Chapter Twenty
Dawn streamed softly through the sweeps of lacy curtain at the windows, dropping golden kisses along all the edges in the room.
Autumn lay in a nest of fluffy pillows and bedding, spent and sore but somehow also rested and replete. What a night. Like nothing she’d experienced before. Crazily intense thoughts and feelings caromed in her head, but her limbs were languid. She could never move again in her life, and be perfectly content.
Cox lay on his side beside her, half over her, staring down at her with eyes sparking with shock. His blond hair, usually worn brushed back from his face, was a tousled mop around his head; she could detect trenches from the paths of her fingers through his loose waves. The shoulder of the arm he rested on was bunched with flexed muscle, the bicep swollen with bearing his weight.
He was so ... virile. Strong and fit and just ... powerful, in a way that was more than the strength in his muscles. There was a power in his person she’d never known in anyone else.
Fresh morning light caught a bead of sweat as it meandered down his temple to his cheek, making it sparkle. Autumn caught it on her fingertip and watched the light play through until it slipped along the side of her finger. Instinct made her bring her finger to her mouth and taste it.
After last night, she knew all the ways he tasted.
He watched her finger move into and from her mouth, licking his lips as he bent to claim a kiss. Her mouth was sore, her cheeks abraded from his beard, but it was a delightful pang, the way a sunburn carried memories of a perfect beach day.
They had to talk. Didn’t they? Something had changed in the hours since they’d left the groundbreaking—maybe it had changed before that, in the clubhouse, in his dorm room. For Autumn it felt significant, important, and she could look into Cox’s denim-blue eyes and see a similar shift happening for him as well. What else could that stunned expression stuck on his face mean?
Her certainty that nothing could be real between them was crumbling. Why couldn’t it be real? She was an intelligent, educated woman. He was an intelligent, experienced man. If they talked, surely they could figure out a way ... right? Cox wasn’t a big talker, okay, but he’d talk about this, right?
She brushed her fingers through his beard. When they passed over his lips, he caught her hand in his and pressed it to his mouth as his eyes fluttered closed.
Yes, he felt it, too.
“Cox ...” she began.
His eyes popped open, and he lowered her hand, squeezing tightly. “No. Hush.”
Apparently no, he wouldn’t talk about this.
Last night, she’d very much enjoyed being subject to him, giving up control, doing as he asked, trusting him to treat her with care. He’d repaid that trust with magnificent care, and the near muteness of their wild lovemaking had deepened the emotion building within it, wrapped the experience in something like reverence.
Now, though, his dogged resistance to having a conversation made impatience twitch at the back of her neck. So she tried again.
“I know you don’t want to talk, and I don’t want to break the magic here—”
“Then hush, babe.”
It was absolutely ridiculous how hard that one little word hit her. Babe. It was a cliché, totally basic. But from a terse man like Cox, it felt like a declaration. A vow.
She didn’t want to push him away from that, but she had something to say. So she persevered. “I need to say this. Please let me, and hear me.”
After a moment of studying her as if he could uncover nefarious intent if he looked hard enough, he nodded.
“I don’t know if it matters in the big picture. I don’t know if anything can change in our lives. If it can, I don’t know if it should. But I am old enough to be more afraid of missed chances than of disappointments. So I need you to know—nothing more than that, just to know—that this time with you feels ... significant to me.”
Cox replied with a single word, but it said everything she wanted to hear.
“Monumental.”
Autumn’s eyes began to ache with new tears. “Yes.”
Cox drew her in close and kissed her the way he did every time, as if he lived by her breath alone.
Instantly, despite the bruisy burn between her legs, she wanted him again. But when she reached between them, seeking his cock, he caught her hand and pulled back.
“Out of condoms.” He smiled. “And we should get some food soon. We skipped dinner.”
They had, hadn’t they? And for lunch, all she’d had was a hot pretzel and a lukewarm beer.
