On top of that, Melanie had called twice, and left voicemails both times. He hadn’t listened to them yet, and the knowledge that he should was nagging at him. What if Pacer had gotten even worse? What if he’d OD’d on whatever it was he was taking but Candy hadn’t found?
Distracted, he pushed through the gate of the clubhouse yard with only a cursory glance toward the dusty GTO parked out front. Huh, was all he thought. One of the boys must have gotten in some repo work amidst the chaos.
He thought he saw an extra bike or two parked in the line of Harleys, but he was tired, so maybe not.
Then he walked into his common room and found an atmosphere of unexpected revelry.
Nickel was behind the bar pouring drinks, and his boys, the ones already here, wore smiles; were laughing and calling to one another across the room. Someone had turned on the music, down low, an unobtrusive bit of twangy country guitar floating through. He’d expected sighs, and slumped shoulders, and rounds of whiskey for the frustration, but instead full pints of beer were sitting on the bar, foam sliding down their curves, and people were hugging, people were–
Oh, that was a woman. Two women. Women he didn’t recognize, and not Lean Bitches, either going by their clothes. A slender brunette with a tight ponytail was shaking hands with Cowboy, and then was turning to Michelle – there was his Chelle, TJ on her hip; shit, the boy was getting too heavy for her to be lugging around like that in her condition, and…
His gaze landed on one face in particular, as a man of unremarkable height with very remarkable blue eyes swiped a beer off the bar and sucked the foam off the top. Then it all clicked into place.
Fox. Fox was here.
He’d brought company. That was…shit, that was Albie. Candy hadn’t seen him in over two years, not since he and Chelle were in London.
The women, upon closer inspection, remained strangers. The brunette was beautiful in a sharp-featured, don’t-mess-with-me sort of way. The other, a blonde with big wavy curls and a much-loved tan leather jacket, had her head lifted, and her chin stuck out in a way that left Candy thinking she was nervous as hell, but trying valiantly to cover it with bravado.
His gaze locked with Fox’s, then, and he realized he’d been standing just inside his own front door, staring like an idiot.
He walked forward, and Fox pushed off the bar to come meet him, hand already stuck out for a shake, smirk twisting his lips. “There’s–” he started to say.
Candy caught his hand in a tight grip and tugged him into a hug. He heard the splash of beer hitting the floor as it overran the glass in Fox’s other hand, and heard Fox’s muttered, “Christ, you monster.”
Candy laughed. It sounded a little high and crazy to his own ears, but it eased a bit of the tightness in his chest. “Foxy!” he exclaimed, pushing him back at arm’s length. “Damn, I’m glad to see you! Did you just get in? What are you doing? Thought you were officially patched into Tennessee now.”
Fox did a little twirl, showing off the back of his cut, and the bottom rocker that read TENNESSEE in proud caps. When he turned back around, he was making a stupid, coquettish face that left Candy laughing again. “Why, you thought right, dahling,” he drawled in an overdone Old South accent.
“Easy, Miss Scarlett. You just patched. Why are you here?” A thought struck. “Did Ghost send you? Not that I’m not glad of the help, but he does tend to underestimate everyone who isn’t him.”
Fox dropped the act, expression closing off with a neat, vaguely terrifying efficiency. The way he flipped the switches on personas could make anyone’s head spin, even if you’d known him for years.
“Well,” he said, gaze fixed on Candy. Too fixed. “No. Not Ghost.”
“I called him,” Michelle said, stepping up next to her uncle. She held TJ with both arms – arms that were shaking – and the look on her face sent a pulse of disquiet through Candy. She didn’t have Fox’s knack for hiding what she was feeling – no one did – and she looked at him now with thinly veiled challenge. Jaw set, eyes hard, lips pressed together until they’d gone colorless. Not one of the soft looks she sent him when she thought he was being cute, or dumb; not one of the rare looks she gave him when she let her fear and doubt bleed through.
I called him, she’d said, with the air of someone throwing down a gauntlet. Daring him to reprimand her for it.
