Eating Asphalt (Sacred Hearts MC Pacific Northwest Book 5)

by A. J. Downey

  “Really? That was fast.”

  “Wasn’t a big job,” he said as we went across the yard toward his truck. He opened his truck door for me, too – an ultra-modern RAM pickup, shiny and black.

  “Watch your shins, there’s a step that’ll come down when I open the door.” I nodded and he opened the door, a running board folding down from underneath the truck.

  “Fancy,” I said with a smile and stepped up into the clean cab.

  He shut the door behind me with a smile.

  “You like the house all gray like that?” he asked me when he got in.

  I took a deep breath and let it out.

  “No, not particularly. Get that enough around here as it is,” I said, leaning forward to look up out of the windshield to the leaden-gray sky.

  “True enough,” he agreed, glancing too for a second as he started the truck. I blinked as the large panel lit up in the center and then really did a double take as he twisted a dial to select his gear.

  “That’s crazy,” I muttered, and he laughed.

  “Yeah, not gonna lie. I’ve turned up or down the volume a couple times by accident trying to put this thing in gear.”

  “It’s a good thing you haven’t fucked that up the other direction!” I declared.

  “True story,” he said and backed out of my driveway.

  “You were saying about paint,” I said, staring out the window.

  “Yeah, maybe the movers taking a minute with your stuff is a blessing in disguise. Painting is a whole hell of a lot easier when there’s no furniture in the way.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “So is cleaning.” I gave him a little bit of side-eye on that one. His men had taped down a paper walkway on my floor all through from the basement out the front door, but my hardwoods were an absolute mess. They had tracked dirt from the basement all through the house, from the living room to the hall to what was now my bedroom and my office. I had yet to get a mop or broom to clean it up.

  Jared laughed and had the grace to look a little embarrassed.

  “Yeah, don’t you worry about that. I’ve got it handled and the floor will be spotless before you know it.”

  “Thank you,” I said with a tiny smile of my own.

  “Technically, Hilary was supposed to give the place a good once-over before you moved in,” he said, and I made a rude noise. He laughed and said, “Exactly.”

  That certainly wasn’t going to happen. The woman was the epitome of cheap and lazy. I hadn’t anticipated just how much work still needed to go into the house until I’d seen it in person. The photographs had been much kinder than the in-person reality of it. The paint job was shitty at best. Several closets didn’t have knobs, let alone closet rods in them. I mean, I was handy, but it was a lot of little things that needed doing that honestly all added up to time I just did not have.

  I worried my bottom lip between my teeth and tried to pay attention to where Jared was taking us, right up until he pulled us into the lot at an unassuming strip mall off the nearest main drag. He turned the dial on his dash to ‘park’ and turned off the truck, settling his fist on top of his thigh and turning in my direction.

  “Spill,” he said. “What’s going on in there?”

  I dropped my eyes to my phone in my hands, which rested on my purse in my lap – a modest canvas handbag with a clipped-on crossbody strap that spilled uselessly to the truck’s floorboard.

  “The house,” I admitted.

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “The pictures were kind,” I said, letting out a pent-up breath. “It’s missing a lot of little things, and it all adds up time wise and I guess… I guess, it’s all just a bit overwhelming.”

  He nodded and I smiled a bit ruefully.

  “Thanks for listening to me bitch,” I said after a moment of silence.

  “Happy to help,” he said. “Come on, let’s eat, and we can make a game plan.”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  We got out of his truck, and he led me across the lot to an inconspicuous little mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant.

  “Really?” I asked as he opened the door for me.

  “Best street tacos in the area,” he said with a grin. “As authentic as you can get.”

  I smiled and said, “I guess we’ll see.”

  He didn’t wait for us to be seated, just picked a table, and slid into the booth. I slid in across from him and a moment later a woman appeared, a pad of paper in hand but no menus.

