by Penny Dee
“The law has let me down more times than you could possibly imagine. Same with my parents. Believe me, if there was any other option I would explore it. But there isn’t. No one can stop him. The only thing I can do is keep one step ahead of him.”
“No one is invincible.”
“He is.”
“Then tell me about him.”
I wanted to, but a cold lump lodged in my throat.
“I will. But can I have a shower first?”
His smile was devastatingly handsome, but the empathy in it made me want to cry.
“Come on. You can pick a bedroom and hit the shower. I’ve got a couple of phone calls to make.”
We continued through the cabin toward the bedrooms. There were two of them. A big one with a king size bed and a view of the river and a second one with a set of bunkbeds and a double bed.
“Take whichever room you want.”
I stepped into the smaller room and put my bags on the bed. Through the curtains, I could see an old shack across the river along the sandy bank.
“This will be perfect. Thank you.”
He went to the kitchen to make coffee while I grabbed some toiletries and clean clothes from my bag, and disappeared into the bathroom. For a cabin, it was a decent size with a shower bath, toilet, a set of shelves with towels, and a porcelain basin beneath a big gleaming mirror. I set my clothes on the basin and turned on the shower. The pressure was good, and as the water warmed, I stripped out of my clothes and stepped under the hot spray. Immediately, I felt my body relax—probably for the first time since yesterday morning. Despite knowing I was safe in the clubhouse, even my sleep had been restless.
Safe.
It had been a long time since I’d felt it. And it was strange to think I found it in a clubhouse full of bikers drinking hard liquor while watching their own battle it out in a makeshift boxing ring.
And because of Chance.
Warmth poured into my chest when I thought about him; he was offering me a glimpse of an unreachable dream—to not have to run from my brother anymore.
I held up my hand and stared at the scar on my palm. The wound had been deep and long and courtesy of Barrett. A reminder to not run away. I was thirteen and it was my first attempt. I got as far as a bus station before a patrol car picked me up and took me home. Money was exchanged and nothing further came of the incident.
As punishment for running away, my parents sent me to my room without dinner and grounded me for two weeks.
Barrett’s punishment was far worse.
That night he slipped into my room, armed with a hunting knife.
“Scream and it will be the last noise you ever make.”
With his hand over my mouth and the other pressing the blade against my throat, I believed him.
Barrett sliced his palm with a hunting knife and then held me down and cut mine.
Mashing our palms together, he declared we were bound by blood. “My blood is in you and yours is in me. You are mine and I am yours.”
“I’m not yours. I will never be yours.”
His eyes narrowed as he squeezed our hands tighter and leaned in. “The sooner you accept it, Sister, the less it will hurt.”
I shivered and closed my palm, shutting the memory back in its box.
Turning off the shower, I dressed quickly and wrapped my hair in the towel before stepping out into the hallway to the inviting aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Chance stood in the kitchen, his broad back to me as he talked on his phone.
“You can confirm you have eyes on him? And he is definitely in California?”
I paused to listen.
Was he talking to someone in California about Barrett?
I stared at the wide shoulders and the T-shirt straining over the muscular body. His arms were huge and the phone looked tiny in his large hand.
“Good, if that son of a bitch leaves town, you let me know right away. I want to be ready for him if he dares come here.”
He was definitely talking about Barrett.
“What am I going to do to him if he does?” I noticed his fingers grip the phone tighter. “I’m going to break every bone in his goddamn body if he steps into this town.”
CHANCE
I hung up the phone and stood in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in my hand, staring out at the river. I refused to think about her taking a shower.
No. Fucking. Way.
My mind wasn’t going to go there.
There being her taking off her clothes and stepping naked into the shower only a few feet away from where I was standing.
But fuck. I’m a guy. And when the girl of your dreams is taking a shower in the very next room, you go there. Not literally there. But you think about what is happening on the other side of the six inches of timber and drywall separating you.
Even if you can’t touch her. Even if you swore off women because the wiring in your brain had short-circuited and touching another woman wasn’t an option until you worked through the chaos in your head.
I drained my coffee and cursed the throb residing in my belly. I didn’t need this. Or want it. But damn if my body had different ideas.
Like I said… I’m. A. Guy.
Needing the distraction, I started to put away the groceries. Before we left the clubhouse, I’d grabbed a few supplies. Coffee. Creamer. Bread. Some of Red’s corned beef. Mayo. Until I worked out what the fuck was going on, I couldn’t gauge how long we would be staying at the cabin, so I’d grabbed a lot of random shit.
Bull told me to take some time off. Things were quiet for the club. He had it working like a well-oiled machine. Since the reopening of the cannabis fields and the supply alliance we had with the Knights, things were running smoothly between the two clubs. It had widened the channels of communications between us, making us allies and not rivals.
So while it was quiet, I was free to have some downtime.
