Spur (Shotgun Saints MC #4)

Prologue

Spur

Eight years ago.

There is a version of my life that ends tonight.

I don't know that yet. I'm twenty-seven years old. I'm three Crowns deep into the best night of my adult life.

My back aches where the new patch sits between my shoulder blades, hot and itching through the leather of my cut, and I keep reaching back to scratch it like a dog that can't quite get to the spot.

Phantom watches me do it with the expression of a man who's just given somebody a life they didn't know how to ask for.

"It gets lighter," he says. "Not the leather. The weight."

I believe him.

Tonight, I believe everything.

Tonight, I turned twenty-seven, got patched in, and I’m a little drunk.

The swelling in my leg has gone down for the first time in six months, and I'm going to believe whatever this man tells me, because this man is the reason I'm not, at present, a line in a newspaper and a hole in the ground outside San Angelo.

He doesn't know that. The brothers don't know that. I know it. I'll carry it in my chest until they put me in my own hole, in whatever part of Texas will have me when the time comes.

He pours me another Crown and toasts the patch.

"Welcome home, son."

Something in my chest breaks open, and I can't tell if it's grief or the opposite.

Shadow slaps my back and laughs like a drain. "Don't scratch it, you'll look like you've got fleas."

"I've got fleas."

"You had fleas. We've deloused you. Read the patch, brother."

I laugh. Phantom laughs. Every man in the room laughs because every man in this room has been where I have been, or close enough to it to understand.

Where I have been is nowhere you'd want to go.

Where I am is the best room I have ever stood in.

The clubhouse is mostly men. A couple of ol’ ladies and clubwhores hang around.

In the corner, I notice a woman before I know who she is.

Blonde, closer to Phantom’s age. Not drinking with anyone. Red Solo cup.

Phantom follows my eyes.

"Jolene," he says. "Come meet the new patch."

She comes over, kisses Phantom's cheek, and shakes my hand.

Her grip is strong, and I don't mean strong for a woman. I mean strong.

"You're the bull rider."

"Was."

"I know what you were."

Her eyes are blue and tired in a way I'm too young to read.

She smiles, but it doesn't go all the way up her face.

"Welcome to the family, Cade. Try not to break anything that belongs to us."

She walks back to her corner, red Solo cup in hand, watching the room.

The door opens just before ten.

I know the time because Phantom's been checking his watch every twenty minutes since sundown, the way a father checks a watch when he's expecting something that means more to him than he's going to admit out loud.

When the door opens, the whole room turns.

Which should tell me something, except I'm a little drunk and a little full of myself.

She walks in.

My spine knows before my eyes do.

Something shifts in the air—not the sound, the brothers keep laughing, the jukebox keeps playing George Strait—but the space rearranges itself around the door.

Gravity.

A planet entering the room.

I look.

She might be in her late teens or early twenties.

She's sunburned across the bridge of her nose in the exact pattern of a straw hat that's been off and on all day.

Her sandy hair is half-braided, half-fallen-out, the kind of hair that's been fought with and won.

Jeans dusty at the knee. Boots scuffed soft at the toe. A silver belt buckle on her hip that I recognize from ten feet away as a regional first-place, because I used to have them too, back when I was winning things.

Her eyes find Phantom first, and she smiles.

The smile is crooked. One side higher than the other, like she's thinking about a joke she's not going to tell.

She crosses the room to my Prez, puts her arms around his neck, and kisses his jaw and says something into his ear that makes him laugh—really laugh, the way he laughs at nobody else in the room, the laugh a man keeps in a vault for one person.

Then her eyes find me.

Not soft. Not shy. Not the way young women are supposed to look at a patched biker twice their size at a clubhouse party.

Appraising.

Like I'm a horse at auction and she's the one with the money.

I feel it in my femur. The rod goes warm.

I don't believe in ghosts. But if I did, I'd tell you the bull that ended me gave a small, low laugh from whatever part of Texas it was buried in, because the bull knew exactly what it felt like to be assessed by something that might own you.

"Spur."

Phantom's voice. His hand between her shoulder blades, steering her toward me.

"My daughter, Dakota. Just in from Odessa. She took the barrel race last weekend. You two ought to get along." He looks right at his daughter, "Dakota, this is our new patch. Cade Holloway. Goes by Spur."

She sticks out her hand.

"Spur," she says. Tasting it. "That's on the nose."

"Didn't name myself, darlin'."

She takes my hand.

The grip is stronger than I expected. She doesn't let go on the beat I try to pull.

One second.

Two.

Holds me the way a woman holds a rein she isn't sure about.

"So, you're the new patch," she says. "Pops says you were a hell of a bull rider. What happened?"

"Got careless."

She tilts her head. One degree. Two.

"You don't look like a man who gets careless."

"Got careless," I say again. Quieter.

"That's not a story."

"No, ma'am."

"Are you going to tell me the story?"

"No, ma'am."

Her mouth does something—the crooked smile again, but this time it's slower, and it has an edge on it I'm not ready for.

"Good," she says. "I'd hate to think you were one of those men who hands out his whole life in the first handshake."

Something under my sternum rearranges.

Not desire.

There's desire in it, she's grown and gorgeous in the way a woman raised on a ranch is gorgeous—but desire isn't what shocks me.

What shocks me is that it took her four seconds to see straight through me.

To the part I don't show anybody.

The part that knew it was going to get on that bull in Laredo and chose to anyway.

The part that isn't careless.

The part that's what got me on the bull in the first damn place.

Ten seconds in, and I know I'm in fucking trouble.

She lets go of my hand and doesn't drop her eyes.

Dakota takes the Lone Star Phantom's handing her. "One, Dakota. Only one. You've got a run in the morning."

