were doing something else? Her job, currently exemplified by the braying ass down the bar, getting drunk on biker booze?
With a thundering mental crash, Autumn realized she was sick of her life. Right there and then it hit her, in this room she hadn’t wanted to be in, dragged here by a boss she hadn’t wanted to travel with, now having a strained exchange with a man she didn’t want to ...
Except she kind of did.
“Autumn!” Chase shouted. His voice had grown think with drink. “Get that stick out your perky little ass and come drink with us!”
As Autumn absorbed the slap of that offense, Cox’s head swiveled in Chase’s direction, and his frown deepened to a canyon between his eyebrows.
With that, she had a new thought, and it rhymed with Duck it.
She drained her club soda and handed Cox his beer. “Yeah, I know how to play pool. Do you?”
His attention on her again, Cox grinned. It emerged on his face like a time-lapse of a planted seed becoming a flower. “Oh, I know how to play. C’mon.”
There was a new note in his tone, one Autumn had not heard before. It sounded like ... playfulness? She couldn’t imagine this man ever being playful, but she’d been surprised repeatedly on this ridiculously long day, so why not now?
“Make it interesting,” she said, letting herself smile at him.
He cocked his head. “You want to bet on it? You think you’re all that?”
She’d grown up with a pool table in their basement rec room; her dads had met playing pool. One of their favorite stories, in the years when they’d been in love, had been about their version of the cliché, where Pops had ‘taught’ Pom to play as a pretense for flirting—but Pom’s uncle had been an actual pool shark, so he hadn’t needed a lesson. He’d simply exploited the chance to get up close and personal with the hot, ginger bear.
Autumn had no intention of exploiting that kind of chance, but she loved the notion of surprising this man with a skill he was no doubt unable to imagine she had.
“I think I want to make it interesting,” she replied.
His grin had softened a bit, become a smile, but it hadn’t disappeared. “How much you wanna wager?”
“Not cash.” There was already money moving between them, via the Heartland Homestead. She considered for a second. “How about this: the winner gets one small favor from the loser. It can’t be anything dangerous, cruel, or extravagant, but otherwise, it’s winner’s choice.”
“One small favor, huh?” As he considered it, his smile softened more, but remained. Autumn was sure it was the longest she’d ever seen a pleasant expression on the man’s face.
“It’s a bet,” he said, and held out his hand.
She put her hand in his and shook on it.
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~oOo~
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She hadn’t noticed until she was following Cox to the pool table, but the atmosphere in the room had changed. When she and Chase had come in, the mood was mellow, with people hanging around in clusters, decompressing at the end of a day. There had been a scent of cooking meat mixed in with a powerful and familiar frat-house reek, and music had been playing softly somewhere. Now, though, a party burgeoned. The music had gotten louder, and with it the conversations. Women moved about with purpose, a purpose likely connected to the increasing food smells coming from the back.
Two men who weren’t wearing leather kuttes were playing as Cox and Autumn walked up to the pool table, but they stopped as soon as Cox grabbed two cues and handed one to her. The other men even collected their sunk balls and racked them again before they cleared the way.
Cox checked the rack, rolling it back and forth over the red felt a few times. He left the triangle in place and looked up at her.
“Ladies’ choice—what’re we playing?”
Though she despised being called a ‘lady,’ she was willing to let it work for her. Shedding her suit jacket and draping it over the back of the nearest chair, she told him, “Let’s keep it simple. Eight Ball.”
He acknowledged her choice with a nod and lifted the triangle. After he hung it on the cue stand, he turned back and said, “Ladies first,” gesturing at the table.
Autumn smiled. “I thought it was ladies’ choice.”
“You don’t want to break?”
In Eight Ball it was possible for the person who broke to run the table and win without ever giving their opponent a play. That could be a tremendous advantage. However, that occurrence was extremely rare. In a typical game between well-matched players, the person who went second got a chance to see the play style of their opponent and strategize, and that could be a significant advantage as well.
Autumn didn’t know if she and Cox were evenly matched. She’d spent her college years humbling frat boys for free drinks, but those days were a decade and more behind her. Nowadays, she played a few times a year. Surely Cox had played more recently than she.
He was probably better than she was. But she always liked to put her self-confidence on display—especially when she needed a reminder of it herself.