“Fine. But let’s do room service. I don’t want to get dressed. Ever again in my life.”
With an almost-chuckle, he rolled to his back, and Autumn slipped from the covers to collect the room-service menu. Crossing the room naked, she could feel his eyes on her, so she added a little sway to her stride and got a soft growl as a reward.
While she stood at the desk, his phone rang. Oh, she hoped it wasn’t the Horde calling him in for some reason. Maybe cleanup from the groundbreaking ceremony? Or—no. Hopefully not more bad news about Tommy.
“It’s Cox,” he said as he answered. Then, “Hey, Tal ...”
Unable to help eavesdropping, Autumn flipped slowly through the slim hotel binder, pretending to study information about check-out times, laundry service, the fire escape route, but Cox did not say another word. When she arrived at the menu, she turned to him.
He stood stark naked beside the bed. The call was apparently already over; his phone rested in his hand, beside his thigh. He stared straight ahead. He’d become a statue.
“Cox?” Nothing.
She went to stand before him. His expression was flat except for his eyes, which were wide with shock, but a completely different breed than he’d shown her all morning. This was horror, not hope.
It was Tommy, wasn’t it? He’d had a stroke less than two days ago. Had he died?
Tears already welling at the back of her eyes, she set a hand on his arm. “Cox, what happened?”
Again, she got no reaction. She was seriously considering doing a Hollywood slap to snap him out of this when he blinked and looked down at her. He frowned deeply, like he didn’t know why she was there.
“What happened?” she repeated.
“She’s ... dead. She’s dead.”
She? “Who, hon? Who’s dead?”
He focused on the wall again. “My mom.”
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~oOo~
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From childhood, Autumn had had a facet of her personality that Pops and Pom called ‘turbo mode.’ She was always organized, always planned and prepared well in advance, but when emergencies or anything unexpected popped up, when big deadlines with short runways loomed, or sudden crises crashed through her life, she focused like a laser and rolled forward like a bulldozer.
Turbo mode engaged the second Cox told her what was wrong. His mother was dead. He shook off a single layer of shock and started wandering naked around the room like a malfunctioning Roomba, bouncing off furniture, chanting that he to get there. I need to get there. I need to get there. I need to get there. Autumn corralled him and helped him get dressed, then hurried into her own clothes, grabbing the outfit she’d worn yesterday from the floor and not caring that the pieces were wrinkled.
When he tried to tell her he had to go, she cut him off and told him she would be going with him; she did not trust him to operate heavy machinery. Remembering then that she didn’t have a car, she called the desk, got Shannon Ryan, and, hoping that her reputation had been polished up a bit by her association with the Horde, asked—without disclosing Cox’s emergency because it wasn’t hers to share—if she could borrow a hotel vehicle for the day.
Shannon offered her personal SUV.
Autumn thanked her profusely and got Cox down to the desk and then out to the parking lot. The very fact that he was allowing her to lead him around like a puppy scared her badly. That she was taking him to the scene of his mother’s death worried her more.
But she was not about to let him do that alone.
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~oOo~
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Following his halfhearted, distracted directions, missing two turns when he forgot to tell her about them, Autumn pulled up in front of a humble butter-yellow bungalow surrounded by a tidily kept yard. A gravel driveway, its white rocks sparkling in the summer sun, made a straight line to a detached garage. An aged Oldsmobile sat before the closed garage door.
This was a small-town neighborhood, a paved street lined with similar small houses, each one boasting a commodious, well-tended yard. Kids were playing, neighbors were gardening, down the road someone was mowing the grass.
It was all so peaceful, so beautiful. Even the butter-hued bungalow before them seemed harmless.
Like a turbo mode of his own had kicked in, Cox surged from the passenger side of Shannon’s truck and headed directly for the front door, his strides stretched long with purpose. Autumn had to run to catch up with him.
Just as he reached the porch step, the door swung open and a solid, curvy woman with a thick, dark ponytail came out of the house and met him with an emotional embrace.
