Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Dakota
I’m four Lone Stars in and I’m not drunk.
I want to be clear about that.
I’m not drunk. I’m not sloppy. I’m not making decisions I’ll regret in the morning with mascara on my pillow and a headache from hell.
I’m loose. There’s a massive difference there, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.
Loose is the place between sober and stupid where my mouth stops asking my brain for permission.
Loose is the thing my mother used to get on Crown and ginger ale at barbecues, and it made her funny, sharp, and a little bit mean, and people either loved it or got out of the way.
I got her mouth. That’s the thing nobody warns you about—you can lose a woman entirely, she can text you twenty-two words and vanish from your life, yet you still open your mouth and she comes out.
Four beers. A fire burning down to coals.
My sister beside me on the bench smelling like baby shampoo and exhaustion.
My father across the yard with his arm around a woman who isn’t my mother holding a baby.
And Spur at the fence.
Still at that damn fence.
I went up to him an hour ago, threw my best pitch, asked him straight when it was going to stop—the avoiding, the Austin trips, the eight-year performance of a man pretending he doesn’t feel what his whole body is screaming.
He didn’t answer.
But he almost smiled. And I caught it. And I remember it in the place where I keep every scrap of evidence that Spur wants me, which is a place that’s eight years thick and growing.
So.
If he won’t come to me, I’ll go to him.
And if going to him doesn’t work, I’ll make it so he can’t walk away without the whole club watching.
My mother’s mouth. My father’s stubbornness. A combination that has never once in the history of my family produced anything resembling a good idea.
But here we are.
It starts with Thunder.
Thunder’s three whiskeys past useful and he’s telling a story about the mustang in the round pen.
The black one. Sixteen hands of don’t-fucking-touch-me that’s been on the compound for six weeks and hasn’t let a single human within twenty feet.
“That horse is the devil’s kind,” Thunder says. He’s leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed and the authority of a man who has never broken a horse in his life but has strong opinions about them. “I’m telling you. That thing’s gonna kill somebody.”
A few brothers laugh.
Bullseye says something about Thunder being scared of a horse that weighs less than his truck.
Thunder tells Bullseye to go stand in the pen himself if he’s so brave.
I look at Spur.
He’s at the fence. Water bottle in his hand now, not beer.
He’s listening, but he’s not laughing.
His jaw is set and his eyes are on the dark beyond the barn where the round pen is, and I can see it on his face—the way he takes Thunder’s joke personally.
Not because he’s offended. Because that horse is his project.
His patience. His work. And Thunder’s calling it a lost cause from the comfort of a chair he hasn’t left in two hours.
Something clicks in my chest.
Not a decision. Not really.
More like a key turning in a lock that’s been waiting for exactly this moment to open.
I set my beer down on the table.
Presley looks at me. “What are you doing?”
I stand up.
“Dakota.” Presley grabs my wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Something stupid.”
“Should I stop you?”
“You can try, but you won’t get far.”
I walk to the edge of the fire. The coals throw heat against my shins.
Every face at the table turns toward me, because a woman standing up at a fire pit full of bikers with that look on her face is either about to cry or about to start something, and I don’t cry.
“I can break that horse.”
Silence.
Not the polite kind.
The kind where every man at the table recalculates what he thought was happening tonight and arrives at a different number.
Thunder blinks. Bullseye tilts his head. Longhorn’s beer stops halfway to his mouth.
“I can break that mustang by the end of September. Nobody else has.”
I don’t look at Spur. Not yet.
I’m talking to the fire. To the club. To every man who’s watched me grow up on this compound and still thinks of me as Phantom’s little girl who used to sneak sugar cubes to the horses.
I keep talking.
"So, here's the bet."
I turn. Walk across the yard. Ten feet. Fifteen.
The gravel crunches under my boots.
The fire is behind me now and the shadows are long.
I'm walking toward the fence where Spur is standing with his water bottle, his locked jaw, and his body that hasn't moved a single inch since I stood up.
I stop in front of him.
Three feet. The same distance as before.
Except this time the whole club is watching and the fire is at my back and I can feel every pair of eyes at that table on the space between us.
His face.
God, his face.
He knows something is coming.
He can see it the way he sees a horse shift its weight before it bolts—the read, the assessment, the rapid calculation of a man who is very, very good at predicting what an animal is going to do next and is now realizing that I am not a horse and his predictions don't work on me.
"If I break that mustang by end of September—" I hold his gaze. Hold it the way he held mine this morning on the bunkhouse porch. For a few moments too long. Deliberately so. "—you take me to nationals."
Nothing on his face moves. But something behind his eyes does.
"Not as my protection. Not as my father's man."
I take one step closer.
Two feet now.
Close enough to see the pulse in his throat.
Close enough to see his hand tighten around the water bottle until the plastic crackles.
"As mine."
The word lands like a match on dry grass.
Mine.
"You walk me through the gates. You stand at the fence. And everyone in that arena knows who I belong to."
His jaw is locked so tight I can see the muscle jumping under his skin.
His eyes haven't left mine. His chest is rising and falling just slightly faster than it was ten seconds ago, and I want to put my hand on it.
I want to feel his heartbeat under my palm. I want to press my mouth to the hollow of his throat where the pulse is hammering and find out if he tastes the way I think he does—salt and leather and the quiet, condensed fury of a man who has been keeping himself on a leash for eight goddamn years.
I don't touch him. Not yet. Not in front of the club. Not until he says yes.
"And when I ride," I say, quieter now, just for him, just for the two feet of air between us, "I ride for you."
Silence.
The fire crackles behind me. Someone's beer bottle clinks on the table. The mustang in the round pen snorts—I hear it from here, the intense exhale of an animal who doesn't trust anyone, and I almost laugh because same, buddy. Same.