  Jared rattled off some Spanish and she grinned. They bantered a moment and she laughed and nodded, wrote some things down, and he looked at me.

  “Chicken, beef, or pork?”

  “Um, beef.”

  “Shredded, ground, or steak?”

  “Shredded please,” I said.

  He talked to the waitress some more and she left, returning a moment later with glasses of water, chips, and salsa.

  “Okay,” he said, looking me up and down, hands folded in front of him atop the table. “What’s bugging you the most?” he asked. “Don’t try and decide what needs prioritizing or any of that shit now. Just what’s eating you about the house?”

  “The lack of closet doorknobs, the fact that the kitchen cabinets and drawers don’t have any knobs, and the lack of rods in the closets. I feel like I can’t hang anything up or put anything away.”

  “All of those are easy fixes. After we eat, we’ll swing by the hardware store and start getting some things.”

  I blinked and he cocked his head as if he were expecting an answer and I sort of jolted into the here and now and said without really thinking, “Okay.”

  He nodded as though satisfied with that and said, “Now, if it’s alright with you, I’d like to ask…” he trailed off and my curiosity got the better of me. I nodded my assent for him to go ahead.

  “What happened with Mr. Mitchell?”

  I sighed and put my chin in my hand.

  “That’s a long story, and it doesn’t have a happy ending,” I said.

  “We don’t have anywhere to be,” he said, holding open his hands and gesturing at the mostly empty restaurant around us.

  “I suppose not,” I said with a weak smile. “Where to begin?”

  “Well, we went through pregnant, married, had kid, and we glossed over graduation,” he said with a half-smile and I blushed.

  “Careers,” I said haltingly, both good. Really good, actually, his better than mine… but his required a lot of travel so we thought. I swallowed hard and said it out loud. “Ben died, suddenly… um.” I cleared my throat, a lump taking up residence in it.

  I took a deep breath and let it out.

  “We thought he was traveling a lot for work, and it um… it turned out he had a whole other family that we didn’t know about and a will, leaving everything to them.”

  “Oh, what?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded slowly. “That’s pretty much the expression I wore, too.”

  “Holy shit,” he said, his eyebrows reaching for his hairline. He picked up his glass of water and took several swallows and set it down, clearing his own throat. “So, uh, how did that all work out?”

  “Not well, for either of us. I was Ben’s legal wife, and so I, of course, contested the will, but it was legally binding and all of that so all I really got out of it was the small life insurance policy that was in my name. The rest? The house and everything else? Went to her and her kids… which considering I paid for half of it that was some bullshit, but you know.” I gave a feeble shrug. “That’s the south for you. Even dead, a man’s word outweighs any of his wife’s desires.”

  “Jesus, fuck.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t want to fight anymore. I just wanted out what I put in. I got a fair bit so I could pack us up and move somewhere to start over.”

  I looked away, my cheeks heating with embarrassment. Stupid, stupid, so stupid, echoed through my mind. My mantra since everything had come to light.

  “I can see why Marc is angry
,” Jared said soberly.

  “Yeah.” I nodded in agreement. “I just don’t have it in me to be mad anymore. I’m just…” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “I’m just sad more than anything. Embarrassed.”

  He searched my face and asked, “What do you have to be embarrassed about?”

  I sighed. “He was having his checks split between two bank accounts and handled the majority of the finances. I’ll be paying some debts for a while. Embarrassed because we worked for the same firm and I guess… I guess they all knew. They had to.”

  “Jesus Christ, people suck,” he said, and he looked about as queasy as I felt since this whole ordeal began.

  “Right?” I asked and stared out into the dimly lit gloom of the restaurant with its colorful terracotta-edged booths with their cracked red-vinyl seats.

  “I bet not one of them lent you a helping hand,” he said, and I shook my head.

  “Nope, it’s just me and Marc against the world.” I gave a small smile at that. “Of course, hindsight being twenty-twenty, it’s just been me and Marc for a long time now.”

