Chapter Eighteen
By the time Autumn and Cox left his room dressed and ready to face the day, the clubhouse was moderately crowded with patches, women, some children and teens, and a few adults who weren’t Horde family or ‘club girls.’ Autumn assumed those men not wearing kuttes were what the Horde called ‘hangarounds,’ a term she interpreted as ‘groupies hoping to join.’
Though there was a noticeable downbeat to the morning, certainly formed by worry for Tommy, the overall atmosphere in the clubhouse was one of purposeful activity. Several boxes of donuts and a large basket of mixed fresh fruit stretched across the bar top, and the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee wafted through the air. Women hovered around the bar like bees over a flowerbed, making sure there were sufficient supplies. Lilli Lunden, Adrienne Ness, and Shannon Ryan called out instructions or sent kids and patches on errands. Very quickly it became apparent that all this hubbub was about the groundbreaking ceremony coming up in the afternoon.
As Cox led Autumn to the bar—hand on her lower back—most of the people in the room smiled or nodded or said good morning, or some combination thereof, and Autumn greeted them likewise. Nobody seemed particularly bothered or even interested that she’d spent the night with Cox. That in itself was a powerful sign that the animosity, competition, whatever between her and the Night Horde was finished. They truly were on the same side now.
Did that side also include Chase? She hoped so; she couldn’t not be on the same side as her boss.
Speaking of whom, Chase didn’t seem to be moving around yet, but it was still pretty early, just past nine a.m. Considering how drunk he’d gotten last night, Autumn wasn’t surprised he was still sleeping it off. Besides, she was in no hurry to deal with him. He’d crossed a few big lines last night, big enough that she couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a problem. Her days of playing his antics off as ‘inappropriate’ were over.
That was a bigger deal than MWGP-NHMC relations. Her boss had full-on sexually harassed her last night. In fact, he’d assaulted her. Cox had beaten the hell out of him for it—which was probably another factor in his slow rising today.
Her eyes went immediately to Cox. He stood at the coffee machine behind the bar, pouring coffee into two cups and looking good doing it. Now that she knew the fit of his body with hers, the power in his long legs, his broad back, his firm belly, the gentle strength in his arms as they held her, the rough rasp of his palms as he touched her, her feelings for the man had become even more snarled and complicated. Nothing serious could happen between them, that was both obvious and incontrovertible, and yet ... she wished it weren’t.
If she’d ever before had as fantastic a time with a man as she’d had last night, she couldn’t remember it. Closed up in that basic, personality-free room, just the two of them, stripped bare and totally vulnerable, Daniel Cox had proved himself to be patient, gentle (except when she didn’t want him to be), and sincerely interested in her pleasure.
Last night, he’d been pretty perfect.
When she’d woken alone this morning, with no sign he had any intention of returning—or had been there in the first place—she hadn’t thought him so perfect. She’d been humiliated and so disappointed she’d wept. She’d pulled herself together and decided it was all for the best, but only just.
Then he’d been back. He hadn’t ghosted her, hadn’t ‘hump-and-dumped’ her, none of that. He’d simply been called away, because Tommy had taken a bad turn at the hospital.
And then, Cox had made it all better by taking her back to his bed.
He wanted to ‘play’ together today and tomorrow, until she and Chase had to head back home. Autumn wanted that as well. Actually, the romantic teenager she used to be was doing bedazzled twirls in her chest, wanting much more than a couple of days. But that old version of herself hadn’t lived enough life to understand that love only worked like that in books and movies.
The thirty-four-year-old version of herself standing before a box of Boston cremes had lived a couple decades more real life and understood that all she and Cox could offer each other was a few days of ‘play.’
Ergo, there was not one positive or productive thing to be had by getting heart-eyes over the guy. He was good in bed; end of story. Correction: he was extremely good in bed. Shockingly good in bed. But still: end of story.