“Age before beauty,” she said with a smirk.
Another grin from Cox. This one was a little stunted, and it slipped from his face so quickly he might have peeled it off like a band-aid, but it had been there even so.
He leaned over, set his cue, and broke the rack cleanly. The six went into a side pocket, and the eight rolled right up to the far right corner and came to a stop at the rim.
“Close one!” somebody behind her said. “Cox almost beat himself before he could get beat by a girl.”
Autumn looked over her shoulder and saw that a small crowd had gathered. That crowd did not include Chase or the girl he’d latched onto, nor did it include Badger or Double A. They were all still at the bar, though she noticed them watching, too.
The cluster of spectators did include Kellen Frey, who had spoken. His grin faltered when he saw her looking. “No offence, ma’am,” he muttered.
“Careful, or you’re next,” she told him, which got a chorus of hoots from their audience.
She turned back to the game. Cox sank the one, and then the five, before she got a chance at the table.
As Cox stepped back from the table and Autumn stepped up, she considered what he’d left her. The eight still rested right at the lip of the far right corner pocket, and the twelve sat just beside it, against the bumper. If she lined up her shot exactly right, she could bank the fourteen so it sent the twelve to the left side pocket. But if she missed by even a millimeter, she’d scratch.
She could sink the ten in the near left corner with a simple straight shot without disturbing that lie, so she took that shot first. Then she saw a chance to use a plant shot, and the two ball, to sink the fifteen and ruin Cox’s setup for the two.
Her plant shot wasn’t precisely perfect, and the two rolled to a good position at the near left pocket, but Autumn didn’t care about that just yet. The cue was perfectly positioned now for a bank shot to deal with the twelve.
As she set up the shot, she noticed that quiet had filled the room, dense as cotton batting, but she set that awareness aside. Autumn played like she worked: with full dedication and focus.
She took the shot. The cue struck the fourteen cleanly and sent it toward the twelve—and the eight—in a smooth roll full of backspin. The fourteen slowed with every inch until it gently tapped the twelve.
The eight rolled about three inches toward the center of the table, away from the pocket. The twelve dropped in, and the fourteen crept to the edge, paused—she could almost hear the held breath of the whole room—and finally dropped.
The room exploded in shouts and cheers. Dozens of hands came out of nowhere to slap Autumn on the back, shake her shoulder, clutch her arm. She hadn’t even won yet, but they were celebrating like she had.
Anyway, as soon as she could get back to the table she’d win—the remaining balls would be easy shots.
Suddenly, she was grabbed forcefully from behind and yanked around—Chase had her. Before she could do anything more than gasp, he slammed her body to his and dropped his drunken, sweaty mouth on hers. His tongue surged into her mouth like a freaking Roto-Rooter.
Shocked, appalled, disgusted, Autumn had not one single thought about her job, her career, or managing Chase to protect it. Her only thought, only feeling, only need was to get away from the horror of this assault. She fought as hard as she could to get free. But she was small and surprised. Chase was much bigger and determined. He ignored her struggle.
Then, just as suddenly, she was yanked away from Chase. This time, Cox had her. He grabbed her, frowned down at her, pushed her toward another set of grasping hands, then leapt at Chase and began to punch. Repeatedly.
And it looked like nobody intended to stop him.
Autumn freed herself from the latest set of hands and arms—they were, it turned out, Darwin’s, and he apologized as soon as she glared back at him—and then didn’t know what to do. She knew she should get Cox to stop trying to kill her boss, but frankly, still charged with outrage and disgust, she wasn’t ready to get between that boorish jerk and what he had coming.
Except Cox was still going, a flurry of blows. Chase was not fighting back. In fact, he was starting to look a little ... floppy.
“Okay, okay. Easy, brother,” Showdown said, as he and Len—two of the oldest men in the club—finally collected Cox and pulled him off.
“Is Trina around?” Badge asked as he and Dom hoisted a reeling, bleeding Chase to his feet. His face was already becoming a misshapen lump of purpling flesh. Autumn couldn’t tell if he even remembered where he was.
“I’m here!” A woman’s voice—Trina, apparently—called from somewhere near the back. “I’ll grab the kit!”
