Calm & Storm (The Night Horde SoCal Book 6)

by Susan Fanetti

  He eyed the bowl. “They’re in vinegar?”

  “Balsamic, yes. But they’re still sweet. It’s a good combination.” He gave her a skeptical look, and she added with a laugh, “Have I ever fed you something you didn’t like?”

  “That was before you got fancy.” He sipped his coffee again and then set the mug down, the lightness of his expression clouding over a little. “Tell me what I missed.”

  “You want to know about Cameron?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll ask him that. I want to know about you.”

  “There’s not much to tell.” He didn’t want to talk about Cameron, which she understood. But she didn’t want to talk with him about her marriage, not this soon, and she’d already summarized her working life. She felt at a loss for what to tell him.

  “Long way from three rooms over Butler’s Hardware to Laurel Canyon, Rainy.”

  She shrugged. “Like I said before: I went to Tahoe from Myrtlevale. I started working in the kitchen as a prep cook, and Louis, the executive in that kitchen, took an interest in me. I worked there for a few years, becoming his sous-chef, and when Louis moved to San Diego, I went with him. He pushed me to apply for an executive chef job at one of the big hotels. I got it, and I worked there until we moved to L.A. Well, Orange County. We lived in Newport Beach. Douglas still does.” Same house, same furniture, same dog. The only new thing in that house since she’d left it was the woman who’d replaced her.

  No matter. If Douglas hadn’t cheated on her and set her aside, she wouldn’t have been sitting here now with Ronin. So she sighed and picked up her story where she’d left off. “Anyway, after we moved, I worked as the executive chef for the catering branch of his company until he sold it. Then I started planning my own place. When we split up, I got serious about it. Cameron is part-owner, by the way. He has a degree in finance. He structured the budget for Mythic.”

  Ronin beamed a proud grin that warmed Lorraine’s heart. “He’s smart, then.”

  “Yes, he is. Magna cum laude at USC.”

  His brow creased momentarily. “Magna cum...that’s good?”

  “It means he graduated ‘with great honor.’ It’s very good.”

  Seeing Ronin’s pride in his son, their son, being able to share that parental pride with him, now, for the first time, made Lorraine feel a strange and painful confluence of emotions. Happiness and sorrow in equal measure, pulling her heart to and fro.

  She opened her mouth to tell him she loved him, but at that moment, the pleasure faded from his face. “Is…is he a good father?”

  “Douglas?”

  Ronin didn’t answer, except with a steady look. Lorraine wasn’t sure what to say. Did he really want the answer? Would it hurt him to know that Douglas loved Cameron like his own flesh and blood? He had two grown daughters, both closer in age to Lorraine than to Cameron. He’d raised Cameron as the son he’d always wanted. Yes, he was a good father.

  After a few seconds, he sighed impatiently. “Rainy. The truth.”

  “Yes. He loves him like his own.”

  Ronin looked down at his empty plate. “That’s…” He sighed and met her eyes. “That’s good.”

  She wanted so badly to apologize for keeping his son away, and to have him accept it and make it mean something, but knowing he wouldn’t, she reached out and laid her hand over his. “I love you, Ronin.”

  Instead of a reply, he simply turned his hand over and squeezed hers. That said enough. That made everything okay. He always made everything okay.

  ~oOo~

  Though Lorraine had tried to turn the conversation around and learn something about his life, Ronin had been beyond reticent. Once they’d discussed the deaths of his parents and her father, and she’d told him that her mother was living in an senior living development in San Diego, riding around in a pink golf cart, all she’d been able to get out of him was that he’d moved to Spokane from Myrtlevale after his mom died, then moved to Madrone about ten years ago. He wouldn’t talk about the Night Horde. At all. He shut down every attempt at a question until she stopped asking, sensing a limit to his patience.

  She knew a little about the Night Horde. Most of what she knew had come from a movie she’d seen a long time ago, and some stuff on the news. In other words, she supposed she knew what most people knew about the Horde or any other biker gang—or, as Ronin had sharply corrected her, motorcycle club.

  Since he wouldn’t give her details, or even basics, Lorraine decided to let her imagination build the answers. He’d always been someone who’d walked on the line between law and outlaw, and he’d loved riding wild and taking risks, so the MC life, if it was anything like she thought it was, seemed a perfect fit for the man she’d known, and for the man she was becoming reacquainted with.

  They had cleaned up after brunch—Ronin had helped with the dishes—and then showered together, which took a while. A little after noon, back in his same clothes because he had no other options, Ronin went out to the kitchen patio again and stared out at the trees. He’d gotten even less willing to talk, or listen, so Lorraine left him alone. Their son was on his way. She had no idea what it could possibly be like for Ronin, facing the moment when he’d meet the man who was his child.

  She had some idea what it might be like for Cameron, because she could vividly recall meeting her father again for the first time in so long it might as well have been the first time in ever.