Like he was the sort of asshole husband who reprimanded in the first place.
In the last few days, he’d been worried, pissed-off, confused, and terrified where his family was concerned. But this was a new feeling hitting him now: like he’d been getting things badly wrong for a while and hadn’t even noticed.
“She didn’t have to try hard to convince me,” Fox said, putting an arm across Michelle’s shoulders.
Candy didn’t miss the slight shift of her weight as she leaned into him.
She said, “We need his help.”
Candy felt vaguely dizzy. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess we do.”
~*~
Michelle had expected Fox, but she hadn’t expected his retinue.
She hadn’t expected Albie, for starters. The last Fox had told her, he was looking for a place to set up a furniture shop stateside. His face sparkled with flecks of grit from the road, and he smelled like he’d been on the back of a bike for hours when he hugged her, but he looked almost excited, she thought. Maybe that had something to do with the blonde he kept shooting glances toward, checking on.
Her name was Axelle, she said, and even if she looked a little wild-eyed, she shook Michelle’s hand firmly and kept her chin up.
Eden she remembered, though it had been a while. Still as beautiful and put-together as ever, gorgeous enough to model clothes with Raven, too no-nonsense to ever put up with that kind of life. She’d softened a fraction, though; the set of her mouth wasn’t as harsh, and Michelle was surprised to get a hug from her.
But then there were the boys Fox had motioned toward offhand and called, “My students.”
“Um,” Michelle said, leaning into Albie’s shoulder, nodding across the room toward the two of them.
In a way, they couldn’t have looked more different. Different hair colors, and different clothes. Where Tenny was nearly posh, in designer jeans, and a new, still-shiny leather jacket, the scruff on his face groomed and stylish, Reese wore a patched and baggy old army coat under his cut, his jeans stained and ripped at the knees. His hair – pale blond – hung in untidy clumps to his shoulders, sliding out from behind his ears even after he’d tucked it back. He scanned the room with an inhuman watchfulness; she had the sense he had already pegged every exit, every weak point, and was cataloguing ways to disarm all of them. Tenny, by contrast, had perfected an aloof slouch, boots kicked up on the coffee table, hands behind his head.
But she’d grown up around her uncles. She could see the same thread pulled taut in both of them: that thick knitted line of training and performance. Both moved with deadly grace: Reese’s practical, Tenny’s practiced.
Tenny had been taught to walk and talk and sit and glance around a room like a real boy. While Reese had only ever been taught how to kill.
Both of them unnerved her.
Tenny most of all, because he was her uncle.
“Oh,” Albie said, catching on. Then he said, “Here,” and deftly plucked TJ out of her arms and into his own. Her back spasmed, and she stretched it out gratefully.
He arranged TJ on his hip and kept his voice low. “Fox told them this would be good training for them, but really, I think he just didn’t want to leave them in Knoxville unsupervised.”
She nodded. “Makes sense. What do you know about Reese?”
“Reese?” He sounded surprised. “Ghost picked him up about a year ago. He and his sister had gotten away from another club. Colorado, I think? He does what you ask. Very polite. Fairly spooky. Why?”
“Last time I talked to Cass, she couldn’t stop talking about the, and I quote, ‘actual book hero who saved her life.’�
�� She grinned afterward, and then grinned wider when she saw Albie’s horrified expression.
“No,” he said.
“Did you honestly expect a pretty boy with blue eyes to drop out of the ceiling on top of a girl from our family and him not to seem like a book hero? We have a type.”
“No,” he repeated. “No, no, no.”
Michelle laughed, and it was the best she’d felt in days.
“My sister is a child,” he said firmly. “She thinks boys have cooties.”
“She’s sixteen,” Michelle said. “Not a child, and definitely not allergic to cooties.”
“Chelle, please shut up,” he said sweetly, and softened it with a press of his shoulder to hers.
Eden had gone to get a beer, and managed to make sipping it look elegant. “Somewhere we could go to talk?” she asked. From what Michelle remembered, she’d never been one for delaying tough business for the sake of social propriety.