All the emotion was on the woman’s side. While she squeezed him and cried, Cox stood like a statue again, his arms at his sides, his expression blank. When the woman stepped back, he simply walked around her and into the house.
Not knowing what else to do, Autumn followed. The woman gave her a questioning look but didn’t stop her. She stayed behind on the porch as Cox and Autumn went into his mother’s house.
The interior of the house was dark and cool. All the curtains were closed, and a window unit air conditioner chugged loudly as it blew artic air into the room. The foresty scent of cleaning products led her to notice that the room was spotless. Even in the low light, the wooden furniture gleamed.
She noticed the state of the house in the hairsbreadth of a moment before she saw that Cox had stopped. At the back of the living room, before an elderly recliner, he stood rigid and silent. From her position in the middle of the room, Autumn could see the slender shapes of feet and legs under a granny-square afghan.
Her turbo mode ran out of gas where she stood. There was nothing at all she could do to fix this. No amount of productivity, or willpower, or resolve could fix this.
The scene held like that for unmeasurable time. Autumn felt herself turning to granite with Cox.
Then he moved. He bent, picked up a stiff arm, checked for a pulse.
A few seconds later, he dropped to his knees.
Autumn stood, tears streaming down her face, and watched him hunch over the hand he held. She stood while he began to rock, his mother’s lifeless hand pressed to his cheek.
When he began to keen, a howl of grief so intense it nearly shook the house on its foundation, she ran to him. He was so much bigger than she was, his grief was so huge it threatened to flatten her as well, but she managed to wrap him up and hold him together.
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~oOo~
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The woman who’d been in Cox’s mother’s house, who had discovered the body, was Natalie ‘Call Me Tally’ Baker. Tally lived across the street with her young son, Colton, and was, as she tearily described it, “Just ‘bout a daughter to Mizz Elaine, and her a mom to me.”
Autumn and Tally stood in the front yard while Colton played at their feet. He was curious about the commotion but too young to be bothered by what it meant.
About an hour had passed since Autumn had crouched before Cox’s distraught form and tried to offer enough comfort to ease a grief bigger than she’d ever known herself. In that time, Cox had ... not pulled himself together, but calmed enough to function at a basic level. He’d reverted to torpid silence and would not leave the living room, but he was sufficiently responsive that Autumn and Tally had been able to handle the first steps in ways he either wanted or accepted.
When she asked whom she should call first, he opened his phone and handed it to her with the word “Badge.” So she called the Horde president—and that one step set off a cascade of activity. Now, an hour later, most of the Horde were on the property, as were several of their old ladies, and five minutes ago a long black van with a discreet logo for Kellogg she didn’t know what to do, how to help. The reason she’d been shuffled back from Cox and all the way out of the house was that she had nothing more to contribute.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said aloud, though not really speaking to anyone.
Tally gave her an estimating look. “I know you’re that city lady who bought Keyes, and I saw how you was with Danny. Feels like I don’t got all the pieces to the puzzle, but what I saw says you matter to him. Never saw him like that with nobody, and just you bringin’ him here says he trusts you. So I’ll just say, do what he wants you to do. Danny don’t like feelin’ anything, so this is gonna hurt him double.”
An eddy of jealousy swirled in Autumn’s stomach to hear Tally call Cox by the name he wouldn’t use. Tally had known him since before so much pain attached to that name, and she was apparently close enough to Cox that he hadn’t stopped her using it. An intimacy Autumn could never have.
“Mama, I gotta potty,” Colton said.
Tally swung the boy into her ample arms. “Okay, big man. Let’s go potty.” To Autumn she said, “I say stick with Danny. Do what he needs. If he doesn’t know, Badger will.”
With that, Tally walked across the street to her own humble bungalow.
