by Toby Neal
Smolder Road
Lucy
Emily Kimelman
Toby Neal
Copyright Notice
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
© Neal/Kimelman 2017
[email protected]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
Cover by Jun Ares: [email protected]
Contents
ARC Copy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Acknowledgments
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Thank you for reading Smolder Road and being part of our Scorch Series journey!
Chapter One
Kane
The Haven will be mine.
I smooth the old blueprint, paid for with lives, of the underground survival complex—that fortified stronghold with its modest cabin hiding so much. My sister, faithless bitch that she is, sleeps somewhere in the earth beneath it, her blood carrying the cure. When I’ve got what I want from her, what Great Nation America needs, she and that whole dago family who own the place will be underground, permanently.
Once I control the Haven, nothing can stop me. I’ll be on my way to the White House. Anticipation makes my hands prickle with eagerness. I roll up the blueprint to hide it.
“Take a team of four. Recon the place. Find their weaknesses. And don’t let them see you.”
“Thought you’d never give the word.” Jackson, my right hand, grins like a wolf scenting fresh meat.
“We had to get set up. This base is even better than the other one.” I look around the dim, cool office. Stone walls protect and enclose me, a good feeling. “I’m sure they’ve got weaknesses. We’ve just got to find them. Now, go.” I flick a hand at him.
“You got it, Boss.” Jackson wheels and leaves, calling for his favorite scouts.
Roan
Tanning a hide shouldn’t make me think of her—but these days, everything makes me think of Lucy. I stroke the silky brown-and-gray fur. Her skin is even softer.
I need to focus on my cabin, not a woman I can never have.
The place still smells a little musty, but each week it gets better as I work on the restoration. Breaking away from the busyness at the Haven, my friend JT’s nearby survival complex, doesn’t feel like betrayal now that the first wave of devastation from Scorch Flu has passed. Ninety percent of the population succumbed to that terrifying flu—a fever so high they call it the Scorching, a cough so deadly that victims drown in their own immune reaction.
Things are finally settling, at least in our area. The bodies are buried, and we’ve begun to rebuild.
But long before this apocalypse, my heritage was stolen and fell into ruin. I’m taking it back. I don’t need the Haven or its people, never did.
Every corner of this simple cabin is filled with memories: the kitchen area with its squat black cook stove where Grandfather prepared meals. The room at the rear where we slept, his snores rattling the windows. The living area, anchored by a wood-burning stove where we sat in the evenings, as Grandfather wove pine needle baskets or beaded while I did the prep work. The tiny closet where he locked me in when I refused to speak.
Terror of small spaces still haunts my dreams.
Grandfather died out here, refusing to leave when the government annexed the cabin as part of a buffer zone around what became the Haven. Ranting and protesting, he expired from a heart attack when they tried to move him by force.
At least, that’s the story they told me in prison.
I shake my head to clear it.
I’ve spent most of the summer building a bathroom with a flush toilet and installing a clay sink with a faucet in the kitchen. Both have gravity-fed tanks I fill from the pump out front, but it is a luxury compared to when I grew up. With those major projects done, I’m curing this stash of rabbit hides and sewing them together for a bed covering.
As if she’d ever join me on something so humble…
But I’m not doing it for Lucy.
This is for me.
I retrieve the last two rabbit skins, already stretched over a frame and drying in a box closed off to animals. I’ve got a jar of brains from hunting that I’ll use to tan them. The substance is soft and cold, pale and waxy, the texture of tofu.
The sun is warming the clearing on this fresh spring day. I strip off my buckskin shirt to avoid getting any tanning materials on it and drape it over a low rocking chair. Grandfather and I made that chair, and a matching one, the year he brought me here.
That there’s even one chair left on this porch is a miracle.
I suspend the rabbit skin, fur down and hide up, over the square wooden beam of the hitching post in front of the cabin. The beam is set at waist height, and positioned near the water pump.
“Try not to lean over when you’re tanning,” Grandfather taught me. “Your arms and back are going to get tired enough from the scraping.”
He was right about that. For all his cruelty, Grandfather was often right, even about women.
“They’re all out to get something,” he warned. “They’ll stab you in the back and take your last meal, like your grandma did to me.” Grandfather liked to point at the scar she’d left, just above the kidney, on the left side of his back. An inch lower and she’d have killed him. She disappeared after that, leaving him to raise my mother—who grew up to be just another disappointment.