  They’d both been awkward at first. There had been the same sense of newness that people must always feel when they meet for the first time—not knowing anything more than the face of things. Lorraine’s mother had filled her ears with complaints and ‘hard truths’ about her father, but she’d tried to set all those aside when she saw him again. But laid over that unfamiliarity had been the sense, the knowledge, that they should not have been strangers. That knowledge had felt like loss, and made the strangeness more awkward.

  She and her father had never overcome it. But then, her father had never been the man that Ronin was, and her mother had not had the lasting love for her father that she had for Cameron’s. What Cameron knew about his father was not much, but it was all good.

  Standing in the kitchen, watching Ronin’s quiet anticipation, Lorraine heard the unmistakable roar of their son’s car coming up the drive. For his college graduation, she and Douglas had bought him a restored 1965 Corvette Stingray. It was the last purchase they had made together, though she hadn’t realized it at the time.

  Cameron had been fascinated by Corvettes from the time he was still in grade school, when he’d discovered a show called Stingray on cable TV. Lorraine had vaguely remembered it from when she was a kid. She’d watched a few episodes with him; it was some kind of private investigator show. He’d thought the main character was way cool, and from that point on, even after he’d gone off to college, he’d asserted that his favorite car was a 1965 Stingray.

  Ronin turned at the sound of the approaching car, but he didn’t move otherwise. Lorraine hurried to the front door, feeling the same powerful fluttering of nerves that she’d felt on Mythic’s opening night, and on the first night she’d ever led a kitchen. Stage fright.

  Her beautiful son was coming up the stone steps, taking his sunglasses off and sliding a stem into the open neck of his shirt. He looked serious.

  “Hi, handsome.”

  “Hey, Mom. Seems like you and I need to talk.” Cameron bent down and kissed her cheek.

  “Yes, well. We can do that tonight at work. There’s a lot.”

  He leaned back and gave her a thorough look. “You’re good, though? Everything’s okay?”

  She patted his chest. “Oh, Chuckie. I think maybe things are very good.”

  Grinning at that, he looked over her shoulder. His expression shifted, became more subdued, and Lorraine turned to see Ronin standing in the doorway. She took their son’s hand.

  “Cameron, I’d like to introduce you to Ronin. Your father.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

&n
bsp; His son was tall and lean, with broad, sturdy shoulders.

  Ronin stood in the doorway and watched mother and son talk. There was an intimacy between them, apparent right away, even in such a simple, casual moment, that made his loss rise up and bite.

  He had to set that aside. The past was the past, and the morning spent with Rainy had given him a taste of a present and maybe a future that he wanted. All he had to do to have it was leave the past behind them, which was part of his philosophy: Learn and move on. Face forward, toward the light. Leave your shadows behind you.

  But every direction he turned seemed to bring him face to face with shadow, with what he’d lost, what he’d spent half his life not knowing he’d had. Mother and son loved each other, had spent a life together. Father and son were strangers.

  Cameron kissed his mother’s cheek and then leaned back, giving her a look Ronin read as concern. He said something, but Ronin didn’t hear it.

  When she answered, she smiled brightly and patted his chest. “Oh, Chuckie,” she said. “I think maybe things are very good.”

  Were they very good? He supposed that was up to him, just as the very bad of the past had been up to her. The weight on his chest made Ronin sigh.

  Cameron looked past his mother then and saw him. The light of intimacy left his expression, and he met Ronin’s eyes with a look that seemed like relief.

  Ronin saw himself looking back at him, and he saw Rainy, too—the best of them, combined.

  She took their son’s hand and led him forward. “Cameron, I’d like to introduce you to Ronin. Your father.”

  Ronin’s son smiled and held out his hand. “It’s good to meet you.”

  Ronin grasped that hand, freckled like his mother’s. His son had a strong grip. What a strange thing it was, though, to be introduced so formally to one’s own child.

  Yes, it was ‘good to meet’ his son, but he couldn’t repeat the canned, expected words that Cameron had said. So he simply nodded. And then they three stood on the stone walk. Mother, father, and son, trapped in an awkward emptiness.

  Ronin was virtually never the one to break a silence, but this one was crushing him under its weight. So he searched for and found a thing to say. “I heard you drive up. Nice engine. What’s your ride?”

  Rainy and Cameron both grinned the same grin at him, and Cameron answered. “’65 Stingray, fully restored. Big block 396. Want to check it out?”

  “I do.”

  Rainy squeezed Cameron’s arm and stepped up to Ronin. Lifting up on her tiptoes, she pursed her lips, and he leaned in so she could kiss him. “I’ll be inside.”

  As she left them and went into the house, Cameron indicated with a wave of his hand that Ronin should follow him down and around the sweeping drive. They walked along the stone wall together.

  “She calls you ‘Chuckie’?” Ronin asked. “Is that your middle name?” He didn’t even know his son’s name. Whose last name did he have?

  “No. Just a nickname. My middle name is Edmund.” Ronin lost a step at that, but Cameron didn’t notice. He was still talking; he had a story to tell.