Autumn stood alone on the lawn. All around her, people were moving about. Lilli Lunden stood at the end of the driveway with her daughter, Gia, both on their phones, clearly delivering instructions or making arrangements. Isaac Lunden stood on the porch with a cluster of Horde, talking seriously. Other men in leather were moving around; Darwin Forrester and Thumper Allen were taking the screen door off its hinges.
Acutely, Autumn felt out of place. For the past day or so, she’d been floating in a bubble outside of time or reality, following her instincts and urges, letting herself play in a little fantasy where she could be with a man like Cox and live a life among the Horde. But it was nothing more than a fantasy. Signal Bend was not her home, she did not belong here, a truth highlighted by her total invisibility in this time of crisis.
She should leave. Figure out a way to get a ride to the nearest car rental place and get herself back to the airport, and then back to her actual life.
Yet that thought felt wrong, too. She didn’t want to slink away and pretend this time with Cox had never happened. She wanted to go back into the house and find him, to help him, to tell him he wasn’t alone.
That was another thing she’d come to understand: for all this activity, for the veritable army of people who’d charged in to help him the very second they’d heard he needed it, Cox thought he was alone in the world. He thought it was true because he thought he wanted it to be true. He had taken all the loss he could stand, so he meant to hold all other connections off at a sufficient distance that he wouldn’t feel the loss of them.
But they were right there with him anyway.
Dear god, how she’d underestimated this ‘biker gang.’ And its town. This whole place was a family.
Cox didn’t feel the great circle of family around him, but he’d felt her. She understood what the stunned riot in his eyes early that morning had been: he hadn’t been able to hold her at arm’s length. She’d reached him the way he’d reached her.
Autumn wanted to go back into the house, go back to him, make sure he knew she was with him, but between her and him was that great wall of family.
And she didn’t belong here.
Or did she?
Oh, she was so confused! Full of grief for a woman she’d never met and the son she’d only barely reached, standing ignored and unnecessary in the middle of a crisis in a family she wasn’t part of, she was torn exactly in two. She didn’t know what to do, where to go, anything.
She took out her phone and called her Pops. As it rang, she looked around and headed to a large, decorative stone beside the mailbox. She sat on it and leaned back against the mailbox post.
“Hello, lass.”
“Hi, Pops.”
“What’s wrong?” Pops asked at once. “You don’t sound right.”
Tears welled at the back of her throat. “I ...” They spilled, and she couldn’t talk for a minute.
Her father filled in the space with worry. “Autumn. Talk to me. What’s wrong? Are you hurt? Did someone hurt you? Are you in trouble?”
“No, Pops,” she managed to say before he went full Caped Daughter Defender. “It’s not me.”
“What, lass? Tell your Pops. Let me help.”
“I don’t know how you can!” she wailed. “I don’t even know how I can!”
“Step by step, Autumn. That’s how we do everything, remember? Step by step.”
That had always been Pops’ wisdom, to take life’s challenges one at a time, but Autumn struggled to retain the lesson. Once she had her goal in sight, her tendency was to focus on nothing else. But Pops’ steady calm was contagious in the moment, as always, and Autumn gathered herself and told him the story. She told it backward, starting with Cox’s mom and ending with Chase’s boorish behavior in the clubhouse last night. As was his way, Pops let her get the whole story out with hardly a word, only interjecting when he didn’t understand her meaning.
When she finished, she was crying again, and Pops stayed quiet for a long time. Long enough that Autumn checked her phone twice to make sure the called hadn’t dropped.
Beginning to worry about a new thing, she asked, “Are you mad?”
“No, lass. Of course not. What could I be mad about? I’m thinking, that’s all. What you’ve said is a lot.”
She knew. She felt the weight of it all settling on her back. “I know, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. But ... you met this man two days ago?”
That was so beside the point right now. “No, Pops. We got close on this trip, but I’ve known him almost a year. He’s part of the motorcycle club I’m working with on this project.”
“The bikers who made you Public Enemy Number One there.”