I was the unwanted offspring of an illicit affair between her and a white man—both of whom abandoned me at the hospital. I went straight into foster care as an infant, and that system is a good idea that doesn’t always work. By the time I started school, I’d spent time in over a dozen homes.
“He has selective mutism,” the school psycholo
gist told my foster parents. “He will need special therapies.” I never got the speech therapy, but it wouldn’t have mattered because silence was my armor and identity.
By the time Grandfather decided to take me in when I was twelve, I’d all but forgotten how to speak.
“Your mother was a worthless bitch who spread her legs for a white man,” he told me that first day he brought me to this cabin. “She died giving birth to you, and it was what she deserved.”
Worse than being abandoned, I’d killed my mother! The hope that had bloomed in my chest at finally being adopted, and by someone from my tribe, my own grandfather… That hope shriveled, charred to ash by the contempt in his dark eyes.
Grandfather took my silence as a project. He set about breaking it, peeling my protection off and hauling me out by force.
Love is never free.
The Lucianos love generously, especially Lucy. She gives love away like there is an infinite supply, as easy to find as warmth from the sun. Lucy would give the shirt off her back to the people left alive in North Fork—or even to me.
But I don’t deserve that love, so seemingly unconditional.
I know better. Love has a price tag, and the cost for Lucy’s love is to return it in the same measure.
I’m incapable of that.
I’m not the last man standing in North Fork. She can do a hell of a lot better than me, with where I’ve been. What I’ve seen. The things I’ve done. She just doesn’t get it.
I walk away but she just keeps coming after me, teasing me with that mouth I want to taste, making me hungry with those long, bouncy black curls I crave to grab, and damn her hot body—she’s built like a tiny Venus.
I scoop a glob of brains out and rub it into the stiff rabbit hide. The smell is something I’ve learned to block out.
Taking a six-inch metal flange, the edge of a car bumper that I cut for the purpose, I begin scraping the hide, periodically wetting it with more water from a bucket I pumped.
Working up a sweat, I begin another layer of scraping, flipping the skin and working from the opposite end. It takes at least four passes to work the hide to the softness I want: soft as butter. Soft as Lucy’s skin.
My wolf, Shadow, raises his head off the porch and pricks his ears. Adelle, my Appaloosa, is staked out peacefully cropping grass, but she doesn’t so much as lift her head.
“What is it, boy?”
Shadow watches the forest trail leading to the cabin, a path I’ve avoided adding wear to, making sure it’s obscured.
Whatever’s out there can’t be anything serious or he’d go investigate, so I keep working the hide. I scrape again, from the top, moving hard and fast, letting exercise unwind the knot that always seems to be in my gut.
But nothing ever unravels it completely.
Chapter Two
Lucy
I leave through the back gate of the Haven. The high, camouflage-patterned metal wall disappears behind me as I walk into the woods. The trees here in Idaho are huge, towering above me, creating a cool moist passage even though it’s a bright, sunny spring day.
My brother’s dog, Pinocchio, touches his nose to my hip. He’s a Catahoula with grey, black and white patches of thick fur. He’s smiling, his tongue lolling, as he walks next to me.
The rifle in my hands is a familiar weight. I’m a damn good shot and have brought home my fair share of dinner. I’d always planned on bringing home the bacon, but I didn’t expect it to be actual meat!
I never used to like hunting—not the bringing home dinner or chasing men kind. Before the Scorching, I was the girl at the bar sipping her appletini with guys coming up to me, buying me drinks, trying to take me home.
But none of those guys were right for me. None of them lit me up the way Roan does. Being near him is like standing outside as a summer storm approaches: hot, electric anticipation.
Roan is a survivor, a victor. He’s awesome at everything.
Not that he talks about himself. He’s quiet, which I love and hate.
Pinocchio stops and I pause, taking shallow sips of breath just like Roan taught me, practicing silence. Pinocchio points with his nose in the direction of a nearby bush, his tail extended and paw lifted.
Probably quail.
I give a slight nod, letting Pinocchio know to go, and I raise the rifle to my shoulder.