  “That ain’t right,” he said. He looked, I don’t know… like he was angry on my behalf or something. The sentiment was appreciated. Aside from my parents, it honestly felt like I had no one in my corner, and even my parents… well, they may have been in my corner, but it was from afar. Always had been. They’d hated Ben and thought I’d made a terrible mistake marrying him and oh boy, they’d been right. I couldn’t tell you how much I hated that.

  I nibbled on a chip that I lightly dipped in the sauce-like salsa that’d been provided.

  Jared looked like he was still processing, and it was all I could do not to squirm in my seat.

  “To new beginnings,” he said finally, holding out his water glass. I gave a watered-down smile and clicked my glass against his and wished I could share the clear firmness of his belief. I mean, I didn’t hold out much hope for myself or my future. I felt damaged, and unlike my house, I felt as though I was beyond repair.

  “To new beginnings,” I murmured and had the grace to at least take a sip before I put my glass down.

  8

  Glass Jaw…

  It was too bad a motherfucker could only die once. I had to reevaluate my initial impression of Cadence Mitchell after her revelation. I thought she’d been pretty before, maybe a little easily riled up or overwhelmed, but after that little bomb drop of hers, I quickly fucking realized that nothing could be further from the truth.

  The woman across from me ran deep, incredibly so, and she had hidden recesses that I could probably only dream of.

  It made her exponentially hotter, at least to my mind. There was honestly nothing sexier than a woman who could hold her own and keep her secrets. If she was this good at keeping her own, it meant if she had a mind to, she could keep a man’s as well.

  That was incredibly hot.

  Likewise, I had to admit that her putting her trust in me like this? That was hot as well. I mean, clearly the situation with her dead husband caused her a lot of embarrassment, which it shouldn’t. That shit was on him. But by the same token, I got it. I really did. It was the rest of the citizenry that got it twisted, not the likes of me. I’m sure she’d heard ‘how could you not know?’ more than a few times by now but she wouldn’t hear it from me. She didn’t know because he didn’t want her to know, and that was usually how that kind of shit worked.

  I knew, from personal experience, not to cheat on a woman – I wasn’t scum. If I wanted to stray that fuckin’ bad, shit was already over and I had the fucking decency to drop the axe and sever ties before I went and got my dick wet somewhere else. No, I meant I knew because of my ties with the club which were stronger than iron. You couldn’t live this life and be completely honest with anyone but your brothers. Women, by default, played second fiddle – always. That was just the way it had to be, mostly for their own protection. Real men didn’t drag their lady to hell with them.

  As I looked at Cadence, her shoulders rounded forward and slightly hunched, the glint of hurt and the fear of being unjustly judged in her captivating green eyes, I hated for her that she’d put her chips all in with such a craven asshole. I bet she hadn’t been touched in a while, and that was a damn shame. She was fucking gorgeous, curvaceous, all sleek sweeping lines that begged for the caress of a man’s hands.

  We were saved from an ensuing awkward silence by the arrival of our food. A few bites in, I turned the subject from personal to semiprofessional, talking about the house. She was bright and knew her shit and what needed prioritizing off her inspection report versus what was just a bunch of fucking penny-ante bullshit.

  It just made her hotter to me, her intelligence. She was bright, and discerning, and holy fuck, she was the total package.

  “Shit,” she muttered, looking at her watch.

  “Time to go?” I asked. We’d finished our meal a little while ago.

  “Yeah, time flies when you’re having fun, I guess,” she said with a little laugh.

  “Glad you’re having fun,” I said with a smile I couldn’t suppress if I’d wanted to. She made it really hard to play it cool.

  I paid. I wouldn’t hear of her doing it, even for just her own meal. I told her it was my official ‘welcome to Washington, I promise it doesn’t suck here.’ She’d laughed slightly, a tightness around her eyes that told me she was beyond worried she’d made some kind of horrible mistake in coming here to restart her and her son’s lives, which inexplicably was a sort of kick in the ‘nads.