“Let’s get him in the back room,” Badger said. “Trina can clean him up. Izzy, grab the bottle—make it two—and come back with us. I think our guest could use some TLC.” As he and Dom headed to the back, Badger looked back to Cox. “You need your hands cleaned up, brother.”
At that moment Autumn saw the girl who’d been sitting on Cox’s lap earlier, and she looked like she was about to volunteer to be his nurse. Before she could think, Autumn said, “I’ll take care of him,” loud enough that the entire room heard her.
The clubhouse went quiet at once, and every eyeball seemed to be on her. They all seemed shocked, but she couldn’t understand why. So she focused on Badger, because he was in charge.
Under the heat of her regard, Badger shook off his torpor first. “Okay, then. There’s a second kit in the bathroom. Dom, c’mon.” With that, he focused on the task of carry-dragging Chase toward, and then down, a hallway at the back of the clubhouse.
Without acknowledging Autumn, Cox headed in the same direction.
Why had she volunteered to help him clean up? Why was she jealous of the overdone tart with the big hair? Obviously those two had something going on—and it was none of her business.
She didn’t live in Signal Bend. She wasn’t interested in any biker, which included Cox. She didn’t even like these guys.
Yet when she chanced to make eye contact with that girl again, the girl (really, she was a woman, obviously at least in her thirties) made a broadly condescending gesture, which screamed, If you’re not going, I am.
Autumn’s feet were heading toward the back before she’d made the decision.
Not knowing the layout of this building, she followed Cox, arriving at the door to a bathroom about half a second before he closed it. Autumn threw her hand up to keep it from reaching the latch.
His expression was his usual faint frown. “I ain’t need help, Autumn. I been cleanin’ myself up since I’s a kid.”
Normally, he didn’t have much of an accent. An occasional tendency to drop his Gs, but little more. Sometimes, though, it was like the ghost of an Appalachian—or, she supposed, an Ozark—ancestor took hold of his tongue.
She looked pointedly at his right hand, which dripped blood steadily onto the peel-and-stick flooring of the bathroom. “I assume you punch with your dominant hand?”
A slight pinch of his lips was his only answer. She took it for yes.
“My two hands are smarter than your one dumb hand. Also, I suppose you got hurt defending my honor—again—so, again, it’s the least I can do.” She pushed into the bathroom; the fact that she was successful indicated his acquiescence. If he’d wanted to stop her, he certainly could have.
She pushed him toward the toilet. He dropped the lid and sat down. She opened the medicine chest above the mirror, but that was packed full of new soaps in both liquid and solid forms. Generally practical, but not helpful at the moment.
“Under,” he said, and Autumn opened the vanity cabinet. Beside a caddy of cleaning supplies and an 18-roll pack of toilet paper, she found a small red tackle box with a black cross inked on the top in Sharpie. She pulled it out and set it on the narrow countertop.
Inside were enough supplies to outfit a doll’s emergency room: antibiotic ointments, disinfectant washes, gauze in various forms, tape, bandages, butterflies, even suturing thread and needles in sterile packs.
Autumn collected some large gauze pads and disinfectant wash. “If you need stitches, we’re going to have to call someone else in. That’s above my nursing level.”
Cox made an odd sound that might have been a chuckle. “I don’t need stitches. Just a clean-up.” He worked his big signet ring off his hand and dropped it in a pocket of his kutte.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said and picked up his hand. She hissed and set the disinfectant aside. “These are a mess. I don’t want to hurt you.”
He looked up at her with that calm frown that was uniquely Cox. For the first time, she saw how much variety of color and light his eyes held. They weren’t merely blue, but sky blue, steel blue, cobalt blue, navy blue, even silver.
“You won’t hurt me.” His voice was soft as a whisper, and Autumn felt it roll down her spine and around her hips.
Clearing her throat, she broke the pull of that shared gaze and grabbed the disinfectant again. She soaked a gauze pad and lifted his hand, dabbing the gauze tenderly over each torn knuckle in turn. If he felt pain, he didn’t show it. Cox’s stoicism was far greater than the tang of some medicine could overtake.