  “When I was in first grade, this one kid picked on me all the time. He started calling me Chuckie, like that ugly doll in those cheesy old movies? I guess he thought with my red hair he was being hilarious. Anyway, one day I told Mom about it, and she told me that the kid was really dumb, because Chuckie was badass. She said I should be proud to be known as Chuckie because it meant I was tough. And she started calling me it, like an endearment, I guess. It worked.”

  He stopped and looked at Ronin, with a wry smirk. “I’ll tell you something Mom doesn’t know. She’s all about non-violence and hugging it out. She thinks she made the name mean something good—and she did. But I also started going into what I called ‘Chuckie mode.’ I was too young to see the movies, but I’d seen a picture, so I thought I got the gist. I bloodied that jerk kid’s nose. And people left me alone after that. I never got picked on again, and I never had to throw another punch. All I had to do was smile like Chuckie.” He laughed. “I’ve seen all those movies now, and Mom sort of polished him up for me when I was little. Chuckie’s a jerk. But now, between us, the name means something else.”

  Done with his story, he stopped, and they had another moment of awkward quiet as Ronin contended with that biting sense of loss. Then Cameron said, “Sorry. I talk when I’m nervous.”

  Ronin was nervous, too. It wasn’t a feeling he was accustomed to. “Don’t be sorry. It was a good story. I’d like to hear whatever you want to tell me.”

  “I feel weird. Like I should sit you down and give you my autobiography and then ask you for yours.”

  “There’s not much to mine,” Ronin said, and then they were standing at the rear of his son’s car. A black Stingray, looking gleaming and new, despite being more than sixty years old. “This is beautiful.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You restore it yourself?” He had an image of his son and the man he called ‘Dad’ leaning under the hood together, and his hands twitched closed.

  Cameron laughed. “No. My dad…oh. Sorry, I…”

  “It’s okay.”

  “My…dad…is the kind of guy who hires people to do things for him. I never knew anybody who could teach me how to work on stuff like this, so I guess I’m the kind of guy who hires people, too. I like cars, and I know the specs of the cars I like. I know what people who know things say, so I can talk an okay game, but I don’t know my way around a car’s insides.” He blushed. “I’ve never even changed my own oil. The ‘Ray was a graduation present from my…parents. Sorry. I don’t know how to say stuff like that.”

  “Don’t get snagged on the words. He’s your dad. We just met.”

  Cameron turned and face him straight on. “My mom…she knows she fucked up, not telling you about me. I don’t know how you’re here now, but I’d like it if you could not lean on her too hard about…all this. She never tried to make it like it was your fault you weren’t around.”

  “We’re working that out. What did she tell you—about me?”

  Cameron turned and walked to the front of his car. He’d parked right next to Ronin’s bike, and now he leaned lightly on his front fender and studied the Breakout. “She always said I was ‘made in love,’ and that you didn’t know but you would love me if you knew. When I was littler, she just said she moved away and lost touch before she knew about me. A couple of years ago, when my…dad…left her, and she was having some trouble dealing, she told me she ran while you were in the Army. She also told me that she’d never stopped loving you. I thought about looking for you then.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t want to bring an angry man into my mom’s life. She’s a good person. She thinks people are inherently good, even if they do bad things. Sometimes she gets really blindsided when people are just bad, and she was already dealing with enough.”

  “You thought I’d be bad?”

  “No. But I thought you might be really pissed off. It wasn’t worth maybe letting her get hurt to meet somebody I didn’t know. My dad was hurting her enough at the time.” Cameron stepped away from his car and crouched at the side of the bike. “Looks like fresh damage.”

  Ronin felt jealous that she’d cared about somebody else enough to be that hurt, and he felt protective of her, angry that she’d been hurt at all. The tension in that contradiction twisted him up. So he pushed it aside and focused on his bike.

  He hadn’t taken the time yet to examine the damage. Now, he crouched next to his son and ran his fingers over the scratched gas tank. No dents, but some of the scratches were deep. The rubber grip on the handlebar was torn, too. “Dropped it last night. Nothing a little elbow grease, a new grip, and some paint can’t fix.”

  “Dropped it—you mean crashed?” Cameron’s head swiveled his direction; his eyes—grey, the same shade of Ronin’s own—wide.

  “Not really. Like falling off a Huffy, just going a little bit faster. I kno
w how to get clear of a wipeout.”

  “Mom told me you used to do motocross and stunt riding.”

  “Still do. The stunts, anyway. Haven’t been on a motocross track in a long time.”

  “That’s so hardcore.”

  The admiration in his son’s voice filled Ronin’s chest. “You ride?”

  “Sadly, no,” Cameron sighed.

  “Want to learn?”

  “You’d teach me?”

  “Sure.”

  “On this?” Cameron reached out as if he were going to touch the Breakout, but stopped short.

  Ronin chuckled. “No. This is too much bike to learn on. I could tow one up from home sometime—or you could come out to Madrone.”