  It gave me the feeling that the whole process of getting across the country for her had been nothing but pitfalls and one big pain in the ass, all the opposition in the world coming from this corner of the planet. With Hilary McConnel in the mix, I wouldn’t put it past anything that that was the case. If I was lucky, I would probably get the full meal deal on that and I was kind of eager to, to be honest. Couldn’t fix it if you didn’t know what was broken.

  I opened the passenger door of my truck and warned her again to keep back and watch the runner board coming down. She smiled at me, a grateful little thing, and got in. I shut the door for her.

  “Give your boy a call. We still have to stop at the hardware store,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, we can do it later,” she said, and I raised an eyebrow.

  “You gotta work tomorrow or can you rearrange a few things?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” she said, and I nodded.

  “I know it,” I replied.

  “I’m free,” she said. “I guess.”

  I smiled.

  “Good deal.”

  I took her back home. Marc was walking up the back alley to the back door of their place when we pulled up.

  “Hey, Mom,” he called as she stepped down from the cab of my truck.

  “Hey, how was your first day?” she asked.

  “It was okay,” he said. “Hey, Jared.”

  “Hey,” I answered genially. “I’ve got some cleanup down in the basement,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m done.” Cadence nodded and went to the back door, keying open both locks on the security door and then the back door to the house beyond it.

  “Hey,” I murmured, and she stopped and raised an eyebrow at me, a silent ‘go on’ and so I did. “Do me a favor,” I told her. “When you leave the house, it’s just an empty house with stuff in it. Stuff can be replaced. You and Marc can’t. Just lock the deadbolt on one of these doors. When you’re home? Yeah, lock all four – but when you’re out, it takes too long to get in the house. You feel me?”

  She paused and searched my face and finally nodded slowly. Marc said, “Way to freak us out.”

  “I don’t mean to freak you out,” I protested. “Just like to keep you both safe.”

  “Why?” Marc asked, shoving in the back door. “You don’t even know us.” He wasn’t meaning to be rude. Nothing in the kid’s tone telegraphed sarcasm or teen-attitude problem. He was just doing that thing teens did – thought
to mouth, no filter in between.

  Cadence gave him a slight glare behind the kid’s back. One of those mommy looks of death that said she wasn’t about to take him to task in front of company or whatever, but later? She’d verbally take a stripe out of his hide. I almost felt sorry for him… but you know how that goes. Never get between a mama and her cub.

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured at me, searching my face. I smiled at her gently.

  “Don’t be,” I said simply. “No reason. He’s just a kid being a kid.” I gestured she should go ahead of me, and she stepped up into the house.

  I followed suit, closing the security screen door. I went to close the inner door itself and Cadence called back over her shoulder, “Leave it open. It’s nice out.” I nodded and threw the lock on the security door, and she smiled and said, “Thank you for lunch.”

  “It was no problem,” I said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

  “Thanks,” she said and skirted into the kitchen and went back toward her office.

  The basement door was directly across from the back door, and I went for it, smiling to myself when I heard her on the stairs overhead going up to Marc’s room.

  I knew that was right. She was gonna go talk to him about having a fuckin’ filter.

  Chuckling, I went down as she went up to finish my cleanup and to get out of their hair for tonight.

  I found her in her office when I was through and ready to head out.

  “Knock, knock,” I called softly, and she looked up and back from her drafting table.

  “Ready to leave?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” I nodded and stepped into the space holding out a couple of sheets off my yellow legal pad I kept around to make lists and write measurements.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Took the liberty of making a list for the hardware store,” I said, clearing my throat. “The stuff on the first page is shit you really ought to get right now if you can afford it. I’m happy to work with you on cost when it comes to labor. Some of it I’m even willing to do for free if you can just wait for evening time or the weekend.”

  “Why would you do that?” she asked, frowning slightly.