“You can have one, you know,” the man in question said, now standing at her side, holding out a cup of coffee. She’d been staring at the donuts before her while her mind fixated on last night. “You can have two. Hell, have three.”
Autumn smiled her thanks as she took the cup from him. Her first sip made her hum; he’d made it precisely right, with one-and-a-skosh spoons of sugar and a heavy splash of milk. When had he noticed how she made her coffee?
This frowning, taciturn man was more than good in bed. He was attentive. He was protective. He was—
Nope. She needed to cut that thread of thought right now.
She took a paper napkin from a stack on the bar and plucked a Boston creme from the box. “Would you like one?” she asked, offering him the one in her hand.
“Not a sweets-for-breakfast guy.” He set his cup on the bar and reached around her—halfway hugging her, making her eyelids flutter—to claim an apple from the fruit basket.
Then he stayed there, halfway wrapped around her, and sank his face into her hair. He nuzzled until his mouth was on her neck, sucking lightly.
Right out in front of everybody.
Autumn’s knees went weak. Her hands were full of coffee and donut, so she sort of fell against the bar. He caught her with his free hand, his chuckle stuttering over her neck and throat.
“Careful there,” he whispered.
“You be careful,” she whispered back.
“Well, isn’t this cozy.”
Her stomach sinking, Autumn turned to her boss, now standing a few feet away. He was dressed, but his suit was badly wrinkled, his normally carefully styled hair looked like it had passed through a wind turbine, and his face was a marbled mess of bruises, cuts, and pasty unwellness.
“Morning—” she started, but he cut her off.
“You fucked him, didn’t you?”
At that harsh, hoarsely snarled question, Cox shifted to put himself between them, but he didn’t speak.
Chase ignored him and carried on snarling at Autumn, “You fucked the filthy redneck who tried to kill me last night.”
Cox moved again, now putting himself directly in front of Autumn, blocking Chase completely. “If I’d tried to kill you, you’d be dead. Watch your mouth and behave yourself, or you’ll see what I mean.”
Peering around Cox’s arm, Autumn saw enough of Chase to watch him lose his steam. He sagged back to a weary, wounded lump.
The thing about Chase, though—this wasn’t the end of it. He would stew and brood and pout until he’d worked up a full froth of outrage, and he’d wait until he was sure he was the biggest rooster in the yard before he let it out.
He’d drop this until they were out of Signal Bend. Until Autumn had no allies or protectors. Then he’d strike.
But that was more than two days from now. In the meantime, she meant to have this little sojourn with Cox, and she’d do what she could to settle Chase along the way.
“Have a seat, Chase,” she said, stepping around Cox. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
Her boss managed a stunted chuckle. “You must feel guilty. You never get me coffee.”
Cox grabbed her hand and frowned at her, asking with his eyes why she was being nice to her boss. She tried to explain with her eyes that he was her boss, which made it all painfully complicated.
He either didn’t understand her part in that silent conversation or he rejected it. Either way, he let her hand go with a huff, and she went around the bar to make her boss a cup of coffee. Not until she was back there did it occur to her how bold a move it was, just strolling behind the bar like she belonged.
Nobody complained. In fact, Showdown asked if she’d refill his cup. He took it black.
When she turned to set Chase’s cup on the bar, he was working his way onto a stool. ‘Working his way’ because it clearly was quite uncomfortable for him to get up there. Chase was a fit man; she couldn’t imagine him being overly sore from yesterday’s travel, and she was sure Cox had delivered all his blows directly to the face. What had she missed?
Well, it didn’t matter. Whatever it was couldn’t be her fault.
Chase didn’t thank her for the coffee, but she didn’t expect that either.
Autumn looked to Cox and found him watching her, his usual frown in place.
Oh, this was going to be quite the weekend.
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~oOo~
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After that casual breakfast, Autumn found herself caught up in the preparations for the event for which she was ostensibly a guest of honor, and she was delighted. She knew it wasn’t really any intentional gesture to make her feel like she belonged; she simply happened to be present while the club was delegating its various responsibilities, and when she offered to help, they didn’t hesitate to take her up on it.