Relitigating her frustrations with the Night Horde MC over the past year was very last thing she wanted to do. “That’s in the past, Pops. Now we’re working together. And Cox and I ... I don’t know what that means. But right now, I don’t know what to do for him.”
Pops was quiet again for a while before he huffed a very paternal sigh. “Okay. Let’s focus there, then.”
Autumn didn’t reply; she didn’t want to say anything that might detour Pops from giving her advice she desperately needed.
“Losing a parent is a particular kind of pain, lass. I hope you don’t experience it for years and years, but you know I lost my mom when I was twenty. I’m thinking about what I needed then. I don’t know if this man, this ... Cox needs the same thing, but here’s my advice: I was young, but I was grown. I hadn’t needed my mommy for years. On that day, though, when I could never have her again, I needed her like a little kid. That was the loudest thing in my head, that I wanted my mom. What I needed was someone to know what had to be done, and also to ask what I wanted to be done, and what I needed for myself. If only one person had just let me say out loud how mad I was at her for leaving me, I would have handled it all better. My mom died of cancer, she didn’t take her own life, but I was still so mad that she wasn’t there anymore. Anger in grief isn’t always just mad at the world. But nobody lets you say that.”
Again, he let a lengthy pause sit between them before he continued, “I think when something like this happens, everybody wants to jump into action, to do as much as they can for the people left behind, to take as much burden as they can. They want to fix things, and they don’t know how to just be with the grieving person and let them experience their grief, however they need to experience it. I needed help knowing what to do, but they all seemed to lose sight of me, too. If they stayed busy and ‘did for me,’ they thought they were helping. I ended up lost in the eye of a hurricane, and I was so angry—angry she died, angry at how she suffered through chemo and radiation for nothing, angry she left me, angry at all the people around me, talking, sometimes laughing, being productive.”
Another, even longer pause. Pops was nothing if not thoughtful—which was why he was Autumn’s go-to for advice. Pom was good at kissing booboos; Pops was good at fixing the problem that made the booboo.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “It still doesn’t make sense all these years later. I guess that’s what I’m really saying. You don’t know what he needs. You have to ask. And then you have to listen.”
Crying again, Autumn scanned the scene around her. Bustle and hum everywhere; a dozen or more people had converged here because they’d answered the call. But who was with Cox? What was he doing? How was he doing?
She didn’t know, because she’d let all these people push her away from him. Because she hadn’t felt like she belonged among them.
But Cox had been with her when he’d gotten the call. It was her he’d held all night, with her he’d experienced something he’d called monumental.
It was her. If Cox wanted her, she should be with him. If he didn’t, it should be his decision. Now of all times, it should be up to him.
“Thank you, Pops,” she said, wiping her face and straightening her spine. “I might not be home tomorrow. I’ll keep you updated, okay?”
“Do, Autumn. I don’t know this man, and I have concerns, but if he means so much to you, okay. But I will be going mad wondering if you’re okay, so keep me in the loop. Do you want me to tell your Pom, or is that too much to deal with right now?”
A little smile pulled on Autumn’s lips. “Let’s hold off a bit. If you call, he’ll be hurt I told you first. If I call, he’ll make a big scene. And either way, he’ll be wearing widow’s weeds and swooning all over town.”
Pops chuckled softly. “Yes. Okay. Don’t go too long without telling him, though.”
“I won’t. I just need to focus here for now.”
“Understood.”
“Thank you. I was kind of losing my head not knowing what to do.”
“I heard that in your voice. And your tears. You’ve never been comfortable with not knowing your fit.”
Was anybody, though? “I love you, Pop-pop.” Why had she called him that? It had slipped out unbidden. Because it felt right.
He made a humming sound. “Oh, lass. You haven’t called me that since you were about eight. Now you’re breaking my heart because I can’t hug you.”
“I’m taking a raincheck on that hug. Soon as I get back, I’m collecting.”