She sips it with the patience of a woman who's been negotiating with her father over beer since she could walk.

"Welcome to the Saints, Spur," she says. "Try not to get yourself killed. You’re one of the pretty ones."

Dakota walks off, a shit-eating grin on her face. She heads straight over to the bar, and her mother locks eyes with her.

Jolene looks back at me for a split second, then back at her daughter. I can’t read the look that passes between them.

Something like a warning. Something like tenderness. Something like a woman watching her own mirror walk across the room and wishing the mirror didn't have to learn what she's learned.

I catch it anyway. I catch all of it—the grin, the mother's eyes, the shape of the air between them. A man who's spent his life reading bulls reads a room the same way.

Dakota takes a stool at the bar next to Rogue.

Leans her elbow on the wood. Laughs at something he says—a real laugh, loud and unbothered, the kind of laugh that doesn't care who in the room is listening. I'm listening.

I shouldn't be listening.

I know I shouldn't be listening and I can't make myself stop.

She tips her Lone Star back and takes a long swallow.

The silver buckle at her hip catches the clubhouse light, and I find myself doing math I have no business doing—how old she was when she won it, how many does she have on a shelf at home, whether her daddy put the first one on her or whether she earned it before he was paying attention.

She turns on the stool, catches me watching and doesn't look away. Hell, she holds my eyes across the clubhouse for three full seconds.

Then she raises her beer. An inch. A toast. For me.

My mouth goes dry.

Ten seconds ago I promised myself I wasn't going to look at her.

I'm looking at her.

I'm still looking at her when the hand lands on my shoulder.

Phantom.

I haven't turned around. My back's to him. He knows. I know he knows. I don't even have to look at him to know it.

"Spur."

One word. Quiet.

I turn.

Phantom's face isn't angry.

That's what surprises me.

I've just been caught by my president having a thought I have no business having about his daughter, and his face isn't angry.

His face is sad.

He shakes his head. Once. Small.

I nod. Once. Small.

That's the entire conversation.

That's the vow.

No hand on a Bible. No knife across a palm. No brothers witnessing.

One headshake from the man who was kind enough to pull me out of a Laredo motel room, and one nod from the man he pulled.

Off-limits.

Forever.

I feel it settle into me the way the patch did. Between my shoulder blades. Hot. Permanent.

Phantom pats me on the shoulder and turns back to the bar, ordering a prospect to pour me another Crown.

"Tell the boys about Laredo," he says. "The version where the bull wins."

I tell the story the way he wants it told—bull wins, rider loses, no tragedy, just a thing that happens in Texas—and the brothers laugh.

Shadow slaps my back again, somebody's ol’ lady kisses my cheek and calls me sweetheart, and the clock above the bar says it’s two after eleven when I excuse myself to get some air.

I don't get any air.

I get my ass to the barn.

The barn sits a hundred yards behind the clubhouse.

Old. Cedar. Built by Phantom's father in the sixties, the kind of barn that smells like eighty years of horse and hay and something underneath both that's just Texas.

I know horses better than I know people. I always have.

My daddy ran a small place outside San Angelo.

I was on a horse before I was on my feet. I got into bulls because bulls were the thing that could hurt me.

When I was nineteen I wanted to be hurt. I'd have been better off staying with horses.

That was the plan, after Laredo. After the rod. After Phantom pulled me out of a motel room and said, Come to Sharp with me, son. We'll figure the rest out.

Slow work. Quiet work. A man, a halter, and some time.

I walk the aisle. Stalls on both sides. Three-quarter horses, all asleep on their feet. A paint filly with one blue eye.

And at the end, in the last stall, an old gelding with a gray muzzle and a swayed back. Yet this guy has the most tired, patient eyes of a horse that I’ve ever seen.

The plaque on his stall says WHISKEY.

I let myself in. He doesn't move. Just watches me.

Puts his nose against my chest.

"Hey, old man."

Horse breath. Sweet and grassy and familiar. I put my hand on his neck, under the mane, the skin warm.

A horse doesn't care what you are. A horse cares what you do. My hand isn't shaking, but something under my hand is.

I tell him what I'm not going to tell anyone else.

"I just made a bad mistake, Whiskey."

He doesn't blink.

"I just shook hands with a girl I have no business thinking about. And I thought about her anyway. Her daddy saw me think about her. I've been patched in for barely a damn day."

He breathes.

"I'm going to keep my hands off her. I'm going to keep my eyes off her. I'm going to keep my boots in my own truck and my mouth shut, and I'm going to stay the hell away from Odessa come barrel season. You understand me, old man?"

Whiskey does what horses do.

He listens.

He doesn't tell.

"Good man."

I stand in his stall for a long time. How long, I couldn't tell you.

My femur aches the way it aches when the weather's coming.

The leather's still itching between my shoulder blades.

The Crown is warm in my stomach.

Somewhere, back at the clubhouse, I hear laughter drift across the pasture.

A woman's laugh, but I don’t think it’s Dakota’s.

I stand in the barn with an old horse, and I lie to myself.

I tell myself I can do this. I tell myself the vow holds.

I tell myself that in a year—maybe two—whatever just happened in that clubhouse will have faded into the kind of thing a man remembers fondly and does nothing about.

A girl he met once. A handshake that went a few seconds too long. A story he'll tell Whiskey on quiet nights and nobody else.

Whiskey listens.

He doesn't tell me I'm wrong.

He doesn't tell me anything at all.

But somewhere behind a twenty-year-old gelding's eyes, somewhere in whatever wordless thing goes on in a horse—I think he knows.

Behind me, through the open barn door, the laughter of the Shotgun Saints drifts across the pasture like a promise.

Off-limits.

Forever.