Thus, she went out to the rental car, collected her bags, used Cox’s dorm room to change out of yesterday’s clothes, and got busy. She started off organizing and fluffing patriotic-themed decorations (garlands, bunting, balloons, and such), but then somebody came from the kitchen to complain that they were having a terrible time getting hard-boiled eggs peeled smoothly. Autumn was a pretty decent cook, as both her dads enjoyed cooking and teaching her, and one of her specialty dishes was devilled eggs with a truffle-oil glaze. She knew how to hard boil an egg. Thus, she ended up in the kitchen for most of the day.
Cox rolled up his sleeves as well, but he managed to be close by frequently, checking in with a look that asked how she was doing. Always, she sent him back a smile, because she was enjoying herself. As in the spring, when she’d helped briefly as they set up their Spring Fling, Autumn was reminded of her sorority days—and realizing that a motorcycle club, at least the Night Horde version, was more like a fraternity than a cartel.
Chase, on the other hand, sat at the bar by himself and pouted for more than an hour, stuffing his face with donuts and coffee the whole time. Autumn checked on him twice and was rebuffed both times—the second time, he’d called her a ‘fucking nag,’ so she left him to his own devices thereafter.
As the preparations were heading toward completion and the groundbreaking was less than two hours away, she noticed he wasn’t at the bar. During a halfhearted search, Izzy, the club girl who’d been with Chase last night, said she’d seen him go back to the dorm with his suitcase. Autumn assumed that meant he was freshening up for the groundbreaking and set concerns about him aside.
The pouting and stewing meant her trip back to Indianapolis would be doubly uncomfortable, at best, but she knew her boss well. Yesterday, he’d learned that he did not hold the power here in Signal Bend, so he would not put himself in another position for that point to be made clear. He would behave himself and then correct his self-confidence by putting her in her place when there was no one around to defend her.
Except herself.
With each passing moment of the morning that Chase behaved like the hyper-entitled scion of generational wealth he was, Autumn became, in steady increments, less willing to ‘manage’ the man and more skeptical that it had ever been the smart call to do so. Rather than best him at his game and make the blind spots of his prejudices and entitlements work for her, wouldn’t it have been better not to accept those prejudices and entitlements at all? Wouldn’t it have been better to demand respect than to manipulate his disrespect so it served her?
All these years that she’d been thinking herself so smart, so savvy, claiming success from the perpetual frat-boy misogynist(s) she worked for, had she really been reifying in her own career everything that disadvantaged women in corporate culture?
“Autumn?”
A hand rested on her arm, and she blinked and looked up at Candy Kohl, Double A’s wife, whose expression was half smile, half frown.
“Yeah?”
“You okay? You’ve been staring at the wall with that spoon in your hand for a few minutes, and I had to put my hand on you to get your attention.”
Autumn looked at the spoon in her hand. It was laden with devilled filling, waiting to be spooned into a piping bag—Autumn always piped the filling into her eggs. It was prettier that way.
She laughed and picked up the piping bag. “I’m fine. Just ... got trapped in a thought.”
“I get it. Happens to me all the time.” Candy rocked a hip into Autumn’s—gently, as if she wasn’t sure Autumn would appreciate a puckishly friendly touch like that. “Especially after a good night with Dub.”
What a strange experience, to have everyone around know what her night had been and to be interested in that fact. In college it had happened, sure, but she’d belonged there, been a member of her sorority, been friends with, lived with, the girls giving her the knowing smirks. A few months ago, she considered everyone in this building today an adversary.
Feeling her cheeks warm, Autumn smiled. She almost shook her head, almost told Candy that she hadn’t been thinking about Cox. At the last second, she decided to get in on the moment instead. So she gave Candy a smirk of her own and did a little head wag to convey, Yeah, what can I say, it was a good night.