Michelle nodded. “Yeah. I have an office.”
When she turned to take TJ back, Albie hugged him closer and said, “Nope. I’ve got him.”
TJ seemed quite content to play with Albie’s hair, so Michelle left them to it, leading Eden down the hall to the office that had once belonged to Candy, and which now mostly belonged to her.
Axelle came, too. She was the last one in, closed the door, and then perched on the arm of the small leather sofa, like she was uncertain of her welcome.
“Axelle and I work as a unit,” Eden said, and Michelle noticed Axelle’s brows go up, briefly. “We have different skills, and we approach problems from different angles, so it makes for a much more thorough investigation.”
Axelle’s mouth twitched into a tiny smile.
“Charlie will talk to the boys, I know,” Eden continued, crossing her legs. She sat in Candy’s usual chair, upright and prim and serious. “But I wanted to hear it from you, first, before any of the details get muddled by…” She waved toward the door. “Man shit.”
Michelle couldn’t help a grin, though a surprised one. “There will be an abundance of man shit, I promise you.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” she said, feeling at a loss. “Honestly, I called Charlie in a panic. It was very much ‘please come’ and not a lot of rational thought.”
“We’ve all been there, darling,” Eden said, and the endearment was said in a matter-of-fact way, rather than a syrupy or affectionate one; Michelle found it bracing, and comforting. She’d always liked Eden. “There’s no shame is asking for help. From what Charlie tells me, it’s been terrible.”
“It has,” Michelle said. She took a shaky breath and spilled out the whole story.
Eden and Axelle both produced notepads and took notes throughout, gazes flicking from their paper to her face, serious, listening intently.
“You did that?” Axelle asked, when she got to the part about flipping the truck. She sounded impressed. “You ever practice something like that before?”
Michelle resisted the urge to fidget beneath the scrutiny. “No.”
“She asks because she’s something of an expert in that area,” Eden said. “Later, she’ll probably ask you how you did it.”
Axelle grinned. “What do you drive? I saw a Challenger out front when we came in.”
“That’s mine.”
“Hemi?”
“It was insisted upon.”
Axelle’s grin widened. “Nice.”
“Did they identify the men who did it?” Eden asked.
“Someone went to check, I think.” Michelle frowned. “But I have no idea yet what they found out. Not that I’ll be told.” She tried to say it neutrally, but she heard the bitterness in her own voice.
Eden’s look sharpened a fraction. She stared a moment, considering. “Are things alright?” she asked, finally.
“Ha! No. There’s apparently a cult moving into town.” But she knew that wasn’t what Eden had been asking, not with that gaze.
Eden confirmed it with a subtle tilt of her head. “No. With you. With your family. Are you okay?”
Goosebumps broke out all down the backs of Michelle’s arms. “Yes,” she said, flatly. “Of course.”
Axelle’s smile slipped away, her mouth tightening.
Eden’s look became very patient, and Michelle knew the urge to snarl at both of them; another of those ugly instincts like she’d had with Jenny earlier.
Just hormones…she tried to tell herself.
But it wasn’t.
To her shame and horror, her eyes started to burn, her vision to blur.
“Oh, damn,” Eden murmured.
Michelle spun her chair a quarter turn away, so she faced her black computer screen. The reflection that greeted her wasn’t pretty; face crumpling and twisting as she fought to check her emotions. Exhaustion washed over her, as it so often did lately; she’d been blaming it on pregnancy – and that was some of it – but there were echoes of a different kind of weariness: a bone-deep, spiritual fatigue that, now that she acknowledged it, had been building for months, long before she’d even found out she was expecting again. A sense of the sky – this big, clear, blue, fathomless Texas sky – bearing down on her, weighting her, in a way the low clouds and smog of home never had. She felt heavy; felt cumbersome, in a way that had nothing to do with her growing belly.
“My marriage is wonderful,” she managed past the lump in her throat. “Candy is loving, and kind, and he’s the best father. There’s nothing wrong with my family,” she snapped, savage on the end, resentful. How dare Eden even suggest such a thing?