To be honest, it was kind of perfect. I had neglected the fisherman’s cottage over the last few weeks, and staying out here now gave me the opportunity to refocus some of my energy on the restoration.
I looked across the river to the old building. In three months I had cleared away all of the overgrowth and kudzu growing wild through the rotted wooden floorboards and broken brickwork. I had fixed the holes in the roof, but I still needed to re-shingle it. Thankfully the foundation was still solid, but the frame rot had taken me weeks to repair.
There was still a lot to do and taking some time away from the club meant I could focus on it.
The creak of floorboards told me she was behind me. I turned around and holy mother of God! Cassidy stood across the kitchen counter from me, damp from the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel, her Alice Cooper T-shirt doing very little to hide her very hard, perky nipples.
Christ and all things holy.
“Feel better?” I asked, averting my eyes from her rack.
“Yes, thank you.”
I pushed a cup of black coffee across the island countertop toward her.
“There’s creamer in the refrigerator and sugar in the cupboard if you want some.”
She shook her head and took a hungry sip of the coffee. “This is perfect, thanks.”
I watched her lace her fingers through the mug handle and take another appreciative mouthful.
“So what happens now?” she asked.
I poured a second cup of coffee.
“Now you tell me what happened.”
A deep exhale left her body, and I could see her struggling with finding the right words. She nervously played with the necklace around her neck. Gold letters spelled the word Hope.
To help her relax, I asked her about it. “Tell me about the necklace. I’ve noticed you play with it when you’re lost in thought.”
“I do?” She looked surprised.
“Yeah. Last night while you were watching Game of Thrones and again the other night when …”
When you kissed me and it took every ounce of my discipline n
ot to kiss you back.
She looked up at me coyly, her cheeks slightly flushed.
“When I kissed you?” An embarrassed smile tugged at her lips. “It’s okay. We might as well address that elephant in the room.”
This girl was a straight shooter. It was refreshing.
“I wasn’t going to say that. And believe me, it took a lot for me to not kiss you back.” I gave her an easy-going smile and gestured to the necklace again. “So tell me about it. Who gave it to you?”
She smiled softly but it was filled with regret.
“My mom.” She dropped her lashes. “My real mom.”
“Right. That’s why you were referring to Barrett as your foster brother.”
She nodded. “When I was born my mother left me in a laundry basket next to the confessional box at a church just outside of Sacramento,” she said, twisting the gold chain around her finger. “Besides me and a blanket, this was the only other thing in the basket.”
“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You don’t need to apologize.” She let go of the necklace and raised her coffee to her lips, taking a sip. “When I was little I used to think it was what my mother wanted to call me. But as I grew older, I started to think it was what she wanted me to always have. Hope.”
“Your mom really left you in a laundry basket?”
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and nodded. “For the first six weeks of my life I was known as Baby Doe—can you believe it? Made the news and everything. I lived in foster care until they could find the woman who had left me behind. But they never did.”
“So what happened?”
“My story made the news and caught the attention of a prominent family in nearby Sacramento, and they decided to foster me.”
“The Silvermanes.”
She nodded.
“To those looking in from the outside, I suppose it was a godsend for the abandoned child to be adopted by such a rich and loving family. On the outside it was an idyllic match. A hugely successful businessman turned politician, a beautiful, stay-at-home wife and mother to a perfect little boy with a shock of dark hair and big brown eyes. When I came along, I was the cherry on top. Everybody thought we were the postcard perfect family all wrapped up with a big red bow. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.” She ran a finger around the rim of her coffee mug as she spoke. “Kerry Silvermane was an ambitious man. Fifthly rich and full of political aspirations. He was rarely home. And when he was, it was all about photo shoots at the house with his perfectly dressed children and immaculate wife. Everything was done as if we were on permanent public display. Kerry Silvermane wasn’t interested in being a father for anything other than publicity purposes. And his wife was too bombed on vodka and pills to play anything other than the trophy wife.”
I noticed how she didn’t refer to them as her mother and father.
“It’s important for me to have some kind of distinction between me and them,” she explained when I asked her about it. “We’re not family. I don’t care how much they try to pretend that we are. We’re not. It’s the only way I can deal with what happened.”
“Do they know about the rape?”
She frowned. “Can we talk about something else?”
I could see talking about it was affecting her, so I agreed. The rest would come out in time.
“Does your brother have the means to find you?”
She nodded. “And more. He’s rich. And he knows how to get away with things. Worst of all, he will already have a plan in place.”
I leaned down on the counter and raised my eyebrow at her.
“Then we’ll just have to wreck those plans.”
CASSIDY
It was surreal, sitting across from a stranger in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, talking about running away from Barrett. It was out of character for me. I didn’t usually tell anyone anything because people either wanted to help you or take advantage of you. And it was my experience that people were more likely to go for the latter when your surname was Silvermane. Case in point: Missy.