Candy laughed and rocked her hip again. “Who’da thunk our Cox’d make a girl blush like that!” She gave Autumn a quick squeeze and said, “I came over to say I found these!”
Autumn looked at the stack of vintage Tupperware deviled egg trays—six of them, each with cups for sixteen eggs.
And they were true vintage Tupperware. “These are fantastic! My dad would fall over with the vapors to see these—they must be from the Seventies!”
Candy considered the harvest-gold and white trays. “I don’t know about that, but they’re old. Not even Lilli knew we had ‘em. I found ‘em in the back of the pantry. They were full of dust and first I thought we should just toss ‘em, but they washed up nice.”
“They’re excellent. Perfect for carting the eggs to the site.”
“I thought so. Need anything else?”
Autumn looked around her little sliver of workstation in the busy kitchen. “Um ... paprika? I had it here, but ...”
“WHO STOLE THE PAPRIKA?” Candy shouted over the din of several people cooking.
A pretty, delicate-looking blonde with Precious-Moments blue eyes turned around. Autumn was sure the girl was one of the Horde children, but she couldn’t quite place .... Lexi. The pretty little blonde was Lexi Elstad. Who wasn’t a child, but somewhere around twenty or so?
“I needed it for the potato salad,” Lexi said, carrying a large container of paprika across the kitchen. “I didn’t steal, just borrowed. Sorry.”
Autumn took the jar with a reassuring smile. “You have more right to it than I do, I think.”
Lexi’s sweet, noncommittal smile became a more complicated expression. “That depends on who you ask.” Before Autumn could react, she turned and went back to her own work.
Candy turned to Autumn and did a conspiratorial eye-roll. “The youts, am I right?” she muttered. “Everything’s a drama with them.”
Having not the foggiest idea what drama Lexi was either dealing with or perpetrating, and unwilling to come down on any side of a situation she didn’t understand and had no right to inquire about, Autumn plastered her business smile on her face and said, “Well, it certainly was lots of drama for me back then.”
“And me,” Candy sighed. “Wouldn’t redo my teens and twenties for anything.”
Normally, Autumn would agree. Right now, wondering if she’d made nothing but wrong choices in her career, she might not say no to the chance to start over.
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~oOo~
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The groundbreaking ceremony for the Signal Bend Pavilion was as quaint and charming as any other Signal Bend event Autumn had experienced. Though it was summer, the high school band, and the high school jazz combo, played sets. Though the ceremony was held on the build site, which was bare lot where the building had been razed, and what was left of the parking lot, there was a kids’ play area, with several bouncy buildings and a ball pit. Tons of food from the Horde (which also included food from Marie’s), beer and wine from the town bars, and a cotton candy machine. Horde patches and their women and older children provided the labor. Cox was on security detail, wandering the site looking ready to hurt anybody who might be inclined toward mischief or malfeasance. But everyone seemed in too good a mood for trouble.
It was enough of a party that the town made a real showing. Autumn estimated about three hundred people, which worked out to about fifteen percent of the town population. A very good turnout.
She had arranged for MWGP to ship out a trade-show display, a setup very similar to the kinds of information signs one saw at a park or historical site. This one had architectural renderings of the finished project, with text the marketing team had created for her original proposal, detailing the amenities and benefits of the project. Somebody had set up that display exactly as Autumn had suggested, so that attendees could take a short journey through the phases of the project. They’d put it up so that at the end of that journey, people came out right in front of the small dais/stage thing the club had built.
It all looked perfect. If she’d been in charge of setting all this up, she would have made only a few small adjustments—tweaks, really—and she would have obsessed about it for weeks. As it was, she’d obsessed about sending the display ahead without her and making the instructions as clear as possible.
The actual ‘groundbreaking’ part was like every other such event she’d been part of: the mayor spoke. Badger, the Night Horde president, spoke. Showdown, the president of Signal Bend Construction, spoke.