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~oOo~
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After her call with Pops, Autumn made two more calls, both to MWGP. The first was to the HR department. It was a weekend, but she left message, stating that she was taking emergency leave effective immediately and would be away from the office for at least the next week. Then she called Chase’s office and left another message, conveying the same information and nothing more. She had his cell number, of course, but she specifically did not want to speak to him.
Those tasks completed, Autumn shouldered aside worry about what it might mean for her job and focused instead on the trouble immediately before her. She walked straight to the house, onto the porch, through the open front door. More Horde and their women were moving about inside. The men from Kellogg she hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, and, though a couple of women had brought food over to his mother’s house, the smart money said Cox hadn’t had any. When she’d asked him directly, his only response had been a confused look, as if food itself was a concept he’d never encountered.
So she ordered them both cheeseburgers, fries, and soft drinks, and they’d sat in Shannon’s SUV (she was going to have to figure out transportation soon) while she watched him eat like a robot. Once or twice his hand froze halfway to his mouth, and she’d had to reach over the console and gently lift it until it continued on its journey. But ultimately he ate most of the meal. Autumn’s appetite had rekindled the moment she’d smelled the food; she felt a bit guilty about that.
When more distracted, halfhearted directions got them to his house, he continued on autopilot as he climbed out of the truck, walked to the front door, and unlocked it. He was aware enough to hold the screen door as she followed him in.
Cox stopped in the middle of the room, stalled out again. Autumn stood beside him, looking around, waiting to give him what he needed, if she could.
Inside, his house was much like outside: well-maintained but spartan. The walls were white and nearly vacant, the curtains plain and grey. A long, black leather sofa, pub style, sat in the middle of the longest wall, facing a large television hung on the opposite wall. The wood floor was plain, but gleaming. A basic black end table sat at one end of the sofa and held remotes, a paperback book, and a lone coaster.
At the back of the long room was a dim hallway. Off to the left was a doorway that pushed a slant of bright light into the room. She saw the edge of a stainless steel refrigerator.
This house looked like he’d just moved and hadn’t had a chance to settle in yet, but she suspected he’d lived here for quite some time. Did Cox have nothing in his life, no comforts, no pleasures? A throb of hurt tightened Autumn’s chest at the thought.
“I ...” he said, staring into middle distance.
She slipped her hand in his. “What, hon? What can I—” she stopped, remembered what Pops had told her, and revised her question. “What do you need?”
Her instinct was correct. He focused on her. But it was a long, sad moment before he could muster a word.
“Tired.”
“Then let’s get you to bed. Where is it, down the hall?”
He looked around as if he didn’t know this place. “Uh ... yeah. Yeah.”
When he started walking, his hand closed over hers, and he led her down the hallway, past an open door to a bathroom, past a closed door with a hook-and-eye lock on the outside, to the open door at the end: his bedroom.
It looked like everything else: the barest possible elements to support a life. Queen-size bed, a dresser, one nightstand under a lamp. The same plain white walls, grey curtains, gleaming wood floors. The bed had nice linens and good pillows, though, and when she led him to the side, she saw that the nightstand had two shelves filled with paperbacks.
He stood there and let her undress him, helping with his boots, stepping out of his jeans, but otherwise meekly letting her tend him. When she turned the covers back, though, his hand clamped suddenly and with force.
Turning to face him, she saw that riotous need in his eyes again, but now with a frantic shadow, something that almost looked like terror. But he didn’t say a word.
Autumn made a guess at what he needed but couldn’t say. “If you want me to stay, I will.”
He searched her whole face, looking for the lie. But she could not have been more sincere.
Finally, he made a single, rusty nod.
Autumn put him to bed. She stripped down to her underwear and climbed in with him.
Immediately, he rolled to her. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled his head to her chest. He lay perfectly still, perfectly silent, and eventually slipped into the amnesiac peace of sleep.
Autumn lay her head on his and held on.