It took a lot for me to trust people. Yet here I was, sitting at a granite kitchen counter, drinking coffee with a fucking amazing looking biker called Chance, telling him more about my life than I’d told anyone in the past two years.
If anything, life was incredibly random at times.
“So do we wait it out? Wait for him to come here?” I asked.
“We don’t know that he will.”
“He will.”
Barrett was already planning something epic. I was sure of it.
“I don’t know what we’re dealing with. I need a bit more time. Until then, you can stay here. We’ll take each day as it comes, okay?”
Something told me this guy would know everything there was to know about Barrett come tomorrow.
Well, almost everything.
“You’ll need to lie low. But you’ll be safe here.”
I stood up, wondering how to broach the subject.
“Listen, if I’m staying in Destiny, then there’s something I really want to do,” I spoke cautiously, knowing I was going to meet with some resistance. “I’d really like to go back to work at the diner tomorrow.”
I couldn’t explain it. I had only known Molly for five minutes, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. There was something special about her. And despite my poor choice of friends, i.e. Missy, I was usually a good judge of character. Molly was kind and generous, and in some way she filled the motherless void in my heart.
But just as I suspected, Chance shook his head. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I know it could be. But I won’t leave the diner, and I’ll be surrounded by people all the time.”
He frowned. “Yesterday you were leaving town, now you want to go back there. Why?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I can’t let Molly down. If she knew I was here and I didn’t show up for my shift... she took a chance on me, and I don’t want to repay her kindness with disappointment.”
Chance did a good job at hiding his frustration. Well... almost. His eyes darkened as he thought about it.
“Fine,” he said calmly. “But you don’t leave the diner. Not for anything. And I mean for anything or for anyone. I’m not kidding. If Alice freaking Cooper is standing outside summoning you… you don’t leave the fucking diner. Got it?”
I nodded. “Got it.”
The look on his handsome face was stern. “And, California, if you want to beat this thing, we do it my way, okay?”
Our eyes lingered on one another for a moment before I slowly nodded in agreement.
Later, when the sun was getting low in the sky and the crickets came out to sing, we sat out on the veranda in two wooden deck chairs.
Chance told me about the fisherman’s cottage he was remodeling. The old house with weather-beaten boards and a crooked porch was directly across the river from us. It looked like it had been abandoned for years and was only now seeing sunlight for the first time in a very, very long time.
I could see the overgrowth had been pulled back, and there were water lines staining the old timber where floodwaters had risen and receded over the years. The glass windows were still in place, and surprisingly unbroken, but the front door was missing. Once upon a time it would’ve been someone’s pride and joy. Their house. Their home. I imagined babies sitting on the knees of grandparents who sat out on the covered porch and enjoyed the view of the river while the mother worked in the kitchen and the father worked out in the fields until dark.
But somewhere along the way it had been abandoned. Left to rot in the rain and the sun and flounder in the floods. Alone and unloved. Until Chance came along and decided to breathe life back into it.
I wasn’t going to even go there with the comparison between me and that house, because that was not only too cheesy, it was too damn sad to even contemplate.
Instead, I was going to sit here and play my guitar, which was always my go-t
o when I started to feel down.
“You’re good. Who taught you to play?” Chance asked.
“Benji. Kerry’s chauffeur. I was ten when he started driving me to and from school. We took to each other straight away. He was so funny. Friendly.” Warmth collided with sadness in my chest when I thought about Benji. Warmth because Benji had been so nice. Sadness because of what had happened. “He used to drive me to and from school. He became my friend, I guess. After supper, I would sit with him and Mrs. Drinnan, our housekeeper, in the butler’s pantry behind the kitchen, and he would teach me the guitar while Mrs. Drinnan got me milk and cookies.”
They were the only fond memories of my childhood. Those evenings with them, learning guitar, while Mrs. Drinnan brushed my hair and Benji told us stories about growing up in New York. I looked forward to that time of the day. Being included. Being loved.
“This was his.” I nodded at my guitar. “He gave it to me to practice with.”
“He sounds like an alright guy.”
“He was.”
“Was?”
I put the guitar down.
“When Barrett …” I paused. I hated recalling this time in my life, but I had to give Chance something to work with. He needed to know about the people he was helping me hide from. “When Barrett did what he did… I kind of confided in Benji. Asked him hypothetical questions. Asked for a friend. I told him things, not everything, just enough for him to realize something wasn’t right. I’m pretty sure he already had his suspicions about Barrett. He knew something wasn’t good with him.” Absentmindedly, I started to play with my necklace. “One night I saw him talking with Kerry. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but it looked tense. The next day someone new drove me to school. When I asked Kerry where Benji was, he curtly told me he had been relocated.”
Years later I learned Benji hadn’t relocated at all. He was made to disappear.
“I don’t know what my father did. But it wasn’t good. You don’t question Kerry Silvermane. Ever.”
Chance picked up the guitar, and to my surprise, started playing around with some chords.
