by Megan Crane
He told himself that was exactly what it was. One big bonus, and fuck Whale for trying to get in there when everyone else seemed to know better. Then he nodded at his president like he trusted him the way he had years back and everything—the club tension, Benny Chambless’s debt, Holly herself—was all solved and tidy already.
“I’ll tell him we can take it out on her sweet little ass,” he agreed, like he’d never thought of Holly Chambless, town saint and former prom queen, as anything but a club groupie waiting to happen. He even smiled, because for some reason he needed to remind himself that he was as much of a sick, relentless fuck as any other man in this room. It was who he was. He’d never wanted to be anything but a Devil’s Keeper, since the moment he’d realized it was a club he could join, if he proved himself. “With fucking pleasure.”
Chapter 3
Holly kind of assumed that immersing herself in a known den of iniquity that celebrated exactly the kind of sinful, degenerate lifestyle that she’d spent her entire existence pretending she didn’t know existed—part of a doomed bid to gain her father’s approval, something she’d forfeited when she’d had the temerity to be born female—would blow up her whole life. She’d expected fireworks. High drama. Character assassinations in the middle of Main Street. Or a few snide comments in the aisles of the country store, at the very least, muttered beneath a good, god-fearing breath or two.
But there was nothing. If anyone cared that Holly Chambless—well-known good girl and apple of her father’s eye so long as she stayed as sweet and obliging as he thought she ought to be—had decided to take a walk on the wild side, they kept it to themselves.
It took her a day or two to realize that she felt a little disappointed by the lack of any reaction. She hadn’t expected actual fire and brimstone, of course, from anyone who wasn’t her loud, red-faced, occasionally more-than-slightly intimidating father. This was the twenty-first century, even if it hadn’t exactly felt that way growing up under the mayor’s thumb in this tiny little town in the swamps a good five miles outside of the middle of nowhere. Still, she’d imagined there’d be a raised eyebrow or two when she ventured out. She’d imagined someone would note that she’d pinned the Lagrange, Louisiana, version of a scarlet letter to her chest.
Yet in complete defiance of all Holly knew about small towns in general and this small town in particular, no one mentioned her new job at all. No one seemed to notice she’d taken it.
She shuffled around her parents’ big house during the day, trying not to let the oppressive air in that old mausoleum get to her. Her mother rarely left her bedroom. Her father was out on bail and barricaded in his study. For all intents and purposes, Holly was alone. It was more than a little weird.
Under normal circumstances, her father cared that she was back in town only when he could trot her out to this dinner or that party and call her his “little hostess.” Mama was a known drunk in what Holly liked to tell herself was a particularly genteel, southern way, which left Holly to be her daddy’s date to a variety of functions. She’d assumed her graduation would mean a marked increase in those duties, especially because she suspected he was auditioning her for the role of one of his cronies’ third or fourth wives. Or planning to ransom her off to one of their beefy, preppy, boring sons. Holly had always assumed that somewhere out there, at one of those parties, she’d meet the son of an associate who wasn’t quite as boring as the rest. Someone like her. Someone who got her. She’d assumed she’d meet someone who cared about the same things she did. Old family names and Louisiana roots. Overlooked bayou towns and their rich, colorful histories. Some of her friends wanted big lives. Holly had only ever wanted a good one.
Smiling and demurring and pretending not to understand innuendos or inappropriate invitations until the right person came along was just part of the deal. It was normal. What wasn’t was her father’s arrest. It meant the mayor’s usually bustling social calendar had been suspended for the first time in Holly’s life—and more than that, that the great Chambless name had been tarnished.