I take a step back and raise my voice so the table hears. "Witnessed?"
A moment of silence. Then Thunder speaks up, because Thunder can't resist stirring shit up. "Witnessed."
Longhorn, quieter, with something complicated in his voice, "Witnessed."
Banshee, from the bench, Bex's feet still in his lap: "I saw that shit."
I don't look at my father. I can't.
If I look at him right now, I'll lose my nerve, and I've been building this nerve for eight years, three weeks, and four Lone Stars.
I'm not losing it now.
"Shake on it, cowboy." I hold out my hand. Steady. Rock steady, even though my heart is doing something illegal in my chest. "Or I walk back to the fire and pretend I never said it."
He looks at my hand, at my face, and then looks at my hand again.
The moment stretches. Two seconds. Five.
Long enough that I start to feel the heat of the fire on my back.
Combined with the heat of his gaze on my front, there’s a very real possibility that he's going to say no, and I'm going to have to walk back to that table and sit down, and die quietly while Thunder makes a joke about it.
Then he takes my hand.
His grip is warm and hard.
His palm is calloused from reins and rope and years of work that have made his hands into something rough and sure.
His fingers close around mine and I feel it in my whole body—the contact, the heat, the current that runs from his skin into mine like touching a live wire.
He doesn't let go.
His thumb shifts. Just barely.
A quarter inch across the back of my hand.
Not a stroke. Not a caress. Just—pressure.
The smallest possible movement that still counts as deliberate.
And his eyes are on mine, they're saying something his mouth won't, his hand won't, and his body has been refusing to say for eight long years.
I feel it everywhere.
In my fingers. In my wrists. In the backs of my knees, the base of my spine, and the place between my hips where the heat pools and settles and makes my breath do something I can't control.
He lets go and steps back.
The kind of stepping back a man does when he knows that if he stays one more second he's going to do something that can't be undone.
I don't step back.
I stand there for a second with my hand still warm, my pulse in my throat, and the whole compound watching and I think: I did it. I actually did it.
Then I turn and walk back to the fire.
I don't look back. I don't need to.
I can feel him watching me. I've always been able to feel him watching.
* * *
I make it back to my cabin.
It’s on the back edge of the compound. Barely six months old. Small and mine.
Pops had it built when I started coming home more often. Didn't ask me. Just had Thunder and a couple prospects frame it out one weekend and told me the key was under the mat.
That's how Pops loves—he doesn't say it, he builds it.
A cabin with a lock, a porch, and enough distance from the clubhouse that his daughter doesn't have to sleep in the bunkhouse with a bunch of bikers.
One bedroom. One bathroom. A kitchen I never use and a couch I always end up falling asleep on. The bed isn’t bad, but it’s too comfortable.
I'm lying on that bed now. On my back.
Boots off, jeans still on, tank top still on, hair fanned out on the pillow in a way that would look good in a photo and looks like a mess in real life.
The ceiling is wood. Pine. I've been staring at it for forty minutes.
My hand is still warm.
That's the thing I can't stop thinking about. Not the bet. Not the words. Not the way every brother at that table watched me walk across the yard like I was either the bravest or the dumbest woman in Texas.
His hand.
The calluses. The grip. The quarter-inch shift of his thumb across the back of my hand that said more than eight years of silence ever did.
I press my palm flat against my stomach and close my eyes.
Feel the ghost of his grip on my skin and the heat that went through me when he held on past those few moments—not a handshake, not a deal, something else.
Something that started in my fingers and went straight down through my gut and settled in a place I haven't let a man reach in longer than I want to admit.
I think about his hands on the reins. On a rope. On a horse's neck, steady and sure.
I think about his hands on me.
I don't let myself finish the thought. Not tonight. Tonight I just hold the warmth of his grip against my belly and breathe.
My phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up.
Three new texts.
Brynn:
DID YOU DO IT?!?!?!?!
Cassidy:
Give me the tea, girl!
Presley:
Night, D. Sleep well.
I ignore all three, swipe to the camera roll, and scroll to the top.
She's there. She's always there.
Sorry kids but I had to leave. I'm going to visit some family and get a break from here.
Twenty-two words. Words that I feel like are lies now.
The text that supposedly came from a woman who is alive, and somewhere visiting family, and chose to leave without a phone call or a forwarding address.
I read it the way I always read it. Looking for something I haven't found yet. A crack. A tell.
My mother would have called me baby girl. She always called me baby girl.
Twenty-two words and not one of them is baby girl.
My thumb hovers over the screenshot button.
For the first time in eleven months, my hand hesitates.
Something happened tonight. Something shifted.
I walked across a fire pit and put my hand in a man's hand and for ten seconds I wasn't the girl.
I put the phone down, roll onto my side, and stare at the wall.
Outside, a truck starts.
I know the sound of every engine on this compound the way I know the sound of every horse in the barn.
That's Spur's truck. The old Ford with the bad muffler that he's been saying he'll fix for two years and never does.
He's leaving.
Middle of the night. After the fire, after the bet, after he held my hand two seconds too long in front of every patched member of the Shotgun Saints.
He's running.
I listen to the engine fade down the road. Getting smaller. The way men do when they're scared of what they feel.
I almost smile.
Run, Spur. Run all the way to Austin if you want. It won't help you.
I made a bet in front of your brothers.
I said the word mine with the firelight on my face and your pulse under my fingers.
That's witnessed. That's on the record. That's the kind of thing you don't walk back from in an MC, you know it, I know it, and every man at that table knows it.
You shook my hand, cowboy.
I’m already yours. You just haven't caught up yet.
I close my eyes, but I don't fall asleep until three in the morning.