The rifle’s a gift from Roan—a small, perfectly balanced piece just right for me. He said he found it somewhere, but I know it wasn’t that easy; guns aren’t just lying around. The Scorch Flu isn’t the only danger in this new world. Without the constraints of law, the worst of humanity has flourished and now everyone who can carries a weapon.
Pinocchio dashes into the bush and three quail give cry, flapping their wings and climbing into the sky. I track one, its white belly bright in the afternoon sun. I brace for the noise and pull the trigger. The quail stutters in its upward flight, plummeting to the ground, its lifeless body thumping onto the soft forest floor.
Pinocchio grabs it for me and I truss the bird’s feet before hanging it on the metal hook attached to my belt, another gift from Roan.
I’ve made it clear I want him. Roan’s a good man, a wounded man, a fascinating, sexy man…the only man for me. But when I try to say things out loud to him about us, my throat just closes and the words won’t come. There’s some lock on me that has never happened before.
The fact that he makes me speechless just makes me want him more.
I want to know every detail about him, and yet I can’t ask him anything, afraid to scare him away even more. And yet, some part of me knows, just knows, he wants me too.
“Nobody around but us chickens,” I sing a bar of the old song to Pinocchio. My mom loves that stuff. She had a real love story. My parents fell for each other when they were sixteen and got married a few years later, had all of us kids and lived happily ever after…until he was murdered.
Dad worked as an undercover cop trying to expose the organized crime networks of Philadelphia. I don’t remember him but I’m sure I would have loved him, because I can see him in all my brothers, who I adore. Each one is more lovable than the next, even if they still treat me like I’m a little kid.
Pinocchio leads the way through the forest at a happy trot. He likes it when we hunt. Right now, Pinocchio’s the best friend I’ve got, the only friend who hasn’t told me to stop chasing Roan. Even Roan’s told me to stop.
But I just can’t, because we belong together!
I kick at a rock in my path. Damn that man.
I spot a porcupine quill on the ground. Roan has a shirt with a pattern of them sewn down the front in chevron shapes. I pick it up and take a long hard look at the forest floor. I’m staring at a path—not well travelled, but definitely there.
Maybe this is where Roan’s always disappearing off to these days.
I follow the path with Pinocchio leading the way, tail wagging. He’s following Roan’s familiar scent! How crazy is it that I already know it’s him—I’m that obsessed!
Scraping sounds pull me forward to the edge of a clearing. I move slowly and quietly, touching my leg so that Pinocchio will stay close.
Roan stands in the middle of a grassy space in front of a cabin. I freeze, watching, like some freaking stalker.
He’s shirtless, all of those ripped brown muscles exposed and glossy in the sunshine, his shoulders bunching as he works. His chest glistens with sweat as he uses a metal tool to scrape an animal hide, draped over a hitching post. His jet hair is held back with a leather thong, accentuating his strong jawline and sharp cheekbones. His abs are tight and chiseled, supporting the tension of his arms.
He’s so beautiful.
Maybe it’s enough just to be near him. Maybe I don’t need anything more.
Oh bullshit! This isn’t nearly enough. I need to make him mine. I want him. And what Lucy Luciano wants, she gets.
Chapter Three
Roan
I spot movement at the edge of the clea
ring and tension hums through my body, tightening every muscle and ligament, bringing blood surging through me as Lucy steps out from behind a tree at the edge of the clearing, head cocked, and sun shining on her glossy, crow-black hair. “What is this place, Roan?”
“This is my place. Private property.” I straighten to my full height, which is not small, and give her a good staredown. I can’t believe the little minx has tracked me all the way out here when I specifically began restoring this place to get away from her and the Haven.
“I was hunting and found a path.” Lucy shrugs and walks toward me, wearing a scoop-necked green tee that showcases her spectacular rack, tucked into worn jeans that look painted on. Her scuffed, dirty boots contrast with the gleaming rifle I gave her, a hunting piece with a nice walnut stock. A bobwhite quail dangles from the wire loop that I made for her. “Pinocchio smelled something. He led me here.” JT’s brown-patched Catahoula trots forward to join Shadow on the porch, wagging his tail.
I can feel Lucy’s gaze on my body like she’s touching me. Heat flushes, tightening my nipples to hard points and my groin throbs. I hate what she does to me, so easily, so often, with no effort at all.
I’m done pretending I don’t know what she’s up to. “You followed me out here. This is my place. And it’s private.”