Mama stayed in her bedroom with all the shades drawn, making the maid keep her stocked in her prescription pills with carafes of perfectly chilled white wine at the ready. That was actually perfectly normal. What was miles and miles removed from normal was that Daddy stayed in his study rather than moving between it and his office in the town hall, locked up tight with all his favorite pictures of himself hunting and fishing and wrestling gators with every prominent figure in southern Louisiana. In a usual summer he’d have been charging all over the house on his way to and from work, making demands of everyone from the maid to Mama to Holly, all of which needed to be obeyed instantly or heads would roll. Sometimes she heard his voice, rising and falling behind the thick study doors the way it did when he was delivering one of his long lectures, like he was some kind of preacher at a pulpit. He didn’t come out to explain himself or tell her that he was innocent or acknowledge her presence in any way. As far as Holly could tell, he didn’t come out at all.
She told herself that suited her fine. And it did, because if he came out, he’d ask her what she was doing with herself as a college graduate. She wouldn’t lie, of course. And her activities of late would cause the sort of knockdown, drag-out battle they’d never had while she was pursuing her largely decorative art history degree. Holly had never rebelled against her strict father and his many rules. She’d studied the subjects he thought were appropriate for her and the kind of life he expected her to live after college. English. Art. Nothing controversial or anything he deemed pointless—which was pretty much anything that would make her too serious or unattractive a dinner date. She hadn’t minded. Why would she? This was the only life she knew. Hell, she’d never even gone through a surly teenage phase—or if she had, she’d known better than to show it. She’d taken what little surliness she’d ever had behind the church for a breather and gotten an eyeful of Killian Chenier instead. Better known as Uptown, apparently.
Okay, maybe the fact her father wasn’t confronting her didn’t really suit her, after all. Maybe she was immature enough to want to have that fight with her supposedly purer-than-the-driven-snow father who, it turned out, was more of a slush puddle on a city street after all these years of sanctimoniously claiming otherwise. Maybe she wanted to see what would happen when he couldn’t claim the moral high ground he’d pretended was his by rights all this time.
But it didn’t matter what she wanted, because she never saw him.
Every night she would dress for her shift at the bar in some combination of jeans, a tank top, and flip-flops. She would wait to be accosted about her intentions as she left the house, but neither of her parents ever emerged from their rooms to notice that she was leaving, much less interrogate her about her destination. She drove herself to Dumb Gator’s and parked her very recognizable cherry red convertible right out in front, like she was lighting up a nightly flare. Then she’d switch her shoes, wiggling her feet into a pair of platform sandals, because she’d tried wearing her flip-flops into the bar exactly once.
Christ, no, Bart had growled at her that first night. What the fuck is on your feet? You’re not here to be comfortable. You’re here to make horny bastards fork over their cash.
Holly was more than happy to do that. She’d decided she wanted nothing else, in fact, than a life filled with horny bastards and the sort of complicated evenings more experienced girls talked about with those low, knowing laughs. Holly wanted a low, knowing laugh, damn it. She was certain there had to be a middle ground between her current state of relative chastity and, say, tattooing biker regalia on her cleavage after “hanging around the clubhouse” like Katelyn. She was convinced that a bar full of self-professed and unapologetic horny bastards was the place to find out exactly where that ground lay. But the horny bastards in question, no matter how rough looking or drunk or clearly seeking out trouble, treated her like she had an infectious disease. A visible one that required they keep a minimum distance of t
hree feet away from her at all times.
“I thought for sure I’d have to fend off butt pinching and leers,” Holly told Katelyn early into one slow night that first week into her new, scandalous life that no one seemed to have recognized as such. “I was totally prepared for wandering hands. And, like, an offensive nickname.”
Her friend let out a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a snort. And was not, Holly noticed, particularly nice, whatever it was. That was par for the course on the nights they shared a shift, so she ignored it.
“I kind of wanted the nickname, I’ll be honest,” she continued.
“Oh, you have a lot of nicknames,” Katelyn muttered, with another not exactly friendly laugh.
Katelyn was lazily wiping down the bar, one of the numerous tasks she would have declared herself too busy to do if there had been a single full-patch DKMC biker in the place she could cozy up to instead. But it was a weird night. No Devil’s Keepers, save a prospect named Pony who sat in that same stool at the end of the bar that was apparently reserved for the club, spending most of his time texting and looking bored. Though he looked up then, his eyes narrowing as he focused in on Katelyn. She didn’t seem to notice.