But the tears spilled over, running hot down her cheeks. She dashed at them with the back of her shaking hands, furious, but they kept coming.
“Dude, you made her cry,” she heard Axelle say in a reprimanding tone.
“No,” Eden said softly. “This has been building for a while. Hasn’t it, Michelle?”
Michelle sniffed angrily, desperately trying to regain her composure; she hated crumbling like this in front of these women – in front of anyone.
Her angry retort died on her tongue, though, when she saw Eden’s expression. Soft, and sympathetic – and, even worse, understanding.
“Michelle,” she said, so gently, and Michelle’s tears only came faster. “I’m not suggesting you don’t have a wonderful marriage. I know you love Candy, and your son. That isn’t what I’m saying.
“But I think.” Her tone became even more delicate. “That, if you’re anything like your uncle – which, from what he’s told me, you are – then you’ve perhaps been feeling a bit restless.”
Michelle’s breath caught. The words hit hard – but not in a bad way. No. Like a much-needed slap.
One instantly followed by a rush of guilt. “How can I be restless?” she asked, sniffing, wiping at her face again.
Eden produced a tissue seemingly from thin air, and Michelle took it with a nod of acknowledgement.
“I’m not,” she continued, and paused to blow her nose. “I work constantly. With balancing the books here, and worrying after the bar. And TJ, and trying to stir up some good will toward the club with the city…” The list felt endless. If she wasn’t asleep, she was going, going, going.
“Yes,” Eden said, with another sympathetic smile. “But I wonder…perhaps…if you’re doing anything for your soul.”
Another mental slap.
God, that was it, wasn’t it? Maybe?
She shied hard from the idea, and blotted her face dry with the clean corners of the tissue. She took a big, shaky breath, and finally grabbed hold of herself. When she spoke, her voice came out halfway normal. “I appreciate what you’re saying.” Not really, but politeness never hurt. “But the only problem here is that I’m pregnant, and tired, and full to the brim with hormones. And that little murderer on the loose problem we talked about. Thanks for worrying, but I can handle myself.” Firmer: “I think Uncle Charlie brought you here for your investigative abilities, not to be a marriage counselor.”
The last was harsh – too harsh.
Axelle sucked in a quick, shocked-sounding breath.
But Eden took it in stride, nodding. “Quite right. Well. I think you’ve given me enough to start with.” She stood, and offered a smile – this one the smooth, professional smile of a hired PI about to get to work. “I’ll see if your husband can point me toward any leads, Axe and I will put our heads together, and then hit the ground running, as the Yanks say.”
“Thanks,” Michelle said.
When they were gone, she snuck another look at her computer screen reflection, and wished she hadn’t.
Nineteen
“So that’s your old lady, huh?” Candy had a whiskey in his hand, and the first few swallows had taken the sharper edges off his discomfiture. He needed to talk to Michelle, but he wanted to do it later, when they were alone. For now, Fox had followed him into the chapel.
Fox shrugged. “I don’t put labels on things,” he said lightly – too lightly. He slid into Jinx’s usual chair and sprawled back in it, one boot propped on the opposite knee, half-drunk beer held on his thigh. The picture of casual, competent assuredness. Candy knew it was a cultivated persona – but that Fox had the goods to back it up. And it did make him feel calmer, having the guy under his roof again.
“You trust her?” Candy pressed, just as lightly.
Fox’s expression didn’t shift, but his gaze lifted, bright blue through the screen of his lashes. Michelle’s eyes were the same color, and held some of the same inscrutable mystique – but Fox’s were on a whole different level. Almost inhuman.
He held Candy’s gaze a long moment, before he said, “I wouldn’t have brought her if I didn’t.”
“She’s a PI?”
“And was MI6 before that. Above your paygrade, really,” he said with a wide, sharp grin.
“I’m paying her?”
Fox tipped his head. “Some. I think that’d be polite. The discount rate, we’ll say.”
Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7) Page 14