It occurred to Autumn that she’d never tended to anyone like this before Cox, and for him, she was on round two. When Pops had his appendix out, she’d brought him soup and gelato and hung out with him for a couple of days cuddled up on the sofa watching classic movies, and she always kept Pom company after one of his youth-clinging ‘procedures,’ but until Cox’s surprising habit of saving her, she’d never actually treated another person’s injury.
His hand in hers. Her body against his. His eyes on her. Her touch causing both discomfort and succor.
It was unexpectedly intimate. Autumn found it difficult to keep her mind still. Or her heart, for that matter.
She liked this man—no, that wasn’t right. She didn’t know him well enough, and there was too much animosity too close behind them, to like him. But she was attracted to him.
Powerfully.
Now that she’d admitted it to herself, she also acknowledged that she’d been attracted to him for a while. Since that night in the spring. That was why he’d been so stubbornly lodged in her mind.
With his knuckles clean and bleeding less, she saw that they were more than shredded. His first two were swollen as well—considerably. “Can you move your fingers?”
As an answer, he flexed his hand a few times—which got the blood flowing again, but apparently also meant nothing was broken. As far as she could tell.
“Nothin’s broken,” he murmured.
“Good. I’m glad.” She rummaged through the first-aid kit, trying to think how she’d bandage knuckles this badly hurt. Was there a joint on the human body that moved more? Finally, she decided on the roll of gauze. At least she could wrap his hand up and keep them covered like that, as she’d done in the spring.
But Cox said, “No. In that compartment on the right, there’s band-aids made for knuckles.”
“Oh, okay.” She hadn’t known band-aids came in different shapes—other than the little dots nurses used after they administered a shot.
The knuckle-shaped band-aids were pretty ingenious, honestly. Autumn was able to dab antibiotic ointment on each knuckle and then—after one false start where she put it on the wrong way—secure each wounded knob.
As she was unwrapping the last band-aid, Cox asked, “Why d’you work for that guy?”
Surprised by the question, Autumn paused with the band-aid still in its paper. “I’ve been with MWGP since I got out of school, and I’ve had a lot of success there. I’ve accomplished important things because there’s support for innovation at MWGP. I have room to try things that could do good in the world. I know it’s just real estate, but real estate is where people have their lives—home, work, play, it all needs real estate, and that industry needs people who are in it for more than just a paycheck. Chase is a jerk, and his ideas about women are prehistoric, but he appreciates innovation. He wants the paycheck, absolutely, but he’s willing to make room for trying new things. I know how to manage him, and except for his boorish behavior, I love my job.”
Why had she answered Cox, who had no right to it, so openly? She didn’t know.
Yes, she did. Because she liked him. No! She was attracted to him. Nothing more than that.
But that was such a lie she couldn’t get herself to believe it anymore. Maybe she needed to find a quiet minute and understand how it had happened, but it had happened: She liked him.
More than that—she felt safe with him. And that, friends and neighbors, was a stunning new experience, feeling safe with a patched member of the Night Horde MC.
“Didn’t look like you were managing him out there,” Cox rejoined, his voice mild and free of challenge. He was observing, not arguing. “That looked like he felt entitled—and it didn’t look like you agree about that.”
“I don’t.” She finished putting the last band-aid on. “He’s never been like that before. Usually, he makes stupid remarks, and that’s about it. This is the first business trip we’ve taken together, and he’s been a lot more to deal with, but ...” She sighed and said another thing she’d been trying to keep in the dark for a while, because its implications were too big to face until she was alone. “I’m glad—I’m grateful—you stopped him, but it feels like you were all getting him drunk intentionally, and I think his level of inebriation is why he pushed things so far. And you beat the snot out of him, so I’m going to have to deal with that when he’s sober, and try to figure out how not to get fired when he blames me—which he will.”
“He won’t fuck with you, Autumn.”
It was sweet, the conviction with which he made that claim. Autumn felt an irrational urge to brush his hair back from his face, but she forbore. “Unless you’re going to loom behind me like a bodyguard for the rest of my life, Cox, I don’t think you can do anything about him once we leave town. I’ll have to handle him myself. Which I’ve been doing for a long time.”
Cox stood up. He moved so quickly that Autumn stumbled back a step. He reached out his wounded hand and caught her arm to steady her.
“He won’t fuck with you,” he repeated, his voice dropping to a growl.
And then he kissed her.