Holly couldn’t exactly blame Katelyn for being bummed. Assuming that was what tonight’s attitude problem was. There were usually a few DKMC brothers around, though Uptown himself hadn’t put in an appearance in days, not that Holly wanted to admit she’d noticed. He hadn’t even been there her first night on the job. There’d been a different biker at the end of the bar every time she’d glanced up, and they’d all seemed to pay a little too much attention to her, though they’d never approached her or talked to her beyond tersely ordering their drinks. Holly had assumed that had something to do with Uptown, though she refused to ask one of the bikers about that or where Uptown was. She absolutely refused.
Katelyn stopped her half-assed wipe-down of the bar. At the far end, Bart rolled his eyes and lit a fresh cigarette. He didn’t comment on Katelyn’s lack of industry. This was only Holly’s sixth night at Dumb Gator’s, but she’d already discovered that Bart didn’t comment on any of the bartending girls’ behavior. Not directly. When he got particularly wound up about the fact that the girls spent more time with various men than slinging drinks—which he indicated by slamming things around on the bar and muttering to himself—one of them would take him into the back room and he’d always emerge some time later, significantly calmer. But it was too slow tonight for Bart to be bad-tempered. Yet.
Katelyn was a different story.
“What nicknames do I have?” Holly asked, as if she hadn’t heard Katelyn’s tone. Or that laugh she was opting not to categorize as mean.
“What do you think?” Katelyn had dyed a purple streak into her blond hair and it fell down to perfectly frame her face, slithering into her plumped-up cleavage whenever she moved. “You’ve been the town princess since the day your father took office.”
“That’s not really a nickname so much as a life sentence,” Holly retorted.
Pony’s dark eyes moved to her and settled there, as if she’d surprised him, but she wasn’t acknowledging random bikers who sat around making brooding faces for hours at a time. Or even nonrandom ones. So she ignored him, too.
“You don’t just show up one day and expect to get a nickname from the club,” Katelyn was saying, frowning at her as if she’d said something particularly profane. “First of all, not everyone gets one. It’s not automatic—it’s either a compliment or an insult. And sometimes it takes years of hanging out with the brothers before they even really act like they know you’re there.”
It was clear to Holly that Katelyn very, very badly wanted to be asked what her nickname was. So she didn’t ask. Maybe that was bitchy, but then again, so was Katelyn these days. Just because Holly was opting not to react to it didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of it.
“Fine, no nickname,” she said instead, drying glasses as she talked. “But not even a single leer? I spent my whole life avoiding this bar because it was supposed to be so rough and scary. I wish someone had told me it was all a big myth.” She looked up when she felt both Katelyn and Pony staring at her. “Well, isn’t it?”
A group of locals came in then, fresh off a shift at one of the nearby refineries, and Dumb Gator’s got louder and busier from there. There might not have been any rough and scary shenanigans, which Holly figured she’d have to resign herself to, but it was steady, never boring work. Unlike whatever work she might have done with an art history degree. Sure, there were perhaps more enthusiastic public sexual encounters than she’d ever imagined she’d bear witness to, but there was usually enough of a crowd when that happened to keep it from feeling too in her face. Such as it was. It was easy enough to concentrate on getting the drinks right, which she thought she got better at every day. And that was a good thing, because the more locals there were in the bar, the more Holly could feel them watching her. Not saying anything to her face, maybe, but definitely saying something to each other.
Better to focus on the drinks, she figured, and let the various tiers of biker-adjacent and generally rowdy patrons do what they liked. Of course, biker chicks weren’t exactly known for their restraint in return.