Then it was time for MWGP to have its say. Before Chase had decided to steal her thunder, Autumn had been drafting a speech, but she hadn’t looked at it for days. She’d known there was no chance he’d sit behind her and let her be the voice and face of his company.
But Chase had been sullen and silent all day. He’d recovered physically for the most part, but emotionally he was still pouting and uncommunicative. When Mayor Kennerman introduced ‘the MWGP team’ for their moment at the mic, Chase barely reacted. He just sat there, staring at some point above the heads of their audience of a few hundred townspeople.
Autumn gave him about twenty seconds, then leaned over and muttered, “Chase?”
He flapped one hand toward the podium. “Do it yourself.”
Oh boy. The trip home was going to be horrific.
Well, this was neither the time nor the place to obsess about that. This was the time and place to be positive and professional, to cheerlead her first Heartland Homestead.
So she stood and went to the podium herself. Though she didn’t have her draft speech, she’d stood at podia like this often enough. She knew the cliches and catchphrases. This time, though, she really meant everything she said. She truly believed in this project.
All she had to do was be honest. And she was.
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~oOo~
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When she was finished and the crowd offered her polite applause (and no heckling!), everyone who’d been on the dais stepped down and headed to the sectioned part of the lot designated for the ceremonial groundbreaking. The massive machines parked at the side of the lot would actually break the ground; this was just a photo op. Thus, Showdown handed her a shiny new shovel wrapped with red, white, and blue ribbons.
Chase snatched it immediately from her hands, with enough force that the shovel slammed into a leg of the trade-show display and set the whole thing to shaking so hard Autumn thought it might collapse.
It didn’t. Everybody watched it quiver and settle, then a strange quiet held on, like a communal held breath.
In that quiet, Chase jammed the shovel into the ground and left it there as he stomped off.
“Chase!” Autumn called.
“Figure your own way out of this hellhole,” he yelled back. “I’m going home.”
He started walking again and kept going, all the way off the site. He was heading to the rental car. She patted her pockets, looking for the keys, but she’d given them to one of Adrienne’s sons, who’d been helping unload. Had he returned the keys to Chase?
Was Chase seriously going to strand her here?
“CHASE!” She hated to shout, but she put her whole chest into his name. He didn’t even twitch.
She started to run after him, but a hand caught her arm at once. Looking back, she saw Cox.
He shook his head. “Don’t.”
“What? Don’t what? Go after him? I have to!” Just then a car door slammed hard, she looked that way—yep, Chase had the keys and was leaving. But he wouldn’t leave town without her, right? Not even Charlton Isley III was that much of a jerk.
“No, you don’t,” Cox insisted. “I don’t want you goin’ after him.”
“What?” Who was Cox to say where she could and couldn’t go?
Chase spun the wheels and sent gravel in every direction as he pulled away—and headed not toward the clubhouse or the B he’d shifted his grip so it was less obviously restraining, but she knew he’d hold her in place if she tried to get free. She yanked anyway, and yep, he wasn’t having it.
“He came at you once,” he said, holding her eyes with his own and not letting go. “Not again.”
Was it the look in his eyes? Was it the way he held her? Was it the words themselves, the protectiveness clenched around every syllable? Or was it what they’d shared last night, and the bit of afterglow that had held between them all day?
In one way or another, it was Cox. She turned her back on her boss, and maybe her career, because Cox was holding her here. Which felt like a metaphor bigger than this moment.
Oh, that couldn’t be a good idea. It had to be a terrible idea.
But once she made that reckless decision, one that would certainly have painful consequences, she shoved worry to the side. All her life, she’d been focused on strategy—seeing the whole field; making all the right choices; navigating around insults, slights, and condescension without showing damage; always putting herself in the best position for success. She was tired of the game, tired of always trying to predict, to control where each move would take her, to map each path that opened and erase each one that closed.
Right now, she stood at the end of her map, and all around her was nothing but blank space.
Okay. Time to see what happened next.