“How long are you home for, sweetie?” one of the older biker ladies asked much later that same evening. She blew fat, lazy smoke rings into the space between them as she propped herself up on the bar, displaying some cleavage that was far more magnificent than even Katelyn’s, though hers wasn’t tattooed. Holly was tempted to take the question as a friendly, neighborly inquiry, but she could see the considering look in the other woman’s eyes.
Crystal something, Holly thought. That was her name. She was one of the only women Holly had ever seen in here who seemed to clear a path around herself wherever she went without even trying. She just walked in in her ridiculously tight jeans and her very high, studded ankle boots and everyone got out of her way. Dove out of her way, more often than not. She ordered drinks only from Bart, and now Holly. Never Katelyn or any of the other girls behind the bar, who she generally acted as if she didn’t see.
“I only just got here,” Holly replied cheerfully, assuming this woman knew who she was. This was Lagrange. She likely did. “I think I need to settle in and figure out what I want to do with my life. For so long all I was really focused on was graduating college.”
“Your daddy can’t be too thrilled about his little girl spending time in a place like this,” Crystal said, gathering up the beers she’d ordered. “Though it’s better that you’re on that side of the bar.” She shook back her long hair, blond streaked through with a light, bright silver that made her look pretty rather than old, and nodded down the length of the bar toward Bart. “Tell Bart to put it on my tab.”
“I didn’t think she had a tab,” Holly said, watching Crystal move through the magically parting crowd again like she didn’t even see the grown men jumping to get out of her way.
“She has a tab in the sense her drinks are on the house,” Katelyn said sourly from beside her. “Always.” She looked at Holly, then rolled her eyes. “Come on, Holly. How can you be this oblivious? That’s Crystal.”
“I knew that. I mean, I know her name.”
Katelyn made an impatient noise. “As in Crystal Guillot, wife of Digger Guillot, otherwise known as the president of the club.” She jutted her chin toward the table where Crystal had settled with a few of her friends, all dressed similarly. Big hair. Low-cut tops. Very tight jeans. They looked tough and they looked hot, the way the biker chicks who strutted around Lagrange always did in Holly’s memory. “Those are all old ladies.”
One of them couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Holly blinked. “You mean, in the sense of being wives to bikers, not in the sense of their actual ages.”
“Some are wives, some aren’t. Whatever.” Katelyn pressed her lips together. “They belong to specific brothers.”
“Is that what your tattoo means?” H
olly asked, and knew instantly that she’d said the wrong thing. The air between them got weird, even with all the loud talking and pounding music surrounding them.
Katelyn turned to look at her full in the face, something Holly didn’t pretend to understand, making her expression…weird. Kind of swollen and narrow at once.
“I belong to the club,” Katelyn said quietly, though something fierce lurked right beneath her voice. Or maybe it was defensive, not fierce.
“Okay.”
“You don’t know what it was like around here after high school,” Katelyn said, her voice not quite bitter. “Everyone who could leave, left. But I wanted to stay. I love it here.” She glared at Holly as if daring her to say something, so Holly bit her tongue. And didn’t remind Katelyn that she’d spent their entire senior year of high school plotting different ways to get out of Lagrange. All of which had fallen through. Because her father had lost his job. Because she’d had to help with her younger siblings. Because she’d been good at making plans and not so good at following through on them. Because because because. Holly pretended she’d forgotten all of that. Katelyn shrugged. “I found a place I like and people who like me. What’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing. Everybody needs a place to belong.” Even if it was an outlaw biker club, Holly supposed.
“They”—and Katelyn jutted her chin toward the same table of women again—“are a pack of fucking snotty bitches. They don’t speak to the likes of me. It’s basically the end of the world as we know it if they’re ever forced to interact with any of the girls who hang around the club. If the bayou flooded and there was one boat? Crystal Guillot would float right by and let me drown.” Katelyn ran her hands down her sides, as if reminding herself of her own lush curves. Or flaunting them to the men leering at her from all over the bar. Maybe both. “She’d love it, in fact. She’d probably try to hit me with a paddle to make sure I sank.”
